Undeception

In response to my last post in which I complained about not having an easy way of annotating my changes in views over the years I’ve been writing this blog, Nick B. asked a very reasonable question that, in answering, will provide an immediate (though temporary) solution. He asked me to mention a few subjects about which I’ve most dramatically changed my mind over the life of this blog. Here are the ones which spring to mind.

Early on I argued very strongly for full preterist eschatology; in fact, I think the desire to explore and disuss that subject was a big reason for starting to blog in the first place. Now, though I still have certain sympathies with this view (especially its implications for the Christian life), most of my earlier articles were, as is typical for people who like to talk eschatology, waaaay too proof-text-oriented. Even though I was no inerrantist, I trusted any and every biblical text about eschatology (including some that weren’t about that but I thought they were) and believed that preterism tied them all together with no discord: I had to run roughshod over the meaning of texts to make it all into a neat little system, despite other contemporary posts in which I warned people about doing that very thing. Rather embarrassing, really. To top it all off, something so fundamental to the subject as my understanding of how biblical prophecy worked has changed unrecognizably — which leads me to a current problem:  I haven’t written much that delivers my nascent opinion on that topic. Note to self…

Related to this, one of the more subtle yet profound changes in my thinking: although I had long since come to rethink my opinions on the OT’s historiographical bona fides, I maintained the presumption that the NT was more often than not “innocent until proven guilty.” In essence, aside from some familiarity with the Synoptic Problem, I had little to no familiarity with contemporary NT historical criticism. So I am sure I quoted NT passages in all kinds of posts without enough of a recognition of those sorts of issues. The breakout Bibliology and hermeneutics series that got the attention of a large cross-section of the biblioblogosphere for the first time expressed ideas about the nature of the Bible that seemed radical at the time, even to me, but my attempts to read through it now are punctuated by frequent facepalms.

Two areas that went unexamined far too long in my journey were atonement theology and the nature of the work of Christ, which of course are now of massive interest to me. I simply do not know what sort of nonsense I might have unknowingly spouted before I began to explore those issues.

So what about you? In which areas have you changed the most dramatically?

I’m very much disturbed to see how often it is that Christians are so devoutly interested in upholding their scriptures that they don’t mind if either God or neighbor gets black and blue in the process.

The trick to being an evangelical these days seems to be the willingness to maintain that evil is not necessarily evil when it comes to God. Besmirching His character under the ironic cover of defending God, what passes for good Christian apologetics is actually much more of a defense of prized doctrines such as inerrancy or Augustinian/Reformed soteriology than the only thing worth defending, viz. God’s character. Defending both our carefully constructed doctrines and God’s character cannot always be done simultaneously because they are often at loggerheads (or else many popular apologists would be without a job). Slick, ear-tickling apologetics serve the much-in-demand function of reassuring people that the Bible is everything they think it needs to be in order for their faith to remain comfortable and unquestionable.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more successful result if someone were consciously trying to relieve Christians of their responsibility to grow up into mature men and women of God. Unlike what I wanted to believe long ago, I do not find it so easy to believe that the truth can be discerned by looking for “that than which nothing more counterintuitive can be conceived.” Now I am convinced that we need to be willing to question things that conflict with our conscience. In some cases, we may have to disagree with Scripture; in many others, we may find that we have simply been forcing something unnatural onto the text.

Regarding the atrocities of the Canaanite conquest: do you think it’s better to worship a God whose morality requires exceptions and redefinitions of key concepts than to live with the uncertainty that perhaps even the biblical authors were not fully aware of the depths of God’s grace? Are you content to excuse even the worst charges against God if by any means it vindicates your Bible and the comfortable theological confidence it gives you?

Regarding the destiny of unbelievers: are you willing to accept lying down the damnation of your unbelieving brothers and sisters, shrugging it off with a mere, “Like it or not, that’s what the Bible says”? Forgetting the examples of Moses and Paul, are you content to cling to that ill-founded defense in assurance that your own fate is secured? Search your heart: are you nursing a strong prejudice against the idea of inclusivistic or universalistic Christianity in order to ensure the relevance of your religion’s special claims? I beg you to reconsider your priorities. As with the brutalities described in the Old Testament, if the Bible truly does unequivocally aver that some souls can never be recovered (which I doubt), it should be the fervent hope of every lover of God that the Bible is wrong about it. Where is the passion for what is right and compassionate that motivated the characters of Job, Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and Paul to contend with their Maker over their understanding of His words? “The Bible says it” simply isn’t good enough.

I’ll be blunt: Holy Scripture or “historic, orthodox” doctrines notwithstanding, the only way God is worth worshiping is if He’s good and loving through and through. I will not subjugate love to scarcely warranted glory or petty retribution disguised as justice. My faith is in a God whose soul is more lovely than ours, who has a higher, more wholesome sense of love and justice than we are able to walk in as humans. My hope is built on nothing less than this!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 2: “Inerrantists Do Not Exist”

In an entertainingly rhetorical style, Stark spends the first part of this chapter defending its title. For the purposes of that argument, he takes the term inerrantist quite literally as “someone who believes that everything the Bible affirms is true, and good, and that it comes from the mind of a kind, loving, merciful, just God” (p. 15).

Stark touches on several biblical teachings that he claims even the most stalwart inerrantist would hold to be “figurative”. In producing examples, first he tantalizes his readers with two shocking assertions about what the Bible teaches that no inerrantist would affirm, namely that Yahweh was son of “the mountain god El Elyon” and that Yahweh at one time required child sacrifice, promising to back up those claims in chapters 4 and 5. Unfortunately (for inerrantists), the other examples he produces of biblical assertions that he says no inerrantist would accept are things that inerrantists quite commonly do accept, although (usually!) carefully obscured under some theological contrivance or other. Stark is no doubt aware of this, but the way he paints the picture is probably successful in alerting any discerning reader that such sleights of hand, and even the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy’s insistence upon a “grammatico-historical” hermeneutic, are attempts at “fixing” the plain readings and as such amount to a tacit acknowledgement of the tensions between various biblical portraits of God taken on their own merit.

As Stark himself says, no professing inerrantist believes in the texts of Scripture completely divorced from relevant issues of literature and historical context: his definition at the start of the passage was itself too “literal” and somewhat more confining than any inerrantist would affirm without the qualification that what the Bible says and what it affirms are two different things. One might ask, has Stark taken all this effort to beat down a straw man? The answer is no: rather, he is making the important point that we all interpret, all subjugate some Scriptures to our judgments about what God is like in other Scriptures.

He calls shenanigans on inerrantists’ claim that they are, consistently anyway, using a historical-grammatical hermeneutic. Despite the CSBI’s assertion that the historical church and even the biblical writers themselves predominantly applied such a hermeneutic to earlier Scriptures, Stark methodically dismantles this claim and shows how this idealized hermeneutic is a post-biblical and late developing concoction.

His next subsection is devoted to explaining “Ancient Jewish Hermeneutics”. The ideal hermeneutic for many inerrantists (non-charismatic ones, anyway) is that there is one primary meaning per Scripture, the one that God meant to convey through the author and is recoverable using the historical-grammatical hermeneutic — cross-checked against the prevailing systematic theology, of course; there may be many applications of a given passage, but one shouldn’t go off the deep end trying to find hidden meanings. Yet Stark contends that this latter was precisely the hermeneutic of choice for the biblical writers:

Interpretation was not a careful process of historical-grammatical exegesis, but an inspired identification of a “hidden meaning” in the text with a present-day reality or concern. (p. 20)

A helpful discursus follows this describing the author of Daniel’s re-appropriation of Jeremiah’s prophecy of seventy weeks in order to address the concerns of Judah in the late second century BCE. Stark uses this as an example of how biblical writers used earlier scriptures as an inspiration, completely revising the original authorial intent (in this case, Jeremiah’s) to inspire hope for people in his own time. Also useful is his explanation of vaticinium ex eventu prophecies: an claim about the spiritual significance of historical events written as though occurring before and foretelling those events.

From there Stark describes a hermeneutic technique known as pesher, a direct descendant of scriptural interpretations seen in the book of Daniel that was championed by certain apocalyptic sects such as the Qumran community beginning several decades before Jesus’ time. From there he points out several parallels between pesher and the treatment of the OT by NT writers, although he is careful not to go overboard in equating them (p. 26-27). The first similarity is in the appropriation of earlier prophecies as being truly fulfilled in an event of eschatological significance. Specifically, he describes the difficulties of applying historical-grammatical exegesis to Isaiah’s prophecy of an almah ‘young woman’ giving birth to a child and coming up with the Virgin Mary and Jesus as that prophecy’s fulfillment: he shows why this can only be so if one departs from the “single, fixed” contextual meaning of Scripture mandated by the CSBI.

What Matthew is doing is essentially what the Qumran interpreters did with the prophets. He is “discovering” the second, eschatological meaning of the text by means of “inspired interpretation.” Like the Qumran community, the Matthean community is not interested in the text for its historical meaning; they are only interested in using the text to elucidate their own present-day experiences and to reinforce their sense of identity. (p. 29)

According to Stark, but with less discussion, such eschatological revitalization of unrelated Scriptures was “especially” true of Paul (p. 30). This hermeneutic strikes me as similar to the interpretive practice of so many charismatic Christians today, as well as a fair number of more mainstream evangelicals who accept the meaning of Jesus’ eschatological prophecies as referring to the events of AD 70 but have applied those prophecies to a yet future, ultimate fulfillment in a way that would have been novel to the NT writers themselves. At this point in the book, Stark himself takes no position on the legitimacy of such ex eventu interpretations, but we are left to infer that, despite its pedigree, it is dubious and less preferable than a truly historical-grammatical approach.

Next he goes about debunking the CSBI’s implication that historical-grammatical exegesis has been the norm throughout church history. The Jewish Alexandrian school of interpretation typified by Philo and the impact of their allegorical readings of Scripture attempted to make sense of the OT’s conquest passages by denying their historicity as such in a way that would be wholly unacceptable to the CSBI signers. There was another response to God’s alleged involvement in the cruelty of the conquest narratives: the response of Marcion, who took the historicity of the conquest narratives seriously but denied the Christian God’s involvement. With a bit of a rhetorical flourish, undercutting the oft-leveled charge of Marcionism upon anyone who like Stark denies the historicity of the OT conquest narratives, he instead notes the similarity of insisting upon trusting a “literal” historiographical reading of the OT as advocated by both Marion and adherents of the CSBI. Of course, neither the allegorical nor Marcionite readings are truly “inerrantist” (no such thing, remember?), but his point, I think, stands. He rounds out the discussion of patristic non-CSBI-ism with a look at Gregory of Nyssa’s allegorical interpretations and the outright rejection of the “single, fixed” interpretation of Scripture by even the most “mainstream” Church Father, Augustine.

Stark puts the bead on the self-contradictory nature of hermeneutics within the CSBI. He discusses some examples of the common case in which the historical-grammatical meaning of a text is arbitrarily subjugated (although presented alongside as peer) to the so-called analogia fidei (‘analogy of faith’) as regards interpretation, i.e., the principle that “Scripture interprets Scripture”. This latter is a quite natural extension of inerrancy (since no two passages can contradict), so it gets used as a blunt object to hammer out passages that would otherwise conflict when all are interpreted based upon a strict historical-grammatical basis. He also cites inerrantists’ tendency to discard an unsatisfactory historical-grammatical reading even when its message would be bolstered by letting other scriptures “interpret” it, if by chance the resultant teaching would be deemed erroneous.

Finally, almost in passing, he defends the academic discipline of biblical criticism from the inerrantists’ charge of a predisposition to deny and discredit “the truths of the Bible.” This is the locus of my only appreciable misgivings in this chapter. Is the academic community really quite as altruistic and trustworthy as he implies? While I recognize that there are many, many involved with biblical studies who point out errors and contradictions in Scripture simply as the most honest and reverent way they know of treating the Bible, I am afraid that he paints a rather rosier than realistic picture of the motivations of scholars in general. A scholar has a huge incentive to creatively and convincingly debunk previously accepted interpretations. As part of the academic process (which I uphold), one’s name is likelier to go up in lights if s/he shatters rather than bolsters a prevailing understanding. Most of us could name more than one famous biblical critic whose personal stake in the matter appears to lean more on the side of vendetta than scientific truth per se.

I’m not really criticizing this, an inevitable, state of affairs; even a dubious motivation for acquiring evidence does not disqualify that evidence. My concern is that reassuring inerrantists that we’re not trying to pull the Bible apart bit by bit is actually misleading, if not somewhat disingenuous. Of course we are, and of course we should – that’s how you study something thoroughly! But we should be honest about the fact that there will be plenty of people whose motivations for pulling Scripture to pieces will not be as pure and clinical as others’, motivations such as a desire for peer recognition or distaste for fundamentalists. This cannot be avoided — a thoroughgoing empiricist has yet to be born – but as in the science debate, the possibility of error should be acknowledged and the occasions of the discrediting of the reckless emphasized. Even biblical critics have human faces. And as with the authors of Scripture, that’s ok.

One of the things you have to get used to when studying another language academically is the sometimes bewildering number of modifiers placed on nominal cases, which themselves may be overwhelming in their own right. Not only must you learn to distinguish the accusative from the dative, and the dative from the genitive (etc.), but then you have to grapple with things like a dative of means as opposed to a dative of manner. I think my all-time favorite is genitive of time within which.

Initially I questioned if some of these categories weren’t just being made up for the novelty of it or, since I was studying NT Greek at a conservative Christian college, because some exegetes with a mystical bibliology were going overboard trying to milk every last drop of meaning from a God-breathed text.

I was wrong, and moreover regarding the latter conjecture, I would that every person trying to milk every last drop of meaning from the Bible were so properly thorough in their linguistic analysis, rather than utilizing the type of “exegesis” that consists of throwing a verse against the wall and seeing what sticks.  By no means am I saying that overwrought dissection isn’t possible, but as I learned more about how language works, I began to appreciate its complexity and have consequently concluded that we do indeed usually need such categories to properly describe what’s being said.

But anyway, I was reminded of the usefulness of these categories recently as I came across this statement by Jesus in Mat 5.12:

χαίρετε καὶ ἀγαλλιᾶσθε, ὅτι ὁ μισθὸς ὑμῶν πολὺς ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς·

Rejoice and be glad, because your compensation will be ample among the heavens.

Now, it is true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and there is a chance that one could make the argument that the following observation is an illustration of just that!

The thing I wanted to point out was that “compensation” is singular but “your” is plural. So it appears he’s talking about a single compensation for multiple people. Most translators would note the possibility that the possessive pronoun is distributive (there’s one of those fancy categories). In other words, is Jesus saying, “You guys are going to share in something great” (the literal reading) or ”You will each find your (individual) compensation to be ample” (a distributive relationship between the possessive pronoun and the object)? Without the very real category of distributive, someone taking a mechanically literalistic reading might conclude that there is one collective reward. But if the possessive is distributive, things make more sense according to our own way of understanding how wages are supposed to work. The distributive reading is indeed the conventional reading, and it makes sense; there do seem to be cases in which the object is clearly not shared as a collective heap but must rather be conceived of as parceled out among the possessors.

This might be one of those cases; surely each persecuted individual deserves his own share. Right? But wait: are we justified in choosing the reading that makes the most sense to us without verifying that we’re not reading our own cultural views back into the text? Scholars commonly remind us that the people of Palestine, as those in the East reportedly do even now, thought much more corporately than individualistically, the latter outlook being commonly claimed as an heirloom of Greek thought that only later influenced Christianity. When we blindly assume that, for instance, the OT prophets were making individualized promises to each of us (Jer 29.11 comes to mind), we run the great risk of personalizing more than we were ever intended to. Matthew was certainly the Gospel the least influenced by Hellenism and the most reflective of Hebraic modes of thought and expression. (And if Goodacre et al. are correct, Luke’s version in chapter 6 that has this exact phrase is borrowed directly from Matthew, not Q…)

Honestly, on this one, I’m not sure. For one thing, wages (a possible translation for μισθὸς) were, then as now, typically given to individuals. And there’s something to be said for the distributive sense when considering the adjective πολὺς ‘much, many, great, plentiful’ with the singular noun. But is it at least possible that Jesus wasn’t promising everyone “wages”, or that they would have their own personal pan pizza, but that he’d deliver a large sheet pizza for us to share? The Sheep and the Goats judgment later in Matthew 25 is certainly pictured as an en masse affair.

Oh, there’s certainly a sense in which this is an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question (what’s it matter so long as we get what’s coming to us?), but I’d still like to know what you think. Would a “collective reward” picture have any interesting implications or advantages over the more typical “individual reward/wage” view?

I embedded a video at the bottom so that you can hear this TIL while you read it.

All This Time

written and recorded by Sting on The Soul Cages

I looked out across the river today
I saw a city in the fog and an old church tower where the seagulls play
I saw the sad shire horses walking home in the sodium light
Two priests on the ferry, October geese on a cold winter’s night

All this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea

Two priests came round our house tonight
One young, one old, to offer prayers for the dying to serve the final rites
One to learn, one to teach which way the cold wind blows
Fussing and flapping in priestly black like a murder of crows

All this time, the river flowed
Endlessly to the sea
If I had my way, I’d take a boat from the river
And I’d bury the old man,
I’d bury him at sea

Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth
Better to be poor than a fat man in the eye of a needle
As these words were spoken, I swear I hear the old man laughing
“What good is a used up world and how could it be worth having?”

All this time the river flowed
Endlessly like a silent tear
All this time the river flowed
Father, if Jesus exists
Then how come he never lived here?

Teachers told us, the Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple in a edge-of-the-empire garrison town
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods but the stone gods did not make a sound
And their empire crumbled, ’til all that was left were the stones the workmen found

All this time the river flowed
In the falling light of a northern sun
If I had my way, I’d take a boat from the river
Men go crazy in congregations
They only get better one by one

One by one…

Hard link: http://www.youtube.com/v/OcXmO-CkxKg
(Please note that the actual studio video for this song is dated, lame, and distracting, so I chose this one instead.)

These are some of my favorite lyrics, but they certainly are haunting! Sting presents a valid critique, but I consider it more of a warning than an inescapable fate.

Now what do you think?