Undeception

This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our sinful natures, what is?

Depravity for me is summed up by self-centered living, which is inexcusable for a species that has achieved consciousness of the divine. We are all sinners because we all start off life living for ourselves, which, after early childhood and the awareness of Otherness sets in, becomes sin. Sin is a state of estrangement from God. Over long eons, God brought His children up biologically so that mankind became sentient and came to know that it had a Maker. At that point, God chose a different means to mature our species. We still struggle to subdue and tame our own biological impulses that lead to our detriment and God’s displeasure, but we master them not through natural selection, but by the overcoming power of the Spirit of God. Christianity is the next (and final?) phase in the evolution of God’s creation.

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This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first sin caused a rupture in the whole race’s ability to interact with God. How the death that Adam experienced because of his sin was passed on to all his descendants has been explained in various ways: the federal view says that Adam’s fall from God’s favor was effective for all humanity because he was the “head” of the race. Another view is that the Fall corrupted Adam’s very genetic makeup, causing humanity to be a slave to its own sinful and fallen flesh, which explains how it was passed on to his children, and thus the whole race.

Regardless of how they explain it, most Christians believe that God considers all humans straight out of the chute as culpable of sin, a stance of separation from God called “Original Sin”. This position explains why every human sins, and why we automatically start out life estranged from God. That we all sin and by nature act in ways that do not please God from early childhood at least is apparent to all. For this reason, it is accurate to say that unredeemed mankind is, as a race, “falling”, but as for “fallen”, what did we fall from? Or, more importantly, what caused this Fall? Allow me to present you with an alternative interpretation based on a view of the Genesis account as etiology.

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This is the sixth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Preliminary Remarks The purpose of these next few posts is to examine my perspective of the doctrine of the Fall, and specifically how it is influenced by my view of the Bible. The purpose of this post is apologetic rather than polemic: my purpose is less to convince anyone of the view I hold and more to explain how someone who holds it deals with doctrinal issues. The earlier posts in this series argued that our Scriptures are not inerrant and are not in fact completely without scientific and historical errors. I also made a plea for interpreting the Bible as literature: that is, we need to recognize that the words of Scripture were not completely isolated from the words written by their authors’ contemporaries and we must therefore identify the literary genre in which they were composed as a first order of business when interpreting the Bible. I cautioned against a view of the nature of Scripture that overspiritualizes its origins, pointing out that if God had wished to set down a series of unanalyzable propositions free from all impurities and the influence of man’s fallibility, He could definitely have chosen a more suitable means than using words written in three different languages over several centuries that must in turn be passed down through many more centuries and translated into countless other languages. Moreover, Christians are left bickering and head-butting each other while trying to determine the supposedly undistilled, pristine, immutable, and uncontradictable truth for almost any given passage. The fundamentalist might understandably wish that God had provided an inerrant and infallible key to interpretation, one decidedly more reliable than the deceptively straight-forward “literal whenever possible” model, which itself all too rarely yields a single, indisputable outcome in its application.

The problem is that the idea of not having an inerrant and hence perfectly uncontestable final authority makes many Christians uncomfortable, and sets many to wondering how rejecting inerrancy limits the Bible’s value and usefulness. The next few installments of this series are meant to address two concerns related to that question. First, I will summarize my belief in the Bible’s origins and nature; second, I want to present a case study of the resultant hermeneutic, with a brief and tentative exposition of how I interpret the passages that have resulted in the doctrine of the Fall.

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This is the fifth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

The Importance of Determining Genre

Because the Bible is a compilation of literary works, in order to get the sense of it, we must interpret each of them in the manner in which it was intended, viz. according to the appropriate literary category. Surely the principle of interpreting things in the manner in which there were intended approaches tautology, but how many Christians ever really follow it through? As mentioned before, the assumptions that determine the “manner in which it was intended” are too often based on what meets the eye alone. So what do I mean by interpreting the Bible as literature?

You read a novel in much the same way that you read the newspaper, realizing that they are both forms of narrative. How you interpret the narratives in each, however, depends on your recognition of the type of literature you are reading. No one would say that Great Expectations was “errant” or “a pack of lies” unless he thought it was written as history. The same goes for the Bible, which is far from uniform in literary genre. We have farmers, shepherds, doctors, and kings for authors; what thoughtful person, recognizing that God chose this diverse crowd rather than three or four prophets or priests to bear witness to Himself, would conclude that God would homogenize their testimonies into one nameless genre, erasing the distinctiveness of each one in His quest to dole out a series of unanalyzable propositions? Instead, within the pages of Scripture we find a broad range of writing styles that includes poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, apocalyptic, and epistle.

Moreover, there is not always a one-to-one genre-to-book correlation. Not every segment within the book of Genesis, for example, is to be interpreted as the same sort of narrative, as is somewhat obvious to someone doing comparative literary analysis on the type of stories being told. The Creation part of Genesis shares many characteristics of Ancient Near Eastern mythology, whereas the stories of the Patriarchs remind us of the Icelandic sagas, collections of family stories that give a group of people a common heritage.

The historical-grammatical (or grammatico-historical) method of biblical interpretation is the practice of taking into account the original language and the culture of the original audience when researching the original meanings of Scripture. By and large, though, inerrantists have used this principle as a defensive and reactionary measure to clear up problems rather than as an active interpretive method: for instance, it is responsible for the observation mentioned before that Judah (and later Israel) used accession year dating, because Edwin Thiele looked at Persian (and that of other ANE cultures) record-keeping and saw that this explained a lot of long-supposed errors in the dating of the kings. The historical-grammatical method has been modified by many exegetes to act as a sort of middle-ground that suspends the value of a plain reading if by any means it helps to demonstrate the scientific inerrancy of the Bible. What is missing from that version of the historical-grammatical hermeneutic is the principle we have been discussing that insists upon interpreting the Bible in terms of the literary characteristics, devices, and genres that make it up. We may call this the literary-generic principle; this principle is a tool that cannot be neglected by anyone claiming to use the historical-grammatical method of interpretation and exegesis.

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This is the fourth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

In the discussion of the mode of the Bible’s inspiration I pointed out that the Bible is a compilation of literary contributions empowered by God and intended to thoroughly equip His people for every good work. My main point could be summarized that God authorized the Scriptures, but was not the author of them.

An admittedly limited analogy of this point draws a parallel between the Bible and the King James Version of the Bible. King James commissioned it, and it is therefore known by his name, although the translators and not he carried out his intentions. In reading the KJV we are realizing one of the ultimate purposes King James had for it. One of the chief purposes for the Bible’s commissioning was for our instruction, and we fulfill that goal when we allow ourselves to be taught by those men He commissioned to write it. One of the limitations of this analogy is the observation that God had a lot more to do with the Bible’s content than King James did with the Authorized Version: specifically, we discussed how God invaded the literature to deliver specific messages through His prophets. Even in these instances, however, the actual sentences and structure with which they framed these messages constituted their own works of literature.

Each of these literary contributions must be approached on its own terms, and never held to the preferred standards of the day and culture in which it is interpreted. Currently, the two standards that are the default for many Christians today are the standards of plain reading and scientific inerrancy (this term is discussed below). This view says that God constructed the Bible so that the most obvious reading is the intended one so that no one, even (some say especially) the least educated would be deprived of the truth, which is always presented in a way that precisely mirrors all relevant historical and scientific facts. Any part meant to be understood using anything besides a literal interpretation is plainly explicit. This approach might be understandable if the “plain” interpretation were consistent across the board, but things that are plain to some are not plain to others: for example, when does Jesus say that His parables are fictional? It is sometimes hotly debated whether the story of the rich man and Lazarus is history or a parable, due to the fact that he actually names a character rather than referring to him obliquely as “a certain man”. Someone from a remote culture with an animistic background might find comfort in a literal reading of Psalm 91:4, where God’s pinions are promised to cover the believer. When does Revelation say that the dragon or the vials or the Lamb are symbolic of other things? Obviously, even the most adamant “plain reading” advocates are making judgments on genre and style in their “plain reading”. This standard is “plainly” inadequate. How about the standard of scientific inerrancy?

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This is the third of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

We can summarize the previous discussion by saying that 2 Timothy 3:15-17 teaches that these writings collectively known as the Bible have been infused with the breath of life from God’s own lips, and we may confidently infer that the Bible has therefore taken on all the practical properties for which God ordained it. This post examines those properties.

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This is the second of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

This leads us to the specific meaning of the word theopneustos. The phrase “inspired by God” seeks to render this enigmatic near hapax legomenon which is a compound adjective with the components theos ‘God’ and pneustos ‘breathed’, represented quite literally in many translations as “God-breathed”. It is often argued whether this word designates Scripture as the manifestation of or as the target of the breath of God: God’s breath is either the source of Scripture or is merely the reason each writing is divinely effective. This last option is closely related to the source of the term “inspiration” pertaining to this doctrine, because the Vulgate translates it “divinely inspired”, or literally, divinely in-breathed. It has been claimed that this reading would require a missing Greek preposition en- ‘in’ before pneustos, so that we should have theëmpneustos.^[1] This form may perhaps have been more conclusive,^[2] but aside from the fact that this is in effect an argument from silence, such a preposition is not grammatically or semantically necessary. The extra-biblical usage of this word is altogether indecisive on the precise mechanics. Are there any other factors that might give us some direction?

Paul used a compound so exceptionally rare that even then it likely had the potential for confusion if left to its own inherent meaning; this suggests that Paul did not use it in complete isolation and probably assumed it would be understood in terms of some implied context. Is there a reference elsewhere in the Bible to God’s breath being manifested as an object, as is claimed with the notion of “writings exhaled by God”? Although I am unaware of an example of this, the argument from silence is of course no more instructive for my argument than for anyone else’s. Rather the strength in my argument comes from asking the same sort of question about the other proposed meaning: what other Scriptures can be found that reference God’s breath infusing something? If so, what is God’s breath doing there?

The notion of God-breathing seems to be a rather explicit allusion to the Genesis account of man’s transformation into a “living soul” as a consequence of God’s “into-breathing” – His inspiration. This was very probably what Jerome had in mind in the Vulgate’s rendering. With an already existing (albeit obscure) compound, it would likely never have occurred to Paul to insert a directional preposition such as the proposed en- (or eis-) before the deverbative element when the allusion was clear enough without it. Paul said “God-breathed” knowing that Timothy would immediately associate that expression with Genesis 2:7.

God’s breath consecrated and empowered the writings of Scripture formed from the dust of the ground (men), and not dictated or handed to man on tablets of gold by the Almighty. As C. S. Lewis put it, this body of the literature of men sovereignly foreknown and ordained was “raised by God above itself, qualified by him and compelled by him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served”^[3].