Not that I have all the answers, of course.
I thought I’d reproduce a summary of my current thoughts on the issue that I formulated in an interesting comment exchange under a post on another site.
I asked what sort of question the authors of Genesis 1 etiology intended to answer:
[1] why the world exists,
[2] how it got made, or
[3] both.
One commenter (whose opinion I highly respect) essentially agreed with me that the answer is [3], but added that Genesis 1 only answered [1] by implication of its primary goal of answering who is responsible, namely YHWH. I have sympathy for this, but I explained why I wrote [1] as I did.
I think Genesis 1 primarily attempts to answer the question of why everything is here as it is by instructing the Israelites/Jews that YHWH tamed chaos in order to subjugate and commission creation for His purposes. Things work as they do (=are “functional” in Walton’s terms) because it was He who intended the sun to shine, the fish to inhabit the ocean, man to hold dominion over nature, etc. The reason the world works as it does is because it was intended to work that way (“God saw that it was good”). There is certainly a strong element of the “who” answer intimately integrated into this, but I think another key aspect of Genesis 1 is a worldview shift toward the common Judeo-Christian belief that the chaos we see in our world is somewhat apparent rather than real.
What I mean is that God is in control of all creation and does not have to periodically journey to Jotunheim to grapple with his mortal enemies the frost giants—the frost giants are well under His jurisdiction. As I explained before, the gods of the ANE are typically not supreme rulers (although they are sometimes called this): they are simply the forces who are in a unique position to keep order in the universe, a responsibility they frequently shirk and indeed often circumvent by their own or other gods’ reckless actions. In contrast with the dualism of gods vs. forces of chaos (often including other gods) seen in so many other world cultures, Genesis 1 describes a deity who is supreme over nature and not in eternal competition with it. YHWH is pictured elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible in continuing contention with chaos and other insurgents, but He settles these incidents from a position of authority rather than as a merely marginally stronger force.
I’d like to address a question to a group that is, on the whole, unlikely to frequent my blog: those who would characterize themselves as conservative Christians.
Whether you were brought up in Christianity or accepted it later in life, the chances are overwhelming that you weren’t just taught to accept Jesus as Lord: you were sold an entire package. Whether it was done prior to conversion or immediately subsequently, you adopted a body of teachings on many subjects, doctrine intended to ground you and detox you from the lies of the world. Typically, depending on your particular tradition, you were told that Jesus atones for us by satisfying God’s need to punish people for wrongdoing, hell for unbelievers, the Trinity, and that all our confidence for the preceding proceeds from the non-negotiable truth that the Bible is 100% accurate (with the unspoken presupposition that your tradition’s intepretation of it was correct).
The main question I’d like to ask is this:
When you accepted the faith, did you even consider that there may be at least something in that package that does not belong?
And I don’t mean in the periphery – something big, like the validity of the canon, the Trinity, or something in the creeds. I also want to emphasize that when I say “consider”, I do not mean ”anticipate arguments against your beliefs and counteract them with arguments from like-minded apologists,” but “seriously entertain the possibility that an honest examination and evaluation of your beliefs would overturn one or more of them.”
Follow-up questions:
- If you have not seriously considered the possibility of a mistake in your short list of important doctrines, why not?
- If you did at one time consider it but have since discarded that doubt, why have you done so?
- If you have questioned and modified one of your beliefs away from the mainstream evangelical Christian stance (e.g. on evolution, eschatology), how did you justify going against that majority in order to do so? Would you be willing to do so on other important topics (i.e. the virgin birth, etc.)?
- Do you think that holding the line on beliefs you haven’t critically examined is a justifiable exertion of energy?
My speech and my proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
Some charismatics take these words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 2.4-5 to reinforce their emphasis on charismatic acts such as healing, prophecy, and the other “manifestation” gifts, particularly in the proclamation of the gospel. The implication is that mere Christian teaching is lacking in power and in fact amounts to a potential distraction unless backed up by miracles.
When we look at Acts, however, the picture we get of the Corinthian situation is somewhat different. In Corinth we see Paul laboring long and hard at teaching, with words, making arguments day after day to those in the synagogue: “Every sabbath he would argue in the synagogue and would try to convince Jews and Greeks” (18.4); “…Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ” (18.5). He is admonished by the Lord in a dream to do something very specific: ” ‘Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent…’ ” (18.9). In obedience and faith, Paul “…stayed there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them” (18.10). He was persecuted, as Gallio described, because of a mere “matter of questions about words and names and [Jewish] law” (18.15) — in short, matters of teaching.
If Paul wrought miracles in Corinth, it is a wonder itself that they are not mentioned, since this very aspect of ministry is claimed as characteristic of his ministry in Ephesus in the very next chapter. If his message were boosted by a few prophecies, words of knowledge, etc., this would be surprising given his adamant statements in 2.1-2 and 3.1-3 that he was forced to simplify his message dramatically, stripping away special revelation (the “mystery”) because they were “unspiritual”.
I am not really trying to prove that there were absolutely no supernatural demonstrations worked in Corinth. Rather, I wish to problematize the idea that Paul’s description of his preaching at Corinth in 1 Corinthians 2.4-5 was a reference to signs and wonders. The answer is in looking at the context of these verses, specifically the several preceding verses immediately prior.
For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe . . . For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
…But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
We’re hearing Paul’s response to the criticism of his Corinthian opponents who claim to be wise and who claim that Paul’s teaching was weak and ineffective. Paul is telling the church that God has turned the tables to the effect that weakness has been vindicated and words of wisdom are now indicative of foolishness. He uses this to suggest that the weakness of his preaching was itself the proof of the “spirit and power” behind what he taught them. He’s acknowledging that whoever’s come behind him seeking to undermine his work in Corinth might well have a silver tongue, but turning it upon them by suggesting that this is a sign of their foolishness instead. Notice 1.27: “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise.” In what possible sense are miracles/prophecies “the foolishness of the world”? Paul is not saying in 2.4, “I used proof of spirit and power instead of teaching and proclamation,” but “The teaching and proclamation I offered” – recall Acts 18 – “did not come by way of persuasive wisdom (strength), but by way of the proof of spirit and power (weakness).” It’s Paul at his rhetorical best, dripping with irony because of the sophistication of his argumentation (despite its so-called weakness).
Finally, look at a few verses I omitted from the above block quote, 1.22-24: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” His argument is this: the foolish message of Christ crucified is God’s way of fulfilling the Jews’ demand for miracles (since Christ is “the power of God”) and the Greeks’ desire for persuasive oratory (since Christ is “the wisdom of God”). Reading it the way these charismatics do, you’d have Paul in 2.5 contradicting his whole carefully laid argument, saying in effect, “…so that your faith might rest not on what the Greeks desire (wisdom), but what the Jews demand (a sign of power).” Rather, “We didn’t want your faith to be in signs and wisdom, but the message of the gospel which alone is truly powerful and wise.”
An unnamed Jesus Creed contributor writes (does that mean it’s Scot?):
No passage in the New Testament ever describes the groups it assumes everyone knows. Yet, we beg for those descriptions and so scholars over the years have sketched and re-sketched, and then discarded and reconstructed what can be known about those groups. The most recent, and thoroughly readable — and every church library needs this book and I would say pastors need it and students need to know about it to save them a million errors of caricature — book that sketches these people is by William A. Simmons. The book is called Peoples of the New Testament World: An Illustrated Guide.
Now, I don’t have any inside information on this book — it could be sheer crap — but I was gratified to see an old professor of mine from my undergraduate career publishing something as potentially useful as this. I only had him for two courses (although one was a two-semester course), but I certainly respected him as an individual and, from what I knew at the time anyway, as a scholar. And to be reviewed so favorably by a site like Scot McKnight’s that is high-profile and has a comfortable relationship with current NT scholarship, I’ve gotta say, “Good on you, Dr. Simmons!”
I have to admit that I would have thought this was pretty cool when I was young enough to want to color it.
There are a few related pictures at Jason Boyett’s site, which I’d never been to before today. Do check it out, along with his humorous comments.
(There’s one more really funny one you need to see at the original page.)
Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned…
I need to find the best references for textual variants in the Gospels. I’m not as much interested in the critically identified “best readings” of the text themselves, but good apparati that show the variants. Right now I’m finding that Aland’s invaluable Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum has a cracking good apparatus, but I need at least one more good source to try to fill in gaps. My goal is to identify variations between the Vorlage and each of the early translations I’ll be working with, so while I don’t have time to become a textual critic, I do have to avail myself of the best available critical work in order to get an idea of what each translation’s Vorlage might have looked like so that I’ll be able to distinguish a stylistic/synctactically significant divergent rendering from a calque of an obscure MS variant.
Dr. Enns has recently reminded us that the Ancient Near East conceptualized the beginning of creation as a battle between order and disorder, the gods vs. chaos. We see the chaos of the natural world represented as an antagonist in the Genesis cosmogony. The forces of chaos are never quite given the dignity of a name, but the functionless void upon which the curtain opens in Genesis 1.2 and God’s actions of appropriating already existing material in that chapter clearly demonstrate that He is not tasked with creating a world from scratch but with the more typically king-like duty of bringing order out of disorder, as John Walton has been arguing.
But this “cosmic battle” between order and chaos is by no means a peculiarly ANE leitmotif. Although separated by hundreds of years from the ANE, Germanic mythology as it shows up in the Scandinavian stories is characterized by the same dualism. As fitting for a people thriving in a harsh environment, the mythology of the Scandinavians as represented in Old Icelandic (“Old Norse”) literature shows this motif in the form of the continuous struggle between the gods and the ancient, formidable, grotesque giants, the frost giants in particular for obvious reasons. The world itself was born of chaos: from the gap between the realm of fire and the realm of ice a mountainous frost giant Ymir was formed, the father of all giants from whose body the earth was made after being slain by the gods (there is good evidence that many of these motifs go back to common Indo-European mythology). The delicate balance of power between the cruel and pitiless forces of nature and the order maintained by the gods is evident in Snorri’s highly entertaining rendition of “Thor and Utgard -Loki” (also called “Thor’s visit to Jotunheim”): while the two gods and accompanying human are clearly somewhat at the mercy of the giants in Jotunheim (“Giantland”), the prospect of encountering the wrath of Thor’s hammer keeps the giants from exploiting their better position.
As J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out long ago in his monumental lecture/essay, “Beowulf: the Monsters, and the Critics,” the Germanic outlook was thoroughly grim, for they anticipated that order as championed by the gods was fighting a losing battle against chaos and its monsters, and that valor was a matter of playing one’s part in a game that everyone knew could never be won.
“The Northern Gods”, Ker said [in The Dark Ages], “have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason” – mythologically, the monsters – “but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.” And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this “absolute resistance, perfect because without hope.”
Tolkien notes that the eschatological conception of “the doom of the gods” indicates that the Germanic outlook was much bleaker than the Mediterranean mythologies in predicting that chaos would triumph. But surely in accepting this fate they were but extrapolating a macro view of world history from their most reliable source: each individual’s experience. Human life is born in travail, then thrives and pushes back against all odds; defying death in early years, maturing to fear and avoid it, growing more and more aware that an entire lifetime’s work of survival is but delaying the inexorable fate of all. Each of us must succumb to the destructive power of nature, so why shouldn’t the entire world work that way?
Polytheistic cultures generally envisage gods as beings of a different sort altogether from the Judeo-Christian conception of God: rather than ultimate beings supreme over the natural world, they are merely beings whose great power was essential for maintaining some control over the natural world — and not always successfully. Despite depicting YHWH in standard ANE terms as a king, Genesis 1 describes Him as in full command of all the chaotic forces of nature.
Acknowledging Genesis’ ANE pedigree does not by any means strip it of special meaning. Rather, studying commonalities among cross-cultural cosmologies highlight the sort of meaning the original audience of Genesis would have been wanting and allow us to appreciate the accounts for what they were intended to be.
On a cue from Philip Harland, I found this remarkable passage showing an example of the perception that some pagans entertained of mid-second century Christians. It’s not pretty:
[Cynics and Christians] divide and upset the household, and bring into collision those inside with each other, and tell them the worst ways to manage their household. They never say, find, or do anything socially productive. They do not participate in panegyrics (festal assemblies), nor worship the gods, nor help govern the cities, nor comfort the sorrowing, nor make reconciliation with those of opposing persuasions, nor arouse the young – or anyone else for that matter – to the affairs of the world.
–Aelius Aristides in The Defense of the Four, as cited by Frances Margaret Young in The theology of the pastoral letters, p. 17.
This was written by an orator who is associated mostly with Asia Minor but who was certainly well travelled. It’s difficult to say how widely his observations applied to Christian communities throughout the world at the time, or whether he was taking just a few bad apples and making gross overgeneralizations. I point it out because 1) much of what Aristides described then seems to correspond to various visible factions of Christianity today and because 2) to the consternation of a wide range of critics both ancient and modern, those commonalities are probably indicative of what a significant constituency of the early church thought was proper.
First of all, the upending of cultural norms for household management seems to be a part of very early Christian behavior. Galatians, a book whose Pauline authorship is virtually uncontested, famously dismissed fundamental social and cultural distinctions between male/female and slave/free. Granted, he might well have been referring specifically to those classes’ equality in standing before God rather than calling for a social revolution, but the tendency is certainly to extend theological outlooks beyond into broader ramifications, and whether or not Paul intended it it appears that this is exactly what happened. Early secular testimony like that of Celsus (as quoted in Origen) shows that Christians were sometimes characterized as giving undue deference to “stupid women”; Harland notes that there was apparently a tradition of attributing somewhat more egalitarian positions to Paul (e.g. The Acts of Paul and Thecla) than have been associated with him in recent years. It is sometimes argued that the emphasis upon maintaining social norms involving gender that we see in the (probably late, pseudo-)Pauline epistles of Ephesians and the Pastorals look for all the world like they were intended to “stop the bleeding” caused by the inevitable exploitation of Paul’s teachings on Christian liberty that would indeed cause much upheaval if not moderated. Christian feminism has left a very bad taste in my mouth, but the more I learn, the more I begin to realize that there is a very strong, very early tradition challenging the male hierarchical pattern that won out by the time of the ecumenical councils.
It also occurs to me that for the most part, those whom Aristides is criticizing seem to be following the advice of the NT in regard to involvement in society. The ubiquitous NT teaching to abstain from the world to remain pure for the returning Christ would naturally lead them, as it does many in the Left Behind crowd now, to avoid entanglement with “the affairs of the world”. If the end of the world had been around the corner, why should they have bothered “arousing their young” to do anything of lasting significance? It’s interesting to watch these eschatological expectations disappear in the following centuries as Christians came to terms with the fact that the apocalypse was not so imminent and as a resolve to make the best of this world grew until the medieval understanding of Christian mission modeled upon Augustine’s The City of God developed. Yet in the last couple centuries imminent apocalypticism has returned and, not coincidentally, its proponents are reading Scripture at face value like those whom Aristides is criticizing — with the grossly obvious oversight that part and parcel of superficial interpretations of Scripture are the manifold statements of imminency that are impossible to square with a gap of two millennia between the NT and us. This appropriation of first century expectations to our immediate future leads many to retreat from engaging society in a useful way for the reason that it’s pointless to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic. Most evangelicals have little patience for subtle, long-term forms of influence, preferring if anything to utilize the strong arm of the state to enforce their ideals and heavy-handed moralism in their forays into the arts, ostensibly in the effort to show the returning Christ that they’ve been busy and have remained out of defiling contact with the world.
To my mind the most damning way in which the modern church resembles the Christians from whom Aristides drew his generalizations is in his pronouncement that they did not “comfort the sorrowing, nor make reconciliation with those of opposing persuasions…” Here again, I suspect that most of this can be laid at the feet of an imminent eschatology. Jesus’ light rebuke, “The poor you will always have with you,” was surely not intended to imply, “You won’t have a chance to remedy poverty before I come back, so don’t bother trying,” but rather “There’ll be plenty of time to fulfill your righteous concern for social justice after I’m gone in a few weeks.” Despite Paul’s many admonishments that believers should strive to live peaceably with all people, there was enough backbiting and indifference toward keeping up good relationships that it apparently struck Aristides as characteristic of Christians in general. I can imagine that if you thought your mission was to hunker down until the bomb exploded and took out all the infidels, you’d expect that exercising the faith was more about maintaining purity of mind, and hence beliefs, than it was about counteracting the defective aspects of society.
Now, my guess is that Aristides’ various indictments listed above were of stereotypes that didn’t apply to any one group of Christians; for instance, I imagine that the more eschatologically minded were not the ones pushing the social structure envelope. But it is nonetheless intriguing to consider how and why the church then might have looked like the church now.
As I have asked before, so I ask again: how much do evangelicals really want the modern church to look like the early church? Are we aware of how much we already do?
I was intrigued by this short video showing Dr. Ard Louis (Oxford University) articulate a simple but profound critique of this fundamental aspect of the reasoning behind intelligent design.
Read Darrel Falk’s helpful summary and commentary here.
This same sort of argument can be applied to the various attractive (but always suspicious) “fine tuning arguments“.
As I said, I was struck by Dr. Louis’s evident intelligence and so went googling to find more about him. In so doing, I discovered that just a few nights ago (January 24, 2010) he gave a lecture at Stanford entitled “Can Science Explain Everything?” in which he argues that even when we accept the answers we find in the laboratory, our search for answers doesn’t necessarily come to a dead end there.
So, what do you think?
A commenter on the previous post raised an interesting point that leads me into something I’ve been wanting to explore here. He wrote:
I don’t see why it would be logically necessary that [the Bible] is 100% true. However, if we allow that it isn’t, then how are we to determine which parts are true? There is no way of knowing, which is damning [for the whole book]. An empirical test would be nice, but as we all know there is no such thing.
How we “determine which parts are true” is especially important in regard to the Bible’s supernatural claims. Being natural and living in a natural world, we find these claims almost impossible to evaluate. Hence, we tend to allow the truth of the spiritual claims of Scripture to piggy-back on the verifiable claims: typically, as the verifiable claims fare, so confidence in the unverifiable fares. This is obviously inductive reasoning, and not a very robust form of it either: conceivably, one could read a set of verifiable events in a newspaper, create out of whole cloth any number of stories detailing supernatural events supposedly related to those newspaper events, and publish a book integrating both the newspaper and the manufactured fantasy stories. Obviously, no one need seriously entertain the bogus claims’ truthfulness simply because of the truthfulness of the verifiable claims.
Now, I don’t think that the supernatural and other unverifiable events of Scripture were all created out of whole cloth. My point is that a healthy dose of humility in our bibliology is warranted: for instance, even if we find out that the Khirbet Qeiyafa fragment establishes that Hebrew writing and even specific content from Jewish scriptures date further back than scholars now suppose, it doesn’t necessarily follow, as some have apparently concluded, that “extreme liberal biblical criticism” has ceded territory specifically over to “conservative” forms of criticism. Doubtless, there are versions of “extreme liberal biblical criticism” that will take evidence like this (if it proves valid) in stride. The fact is, even if proof for the resurrection of Jesus were uncovered, there would be possible explanations other than those given by the writers of the New Testament.
When the conclusions of certain biblical critics is characterized as “extreme” or “liberal”, it has already been judged from a confessional standpoint. Is this fair? I happen to think that our confessions should be sufficiently grounded by evidence before allowed to sit in judgment of contrary evidence. This leads me to muse: those who approach a particular ancient text from the same position as everyone throughout history except some Jews and Christians and who seek to verify what they can using the carefully honed skills of historical and textual criticism are “liberal”, and those who posit an unnatural (“supernatural”) influence that throws out all other humanity’s understanding of the text are the ones called “conservative”? What in heaven’s name do “liberal” and “conservative” even mean anymore?
An excellent introduction to the nature and importance of historical studies for biblical interpretation is a short (142 pp.) and readable book called The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith by Dr. James F. McGrath. In this book, McGrath uses a critical examination of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ burial and resurrection coupled with our extra-biblical knowledge of first century Palestinian burial practices as an example of the kind of conclusions that an historian not committed to affirming inerrancy might draw. While the preponderance of his suggestions are not as scandalous as evangelicals might fear, many of the ideas he as an historian must entertain will certainly not sit comfortably with even more liberal evangelicals. But importantly, this is not his only point: he also seeks to present an explication of and apologetic for using the tools of historical study on our beloved Bible. Most evangelicals are skeptical of using these tools except when it is expected to not affect or to bolster their already formed conclusions; they tend to view historians who come to non-evangelical conclusions about Scripture as atheists seeking to undermine faith. This skepticism is understandable, but somewhat misplaced, since “…there is much evidence that there are many people working in the fields of history and Biblical studies as an expression of their faith rather than because of opposition to it” [emphasis original]. Moreover, engaging the findings of historical study should be a crucial part of our interpretive process. His book undertakes to explain how:
…the very common approach of taking Biblical stories uncritically at face value, and using them as a reason for dismissing evidence not only from history but from science and other sources of knowledge, is fundamentally misguided. Historical study provides us with the only tools available to us for knowing about the past. (p. 8 )
The historical data in Scripture is examined like we examine any other ancient text purporting to record historical events. Because first-hand observation is naturally precluded, empirical tests are never exactly conclusive when dealing with certain types of historical data; this means that most attempts to determine historicity are inevitably indeterminate. An historian gathers an idea of the likelihood of certain events but, as long as he is working as an academic, he must remain ultimately agnostic, no matter what his hunch might be.
At some point though, people generally aren’t content with accepting indeterminacy about such events: they will generally come to their own, ultimately untestable, personal conclusions one way or another. Some will consider errors in the Bible’s depiction of demonstrable events and then look askance particularly at the indemonstrable events, concluding, “None of it’s true.” Others like myself find that the supposition that the Bible testifies to certain fundamental transcendent truths explains more than it causes trouble for, especially when taking into account the experiences of ourselves and others we know and love. So, without contradictory evidence, but also without proof, we believe; the problem I’m critiquing is that not all of us recognize that it is in fact without proof that we believe. But as McGrath also argues, excessive dependence upon empirical proof can be just as misguided.
There are many questions that we cannot answer with absolute certainty, and yet we find ourselves willing to accept some things in the absence of absolute proof. Most of us consider this world that we inhabit to be real. Sometimes, we must take reason as far as it can take us, and then keep moving forward beyond what we can prove. (p. 12)
In his latest post, Mike mentions a Facebook conversation with someone puzzled by his rejection of inerrancy; I was involved with the conversation as well. As Mike described, this individual raised the common IYCBIAYCTAOI objection (if-you-can’t-believe-it-all-you-can’t-trust-any-of-it), asking, “Why do you believe the Bible is true?”
I responded by asking, “What makes you think it’s necessary that the Bible (as in the entire thing cover-to-cover) be ‘true’ (by which I assume you mean perfectly conforming to and accurately depicting objective reality)?” It’s this question I want to explore in this post.
Among other things, he responded that unless the OT (for instance) is 100% accurate, we cannot bear witness to Jesus. But this is manifestly false: the first century apostles evangelized to Gentiles who had no reason to accept the OT’s reliability, which wouldn’t even have been available to them in print, since copies of Scripture were not carried around for distribution in the first century. Yet somehow, these Gentiles believed the witness of Jesus’ apostles anyway. Moreover, early believers didn’t even have a New Testament to witness to Jesus; hearsay and word of mouth were all they had to go on. I contend that we’re no better off — nor worse off — than they are. We too are dependent on the testimony of fallible humans who have experienced God in Christ, and by faith we trust Him to lead us through fellow believers’ human testimony.
One of the most annoying things about the divide over inerrancy is that people like me who reject it are somewhat forced by the nature of the debate into the position of pointing out the flaws in Scripture. But I dearly treasure the Bible: even while not positing its perfection, I find it to be an invaluable witness to what our faith is supposed to be about. We depend on the Bible no less than we depend upon a guy at the gas station to give us directions. Could his directions be imperfect? Could it be 13 miles down the road instead of 10? Might we have been told to turn left at “the third red light” despite there being only two lights and a four-way stop? Yes, but we have no reason to believe he’s lying to us, and plenty of reasons for trusting that he has an idea of what he’s talking about and that we’re a lot better off having asked for directions than having driven around unguided. Besides, when we’re seeking direction (in both the literal or metaphorical sense), aren’t we supposed to trust God to deliver us to our destination?
So although I reject inerrancy, I still do find the Bible invaluable as an historical witness to God’s work in the world, and especially in the personhood of Jesus. This makes it all the more necessary for us to honestly and earnestly dig down inside the Bible and recognize how, when, why, and by whom it was constructed: this is the goal of biblical studies, which includes the disciplines of textual and historical criticism often unjustly maligned as being destructive of the text. And yes, we may end up discarding commonly accepting beliefs about the Bible like “Paul wrote 2 Timothy” or “We inherit Adam’s fallen nature because of his sin,” but if our faith is truly in God and not those beliefs about Scripture and what we’ve been told it says, we’ll come out on the other end with our faith purer for having stripped away the distractions.
For inerrantists, the Bible must be accurate through and through. For one thing, they want it to be provable as inerrant in order to substantiate the doctrines they have been taught. After all, you can’t prove anything with a source that’s got problems, right? And this is what they can’t allow: the Bible must not only be usable to prove the validity of their faith to others but, to an alarming extent, to themselves as well. I still believe God shows evidence of Himself in life circumstances, that He speaks to us in various ways; I believe I have experienced Him at work in my life in many ways. But none of it constitutes “proof” of any kind. My own faith bears a striking resemblance to the faith we see in the Bible. For instance, Abraham is a model of biblical faith: how much do you think he understood about the Bible, the atonement, or bodily resurrection? Or even the nature of God: like even many Israelites of later periods, he almost certainly wasn’t a true monotheist: YHWH was simply the supreme God, the right God rather than the only God. How much did any of this matter? He walked with God.
Biblical faith, the kind that pleases God, is not presented as carefully maintaining certain propositions about God (no one seems to be able to agree on just which ones) while stubbornly and myopically defending the interpretation of those propositions accepted by one’s tradition. Biblical faith is believing in God as a person, even when He isn’t fully understood; its key characteristics are trusting and allowing Him to guide us. Christians are guided by the example He provided us in the person of Jesus. The Christian faith can’t be proved, certainly not through a book that requires the reader to accept it as proof a priori – no matter how much we expect or would like for that to be the case.
Let me ask you: why is it logically necessary, rather than merely preferable for one reason or another, that the Bible be entirely true through and through? (Please try to answer without begging the question of its divine authorship and what that should look like.)
My friend Mike Beidler’s not busy enough being a military diplomat in the Middle East right now. You know, things going so swimmingly, he doesn’t have anything at all to do. Since he’s been over there, he’s joined a group that is watching Focus on the Family’s film series The Truth Project that seeks to reinforce the predominant American evangelical worldview — you know, the Truth.
An important component of this project, of course, includes a critique of evolution, which, also of course, has bugged Mike a bit. I saw him writing up his thoughts in brief form on Facebook and decided to twist his prompt him to channel these interesting thoughts toward his recently inactive blog.
Your assignment? Go read it, and give him enough responses so that he feels pressured to continue.
Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels may have originated/developed based upon dialectal considerations. As I run across patterns such as Matthew’s preference for plural nouns and lexical issues such as synonym substitution that by all appearances don’t significantly influence thematic or other conscious stylistic differences, I automatically think dialect, although of course idiolect variation occurs within a single dialect. This is contingent, of course, on being able to identify the place of origin for other texts with which they may be compared, so I recognize it’s a tall order. I assume there are plenty of guesses about where certain Gospels (John, for instance) originated based upon other considerations.
I imagine that narrowing down geographical areas in which the texts (or their authors) might have originated and developed has the potential to influence our understanding of the issues related to the transmission and composition of the traditions/texts of the Gospels.
I’d like to ask anyone who reads this blog and is informed about these issues: how have they been treated in the literature? And if you aren’t personally aware, do you think you could refer me to someone who might be? I’d certainly appreciate it!
Using an analogy especially interesting to me as an historical linguist, Sabio Lantz at Triangulations reminds us of the power of understanding that the Christian faith isn’t quite as unique as we all like to think:
We often see that naive mono-linguists think their language is unique in its ability to express deep thoughts. Well of course they do — they have never mastered another language. A good way to cure this parochial blindness is to do comparative studies. Using comparative linguistics researchers have learned more about the very nature of language than by studying any one language in depth.
He draws a correlation (the same one I drew a while back) between comparative linguistics, which shows that the Indo-European languages are related by a common source language, and comparative biology, which shows us that all life is related by a common ancestor. He goes on:
I feel that religious folks who have never thoroughly understood another religion are handicapped in a similar way to mono-linguists. And no matter how deep they dive into their religion, no matter how thoroughly they know their religious history, their scriptures original language(s) or the intricacies of their religion’s theologies, it will be the rare person who will see the deep patterns of all human religious thought.
Sabio suggests that just as “[i]t is by comparative religious studies that people can see how much their religion shares with other religions,” so also “[d]oing comparative studies helps people to see the nature of human hearts which generates their faiths.”
Despite the fears of many Christians, acknowledging such similiarities does not itself undermine the validity of Christianity. In fact, C.S. Lewis argued that certain universal similiarities such as shared mythological themes are to be expected. In his essay “Myth Became Fact”, he remarked that he would be more troubled if Christianity did not correspond to universal ideas in mythology, even in specific motifs such as “dying god” imagery:
We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block, if they weren’t.
To be clear, this is not Sabio’s point. As a former Christian, he does indeed believe that the universality of Christian themes that contradicts Christianity’s typical claims of exclusivity should lead one to the conclusion that Christianity is superfluous as a whole. I disagree. But such claims of exclusivity are indeed overwrought and largely based upon the belief in an inerrant source of all knowing. I don’t think Christianity is even fundamentally about holding onto various and sundry truth claims, but about surrendering my being to God in Christ.
Like Sabio, I am uncomfortable with the type of Christianity that maintains that all necessary truth lies exclusively within the pages of the Bible. The biggest problem is that this philosophy has a tendency to undervalue truth in a tragic way. This type of person has been caricatured in the character of Ned Flanders, who forgets to live life in a way that’s at all relevant to the world God made. Although most inerrantists would not maintain that literally all truth is in the Bible, they would say that all truth necessary for salvation is in there. This, then, is typically construed as a stamp of authenticity on the entirety of the claims of Scripture, resulting in the nonsensical demotion of other valid pursuits of truth when they conflict with something in the Bible. Clear example: the evolution/creation debate. Another difficulty resulting from this is responsible for an old habit of my own in which ethical insights from other systems are eyed distrustfully as possibly being somehow “worldly” if they are not presented in the Bible, without looking at their intrinsic merit.
I’m not saying that the Bible is all “derivative”; no one could seriously believe that it’s not got something unique to bring to the table. What I’m asking is that we Christians begin to see that “not in scripture” and “unscriptural” don’t necessarily equate to evil, wordly, or useless. I continue to affirm by my personal faith that Christ (not the Bible) is the fundamental expression of God to humanity. But God’s truth is reality, and so permeates the universe in ways not able to be contained in a single book. Defenders of the Bible through inerrancy who see themselves as the guardians of God’s truth are limiting God’s reign and authority over all extrabiblical reality by subjugating it all to their interpretations of Scripture.
Whatever is true is true whether or not the Bible says it — whether or not it even agrees with it. If believing the truth is so important, shouldn’t we concern ourselves first with seeking out truth rather than defending what we already believe?
The Intelligent Design documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was never released in the theaters in the UK, so now in the wake of the DVD’s release there this month, the UK radio show Unbelievable has recently partnered with someone named Mark Haville to host the first screening of the movie to a UK audience. In anticipation of this event, Unbelievable has done a couple of shows related to the topic.
This last weekend’s show was an interesting knock-down-drag-out between Meyers and atheist Peter Atkins of chemistry textbook fame. I thought I’d direct my readers to it, if for no other reason than to enjoy the fireworks that result. I thought the discussion of Meyers’s trademark information theory arguments for ID almost went somewhere really helpful, but since Meyers has the tendency to filibuster and Atkins has a short fuse, and because both have no qualms about talking over one another, the topic ended up stillborn. In any event, it is evident that they are in effect speaking two entirely different languages.
Anyway, since Expelled is up for discussion again, I thought I’d point out a video produced by Gordon Glover at Beyond the Firmament. The point of this light-hearted video is to lampoon the ID claim that scientific institutions show unfair prejudice when they insist that their science faculty refrain from introducing non-natural (“unnatural”?) alternatives to scientific explanations that have so far adequately accounted for the natural phenomena being examined.
I’m happy to say that this video includes four voice-overs from your humble correspondent. Any guesses as to which ones? Hint: three of the voices are identical but are assigned to different faces, and the other is done in a non-American accent; the best ones, Stein and Dawkins, are done by Gordon himself.
Enjoy!
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