Undeception

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While studying NT Greek in undergrad, I became interested in linguistics. I gradually became alarmed as I discovered that key insights into human language made by linguists were hardly ever taken into account among scholars intending to interpret the Bible from the original languages. Greek and Hebrew are treated by too many exegetes as special codes more than as living, changing, and internally diverse human languages.

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Over the last couple of days, Joseph Kelly and John Hobbins had a brief blogversation about what ḥesed means in the Hebrew Bible. These two guys are waaaaaaaay out of my league on this sort of discussion, and to my knowledge do not fall prey to the above mentioned shortcomings of biblical scholars, but reading Joseph’s last post prompted these thoughts.

Just as an outside observer, it appears that what we have here may be a result of treating semantics on a synchronic basis rather than reconstructing possible diachronic effects — not to mention the possible effect of synchronic language variation. That is, I think it’s clear that ḥesed means something very much like ‘loyalty’ in certain passages as Joseph suggests, ‘justice’ in others, and very much like ‘random acts of kindness’ in others (e.g. Ruth). As a linguist looking at this broad usage, I think we’re seeing the concept being used differently in different communities, probably living at different periods in history.

I admit that I’m no expert in OT chronology, and I have by no means done a study on every instance of this word. But I’ll offer one highly conjectural sketch of what the evolution of the word could have looked like:

It appears as though the word originally meant something akin to ‘obligated fairness’ and gradually evolved into more of a bland sense of ‘favor’. Psalms presents an early meaning, namely ‘justice, fairness’; at a later period (Exodus, 2 Samuel, etc.), Israel’s conviction of God’s favor for their community may have helped broaden and even dilute the concept to mean ‘loyalty, faithfulness’, perhaps further weakened toward ‘favor, goodness’ (essentially, “YHWH does right by us”); Ruth, typically dated in the Hellenistic period, might be a snapshot of the word at a late period in which the meaning of ‘goodness, favor’ has remained, the semantics of obligation possibly having dropped out over time (although I would also question ruling out a personal sense of obligation in Ruth’s faithfulness to Naomi).

I have focused here on possible diachronic reasons for this word’s varied usage rather than possible variation effects from different, synchronically coexisting theological or geographical communities. And as I said, this is nothing more than an armchair analysis. But this sort of variation in meaning between texts is absolutely the kind of thing that we must expect in our linguistic excavations in the Bible, and it’s also the kind of thing that biblical scholars don’t pay enough attention to. They often end up inflating words with all kinds of semantic baggage in ways akin to the Amplified Bible.

Lord knows I’m not accusing either the linguistically astute John Hobbins or Joseph Kelly of this, but I did think this particular discussion might benefit from those considerations in ways I hadn’t seen offered so far.

Parchment and Pen has a post up that seeks to classify  the different Christian views on origins. C. Michael Patton is usually pretty good at describing different points of view sympathetically, and things were going along pretty uncontroversially as he described different types of special creation, that is, views of creation that envisage miraculous intervention of one sort or another. Then he gets to “Deistic Evolution”, whose advocates, he asserts…

Believe, as Darwinian Evolutionists, that God created the universe over billions of years, using naturalistic evolutionary processes to create humanity without intervention.

Wait…that sounds a lot like “theistic evolution” (or  ”evolutionary creation”), doesn’t it?

I call this ”deistic evolution” due to the “hands-off” approach God takes to the development of man in the evolutionary process. Darwinian evolution, through the process of natural selection, is accepted. While there is across the board agreement that God did not/does not intervene in the process of evolution, DEers are divided as to whether God directly caused the first life to begin or whether he let life come into being naturalistically (abiogenisis).

Among those he describes as “Deistic Evolutionists” who apparently believe that God was “hands off” in creation, he cites Pete Enns, who just happens to be a Reformed Christian who has recently posted part 13 of a series that outlines the relationship between evolution and God’s sovereignty from a Calvinistic perspective. For any Calvinist, the notion that God would be laissez faire about such a thing as the creation of the universe is unthinkable; deism is a four-letter word among the Reformed. Patton, a Calvinist, knows this, which I take to be an obvious backhand. It’s not as though that were the only adjective he could possibly find (I would argue that no adjective is needed for “evolutionist”), and that particularly adjective is laden with a view of God’s nature that is eschewed by most Christians, including most who accept the findings of mainstream science. I must say that this choice was unbecoming of him and his reputation as a straight-shooter.

The fact is, God can be at work in and through creation whether or not He feels the need to tweak this or that during its development. My favorite analogy is of a competent software engineer who is able to develop a program that, once executed, will perform her desired goals without requiring her intermittent input. She is no less responsible or “hands on” about how it performs, since she wrote every piece of code responsible for how it operates; in fact, the more of an expert she is, the less of her interference in its execution is necessary. This analogy is of course limited, and I’ve heard others who modified it to say that God in a sense wrote Himself into the code (which I quite like the sound of, even if I don’t fully understand all of its implications).

The last category in Patton’s list is Intelligent Design (ID). He notes that one can be both an ID advocate and a special creationist of any sort: it simply requires acknowledging that the possible influence of miracles must not be excluded from one’s laboratory research. What’s interesting here is that he subcategorizes “Deistic Evolution” and evolution-friendly Intelligent Design alike under a category called “Theistic Evolution” (TE)! Although most ID advocates (at higher levels, not so much in churches) acknowledge significant evolutionary activity, sometimes including universal common descent, the views of TE and ID have usually been placed in contradistinction to one another.

As I said above, I don’t think accepters of mainstream science need a special label, whether they’re believers or not. But for the purposes of lists like this in which the theological component is a criterion for classification, I usually prefer “theistic evolutionist” – with no ID, thankyouverymuch – (not so keen on “evolutionary creationist”).

I would suggest, however, that as long as we’re classifying these origins positions by theological commitment, perhaps my own position is best characterized not specifically by the origins component, but by the hermeneutical component responsible for it. My hermeneutic is characterized by a firm conviction that the Bible is first and foremost a literary work and a product of the times in which its constituent content was written. Further, I am convinced that an examination of the genre of early Genesis will confirm it as a work of ANE literature and that consequently we need bring no expectations of a theological nature to the table when asking questions about origins. Almost incidentally, since I do not expect Genesis to answer the question of how the heavens and the earth and all that are in them originated (its authors seemed to be more interested in why), I look to mainstream science to answer that question — as most Christians do unquestioningly for questions of weather, embryology, etc. regardless of their view on origins. Perhaps this doesn’t give me a neat, tidy two-word descriptor, unless you like (as I confess I do) a term I coined a few years back: literary-genericist.

I would be remiss in not pointing out and appreciating Patton’s fair-minded ecumenicism on the origins issue:

I believe that one can be a legitimate Christian and hold to any one of these views….While I believe that this is an issue that we should continue to discuss with excitement and hope, this is not an issue, in my opinion, that should fracture Christian fellowship.

Mark Goodacre’s latest NT Pod discusses the high concentration of “according to the Scriptures” tags in the Gospels’ Passion narratives and asks whether the Passion narratives are prophecies historicized (as argued by Crossan) or tradition scripturalized. The specific context of his discussion is the Passion narratives, but the principle that will explain it goes for all the Gospel material that cites details of Jesus’ life as prophetic fulfillments.

In the first view, the Scriptures were mined for information about what should have been true about the Messiah, prophecies the NT authors thought would yield some information to fill in their hazy knowledge of the historical details about Jesus. One of the problems with this sort of thinking is that it seems to lean heavily on the assumption that the passages now typically viewed by Christians as messianic had been conceived of as such before the Gospels were written. Easily the weakest evidence for Jesus’ importance presented by Lee Strobel in his Case for Christ material is the claim that Jesus bafflingly fulfilled four dozen OT prophecies, all centuries after the fact. What we can’t forget (and Strobel’s “experts” apparently have) is that we have very little evidence that many of those so-called “messianic prophecies” were considered messianic before the authors of the Gospels cited them as “fulfilled” in Jesus.

I have little doubt that there are instances of the historicization of prophecy in the Gospels, but the idea that all the details of the Passion narratives were extracted by poring over the OT is not particularly compelling. In the podcast, Goodacre points out some good reasons that the model falls short and ends up arguing for something that I agree is more likely: that early believers found in the details of the Passion, which they knew from their traditions, parallels to the Old Testament that were so striking that they sounded like they might have been prophecies. These early believers, particularly the Jewish ones, were so steeped both in Scripture and in their conviction of Jesus’ importance that they looked at Jesus and saw the OT made flesh and walking among them. They also needed an explanation as to how both their cherished Scriptures could be reconciled with this new figure, and so they essentially padded Jesus’ messianic credentials by revising a job description tailor-made around the details they knew of Jesus. They obviously already thought of him as messianic or otherwise eschatologically important (or else why bother?), so they looked to their Scriptures and, using the fluid interpretive methods of the day, found lots of material that buttressed their beliefs.

A very similar way of reading the Bible is amazingly popular even among modern Christians. It’s behind the christological, often called christocentric, readings of the OT, which in practice come off as the reverse process: we see Jesus in the OT more than we see the OT in Jesus because we’re not as steeped in the OT and do not feel the same need they did to justify their new beliefs at the expense of their Scripture’s sole authority. Nowadays we take New Testament theology as our authority and think we have to find reasons to justify keeping the OT around. So when we see a fourth person in the fire with the three Hebrew children, it’s Jesus; when we read of the ram in the thicket, it’s Jesus. And trying to prove a reading of one passage by citing another passage in a completely different biblical context is not at all unlike the NT authors’ attempts to show that their old authority, the Tanakh, affirmed their shift of allegiance toward a new authority by anticipating him through prophecy.

Preachers and inspirational/devotional writers make whole bales of hay out of this sort of typology and similarly anachronistic readings of the OT: our congregations are led to believe that there is christological, or at very least explicitly Christian, significance to be found in seemingly every nook and cranny of the OT. If the “tradition scripturalized” position is correct, this has a very good pedigree in Christian belief. But of course, a parallel’s existence doesn’t at all imply its divine intentionality. We should keep around the Old Testament not because of an erroneous assumption that it is crypto-Christian, but precisely because it’s a testimony of what faith in God looked like before Christ. Reading the Old Testament makes me glad I’m a Christian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even if the book of Jonah didn’t feature the famous big fish, it wouldn’t take much serious study before you realized that it’s not an historical account. Doug Chaplin cites fourteen facts about the book of Jonah that taken together should really point any thoughtful reader aware of the basics of how literature works away from interpreting the book as historical narrative. The book of Jonah is a great example of how reading Scripture literalistically instead of as literature (“literally”) doesn’t do the text justice.

Nowadays, Jonah is on my short list of favorite books in the entire Bible. But it wasn’t until I realized it wasn’t historical that I began to appreciate it or understand its message and ingenious artistry. I find it highly ironic that once we reject the modernist premium on the historicity of stories, we find that among the Bible’s literary pieces, Jonah is surely among the most similar to modern literary sensibilities in its use of literary styles: as far as I know, its employment of irony and comic exaggeration is almost peerless in ANE literature (although you’ll find good doses of those features in contemporaneous Greco-Roman literature). Its messages of concern for others not like ourselves, the heavy responsibility of being among God’s elect, and the misguidedness of ethnocentrism are among the most “Christian” in the Old Testament.

Yes, those particular lessons could perhaps be drawn out by anyone (mis)taking Jonah as historical narrative. But one other astounding aspect of the book that is not so obvious to an inerrantist expecting accurate history everywhere is the intensely subversive and satirical backbone of the book. As I explained before, Thom Stark points out the sharp contrast between the perspective behind Deuteronomy 20.16-19, in which Yahweh prohibits destroying trees amidst the merciless destruction reserved for untold numbers of humans, and Yahweh’s concluding words in Jonah 4.10-11:

You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?

“And also many animals”! The last words of the book! Yet another example of the author’s hilarious sarcasm and sense of irony, the same sense of irony that, as Chaplin notes, depicts Nineveh repenting immediately despite Jonah conveniently neglecting to mention repentance as an option, and that shows Jonah’s displeasure at Nineveh’s repenting in the shadow of adversity — in the same way he had just finished doing (only more willingly than he had done so)! And on and on. This book is a riot — and it’s beautiful. I think I’d actually be disappointed to discover that it actually happened: I appreciate it all the more for seeing its author’s storytelling skills.

If you truly love the Bible and not merely whatever teachings you have been told are within it, then for heaven’s sake, read each selection on its own terms, even when it means entertaining the possibility that those terms in one author might come into conflict with others elsewhere, and even when it means admitting that a juicy miraculous story that is fun to believe really happened never actually did. Loving the Bible means much the same thing as loving other people: enjoying it for what it is, accepting what is imperfect but can’t be changed, and avoiding the temptation to twist it into the shape of our expectations for it.