Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Biblical Criticism

Discussion of the historical-critical method and its various methodologies and their application to Bible study and formation of doctrine.

  • Book Notes: An Old Testament Theology (Waltke)

    Waltke, Bruce K. with Charles Yu. An Old Testament Theology: an exegetical, canonical, and thematic approach. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007. ISBN: 0-310-21897-7. 1040 pp (940 excluding front and back matter).

    I’m going to complain a bit about this book, so first let me tell you the good things about it. It provides a solid introduction to the scope and theology of the Old Testament from a confessional point of view, starting from Christian orthodoxy. The tendency is the conservative edge of evangelicalism. It is not fundamentalist, and struggles with many issues that one might expect fundamentalists to ignore.

    In addition, there are several very strong points about this:

    • Waltke clearly expounds his approach and the understanding of inspiration on which he bases it. He then consistently applies that throughout.
    • The discussion of narrative theology and how one goes from narrative all the way to application. I don’t always agree, but the discussion is enlightening.
    • The chapter on creation has much to commend it, though it features in my complaints as well.
    • Chapter 16, The Gift of Liturgy is again excellent.
    • The overall theme of covenant theology is well-done and will be very helpful along with the discussion of alternatives.

    A substantial portion of the book is taken up simply narrating the story of the various Old Testament books and providing an introduction and background. Thus there is less on the theology of a book than there is simply bringing the reader to the point of understanding. This is probably required in an introduction of this sort, though ideally I would hope someone would take an Old Testament introduction before taking Old Testament theology.

    The confessional approach is not precisely one that resonates all that well with me in the study of the Hebrew scriptures or the Old Testament. This should not be a complaint because one can hardly criticize a book for being what it sets out to be. One should, however, note that Waltke is quite serious about this and that the confessional approach shows through.

    The book is also true to its title as an Old Testament theology, and not a theology of the Hebrew scriptures. In other words, the Old Testament passages are read Christologically, and chapters frequently conclude by discussing how these concepts carry through into the New Testament. Again, this is an approach that is clearly stated in the early stages of the book, and then carried through consistently.

    Though I personally would prefer more discussion of the theology in the historical context rather than the context of Christian canon and theology, this is again a stated goal of the book as a whole. You will find the justification for that approach in the preface and the first several chapters.

    Now for some complaints:

    • The author affirms Biblical inerrancy. While I do not, that is not the complaint. In his support of inerrancy and the unity he expects as a result, he seems to gloss over differences in theology between various books with very limited explanations. For example, the difference in perspective on marriage outside of Israel between Ruth and Ezra/Nehemiah is not so much as given a routine dismissal.
    • The author is very much opposed to the historical-critical method, but doesn’t really bother to explain very much of it. I would expect that if one dismisses a particular method in an introductory work, one needn’t go into depth on it, but he repeatedly references and disparages the method, almost exclusively by discussing naturalistic presuppositions, yet fails to provide sufficient foundation in my view.
    • The discussion of creation is really quite good, but is marred by a dismissal of “evolutionism” based again on its supposed naturalistic assumptions. In fact, some varieties of theistic evolution would fit quite well with the interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis provided.
    • Chapter 9, The Gift of the Bride is dismal throughout, in my view, as Waltke embraces patriarchy with both arms. That is too long of a discussion to go into here. Suffice it to say that I disagree with almost the entire chapter, including the notion that Deborah is the “exception that proves the rule” (p. 245).

    I just reviewed DeSilva’s New Testament introduction, which is also from a more conservative perspective than my own, though not as conservative as Waltke’s. Yet DeSilva managed to present a variety of viewpoints while at the same time letting you know where he stood. He provided enough material for the student to evaluate without even going to the references. That is a quality I really appreciate in an introductory work.

    I am not a fan of purported neutrality. The author does have a viewpoint, and I think it is better to let the reader know what that is. Yet advocacy can be combined with a broad coverage of alternatives that give the student a good perspective. I know a number of liberal works that write as though all conservative views can be dismissed. For example, one will search in vain for defenses of Mosaic authorship in many critical commentaries on the books of the Pentateuch, even defenses presented for the purpose of refutation. This book appears to be a good example of the reverse.

    It’s a bit cheeky of me to review the work of so well-respected a scholar as Waltke, whose Biblical Hebrew Syntax I consult regularly (it’s on my “constantly available” shelf). But while I did find considerable here that was helpful, the items I mentioned detracted substantially from the value of this experience. Were I asked to teach Old Testament theology (much more likely than that I would be asked to teach New Testament intro!–see my comments on DeSilva), this would not be my text.

  • Book Notes: An Introduction to the New Testament (DeSilva)

    DeSilva, David A. An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods, and Ministry Formation. Downers Grove, IL, 2004. ISBN 0-8308-2746-3. 974 pp. (904 without front matter and indexes).

    This is a bit out of place for review here and by me, but I wanted to write a few notes about it anyhow.

    If I were to teach an course in New Testament Introduction, admittedly not all that likely, I would want to use this text. I’m not an NT specialist, and this book is not well suited to the groups I usually teach. It’s designed for the seminary student, and I wish I’d had it as a text at that time. Alas, that was the 70s, and the copyright date is 2004.

    Why do I like it? The primary reason is that it covers issues in New Testament criticism effectively and practically. By “effectively” I mean that various critical methods are described briefly and clearly so that the student can grasp both the origins of the method and how the method might be applied even by those who don’t accept all the presuppositions of those who originated it. The description is rounded out by examples. By “practically” I mean that each such section concludes with practical exercises.

    I had to figure a great deal of this stuff out by working backward from commentaries. There are, of course, a number of rather good books which I discovered along the way (Augsburg Fortress’ series Guides to Biblical Scholarship comes to mind), but both my undergraduate and graduate experiences generally involved hearing or reading the claims, struggling with the material, and then finding the good explanations afterward.

    These sections don’t just cover a few traditional critical skills. They range from textual criticism to feminist criticism with the positive and negative aspects of each, and all those between.

    A secondary reason to like this book is the emphasis, indicated in the subtitle, on ministry formation. I work largely with lay audiences, but I do frequently get to talk with pastors, and one great weakness of seminary education, from my unscientific survey, is a lack of practical application. I can do [something taught in seminary], but how will I use it? Each book of the New Testament has a discussion of how it can be helpful in ministry formation.

    These sections are good. I would think that a good seminary student would want to keep this one for his library shelves. If he or she did not, it would set off alarm bells for me.

    Just to give an example of the types of topics, let me look at the book of Romans, since it’s one I’m studying for personal devotions at the moment, as well as at church. We encounter a full page excursus on the literary integrity of Romans, a slightly longer one discussing faith in Romans, another titled “Grace and Justification in Jewish Sources”, one on “Paul’s Hermeneutics and the Pesharim of Qumran”, another on “The Enigma of Romans 7:7-25” (he and I would disagree in part there, but it’s a pretty thorough discussion), and “The Law: Catalyst for Sin or Divine Remedy.” The “EXEGETICAL SKILL” section is a bit over 2 1/2 pages on social-scientific criticism discussing analysis of ritual. The Ministry formation section covers a bit over seven pages. All of this is the extras that frame an excellent introduction to the book and to tendencies in interpretation. DeSilva even manages to discuss homosexuality, though doubtless due to the nature of the topic, nobody will be satisfied!

    Not being a specialist in this area, I really haven’t surveyed the full field of New Testament introductions–there are quite a number of them–but I have read a few, and none matched the quality of this one in all ways.

    I should note that DeSilva is clearly more conservative theologically than I am and more negative on the values of some of the older forms of criticism–form, redaction, and source, for example. But that does not prevent him from presenting both the positive aspects and the nuts and bolts methodology, within the scope to be expected of a work of this size. I would not be uncomfortable basing a class discussion on his material on any of the topics, even homosexuality.

    Unfortunately, as I said, I won’t get much opportunity to use this book, but I did enjoy reading it, and I do recommend it as a way to kind of round up your New Testament exegetical skills, especially if you’ve gotten stuck a bit in a specialist’s rut. If you are an NT specialist about to teach NT introduction, check it out.

  • Book Notes: The Gospels for All Christians

    Bauckham, Richard, ed. The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998. ISBN: 0-8028-4444-8.

    I hesitate to call this a review. It’s more of an interaction with the text, a few thoughts as I read the book The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences. I’m going to allow myself to ramble! Also, as you will doubtless note, this was published in 1998, and thus is not “hot off the presses” and yet I think it is very relevant.

    This was one of the four books that I noted arrived via interlibrary loan on the same day, something marginally inconvenient, considering the size of the books and the height of my “to be read” stack. I had added it into the list at the last minute, because it was edited by the author of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which was one that was already on my list, and because a friend had recommended it.

    I will confess that I started reading this book with low expectations. The problem it addresses, as stated to me, did not appear incredibly urgent or gripping. I was tempted to start with a different book, but there was that return date staring at me, and I loathe returning interlibrary loan books that I have not completely read, so I dug in.

    If you were educated in a liberal school, especially if you come from a conservative perspective, you will probably respond to this material differently. I compared notes with a friend who had used different texts than I did (I was educated by fairly conservative professors at Seventh-Day Adventist schools), and he certainly reacted differently on his initial read. Since I started conservative and moved more slowly left, I never took quite the extreme position which Bauckham is addressing.

    In the first chapter, Bauckham addresses the consensus view, at least at the time of writing, though I think it largely continues, which is that the gospels were addressed to specific communities and that in interpreting them we must discover the beliefs and the situation addressed in the community in order to understand the message. A corollary of this is that we learn either largely or exclusively about the community, rather than about Jesus when reading the gospels.

    To get the negative out of the way first, I felt that Bauckham overstated the nature of the consensus to some extent. Unfortunately, however, I can’t deny that there are folks around who exemplify precisely the attitude he is addressing. In turn, I think he overstates his case, practically eliminating any study of the audience from interpretation of the gospels. There are cracks in this extreme case, though they occur much more in the other essays, and he displays what strikes me as a slightly more moderate approach in chapter 5, John for Readers of Mark.

    Since he is attempting to force a paradigm shift, perhaps all this is understandable. Paradigms rarely shift when only nudged; they have to be attacked with sledge hammers. Then moderates (perhaps like me!) come around and start playing “moderately,” but in the new paradigm.

    I think this reflects a fairly common problem in Biblical studies (and perhaps other disciplines, but that’s their concern), in that when someone proposes a new approach or tool there is a tendency to apply it broadly to just about everything. Form criticism provides a useful tool for studying certain sayings that are transmitted orally, and then find themselves part of a written text. Form critics tended to make their tool the tool for Bible study, and soon they were studying things that probably never existed separately as part of the oral tradition using a tool that was really only well suited to that one task.

    If a carpenter worked in this manner with his tools we’d call him crazy. When Biblical scholars do so, we call them pioneers. And to be honest, in general they are. Their critics reverse the situation and throw out the tool because it doesn’t do everything its initial practitioners claim for it. This would be much like observing a carpenter using a hammer in many places where it should not be used, and concluding that the best option would be to discard the hammer.

    In turn, redaction critics come along and discard much work that goes with form criticism. Quite regularly they correctly criticize form critical work, yet at the same time they want redaction criticism to be the tool for Biblical studies, and soon we have it applied to texts that really show no signs of redaction.

    My suggestion here is that we need to salvage something from each of these things and make it useful, as many commentators (Brevard Childs comes to mind quickly) have done, not dismissing the methodologies completely, but putting them in their place.

    In the case of the gospel audiences, it strikes me that there would be significant impact of the author’s more immediate community, but that the broader audience would certainly reduce the amount that one could properly deduce about about the audience. Yes, it’s a moderating position, to which I am naturally attracted, but I think it is a valid one, a case in which a moderating position is precisely what is called for.

    I would use one of my own sermons as an example. I am very likely to prepare a text, preach it to a specific congregation, and then also post it here on my blog. The sermon is designed with the congregation I’m addressing in mind, but my words are not exclusively for them, and you should not interpret all of my words in terms of addressing that congregation. My ideas have formed in conversation with many people who hold many differing views. Yet there would be points that would be specific to that group.

    Similarly the form critical approach which heard the voice of the community in everything and the voice of Jesus in nothing needed some moderation. If you think about a modern preacher telling a story, ask yourself whether the preacher’s story is determined by the lesson he’s teaching the congregation or by the facts of the story as history.

    For me, the answer would be that I am loathe to adjust a story. I seek one that fits the situation I’m addressing without too much fudging of the facts. Nonetheless I do adjust emphasis. I have used the same story in different situations to make different points. I also know preachers who are quite comfortable adapting a story quite substantially to their needs at the moment.

    Would the disciples do this to the story of Jesus? Intentionally? I doubt it. But unintentionally I think they could apply stories in very different ways as time went on, and thus the audience and the situation of the early church would impact the message. It may be difficult or impossible to determine just how much, but given the possibility, it seems useful to me to try.

    The second chapter, The Holy Internet: Communication Between Churches in the First Christian Generation (pp. 49-70, Michael B. Thompson) is probably one of the two most helpful chapters I’ve read in the last five years, and the other one is the third chapter, Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels (pp. 71-112, Loveday Alexander). This information is available elsewhere, but not in such a compact and helpful format. It’s very easy to underestimate communications in the ancient world.

    I’m reminded of the difference between the way my children communicate and the way I did when I was their age. We were in South America during my teen years, and it cost several dollars a minute to make international calls. You just didn’t do it, unless things were really, really critical. Now I get pictures and videos of my grandchildren moments after whatever great milestone–or merely interesting moment–has passed. When I talk about it, they’re likely to look blank and say something about how we must have really been out of touch! But we weren’t. Those snail-mail letters actually did communicate.

    When you compare snapping a picture with your cell-phone and sending it to a list of folks from your contacts to taking the picture, getting it developed, waiting for it, writing a letter, mailing it, and waiting for it to travel the necessary distance, it might seem like nothing would get communicated. But we did precisely that all the time.

    In the same way, we might imagine that if we had to walk from days to weeks in order to visit a neighboring church, we wouldn’t do it. Yet the folks in the early church did, and they did it quite a bit. We might also imagine that few books would be distributed if they were copied by hand, but again, we would assume incorrectly. People did go to all that trouble, and produced quite a few.

    One further thought I got from chapter three was the close connection between oral and written forms. I have argued this before in terms of the New Testament autographs. It’s quite possible that texts were revised even by authors after they were written down. We consider something more set in stone once it is written, but they perhaps did not. Some variations in early manuscripts might be explained by such freedom rather than scurrilous scribes (Western non-interpolations?)

    About People, by People, for People: Gospel Genre and Audiences (pp. 113-146, Richard A. Burridge) is more dense and less useful than the preceding two chapters, but nonetheless is rather helpful and provides some of the very balance I was requesting in the first chapter. I think I would still lean a little bit more toward seeing an impact of the audiences, but the argumentation here is definitely worth considering.

    I found Bauckham’s second essay, John for Readers of Mark (pp. 147-172) to be more interesting than his first, but ultimately unconvincing. I say this not in the sense of having a ready refutation, but rather in the sense of having a tentative verdict of “not proven” regarding his case. There are some intriguing connections here, and I’m not going to try to summarize them. Bauckham provides a way to read John as complementary to Mark on the assumption that Mark could be expected to be available to his readers. I think some of his arguments would be considerably blunted if gospel stories were transmitted orally, and especially if Mark represents a great deal of that oral tradition. But that is too much to try to argue right here. Bauckham does address the issue of oral traditions, but rejects them as adequate explanations; I find his rejection premature.

    The sixth essay, Can We Identify the Gospel Audiences (pp. 173-194, Stephen C. Barton), is a discussion of how accurately we can determine the gospel audiences. I think we do well to be skeptical, especially of our own reconstructions, but I also think that we will be saying something about audiences if we interpret at all. In general, however, the chapter is quite balanced in my view.

    Finally we have Toward a Literal Reading of the Gospels (pp. 195-217, Francis Watson). Again, this probably pushes a little further than I would be comfortable with, but it is nonetheless a valid counterpoint to the tendency to believe the gospels have nothing to do with literal events. Note here that Watson is using the word “literal” as it would be used in literary discourse, not the more popular idea of “having greater truth value.” The literal reading that Watson is looking for is one that allows the gospel writers to talk about actual events and people, even if he also wishes to symbolize something else.

    Nicodemus is a good example. One can understand him as symbolic of a particular group of people with whom the community had to deal, yet there is no particular reason to assume that there was no Nicodemus, or that there is no underlying actual story. This is an area again that calls for careful nuance. I’d like to quote Watson:

    Is it possible to envisage a future Gospels scholarship in which person and text are reintegrated? This suggestion would not entail the naive positivistic assumption that the Gospels are to be understood, so far as possible, as a direct transcript of historical reality. Like the various incompatible models of the so-called historical Jesus, the Gospels are interpretations of the historical reality to which they refer. The Gospels represent the early Christian reception of the life and person of Jesus, and the eventual emergence of the fourfold Gospel canon represents the decision that the Christian community will henceforth appeal to this complex rendering of the received reality and no other. . . .

    All in all, this is a worthwhile goal.

    In conclusion I must say that while I approached this book without enthusiasm, it grew on me as I read, and I think that the authors and editor have done a great service. I commend it to those who are interested in the study of the gospels.

  • The Pain of Reinterpreting Scripture

    In several recent posts I’ve been referring to the relationship between scripture and evolution, and particularly how I moved from young earth creationism toward theistic evolution not because I studied evolution and became convinced, but because I studied Genesis and became convinced it was not narrative history.

    At the same time I’m looking at bit at theodicy, specifically the question of how a God who employs violent means (or at least appears to do so) can also be seen as a good God. This also requires one to look in some perhaps disturbing ways at how we interpret scripture. For example, if I take the Genesis flood to be literal history and also as a direct action of God, then I have a level of violence in God’s behavior towards humans that is much harder to explain, in my view, than the mass extinctions that occurred millions of years ago, or than the ongoing struggle for survival in the natural world.

    Why is it so difficult to take a new look at scripture and to decide to take some things in some way other than as a factual historical account or as a transfer of data?

    In my own experience I would list fear first. This fear is of two types. There is one’s own fear that in the process of looking at scripture in a different way, one may become separated from one’s community and support structure. I remember sitting down in Hebrew class and encountering some of the classical problems in the way we understand scripture. What was around the next corner?

    One’s own fear of losing one’s anchor is bolstered and validated by the fear of one’s family and friends back at home. When I was still in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, I thought this was a feature of smaller, more isolated denominations. Now that I am a member of a United Methodist congregation I have come to realize that this is nearly universal. Even in conservative evangelical churches that are sending their young people to conservative evangelical schools there is a tension between the way they have been raised and what they might learn in seminary.

    The fact that some young people come back from seminary quite thoroughly altered, and not always to the good, simply feeds into this fear. I would suggest that we look at this differently, however. Might it be possible that less young people would lose their moorings in their community, if that community prepared those young people to joyfully undertake a voyage of discovery rather than repeatedly trying to make those moorings more secure?

    Let me illustrate from my programming experience. I recall an early effort written in C, in which I had had a serious bug in a function. I worked on the code but found nothing that I thought should cause the problem. When I tested it again, however, it started to work. There was something in what I had done that had fixed the problem without me knowing it. For some time I was afraid to tinker with that function, because I was afraid that I would break whatever unknown thing I had unknowingly fixed!

    I use words built on “unknown” intentionally. Part of the problem we have here is that preachers and teachers do not talk enough about how interpretation is accomplished. To many young people about to leave for college or seminary, Biblical interpretation is a black box. They have read a number of texts and they know how they are supposed to apply, but they aren’t all that sure why. The good thing about the black box is that it is acceptable to their friends and relatives.

    At seminary, a professor may ask them to take the black box apart, i.e. to make it no longer be a black box. The professor may suggest applying a different black box just to get the students to start asking what’s inside. There are many tricks of the trade for getting students to think.

    I think that there is a fear here on the other side–the fear of pastors that their parishioners won’t sit still to learn what went into interpretation, or that they will choose to get rid of a pastor so irreverent as to tinker with the nuts and bolts of Biblical interpretation. That’s why so frequently even in pulpits held by preachers who are skilled in historical-critical methodologies, we never hear the method, even if it has been applied in preparing the sermon. The results, such as sources, dating of documents, forms, and so forth are presented as the products of another black box.

    These black box results are often presented with great confidence, and become, to the parishioners, the true meaning of scripture. When someone else gets different results form the black box, for example dates for Mark that vary from 45 – 85 CE, that’s disturbing, and people begin to wonder if seminary ruined the pastor.

    It’s not that easy to solve, because it would require us to spend a little more time dealing with the nuts and bolts and a bit less time merely exhorting congregations to live more precisely according to the interpretations they have always held.

    But there would be a major benefit. When you know what goes into creating a new interpretation, you also know how to argue against something that doesn’t make sense, and so instead of a journey into the unknown without a map, you can explore with reasonable confidence, always knowing that there are some landmarks, and if the landmarks run out, you know how to survey the territory.

  • Is Anything Biblical?

    Over on Complegalitarian Wayne Leman asks whether either side of the complementarian/egalitarian debate should claim to be Biblical. Since I am openly egalitarian, perhaps I should try to answer the question “is egalitarianism Biblical?” instead.

    But the fact is that I’d rather question the term “Biblical,” as indeed some of the commenters to Wayne’s post have done. The fact is that most people in the Christian community claim to believe things that are Biblical in one way or another. And depending on one’s approach, almost anything can be called Biblical.

    I’m sure I’ve told the story before of the young man from an Independent Baptist church who came to my door wanting to share the gospel with me. It didn’t matter to him that I was already a Christian, or that I pulled out my Greek testament to follow along with his texts. He was arguing in favor of “once saved, always saved” but more particularly that the “once saved” had to be a complete and total dependence on grace without any inkling of any form of works. He had a quite legalistic definition of grace, in fact! We both presented texts, and as those of you acquainted with the topic may guess, books like Matthew, Hebrews, Acts, 1 John, and James featured in my part of the discussion. When it was over and he was about to leave he said, “I’m worried about your salvation. I’ve presented you with nothing but scripture, but you haven’t responded with any scripture.” Then he paused. “Well, except for Matthew, Acts, Hebrews, and James, and they don’t count!”

    His reason they didn’t count was that according to him those books were written either for the Jews or for a “transition period” between the Jewish dispensation and the dispensation of the church. Those with theological training will recognize a fairly detailed and intense form of dispensationalism.

    Now my point isn’t whether his form of dispensationalism is right or wrong–I happen to think it’s silly, but that is unimportant here. Rather, I’d like you to notice that both of us though we were being Biblical, but neither of us would be likely to recognize what the other one was doing as Biblical. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a sermon illustration about visiting this guy who read Greek and who kept using texts that just didn’t apply in that particular context.

    Depending on how you approach interpretation, a great variety of things can be made Biblical or not Biblical. That’s because the Bible is a collection of different books from different times, places, and written for different purposes. They are brought together as a “Bible” by the recognition of the Christian community. I happen to think that collection is Holy Spirit driven, but that’s not the key issue here.

    There is enough diversity in all those books that depending on how I tie them together, I can come up with very different results. Yet over and over I encounter people who won’t even discuss their approach to interpretation or their understanding of the Bible as a “canon.” What many want to say is that they are just teaching what the Bible says, and then they quote a line, a verse, or a passage and apply it to their particular time and circumstances. But that line, verse, or passage wasn’t written at that moment, and its author didn’t point it at that particular time, place, and circumstance. The interpreter is taking something that was written at one time and place and applying it to another.

    And we have to do that. But we should acknowledge that our understanding is involved in our interpretation and application of the passage. We each interpret, we each have to take responsibility. Some think it appears selfless and humble to take ourselves out of the equations. “I’m just proclaiming the word of God.” But it isn’t humble to do the work and then claim that it was really God all along instead of you.

    Let me just list some key approaches to understanding the Bible as a complete canon.

    1. Community – the community receives, collects, and interprets, then in various ways mediates the application. The Catholic church’s “magisterium” is one aspect of this type of approach though there are many others. In some charismatic churches the pastor has become a local “magisterium” and nobody can question the pastor’s understanding of scripture. It may get labeled in different ways, but few of us are immune to the attempt to create some kind of authority.
    2. Dispensationalism – since the Bible appears to say very different things in different places, one way to make it work is to divide it up. Then if you have one text that says “faith without works is dead” and another that “you are saved by faith apart from works” (pardon my loose paraphrasing here), you just assign them to different dispensations.
    3. Proof texting – rarely claimed as a method, but very commonly used, this involves taking your favorite key texts and applying them while ignoring everything else. The more accomplished proof-texters have ways of explaining away all other texts, and seem oblivious to how ridiculous such explanations may seem to others.
    4. Historical-critical – I enjoy the tools of this method, but it too has its weaknesses, usually in that it takes texts apart without ever putting them back together. One can come up at the end knowing about everything there is to know about a text, but still having no idea what it actually means.
    5. Covenant theology – fit the texts within the various covenants God made. I like large portions of this idea, though a bit of overdoing it can result in something that looks remarkably like dispensationalism, though the two are not really that closely related.

    Of course there are more, and I’m not here trying to advocate one or the other. I’m just trying to point out that we all have some approach or combination of them, and often when we think someone else is hopeless non-Biblical, it is more the result of a difference in approach than to any ignorance on their part.

    In the end, however, I think the term “Biblical” is not a very meaningful one. I’d prefer “true” and “false.” Once we’ve made our claims we can then discuss the issues based on whatever evidence and process of logic we used to arrive at them. At a minimum, however, we have to look at the approach, otherwise the debate will be intractable.

  • Faith and Creation – Some Links

    I encountered a few posts related to these to words, to which I’d like to call your attention. First, via Higgaion I navigated to this post about taking things on faith.

    The author, Dr. James F. McGrath, makes some excellent points on just what faith means from a Biblical perspective. One thing I would emphasize is that while we may believe certain things on limited evidence, we rarely believe based on no evidence at all, or contrary to the positive evidence. Usually we at least believe that there is some evidence with us.

    Let me quote one key comment that ties this in with creation:

    There is no reason to think that the author of Genesis expected his readers to believe his creation story ‘on faith’. He does not dispute the basic facts of the natural world as understood in his time: that the world is mostly land with a large gathering of connected basins filled with water called seas; that there is a dome over the earth; that above the dome are waters; that there are lamps placed in the dome (the moon, like the sun, being viewed as a source of light). He says all of this because it is what people thought in his time. None of it is anticipated to require faith to believe it. What the author offered was an alternative story of creation, not alternative facts about that which was created.

    This is an extremely important paragraph. Those who have never tried it, have no idea how difficult it would be to express both a new view of God and a complete new cosmology simultaneously, and have it connect with hearers. Those who look for a modern cosmology in the Bible are really asking the wrong questions of the text. We tend to ask how accurate the text appears to us, when a better question would be what the text communicated to those who first spoke/wrote or heard/read it. I don’t mean here to say that the historical meaning is the only meaning of a religious or spiritual text, nor that we can be 100% certain we know. But we will do much better starting with that historical text, then by immediately trying to read it from a perspective unknown and unimaginable to the first audience.

    The second related post is the beginning of a series by Dr. Westmoreland-White on Levellers. He has written an initial post that consists largely of suggested reading, and has now continued with an initial post looking at the texts, starting from Genesis 2:4b-25.

    Dr. Westmoreland-White notes regarding this passage:

    All this is clearly to say that those who told this story and those who wrote it down and included it in our Bibles were NOT asking scientific questions. They were asking about God and humanity and our relation to each other and the world (as they knew it). By the time of the early monarchy when this was written, Israel was in conflict with surrounding nations who all had their own gods and goddesses. The constant question was “Who is this YHWH of yours anyway!” since Yahwism was relatively new to Canaan. . . .

    There is a similarity in the way in which the two bloggers are viewing the text, and I agree with them both on this. This series is likely to be good.

    With reference to the sources of the early chapters of Genesis, I have thus far presented a working translation of the first 10 chapters of Genesis, and I plan to post the 11th either later today or sometime tomorrow. The purpose of using my own translation is not that I think mine is better. In fact, due to a number of factors I would consider it worse. But I wanted a copyright free, modern language translation which I could slice up according to the sources. You’ll find these posts with the sources color coded in category “Genesis” on my Participatory Bible Study blog.

    I think that will do for now.

  • Biblical Studies Carnival XXIII Posted

    . . . at Ancient Hebrew Poetry. I don’t have a post in there this time, but that’s not a complaint–I can’t think of what I’d nominate in this case. I will certainly get some blogging fodder from reading the posts. There are certainly a substantial number of excellent biblioblogs available.

    Speaking of which, John continued his postings with things he left out of the first one and then a map of the world of Bible bloggers. The latter is especially useful.

    Enjoy!

  • Crossway ESV Literary Study Bible

    Regular readers of this blog (that imaginary group every blogger hopes he has!) will know that I am not a fan of the [tag]ESV[/tag]. More precisely, I’m not a fan of the hype that surrounds it in certain circles. It’s not a bad translation in my view–it’s just not very special.

    Thus I was not immediately attracted to ESV, The Literary Study Bible despite the very attractive title. I think literary study of the Bible is one of the key elements that is lacking in Bible study by many Christians. Besides the specific benefits of the various literary disciplines, simply relating Biblical material to the metanarrative can improve one’s memory, if nothing else. I’m reminding of a lady who was in a study group I led. After about six months she suddenly got an expression of wonder and surprise in the middle of a session and announced, “I finally see it! It’s all connected!”

    Adrian Warnock has printed an extract from this Bible (12 Literary Features of the Bible) with the permission of Crossway, and that one section is enough to spark my interest. I will certainly place this on my list to buy and use, and perhaps review here once I’ve had time to enjoy it a bit myself.

    I must note that there are some nuances of the 12 features that I would state a bit differently, but without context, it’s hard for me to tell just how far I differ, so I will save my quibbles until after I have actually read and worked with this Bible. As it stands, I welcome a new tool for students of the Bible in English. Anything that directs people to another perspective from which to study will be helpful.

  • Reading Part 6 (On Inerrancy)

    I somehow got the idea that the inerrancy series to which I linked yesterday was in five parts. A comment from the author let me know that I was wrong on that point, and how I got the idea I do not know, consider that the statement “*Part 6 will conclude with reflections on why the doctrine of inerrancy is important.” occurs at the end of the notes to part 5. But such is life in the blogosphere.

    You can now read part 6, and it does tie the package together. I would like first to quote portions of the author’s comment to my previous post here to set the stage. After gently reminding me of the sixth part, he said:

    I don’t want to give the impression that some people, such as yourself, are “too far away” to connect with. This was a paper I wrote for seminary last year, and given the space limitation I had to narrow down my argument rather strictly. To engage every possible position on inerrancy was not possible within the scope of the paper, but I believe I had something original to say to those who claim some sort of “limited inerrancy.”

    This is a good point which I did note. Now I don’t find that the premises he lists at the beginning of part 6 catch me. When he says “The Bible’s claims about its own integrity are a matter of faith and practice” as the second premise, I’m not sure I’d agree, but then I’m truly not one of the limited inerrantists whom he is addressing, and thus I might not evaluate that statement properly. I reject inerrancy in all its forms and I have problems with the term “infallibility” in many contexts. I’ll write more about that below.

    I have been frequently shocked by positions held by people who do claim to accept inerrancy. There seem to be people out there who profess some form of belief in inerrancy who are more liberal in their handling of the scriptures than I would be able to accept. One of these points is the late dating of the book of Daniel, which I have grave difficulties reconciling with inerrancy. I commented on this point in Earnest Lucas’s fine volume in the Apollos Old Testament Commentary series, in which he doesn’t specifically affirm a 2nd century date for Daniel, but does argue that one can affirm inerrancy and yet hold to a late date. I’m supposed to be the liberal on this issue, and I accept a mixed dating, with a historical Daniel and some fairly old stories supplemented by later Hebrew additions.

    You said “it’s a bit odd to use either a proof-texting approach or the approach of systematic theology to determine what the Bible must be.” I’d like to clarify that the argument I presented makes no claims to what the Bible must be (or must not be). My argument is more modest in that I’ve only argued what the Bible claims to be. Whether or not the Bible is what it claims is an entirely different point, and I’ve yet to present any argument regarding that.

    On this point, I understand the objection to my comments, but in the broader picture, the doctrine of inerrancy seems to me to result from systematic theology more than it does from observation of the Bible. In fact, the claim of inerrancy produces a considerable effort in explaining those elements of the Bible that don’t appear to fit the picture. I’m not only talking about explaining errors or reconciling contradictions, but also looking at the process. The synoptic gospels, for example, display signs of copying from one to another. The simplest explanation for stories with slight variations is that they are the same story remembered or passed on with slightly different details. The doctrine of inerrancy forces one to explain how the details really worked. An extreme version of this is Lindsell’s explanation of the cock crowings and denials that reconciled the stories in the gospels. Now one can’t be absolutely certain that Lindsell was wrong, but it seems very improbable that he was right. (I see a reference to this here. I don’t have a copy of The Battle for the Bible on hand to check the accuracy of that reference, however.)

    My preferred approach is to sit down with the Bible and ask, “Just what does this book appear to be, and what does it appear to do?” Having gotten a start at answering that question, I will move on to what precisely it is, and then I have some basis on which to interpret and apply statements such as 1 Timothy 3:16-17 (which winds up being very important in my view of inspiration as well) or 2 Peter 1:20-21.

    Welll, I started this post with “Biblical inspiration” fatigue, as in I’ve written way too much on the subject recently. But I should still say something about what I do believe. (Note that this is not in response directly to Roger’s series. I simply feel that I should make a positive statement to connect with any criticisms, thus giving people equal opportunity to criticize my views.)

    First, I do not think a doctrine of scripture, apart from a more general doctrine of how one discovers God’s will is likely to be valid. That is sort of like a view of how a house will be laid out sole by expressing the accuracy of the measuring tape. In such a case the measuring tape can be 100% accurate, but it’s practical accuracy is limited by the people who receive the information.

    This leads to my second point, which is that as human beings, we are always speaking of God’s word as we receive it. God’s word in God’s mind is always true and absolutely accurate. If we believe that God is infinite, his word in his mind is also without perspective, or perhaps more accurately with absolute perspective. We, on the other hand, never comprehend something without perspective, and those moments in God’s presence that simply hint at God’s absolute perspective are overpowering.

    Third, I hold that this perspective issue applies to the prophet who initially receives the revelation as much as to any other human. He will not absolutely comprehend the message, and based on recorded statements in scripture as well as observations of the written product, I see no validity in the idea that God’s inspiration involves dictation. (Now please don’t assume that I think inerrancy necessarily involves verbal dictation. The vast majority of inerrantists I know do not.) My particular point here is that the prophet understands and expresses the message as a human, and thus the received communication is itself limited. I would argue further that the received message is imperfect, but I have little time to follow that trail.

    Fourth, this results in the possibility of error at any stage of the transmission other than the thought in God’s own mind. The possibility of error applies to everything that is communicated because everything communicated goes through a human mind, is then copied by a human mind, and is later interpreted and applied by a human mind–all imperfectly.

    Inerrantists of my acquaintance accept that interpreters are all fallible, and certainly fallible in faith and practice as well as history and science. They accept that copyists may have made errors, though they would maintain those are few and of small import. I simply extend that one more step. Any human mind that transmits the word of God will do so in a limited way, i.e. imperfectly.

    So why read and depend on the Bible? Well, first, I don’t “depend on” the Bible as such. But generally this question tends to make me crazy. I depend on potentially fallible materials in my daily life. I am a fallible person who makes imperfect decisions, many of which I now know, from the eminence of 50 years (!) to have been really, really bad. I deal with imperfection. It is important to me that God is perfect, but I see no need for any human to be perfect.

    Now the Bible is a core element in my reception of God’s word, but by itself it is words on paper. I must bring all elements of God’s revelation together in order to have the faintest prayer of a chance of getting anything right. And that “prayer” of a chance is precisely what I do have. For me the Bible comes in a Spirit-filled community and is guaranteed to me not by the factual content of the text, on which I may change my mind in the next several seconds, but rather on the Spirit and the community with all the gifts and wisdom that God can give us. Even so I know that we will be in error from time to time.

    But even more importantly, I think we spend most of our times in the questionable areas, things on which we can quite reasonably disagree, while most of our actual problems come in areas on which we know what is right, and yet aren’t doing it. But again, that’s another point.

  • Pope Benedict XVI on Creation-Evolution Controversy

    My sister e-mail me a link to this article on to me via e-mail.

    Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries — particularly the United States and his native Germany — between creationism and evolution was an “absurdity,” saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

    The pontiff, speaking as he was concluding his holiday in northern Italy, also said that while there is much scientific proof to support evolution, the theory could not exclude a role by God.

    Now while I agree that there is much evidence for evolution (I think “scientific proof” is a poor use of terms), I have to say that I don’t think the debate is an absurdity. For folks like Dr. Kurt Wise (author of Faith, Form, and Time, who believes as an article of his faith that he must take Genesis 1-11 as accurate scientifically and historically, it does make a difference. I might call him bullheaded, but I shouldn’t call him stupid. Given that one assumption, the debate isn’t absurd, because from his point of view, the Bible must be false if evolutionary theory is true.

    I don’t have that same problem, because I don’t understand the Bible as a whole, or Genesis 1-11 in particular in the same way that he does. Yet while I continue to have a very low regard for scientific arguments in favor of young earth creationism, as I’ve indicated in several recent articles, and I object to young earth creationists identifying their one interpretation of Genesis as “the Christian faith,” it is obviously quite possible for people with substantial IQs to disagree.

    From the point of view of Catholic Biblical interpretation, it may, in fact, be absurd to come to a problem. I know that my wife, who was raised Catholic, never even saw this as an issue. I lack the knowledge of Catholic doctrine to comment intelligently on that fit. One assumes that Pope Benedict does not suffer from that deficiency, and that one can take his statement that the argument is absurd from that perspective as fairly definitive.

    The primary debate, however, is not between Catholic theologians. It is rather between Christian fundamentalists and some conservative evangelicals and other protestants for the most part. And there we have a simple divide.

    Tim LaHaye, in his book How to Study the Bible for Yourself states as his first rule of hermeneutics (p. 159), “Take the Bible literally.” In my copy of his book I have circled that statement and simply written “WRONG!” And there’s the key point of the debate. I don’t like the literal-figurative continuum as a single way of discussing how to take Biblical meaning. I prefer to discuss the types of literature involved, and what one might expect to get from those particular forms. As commonly understood, however, “literal” generally means “in the most concrete sense possible,” thus suggesting 7 literal 24 hour days, and accurate recording of all generations in the genealogies, for example. “Taking the Bible literally” in that sense of the word will result in support for young earth creationism.

    The controversy is real, and not absurd, however shocking certain positions in it may seem to any one of us.