Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Biblical Inerrancy

  • Interpreting the Bible II: Excursus on the Plain Sense

    I want to tie up a few loose ends in my first post on this series as well as point out some things on which I will need to comment further. In particular, I read this post by John Hobbins that references a post by Wayne Leman regarding complementarianism and the “plain sense” of scripture. I want to distinguish what I mean by “obvious exegesis” from the idea of “plain sense” and define what I would mean by either one. One should note, of course, that what I mean by those terms may differ from the way others use similar terms.

    One might ask why I would bring in a second controversial topic when I started with evolution. Here, at least, there is a method to my madness. I think it’s very important to check out methods of interpretation by applying them to other texts and other topics. Very often we change our approach to interpretation when the topic or text changes–always a bad sign.

    I recall one online discussion about plain text of scripture in which the texts were limited to the Sermon on the Mount. The individual with whom I was discussing started with Matthew 5:33-37. He told me I was in violation because I said I would take an oath as a juror, or in the unlikely event I took a public office.

    No discussion worked, even to the point of getting him to understand the possibility that someone else might understand the application of the text differently. He appealed to the “plain sense,” and after several rounds of discussion defined this as the way an average American high school student would understand the text.

    So I pointed him to Matthew 5:29-30 in which Jesus says to pluck out your right eye if it offends, or to cut off your hand. How would the average high school student understand that command? Now he had a very complex explanation which involved fulfillment of the command through the willingness to face martyrdom for one’s faith–a much more allegorical explanation than my view that 33-37 is a hyperbolic way of saying “Just tell the truth!”

    One point here is that the “plain sense,” however defined, is very often not all that plain, and the way in which one comes to a “plain sense” in one text may differ substantially from the way in which one discovers it in another.

    But further, the idea of plain sense is not the same as what I mean here by “obvious exegesis.” People have very little patience for distinguishing between the historical meaning of a text and it’s application, but the distinction is important. These terms are not always used consistently, but I’m using “exegesis” to refer to that historical meaning, or more precisely the meaning of the original author to his or her audience.

    That historical meaning is much easier to discern than is the application, but even so, one of the main points of this series is that it is not only difficult to define, such as whether one goes into the prehistory of a redacted text, but difficult to achieve once you’ve chosen the precise target. It simply isn’t always all that obvious what an ancient text means.

    Application, which is usually in view when one hears “plain sense,” is even more complex than is the historical meaning. The fact is that one cannot keep all the commands in scripture. Many of them are obviously intended for particular times, but even amongst the rest there are many commands that do not work well together, or which we would even regard as evil, such as the death penalty for sabbath breaking.

    This isn’t exactly a new problem, invented by modernist or liberal Christians (perhaps like me?) who want to avoid following the Bible, but don’t want to admit it. Acts 15 describes an early church conference at which the discussion was precisely about what commands would apply to what people, particularly gentiles. In 1 Corinthians, starting with chapter 8, Paul expresses a somewhat different theology on the issue. The arguments all around might be very similar to modern ones. One side might well have relied on the plain sense of scripture, while the other relied more on theological nuances.

    Now the topic of John Hobbins’ and Wayne Leman’s posts, the complementarian vs egalitarian debate, is a good test case. Let me limit myself to Paul as an illustration.

    There are egalitarians who believe Paul was actually an egalitarian, and that there are good explanations for all of his comments that make them consistent with egalitarianism. There are those who believe that Paul personally had a problem with women, but that egalitarianism is nonetheless the correct theological position today.

    Complementarians generally would regard Paul as supportive of their position, but this depends to large extent on the idea that we today should do the same thing as Paul did in this particular case.

    When I discussed my own position (very egalitarian), I cited Galatians 3:28, “no more . . . male or female” in support of my position. Do I think Paul intends here to support an egalitarian position? If so, why does he elsewhere forbid women to teach?

    The fact is that I don’t think Paul is an egalitarian, or that he intends to support egalitarianism here. I think he got pretty close to erasing the Jew or Greek boundary, and probably anticipated seeing slave or free become equal in practice. I doubt he thought of a day when women would be pastors on an equal basis with men.

    So how can I be egalitarian and also claim to give any authority to the Bible? Well, there are certainly many things that I think were appropriate for a particular time or place, but are not appropriate for others. What Paul taught in his pastoral messages to his churches is not good advice for he 21st century.

    So I’m arrogant enough to put myself above Paul? Well, yes, in the sense that I live in the 21st century, and he most definitely didn’t. I get to look at my situation and my time and try to apply the principles that come from the gospel to what I find here.

    I think Paul glimpsed this, and points to it in passages such as Galatians 3:28 or Romans 16:7 when he calls Junia as apostle. But the path to that application is nothing like direct, and nothing that I think anyone would define as the “plain sense.”

    I believe it permits me to express the historical meaning without having to bend it to modern practice, while at the same time letting the gospel guide me beyond the word to a more appropriate application today.

    In conclusion, let me reiterate that my point here is not to provide a substantial support for any particular position but rather to show that Biblical interpretation, from historical meaning to current application is much more complex in practice than most people believe, and that this complexity is not something new.

    In later posts I will provide further examples of cases in which multiple and perhaps odd interpretations of scripture have been made within scripture itself and in the history of the church. I also want to discuss both the definition of inerrancy and its application in interpretation.

  • Adrian and Dave Warnock on the Atonement

    So far as I know, no, they’re not related.

    Adrian is concerned with the suggestion that anything in the Bible might be culturally conditioned. Wake up and smell the coffee, Adrian! Practically all of Hebrew scriptures is about leading people from here to there. The narrative is built around the exodus, about physically moving from here to there, and then that becomes a metaphor for spirituality. On what basis would one imagine that what God taught them would be anything other than culturally conditioned?

    But there is explicit scripture for this as well:

    I also gave them statutes that were not good, and judgments by which they could not live. — Ezekiel 20:25, my translation

    The whole context of that verse is worth studying, as is the entire book of Ezekiel. In fact, looking at Ezekiel and Jeremiah as they deal with the Babylonian exile is a theological exercise well worth the time. The exile did not occur with its theological context all ready to go. These prophets, and 2nd Isaiah after them, had to build that context in the people’s mind. The success of this enterprise is demonstrated by the survival of Judaism.

    I think Paul reflects this somewhat with his concept of the law as a schoolmaster (Galatians 3:24). God’s revelation is not always intended to be eternal in the form in which it was given. Even Jesus, God in the flesh, had a temporal context in which he spoke and acted.

    Dave Warnock, however, responds to this in somewhat more detail and with some excellent scriptures. I commend his post, Sub-Biblical arguments against Steve Chalke to you for study and thought.

    Now that you did that (you did go and read Dave’s post, right?) let me just comment that one doesn’t honor scripture by pretending it is something it is not, and was never intended to be. One honors scripture, I believe, by taking it as it is, as much as one is able.

  • 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.

  • The Bible Does Not Contain Science

    Jason Rosenhouse has a post at EvolutionBlog responding to an essay by Owen Gingerich in Frye’s Is God a Creationist?.

    In that essay, Gingerich makes some interesting claims, suggesting some special advance information provided by God in the words of Genesis 1. Rosenhouse quite correctly comments and then asks:

    It’s people like Gingerich I don’t understand. He cherry picks two verses that he wants us to take very seriously. In verse three we find that God begins by creating light, and, hey!, that’s kind of like what modern cosmology says. Then he turns to the end of the stroy and tells us we should ruminate on the verse that asserts we were created in the image of God.

    And the twenty-three verses in between? Where the Bible enumerates, in great detail, a sequence of events that is utterly fictitious? Well, just ignore that part.

    And right there is my major problem with several approaches to apologetics in Genesis 1-11. There is a common thread of trying to preserve the idea that God somehow provided scientific knowledge ahead of time, and described the origin of the universe in ways that would not have been known to the ancient world in which this literature first appeared.

    Sometimes, as in young earth creationism, interpreters take Genesis at face value as narrative history (I discuss what I believe the actual genre is here, and then demand that reality conform to their view. When reality fails to play nice, they simply deny it, or claim that in the future we will find out they were right all along.

    At other times, old earth creationists try to find ways of reconciling the statements of the first 11 chapters of Genesis with science, not in the strict sense of scientifically worded statements, but in the sense that as a narrative history, they don’t contradict science. Rather, they can be viewed symbolically as going along.

    Finally, we have the approach of Gingerich, which is to claim glimpses of great scientific ideas in the prose of the chapter. Admittedly, this requires reading past a great deal, and requires some imagination, but that has not prevented numerous people from trying and from publishing what they believe they have found.

    When I deny scientific content in Genesis, I am frequently confronted by someone who has read somewhere how closely aligned Genesis is with science, and they will point to some area of agreement. But these areas of agreement, even if one has the imagination to accept them in the first place, are very small, very narrow, and are surrounded by areas that are puzzling at best from the scientific perspective.

    I would apply here a standard I demand in comparative literature and comparative religion: Compare both the similarities and the differences. I also use a related requirement to search out what is regarded as critical within either the piece of literature or the religion in question. For example, to an evangelical Christian who believes firmly in salvation by grace received through faith, and regards that as central to his faith, the fact that another religion teaches love is only a minor point of similarity. It doesn’t make the two religions equal.

    So in comparing Genesis 1 and 2 to science, it is not valid so simply list points of contact without also listing points of dissimilarity. One interesting thing here is that those who point out that “let there be light” is in one of many ways similar to the big bang do not also note the spirit of God, or God’s wind moving across the waters before the light appears. One has to posit a strange mix of symbol and literal physical data to make this work.

    When Genesis is compared to scientific data as we know it on a broad basis, looking for both similarities and dissimilarities, it doesn’t come out so well. In addition to looking at both, it’s a good idea to look for accidental similarities, such as information that would be common knowledge anywhere. A reference to sunrise and sunset in two distant cultures would not be regarded as evidence that they had communicated, for example, because both would have observed the same phenomenon.

    To support the claim that the Bible contains science, one would need to find statements of physical fact stated in a well defined and testable way, in other words, statements made the way scientists might make them. You may believe I am putting too high a standard here, but to use such a thing as evidence one must eliminate other explanations, especially more plausible ones.

    If one thinks that the “waters” in Genesis 1:2 make some sort of statement of the place of H2O in chemistry, an implausible suggestion on its face, one should also consider the place of the waters or the deep in related ancient near eastern creation myths. Is it more probable to assume that the statement came from an unknown chemistry, or that God chose to cryptically convey information, information that would not be recognized until it was discovered in other ways, or that the waters here come from the same pool of mythological symbols used throughout the ancient near east?

    For me, this issue settled into place when I started to read this material in the context of ancient near eastern literature. It is not surprising that even one of my professors in graduate school, a Seventh-day Adventists school and fairly strong on young earth creationism and associated interpretation, was extremely concerned that I would not see Genesis as coming directly from God in its current form.

    Reading Genesis as ancient near eastern literature worked. It fit. I didn’t have to explain numerous loose ends. It was also something that the original hearer and/or readers might well have understood. There really wasn’t anything left to explain.

    Over time I learned to read Genesis again as theology, and specifically as theology suited to its time. It expresses, in the context of ancient near eastern cosmology, the relationship between God and the universe. Even that expression is time and culture related.

    Now I don’t expect atheists to like my position that much better. I know that they generally look down on views of inspiration that don’t result in error free texts with hard knowledge. After all, why couldn’t God get it right? But I think a better question is why would God get it “right” in that sense?

    Spirituality involves communion with God, and the Bible reflects that communion as experienced by my community and its antecedents. Every piece of scientific information people claim to have gotten from the Bible can be found elsewhere, better expressed, and more reliable. But as a Christian this is the core of the experience of my community.

    That doesn’t provide me with the means to convince others that my (or our) scriptures are better than others. That would have to work through the lens of the community. But the attempt to find scientific data is sure to be a failure.

    Doubtless the Bible will get some facts about the physical universe right, but unless those facts are more than incidental, they demonstrate nothing, and high claims for them can only result in a negative judgment on the text in which they are found.

  • Discernment and Revelation

    Yesterday I wrote a post regarding judging revelation by means of reason, and in particular pointed out that one of the problems I see with Biblical inerrancy is that it cannot be demonstrated in this fashion.

    In a failed attempt at being brief I failed to underline that this is only one of my many objections to inerrancy, or that this objection is only applicable to certain approaches. It seems to me that when one can pick up a book attempting to reconcile errors in the Bible so as to demonstrate its inerrancy, it is appropriate to object to the process on the basis that there is no adequate standard to use in the task.

    There are those who take inerrancy as a presupposition, but does it not seem odd to take “this book is without error” as an axiom in one’s thinking and build all else from there? And if one has done so is it not a bit odd to then go about comparing the scripture with historical research in order to demonstrate what has been taken as an axiom? (‘Axiom’ and ‘presupposition’ are not quite synonymous, but are close enough for my purposes here.) That is a large topic, and I’m going to leave it for later.

    At the moment my concern is that my critique of that one approach means that I think it’s the only one, and that it has failed. In other words, if I think reason is inadequate on its own to determine whether God is speaking, or whether something is divine or demonic (think Tillich’s definition of these terms, though I don’t have his Systematic Theology on hand to quote, I think I found the right passage on page 226ff of volume 1 via Google Book Search.)

    This is especially important because Peter Kirk has broadened the discussion to discernment in the wider sense, such as testing Todd Bentley’s ministry, and I would hate to be understood as saying that such discernment is impossible. I do think that the fact that I disagree to a significant extent with Peter about Todd Bentley, though not as much as some others, indicates that discernment is not an easy subject to pin down.

    I’d like to point back to this post, which deals with discernment, as well as the Biblical Inspiration tag on my Participatory Bible Study Blog.

    For those who will go so far as to buy books (stop reading now to avoid gentle commercial announcement), I discuss these issues in my books When People Speak for God and Identifying Your Gifts and Service: Small Group Edition dealing with spiritual gifts in general but with substantial discussion of testing and authority. (End commercial, you can start reading again!)

    The key point I would like to make in this hopefully short post is that discernment, inspiration, revelation, and related issues are not simple, and we must approach them carefully and with–dare I say it?–discernment!

  • Using Reason to Judge Revelation

    One of my objections to inerrancy is that it is impossible to demonstrate. Lacking a perfect standard external to the Bible and also lacking perfect understanding, we are unable to actually demonstrate that the Bible is, in fact, without error. Some apologists seem to believe that if we just apply the right set of standards to all the literature before us, the Bible will stand out as inspired and inerrant as opposed to all other claimants.

    The problem is that if God reveals something to you that you cannot know in any other way, by what means do you determine that it is true?

    Previously I have written that determined what is an authoritative, inspired source is defined within a community, rather than in some externally objective fashion. Thus if one wanted to compare the revelations of Christianity and Islam, the Bible and the Qur’an respectively, one would need to compare the communities rather than the books. In practice the books are defined and judged by the communities involved. That sort of comparison is a daunting task, and neither of these communities (nor any others I know of) consistently seem to come out well. There is always the “everybody’s human” dodge, but that only makes it harder.

    Christopher Smith discusses some issues related to this in his post Some Objections to Newman’s Anti-Rationalist Polemics. There his main concern is applying our conscience to scripture. For example, what does one do about commands to genocide in scripture? This is a question closely related to my current series on theodicy.

    Referring to Newman’s claim that scripture is not to be judged by its contents, but rather by its credentials (an iffy proposition, to say the least!), Chris says:

    The kind of thinking described above may resolve the problem of divinely-ordained genocide in the Old Testament for the Bible inerrantist, but it also resolves the problem of divinely-ordained unbeliever-killing for the Muslim Brother. And of course, Newman applied it selectively. . . .

    I would add that if anything God commands is right by virtue of the fact that God commands it, a variation on this same statement, then how can one possibly tell the difference between divine and demonic? This is a major reason that I often equivocate (or some would probably use less charitable words) on the revelation aspect of scripture and dwell heavily on the experiential aspect. I tend to see scripture as a record of experience with God, revelatory in the sense that I judge it to be experience of the divine, but not in the sense that it provides extraordinary information that could not be acquired otherwise.

    Now there must be revelation in there if people are experiencing God, but we have a very imperfect idea of what is divine revelation and what is part of what we bring to the table. On the key question here, acts of God which seem to be morally reprehensible, I would say that we need to ask just how much of all of that was what God brought to the table, and how much was the result of what humans brought with them.

    I would submit that even when we have come through an experience that we say has profoundly changed us, we have only been changed a little at a time.

    Chris starts his concluding paragraph thus:

    Reason, of course, can lead people to differing beliefs, as well. I do not claim that reason is perfect, pure, or easy to use. . . .

    Good point, and that’s why we constantly put things to the test, both of reason and of experience. When someone comes out and says, “God told me to injure or kill people for no valid reason,” we can know that it’s wrong, and by definition, if wrong, it is not God.

  • On Being a True Believer

    I’ve been thinking of writing this ever since I read Joe Carter’s post Plagued by Certainty, but I haven’t really had the time. You see, while there are certainly many things regarding which I disagree with Joe Carter, I find a certain resonance with his claim of certainty in matters of faith.

    This certainty does not extend to the full list, nor has it remained unquestioned throughout my life. Rather, I would call myself a true believer not because I have always been convinced, nor because I have a growing belief, but rather because I have made the maximum effort to disbelieve, and come up a failure.

    (more…)

  • Inerrancy: Nuance or Discard?

    Through a Glass Darkly has a good note titled Nuancing Inerrancy as a follow-up to this post on Ancient Hebrew Poetry. I’m not sure what order to read them in; just read them. (There are more links to follow!)

    I would add only that I have a hard time using the term “inerrancy” in this way, because it only means what these gentlemen say it does to a relatively small group of people. Now the small group includes generally those most expert on the topic, but if you go to just about any church and say “inerrancy” this is not what the people will understand you to be saying.

    That’s the problem with words–people use them, and they change. Thus while I applaud the definition, and will jump on the bandwagon if any signs of movement occur, that doesn’t seem likely at least where I work.

  • Biblical Inerrancy and Evolution

    It’s very easy to equate the creation-evolution debate amongst Christians with the inerrancy debate. Many assume that those who accept the theory of evolution will automatically reject inerrancy. But this is not the case. This confusion results from another incorrect equation–Biblical inerrancy with Biblical literalism.

    Biblical literalism is itself a difficult concept to get ahold of. In popular usage, “taking it literally” is often equated with taking it seriously. But the most common form of Biblical literalism means taking the Biblical text as the most concrete form of literature possible. This is expressed, for example, by Tim LaHaye in chapter 11 of his book How to Study the Bible for Yourself as: “A good rule to follow is try to interpret each passage literally. If this is obviously not the case, then as a last resort try to find the spiritual or symbolical [sic] truth it is communicating.” What this means in practice is that a Biblical passage gets interpreted as a form of literature that can be taken literally.

    Let’s take the book of Jonah, for example. To the literalist it appears to relate a series of events, and one can take it as a true story. Jonah did flee in a ship, get swallowed by a great fish, preach in Nineveh, and convert the entire population to the worship of Israel’s God. A non-literalist, on the other hand, can consider that the book might be a fictional story written to make a point. Thus it could express certain teachings, such as a willingness to show grace to foreigners, even if the actual events of the story did not happen.

    To illustrate this from a modern perspective, consider the difference between a historical account of a battle, a historical novel based on the events of the same battle, and a romance set in the time period of the battle. The first intends to tell you what happened in the battle. It may be in error on various points, depending on the quality of the research and what information was available, but its point is to relate a series of events accurately. The historical novel, on the other hand, does not purport to report events strictly as they happened in the actual battle. It may invent actions for lead characters, or attribute historical actions to fictional characters in the novel. It might be intended to portray the feelings of soldiers involved, or even to give a picture of the events based on history, but with more of a personal feel than the available information permits. The romance, finally, may be authentic in terms of costumes, attitudes, places, and connections to historical events, but is much more loosely tied to actual history.

    The Bible is a collection of literature of various types, and thus the interpreter is called upon to determine just what type of literature is involved with each reader. I cannot object strongly enough to LaHaye’s idea that you try to take it literally if at all possible. The first step is to ask what type of literature any particular passage is. If one interpreted a historical novel as though it was a work of history, then one might expect to find things like the home of the lead character in the place where the novel indicates the character lived. But one would be disappointed.

    So how does this relate to inerrancy? Inerrancy itself means different things to different people. But the standard definition amongst theologians can be summarized as “the Bible is without error in what it intends to convey.” Now if you think about it a moment, “fiction” is not “error.” Rather, it is intentionally written as it is for a purpose. Thus if a Biblical writer chooses to express a message in the form of fiction, as is indubitably done in the parable of the trees (Judges 9:7-15), that is certainly not an error–it is the intent.

    The assumption that a belief in inerrancy involves some sort of literalism thus results in some considerable confusion. In the area of origins, this involes assumptions regarding the interpretation of Genesis, especially chapters 1 & 2, assumptions that divide interpretations into two categories: 100% accurate narrative history vs an interesting ancient story that got it all wrong. In fact, most interpretations of Genesis fall somewhere between these extremes.

    Amongst these options are some kind of symbolic meaning, usually associated with Old Earth creationism. In this case, Genesis generally presents creation in phases without getting picky about chronology or other details. Just how picky one can get will vary with the interpreter. Then there is my own interpretation which suggests that Genesis 1:1-2:4a is a form of liturgy, while Genesis 2:4b-25-4:26 is a form closely related to myth. These are designed to express the relationship of humanity to God in the context of an ancient near eastern culture, and their cosmology. A similar relationship can be expressed in a modern cosmology, something I think Dr. Richard Colling has accomplished in his book Random Designer; I blogged on the specific point here.

    As I understand inerrancy, someone who accepts that doctrine could accept either of these two alternatives. In fact, I’ve discussed my position on evolution with a friend who does accept Biblical inerrancy, and he indicated that the difference between my view and his does not involve Biblical inerrancy. If he found me convincing on other grounds, his belief in inerrancy would not prevent him from accepting the conclusions I express about origins (in general, that is).

    Why am I concerned about this, since I do not accept the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy? I would like debates to center on actual issues between those debating. The confusion between literalism, in the form of taking literature in as concrete a manner as possible, and inerrancy, as believing the text contains its intended message without error is unnecessary and unproductive.

  • The Human Face of Scripture

    Psalm 137 came up in the lectionary for this week. Now there was a time when we would get this Psalm at least with the final verse left out. That verse reads “Blessed is the one who seizes your little ones and dashes them against a rock.” One should understand, of course, that this was a Psalm about/by Jewish exiles in Babylon, and that the Babylonians had done precisely that sort of thing to them. One strong element of the Psalm is revenge.

    I was teaching a class on the Old Testament, drawn from the book Who’s Afraid of the Old Testament God? once, and I asked people in the class whether they would feel the way the Psalm describes if someone had come into their community and killed their children. Would they want their attackers to suffer the same fate?

    Person after person in the audience expressed their desire to be forgiving, and their disapproval of the attitude expressed in the Psalm. Then one lady, a grandmother, interrupted the flow. “I think many of us are lying to ourselves,” she said. “I would feel bad that I wanted it, because I know what Jesus said, but I would want them to suffer the same fate.”

    Several people changed their minds. That one lady had given them some cover to be honest with themselves. The fact is that Psalm 137 is a very human Psalm, and a very real Psalm. It makes us uncomfortable, but I believe part of that discomfort is that we know that those feelings are not far from many of us.

    Does this justify a search for vengeance? That’s another matter. It is an expression of the true desires. Perhaps what we need to do when we have such feelings is express them and then seek the grace to forgive. That’s another subject. My point right now is that the Psalm expresses who we are.

    This Psalm makes me think about what the Bible actually is. I’m amazed at how frequently we decide what the Bible ought to be, and then try to force it to be whatever it is we think it ought to be. But we have the Bible itself and we can observe that it doesn’t fit these prescriptions we make for what it must be. People decide it must contain hard information sent from God by means of verbal dictation. Humanity should not have any real involvement. A little personality here and there, but no impact on the actual message.

    But in fact the Bible displays a range of human attitudes, emotions, cultural baggage, and even mental capacity. God’s commands are not merely God’s commands; they are what people heard God commanding them to do. And communication is limited to the capacities of the least capable end of the line. Scripture displays both a human and a divine face. (See The One-Ended Cord.)

    I also recently read a post titled Minimising mistakes in the Bible (or not). This is a good discussion of a minor Biblical error. The “error” a problem for inerrantists, who have to find a way to work around it. I would suggest, however, that it’s a natural part of the human face of scripture. The message comes through clearly, while there is a minor glossing over of fact.

    People often assume that I don’t believe in inerrancy because I have a long list of errors in the Bible. But that is not my problem with the doctrine at all. For those who want to ask me for my list, I don’t have one. I’ve encountered many things that I put down to “the human face of scripture,” but I don’t keep lists of them, because to me they are not very important. I suppose that if I did not reject inerrancy on other grounds, such a list might become important to me. But as it is, I think inerrancy simply misses the point of a communication between a perfect God and imperfect (or at least limited) human beings. Such a communication is simply much more dynamic than can be described in the phrase “error-free.”

    Scripture is divine, because it involves communication with God. It’s human because it is communicated through and to humans. Because it is what it is it requires careful and prayerful–Holy Spirit guided–interpretation and application, accomplished, of course, by humans, who are hopefully aware of their own limitations.