Undeception

I realize this is a week old, which in the blogosophere can make something quite stale, but I had some thoughts on James K. A. Smith’s surprisingly negative review of Peter Enns’ recent The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins.

Smith’s criticism focuses on Enns’ methodology, which is based on the reasonable belief that we can’t decide what God may have meant by a passage until we know the immediate, contextual meaning of that passage.

On the contrary, says Smith, “The church has always staked its reading of the Bible on the conviction that Scripture’s meaning exceeds what the original human authors could have intended.” Smith expects the Church to derive the most appropriate and relevant interpretations of Scripture by basing our interpretation in “worship”, whatever that means, “which will generate meanings…that could never have been intended by [the] human authors,” meanings that are “intended as meanings to be unfolded ‘in front of the text’ by the divine Author.”

The notion that there may be meaning in Scripture above and beyond the original meaning may be a conceivably defensible position (a position I once espoused on this site), but he doesn’t stop there: Smith insists that Enns is wrong to try to recover the meaning of the authors for the original audiences because of the danger of it hindering us from extracting a more appropriate, divinely intended meaning for us. So in reading Genesis, Enns should not expend so much effort in recovering the Ancient Near Eastern context, including relevant literary and archaeological backgrounding. That sort of research is well and good, Smith allows, but it doesn’t tell us what the Bible really means now, because it doesn’t take into account the meaning intended for us as contextualized within the Christian canon:

First of all, the Christian church is not a recipient of the book of Genesis as a discrete unit; we receive the book of Genesis within the Bible and that Bible is received as a whole—as a “canon” of Scripture.  Second, internal to the canon is the conviction that meanings God intends are not constrained by what human authors intended.

Although he puts his preferred hermeneutic in terms of “recontextualizing” Scripture, in essence Smith is wanting to theologize the text before situating it in history, because we are apparently not allowed to come to any conclusions by examining individual texts like Genesis and Romans that make it hard for this recontextualization (which in practice looks like front-loading) to occur.

Because Jamie Smith is no fundamentalist, or even a Chicago style inerrantist, he concedes, “Enns is exactly right to push back on ‘conservative’ or ‘literal’ readings of the Bible that anachronistically impose a ‘journalistic’ sense of ‘history’ on ancient texts.” But in this review specifically he seems uncomfortable with Enns’ claim that Paul and the author Genesis might not have intended the same meaning in their passages on Adam and Eve: “In fact, if it becomes a contest between ‘the authors of Genesis’ [note the scare quotes, presumably to flag Enns' avoidance of "Moses"] and Paul, Enns sides with ‘the original meaning’ of Genesis as the determinative meaning.” Not having read the book but broadly being aware of Enns’ perspective, I doubt that Enns would actually say either is determinative to the subjugation of the other; instead, it is Smith who wants to subjugate the intended message of both “Moses” and Paul to the meaning of the “divine Author”…whatever that might be. (I presume by Smith’s objection to letting Genesis carry its own meaning that he expects that God’s intended meaning happens to correspond more closely to Paul’s.)

But what of Smith’s “divine Author”? Should we put so much energy into finding the original meaning that we miss the message God intended for the Church to receive? My understanding is that Enns would affirm divine authorship in some capacity, although he rightly cautions us to avoid the “priority of the divine” that Smith here advocates.

To put it bluntly, I am no longer of the opinion that Scripture is layered with a special coating of “what God meant” sauce; neither do I believe that the Bible is composed of the flesh of human words attached to a divinely crafted backbone. Nor am I enamored with Peter Enns’ incarnational model of Scripture as I understand it, which is built off of the belief that divine and human authorship overlaps. In short, I have seen no compelling, non-circular reason to maintain the belief that God should in any meaningful sense be considered the author of the Bible. To believe in God’s providential intentions for the Church in the production and canonization of the Bible is one thing; I can affirm as much myself. To credit Him as the publisher might even work. I have sometimes drawn the analogy of God’s purposing of Scripture to that of King James commissioning the translation of the Bible. It occurs to me now that my view of Scripture as the response of humans to divine revelation and inspiration strikes me as fairly well analogous to a Festschrift. But God as author? Hardly. And the contention that He was the kind of author who overlaid the glaringly human text with some esoteric meaning recoverable independently of the meaning it had to the original audiences and available only to subsequent theologians reminds me quite a lot of the infamous “Bible Codes” from a couple years back. It sounds even more like Gnosticism.

But even if God did ordain a higher meaning upon the text, surely we can only hope to find it by first contextualizing and resituating each passage back in its original habitat and going from there. Otherwise the original meaning becomes completely incidental, despite the fact that something much closer to the original meaning than Smith’s canonical reading was the only one actually available to those who canonized it! They canonized the texts for what they were, not for some divine meaning that would override what they were after their canonization.

For these reasons, Jamie Smith’s canonical approach falls far short, and Enns’ approach – by no means uniquely his – of putting the effort into letting the original authors speak for themselves so that we can attempt to interact with each of them on a case-by-case basis handily continues to carry the day.

There have been a few recent discussions in the blogosphere tangentially related to Lawrence Krauss’s recent book, A Universe from Nothing, including an off-handed post by me and a short one by Eric Reitan. Today’s episode of the Unbelievable radio show promises to be interesting. You can probably expect me to give my thoughts on it once I have a chance to listen to it at the beginning of the week. For now, here’s the episode summary:

Lawrence Krauss is a Cosmologist at Arizona State University who describes himself as an “anti-theist”.  His latest book “A Universe from Nothing“ has received both acclaim and criticism for its attempt to answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Debating the issue with Krauss is Rodney Holder, Course director at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. An astrophysicist and priest by background.

In a lively exchange they debate whether Krauss’ “nothing” is “nothing”, fine tuning and multiverses, scientific knowledge, miracles and the usefulness of theology and philosophy.

I was recently warned about the danger and “arrogance” of judging certain portions of Scripture to be erroneous, particularly in regard to a theological claim made in the Old Testament (the death of Uzzah in 2 Sam 6.7 and 1 Chron 13.10): “In so doing,” said my conversant, “we set ourselves above the Bible and make ourselves the judge.” I agree that we should treat Scripture respectfully. This doesn’t mean that we can’t argue with it, but we should treat it with all due reverence.

The truly frustrating thing that I’ve been trying to point out (for it seems like forever) is that people don’t stop to properly analyze why it deserves this respect.

Those of us who come from Protestant traditions somehow acquire the assumption that we must respect the Bible, and that it is arrogant and dangerous to disagree with it, for the reason that it is perfect, untouchable, the very words of God, etc. But again, why?

I have heard it said, “Christ did not give us a book; he gave us a Church.” That is, the primary reason we give the Bible such high respect is because the Church, the community of believers that composed and compiled the Bible, has passed it down to us as something worthy of respect and honor. Here again, Protestant traditions have undermined that rationale by teaching us to distrust the fallible Church (which Catholics seem to view as more infallible than it actually is) and trust only in the infallible Bible (which most Catholics do not affirm as altogether infallible) — the same Bible that was written and canonized by that fallible Church! Protestants will typically respond that God especially sanctified the efforts of the Church, making sure everything was ship-shape, error-free, and all/only the right books were included because…again, why exactly are they convinced of that?

Is it just because we think the Bible says that we need to uphold it as inerrant? That’s entirely circular. Does something outside the Bible tell us to? That’s self-defeating, because holding that criterion as inviolable is by nature upholding something extra-biblical as your guiding principle. Is it because we find it really, really handy, indispensable even, to have an authoritative constitution to evaluate everything by? As I have quoted Lewis before:

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form—something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this.

If we non-inerrantists believed that God Himself wrote the Bible, guaranteed its full accuracy, and made it exactly how we wanted Him to make it and for the same reasons, it might indeed be arrogant and dangerous to place ourselves above God by saying “I reject that.” But we don’t believe that: actually, many of us are dismayed by the ill-founded presumption of attributing everything in Scripture (or worse, everything we read into Scripture as interpreters) to God indiscriminately.

I have been accused of trying to dismantle the bedrock of people’s faith and denigrating the Bible just for the thrill of proving that I’m right. If that were the case, I’d spend a lot more time pointing out biblical errors and disproving the attempted reconciliations of apologists. But ferreting out and proclaiming the Bible’s shortcomings is not really how I want to spend my time, mostly because I actually care very much about the faith of others. And I don’t wish to see their house come down on a poor foundation: I know far too many people who have made an inerrant Bible the bedrock of their faith, and when the winds and storms of evidence beat against this assumption they’ve been told is non-negotiable, they lost their faith altogether. Building your faith on a Bible with unimpeachable “authority” is building your faith on the sand. I don’t want to see that happening. Another danger for inerrantists that motivates me to speak out is crazy Francis-Chan-esque affirmations of hollow, unconvincing, or outright loathsome understandings of God’s character and ways.

I certainly am not arguing that there is no warrant for caution in indicting Scripture as containing error. As a rule, we should always give our brothers and sisters in Christ, including the authors of Scripture, the benefit of the doubt and not cast aspersion on their hard-won opinions without fear and trembling. But when we are told that in reckoning some Scripture as erroneous there is the danger that we exalt ourselves as the final authority, I must respond that the danger of refusing to acknowledge that we must judge Scripture is that we will not be able to recognize it when we are doing it. Instead, we exalt our interpretations as the authority and claim that we are just following what God says through the Bible. Because the Bible does not come with a divine commentary,  we all interpret the Bible, and we are all responsible for determining what makes the most sense using whatever means we have at our disposal. We do not have the option of just “going with what Scripture says” — we can only go with what we think Scripture says.

What this means is that if God truly gave us the Bible, in so doing He gave us a medium that requires human judgment, faulty as that usually is. Since He didn’t provide us direct access to the Truth without need for an interface, He could not have expected that we could just trust whatever it is we think we read in the Bible. He had to have known we’d be judging Scripture. Bearing this out, the Gospels show Jesus himself judging Scripture, and occasionally finding it wanting.

My problem is not that people want to give Scripture a unique and extremely important place in our walk with God: my problem is with the accusation that refusing to treat the Bible as an authority of a completely different and superior nature than our other authorities, which include Church tradition and personal conviction, requires a “dangerous” degree of personal judgment from which inerrantists are blissfully exempt.

Please consider how much you might be putting in God’s mouth by maintaining the “authority of Scripture” before accusing people of being arrogant/dangerous for not trusting that this or that biblical author author got it right all the time every time.

Diglotting has another excellent post up called, “Why I Believe in the Resurrection“. I’ve been thinking along these lines myself lately (as so often happens with Kevin’s posts). Do read it!

But while I’m largely in hearty agreement with the post, I figured I’d push back a little regarding the following remarks:

I have seen some Christians make the (strange) argument that the success of the early Christian movement is evidence in itself regarding the veracity of Christ’s resurrection! I find that to be complete nonsense.

Data useable in support of an explanation is evidence. Obviously, how good the evidence is varies vastly and depends largely on how exclusively it favors one explanation over its competitors. And clearly the success of a movement based on a miracle is not great evidence of that miracle’s historicity, still less “evidence that demands a verdict”, and a far cry from anything like proof. But it does seem to be at very least something that deserves an adequate, coherent explanation instead of ad hoc, anything-but-miracles hand-waving. Even if the movement had failed it wouldn’t disprove that the miracle happened, so it’s a thing of interest that it did not only not fail, but passed with flying, history-shading colors. So even if the success of the Christian movement as a result of the fervor of the earliest believers is not a piece of evidence exclusively in favor of the Resurrection, it’s at least more in line with “something remarkably unusual happened to start this whole thing off” than with “nothing very significant happened to inspire and fuel a movement that would shape the future of the world anyway”. This is surely necessary as a first rung on an evidential ladder — though probably not much higher than that. I do agree that putting too much weight on it as many apologists would like to do indeed tips the scale toward the “nonsense” side of the spectrum.

That minor quibble aside, I highly recommend the post!

Over a year ago I started a closed, hidden Facebook group for a few of my friends and me so that we could share links and discuss issues swirling around our rejection of inerrancy. It was an experience of much empathy and encouragement that most all of us really appreciated.

Then around the time my blogging slacked off in the late summer of last year, I also began frequenting the group less and less. I was recently asked by a dear friend from the group to explain what was going on with me. He was specifically referring to my less frequent interaction with the group, but as it’s related to my coincident lull in blogging, I thought I’d put more words into explaining what I think lies behind it all.

I do often miss the “good Christian fellowship” of those days. At times I also miss the probing discussions we had, but to a markedly lesser extent. This isn’t because they weren’t good discussions: it’s just that I’m not as much in that stage of my journey right now. I don’t know…I suppose I’m just tired of all the over-thinking, the second-guessing. After studying and reading and hashing and rehashing, the simple fact is that when it comes to the most fundamental questions (regarding the existence of God, the problem of evil, soteriology, etc.), one of two situations obtain: I know what I believe on the subject and I know enough about why I should and shouldn’t believe it to last me for some time, or at least I am content to abide in hopeful uncertainty. My faith is a choice, a step out into the unknown, not because, as Evangelicals do, I’ve convinced myself that I’m sure I’m headed the right way or that what I’m stepping onto is secure, but because my deepest hunches and most profound philosophical speculations lie in that direction alone. But I don’t pretend to know it’s true. So I stand here shrouded in uncertainty where I have ventured. The fruitless effort of obsessing about these questions about which we can never have full certainty has once again brought me into a forced humility. My consequent unwillingness to trumpet my tenuous conclusions around as the solution to everyone else’s searches is one part of the equation that has led to my being much quieter of late.

Another part of disentangling myself from the world of biblio- and theoblogging is something I’ve just finally worked out in my mind. Although I had managed to avoid these feelings for quite some time, in the last year I finally succumbed to a constant state of annoyance and even disgust at the constant self-justification, drummed-up confidence, and especially the rarely restrained personal vitriol and arrogance on the part of one group of people I had long counted among my closest allies: atheists. Not all of them are like this, I’m obliged by fairness to qualify, but these attitudes generally correlate directly with the degree of satisfaction they get in proclaiming their unbelief; sad to say, the distribution of atheists on the Internet is a rather lopsided (and I hope, unrepresentative) ratio in favor of this genus of atheist. It’s gotten to the point that if I find out someone’s an atheist within five or ten minutes of encountering him, I can depend on his being obnoxious on the subject.

Around the time I started recognizing that the New Atheist “civility” was spreading among even more mainstream non-theists, I noticed the disease showing up among many of those even closer to my ilk, i.e. post-Evangelical and otherwise “liberal” Christians: the ones who seem to take every opportunity to belittle and shame conservative Evangelicals, a group of believers whom I also consider to be sorely in need of correction. By all appearances, it’s not enough to be convinced that Evangelicals and other theologically conservative Christians are wrong: they’re obviously [blankety-blank] morons, due no more attempts at civil, intellectual interaction than the clinically insane. Ridicule is the medicine prescribed to those who believe that the Bible is inerrant, the world was created in 6 days, and that conservative American politics are the direct reflex of biblical morality. Frankly, the eternal obsession with bawling about the idiotic, hypocritical foibles of Evangelical Christianity has gotten really, really old.

But on further reflection, this exposed in me something I didn’t like: God forgive me, I also had been letting my disgust for things like inerrancy, creationism, and penal substitution displace my loving concern for those who believed those things.

My dissatisfaction with this state of affairs led to a number of posts on my blog (this one included) targeting a different audience than was originally intended for it. I had always focused on “challeng[ing] unquestioned Evangelical assumptions about Scripture, theology, the creation/evolution debate, and biblical studies.” My efforts were for them, but in reality it was no less for me as well, as I hammered out the wrong things I thought important not to believe. But at the bottom of the slippery slope, having stripped away many if not most of the beliefs that conservative Christians hold as sine qua non‘s of Christianity, the loss of which were the last straws for ex-Christians I have encountered in my journeys, somehow I found my faith afresh. The tide turned from finding thing after thing to disbelieve towards finding new ways to act on things I found worth believing. I’m sure I’ll never really stop thinking about these things and finding new things to question and/or critique, but at some point you’ve just got to live it and hope for the best.

Look, I know it’s hard dealing with some of these conservative Christians when it comes to theology. OK, most of them. And I know there are some pretty harmful consequences to some of their beliefs that we need to stand up and counter. I’m certainly not calling for détente, or for burying our heads in the sand while the victims of bad theology pile up. And I realize that sometimes there’s no better way to show someone an idea is wrong than to show them how silly the idea is. But trying to force people to laugh at themselves as hard as you’re laughing at them is simply not realistic. Yes, in many cases we’ve got to shake them, raise our voices, and tell them to snap out of it — but always after examining our motives and our methods to ensure we are speaking the truth in love.

The temptation of Internet exchanges to be entirely immune to the checks of face-to-face interaction has fairly well saturated the church, I fear. I’ve gotten much further convincing my Evangelical friends to soberly reanalyze the harmful behavior driven by their bad theology by engaging them in confrontational yet personal conversation than I have with exasperated, sarcastic, snarky retorts thrown at them in disembodied e-text. I’m ready for these people to come around, and I don’t think shaming and gleefully castigating them is cutting it; in fact, it alienates them yet further by giving them a martyr complex as they understandably suspect that their positions are more righteous due to the manifest unrighteousness of the anger being hurled at them in response.

Although we might like to think of our diatribes as humorous constructive criticism, by examining my own heart I can see that much of what is passed off as well-intentioned criticism serves another, ulterior purpose: like a teenage girl desperately trying to be popular by disowning her annoying, dorky brother in front of her friends, we want to show everyone that we’re not as unreasonable as those other people so no one lumps us in together. My friends, Jesus didn’t seem to suffer from this form of pride.

We all want to battle dangerous forms of ignorance and lessen its influence in those groups (such as many conservative forms of Christianity) that seem to defend it the most confidently. And I don’t doubt that you can lampoon, mock, and marginalize a group of people into oblivion. But it’s wrong: we have to remember that conservative Christians are not just perpetrators but also victims of bad theology, and my religion tells me not to hope for the physical, spiritual, or emotional destruction of those who are wrong but their deliverance. Granted, if you’re one who doesn’t believe there’s anything transcendent that stands as the basis for ethics or morality, I can understand wishing for the former, even as I shrink back in horror from such a world as yours. But I should be able to count on other (theologically) progressive Christians to show more patience, sympathy, and love for others — in short, living in the way the founders of our faith told us should be our hallmark. The authors of the New Testament consistently advised believers to nurture one another and shore up unity within their community of faith, so much so that many scholars have expressed doubt that the first Christians cared for anyone outside of their community at all. Rather, I think the sensible plan was always “Jerusalem first, then Judea, then the uttermost parts of the earth,” a strong, healthy core with influence rippling outwards in concentric rings. Make sure your own house is in order first — and that means tidying up the messy rooms rather than demolishing them. One of the many sound critiques of Evangelical culture is that they tend to “shoot their wounded,” which is something sensitive and responsible “progressive” Christians have disavowed. Yeah, well, I’m just not seeing it, folks, and neither is the watching world: liberals hardly less than conservatives round up the ones who we think hold us back and/or make us look stupid, bind them to piles of sticks and dry grass, light the match, and hold a public spectacle of the whole affair.

I realize I’m laying it down pretty hard on my own allies here; I don’t really mean to bust anyone’s chops – how hypocritical would that be! – and as I alluded earlier, I think this problem is in large part attributable and endemic to the medium of online interactions, which tends to desiccate interpersonal exchanges into impersonal ones. It’s just that I care for everyone involved in these debates and want to insist that tough love can be shown without it looking indistinguishable from a drive-by shooting. I emphatically agree that we need to make taking care of the oppressed, marginalized, and suffering in this world our chief priority as Christians, and that Evangelicalism doesn’t seem to have the tools or even the motivation to help us, but it’s really not too much to ask to insist that we treat them with concern as well. In actuality, we are harming our world if we let our disgust poison the portion of it that sits in conservative churches. “Love your enemies” applies even if those enemies are family. And honestly it looks a lot different than what I’ve been seeing.

I expect to be dismissed by many as preaching sentimentalism and maybe even, despite my protestations above, a non-violence that enables more violence: “Easy for you to say, Steve: you’ve never suffered gender discrimination for church office or been kicked out of Christianity for being gay.” But I’m not saying we shouldn’t address those issues: I’m reevaluating how we’re going about it. If you haven’t noticed, our results in getting these people to both a) change their minds and b) not become disillusioned, bitter atheists are pretty abysmal.

I write this for those in whom the all-inclusive heart of God is being cultivated. It’s not easy to show patience and speak the truth in love in this environment, and those of us earnestly attempting it really need all the help we can get. I’m just asking that you consider how inadvertently destructive your publicly posted incendiary content might be. Meanwhile, if I decide that I can be of some use by continuing to keep up this blog, I’ll try to refocus on exemplifying the kind of engagement that I have advocated above. Engage them, get to know them and love them, bring them alongside. As we tell the Calvinists who insist that God’s “justice” trumps His love, there is no justice without love.

From no dark came I, but the depths of light;
From the sun-heart I came, of love a spark;
What should I do but love with all my might?
To die of love severe and pure and stark,
Were scarcely loss; to lord a loveless height–
That were a living death, damnation’s positive night.

- G. MacDonald

Presumably one would have to go to the beginning of the universe to find the answer to that other, oldest question in the universe.
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Trying so hard not to spoil the fun of this by over-analyzing it. If I can…just reach…the publish button…

This time from the pen of Howard Gordon:

Scully: “So you’re basing this theory on a folk tale.”

Mulder: “It’s just another way of describing the same truths, right? I mean, all new truths begin as heresies and end as superstitions.* We fear the unknown so we reduce it to the terms most familiar to us. Whether that’s a folk tale, or a disease or a conspiracy.”

Scully: “Mulder, even if you’re right, I mean especially if you’re right, why would he leave his own country to come here?”

Mulder: “Free cable.”

from “Teliko”, episode 4×04

* Paraphrasing T. H. Huxley: “History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.”