Undeception

John Walton points out that often in the Ancient Near East, a temple dedication ceremony would take place over seven days’ time; for six days, the temple would be furnished and the priests would take up their posts, and finally on the seventh day the deity would come in to take residence and begin to exercise his/her authority. Walton argues that when the Hebrews heard the priests read the creation week of Genesis 1 to them, they would probably not have taken it (primarily, anyway) as a treatise on history or a scientific origins account but as a comosgony framed in terms of an analogy with the construction and resulting importance of the temple as God’s headquarters for the universe. Walton refers to Genesis 1 as a “temple text”: it is a literary form of analogy to the establishment of the sanctuary. His “rest” was not about sleep, but about settling in at the control booth and taking command of the cosmos He had set in place. Six days you shall work, rest on the Sabbath. In fact (and this is not from Walton), that’s why the Sabbath was not made for man, but man for the Sabbath: it became a day of doing nothing (even healing!), when, as Jesus demonstrated with the healing of the man with the withered hand, it was intended to be a day of doing the Lord’s work, a day set aside to remember God’s intention for the heavens and the earth (the implementation of His purposes).

Remember Isaiah 66.1: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house that you build for me?” Like the word “rest” in Genesis 1, this word commonly translated footstool may sound like it’s describing a simple Laz-E-Boy scenario. But as most commentators recognize, the footstool language should conjure the image of the posture of the victorious ANE king with his foot on the neck of the defeated foe. It’s the picture of a king exercising authority and dominion. A king in this position could “rest” in the confidence that he was in control of the situation, but his kingly responsibilites were by no means complete. Footstool in passages like Isaiah 66.1 and Psalm 110.1 refers to those who have been subjugated; it is after this “rest” of conquest has been undertaken that the king’s reign over all his subjects is realized. Recall that Isaiah 66.1 is only a few verses after the passage in chapter 65 in which Isaiah describes the establishment of a new heavens and a new earth, which is the same setting as Genesis 1. Compare Ps 110.1: “The LORD said to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet,’ ” which was quoted multiple times in the NT (Lu 20.43; Ac 2.35; Heb 1.13; 10.13). What Isaiah was envisioning in chapters 65 and 66 was a new order, a new throne and footstool; this time those forcibly subjugated would be those who had been nullifying God’s purpose for His house. Beginning with the “earth is my footstool” verse, Isaiah goes on to list God’s grievances against those whose right standing with God implied by their adherence to the Law was being contradicted by their character, because they weren’t honoring God with their actions.

The early Christians thought of themselves as the new temple being built up (e.g. Ep 2.20); if they recalled their ANE past, they would have anticipated their “dedication” after their completion and furnishing. This completion would be realized in the initialization of God’s full reign through Christ, which Christ would conduct by putting his enemies under his feet (1 Cor 15.24-27), the most obvious of which were of the same cloth as the “enemies” seen in Isaiah 66, the practitioners of the Mosaic covenant whose lips honored God but whose hearts were far from Him.

This post unintentionally got into eschatology, but my main point was that Genesis 1 is a description of God’s ordering of the cosmos in the familiar terms of the house of the Lord. Not an historical account of the creation of the physical universe, it is a carefully sculpted literary expression using the familiar terms of the covenant intended to bear witness to God’s preeminence over all creation.

If so, I’m sure you made up your mind well before researching critiques. But seriously, do you have any idea how deceitful and fallacious Comfort’s introduction is?

It’s really sickening that so many Christians uncritically accept any criticism of evolution as valid simply by virtue of the fact that it’s a criticism of evolution. Even a cursory amount of research will show how many egregious misrepresentations of Darwin and evolutionary theory are in this introduction. And Comfort cut out two chapters that are widely recognized to contribute some of the best evidence for Darwin’s thesis.

If we will be known by our fruit, and especially if you want to entice others to eat it, I’d be much more careful that straw men and outright lies aren’t charged to your account if I were you.

Above all, I’m dreadfully disappointed that a group of people so committed to believing all the right things would so actively propagandize falsehoods and mischaracterizations without fact-checking them.

How much stock do you put in actors’ political opinions? Unless he were trained as a surgeon, I’ll warrant that you wouldn’t let a preacher operate on you, no matter how much you respect his theology and pastoral sensitivity. If you’re going to criticize evolution, do so on scientific grounds, why don’t you?

Commonly in Christian theology, the agreement between Adam and God (the Adamic covenant) and the agreement between the Israelites and God (the Old Covenant of Moses) are contrasted (the Noahide and Abrahamic covenants are given varying significance depending on who’s talking). Many, such as those holding firmly to the Westminster Confession, argue that the Adamic covenant was a “covenant of works”, the Mosaic covenant was “of grace” at heart but administered through works, and that the New Covenant is thoroughly a covenant of grace. It’s almost as though God kept trying different ways to maintain a relationship with humanity, and finally managed to get it right with Christianity.

Reading the Eden story as an historical account gives us the impression that there was a covenant with humanity that got broken. Successive attempts at reconciling God and man were necessary, each in the form of a new epochal covenant that had to hold up at least temporarily until Jesus came and brokered the final version. But we get a slightly different picture if we understand the early Genesis accounts as etiology, an origins story, offered by later Israelite theologians to replace the errant myths they were familiar with, some lingering from their ancient past and others absorbed from surrounding cultures.

Did you see the Indiana Jones movies? Everyone knows him as the swashbuckling archaeologist who displayed his uncommon daring, epic bravado, and quick thinking to rescue relics and precious artifacts from those who sought to exploit them for nefarious purposes. We learned all that about him in the first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and saw his awe-inspiring knowledge, skill, and good luck in action once again in The Temple of Doom. We intuited that these were not two isolated occasions. We could tell that he’d been at this for quite awhile, and was an “old hand” at it.

At the beginning of the third movie, the filmmakers included something commonly appreciated by fans of such recurring tales: an origin story. Now this is interesting: those who see him as a young man might have expected to see some decisive moment that transformed him from a typical kid into the legend as we know him. Whereas a young, carefree, and well-adjusted Bruce Wayne experienced something that sharply reversed his course and sent him hurtling toward the brooding, dark, and psychologically scarred Batman he became, Lucas and Spielberg took a tack that’s in many ways much more interesting — and ancient.

To our surprise (and satisfaction), when we first see him as a teenager, despite the absences of his only known phobia, the scar beneath his chin, and his iconic fedora, he’s already Indiana Jones. By my count, four separate etiologies are presented in this short story prefacing The Last Crusade, but what’s remarkable is what remains the same: here at our first glimpse, what do we see but the same idealistic adventurer that we’ve known all along, who believes that precious artifacts “belong in a museum”, knows his archeology, is bravely tenacious, and stands his ground even when cornered. We find that what makes Indiana Jones Indiana Jones is…well, he’s Indiana Jones.

I think that’s one of the primary things the Genesis story of the Fall was meant to convey: God initiates relationships with men, and their pride and self-interest routinely cause the severing of those relationships. Now, I’m not sure how “Moses” arrived at this conclusion; God certainly may have revealed it, but since He didn’t reveal how it happened (via the evolutionary processes that created us), I tend to think it was acquired by more proximate causes. For one thing, as seen in etiologies across the ancient world, uniformitarianism seems to have been generally taken for granted; they formed their etiologies based upon assumed continuity between what is observed in the present and what happened in the past.

No matter, one of the most profound revelations to us in the Genesis story, one we can take to the bank, was that humanity was human all along. The unfaithfulness the religious leaders of Israel were warning against the Israelites repeating is seen as part and parcel of the warp and woof of what people have always been. “You’re just like your muleheaded Grandpa Adam.”

An interesting result of this interpretation is that it redirects one view of the Fall popular among Christians who understandably want to make sure that accepting evolution and a non-historical view of Genesis doesn’t throw out any more than necessary. These take up an allegorical or parabolic interpretation in which Adam and Eve aren’t necessarily two historical people, but whose Fall as depicted actually did take place in history among a certain population of humans. This view has been championed by theologians from C. S. Lewis to Keith Ward. The idea is that there was a period of time, probably in the thousands of years, in which humans were doing just fine, walking in the Garden with God in the cool of the evening, until by the influence of some catalyst they rose up and rebelled. I think this misses the point of the story, which was that humans have been humans as long as they’ve been human. In fact, what the story seems to be saying is that humanity is in a sense defined in contradistinction to other creatures by our simultaneous knowledge of God and the moral law and our inability to acknowledge God and live up to that moral law.

I tend to see a bit more continuity throughout human history in what God expects from those with whom He is in covenant: He expects love and faithfulness. The fantastic aspect of the New Covenant is the demonstration in Jesus’ self-sacrifice that God’s love covers our unfaithfulness and inadequacy to love. And as we consciously submit to Him and subjugate ourselves to His order, an ability to live and love Him faithfully and adequately are given back to us by His grace.

In a discussion involving my rejection of inerrancy, a frequent commenter mentioned the inerrantist objection, ”Without [our Bible] can we confidently walk up to a non-believer and ask him to believe our own personal faith in God without showing him something that he can see that points to that God?”

The first thing I’d like to note is that we can confidently show our non-inerrant (can anyone think of a better term than “errant”?) Bible as something that points to God. The Bible, if nothing else, points to God, but this obviously stops well shy of “proving” Him or anything about Him. But what the commenter is getting at is the inerrantist’s uneasiness with the fact that we have no official “last word” source text whose very existence will elicit compulsory belief from the doubter to whom it is presented. This is, in effect, what the inerrantist holds the Bible to be: you must believe because the Bible says so.

In actuality, I doubt very many reasonable people become Christians solely because they have been persuaded that the Bible is inerrant. They become convinced by what it says, and this may or may not suggest to them that the whole thing is absolute, crystalized divine perfection. We don’t need to be assured of inerrancy in order to make good use of a newspaper, but our confidence may be boosted by its consistent accuracy.

Telling an unbeliever, “Accept Christ as Lord, just as the Bible says,” is not itself dependent on inerrancy at all. Laying aside any questions about the value of proselytism, rejection of inerrancy itself does not undermine it in principle, although it does underscore the invalidity of one common tactic.  I think it no less likely (and more probable, in fact) that I might convince someone to adopt my faith if I told him that…

(1a) the Bible was written by ancient witnesses who believed Jesus was Lord, and that

(2a) I’ve found that to be true in my life and seen it at work in others’ lives

…than if I tried to convince him that…

(1b) the Bible is 100% perfect because it and I say it is,

(2b) Q.E.D., Jesus has been proved Lord.

(3b) Oh, and I’ve found that to be true in my life and seen it at work in others’ lives.

If they find one error in Scripture, or even just one difficulty without a plausible answer, they’ll be obligated by sound reasoning to declare (1b) unsatisfied and chuck (2b) without a second thought about (3b). In other words, when they ask, “Why should I believe your Bible?”, which puts a more significant strain on credulity? “Because it’s perfect, which proposition I accept because it says so about itself,” or “Because it works, and has yielded extraordinary results for believers and for society as a whole throughout the centuries”?

The inerrancy doctrine has been used more than anything else as a blunt object to decisively “prove” Christianity. But only the young or gullible come to accept Christianity based upon that. Too many Fundamentalists and evangelicals feel as though they have to prove the Bible’s perfection so that their faith will be “proved” as well. But we don’t need proof of its inerrancy; we need evidence of its usefulness and its reliability. Even if we don’t consider the Bible to be any more indicative of actual events in the times they describe than historians assume for the uninspired, non-inerrant, but sincere works of Josephus, Tacitus, or Julius Caesar, we still have something to reckon with.  And for all my rejection of inerrancy, I find it an unmotivated leap to also reject its adequacy for leading us to the formative and definitive stages of our faith’s history, from which starting point we and the Church throughout history have gone on to encounter the truth of God in Christ.

The question that must be asked of inerrantists is this: Is it Scripture or man’s wisdom that is the ultimate basis for Christians’ belief system?

If you answer that Scripture is the foundation of our beliefs, you must also believe that even our beliefs about the Bible should be scriptural, free from the impositions of man’s so-called wisdom. Please tell me then, inerrantists, where you can find in Scripture that the Bible, meaning the canon as canonized by the Catholic Church, is inerrant.

Experience tells me that I will be directed to 2 Timothy 3.16-17. But this won’t work for multiple reasons. Number one, it’s only talking about the OT at best, since there was no “all Scripture” apart from the OT at the time it was written. Do you want to argue (as someone I know has) that this applies to the NT because 2 Peter apparently calls Paul’s writings “scripture” (Gk. graphe)? Laying aside the fact that graphe is the typical word for “writing” in Greek and not Scripture with a capital “s”, we have the significant issue of 2 Tim. not actually saying “inerrant”, “no errors”, “perfect”, “the very words of God” or anything approaching it; therefore, “inerrancy” is man’s imposition on the actual text of Scripture. What will happen here is that the inerrantist will claim that “inspired”/”God-breathed” means “error-free”, because God cannot lie. But this is where man’s wisdom comes in: the Bible nowhere says that “God-breathed” means “God dictated”, and no one except for an unhinged Fundamentalist claims the Bible is actually divine dictation, so they then must come up with the idea that God insured the accuracy of the perceptions of those to whom He revealed truth in Scripture. This is pure human speculation. It is not in Scripture. It is an extrapolation based upon man’s wisdom that has no biblical support. Therefore, the inerrantists’ belief system is based not upon Scripture, but upon the human philosophical proposition that God wouldn’t let authors of Scripture misinterpret any truth pertaining to science, history, or theology. Sure, it’d make sense for that to be the case, but it’s just not there in the Bible, and it violates no Scripture to believe that God’s inspiration entailed something a little less extravagant.

If they can think of no other prooftexts to produce, this is the part where they will change the subject and start talking about how the world will come crashing down around us if we throw inerrancy out. “How can we know what’s true and what’s not?” “We’ll all become self-serving Hitler apologists if we don’t have an absolutely inerrant witness from God Himself.” But need I say again that what this stuff amounts to is “man’s wisdom” about Scripture rather than any claim it makes for itself? That’s not to say it’s incorrect reasoning, but it’s certainly not sola scriptura – it’s depending on man’s reasoning to invalidate man’s reasoning. And it’s bad reasoning at that, for it depends on the argumentum ad consequentiam, the appeal to consequences. However undesirable the consequences, I’m personally committed to pursuing the truth.

So how about it? Can you point me to any Scriptures that dictate outright (and it must be outright, since weaving this and that passage together by logical train of thought is the work of the wisdom of man) that the Bible is inerrant or infallible?