Went camping this weekend, so this weeks blog will be somewhat short. I had a good friend of mine ask me recently "What percentage would you say you should take the Bible literally?" This is an excellent question, but one you can't really answer with percentages, though to be honest it also very much depends on what you mean by "literal." If by literal you mean "take the plain meaning from the words on the page," the answer is you should never, ever take the Bible literally. What is plain to us living in urbanized secular 21st century America would not remotely be plain to a desert-roaming beduin tribe, as a for instance. The ancients understood the world through lenses radically different from ours and it is those understandings that are built into Scripture.
Take an email that you sent off last week. That email is very grounded in your cultural worldview. We live in a civilization that has benefited from many, many years of scientific and philosophical developments. We can talk about evolution, the 9-11 tragedy, and the Big Bang theory amongst zillions of others without any further explanation. If I translate that email into perfect Taiwanese and show it to a farmer or rancher who has had no exposure to Western culture, that person is at best going to just hazard a guess as to what is going on. If this email is important enough to them, they will actually manufacture the meaning using their own cultural concepts, thus replacing what the author wanted to convey.
This is what we do with Scripture. We take our own culture and manufacture meaning. This is why we can't read Scripture literally if we want to take Scripture seriously at all. To give a salient example, the ancients had a very agrarian understanding of procreation. A man had his seed and when he copulated the seed (literally sperma in Greek) would be implanted in the woman who would either be fertile or infertile. There was no understanding that the woman contributes any genetic material because they are basically just surrogates; all the genetics comes 100% from the male. This is why ancestry was so incredibly important, you were your ancestor. Who you are as a person is absolutely bound up with who your ancestor was; you're basically a variation of them. This is also why Jesus can be God's son and still be God Himself.
So you see, even something as monumentally important to Christianity like the Incarnation was still described and understood in the terms and concepts of the people at that time - in fact that's how God always works. He works with the understandings of His children for His redemptive purposes, not against them. Taking the birth of Christ, however, in the way we usually do manufactures a different meaning than what the author intended. If we do that, we are creating our own Scripture and in my opinion are involved in worship of the self, not God.
Still, can I take some of the Bible and does the plain meaning then match the plain meaning now? Yes, lots of times. Do not murder, Love your neighbor as yourself, among numerous others. However, these things cannot be answered with a percentage. When to take something literally as opposed to figuratively is ultimately a question of Biblical genre...i.e. what kind of writing is it? That question we will save for next time.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Thursday, August 4, 2011
The Bible (we were gonna talk about it sooner or later)
Been having a large number of issues come up concerning the Christian Bible lately, so I thought this would be a good blog topic for this week. Apparently because a lake in Texas has turned blood red due to algae there's an idiot out there quoting Revelation, a book that only barely made it into the canon of Christian Scripture and is certainly one of the most difficult books of the Bible to muddle through (probably one of the reasons it only barely made it in).
So here's the playing field here in America today. On the right we have what seems to be Christianity, holding that the Bible is the direct, inerrant and infallible Word of God. To disobey the Bible is to disobey God Himself. On the left we have the rest of society who see that literally interpreting the Bible winds up with people without tattoos or women's rights while also making the favorite method of punishment being stoned to death. Seeing these things as really rather backward and thus damaging to many people (plus tattoos rock!) intelligent secularists will usually try to undermine the Bible's authority by asking questions of authenticity. The usual suspects are questions of authorship, i.e. whether one person wrote a book and was recording what was given to him or whether it was compiled by a much later person using barely remembered stories and myths of that culture, or questions of copyist accuracy, i.e. whether these books look the same after several thousand years of human copying by hand.
Here's my issue...the Bible never refers to itself as a rule book, so it does little good to follow it like one or undermine it. The school math textbook was written by someone other than Albus B. Numberaddition! Numberaddition was assembling the the math theories of those before him! The subtraction problems were changed in the new edition! These arguments bear no real weight on teaching book. Not only does the Bible look nothing like a book of statutes, being full of songs, short tidbits of wisdom, personal letters, and stories, but it actually never has any understanding that it's Divine legal code. The only understanding the Bible has of itself is that it is teaching not rules.
"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" 2 Tim 3:16
"For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope." Romans 15:4
Take the word "Torah." Previously considered to mean "law" by many previous Christians, many scholars now understand it to mean "instruction" or "teaching", which makes sense because God who gave Torah became a teacher when He became incarnate, or so Christians usually hold. Even Leviticus, the most rule oriented book in the Bible has been described as continuing "the genre of the Pentateuch as a whole - that is, primarily instructional history." (Longman & Dillard, Intro to the Old Testament, Zondervan (2006) p. 83)
You see the entire point is not that there is a one-to-one correlation between what the Bible says and how we should act. The point is to know how people interacted with God and each other then so we can have a good idea of how to interact with God and each other now. To pretend we can take the writings of a culture that existed at least 2000 years ago with no attempt to know in what context they were writing them isn't God worship, its book-worship.
The problem lies in the phrase, "the Bible is the Word of God." First, the Reformers themselves did not understand the Bible to be word for word from God himself - that comes generations after Luther and Calvin through conflicts with Catholicism.
"But this does not mean (Luther) was a rigid biblicist, for what he understood by the 'Word of God' was more than the written word in the Bible...The Bible declares that, strictly speaking, the Word of God is none other than God the Son who was made flesh and dwelt among us...Given this biblical understanding of the Word of God, what makes the Bible the word of God is not that it is infallible, nor that it can serve as a source of authority...The Bible is the Word of God because in it, Jesus, the Word Incarnate, comes to us." Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity Vol. 2., HarperSanFrancisco (1985) pp. 29-30
The question during the Reformation is what vehicle is best for getting at Christ - the Church or Scripture. Indeed, Biblically speaking many perfectly orthodox scholars see no evidence within the Bible itself the belief that God authored it. It has God's words in it, but is itself not God's direct inerrant Word. Personally I cannot find a theological institution that taught that the Bible is word for word from God Himself until the 1820's and it did not receive open attention until decades later.
So here's where I am: I respectfully disagree with those who will say that the Bible is made up, that the miracles of Jesus are metaphor or whatever else you want to toss into the pot. I entirely agree with their motivations, however. Katrina didn't happen because God hates gays, liberals, or even bottled soda it happened because this country is two steps away from being a bunch of Pharisees for Jesus. The people that worship him now are the very ones who would've nailed him up on the cross in the first place! IN WHAT STATE IS CHRISTENDOM WHEN GOD HAS TO USE THE ATHEISTS TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM MAKING THE BIBLE INTO IDOL?!
(actually Katrina happened due to a combination of Atlantic storm cells, crappy dikes, and a bunch of people who willingly lived below sea-level, but you get the idea)
So here's the playing field here in America today. On the right we have what seems to be Christianity, holding that the Bible is the direct, inerrant and infallible Word of God. To disobey the Bible is to disobey God Himself. On the left we have the rest of society who see that literally interpreting the Bible winds up with people without tattoos or women's rights while also making the favorite method of punishment being stoned to death. Seeing these things as really rather backward and thus damaging to many people (plus tattoos rock!) intelligent secularists will usually try to undermine the Bible's authority by asking questions of authenticity. The usual suspects are questions of authorship, i.e. whether one person wrote a book and was recording what was given to him or whether it was compiled by a much later person using barely remembered stories and myths of that culture, or questions of copyist accuracy, i.e. whether these books look the same after several thousand years of human copying by hand.
Here's my issue...the Bible never refers to itself as a rule book, so it does little good to follow it like one or undermine it. The school math textbook was written by someone other than Albus B. Numberaddition! Numberaddition was assembling the the math theories of those before him! The subtraction problems were changed in the new edition! These arguments bear no real weight on teaching book. Not only does the Bible look nothing like a book of statutes, being full of songs, short tidbits of wisdom, personal letters, and stories, but it actually never has any understanding that it's Divine legal code. The only understanding the Bible has of itself is that it is teaching not rules.
"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness" 2 Tim 3:16
"For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope." Romans 15:4
Take the word "Torah." Previously considered to mean "law" by many previous Christians, many scholars now understand it to mean "instruction" or "teaching", which makes sense because God who gave Torah became a teacher when He became incarnate, or so Christians usually hold. Even Leviticus, the most rule oriented book in the Bible has been described as continuing "the genre of the Pentateuch as a whole - that is, primarily instructional history." (Longman & Dillard, Intro to the Old Testament, Zondervan (2006) p. 83)
You see the entire point is not that there is a one-to-one correlation between what the Bible says and how we should act. The point is to know how people interacted with God and each other then so we can have a good idea of how to interact with God and each other now. To pretend we can take the writings of a culture that existed at least 2000 years ago with no attempt to know in what context they were writing them isn't God worship, its book-worship.
The problem lies in the phrase, "the Bible is the Word of God." First, the Reformers themselves did not understand the Bible to be word for word from God himself - that comes generations after Luther and Calvin through conflicts with Catholicism.
"But this does not mean (Luther) was a rigid biblicist, for what he understood by the 'Word of God' was more than the written word in the Bible...The Bible declares that, strictly speaking, the Word of God is none other than God the Son who was made flesh and dwelt among us...Given this biblical understanding of the Word of God, what makes the Bible the word of God is not that it is infallible, nor that it can serve as a source of authority...The Bible is the Word of God because in it, Jesus, the Word Incarnate, comes to us." Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity Vol. 2., HarperSanFrancisco (1985) pp. 29-30
The question during the Reformation is what vehicle is best for getting at Christ - the Church or Scripture. Indeed, Biblically speaking many perfectly orthodox scholars see no evidence within the Bible itself the belief that God authored it. It has God's words in it, but is itself not God's direct inerrant Word. Personally I cannot find a theological institution that taught that the Bible is word for word from God Himself until the 1820's and it did not receive open attention until decades later.
So here's where I am: I respectfully disagree with those who will say that the Bible is made up, that the miracles of Jesus are metaphor or whatever else you want to toss into the pot. I entirely agree with their motivations, however. Katrina didn't happen because God hates gays, liberals, or even bottled soda it happened because this country is two steps away from being a bunch of Pharisees for Jesus. The people that worship him now are the very ones who would've nailed him up on the cross in the first place! IN WHAT STATE IS CHRISTENDOM WHEN GOD HAS TO USE THE ATHEISTS TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM MAKING THE BIBLE INTO IDOL?!
(actually Katrina happened due to a combination of Atlantic storm cells, crappy dikes, and a bunch of people who willingly lived below sea-level, but you get the idea)
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