Archives for “Ancient Near East”
Second century heretic Marcion was quite a character. Because the only contemporaneous descriptions of his beliefs that survived are those of his detractors it’s hard to say definitively, but his distinctive teachings seem to have originated in the belief that the god of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was a cruel and evil god challenged by the good god represented by Jesus; for Marcion, this schema accounted for what was even then recognized as a sharp contrast between the harshness of God’s behavior in much of the Old Testament and the essentially loving nature of God as revealed in Jesus.
What has emerged as the “orthodox” way of dealing with the contrast in OT/NT divine dispositions is a vehement denial of any such contrast. And indeed, as I have said on this blog, the OT’s Yahweh is extolled as full of ever-new mercies and unending lovingkindness, and much judgment and hellfire is found in the sermons of Jesus. We are far astray if we deny that Jesus was said to have come “to bring a sword”; the aspect of the historical Jesus as apocalyptic prophet speaking the doom of the current age should never be too far underplayed. Instead, what we should emphasize is the explicit characterization of God’s motives for judgment as reflecting personal concern and a desire for restoration, not a craving for vengeance and some sort of legal satisfaction of abstract requirements. The religious leaders of Jerusalem were condemned because they caused the little ones to sin, because they did not care for the fatherless and the widow, and because they had proved themselves faithless “hirelings” by their indifference to the welfare of those over whom they were given supervision. The desire for restoration and concern for the marginalized is, again, something not at all alien to the later Old Testament writers; Jesus simply put the focus more squarely on those things by virtue of his place as the “image of God bodily.” God has an interest in judgment but not because of a desire to wreak revenge on those who have personally affronted Him disguised as disembodied “justice”.
- Why Genesis 1 was written 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...
- “Total war” or just plain old war? Apologist Matt Flannagan once again defends God against the charge of commanding the Israelites to commit genocide against the Canaanites. Not including the final sentence, his concluding statement articulates a...
- Chaos in Genesis and Germanic mythology 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...
Apologist Matt Flannagan once again defends God against the charge of commanding the Israelites to commit genocide against the Canaanites. Not including the final sentence, his concluding statement articulates a very important reminder about the importance of recognizing the Bible as a product of ANE literature:
Related posts:Consequently, if one does not read the texts in isolation and is sensitive to the genre of Ancient Near-Eastern writings then a literal reading is far from obvious. As Egyptologist James K. Hoffmeier notes, such a reading commits “the fallacy of misplaced literalism … the misconstruction of a statement-in-evidence so that it carries a literal meaning when a symbolic or hyperbolic or figurative meaning was intended.” This underscores an obvious but often neglected point, the bible is not written in accord with the conventions of 21st century English. It was written in ancient foreign languages and in the conventions that governed historical, legal, epic, etc writings of that time. To understand what it teaches accurately one needs to ask what it teaches given these factors. When one does this, it seems probably that the Old Testament does not teach that God commanded or that Israel carried out, the genocide or extermination of the Canaanites.
- Who is Satan? This is the first post in a guest series by Arcamaede, who has contributed previously. Hope you enjoy it! ~ Steve ___________________________________________________ This is the article that just wouldn’t die. ...
- Facing the music: genocide is just genocide Kenton Sparks contributes a humdinger of a post today, the second post in a seven-part series entitled “After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age.” He begins with...
- Lessons from the Canaanite Conquest Second century heretic Marcion was quite a character. Because the only contemporaneous descriptions of his beliefs that survived are those of his detractors it’s hard to say definitively, but his...
He begins with a starkly stated proposition:
The factual contradictions within Scripture or between Scripture and extrabiblical sources cited in my previous blog are not, in my view, the most serious difficulties that Christians face in the Bible. More troublesome are those cases where a biblical text espouses ethical values that not only contradict other biblical texts but strike us as down-right sinister or evil.
He then goes on to highlight the clear incongruence between Mat 5.43-45 and Deu 20.16-18.
Says Sparks, “These words from the lips of Jesus and the Law of Moses are profoundly different. How can one biblical text admonish us to love our enemies and another command Israel to commit genocide against ethnic groups because they have a different religion?”
I am quite familiar with most of the involved justifications for the ritual act of consecration-by-destruction, or “ban” as it used to be called, known as ḥerem. In my undergraduate Apologetics class (or was it Deuteronomy?) I devoted a paper to arguing how truly ethical and even merciful it was for God to want those men, women, children, and babies murdered.
Related posts:- The lost art of humility: homosexuality and usury Most of the hullaballoo surrounding Knapp-gate seems to have blown over for the time being, but its implications and the probability of similar future incidents continue to grow. Undeniably, a...
- Thinking “Outside the Box” about the Bible My friend Cliff Martin has written one of the best, most concise descriptions of the nature and purpose of the Bible that I have ever had the privilege of reading....
- Human interpretations of Scripture and nature This is long for a “quote of the day,” but it’s so well stated that I couldn’t resist. It’s from an article by Kenton Sparks, author of God’s Word in...
I haven’t yet had the talk RJS asks about with my inquisitive, but trusting, science nerd second-grader, but I think she’s become aware of the science/creationism conflict, particularly as regards the age of the earth. She reads all secular books about science and we talk about science as though there were no such thing as creationism, but she is taught an adamant and somewhat polemical version of YEC at church. It won’t be long before I’ll have to address these issues, but I’ve been preparing for it for years now and don’t dread it anymore. Here is how I’ve imagined it going down.
Related posts:Well, the ancient Israelites didn’t really know how the world came about. They weren’t scientists and didn’t try very hard to be; they were more interested in how to live life obediently to God. This was a good thing for them, and something we can learn from them nowadays.
- N.T. Wright on “unfaithful”, “flat” readings of Genesis The BioLogos Foundation hits another home run by soliciting and sharing this gem: Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, while no fundie, is generally regarded among scholars and many evangelicals as...
- Chaos in Genesis and Germanic mythology 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...
- Contextual interpretation in Genesis: Cain’s mark I suppose it goes without saying that approaching the Bible as contextually bound literature leaves you asking different questions and giving different answers. In the comments of one my posts...
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.
Related posts:- Chaos in Genesis and Germanic mythology 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...
- N.T. Wright on “unfaithful”, “flat” readings of Genesis The BioLogos Foundation hits another home run by soliciting and sharing this gem: Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, while no fundie, is generally regarded among scholars and many evangelicals as...
- Explaining Genesis to our children I haven’t yet had the talk RJS asks about with my inquisitive, but trusting, science nerd second-grader, but I think she’s become aware of the science/creationism conflict, particularly as regards the...
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.
Related posts:- Why Genesis 1 was written 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...
- N.T. Wright on “unfaithful”, “flat” readings of Genesis The BioLogos Foundation hits another home run by soliciting and sharing this gem: Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, while no fundie, is generally regarded among scholars and many evangelicals as...
- Contextual interpretation in Genesis: Cain’s mark I suppose it goes without saying that approaching the Bible as contextually bound literature leaves you asking different questions and giving different answers. In the comments of one my posts...
The BioLogos Foundation hits another home run by soliciting and sharing this gem:
Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, while no fundie, is generally regarded among scholars and many evangelicals as fairly conservative in his theological outlook (e.g., he affirms an historical Fall of some kind), so this is good to hear from him. I found it interesting that Bishop Wright clearly affirmed Walton’s model of Genesis 1 as a statement of God’s authorship and control of the universe recounted in the form of an analogy to a temple dedication. He echoes Walton when he warns that taking a “flat” view of Genesis as simple history just because it’s what our culture expects is in a real sense a dishonor to the text itself.
Related posts:- Why Genesis 1 was written 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...
- Chaos in Genesis and Germanic mythology 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...
- Indiana Jones and the Fall of Man Commonly in Christian theology, the agreement between Adam and God (the Adamic covenant) and the agreement between the Israelites and God (the Old Covenant of Moses) are contrasted (the Noahide...
William Dembski, a father of the Intelligent Design movement, has recently become comfortable calling himself an old earth creationist who, as a good Baptist, accepts the historicity of Adam and Eve. This comes as no surprise really, but it’s interesting to see how his gears turn as he systematically lays all his cards on the table for why he’s personally invested in pursuing a critique of common descent.
Discussing his book The End of Christianity with the host of the UK radio show Unbelieveable and an atheist guest, Dembski describes how he thinks that the chief difficulty for old earth as opposed to young earth creationism is the exceptionally long time for evil having existed prior to the event that was supposed to have caused it: the Fall of Man.
Related posts:- Theodicy and evolution Cliff Martin continues his interesting discussion of the apparently conflicting ideas of the loving Christian God and the God who ordained the sometimes brutal processes needed for evolution. I see...
- Lamoureux: links and labels Mike Beidler over at The Creation of an Evolutionist has a post up with a link to an overall excellent interview with the brilliant Denis Lamoureux, author of Evolutionary Creation,...
- My position on the origins question Josh recently commented on another thread, “I want to hear your explanation of the origin of life on earth. I have heard the positions you are against. So how did...
John Walton points out that often in the Ancient Near East, a temple dedication ceremony would take place over seven days’ time; for six days, the temple would be furnished and the priests would take up their posts, and finally on the seventh day the deity would come in to take residence and begin to exercise his/her authority. Walton argues that when the Hebrews heard the priests read the creation week of Genesis 1 to them, they would probably not have taken it (primarily, anyway) as a treatise on history or a scientific origins account but as a comosgony framed in terms of an analogy with the construction and resulting importance of the temple as God’s headquarters for the universe. Walton refers to Genesis 1 as a “temple text”: it is a literary form of analogy to the establishment of the sanctuary. His “rest” was not about sleep, but about settling in at the control booth and taking command of the cosmos He had set in place. Six days you shall work, rest on the Sabbath. In fact (and this is not from Walton), that’s why the Sabbath was not made for man, but man for the Sabbath: it became a day of doing nothing (even healing!), when, as Jesus demonstrated with the healing of the man with the withered hand, it was intended to be a day of doing the Lord’s work, a day set aside to remember God’s intention for the heavens and the earth (the implementation of His purposes).
Related posts:- Chaos in Genesis and Germanic mythology 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...
- Why Genesis 1 was written 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...
- My position on the origins question Josh recently commented on another thread, “I want to hear your explanation of the origin of life on earth. I have heard the positions you are against. So how did...
Commonly in Christian theology, the agreement between Adam and God (the Adamic covenant) and the agreement between the Israelites and God (the Old Covenant of Moses) are contrasted (the Noahide and Abrahamic covenants are given varying significance depending on who’s talking). Many, such as those holding firmly to the Westminster Confession, argue that the Adamic covenant was a “covenant of works”, the Mosaic covenant was “of grace” at heart but administered through works, and that the New Covenant is thoroughly a covenant of grace. It’s almost as though God kept trying different ways to maintain a relationship with humanity, and finally managed to get it right with Christianity.
Reading the Eden story as an historical account gives us the impression that there was a covenant with humanity that got broken. Successive attempts at reconciling God and man were necessary, each in the form of a new epochal covenant that had to hold up at least temporarily until Jesus came and brokered the final version. But we get a slightly different picture if we understand the early Genesis accounts as etiology, an origins story, offered by later Israelite theologians to replace the errant myths they were familiar with, some lingering from their ancient past and others absorbed from surrounding cultures.
Related posts:- Case Study: the Fall This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first...
- Self-preservation, the Fall, and redemption In my explanation of man’s depravity from the view of a recurring, individualized (non-historical) Fall, I have argued that mankind’s natural separation from God was in origin a result of...
- N.T. Wright on “unfaithful”, “flat” readings of Genesis The BioLogos Foundation hits another home run by soliciting and sharing this gem: Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, while no fundie, is generally regarded among scholars and many evangelicals as...
My friend Cliff Martin has written one of the best, most concise descriptions of the nature and purpose of the Bible that I have ever had the privilege of reading. He also makes some interesting remarks about the usefulness and validity of orthodoxy, something I’ve discussed here and there on this blog.
I strongly suggest that you go over to Outside the Box and read it. But in case you’re too lazy, and because it so well expresses my own current thoughts, I’m going to reproduce a substantial part of it right here.
Related posts:My friends who read the Bible as if it were the very inspired words of God see themselves as standing on the solid high ground of Fundamentalism, and see me as skidding down the slippery slope of that dreaded disease of Liberalism.
- The Truth Project and critical thinking The most dangerous shyster is the one who has convinced himself to believe his own pitch. Over at The Creation of an Evolutionist, Mike is continuing to blog through his...
- Brief question about inerrancy The question that must be asked of inerrantists is this: Is it Scripture or man’s wisdom that is the ultimate basis for Christians’ belief system? If you answer that Scripture...
- The Bible as literature and what that means to us Mike Beidler pointed me to an article entitled “The Bible as Human Literature” that culminates in the provocative question, “If Jesus is really raised from the dead, what do we...
I suppose it goes without saying that approaching the Bible as contextually bound literature leaves you asking different questions and giving different answers.
In the comments of one my posts awhile back, someone expressed bemusement about why God protected Cain after he killed Abel. Not striking him down is easily answerable as an early expression of divine mercy — but did He have to go and make sure nobody killed him? Would it not have been more in line with God’s general practice (especially the OT God) to respond to Cain’s plea for clemency, “Yes, they probably will kill you. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” Think of the cataclysmic consequence of the wickedness of Cain’s line (the Flood) that God could have nipped in the bud by simply allowing vengeance to be taken on Cain. One might make an argument from within a certain theological system that this was an example of God essentially ordaining evil for His own sovereign purposes. The pernicious hermeneutical principle referred to as analogia fidei (the analogy of faith; “letting Scripture interpret Scripture”) goes about interpreting passages like these by ignoring relevant context and stringing unrelated Scriptures together along the flimsy string of theology the interpreter started with and insists upon reading into every nook and cranny.
Related posts:- Are the early Genesis stories historical accounts? Before I "took the road less traveled by" into historical linguistics, I was highly interested in ancient history, especially as it related to the Old Testament. I wanted to learn...
- Chaos in Genesis and Germanic mythology 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...
- Case Study: the Fall This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first...
[A note to the reader. This post is authored by AMW, not Steve.]
I have been having a debate with Arv Edgeworth on the scientific merits of the Deluge narrative from Genesis, chapters 6-9. You can read our ongoing debate on the comment thread here. While most of the discussion has been around the scientific questions, it has become apparent to me that the Scriptural side of the debate is important as well. In fact, I suspect that for most folks on the creationist side of the evolution/creation debate, the Scriptures are the very heart of the debate. If the first three chapters of Genesis had never been written, most evangelical Christians would be more than happy to accept the existing orthodoxy of the biological sciences.
Related posts:- N.T. Wright on “unfaithful”, “flat” readings of Genesis The BioLogos Foundation hits another home run by soliciting and sharing this gem: Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, while no fundie, is generally regarded among scholars and many evangelicals as...
- On judging Scripture (and finding it wanting) — TIL #4: “Pray for You” At the suggestion of a certain rather busy diplomat, I decided to treat this trending ditty as a Theologically Interesting Lyric. It is indeed theologically interesting, because it dovetails into...
- Creation as God’s temple John Walton points out that often in the Ancient Near East, a temple dedication ceremony would take place over seven days’ time; for six days, the temple would be furnished...
Almost two years ago when I posted on another website the original version of what would become the last two posts of my Bibliology and Hermeneutics series, my friend Jeremy Lile took a principled stand against my essay. He disagreed with the idea that “if the Bible does not present a ‘scientific’ explanation of phenomena it is also errant.” Recommending Clifford Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures, Jeremy argued that this was improper: “[This conclusion is] the result of the method you have adopted. The etic strategy, i.e., the outsider’s perspective, you employ necessarily removes the text from its cultural framework and breaks it down into foreign categories created by the analyst. Analysis now occurs ‘outside’ the cultural system – meaning is no longer ‘local.’ This approach is useful for cross-cultural studies, but it has its shortcomings. The emic view, which I have been advocating implicitly in my articles, approaches data from inside the culture. In other words, it would be wrong to call ‘story’ (emic) errant because is doesn’t line up with our notion of history (etic). It would also be wrong to assume the author was trying to present what we call history. It’s an unfair assessment of the text from the outside. More to the point: the errancy may only exist in the categories you created for analysis.” Regarding the invalidity of forcing the outsider view, another contributor noted, “This would be like discovering and claiming an already inhabited island, and then prosecuting the natives for trespassing.”
Related posts:- Thinking “Outside the Box” about the Bible My friend Cliff Martin has written one of the best, most concise descriptions of the nature and purpose of the Bible that I have ever had the privilege of reading....
- The Fallout This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our...
- Finding God’s hand in Scripture All Christians generally agree that the Bible was written down by humans, and most agree that in some way their writings are reflective of their individuality; the question comes in...
From the Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, pastor of St. Stephen Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, comes this gem of an op ed (Star-Telegram.com).
The debate over teaching evolution in schools has a lot to do with science, but not biology.
Look instead to archaeology, anthropology, and mostly to literary and historical criticism — the tools modern scholarship uses to interpret the Bible.
The application of scientific method to holy writ has raised doubts about scriptural infallibility. Those who want to teach students “the weaknesses” of evolution hope, like good lawyers, to raise enough doubts that creationism looks credible. They fear that if creationism isn’t credible, then their literal reading of Scripture isn’t credible, either — and neither is their faith.
They’re right. But what’s needed is not faulty science. Believers need a new way to assert the truths of biblical faith without turning off our brains in the process.
Fundamental to the question of origins is the purpose of the Bible. He continues:
Related posts:- My position on the origins question Josh recently commented on another thread, “I want to hear your explanation of the origin of life on earth. I have heard the positions you are against. So how did...
- Why the debate over creationism matters Recently I have been involved in a couple conversations with folks who aren’t really “informed” (I use the term loosely) creationists but have been hounded enough by creationists/biblical literalists who...
- You can’t just ignore the evolution debate I generally like World magazine. Oh, there’s plenty I disagree with in every issue, but one thing editor Marvin Olasky and his team just seem to get that so many...
Mike Beidler over at The Creation of an Evolutionist has a post up with a link to an overall excellent interview with the brilliant Denis Lamoureux, author of Evolutionary Creation, conducted by CanadianChristianity.com. Check it out!
On a side note (and I do think that this is just a side note), Lamoureux has spearheaded an effort to change the term theistic evolution (TE) to evolutionary creation (EC). At the same time, he ardently rejects scientific concordism, which assumes agreement between the science reflected in the Bible and the reality as God knows it; the scientific conceptions of the authors of Scripture that bleed through the pages (e.g., the firmament, the fixed earth, the heart as the organ of thought) were never the intended message and so were not under providential review. He maintains that the science and even some of what is nowadays considered (in violation of cultural/literary context) to be historical accounts were merely culturally relevant vehicles for the “Message of Faith”, the spiritual truth that is the subject of the Bible and the manifestation of inspiration (this is theological concordism). I am on board with this. However, in my oh-so-justifiably-humble opinion, trying to change the name of our belief in both evolution and Christianity is helping folks strain at a gnat while insisting that they swallow the camel of what amounts to the rejection of inerrancy that I just described.
Related posts:- The trouble with intramural accommodationism Can one be consistent in accepting both the common form of inerrancy as described in the Chicago Statement and universal common descent? This question is something I struggle with when...
- My position on the origins question Josh recently commented on another thread, “I want to hear your explanation of the origin of life on earth. I have heard the positions you are against. So how did...
- Dembski on theodicy and a young earth William Dembski, a father of the Intelligent Design movement, has recently become comfortable calling himself an old earth creationist who, as a good Baptist, accepts the historicity of Adam and...
I’ve not got much to say about this, but please check out Cliff Martin’s post that describes his thinking on the unchanging nature of God, progressive revelation, and the inspiration of Scripture. I don’t think I disagreed with anything he said. Here’s an excerpt:
Related posts:I believe that the Bible is a unique book, inspired from Genesis to Revelation. I believe it is the very book God wanted us to have. I hold to the authority of the Scriptures in matters of faith and practice. I believe the Bible provides a solid and dependable foundation for Christian living. I read it. I study it. I love it. I teach it. I find that it is “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). I believe all the Scriptures are infallible. Infallibility, as I use the term, means that the Bible, in its totality, does not mislead on issues of faith and practice, though it may not be without error in all respects. In my years of reading and studying the Bible, this view is more consistent with the Scriptures themselves than what I consider a forced claim of inerrancy.
- The canon and revelation Damian at Castle of Nutshells, one of the most thoughtful bloggers I read regularly, has recently written on the topic of the canon. Specifically, he asks (without answering), is the...
- The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture This is the third of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. We can summarize the previous discussion by saying that 2 Timothy 3:15-17 teaches that these writings...
- The origins debate: more than evolution From the Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, pastor of St. Stephen Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, comes this gem of an op ed (Star-Telegram.com). The debate over teaching evolution in schools...
Lawrence Boadt’s excellent Reading the Old Testament has a chart on page 79 that illustrates some key differences between the way the ancients viewed history and the way we do today. We tend to be shocked when we discover that there might be any deviation from what we subconsciously have accepted as the only viewpoint. These are examples Boadt gives for distinctions that should inform our study of the Old Testament, even the parts written in some sense as history. Here is the chart:
- Are the early Genesis stories historical accounts? Before I "took the road less traveled by" into historical linguistics, I was highly interested in ancient history, especially as it related to the Old Testament. I wanted to learn...
- Case Study: the Fall This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first...
- Contextual interpretation in Genesis: Cain’s mark I suppose it goes without saying that approaching the Bible as contextually bound literature leaves you asking different questions and giving different answers. In the comments of one my posts...
Before I "took the road less traveled by" into historical linguistics, I was highly interested in ancient history, especially as it related to the Old Testament. I wanted to learn Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and of course Hebrew so that I could study the Ancient Near East (ANE) and how it related to the Bible. The more I read on my own, the more I realized that such studies did not confirm the Bible as a purely divine record of history. ANE archaeology and history demonstrate the ANE heritage of the Bible; but once we acknowledge the ANE context of the Bible, we should not expect to see those aspects which differ from 21st century Western ideals to be omitted from it and should likewise not expect to see our modern ideals in place. Sadly, it is difficult for readers of literature to approach any text fully aware of the ideals, mindsets, and motivations of the authors even when contemporaneous with them, much less when separated by changes to culture, social context, and language wrought by millennia of intervening time; the unconsciously anachronistic depositing of ideas and concepts foreign to the author and original audience are also hard to identify and purge from our readings.
Readers of this blog should know that I believe the Bible is no less subject to anachronistic misinterpretation than other literary works, and I would point out to those who disagree that there are myriad cases in which they themselves make provision for this problem - any time they insist on doing anything beyond a surface reading that doesn't take into account the history and culture of the people involved with the writing of the Bible. Educated evangelicals in particular have a tendency to eat up any book they can get their hands on that purports to show the Bible in its original context, provided the conclusion is "conservative" and is treated as upholding the historicity of the Bible. I myself tend to do this even today, and with some just cause: zealous secularist debunkers approach the text looking for erroneous information they suppose invalidates the message of Scripture. For most evangelicals, an appeal to historical/cultural contextualization is especially lauded when it is used to clear up apparent challenges to scientific inerrancy. Take for example Edwin Thiele's observation of Judah and Israel's alternating usage of accession and non-accession year dating in recording regnal lengths in First and Second Kings, a situation somewhat perplexing to anyone advocating the "plain reading" approach. This has caused some conservatives (especially fundamentalists) to attack Thiele's explanation as an end-run around God's intention to provide us all truth provided we use a plain, literalist hermeneutic (witness one such person reviewing Thiele's book, Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, on Amazon).
The "plain literalist" hermeneutic is useful for upholding the current ideals of historiography in the Old Testament narratives. The problem is that this is a dreadfully anachronistic endeavor: the modern genre of historiography was not developed before a Greek movement that took place centuries after the supposed origin of the stories, and even then it took quite a while for those ideals to saturate Greek historiography and then the rest of the world through Hellenism. It's not that those before the turn of the first millennium A.D. were incapable or too ignorant to write history the way we expect it in our post-Enlightenment world. It's just that they had different ideals for what they wanted from a story. Cold, dispassionate, scientific history without any foreseeable application failed to supply the meaning or entertainment they demanded from their stories. They wanted colorful stories that gave them meaning, not history for history's sake. Modernists, however, tend to believe that an exact recounting of history is the highest or most important use of narrative. As I wrote elsewhere, "The difference between the ancient and the modern motivations for and method of speculation about unknowns is that the ancients used mythological stories in order to apply meaning to the subject of their speculation and we tend to use scientific enquiry to sever meaning from the subject, and are thus generally skeptical that any meaning can or should be applied. The ancients were content to be ignorant of the mechanics of how, as long as they knew why. Modernists feel satisfied to have discovered the natural causes, the how's, and seem convinced that this abolishes meaning."
But the use of mythology to convey meaning is not something that disappeared without a trace with the onset of the Age of Reason. Gordon Glover likes to point out that the American tall tales about such figures as Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill are not intended to explain topographical features such as the Grand Canyon, but they do acknowledge the existence of those features as integral aspects of the frontier and use fantastic stories about their creation as entertaining vehicles of meaning to illustrate character virtues such as strength and courage which have now successfully been associated with the frontiersmen who tamed the wilderness.
Would it be so scandalous if the Israelites, like all their neighbors, had little use for a cold recounting of geological, astronomical, and biological history, preferring stories chock-full of meaning? What would be wrong if God saw it fit to communicate the truths most relevant and significant to them in the way most familiar to them? The self-centeredness of the objection that this genre isn't as relevant to us is readily apparent and needs no comment here.
ANE scholarship has long pointed out the similarities between the early Genesis stories and the myths of the ANE, from the obvious Utnapishtim/Noah parallel to shades of Enki and Ninhursag in the Garden narratives. Nevertheless, literalists have a few preferred methods of explaining these parallels away. First, they will deny any similarity of style between the Genesis narratives and the ANE myths. Other times they will insist that the similarities are merely chance or so general and vague that they are hardly significant. Lastly, when the parallels are undeniable, they break out their ace in the hole: they claim that Genesis is the original, historical basis for the ANE stories, regardless of the fact that the latter predate Genesis by as much as a millennium.
I want to share a few of my thoughts on these literalist responses.
Related posts:- Contextual interpretation in Genesis: Cain’s mark I suppose it goes without saying that approaching the Bible as contextually bound literature leaves you asking different questions and giving different answers. In the comments of one my posts...
- Chaos in Genesis and Germanic mythology 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...
- Case Study: the Fall This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first...
When I was at Truthvoice 2008 a month ago, the co-author of Beyond Creation Science, Tim Martin, gave two talks that I thought were worthy of discussion on my blog. Here are my thoughts on the first talk.
[Note: I am summarizing based on the notes I took, and I honestly hope I misrepresent nothing he said. I'm going to let him know about this to give him a chance for correction/clarification.]
Related posts:- Life in God’s Garden Summary of Part One God the Gardener created a son (Lk 3.38) to tend the garden. God, as a father, was training up his children Adam and Eve in the...
- Indiana Jones and the Fall of Man Commonly in Christian theology, the agreement between Adam and God (the Adamic covenant) and the agreement between the Israelites and God (the Old Covenant of Moses) are contrasted (the Noahide...
- Progressive revelation I’ve not got much to say about this, but please check out Cliff Martin’s post that describes his thinking on the unchanging nature of God, progressive revelation, and the inspiration...
Josh recently commented on another thread, “I want to hear your explanation of the origin of life on earth. I have heard the positions you are against. So how did we come about?”
Actually, you’re asking two different questions. The first, concerning the origin of life itself, I have not come to any conclusions on. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a supernatural act of intervention. But then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened by some natural process. The fact is, even scientists don’t have a really good explanation for “abiogenesis” (life from non-life), although they’ve got lots of hypotheses. Yet this current lack of knowledge alone does not make me immediately decide, “Oh! Miracle!” I have explained elsewhere why this God-of-the-gaps explanation is a sinking ship; that some rain god’s direct, miraculous intervention is behind the phenomenon of rain might have seemed like the only possible explanation before an understanding of meteorology, but such a claim would not only have been entirely premature, but, when displaced by a scientific explanation, would appear quaint and superstitious. Just because we don’t know now doesn’t mean we won’t be able to figure it out, and we may even one day be able to reproduce it.
Related posts:- Dembski on theodicy and a young earth William Dembski, a father of the Intelligent Design movement, has recently become comfortable calling himself an old earth creationist who, as a good Baptist, accepts the historicity of Adam and...
- Lamoureux: links and labels Mike Beidler over at The Creation of an Evolutionist has a post up with a link to an overall excellent interview with the brilliant Denis Lamoureux, author of Evolutionary Creation,...
- The origins debate: more than evolution From the Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, pastor of St. Stephen Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, comes this gem of an op ed (Star-Telegram.com). The debate over teaching evolution in schools...
This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our sinful natures, what is?
Depravity for me is summed up by self-centered living, which is inexcusable for a species that has achieved consciousness of the divine. We are all sinners because we all start off life living for ourselves, which, after early childhood and the awareness of Otherness sets in, becomes sin. Sin is a state of estrangement from God. Over long eons, God brought His children up biologically so that mankind became sentient and came to know that it had a Maker. At that point, God chose a different means to mature our species. We still struggle to subdue and tame our own biological impulses that lead to our detriment and God’s displeasure, but we master them not through natural selection, but by the overcoming power of the Spirit of God. Christianity is the next (and final?) phase in the evolution of God’s creation.
Related posts:- Case Study: the Fall This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first...
- The authority of Scripture This is the sixth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. Preliminary Remarks The purpose of these next few posts is to examine my perspective of the...
- Thinking “Outside the Box” about the Bible My friend Cliff Martin has written one of the best, most concise descriptions of the nature and purpose of the Bible that I have ever had the privilege of reading....
This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first sin caused a rupture in the whole race’s ability to interact with God. How the death that Adam experienced because of his sin was passed on to all his descendants has been explained in various ways: the federal view says that Adam’s fall from God’s favor was effective for all humanity because he was the “head” of the race. Another view is that the Fall corrupted Adam’s very genetic makeup, causing humanity to be a slave to its own sinful and fallen flesh, which explains how it was passed on to his children, and thus the whole race.
Regardless of how they explain it, most Christians believe that God considers all humans straight out of the chute as culpable of sin, a stance of separation from God called “Original Sin”. This position explains why every human sins, and why we automatically start out life estranged from God. That we all sin and by nature act in ways that do not please God from early childhood at least is apparent to all. For this reason, it is accurate to say that unredeemed mankind is, as a race, “falling”, but as for “fallen”, what did we fall from? Or, more importantly, what caused this Fall? Allow me to present you with an alternative interpretation based on a view of the Genesis account as etiology.
Related posts:- Indiana Jones and the Fall of Man Commonly in Christian theology, the agreement between Adam and God (the Adamic covenant) and the agreement between the Israelites and God (the Old Covenant of Moses) are contrasted (the Noahide...
- The Fallout This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our...
- The authority of Scripture This is the sixth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. Preliminary Remarks The purpose of these next few posts is to examine my perspective of the...
This is the fifth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.
The Importance of Determining Genre
Because the Bible is a compilation of literary works, in order to get the sense of it, we must interpret each of them in the manner in which it was intended, viz. according to the appropriate literary category. Surely the principle of interpreting things in the manner in which there were intended approaches tautology, but how many Christians ever really follow it through? As mentioned before, the assumptions that determine the “manner in which it was intended” are too often based on what meets the eye alone. So what do I mean by interpreting the Bible as literature?
You read a novel in much the same way that you read the newspaper, realizing that they are both forms of narrative. How you interpret the narratives in each, however, depends on your recognition of the type of literature you are reading. No one would say that Great Expectations was “errant” or “a pack of lies” unless he thought it was written as history. The same goes for the Bible, which is far from uniform in literary genre. We have farmers, shepherds, doctors, and kings for authors; what thoughtful person, recognizing that God chose this diverse crowd rather than three or four prophets or priests to bear witness to Himself, would conclude that God would homogenize their testimonies into one nameless genre, erasing the distinctiveness of each one in His quest to dole out a series of unanalyzable propositions? Instead, within the pages of Scripture we find a broad range of writing styles that includes poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, apocalyptic, and epistle.
Moreover, there is not always a one-to-one genre-to-book correlation. Not every segment within the book of Genesis, for example, is to be interpreted as the same sort of narrative, as is somewhat obvious to someone doing comparative literary analysis on the type of stories being told. The Creation part of Genesis shares many characteristics of Ancient Near Eastern mythology, whereas the stories of the Patriarchs remind us of the Icelandic sagas, collections of family stories that give a group of people a common heritage.
The historical-grammatical (or grammatico-historical) method of biblical interpretation is the practice of taking into account the original language and the culture of the original audience when researching the original meanings of Scripture. By and large, though, inerrantists have used this principle as a defensive and reactionary measure to clear up problems rather than as an active interpretive method: for instance, it is responsible for the observation mentioned before that Judah (and later Israel) used accession year dating, because Edwin Thiele looked at Persian (and that of other ANE cultures) record-keeping and saw that this explained a lot of long-supposed errors in the dating of the kings. The historical-grammatical method has been modified by many exegetes to act as a sort of middle-ground that suspends the value of a plain reading if by any means it helps to demonstrate the scientific inerrancy of the Bible. What is missing from that version of the historical-grammatical hermeneutic is the principle we have been discussing that insists upon interpreting the Bible in terms of the literary characteristics, devices, and genres that make it up. We may call this the literary-generic principle; this principle is a tool that cannot be neglected by anyone claiming to use the historical-grammatical method of interpretation and exegesis.
Related posts:- Case Study: the Fall This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first...
- Contextual interpretation in Genesis: Cain’s mark I suppose it goes without saying that approaching the Bible as contextually bound literature leaves you asking different questions and giving different answers. In the comments of one my posts...
- The Fallout This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics. So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our...