Undeception

Effective this post, I’m going into radio silence for approximately one month. Well, not exactly. I mean, for one thing, this isn’t radio. And for another, I hope I’ll not be altogether silent over the next month, but there are no promises, either.

What’s the occasion? Well, let’s just say that the outcome of the event that transpires in the next month is the single most definitive turning point for me so far and will largely determine what I do for the rest of my life. Am I overstating things? Hardly.

I hate that this comes now when my blog traffic is at a record high. But as I said above, I’m not planning on unplugging completely: I will still be on to respond to comments as necessary, maybe put up a link I’ve found, summarize a thought going through my head, etc. So don’t take me off your blogroll yet.

If you would, whenever (if ever) this blog comes to your mind in the next month, drop to your knees and send out a fervent prayer on my behalf – or at least whisper, “Lord, help jog Steve’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad memory.” Thanks!

~Steve

I’ve not got much to say about this, but please check out Cliff Martin’s post that describes his thinking on the unchanging nature of God, progressive revelation, and the inspiration of Scripture. I don’t think I disagreed with anything he said. Here’s an excerpt:

I believe that the Bible is a unique book, inspired from Genesis to Revelation. I believe it is the very book God wanted us to have. I hold to the authority of the Scriptures in matters of faith and practice. I believe the Bible provides a solid and dependable foundation for Christian living. I read it. I study it. I love it. I teach it. I find that it is “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). I believe all the Scriptures are infallible. Infallibility, as I use the term, means that the Bible, in its totality, does not mislead on issues of faith and practice, though it may not be without error in all respects. In my years of reading and studying the Bible, this view is more consistent with the Scriptures themselves than what I consider a forced claim of inerrancy.

A correction from a commenter shows that I was wrong in attributing the following quote to Eusebius, the Early Christian Father (ECF), in my post entitled: “Is full preterism a new doctrine?“

All authorities concur in the declaration that “when all these things should have been done” “the End” should come: that “the mystery of God should be finished as he had declared to His servants the prophets”: it should be completed: time should now be no more: the End of all things (so foretold) should be at hand, and be fully brought to pass: in these days should be fulfilled all that had been spoken of Christ (and of His church) by the prophets: or, in other words, when the gospel should have been preached in all the world for a testimony to all nations, and the power of the Holy People be scattered (abroad), then should the End come, then should all these things be finished. I need now only say, all these things have been done: the old and elementary system passed away with a great noise; all these predicted empires have actually fallen, and the new kingdom, the new heaven and earth, the new Jerusalem – all of which were to descend from God, to be formed by His power, have been realised on earth; all these things have been done in the sight of all the nations; God’s holy arm has been made bare in their sight: His judgments have prevailed, and they remain for an everlasting testimony to the whole world. His kingdom has come, as it was foretold it should, and His will has, so far, been done; His purposes have been finished; and, from that day to the extreme end of time, it will be the duty, as indeed it will be the great privilege of the Church, to gather into its bosom the Jew, the Greek, the Scythian, the Barbarian, bond and free; and to do this as the Apostles did in their days–in obedience, faith and hope.

The quote belongs to Dr. Samuel Lee, who translated Eusebius’ Theophania in 1843. I sincerely apologize for the misattribution and for the argument I tried to make from it. Read my original post to see my revision of it, which now presents an actual quote from Eusebius affirming Matthew 24′s apocalypse as having occurred in the first century. This is not the same thing as full preterism; for instance, Eusebius in the Theophania actually gives the routine line from the ECF about a future resurrection of the “selfsame” body, which full preterism rejects. Does this harm my theology? Not exactly.

Think of it this way: the ECF disagreed about a lot of things. They agreed on a number of things as well. On the things they disagreed upon, we are told to believe that at least one of the parties was wrong and one was right; on the things they agreed upon, it is the very truth of God. But why should we believe that on any one of those issues, any of the parties was correct? Could the issues upon which they agreed have been blind shots in the dark that happened to hit the same, but wrong, target? I see no scriptural mandate that the ECF had to be right on anything, much less everything. The ECF weren’t even mentioned in the Bible. Rather, it was the Apostles that the Holy Spirit was going to lead into all truth, and that’s recorded in Scripture. People, listen: most of my friends know that there is no more fierce advocate for studying and appreciating the ECF and the teaching of believers gone before us than I, but can we ever accept their words over the Bible? I think not. And for me the biblical evidence for full preterism and against a future end of the world is insurmountable.

So take it as you will. Thanks, anonymous poster, for “undeceiving” me: I welcome and covet your interaction on these issues.

Something jumped out at me several days ago when I was reading Acts 13: it reminded me of Romans 11. And well it should. After all, Acts was written by a fellow who accompanied Paul on numerous missionary journeys and should have been quite in sync with his doctrine and theology.

Interestingly enough, at about the same time I noticed the obvious parallel, my brother-in-law Josh was having an epiphany of his own that was soon manifested in two posts on his site, “Predestination: A Misunderstanding of Jew vs. Gentile In the New Covenant?” and “Predestination Misunderstanding Part II: Vessels of Honor and Destruction“. The subject is clear from his post titles, and they intersect with what I was reading in Acts. Let’s get down to it, shall we?

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Lawrence Boadt’s excellent Reading the Old Testament has a chart on page 79 that illustrates some key differences between the way the ancients viewed history and the way we do today. We tend to be shocked when we discover that there might be any deviation from what we subconsciously have accepted as the only viewpoint. These are examples Boadt gives for distinctions that should inform our study of the Old Testament, even the parts written in some sense as history. Here is the chart:

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Before I “took the road less traveled by” into historical linguistics, I was highly interested in ancient history, especially as it related to the Old Testament. I wanted to learn Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and of course Hebrew so that I could study the Ancient Near East (ANE) and how it related to the Bible. The more I read on my own, the more I realized that such studies did not confirm the Bible as a purely divine record of history. ANE archaeology and history demonstrate the ANE heritage of the Bible; but once we acknowledge the ANE context of the Bible, we should not expect to see those aspects which differ from 21st century Western ideals to be omitted from it and should likewise not expect to see our modern ideals in place. Sadly, it is difficult for readers of literature to approach any text fully aware of the ideals, mindsets, and motivations of the authors even when contemporaneous with them, much less when separated by changes to culture, social context, and language wrought by millennia of intervening time; the unconsciously anachronistic depositing of ideas and concepts foreign to the author and original audience are also hard to identify and purge from our readings.

Readers of this blog should know that I believe the Bible is no less subject to anachronistic misinterpretation than other literary works, and I would point out to those who disagree that there are myriad cases in which they themselves make provision for this problem – any time they insist on doing anything beyond a surface reading that doesn’t take into account the history and culture of the people involved with the writing of the Bible. Educated evangelicals in particular have a tendency to eat up any book they can get their hands on that purports to show the Bible in its original context, provided the conclusion is “conservative” and is treated as upholding the historicity of the Bible. I myself tend to do this even today, and with some just cause: zealous secularist debunkers approach the text looking for erroneous information they suppose invalidates the message of Scripture. For most evangelicals, an appeal to historical/cultural contextualization is especially lauded when it is used to clear up apparent challenges to scientific inerrancy. Take for example Edwin Thiele’s observation of Judah and Israel’s alternating usage of accession and non-accession year dating in recording regnal lengths in First and Second Kings, a situation somewhat perplexing to anyone advocating the “plain reading” approach. This has caused some conservatives (especially fundamentalists) to attack Thiele’s explanation as an end-run around God’s intention to provide us all truth provided we use a plain, literalist hermeneutic (witness one such person reviewing Thiele’s book, Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, on Amazon).

The “plain literalist” hermeneutic is useful for upholding the current ideals of historiography in the Old Testament narratives. The problem is that this is a dreadfully anachronistic endeavor: the modern genre of historiography was not developed before a Greek movement that took place centuries after the supposed origin of the stories, and even then it took quite a while for those ideals to saturate Greek historiography and then the rest of the world through Hellenism. It’s not that those before the turn of the first millennium A.D. were incapable or too ignorant to write history the way we expect it in our post-Enlightenment world. It’s just that they had different ideals for what they wanted from a story. Cold, dispassionate, scientific history without any foreseeable application failed to supply the meaning or entertainment they demanded from their stories. They wanted colorful stories that gave them meaning, not history for history’s sake. Modernists, however, tend to believe that an exact recounting of history is the highest or most important use of narrative. As I wrote elsewhere, “The difference between the ancient and the modern motivations for and method of speculation about unknowns is that the ancients used mythological stories in order to apply meaning to the subject of their speculation and we tend to use scientific enquiry to sever meaning from the subject, and are thus generally skeptical that any meaning can or should be applied. The ancients were content to be ignorant of the mechanics of how, as long as they knew why. Modernists feel satisfied to have discovered the natural causes, the how’s, and seem convinced that this abolishes meaning.”

But the use of mythology to convey meaning is not something that disappeared without a trace with the onset of the Age of Reason. Gordon Glover likes to point out that the American tall tales about such figures as Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill are not intended to explain topographical features such as the Grand Canyon, but they do acknowledge the existence of those features as integral aspects of the frontier and use fantastic stories about their creation as entertaining vehicles of meaning to illustrate character virtues such as strength and courage which have now successfully been associated with the frontiersmen who tamed the wilderness.

Would it be so scandalous if the Israelites, like all their neighbors, had little use for a cold recounting of geological, astronomical, and biological history, preferring stories chock-full of meaning? What would be wrong if God saw it fit to communicate the truths most relevant and significant to them in the way most familiar to them? The self-centeredness of the objection that this genre isn’t as relevant to us is readily apparent and needs no comment here.

ANE scholarship has long pointed out the similarities between the early Genesis stories and the myths of the ANE, from the obvious Utnapishtim/Noah parallel to shades of Enki and Ninhursag in the Garden narratives. Nevertheless, literalists have a few preferred methods of explaining these parallels away. First, they will deny any similarity of style between the Genesis narratives and the ANE myths. Other times they will insist that the similarities are merely chance or so general and vague that they are hardly significant. Lastly, when the parallels are undeniable, they break out their ace in the hole: they claim that Genesis is the original, historical basis for the ANE stories, regardless of the fact that the latter predate Genesis by as much as a millennium.

I want to share a few of my thoughts on these literalist responses.

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Do you believe that the theory of evolution has never been observed? That it is purely theoretical and has never been, can never be, demonstrated in the laboratory?

Well, it appears that this ICR and AIG favorite is no longer a sustainable argument:

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

This population of E. coli was observed to evolve a new trait known as Cit+, the ability to metabolize citrate. What’s really interesting is that the inability to metabolize citrate has previously been one of the distinguishing features of E. coli. This is more remarkable than it may seem on the surface. How so?

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