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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All flaws duly acknowledged, I still loves me some C.S. Lewis. He is the reason I am where I am today (whether that’s credit or blame is up to you to decide, of course!). His thoughts here have been articulated time and again on my blog in my words, but I am glad to present them here in Lewis’s well-spun words.

Dear Mr. Beversluis,

Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.

To this some will reply ‘ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognize good when we see it.’ But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: ‘Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?’ — ‘What fault hath my people found in me?’ And so on. Socrates’ answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham’s, Paley’s) leads to an absurdity. If ‘good’ means ‘what God wills’ then to say ‘God is good’ can mean only ‘God wills what he wills.’ Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.

But of course having said all this, we must apply it with fear and trembling. Some things which seem to us bad may be good. But we must not consult our consciences by trying to feel a thing good when it seems to us totally evil. We can only pray that if there is an invisible goodness hidden in such things, God, in His own good time will enable us to see it. If we need to. For perhaps sometimes God’s answer might be ‘What is that to thee?’ The passage may not be ‘addressed to our (your or my) condition’ at all.

I think we are v. much in agreement, aren’t we?

Yours sincerely, C. S. Lewis

Big thanks to Alex Smith at the Evangelical Universalist message board for this gem (and David Baldwin for tipping me off).

No one disputes the observation that most conservative American Christians are both inerrantists and believers in constitutional “strict constructionism”, i.e. the idea that if a given power was not enumerated or otherwise granted by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, it’s out of bounds for the U.S. Federal government. The clever parallel between the errors of inerrantism and constitutionalism seems to have first surfaced in the biblioblogosphere a couple of years ago and made ripples throughout many of the sites that I usually enjoy for their theologically unconservative Christian views. I’ve seen the comparison rediscovered and reasserted several times since, and it’s grated on my nerves long enough to get me to write about it.

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The first thing to point out is that believing that we should follow the Constitution as much as possible is not predicated on the belief that the Constitution is even approximately inerrant. What would it even mean to say the Constitution is “inerrant”, anyway? Most of the people who maintain that the Bible is inerrant mean primarily that the Bible does not err in matters of science, history, theology, and any presentations of facts. Now, can any of these expectations about the Bible be made to apply to the U.S. Constitution? Have you ever seen anyone try?

Taken that way, the inerrancy/constitutionalism argument is a sloppy criticism indeed, but the critics’ actual objection is not really as unreasonable as that. What they instead mean to imply is that neither the Bible nor the Constitution are infallible in their respective areas, and that inerrantists and constitutionalists believe against all the evidence that they are. The only thing that keeps this from being a completely laughable straw man is that there are indeed some constitutionalists, who indeed generally also happen to be inerrantist Christians, who talk as though the Constitution could not be improved upon in any way. There are certainly no fewer ignorant constitutionalists than there are among most political viewpoints, but even these would hardly say that criticism of the Constitution is out of bounds because of some mystical infallibility: rather, they’d say that criticism of the Constitution is automatically wrong-headed because the document was based on a sound political philosophy that they would be able to articulate even if the Constitution had never been written.

See, sniggering insinuations that constitutionalists believe the Constitution or its authors were endowed with something akin to divine inspiration is closely analogous to the preposterous idea that agreeing wholeheartedly with Why Evolution Is True is tantamount to believing in Jerry Coyne’s divine inspiration, when all it really takes is a decent, informed understanding of evolution to see that anyone who disagreed with the book’s broader points would be running afoul the scientific consensus undergirding the book. Many constitutionalists support adherence to the Constitution because they happen to think the principles are sound. Mocking the Constitution doesn’t knock down the political philosophy behind the Constitution, any more than refuting inerrancy logically refutes faith in God, of which the Bible is a fallible ancient expression. That actually leads me to perhaps the widest gulf between inerrancy and constitutionalism.

The constitutionalist’s “faith” in the Constitution is no more unreasonable than expecting any other law should be upheld or changed rather than merely ignored. Good laws, such as those against murder or theft, are meant to be universally applied. We suffer no loopholes or reading between the lines on those. Then there are tax codes: liberals, the chief skeptics in regard to constitutionalism, are the most likely to insist that every single person eligible to be taxed be required to contribute their fair share, and campaign to modify or repeal laws that don’t tax certain brackets in the proportion they see fit. The whole idea behind laws is that they do not suffer exceptions lightly: every possible exception must be codified in the wording, and every loophole must be closed or it will be exploited and the intent of the law thereby thwarted. If you understand this, you understand constitutionalism.

In fact, it’s not constitutionalists who make the U.S. Constitution out to be some sort of mystical exception: that’s actually done by those who have found it expedient to pretend that it, unlike every other “legal and binding” writ in jurisprudence, is a “living document” that is actually meant to be manipulated, conveniently misconstrued, and generally ignored.

And before you remind everyone, I am aware that Congress had compromised on these ideals before the first president’s first term was complete. This is a testament to the inadequacy of the Constitution as framed, and to the predilection of those in power for finding shortcuts to more power; but here again, this weakness doesn’t mean that we can allow politicians to proceed in running roughshod over “the supreme law of the land.” It means we need to patch up the holes a lot better. Here’s the thing: the Constitution never considers itself immutable, and neither do those who support it. But as with other imperfect or bad laws, you don’t ignore the flaws or come up with phony alternative interpretations of its meanings, like apologists who make the objectionable parts of the Bible into a holy allegory: you either amend it or you repeal it. If you think the Constitution should authorize the federal government to ensure that healthcare be free, or that abortions be illegal in all fifty states – whatever it is – you don’t corrupt the meaning of definite, established phrases in the Constitution to lend an air of legitimacy; you augment the powers of the federal government through the amendment process. Just as with any other law, exceptionlessness is a protection against the partiality and whims of demagoguery, the runaway ambitions of the political class, and power brokers who try to buy the federal government’s favor. To simply ignore the supreme law of the land when convenient is by definition lawlessness — and try to find a liberal who believes that anarchy is a good thing! Not having the powers of the federal government constrained by anything other than politicians’ imaginations is a sure way to maintain an oligarchy, which is essentially what we have now.

Please don’t dismiss me as a blind constitutionalist or a political conservative. I am neither. I used to have a higher opinion of the Constitution than I do now. I was taught by political and religious conservatives that although it’s not perfect, it’s the best thing free people have come up with in quite a long time, and maybe ever. I now think that’s an overstatement,  and I can point out several flaws without even trying very hard. Maybe the Constitution is entirely inadequate and awful, that the form of government it was intended to establish and perpetuate is useless for today’s world. Maybe what we need is more centralization of power rather than the checks and balances on national powers to preserve local, subsidiarian governments as intended by the Constitutional Convention. Maybe so. We can talk about that. But please don’t pretend that demanding that the federal government take no more power for itself than was set aside for it by the law written to establish it is somehow completely looney and absolutely necessary for reasonable people to dismiss. And still more, be intellectually honest enough to admit that insisting on laws having definite meaning that should not be ignored by the whims of the current majority is in any way related to believing that the Bible contains no errors.

The simultaneous popularity of inerrancy and strict constructionism among conservative Americans is mostly coincidental, with the exception that conservatives think that both ideas are worth conserving. Then again, given that there are plenty of things that even liberals want to conserve, that exception does not make the comparison of constitutionalism and inerrantism useful for anything but a cheap shot.

This last week’s episode of the Unbelievable? radio show was a rerun, but a good one to listen to (if you’re patient, that is). It was a conversation between apologist Jay Smith and atheist Stephen Pilcher concerning the so-called “Easter Challenge“: can you weave together all the NT accounts of that seminal event in Christian theology, the Resurrection?

The show goes as might be expected. Naturally, the apologist thinks he can meet the challenge. And so he tries, pulling together all the disparate accounts with different eyewitnesses, sequences of events, and other information and weaving them into a harmonized tapestry (compliments of Andy Bannister). The atheist isn’t buying it. The apologist hears all of the atheists’ objections, but he doesn’t buy them, either, because he has an explanation that can support his presupposition of the NT’s complete correspondence with actual history. On the whole it reminds me of another creative “enterprise” of affirming and concocting continuity.

Can Star Trek’s continuity over several series and movies be resolved? Despite certain hiccups (the Klingons’ foreheads, anyone?!), a devout Trekkie will tell you, “Sure, if you try hard enough.” The originators of new content were often simply not familiar enough with all the other existing content to produce a seamless narrative and probably nearly as often were aware but intentionally recast certain plot points or character details for the purposes of their current script. Convincing resolutions of continuity errors are debated among the fans, so it was welcome news when ENT finally explained why Klingons’ appearance changed between TOS and TMP. But unlike apologists, Star Trek fans realize that they’re only interested in the effort of clearing up continuity errors in order to preserve an ideal of continuity that was simply not shared by their sources (especially Gene Roddenberry). They were all functioning from within varying perspectives and emphases, and so their material differed.

Smith readily acknowledges that each NT author also had different perspectives and emphases: he clings to this, in fact, since that alone begins to account for the very different ways the Resurrection accounts are presented. But different emphases and perspectives are not enough to explain why the authors of the accounts selected testimony with so many surface incongruities with one another. As is commonly pointed out, for any given complex of confluent events such as those leading up to and following a car wreck, four eyewitnesses will most often have some conflicting testimony, and while those differences can often be explained (bad eyesight, fear of implicating themselves, etc.), they can’t always be believably explained away to be completely reconciled as independent, factual observations. Nor does anyone expect them to be, unless requirements of unfailing factual accuracy are applied ex post facto.

Ok, so the various authors were drawing on different sources, viewing them from different angles. But can we credibly account for the reasons the authors drew on those different sources, especially when they seemed to contradict one another? Yes, each author wrote for his own purpose and to his own audience, but if Luke’s explicitly stated purpose was to consult the various sources and compile them into an “orderly account”, this was his opportunity to do so for a subject of peak importance. Even if he did what he could with what he had available, it’s a shame indeed that the Holy Spirit didn’t inspire him to undertake what Andy Bannister would some two thousand years later!

Granted, if the events took place precisely as Jay Smith thinks they must have, the details could indeed be pulled apart and divvied up over the different NT authors to give us exactly what we have. And I’d like to go further and state that some of the discrepancies can indeed be plausibly accounted for or dismissed. For instance, Smith points out the weak objection that there are “men” at the tomb in Luke’s account vs. “angels” in Matthew’s: in the first century, angels were not pictured with wings, and so may not have been readily distinguishable from humans (cf. Heb 13.2). We can indeed get nit-picky to the point of nonsense if we’re consciously trying to pull apart a story (just ask a defense attorney), and many critics do. Still, how plausible is the intricate aggregation of all the rationalizations required to order to present a single unified account?

As with Star Trek, given the conviction that it all must hang together, continuity can be achieved. Square pegs can be crammed into round holes. This is why it’s hard to dissuade someone from believing in inerrancy: humans are well-suited for coming up with explanations to fit their expectations, even if it requires “explaining away”.

While admitting their own presuppositions, Jay Smith and host Justin Brierley both contended that Pilcher came to the table with certain theological presuppositions of his own. While no doubt true, I think this is mostly irrelevant for Pilcher’s view, but it is telling on the part of Smith and Brierley. As a Christian who believes that in one way or another the Resurrection occurred, my baseline theological presuppositions do not differ so very radically from the Christians on the show. What puts me closer to Pilcher’s views than Smith’s on this issue is only a difference in theological presupposition insofar as the Smith’s theology is based upon certain expectations of Scripture that I do not share.

As Justin Brierley admitted, “We come [to the Bible] with an attitude of faith, and when we see things that are contradictions we will happily say ‘yes’ to something which helps us to reconcile them.” First, notice that their faith is in the Bible, or at best, in God’s intention to give us a crystallized piece of truth (which happens to be the Bible). And so they approach the Bible with a certain expectation that is to be defended at all costs, and consequently they’ll gladly accept anything that appears to help their case, cumbersome and implausible as it may be on its own merit. On the other hand, I come to the NT accounts with an expectation that they are a collection of ancient texts consisting of differing people’s takes on a bewildering event that certainly would have easily outlasted the memory of the events surrounding it. If anything, for me this aftershock haze of refracted recollection and attempted reconstruction, which was then visualized by the theological emphases of the different Gospel narratives’ craftsmen, actually serves the purpose of focusing the lens on the event in question: the Resurrection.

If we wake up one morning to find Reuters, the AP, the New York Times, Yomiuri Shimbun, and the Times of India all reporting on the same astoundingly surprising story, will we insist upon a complete harmonization of their accounts before believing the story that induced them all to publish? Will we demand that every single story each paper publishes in their respective issues be inerrant as a condition for believing the basic event they’re recounting? In the end we may not believe their story, but it won’t be because of such unreasonable expectations as those.

No, the first century accounts of the NT do not come close to matching the reporting standards of a modern newspaper — understood, acknowledged, undisputed. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Outside of a presupposition of an inerrant Bible, which I don’t at all share, why should we expect such a thing from Paul, Luke, and the other Evangelists? They wrote decades later than the events they describe, only marginally intending to solidify an already fuzzy remembrance of peripheral details, and they presented the events in ways that applied particular lessons tailored to their respective audiences.

The Easter Challenge, like so many other evangelistic atheist methods, is most successful at putting Christians on the defensive about something they really have no need to be defensive about. We don’t need inerrant, reconcilable Easter accounts in order to place hope in the Resurrection. Losing one’s faith in the Bible’s ability to perfectly convey certain facts does not require a loss of faith in the facts underlying their imperfect conveyance. It requires considerably less blind credulity on my part to believe in the event testified to in the various conflicting and competing Easter morning accounts than to bank my entire faith upon the faultless concord and historicity of those accounts. Sure, we can’t prove the Resurrection, given that the event is only recorded in a Bible that is neither inerrant nor completely consistent internally, but it’s easier to believe in that event for which no contrary evidence exists than to believe that the Bible is inerrant and completely consistent internally, a contention for which contrary evidence abounds and which requires…well, creative explanations to support it.

Luckily, Paul did not say that we had to feign or psyche ourselves into absolute certainty that God raised Jesus from the dead, or that the NT contains an inerrant account of it (what rum luck it would have been for anyone alive before the Inerrant and Completely Trustworthy Account was available!): he said that believing it in our hearts was sufficient. And that I do, continuity errors notwithstanding.

I just finally got around to reading the post from BioLogos from May 31, “BioLogos and the June 2011 ‘Christianity Today’ Cover Story“. Within it, president Darrel Falk makes note that they’ve had trouble identifying theologians who affirm both the historicity of Adam and Eve and evolution. While the scientific data cannot alone rule anything out, the stance that accepts God’s selecting one man and one woman out of an early population of Homo is something Falk flags as having had little serious theological effort placed into explaining it:

The “Federal Headship” model that accepts the scientific findings while at the same time holding to the historicity of a real first couple has not yet been carefully worked out by theologians. The reason that we haven’t had many articles of that sort is because we haven’t been able to identify theologians who are looking at the question from that perspective. In general, our experience has been that theologians are in one of two camps. Either they work within the framework of a non-historical Adam and Eve or they believe the scientific conclusions will eventually prove to be deeply flawed and humans were not created through an evolutionary process after all.

That divide is something I’ve certainly witnessed, and no doubt it’s used by the latter group to demonstrate the “slippery slope”. And in this case, I think they’re right: most who go all the way to say that so many aspects of Genesis 1 and 2 are not historical or literal have a hard time drawing the line at the historicity of the first pair. The divide comes over how we deal with the NT’s treatment of Adam, who Paul especially seems to use as a key figure in his theology (I would argue that Adam is not any more key to Paul than Melchizedek is to Hebrews, used typologically). In short, it’s not nearly as much about the historicity of Adam and Eve as it is the historicity of the Fall.

Although people like Tim Keller and Denis Alexander will continue to try arguing for a first pair of souled individuals, a position that was assumed by C. S. Lewis and has recently been affirmed by Vatican theologians, my guess is that the next generation of Christians who grow up accepting evolution as a “first language” will never seriously consider it, in the same way that teens growing up today rarely crack open their parents’ books on how to install software or run basic functions of Microsoft Office. Federal headship, like most other models of the Fall, may well be a moribund theological construct.

Falk urges “caution” with the federal headship view of the Fall because there are a number of theological questions that have yet to be teased out satisfactorily. Did God only impart His life-giving spirit to two of them, who promptly turned around and “fell” in a way we might have expected from the rest of their still-animal tribespeople? How did their divinely imparted souls that separated them from their peers and ancestors get passed on to their descendants? How did their fallenness get passed on?

Given questions like these and the available alternative of understanding that the “fallenness” of humanity and its solution in Christ don’t depend on an historical Fall from an historical pair, I’m fairly confident that a denial of the historicity of Adam and Eve will become the dominant paradigm within the next couple of decades.

This prediction will lead to the question, “But what about those who hang onto inerrancy? How will they simply reject the Bible’s teachings about Adam and Eve?” Well, for one thing, I think most Christians (and in honesty, people in general) tolerate enough cognitive dissonance to the effect that this will not invariably be noticed as a conflict with an assumption of evolution. Another factor is the attempt to salvage a semblance of inerrancy by arguing for figurative language and other literary devices to account for Paul’s treatment of Adam and Eve (this was the path I took several years ago). But even more so, I think that the inevitable acceptance of evolution by the younger generations will in fact pull a modified or abandonment inerrancy along with it. As Cliff Martin likes to point out, the Church will accept evolution; it must.

This is a companion piece to another post of mine, “We might not like it, but it’s in the Bible, so…”

Occasionally I see people back away from their theological hunches, or at least decide to remain agnostic about them, because try as they might they just can’t see “where the Bible teaches it.” The starting point for them is this: The Bible is our necessary, inviolable source for ascertaining truth about God. What it says, goes. Thank heavens we know exactly what it says! They call this a biblical faith.

My good friend Drew Smith stumbled across a post by Angela Shier-Jones at The Kneeler speaking about her philosophical faith, which resonated with me, especially given some recent conversations on this blog. This is almost precisely what I’ve been noticing about my own faith lately, with its roots in the Bible but its trunk and branches reaching and spreading into the air above it.

As a Christian who, although rejecting inerrancy, still loves and feeds on the Bible, I realize that above all it offers important glimpses into the mind of men grappling with the things of God. I value Scripture as I value all church tradition, because the Bible is simply the earliest instance of church tradition available, codified by later church tradition, and hardly less fallible. But for bringing us to meet God, the Bible is uncommonly valuable, so much so that I find it tragic that so many believers could have been led into the company of Jesus by the Bible and then found it necessary to throw out some of the insights gained by the illumination of the fire that he started, just because it wasn’t strictly “scriptural”, i.e. it didn’t sound enough like the glimpses of men of old that are recorded in Scripture. Those men may have written something deemed by later men to deserve inclusion in the Bible, and a few of them may have even known Jesus when he was here, but in their time they could not have benefited from the stream of understanding that has developed through the ages from the seed of truth they planted.

Moreover, as eloquently pointed out by Thom Stark, they themselves set the precedent for this dynamic wrestling with the problematic theologies of their contemporaries and forbears that occasionally shows through in entire books of the Bible: in Thom’s words, the Bible is an argument with itself. How can we simply trust that the arguments ever got settled within the canon we have? Who settled it? Where is their consensus ratified for our use? The closest thing we have, in my understanding, is that “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all,” and even that isn’t “proved” by Scripture. But the hope is sparked there, and in hope we go on to shine that light wherever something our God-seeking conscience considers darkness is imputed to God or His ways, even when that darkness is something one or more of the authors of Scripture believed.

Rather than a definitive end to theological arguments or clearly ringing pronouncement of unquestionable truths, the Bible instead sets a trajectory of understanding about God that does not land within its pages. Shier-Jones in her blog post put it this way (in the form of a prayer):

How sad that religion so often decries the great gift you give to us of collective intelligence, of the progress of knowledge and the slow but inexorable maturing of the mind of humanity. How pathetic when priests, the appointed guardians of the mysteries, perjure their calling by insisting that they already know what the truth is, that we need look no further, seek no harder. We can stop asking and stop knocking at your door because you have already said all you intend to say. The Bible says it all, and what it says is all that we need to know.

Thank you God – that you taught me better than to believe that!

The Bible is your word – but it is not your final word…

There is much in the Bible that does not teach, and even much which disallows, human evolution, which is hands-down the best explanation for the similarities and diversities in the biological forms on this planet. The same thing goes for universalism: only a few passages can be found to support it in Scripture, and there are certainly passages that contradict it, but at least in this case the germ of understanding about God and His nature that blossoms into and nourishes universalism is easily found within Scripture, and in certain places our glimpses into the heart of the Bible’s authors suggest that it had already begun to sprout there.

When I viewed Francis Chan’s recent video, I was annoyed by his suggestion that we should not try to understand God outside of strictly biblical considerations, since we are only like clay to the Potter: “Our only hope,” says Chan, “is that He would reveal to us what He is like, and then we can just repeat those things.” He goes on to show that he thinks God has done so, within the pages of Scripture alone. Rather than literally “only hope”, I suppose he meant, “only hope for knowing with certainty,” but the distinction between those two things are lost on most inerrantists, it seems. If that was our only hope, quite simply, we’d be SOL.

I initially decided I’d let the Apostle George respond to Chan, but a friend reading that post was not convinced. What makes us think, he wondered, that we can impose our ideals upon God? Although it may perhaps be an imposition upon God to say that He must be a certain way because we would like this or that to be the case, this is not the same as applying more factors than proof-texts to our understanding of who He is and what He is like, and weighing other interpretations of Him against those factors. Everyone applies their own reasoning and presuppositions when reading the Bible, of course, but most don’t acknowledge it, and will even condemn it when they see it in others. MacDonald’s insight was that we owe it to the one we worship to self-consciously apply the best of our experience and reason to understand Him, and not simply parrot the prevailing doctrines, even when gleaned from Scripture.

It’s the conscious application of this variety of factors that makes this approach more satisfactory than pretending we’re not “imposing” anything on God when we string bunches of scriptural testimony together, shrug our shoulders, and say, “Well, I guess that settles it; I guess acting monstrously can be just, and showing vindictive spite can be the reflex of love.” We can’t just point to this or that Scripture that describes God doing manifestly evil things like ordering the violent deaths of men, women, and children or (ostensibly) torturing people for eternity and let those instances predominate over our beliefs about what “goodness” means as it applies to God. We must steadfastly avoid placing every insight from nature or from philosophy under the subjection of our even more fallible patchwork quilt of sola scriptura theology, especially when the resultant position makes God out to be essentially unworshippable.

If God has indeed used Scripture to birth something real within our hearts and minds, let’s trust Him to bring us where it leads rather than cutting it down and using it as mulch for some doctrine of our own, based as it usually is in the often underdeveloped and immature understanding of those who went before us! I’m not advocating a “chronological snobbery” (Lewis’s phrase) that assumes everything before us was wrong and everything modern is right, but neither should we commit the opposite error of supposing that “greater things than these” can never be done by those who meet God for themselves. Surely an all-out trust in God as a fundamentally good person, as best we understand “good” with all the available data weighed judiciously, is preferable to letting slavish adherence to orthodoxy stand in for a faith that could mature both our souls and our understanding of God.