Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – Ia

    I wanted to follow up briefly on my first post on Misquoting Jesus to provide a quotation and make a couple more comments on inspiration. The quotation comes from page 13:

    It is a radical shift from reading the Bible as an inerrant blueprint for our faith, life, and future to seeing it as a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live. . . .

    This is certainly a shift that often occurs when someone with a very strict view of Biblical inspiration is confronted with the facts of Biblical history. But there is a huge amount of spin that is possible in circumstances like this. Discussions of Biblical inspiration, for various reasons, tend to be dominated by extremes. Either one can trust everything in the Bible, or one can trust nothing. Either it is without error on everything, or it has no valid information at all. I’m not accusing Bart Ehrman of taking such extreme views, though he has made a very radical shift in his own appreciation of the Bible.

    I could quite easily say that the Bible is “a very human book, with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live.” Yet at the same time, I regard the Bible as inspired. It seems to me that both fundamentalists and skeptics have a similar assumption about what a divinely inspired book must contain. Both agree that it must contain accurate information and precise instructions. The debate between them is over whether the Bible provides any such thing. But why should we assume that God wanted to provide us with that particular type of guide?

    Christians place strong emphasis on 1 Timothy 3:16 and “God-breathed (theopneustos).” In fact, in any discussion I’m involved with on Biblical inerrancy someone is sure to quote that text in support of the doctrine of inerrancy. Once they have quoted this verse, which they seem to think I will never have read, they look hopefully at me, assuming they have made their point. When I fail to see support for inerrancy in the text, I can see that they conclude that I must surely be a very perverse man. (In this paragraph I use the term “inerrancy” in the very loose form in which it is normally used. The Chicago Statement is generally a bit more nuanced.)

    But where is the definition of what happens to a speech, a text, or any form of message when it is breathed by God. A partial analogy might be found in Genesis 2:7, when God breathes the breath of life into the first human. The result was that the person became a living person, but Genesis 3 very quickly suggests that the man did not become inerrant.

    I tend to take my clue on this from he remainder of 2 Timothy 3:16, which tells us that the scripture is useful for training, rebuke, correcting faults, and training in righteousness. The Bible can be all of those things without also being inerrant. In fact, we regularly manage to live our lives and learn new things while using resources that are not totally without error.

    Of course a more nuanced view of inerrancy is normally included in doctrinal statements. That version applies only to the autographs. Ehrman mentions this issue a few times. The following question comes from page 11:

    Even so, what is one to make of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture?

    While I agree with Elgin Hushbeck that we truly have substantially recovered the original text of the New Testament, I think that Ehrman’s question is relevant. Why must the autographs be inerrant, if we do not possess them?

    Let me illustrate. (I discuss this in greater detail in the tract What is the Word of God?.) God speaks to a prophet, the prophet verbalizes the message, a scribe copies the message at the prophet’s dictation, then other scribes copy that. Not all of these steps occur every time, but that is a good general view. Let’s assume that God speaks the message correctly. If the prophet errs in hearing the message, then we have a problem with inerrancy. If a scribe to whom the prophet is dictating the message errs in hearing or writing, we have a problem with inerrancy. But once the text has gotten to paper, papyrus, or parchment, there is no problem if the next copyist makes an error.

    Why? This certainly seems like the view of a textual society, where the written form is given priority. But no matter where the error is introduced, the result for us is the same–an error in the text as we possess it. And as most supporters of Biblical inerrancy would agree, we can get everything necessary from the Bible as we have it. So why worry about the state of autographs that we have never had?

    Thus I think textual criticism itself makes it pretty clear that one can deal with a text in which there are errors, and in which we have doubtful readings in those few cases where the evidence is not extremely strong.

  • Sudan Missionary from Pensacola

    There was an encouraging story in the Pensacola News Journal titled Big difference in Sudan about Jim Esson who is returning to the Sudan and working on building a medical clinic. This is a very positive form of mission activity.

    In the comments someone complains that the mission is out of town while there are still people in need locally. But there are many different forms of service, and we don’t need to choose just one. There are plenty of resources available; what we need is the willingness to use them wherever there are needs.

  • Amazon.com UnSpun Best English Bible Translation

    I discovered Amazon.com UnSpun (and wrote a bit about it here) and of course immediately located a list of the best English Bible translations. Here it is:

    Update: I am going along with Peter Kirk as posted on the Better Bibles Blog and replacing this poll with the one he suggested.

    I think it would be interesting to get the votes of many of the well-informed folks in the blogosphere to vote on this one and perhaps change the rankings a bit. I suspect that with the votes, there’s a great deal of simple name recognition involved in the current rankings.

    So those of us who have nothing better to do than vote in useless polls–how about we give it a try? I notice the CEV and the TNIV, two of my favorites, are way down the list.

    PS: Actually I would note that the CEV, TNIV, and REB were significantly improved in ranking by my votes.

  • Response to Misquoting Jesus – I

    I have finally started reading Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. It came in about a week ago via interlibrary loan, and I have now gotten through the introduction and the first chapter. Unlike my response to The God Delusion, I’m not going to post all sections at once, but rather I’ll just post my reactions a chapter at a time.

    Before I get started, however, I want to mention that Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. has joined the list of speakers at Running Toward the Goal, a 5 minute +/- audio podcast sponsored by Pacesetters Bible School, Inc.. Elgin will focus on Christian apologetics and chose to give his response to Misquoting Jesus in his first podcast. There is also a link to the transcript there. Elgin accepts the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, as he mentions in the show, so he will have a somewhat different perspective than I do, though his response is surprisingly similar.

    I read the introduction to Misquoting Jesus with a great deal of empathy. Going into college, I was in many ways where Bart Ehrman was. I benefited from three important differences, however. First, though my parents were very conservative in their own beliefs, they did not discourage me from questioning. Second, I had already seen the number of manuscript variations by looking at the New Testament in the old Nestle-Aland text (25th edition, I believe) that I started Greek with. Third, my undergraduate professors gave great attention to dealing with questions that arise because of the differences.

    Amongst my own experiences I would count a time when I was 12 years old and became concerned with just how one could prove that the Bible was true. This happened some time during Sabbath School (I was raised Seventh-day Adventist), and by the end of church I had found my solution–Bible prophecy. We could be certain the Bible was true because of prophecy. I proudly proclaimed my solution to my Dad who affirmed that prophecy was important, but pointed out that there were ways to get around prophecy. The bottom line was faith, he told me.

    In college I recall facing question after question. I confronted a young earth when studying the texts of the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. I located the paper I wrote at that time when going through my files recently. The contents are hardly stunning, and my conclusions appear somewhat timid to me now, but I was raised on the 6000 years period–no 6-10 thousand variation for me–and the textual differences were the first break with the young earth view for me.

    So dealing with manuscript variations has played a huge role in my own development as it did for Dr. Ehrman, even though the outcome was not the same. I would note that I did leave the Seventh-day Adventist Church out of seminary, and didn’t return to church, now as a United Methodist, until 12 years later, but that didn’t have to do with doubts about the Bible. I was liberal enough by the time I was working on the MA degree to have some difficulties at the SDA Theological Seminary. They were rather minor problems, to be sure, and I managed to resolve them quite reasonably, but they made it clear to me that not everyone was primarily interested in finding the truth, particularly in Biblical studies.

    Since I do not believe in Biblical inerrancy myself, and have not almost from the time I formed a conscious view of inspiration, the fact that there are variations in the wording is not that major of an issue. (Note that while my views of a number of issues were altered as I discovered manuscript variations, I had not truly formulated my own view of inspiration before I was a college student. It was all sort of ad hoc.) But there is a certain shock in discovering the actual history of the Bible if one hasn’t spent serious time thinking about it.

    This is very important for Christian education. I think that we are wasting most of our available educational time in the church in the mistaken view that if we have reaffirmed the doctrines enough times as a young person is growing up, they will stay in the church. Of course at the same time, many church leaders complain about the number of young people who leave the church when they get to college. The shock, in my view, is not how many leave, it’s that any of them stay.

    The time is past when one can get by with providing only part of the truth. It was never right, but with the internet and the available of information generally, any young person who is reasonably curious will have access to all the negative information that the Sunday School teacher may be trying to avoid.

    I realize it seems like a risk to expose children and young people to other religions, but a faith that cannot survive information is not going to be much of a faith. I have blogged on this before here.

    Since I have already read chapter 1, I believe I can fairly confidently say that I will post a few thoughts on it (canonization) tomorrow.

  • Dinosaur Protein

    If you’ve seen the information on T. Rex protein and are wondering what it does and doesn’t mean will problem find this post on Pharyngula helpful. There are already creationist misinterpretations of this information, such as this one:

    For the moment, let’s not ignore the importance of what has been found (and as will be declared in the soon-to-open Creation Museum): finding T. rex soft tissue is compelling evidence that it was not 65 million years ago that dinosaurs died out, as given on the evolutionary timeline.

    This looks like another example of excellent scientific work.

  • Freedom of Speech and People’s Feelings

    It appears a couple are threatened with offending Hindu sensibilities for their wedding, according to this story from the Evening Standard (London). (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) This is an Indian case, and due to the fame of one of the participants there is some indication India won’t pursue it.

    Those who approve of laws against “hate speech” or various similar restrictions on freedom of speech should be warned, however, that no matter what your views, this could be you.

    This is a serious danger to freedom, especially in cases of religion. When a government makes “offending” any class of religious people a legal offense, there is virtually no barrier before any speech whatsoever can be banned. What can I possibly say that will not blaspheme somebody’s religion. I do not believe Mohammed was a prophet. I’ve offended Muslims. That belief should be no surprise, however. I’m a Christian. I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Islam should be illegal, no matter how offensive Muslims find them. But note that at the same time I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Christianity, Christians, or major Christian figures should be illegal either. That’s freedom of speech. If you’re easy to offend, get used to being offended.

    Of course many non-Christians will agree with me on that point, but I again let me extend that further. Hate speech laws that target conservative Christian criticism of other religions or homosexuality, for example, are also anti-freedom. I often really don’t like the categories of speech they forbid, but that’s not the point.

    Let freedom of speech reign, and let’s all learn to be less offended by it.

  • God Delusion and The Bible

    The major complaint that I have about the treatment of the Bible in The God Delusion is that it is somewhat superficial. Particularly in the section on the Old Testament, Dawkins merely points out problems that we should recognize as real with scriptures. (For another approach see Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God?.) I would say that someone who can read Judges 17-21 or Numbers 31 without serious concern has a problem with their moral compass.

    Passages such as those are a key reason why I do not look at the Bible using the “boy scout manual” metaphor. The Bible is almost completely unlike a boy scout manual or the instruction book for your car or an appliance. It is, instead the story of people experiencing God. (See my essay Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Authority.)

    I do not believe the inspiration of the Bible can be successfully argued outside the concept of the community. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing that can be said for or against. It simply means that acceptance of the Bible as a source of authority, and appropriate use of it must occur in a community of faith.

    One might expect that this would be an area in which I would spend the greatest portion of my time, since it is my specialty, but it would be hard for me to emphasize enough how un-earthshaking Dawkins’ arguments about the Bible actually are to me. They do bring up a serious point in terms of Christian education, however. There are many, many Christians who don’t know about these things and have never taken them into consideration in their own understanding of the Bible. They loudly proclaim that they keep every command in the Bible and do everything the Bible says, but very fortunately they don’t actually do that.

    Preachers and teachers who don’t want to deal with the difficult questions have a tendency to read only those portions of scripture that are easy to understand and will comfort the congregation. Some versions of the lectionary, for example, leave off the last two verses of Psalm 137 in reading because they will obviously disturb some members of the congregation, or don’t appear to fit with the rest of the reading. But one needs to face the fact that the did fit to the original author.

    I have blogged on this topic before: Slavery and the Bible, Biblical Decision Making, Slavery and the Bible Condensed, and The Danger of Unchanging Truth.

    One last thing, and this is addressed more to my fellow Christians, especially moderates and liberals, than to Dawkins or other atheists. It is not sufficient to tell someone that they should not take the Bible literally. There are many varieties of not taking the Bible literally. Take Numbers 31, for example. If you say not to take it literally, you might be suggesting that the story never happened, or that it did happen, but that Moses imagined God’s commands, or that the entire story was intended as an allegory (meaning what?), or perhaps that it’s historical but not normative. Again, I’ve blogged on this before here and here.

  • The Complexity of the Creator

    The attack on moderation, or excluding the middle (broadly conceived) and the assumption that this is all there is are the two key points of disagreement, from which most everything else follows.

    The assumption that this physical universe is all that exists is illustrated in the discussion of the multiverse theory (pp. 145-147). Now do not take this too far. I’m actually attracted by the multiverse theory as he expresses it. It’s obviously speculation, but it’s enjoyable speculation at least, and may even point in the right direction in years to come. My knowledge of physics is too small to go any further than that.

    But for me the question still remains–who is the creator? At some point you do have to get to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The environment in which the universes of the multiverse exist, such as to be subjected to natural selection must exist, and thus you only push the question back another step. Now, instead of asking where the universe comes from, you must ask where the multiverse comes from. The universe is clearly not nearly so universal as we thought (if these speculations are true). It is naturally caused by the multiverse.

    This should be familiar to those who have studied arguments for the existence of God. The question frequently comes back to where God comes from. But that is the point of that particular category of argument. Because nothing else is self-existent, we look for a self-existent source for other things, because it seems pretty clear that something must be self-existent. (Of course it may indeed be “turtles all the way down!”)

    At the same time if we admit that something is self-existent we have already taken a step beyond anything we understand within the physical world. We’re imagining something that’s so far out of the box that it’s, well, out of the universe, or perhaps even out of the multiverse. At this point, I think I’m making one of the best arguments for agnosticism. Whatever is the ultimate cause or “ground of all being” (Tillich), is not something we can measure according to the standards we know.

    Thus I find it totally irrelevant, though interesting, for Dawkins to claim that God must be “very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” Well, yes. And if theists in general were asserting that God had first evolved into what he is and then created the universe, that would be relevant. But this is a clear example of Dawkins assumption that even God must be natural. He first defines God into the natural universe and then argues against him, but that is simply a complex way of assuming one’s conclusions. As it is, it kind of misses the point.

    What theists are saying is that there simply is no natural force that can produce the creator, period, so the creator is something that is outside of our physical universe, who operates according to very different laws.

    For a contrary view more conservative than mine, see Christianity and Secularism by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. (My company publishes that book.)

  • Points of Agreement

    [Continuing my series responding to The God Delusion. The starting entry is From the Land of the Deluded.]

    It may surprise many readers to know that I have a number of points of agreement with Dawkins. Since I have blogged about many of these things before, I’m only going to give a basic list with an occasional link to other writing I have done on the subject.

    First, I accept the theory of evolution, and I even appreciate the description Dawkins gives about it. For an understanding of atheistic evolution (and I believe the adjective is not unfair in his case), I recommend The Blind Watchmaker (link to my brief review). But I also recommend it to anyone who simply wants to understand the simple power of variation plus natural selection to produce amazing things. It’s wonderfully well written and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I even understood Gould’s punctuated equilibria much better after I read it! (Gould is one of my favorite science authors of all time, but he tends to be more wordy and is easier to misunderstand than Dawkins.)

    Second, while I know that many Christians have been offended by the title and the tone of the book, I’m afraid I don’t see the point. I titled my opening entry From the Land of the Deluded. Why? Is it because I believe I am, in fact, deluded? No. I just find it amusing. What is puzzling to me is that Christians are concerned that an atheist calls them deluded. If he is, in fact, an atheist, as what else could he regard them? If he is an atheist he doesn’t share many basic assumptions with them. What possible offense can his judgment have on them? I’m a believer in dialog, and I think dialog needs to be courteous. But dialog also needs to be clear. We need to know what each party to the discussion actually believes, otherwise we cannot possibly hope to come to a real understanding.

    Third, I deplore the negative stereotyping of atheists in American or any other culture. I do not believe that atheists are by nature immoral any more than anyone else. I would have no problem voting for an atheist for public office.

    Fourth, I do not believe in indoctrination. I do believe in religious education. I advocate this distinction in churches. A child should know about more than his birth faith and should have the right to make an informed choice. This means hearing about other faiths and about the option of no faith, and I would provide this training in Sunday School. Note that I don’t mean teaching from one of the little “Different Religions and How to Convert Them” kind of books, but from materials that positively present the views of the particular group. I blogged about this previously here.

    Fifth, I’m pretty happy both with the Zeitgeist commandments enumerated on page 263 and 264, and with Dawkins’s amendments to the same. It’s perhaps odd that coming from such different positions, we look for such similar things in society, but I think it is a good indication that moderation is a possible option.

    Sixth, I do believe that religious beliefs should be subject to challenge, and I agree pretty much down the line with his comments on the Danish cartoons story (p. 24ff). I blogged about it previously here.

    Sixth, last but not least, I must call attention to the footnote on page 321, quoting Ann Coulter: “I defy any of my co-religionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell.” Well, I have not read Ann’s book, so assuming Dawkins has quoted her correctly, I will say simply that I do not laugh at any such thing, nor do I regard it as a Christian attitude for anyone to laugh at the prospect of anyone else burning in hell. (Hell itself is another worthwhile topic, but I’m not going there right now.)

    When there is conflict on issues such as this, I am in favor of religious freedom. I wish I had come away from The God Delusion with the feeling that Dawkins also favors freedom, but I’m not certain. He seems to have a certain tendency to assume that he is right (not necessarily a bad thing), and to assume that he can also make a better choice for everyone else, which I think is a bad thing.

  • Forced to the Extremes

    If I were to respond to only one item in The God Delusion, it would be this one. Put simply, I am a moderate by conviction, and Dawkins is most definitely not.

    To illustrate, let me quote:

    . . . Desits differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins of confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist’s metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism. [emphasis in original]

    Now to some readers this may seem like a gentlemanly opening for dialogue, but based on the remainder of the book, I would have to argue otherwise. Dawkins sees two possibilities–religion of all related varieties on the one side, and atheism on the other. He downplays moderation of all types. There was the time in reading this book that I thought I would respond only to that point, because for me this is the critical issue. Do we look at all the various options across the spectrum, or do we try to reduce them to a binary choice between two extremes? If we reduce them to the two extremes, I wind up with the religious fundamentalists. I’m not going to say that’s unfair. Fairness is not the most important issue. But it is inaccurate.

    No matter how much rhetoric is expended to try to pretend otherwise there is a difference between me and an old earth creationist, and in turn between the old earth creationist and a young earth creationist. There is even a difference, hard as it may be for a defender of the theory of evolution to see, between someone like Kent Hovind and Kurt Wise (pp. 284-286). The world doesn’t divide itself into only these two extremes.

    Now while I consider this an extremely important point, it might be irrelevant to the theme of the book, except that Dawkins regularly attacks those who take a more nuanced position than his. An entire section is titled “The Poverty of Agnosticism” (pp. 46-54) and it is not at all kind to agnostics.

    I would have to admit that this section annoyed me even more than most of the attacks on Christianity. I would regard Agnosticism as an extremely rational alternative. In fact, from a purely intellectual point of view, barring any leap of faith or other such maneuver, I would probably fall into that camp. But Dawkins is fully convinced that there is or will be a natural explanation for everything, and thus even suggesting that one doesn’t know simply strikes him as too weak.

    This results, again, from that simple binary approach. If you make the assumption that there are two alternatives, either it can be demonstrated that God exists, or atheism is true, then if you can show that the demonstration of God’s existence has failed, atheism is the only remaining option. It’s no surprise that agnosticism draws Dawkins’s ire here! It’s the obvious alternative. If you fail to demonstrate that God exists, you don’t assume the alternative; you realize that you don’t know.

    If one forms the question instead as “How do we understand the existence of the physical universe?” the answers are somewhat different. They would include God, a self-existent physical universe (so atheism), and no possibility of coming up with an understanding. Each of these alternatives would need to be examined on its own merits.

    One more note on the issue of moderation:

    As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers. The alternative, one so transparent that it should need no urging, is to abandon the principle of automatic respect for religious faith. This is one reason why I do everything in my power to warn people against faith itself, not just against so-called ‘extremist’ faith. The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism. (p. 306)

    One of the most common arguments I face from fundamentalists and also some conservatives is the “slippery slope” argument. If you give anything away, it’s only the first step to giving everything away. But this is a fallacious argument because it has built in the assumption that the correct position will result from choosing one of the extremes. Perhaps the position in the middle is the most correct, and in that case we would have a “slippery slope” on either side.

    This quote is also further evidence that I did not miss the nature of the book in my comments on Plantinga’s review. Put simply, there is no religious position which Dawkins finds tolerable. All of the positions in the middle are simply dangerous compromises.