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So does Leviticus November 10, 2009

Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation.
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Joel’s recent post on the Deuterocanon finished on an amusing note:

Two of the silliest notions about these books are:

  1. The Jews don’t accept them
  2. They teach unChristian doctrines

To number one, I say, and? The Jews don’t accept the New Testament books either. Further, the Jewish canon wasn’t settled until after the New Testament was written – until after the Temple was destroyed.

And number two? So does Leviticus.

And number two? So does Leviticus. Ha! Good stuff, Joel.

Inerrancy leads to distorting God’s character November 1, 2009

Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation.
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Steve drew my attention to Cliff’s post on literal interpretation:

Inerrancy leads to distortions of the character of God. Sometimes, horrendous distortions. A few examples should suffice: In an inerrant Bible, God becomes one who endorses the practice of selling one’s daughters as sex-slaves (Exodus 21:7-11). The God of the Inerrantist commands that children who sass or stubbornly disobey their parents are to be killed for their transgressions (Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21). If God were speaking through Moses in the pages of Numbers 31:9-18, then God followed the pattern of many military conquerors, rewarding soldiers with virgins for their sexual indulgence (or please, Inerrantist, explain what else is going on in these verses!). The God of the Inerrantist was, on occasion, confused about biology, as when he identified rabbits as ruminants in Deuteronomy 14:7. Furthermore, an Inerrantist must view God as sometimes raging out-of-control, one who had to be talked out of venting his rage upon the Israelite nation by the cooler-headed Moses (Exodus 32:7-14). This list could be expanded. We haven’t even ventured beyond the first five books! But my point should be clear by now. Inerrancy is dangerous to a healthy view of God and his character. It leads to theological confusion and distortion.

There’s more good stuff, but I think this is the crux, and a well-said one at that. Thanks, Cliff.

Sin and evolution October 23, 2009

Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation, Evolution and Creation.
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The clayboy, Doug Chaplin, recently wrote a thought-provoking post on original sin and evolution. He entitled it ‘No Adam, No Fall’, because it struggled with the Pauline concept that that Adam’s failure was a decisive moment in history. I’ll be quoting exhaustively, because I loved some of what Doug said.

I note Paul’s method. He re-reads the earlier story in the light of Christ. He does this with most things. I wonder what ways are open to us if we take that method seriously and look at ways of re-reading the whole narrative in the light of Christ, an even more thorough-going move from solution to plight, in the knowledge of creation and evolution that we have subsequently acquired.

I think this is an important thing to realize; Paul’s interpretation of Adam in the light of Christ is something we should attempt to imitate in our own interpretation of the Old Testament. Paul writes many letters, all teaching his followers in the churches how to think theologically, and how to be like Christ. These two things are not entirely separate. But, I think because of the goals of these letters (education), if we disagree with how Paul re-reads the Old Testament, we are not negating God’s inspiration in his letters. Paul wouldn’t have minded if we disagreed with him about Adam, so long as we re-read the fall in the light of Christ. I think the rest of Doug’s provisional thesis is best read in this light.

Sin” (if I may be every bit as anthropomorphic and anachronistic as Richard Dawkins is) is not only in the world long before “Adam”, but is the mechanism whereby Adam’s species can emerge and flourish as the one who is able to name the animals (in increasingly sophisticated taxonomies) and tend to the garden of the earth’s ecosystem (or destroy it).

As regular readers know, I’m a thorough supporter of Rene Girard’s memetic theory as a theory of sin; and of Christ’s sacrifice as a miraculous overcoming of that sin, rather than a satiation of a wrathful God. And hence, I think Doug hits the nail on the head with this: Sin is, in fact, something intrinsic and important to not only our daily lives, but our ancestry, and it is what makes us what we are. We are both very good in the eyes of God (Genesis 1:31), and not (Genesis 2:18).

Creation is what God is about, creating order from chaos, drawing conscious forms of life able to love and praise out of the primordial soup, developing those who will come to find their true selves in the image of the one in whom God encounters his creation. The image of God, revealed in Jesus, is God’s intention for men and women, transcending the selfish gene to live in a self-giving love that mirrors and responds to the love of God.

But, most importantly, God drew us out to overcome this flaw that both made us thrive and (perhaps) disappointed him in us. Through Christ, we can transcend the sin that has made us thrive, we can live in a self-giving love mirror and respond to the love of God. A valuable concept, Doug, and one beautifully put.

Why do I say ‘perhaps’ when it comes to God’s disappointment in us?

…there are indeed those other traditions of the origins of evil in the world which go alongside and beyond the account of Adam, Eve and the serpent. [...] Some of them seem to lay the blame more clearly on God, who makes both darkness and light. I think we need to go back to a fuller exploration of those traditions, and see if they can help enrich our understanding.

I culled a little bit, because I wanted to draw attention to laying the blame more clearly on God. There is certainly testament in scripture to God’s control over both good and evil – and how could there not be, and he still be God? It is something we must live with, if we are to be truly monotheistic in our faith. However, to me this suggests that it is unlikely God was disappointed in us, because that sin that helped us thrive was likely something given to us to overcome. We were made in the image of God, and the eternal presence of sin might be a necessary balance to God’s difficult role as Lord over both good and evil. And yet, God’s to constantly transcend this dual character for good: So too, through Christ, we can transcend our sin, and respond to God’s love.

Thanks for provoking thought, Doug

Tradition and Catholicism in Vanhoozer’s Theses October 21, 2009

Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation.
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I really appreciated a few of Kevin Vanhoozer’s theses as ones that should be better publicised:

7. The Spirit who speaks with magisterial authority in the Scripture speaks with ministerial authority in church tradition.

Now, whilst I’m not sure of the difference between magisterial and ministerial (I’m guessing it’s related to the authority to define doctrine), I think it’s incredibly important to recognize that church tradition does speak with a kind of authority that directly proceeds from God. Hence, it’s not tenable to reject any tradition simply on the grounds that it does not appear in the Bible.

8. In an era marked by the conflict of interpretations, there is good reason provisionally to acknowledge the superiority of catholic interpretation.

I realize that here ‘catholic’ is not capitalized, so I wonder what Vanhoozer’s definition of ‘catholic’ is; but I suggest that the world ‘Catholic’ can be substituted, and be very reasonable, considering that, as one of the interpretations with the longest history, there is certainly good reason to provisionally acknowledge its superiority.

So, now that I’ve revealed my biases, how did you guys interpret these two theses?

Inspiration, Fallibility and Canon October 11, 2009

Posted by Damian in Biblical Exegesis and Interpretation.
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Steve’s response to my two posts on Canon, as well as a few other posts on the general subject, have produced a few new thoughts.

E. Russo said:

…the Bible we have today is filled with all sorts of interpolations, additions, and other errors that clearly shows the handiwork of Man. But, I’m not going to toss it out because it may be theologically, politically, or even historically skewed (which seems like the direction that Ehrman is leaning towards). By realizing our own fallibility we come one step closer to walking a life of humility and love. And with that understanding we can grasp a deeper meaning found buried within the Bible.

What does it matter if the Comma Johanneum was not added until centuries after the closing of the canon? Do we keep it in there for tradition’s sake or just to support our theological views? Should we butcher the Bible like Thomas Jefferson did with his and take out what doesn’t jive with our worldview? And what about the non-canonical texts that the church decided were not divinely inspired? Can we grow spiritually from non-canonical texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Paul, or even the deuterocanonical books in the Catholic bible? If a text is not “divinely inspired” does it carry any worth at all? What then guides us to read, say for instance, the Bible as oppose to the Book of Mormon?

Russo makes some good points here; I certainly think that we can grow spiritually from non-canonical texts. I think Christianity as a whole has established this as a standard belief, from the testimony of the booming Christian publishing industry. The question, rather, is what weight ‘divine inspiration’ really carries. Why is it that we consider the Bible more greatly inspired than other texts? Why are we to believe the bible over other texts? The Weekend Fisher (Steph, I believe?)  points out that:

Ehrman’s work doesn’t list every single piece of early Christian writing, but it does tally up an impressive 42 additional works. If you compare the 27 writings that did make the New Testament with the 42 that Ehrman lists that did not, we find that the church was, actually, fairly selective. If we just work with these two simple numbers — the list that the early church ultimately accepted and the list that Ehrman proposes — we find that the church screened out just over 60% of the proposed writings.

It’s a legitimate question: On what did the early church screen works as being “in” or “out”? But it’s not legitimate to say they weren’t screening.

That is, that something was certainly separating the choices that included our New and Old Testaments in ‘the List’ that became canon. We just don’t always know what it is; one such a characteristic seems to have been apostolic authorship, although not all texts purported to be written by the apostles were included in the canon (there are a number of additional letters of Paul, I believe). If they were indeed chosen according to a theological agenda, we have to be sure that agenda was God’s agenda. Or further, is ‘the List’ even valid if we’re interpreting outside of the agenda that produced it? Christians before this list was made believed other texts were ‘divinely inspired’. What characteristic made the texts on  ’the list’ the only ones that still own that label?

In current language, ‘inspiration’ is pretty general; this post was inspired by Steve, Steph, Russo and Jon. At this moment, I wonder if this is all that that phrase meant: The texts are inspired by God. But it was their theology that made these specific texts special. They were inspired by God and Orthodox. But then, there are plenty of Orthodox texts that did not make it into the New Testament – Didache and the letters of Clement, for example. And certainly, nobody would contend that much of the modern Christian publishing industry deserves to be in the New Testament. Jon Sweeney quoted from an interrogation of St Joan of Arc recently, which made me wonder about the nature of inspiration:

Joan: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.

Robert: They come from your imagination.

Joan: Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.

How does God speak to us? Whilst, I can speak only for myself, I’d tend to agree with Joan. It’s our thoughts; our mind. Steve noted that:

The solution for me lies not only in elevating the Church’s opinion of the extracanonical but in reining in our expectation of canonical authority. If we view the canonical books as divinely influenced rather than as divinely authored literature, I think the need for examining extracanonical literature becomes apparent.

I think Steve might be right; perhaps our solution is not to elevate texts outside the canon, but rather to expect less from the canon itself. The authority, for Steve, seems to be in the List and in the sufficiency of the list. It is not the texts (which are fallible), but rather the list (which is sufficient).

In Judaism, the Torah holds a place of extreme reverence; the rest of the Bible holds a lesser place; and the volumes and volumes of writing on God – agree or disagree with it – holds a place of esteem as well. We could equally hold the extra-canon, and everything written by Christians on the subject of God, in esteem; it’s inspired by God, in a flawed way that I have difficulty distinguishing from the way by which the Bible was inspired.