Undeception

This is the complete listing of my chapter-by-chapter reviews of Thom Stark’s The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It) (Wipf and Stock, 2010).

Foreword by John J. Collins and preface: Front matter

Chapter 1: “The Argument”: Diversity in the theologies of biblical authors

Chapter 2: “Inerrantists Do Not Exist”: The dubious hermeneutics of inerrancy

Chapter 3: “Inerrancy Stunts Your Growth”: Why criticize inerrancy?

Chapter 4: “Yahweh’s Ascendancy”: Polytheism in pre-exile Israel

Chapter 5: “Making Yahweh Happy”: Baal’s blazing babies

Chapter 6: “Blessing the Nations”: The God-sized hole in the Conquest narratives

Chapter 7: “The Shepherd and the Giant”: Slaying a tall tale with a slingshot

Chapter 8: “Jesus Was Wrong”: Apocalyptic contortions Part 1, Part 2

Chapter 9: “Textual Interventions”: Making excuses for your alcoholic uncle

Chapter 10: “Into the Looking Glass”: Peer reviewing the biblical authors

For more discussion of this material and to hear Thom’s answers to some lingering questions, please note this interview with him on the [ad hoc] Christianity Podcast.

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 10: “Into the Looking Glass”

By this point in the book, and undoubtedly long before, what everyone’s asking is, “So what’s his solution?” How can we read this very human book with all its human flaws and still think of it in some way as scripture?

Much of this chapter retreads familiar territory in light of Stark’s answer. One might be surprised that they’ve already encountered his answer to that question several times throughout the book. The answer: by confronting the text head on. The earliest texts set the precedent when they argue with one another. Many of the chapters describe a changing understanding of God and His ways, and despite the claims of the canonicists, we cannot assume that we are the beneficiaries of an interpretive victory won long ago by those who had the most recent word on the subject, whether author, canon, or council: that would be similar to what Lewis referred to as “chronological snobbery”, the assumption that the later a belief, the better. Instead, we have to engage the text in a way analogous to the old classical model of the dialectic, i.e. not as an infallible rule or unaccountable master, but as one of our teachers who is occasionally presenting something incorrect. Stark has referred to this type of engagement with the text as a confrontational reading more than once before this chapter. Perhaps another way of thinking about it would be peer review, in which even those accounted as experts (the biblical authors in this case) occasionally have their consensus overturned by new data presented by new researchers.

The key insight from this chapter is laid out in the first section, which at last elucidates the somewhat ambiguous title of the book. Stark’s point is this: the Bible is a mirror. When we read the Bible, we are looking at humanity’s attempt to understand the divine. We cannot even hope to accurately see God’s face in the text until we stare those ancient human faces in the eye and make the intentional and painstaking effort of wiping the egg from our moustaches, washing the toothpaste off of our chins, and taking the beam out of our eyes. When we read the Bible, Stark argues, we are not looking at God, but at ourselves, in all our human shortcomings and failures, subject as we are to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. It is not only Scripture for us insofar as it accurately speaks to us and convicts us of our shortcomings through its true teachings; no, we cannot fully claim it as our Scripture until we acknowledge our weaknesses, temptations, and unfavorable tendencies writ large within the text, indicting those human flaws in the justification for actions prescribed and described in the text and even in the very motivations for the writing/editing/compiling of the text. We can’t just learn from good examples and ignore the mistakes of our community, both historical and current, by covering up for them or cleverly explaining them away. For Stark, we can only ever hope to use the Bible effectively as Scripture if we consciously read it as a record of history that, when found wanting, we can then do our best to avoid repeating. Stark argues that God may indeed speak to us through the text, but often He does so in pointing out the pitfalls of human nature that produced the text.

The rest of this first section reexamines a few of the material from previous chapters under a confrontational reading to show what sorts of insight might be gleaned. I will only focus on a couple of them.

Stark argues that the development of monotheism from polytheism evident in the Old Testament doesn’t mean we just uncritically declare monotheism as the winner. He points out certain harmful tendencies of monotheism that are often noted by anthropologists and sociologists, paraphrased as “if you cannot kill or enslave them, convert them” (p. 221). Indeed, in chapters 4 and 5 he already showed that monotheism in Israel developed amidst such mindsets. But we only notice that when we entertain the possibility that the Bible is not inerrant and is never unchallengeable.

Many conservative American Christians will find the specific “condemned texts” he selects and draws lessons from to be at odds with their politics. But it is such close identification of Christianity with that particular conservative stance that he thinks the text warns us about in cases like the sacrifice of innocents: “…we continue to offer our own children on the altar of homeland security, sending them off to die in ambiguous wars…” (p. 222). Still, no particular party or political ideology is immune from the charge of hero worship and propaganda that he takes to be the most valuable moral of the David and Goliath story.

Reading biblical propaganda such as the legend of David and Goliath at face value may have its rewards; it is certainly an inspirational story. But such a reading can also foster delusion. Moreover, such a reading is not as interesting or as relevant as a critical reading. It is the critical reading that prepares us to face the real world where the true giants are the centralized powers that mask themselves with the ruddy faces of shepherd boys and good ol’ boys. (p. 225)

This doesn’t undermine his main point here, but I daresay that if he thinks a critical reading is more interesting and more relevant, he hasn’t tried to teach the story to young children!

This is the chapter that picks up where he left off in chapter 8, “Jesus Was Wrong”. He spends several pages talking about the problems with the apocalyptic mindset that, as he argued in chapter 8, Jesus was functioning from within. Stark makes a lot of hay pointing out the shortcomings of a dualistic, “black and white” way of viewing the world (“You’re either for me or against me”). The dualism of God vs. the world is somewhat impotent to effect the changes it most wants to accomplish, because waiting for God to come sweeping down on a wire to fix everything stymies progress in the interim:

Time and again, the Christian commitment to justice has been undermined by the expectation of an imminent end. Generation after generation, those who suffer are told to wait it out; authentic justice is impossible this side of the eschaton, but there is hope to be had in the conviction that the end is nigh. Yet the end has never been nigh, and there is no reason to believe that it is nigh today. (p. 227)

Here he acknowledges something I anticipated in my review of chapter 8, that to say that someone thought in apocalyptic terms is not to say that the entire set of his ideas could be boiled down to and dismissed as “apocalyptic”. Stark suggests that if we could recover those aspects of his thinking that Richard Horsley identifies as going back to Mosaic covenantal sources (such as “mutuality and debt forgiveness”), we will find positives in Jesus’ teaching that have the most potential for those “searching for strategies of resistance to domination and for those communities who have voices in democratic societies” (p.229). Supporters of capitalism and personal economic liberty are likely to find it more difficult to let Jesus get that right than the apocalyptic worldview.

As an aside, this highlights a limitation in Stark’s presentation at points throughout this book, and especially here: if he is trying to convince inerrantists they’re wrong, either he needs to underplay the politics (I get the feeling he’s doing his best to do this and falling short) or allow room for fuller argumentation, which certainly seems impractical in this type of book. He seems to work from the impression that getting someone to abandon inerrancy will make the shackles of conservative politics fall off their wrists, which may indeed happen for many, but in the case mentioned above there is a (probably unavoidable) limitation in his argumentation that requires a prior sympathy for social justice in order to have much persuasive value.

But now those wanting to know how what value Jesus being wrong could possibly have had are presented with Stark’s answer:

The revolutionary impulse was right. The curse upon the existing world order was valid. The expression of hope in a new beginning was vital. The creation of counter-cultural communities which function as signs of this new beginning was not only noble but necessary in order for the revolution to be successful. But the waiting for a miracle to make it all happen–that was wrong…Their apocalyptic framework was most likely the best they could do given the limitations of their time, place, and political climate. But we live in a different world. We do not have to wait for the miracle. (p. 230)

This is the recurring type of lesson learned by the negative example recovered in a confrontational reading, and it’s the primary contribution of this book. Admitting there are errors is only the beginning. Stark counsels us in Shakespeare’s words to “gather honey from the weed”, appropriating what works and, vitally, leaving in what doesn’t to serve as an ever-living reminder. This is why the Marcionite charge won’t hold up against Stark and his reading. He rejects it as among the worst possible solutions because it is antithetical to the approach he advocates. There is no more powerful a reminder of the dangers of mowing grass barefooted than when I see my cousin’s feet with its missing toes; when he wears shoes, it’s all too easy to forget. Abandoning inerrancy is only half the battle: we can neither merely cut out the offending texts or acknowledge errors while focusing exclusively on the positive, inspirational messages in what’s left. We must confront the writers of Scripture and their respective communities, and by confronting them, confront ourselves and our own communities of belief.

The final part of this chapter is devoted to diagnosing and addressing objections to a rejection of inerrancy. Stark indicts the mindset that wants all or nothing and a final, infallible, unquestionable authority as “the mark of profound immaturity” (p. 233). This plays into his earlier remarks about the importance of developing as moral agents and inerrancy’s thwarting of this endeavor. “Our Scriptures are like our parents. As much as we disagree with them, we cannot escape the ways they have irrevocably shaped us; nor, in many cases, should we want to” (p. 234); but as we mature, we learn that we can build off of their foundation and learn from their mistakes, and so must we do with Scripture and Christian tradition based off of the readings handed down by our forebears. In this I am reminded of the reminiscence of Rachel Held Evans in Evolving in Monkeytown how the moment she realized her adulthood was when she was able to confront her father’s inadequate theological response to a searing question about suffering. In failing to have a good answer to his daughter’s question, her father did not fail as a father, but had at last succeeded: he had finally produced a woman. As Paul spoke of Torah, the Bible as a whole is a pedagogue that is only as successful as its ability to train us to acquire and apply our understanding beyond its tutelage.

As a parent of small children, I found that this leaves me wondering exactly how I should present the Bible to my children who are nowhere near the maturity level from which Stark wants us to read the Bible: as they get older I can educate them in the dangerous human tendencies on display in the Flood narrative, but I cannot simply wait until they are old enough to understand the nuances before they learn the story. Perhaps a crisis is necessary: perhaps they can take stories like that at face value and I can draw out the good values in them until they’re old enough to 1) face the truth that the story never happened, 2) realize there are some immoral ideas behind that conception of God, and 3) appreciate the lessons we can learn from those bad examples. But hey, Stark never said it would be easy.

The most likely objection to all of this I (and Stark) have been saying is that we with this approach, and a rejection of inerrancy in general, we are left “picking and choosing” what is to be accepted and what is to be discarded. But as Stark argues in this chapter, the simple fact is that everybody chooses. Arminians, Calvinists, universalists–all Christian traditions presuming inerrancy choose which passages to read the others through, proposing new interpretations for (or burying) those passages which contradict their anchor doctrines. The other problem is that, even if the Bible were inerrant, no one has access to its infallibility. It is all filtered through our differing mindsets developed in our wildly different communities and cultural histories.

For Stark, being a Christian means using Jesus as our starting point, allowing his valuable teachings to guide us and to serve as both a launchpad and as a home base for our moral development. Living the Christian life is much more about developing workable ethics than defining rigid doctrines. It’s about accepting God’s call to implement his vision for humanity, a vision a church bound up in inerrancy has lost.

Who will get the most value from this book? From my perspective, it’s highly useful for readers like me, who are already convinced that the Bible is not inerrant but want something to do with the passages that cause problems for us. I have approached most of these posts with an inerrantist reader in mind, and when standing back and aggregating the concerns my posts anticipate on their behalf, I still find that it would be a good resource for the type of questioning believer most likely to want to read this book. For the dyed-in-the-wool inerrantists who most want to believe Stark is full of baloney…well, I’m sure he was never under any illusions about overcoming their doubts anyway. I advise commending this book to those in your circle of influence most likely to engage you on these topics, since a book like this is best read in community. In fact, the ideal scenario is for a small group study with plenty of interaction. The possibility of a future edition with study questions at the end of each chapter has been mentioned; I dearly hope that comes to fruition.

I’d like to warmly thank Thom Stark for this book. No, I am not convinced of every one of his particular critiques of the biblical authors nor of the universal applicability of all the principles by which he finds the various texts wanting, but neither does he expect me to be; that would be a replacement of one unappealable magisterium with another. Thom makes the important point that each individual and community must make the judgments as best they can in their circumstances. Regardless, I can confidently assert that for his main arguments, he has made his case.

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For more discussion of this material and to hear Thom’s answers to some of my lingering questions, please note our interview with him on the [ad hoc] Christianity Podcast.

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 9: “Textual Interventions”

If you hadn’t known it before picking up this book, at least by chapter 9 you’d be pretty sure that inerrancy is a wholly unsuitable expectation to place upon Scripture because it is built upon a vehement denial that the Bible ever speaks from the inaccurate perspectives that Thom Stark has pointed out so far. Inerrancy is one “reading strategy” as he puts it, one method for coping with those problems. Unsatisfactorily, it does so by denying that there are in fact problems.

He’s already discussed the shortcomings of that strategy, however. Chapter 9 is dedicated to describing and to varying degrees critiquing three other popular reading strategies, sometimes but not necessarily used in tandem with inerrancy. He refers to these as “enablers” because they are too often chosen in order to allow us to recast difficulties presented by the text in terms that exonerate it, thereby exempting it from critical scrutiny. His preferred reading strategy, a full explication of which will not appear until the next chapter, he refers to as a confrontational reading but also, in contrast to the “enablers”, a “textual intervention” that will not allow the inaccuracies and destructive behaviors affirmed by the Bible to go unchallenged. (The metaphor of the “alcoholic uncle” referenced in the title of this post appears within this chapter when discussing the need for textual intervention.)

In chapter 6 he noted that the allegorical treatments of the more brutal Old Testament passages by Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and other early interpreters showed that they at least were more aware than many modern apologists that the meaning of the texts was obviously incompatible with any vaguely Christian moral system. This realization was their motivation for finding another way of reading those texts, such as allegorizing the violent purging of Canaan in terms of the grueling process of personal sanctification. But Stark doesn’t think this is ultimately the best way to handle these texts, because rather than actually dealing with what the text is telling us, allegorical readings give us a way out of indicting the tragic reality behind those passages, whitewashing the turpitude of those who authored them and offered them up as sacred writ. “Such readings are dishonest with the text, and can blind believers to problematic aspects of their faith heritage, whereas confrontational readings of the scriptures produce humility in religious believers” (210). Moreover, a denial of the actual meaning behind many of those stories is disrespectful to the victims of the more horrific events justified in the text as divine in origin (to whatever extent those events actually transpired as described).

Another alternative is championed by those who are convinced that picking apart the details or the redaction history of a narrative in Scripture and digging as deep as possible in order to recover the original intent and intended application are ultimately irrelevant to what Scripture means for us: what matters is the text as handed down to us by our predecessors in the community of faith known as the church. It’s a hermeneutic that self-consciously depends on theological traditions, especially those developed and affirmed by the early councils. It is because of that emphasis that it has been called a canonical hermeneutic. From the conviction that what matters for the community of faith is the reading handed down to us for our encouragement arises a certain nonchalance among many advocates of canonical readings that will suffer all the historical layers of the texts to be peeled back and the original meanings exposed; many are quite familiar with and accepting of an historical-critical approach to the Bible that Stark has been presenting the fruits of throughout the book. But with information recovered by such critical studies they will not bother to grapple: their response is, rather, “So what?” What matters is how the text as historically interpreted and thus providentially provided can be used to build up the faith of the faith communities of which we’re a part. In contrast, Stark contends that we cannot blindly trust that God’s hand was in the passing down of readings of Scripture, since not only the readings of the historical church but even the very passages that made it into the canon were mostly written and chosen “by the religious and political elites in order to serve their own interests” (p. 211). I found that to be a confident statement that deserved much support, but got none except a footnote referring the reader to another book. He has, of course, mentioned quite a few passages in the Old Testament that seem to have been essentially propaganda, but he made no such case for the New Testament or the canonization process itself. The conservative reader will find this criticism of canonical readings utterly underwhelming. Another misgiving Stark has with this approach is the question of who defines the canonical reading in the first place. The readings of the historical community of faith were hardly consonant with one another, and still less unanimity remains for our benefit. “The result of such readings is not a biblical theology; it is a theology that is imposed upon the text in a way that is methodologically uncontrollable” (p. 212). I would suspect that most advocates of this hermeneutic would recognize this difficulty and say that God is still providentially ordaining modern readings in ways that are not subject to external verifiability but for internal applicability. Although Stark does not make the correlation, this strikes me as a rather neo-orthodox approach to Scripture.

The final approach to Scripture that Stark addresses, the subversive reading, is popular nowadays among many of the liberation theology persuasion. This approach essentially inverts the obvious reading of a passage and in many cases even goes so far as to claim that this counter-intuitive reading was actually the intended reading of the passage. So, for instance, behind Jesus’ famous advice to “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,” while on the surface defensive of the status quo of taxation, there seems to actually be an implication that God’s interests and Caesar’s interests are diametrically opposed, and that the money coined by Rome was unfit for the devout to keep in their possession. Similar subtle but unequivocal anti-Empire undertones in Paul have gained notoriety in recent years. Stark does not deny the reality of many of these subversive readings. That these passages are truly against the imperial powers of the time is not to be challenged: what Stark finds unsatisfactory about heralding the recovery of such original but long obscured readings is that they are insufficiently subversive. Because Jesus’ and Paul’s criticism of Rome was so underplayed and hidden in plain sight for the original audience’s benefit, the opposite meaning for subsequent audiences has too often prevailed. Human government’s divine right to virtually unlimited force as apparently affirmed in Romans 13 as a temporary measure until the any-day-now eschaton was ripped out of that context and turned into a condemnation of the Christian’s right to protest an abusive government. But recovering the historical intent is not enough for Stark and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, whom he quotes extensively: what is needed is a complete deconstruction of the concepts and terms in which those passages were situated. In other words, even Jesus’ teaching that the powerful would be brought low and the low brought to power, while understandable as relief for the desperate in the immediate context of the first century, still implied the legitimacy of the powerful/weak opposition model of human interaction, albeit with the new faces for the slaves and masters.

…[W]hat is necessary is an analysis of the way that the perpetuated inscription of the categories of empire and patriarchy have impeded progress toward human rights, democracy, and authentic human freedom…If we do not come up with new language to depict our relationship with the divine, then the categories of empire will continue to dominate our thinking, even if their use by Paul and other early Christians was only ad hoc and subversive. Applying the language the emperor used for himself to God ony legitimates the ideology of empire, and ensures that categories of domination and subordination will continue to be second nature to human societies, generation after generation. [p. 217]

As a liberation theology manifesto, this works fine; as a criticism of inerrancy, it’s rather esoteric and probably too underdeveloped to do much good for those not familiar with “the language” of liberation theology. For instance, most average evangelical Christians will ask questions such as, “How should we view our relationship to the divine apart from submission to authority? Should our enlightened ideals about the relations between humans also be the guiding principles by which we understand and order our relation to the divine?” Others will ask, “Are all democracies preferable?” Others, “Are all aspects of patriarchy oppressive?” I myself wish he had supported his contention that willful submission to a wise lord or obedience to a loving father (the latter is more common, admittedly!) are metaphors that need to be deconstructed right out of commission. The answers to these obvious questions are assumed or at least too obliquely addressed within this chapter, which hastily barrels on to completion shortly after the above quotation. Having been assured of the validity of those “subversive readings” by Stark, many readers will find those readings to be an attractive view that his criticism does not sufficiently problematize.

The next, final chapter will deal with what this chapter was (mis-)named: “textual interventions”, confrontational readings of Scripture that value the original meaning of the text, but love it too much to leave it that way.

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 8: “Jesus Was Wrong” (part 2)

As a preterist with a fully “realized eschatology”, I had no trouble with most of the discussion in the first part of my chapter 8 summary. Where I began having a problem was in Stark’s insistence that “Each apocalyptic community had their peculiarities, but the end result was the same–the restoration of Israel and the judgment of the nations” (p. 168). Even that isn’t a problem unless you accept Stark’s contention that “the restoration of Israel” means exactly what it sounded like to the first century audience: the ascendancy of Israel as a political force, headed up under a triumphant Messiah in David’s model that would free the nation from Rome. Stark focused on much more than that in this chapter, but it’s that contention that will drive the discussion in this post.

We’re always told that the expectation that the Messiah would set up a physical kingdom based in Jerusalem and free Israel from Roman rule was a misunderstanding the disciples had until the resurrection, when the light bulb finally came on; it’s never intimated that they believed this because Jesus himself had believed this, and that this belief fueled the faith of the Jesus Movement all the way until the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus himself is always thought of as knowing the full story, trying to get through to his nationalist followers with little success. I think there is textual support for this, but one cannot exclude the possibility of post hoc, hindsight clarity put in Jesus’ mouth, although this was just as likely to be honest speculation, to the effect of, “Surely the Messiah understood it all correctly, and we just didn’t understand.”

The sayings that even most secular scholarship agrees were spoken by Jesus lead to the conclusion that he believed that the national misfortunes of Israel were drawing to a close, that the foreign powers and their unrighteous Jewish collaborators were going to be punished, and that he, the Messiah, would bring this all about. Thus Stark believes that Jesus’ prophecies sound a lot like the vision of the future held by most dispensationalist futurists: Jesus physically coming back to reign, with physical Jerusalem a place of eschatological interest.

Most preterists will dislike this interpretation and insist that a spiritual revolution, heralded as it was by the physical destruction of Jerusalem c. 70 AD/CE, was always in mind. What evidence does Stark cite against this view?

Stark spends a considerable portion of this chapter responding to many of N.T. Wright’s popular teachings on eschatology, which are basically preteristic. The target of Jesus’ oracles is a crucial aspect of disagreement between Stark and Wright, with the latter affirming the view that Jesus was referring to a spiritual kingdom alone.

We preterists pride ourselves on having a leg up on our literalist brothers and sisters in that we recognize the eschatological idioms within the Olivet Discourse as having been carried over from earlier prophecies in which the promised events (the moon turning to blood, the Lord’s coming on the clouds, etc.) did not happen literally. Stark agrees that this language is from the Old Testament prophets, but essentially asserts that preterists don’t take it far enough: if, as preterists forcefully contend, Jesus prophesied using the language of the Old Testament prophetic tradition and if his audience recognized it as such, then his audience also had no reason to think that Jesus was using that well pedigreed prophetic diction somehow divorced from the greater context and traditions behind those idioms.

Specifically, the source texts for many of Jesus’ apocalyptic language are Isaiah 13-14, Joel 2, and Ezekiel 32, and they all use those prophetic metaphors such as stars falling from the sky to describe God’s judgment. But, Stark argues, the key is that in each case the recipient of the judgment was a foreign power of oppression. A holistic liberation was expected from Messiah, yet in the preterist system, it is apostate Jerusalem – the home team – which is the sole target of Jesus’ prophecies, as indicated by the predictions about the destruction of the temple. For Stark, it is manifestly clear what Jesus was saying: that God would use Rome to sack the holy city in judgment of the shortcomings of His own covenant people, but that, as described again and again in the Old Testament prophets, God would then turn around and send judgment upon His own instrument of judgment — in this case the Roman Empire.

Wright’s reading of Zechariah 14, Stark notes, is essentially a summary of his view of the events described in the Olivet Discourse: “Yahweh calls down the wrath of the Gentiles against Jerusalem; Jerusalem is attacked and destroyed; Yahweh is made king and glorified as Jerusalem is punished for its sins” (p. 194). But this is not the whole story.

This passage hardly supports Wright’s interpretation of Mark 13, and it hardly reflects the events of 70 CE. It does, however unfortunately, reflect very much what Jesus of Nazareth predicted would take place at that time. In both Zechariah 14 and Mark 13, Yahweh punishes Jerusalem with foreign armies, before immediately turning around and punishing the Gentiles that were used to punish Jerusalem. In both oracles, after the judgment of the nations, a new age of unfathomable glory ensues. In neither case were the oracles fulfilled. (p. 195)

As evidence that the Jerusalem religious machine and not the foreign oppressor was the target of Jesus’ prophecies, Wright has argued that Jesus’ counsel to flee Jerusalem in Mark 13 was an allusion to the situation of the refugees from Babylon in Jeremiah 50.6,28. But in Jeremiah why are they told to flee Babylon? “Because,” answers Stark, “Yahweh is coming to take vengeance on Babylon for destroying his temple–precisely what Rome would do to Jerusalem in 70 CE. If anything in Mark 13 echoes these verses in Jeremiah 50,” Stark continues, “it would not be the instruction to flee but the proclamation of doom against Rome as repayment for the desecration of the temple” (p. 193). Rejecting Wright’s correlation of Jeremiah 50.28 to Mark 13, Stark sees Jesus’ instruction to flee to the mountains following the Romans’ desecration of the temple as an allusion to the Maccabees’ flight to the mountains to regroup and await reinforcements for a military invasion after the original “desolating sacrilege” by Antiochus Epiphanes. Only this time, they would be led down from the mountains by the returning Messiah.

Like most other preterists, Wright sees the desolation of the temple as the liberation and vindication of faithful Israel, yet Stark contends that God’s vindication was envisaged as being made necessary because of the desolation, reading the Gospels’ anticipation of the desolation as foreboding, not as a positive, glorious hope. The final battle, the Day of the Lord, would come when God swiftly responded to the local judgment on unfaithful Jews using the Romans with a global judgment upon the Romans.

Stark also takes issue with Wright’s understanding of the timing of the events prophesied by Jesus. For instance, for all the “time statements” that preterists rightfully bring out in support of a first century fulfilment, there is something of a forgotten or at least misplaced “time statement”: although Wright equates the judgment on Jerusalem with a symbolic “coming of the Son of Man”, the coming of the Son of Man was said in Mark 13.24/Matt 24.29 to occur “after the suffering of those days” — that is, following the sacking of Jerusalem. The destruction of Jerusalem could not itself be the coming; the divine vindication/retaliation is pictured as coming in response to the events that required vindication/retaliation, namely the Roman decimation of God’s holy city. Thus when Jesus warns his disciples not to follow any others claiming “I am he,” he is teling them that “they are not to follow after those messianic hopefuls who claim to have a divine commission to wage war on Rome. Yet note that not one of the gospels denies such a war is to be waged” (p. 179, emphasis original). Another observation that I found particularly impressive in setting up Stark’s picture of an inevitable Jesus/Rome clash was this:

Apart from being theologically “liberal,” belief in the resurrection [i.e., of the dead = an afterlife] was also politically explosive, for the same reason that contemporary extremist Islamic belief in the resurrection is politically explosive. Belief in the resurrection freed one up to walk a dangerous path of hard-line opposition to Rome and to the puppet temple regime in Jerusalem. (p. 167)

Jesus would have been considered a walking time bomb. This helps explain Rome’s participation in the Jews’ plan to eliminate him.

The applicability of the judgment is another important subject of Stark’s critique of Wright. Preterists contend that the scope of the judgment of Jerusalem was local in implementation but global in significance. All language implying worldwide activity is conceived of as spiritual in nature. Stark is singularly unconvinced, and contends that the predicted judgment was described unmistakably worldwide in physical scope: judgment was to fall on “all who dwell on the face of the earth” (Lk 21.35); Matt 24.30 says that “all the tribes of the earth” would mourn. Preterists will counter that universal language is used in the Old Testament to describe non-universal events, but I don’t think they’re considering that those prophecies’ targets were world empires and, absent a knowledge of the Far East, Africa, or the Americas, the scope was probably conceived of as truly universal even then. Taking into account the argument that the opponent of the last battle prophesied by Jesus was the nation responsible for desecrating the holy city, Stark is convinced that “…what Jesus means is dreadfully clear: Rome’s time is up…The worldwide mourning of the tribes indicates in no uncertain terms that this is a picture of the final judgment” (p. 182). Partial preterists such as Wright are more scandalized by this interpretation than full preterists, who would agree that this was the “final judgment”, resurrection of the dead included, only that it was somehow invisibly and universally appropriated from that localized event.

Stark notes Jesus’ response in Acts 1.7-8 to the disciples asking him if he was going to “restore the kingdom to Israel” at that time:

He does not deny that he intends to deliver Israel from Rome. He simply declines to tell them when. Pentecost is therefore presented by Luke as the empowerment of the disciples to prepare the world for the Messiah’s coming to restore the kingdom to Israel. (p. 203-204, emphasis original)

Having addressed the prophecies attributed directly to Jesus, Stark turns to what are considered the earliest extant Christian writings, the epistles of Paul. As with Jesus, much of Paul’s teaching came out of his conviction about an already-not-yet realization of the end times, a partial overlapping of the coming world order onto the current one. From counseling people not to marry until the end came (1 Cor 7.36), to teaching that “social norms were topsy-turvy in light of the imminent reconstitution of the cosmos” (p. 202; 1 Cor 7.26, 29-31), to stressing the urgency of the Christian mission because they were over halfway to the eschaton since Jesus’ time (Rom 13.11), Paul and the other early Christians were clearly of the opinion that the new day was about to dawn. Once again, for the countless proofs of early Christians’ expectations of imminency, read the book (or search my site — I’m pretty sure I’ve got a lot of the “time statements” cataloged somewhere on here!).

Stark asserts that Paul too envisaged the coming Kingdom of God as the end of Roman political domination. Citing several scholars, he avers that when Paul in 1 Thess 5.3 speaks of people immediately before the eschaton obliviously repeating “peace and security” (Gk. ειρηνη και ασφαλεια), Paul is consciously alluding to one of Rome’s official state slogans, Pax et Securitas, from Augustus’ propaganda campaignl; Paul was declaring the days of Pax Romana at an end when Christ returned. Stark also infers from Romans 12.14-21 that Paul’s counsel to the Christians in Rome to bless their persecutors and await God’s vengeance on them is an indication that he at least believed the “end of the age” to mean a shakeup of power in Rome and not merely in Jerusalem.

From here Stark notes the response to what might be called “the Great Disappointment of 70″ as documented within the New Testament itself. The late, pseudepigraphical 2 Peter (which he discusses in a footnote) abandons the imminency expectation altogether, reversing the old apocalyptic argument that swift deliverance was a sign of God’s justice and arguing instead that God’s waiting was a sign of His compassion, in order that He might save more people. Like Stark, I find this an unhelpful solution, since delay only allows more to perish in the interim. Another response is evident in the Fourth Gospel, also written some time after the Great Disappointment, which in its abandonment of an earthly kingdom for a spiritual kingdom (e.g. John 18.36) and near exclusion of apocalyptic elements has become the standard Christian understanding, although many futurists still hold out hope for a future millennial kingdom on earth as well.

As for points of weakness in Stark’s argumentation in this chapter, I noticed that Stark does not address why Matthew and Luke/Acts at least, if written after 70 CE as scholarship generally supposes, do not do more to reframe the picture of redemption in a form better conforming to the deflation of expectations as the authors of the Fourth Gospel and 2 Peter did. To the contrary, Luke in particular seems at pains to identify the Olivet Discourse as relating to the siege of Jerusalem, when “Jerusalem is surrounded by armies.” If nothing else, Stark’s interpretation strikes me as an argument for an earlier dating of Luke than is often supposed. If he has anticipated this response, as I suppose he has, I wish he had included it.

There are a number of ways of dealing with all of this information. It is at least possible that Jesus was speaking subversively about the Romans, as any liberation theologian (like Stark) could appreciate; that he appealed to Messianic expectation by speaking in terms of militaristic triumph over the empire while quietly subverting this by teaching love for one’s enemy and the inversion of least/greatest; that his disciples truly did just “miss it”. Of course, how exactly the “redemption” promised in Luke 21.28 happened as a result of Jerusalem’s defeat in any imminent sense is of course a difficult question. Yet at least it is hard to dispute that the Christian principle of inversion, the ideal of voluntary servanthood and love of one’s persecutors, when it has infiltrated hearts and minds, is indeed one of the greatest possible enemies of empire.

Perhaps, alternatively, Jesus himself wasn’t fully aware of the spiritual implementation of his oracle against Rome, and that in Jesus’ prophecies we’re seeing yet another of the “human faces” of God. I’m open to the idea of Jesus “growing into” his mission, such as is argued by those who see the Syro-Phoenician woman incident as the moment in which Jesus realized that his ministry applied to more than just the Jews, so I can stomach the possibility of his own understanding of the nature of the kingdom developing over time, and even of its being crystallized in incomplete form by his untimely death.

I don’t know that scholars do them justice when they speak of “millenarians” and “apocalyptic prophets” in such broad terms as though there were a school that taught “How to Be a Charlatan” as a vocation. Can we really boil Jesus or those other men down into a category and say that each of them, based on several overlapping thematic factors (described by Koch and Allison), were merely “dime a dozen”, “run of the mill” end time hacks, individual distinctives admitted but notwithstanding? Was Jesus an “apocalyptic prophet” any more than I am, ontologically or existentially, a “blogger”? I wonder if we would be less scandalized if we thought of Jesus as a teacher and moral philosopher who happened to have Jewish apocalyptic leanings and interests, even preoccupations, which understandably got more attention when so many of his prophecies seemed to come true (earthquakes, wars, famines, the temple’s destruction within 40 years, etc.; as Stark admits, “nine out of ten ain’t bad”). I’m merely saying that even if we allow Jesus to be mistaken in some of his apocalyptic expectations, we needn’t draw the conclusion that he should be dismissed as merely a “failed apocalyptic prophet”, or that he was not someone who said things that God wanted humanity to hear. After all, it’s not his doomsday prophecies that have shown the potential to change the world, which any self-respecting Messiah would want to do above all else.

Another point of criticism: Stark mostly dismisses in a footnote reference to Allison’s Jesus of Nazareth the possibility that Jesus prophesied a spiritual kingdom signified through some real world events (like the destruction in 70 CE) and that it was the New Testament writers who misunderstood it. Although various comments littered throughout the chapter obliquely challenged that contention, I think that perhaps it deserved a bit more dedicated commentary than he gave it. If Allison conclusively demonstrated the folly of this supposition as Stark implies, it would have been invaluable to summarize it in full text.

At very least, I’d say that Stark has convinced me that the Gospels (by and large) and the Epistles (by and large) teach that Jesus’ imminent return would be about more than just the vindication of Christians as implemented through the destruction of Jerusalem. So as I see it, eschatological systems as understood by most preterists and futurists alike that refuse the idea that Jesus was wrong can only thrive either upon distortion of the text or a claim that the NT authors got Jesus wrong — neither of which are compatible with inerrancy.

If indeed the New Testament is correct that Jesus prophesied Israel’s restoration as a nation and Rome’s demise, then he was wrong, at very least about the timing. Stark’s answer to this? He is sympathetic to the concerns Christians will have about Jesus being viewed as merely a “failed apocalyptic prophet”. In the conclusion of this chapter, he responds, essentially, with “wait for chapter 10″! Sounds like a great way to make people skip the chapter that comes in between this chapter and that one! (Don’t worry; I won’t.)

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 8: “Jesus Was Wrong” (part 1)

I am a full-on, unapologetic non-inerrantist, and I was before reading this book. I have long maintained that the Bible is made up of the opinions and frequently faulty understandings of its human authors rather than divinely revealed and guaranteed dispensations of truth. I have not only been heretofore untroubled by Thom Stark’s exposure of the Bible’s factual and ethical shortcomings, as a lifelong lover of the Bible, I have actually relished the information as revealing its true nature.

But that was the Old Testament. In chapter 8, Stark comes calling on the New Testament. And in spite of myself, I find it rather uncomfortable.

Was Jesus wrong? Not just ignorant about the day or the hour of his return; not even just mistaken about what the smallest of all the seeds of the earth was, or whether Moses wrote the Torah, or the historicity of Noah’s flood. In this chapter, Stark dares us to consider that Jesus may have been wrong about a very important aspect of his mission. Stark takes on virtually all the different eschatological viewpoints, and even for those without firm commitments, this will be tough stuff for virtually anyone who calls Jesus Lord. C.S. Lewis famously called Matthew 24.35 “the most embarrassing verse in the Bible,” and while Stark might point us to other passages perhaps better qualified for that distinction, he would surely agree that Lewis was speaking from a more accurate understanding of the New Testament’s eschatology than most modern Christian eschatology junkies!

Chapter 6 and this chapter are the two longest in the book, differing in a scant three pages’ length. But because this one was much heavier for me and for many of my readers, I have decided to take more than one post to unpack his discussion. This post will deal more with backgrounding the issues, while the next will pick up where it got really sticky for me as a somewhat nuanced preterist.

The first argument, with which I was actually quite familiar already, is that Jesus’ style and message resembled those of the first century Jewish apocalyptic prophets (following Sanders, etc.), several of whom we know from Josephus and other sources. Stark explains the origin of the apocalyptic genre as second temple era theodicy. The ancient prophets had blamed their national misfortunes on Israel’s sinfulness, and had prescribed repentance as the cure. Well, Israel did repent, but to little effect: they returned from captivity, but despite their redoubled devotion remained political nobodies under the thumb of the Greeks and then the Romans for centuries. This called for a change of explanation: originally it was God punishing them, but now it was God’s enemies who were persecuting them. So, the philosophers came up with a reasonable solution: these enemies would get theirs in the end, even as the faithful were awarded. This was essentially a return to the dualistic cosmology left behind with the rise of monotheism and the denial of other spiritual powers. Here is where the familiar Satan comes into the picture as the archenemy of God; here also began the belief in the resurrection of the dead.

But here’s the thing: within the apocalyptic mindset, the expectation of an afterlife and a final judgment vindicated God for allowing unwarranted adversity only if “the end that justified the means [were] conceived of as imminent. Yahweh’s righteousness was expected to be displayed in the fact that he could not suffer the suffering of his people for very long” (p. 164).

A belief in the imminency of the eschaton was a foundational tenet of second temple Judaism’s apocalyptic movements. It was a belief shared by the followers of Jesus, for the very good reason that the various “time statements” of Jesus throughout the Gospels affirmed it in no uncertain terms: “Surely I say unto you, this generation shall not pass…”; “Some of you standing here will not taste death until…” etc., etc. But this was by no means the only affinity between the Jesus Movement and other Jewish apocalyptic groups. Stark cites a long list of assumptions and beliefs from Klaus Koch and Dale Allison, which all point to the conclusion that Jesus, if the Synoptics are to be trusted, was firmly a part of a much larger “millenarian” tradition, distinctions aside.

Stark supplies full text from the Synoptics that show exactly what Jesus predicted about the future. Interestingly, in addition to the standard-fare expectation of tribulation before the end, Stark states that one of the main distinctives of Jesus teaching in the Gospels was anticipation that the Messiah himself should suffer before ultimate victory. Another distinctive emphasis of Jesus, though not exclusive to him (e.g. the Qumran community), was that of a “realized eschatology” — the idea that aspects of the future world order could be realized even within this current world world order. This whole section reads like a primer to preterism, showing how Jesus unequivocally prophesied his return in glory and the judgment of the nations as within his disciples’ lifetime. Old news for me. I won’t summarize his arguments here, but if you think Jesus’ prophecies could be wrangled into introducing a two-thousand-year-and-counting gap between his disciples’ lifetime and the end times, you’ll want to read this chapter.

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 7: “The Shepherd and the Giant”

Chapter 7 features a critical analysis of the story of David and Goliath. Stark makes note of several features of the story seldom called to our attention by our Sunday School teachers. He begins by showing why scholars believe that the story in 1 Samuel 17 was inserted much later (probably post-exile) than the rest of the book was written (probably pre-exile).

For one thing, 1 Samuel 17 shows a completely different “origin story” for David’s introduction to Saul’s court. In the previous chapter (ch. 16), Saul specifically asks Jesse to send David into his service and is so impacted by David’s skills with the lyre that he notifies Jesse he is making David one of his retainers; yet in the very next chapter, Saul is pictured trying to figure out where this young fellow from the fields came from, asking his name and inquiring about his father’s name and residence. There are apologetic attempts at reconciling these, of course, but the very fact that such attempts have to be made reveals the enterprise to be a clean-up operation.

There are more compelling reasons to view 1 Samuel 17 as a later interpolation. One of those reasons that Stark discusses at some length is particularly interesting: did you ever notice 2 Samuel 21.19?

…and Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, killed Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.

Let it be noted that we don’t just have a Philistine hero named Goliath in both passages, nor just a Philistine hero named Goliath who was of prodigious size, nor even just a Philistine hero of prodigious size named Goliath who was from Gath (which is what “Gittite” means), but a Philistine hero of prodigious size named Goliath who was from Gath and who was slain by a Bethlehemite. The only difference, apart from the time frame (2 Samuel dates from the end of David’s reign) is who that Bethlehemite was: David or Elhanan. This doublet appears to be a clincher for what is already good evidence that 1 Samuel 17 was inserted, not seamlessly, as a “royal apologia” for David, whose prowess as a warrior was already thought to have been evident at an early age, long after the rest of Samuel was written (1 and 2 Samuel were originally one book). At this point, a savvy apologist will invite us to contrast 2 Samuel 21.19 cited above with 1 Chronicles 20.5:

…and Elhanan son of Jair killed Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.

Interestingly, here it is in inerrancy apologists’ best interest to point out a contradiction between the two passages, because they can say that the error lies in a copyist’s mistake of 2 Samuel (it is not for naught that they uphold inerrancy “in the original manuscripts”). Stark carefully explains the textual relationship between these two passages that in Hebrew are almost verbatim but for a couple very small differences. He shows why, rather than a textual corruption in 2 Samuel 21.19, a better explanation is that the post-exilic Chronicler’s thoroughgoing practice of ameliorating David’s character and reputation motivated his co-opting and conscious edit of 2 Samuel’s account. Painstakingly, Stark details the Chronicler’s ingenious solution: simply change a letter here, add a letter there, and “of Bethlehem” becomes “[direct object marker] Lahmi”. Voilà! Elhanan is now said to have slain the brother of Goliath the Gittite, named ”Lahmi”. The Chronicler has handily reconciled his history of David’s reign with the folk tale of the defeat of Goliath that had probably already been attributed to a Bethlehemite more famous than Elhanan, a story so popular that it got grafted into 1 Samuel, lack of continuity with the previous chapter notwithstanding. Unfortunately, the Chronicler’s convenient solution stands out like a sore thumb: 1) lahmi ‘my bread’ is nowhere else used as a personal name and 2) it is a Semitic and not a Philistine word.

For Stark, attributing the legendary defeat of the large Philistine champion to David, as done in the full-fledged story wedged between 1 Samuel 16 and 18 and in 1 Chronicles 20′s “correction” of the contradictory blurb from 2 Samuel, is a clear example of post-exilic “propaganda”. Telling the story of young George Washington and the cherry tree, another tale of dubious historicity, can be a harmless illustration of, say, Washington’s character as it was perceived by those who knew him; we get propaganda when an inaccurate story is made an official story by people in power who stand the chance of benefiting by it politically. Stark believes that the Chronicler wished to help perpetuate a belief in a mythically ideal Davidic kingdom for some political or religious purpose. More for the sake of other readers than for me (I have my own guesses), I wish Stark had gone further into describing how the Chronicler expected his exaltation of David to yield more prestige or influence. Despite subtitling the chapter “Government Propaganda”, even Stark admits at the end that the “government conspiracy” implied in the term propaganda may be reading too much intrigue into what might have amounted to mundane hero worship. Stark’s characteristic honesty in presenting his case is commendable, but confusing here in a chapter otherwise pervaded by the supposition that it was a piece of propaganda.  Which leads me to my final criticism of the chapter.

Stark explained in the preface that most of this book was comprised of revised and edited versions of posts that originally appeared on his blog. I could be wrong, but this chapter stands out to me as the most obvious example of a one-off post that was incorporated into the book, since it doesn’t seem to have been as well integrated as some of the other chapters (how’s that for some source criticism?). This isn’t to say that this chapter didn’t belong in the book: rather, I find that the book’s central contention, that the Bible is an argument with itself, would have been better served were his criticism of the David and Goliath story employed more consciously as an example of that theme rather than, as it seemed to me, primarily put to work as evidence that the story as we know it is simply a retrofitted political puff piece on King David. That is, Stark makes it clear from the subtitle and introduction of the chapter that he intends to discuss David and Goliath in order to indict the story as political propaganda, using the various fascinating conflicts between the Samuels and 1 Chronicles merely as evidence of the main story’s historical illegitimacy. At any rate, I can’t imagine but that it will seem this way to his target audience, who already fear that biblical criticism is just an excuse to rip things out of the Bible. I tend to think that if Stark had been slightly more aware of that concern, he would have revised the original post a bit to more clearly recapitulate the “Bible as internal argument” theme, more self-consciously bringing home the point I believe he most wanted his readers to take away: that very human tendencies such as hero veneration and government propaganda have helped give rise to The Argument between biblical sources that we see when we discard inerrancy as a presupposition.

Nevertheless, this chapter is both entertaining and persuasive of the nuts and bolts of the critical view of David/Goliath/Elhanan held by most biblical scholarship today.

Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution by Denis O. Lamoureux

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have long maintained that we cannot hope for a broad acceptance of evolution among evangelicals until the heavy theological questions are acknowledged and a plausible approach to the theological quandaries evolution creates are sketched out — followed by rather than in reaction to an explanation of the science behind it. This is what Denis Lamoureux aspires to do in Evolutionary Creation.

This book bears the name of Lamoureux’s recommended term for exclusively non-interventionist “theistic evolution”. In discussing scientific strengths of evolutionary theory, I especially appreciated how Lamoureux supplements a respectable treatment of genetic evidence for common descent by lending his unique perspective as a dentist to present the considerable paleontological evidence from analysis of teeth and jawbones. His critique of special creationism and intelligent design was clinical and admirably civil, but fervent nonetheless.

Lamoureux spends considerable space presenting a view of the Bible’s authority that doesn’t take its scientific or even all of its historical claims as accurate. In his memorable terminology, he rejects scientific and historical concordism, the beliefs that an authoritative Bible demands full agreement between the authors’ understanding and scientific/historical reality on those matters. This is a good and necessary start, and I found his candor about theological problems and uncertainties commendable. Yet ultimately I found rather weak his basic assumption that a “message of faith”, a divinely guaranteed spiritual message, lay embedded within every passage; I found that he offered no compelling rationale for discarding scientific or historical concordism while retaining what appears to be merely nuanced theological concordism.

One more significant component of the book is its detailed account of Lamoureux’s “evolution” of thought on these matters, beginning with creationism, followed by evolution acceptance and atheism, then back to creationism, and finally to acceptance of evolution. One should not underestimate the potential of testimony for creating empathy and so attracting outsiders.

Due to this book’s impressive attempt at being a comprehensive volume giving at least an overview of all areas touched by “evolutionary creation”, it is not for the casual reader. For someone who wants to delve deep into the theological and scientific issues swirling around the debate, it seems a great introduction, almost textbook-like (indeed, I can see it being used in Christian college environments). Evolutionary Creation will serve as a useful introduction for those wanting a thorough discussion of all these matters.

(Please note: this book review first appeared at Goodreads. I’m just getting into that site and noticed that I could post my review as a blog post; hence this.)