Some Opening (Rough) Thoughts on the Bible
It seems the only times I get time to post is when my wife is in bed and I am up later, an infrequent thing. But here I am, at only 10:00, been reading about Rob Bell at BW3's site for an hour (and much on homosexuality); a friend gave me Velvet Elvis and I have read a little. The funky format bothers me, but will read more when I can.
So, this little post is not about Rob Bell.
Nor is it a full treatment of the Bible, homosexuality, or any of the other things I have said I would write on here. But is is a beginning. A snapshot of my current struggle/thought.
My understanding of the Bible must begin with how I read the NT. I am no NT scholar, but I know its contents decently well, with maybe a weakness in Hebrews...for some reason I have never gotten around to reading that entire letter. But the four gospels I know, and the epistles, decently. And let me just say this: I think Paul's letters are just that, Paul's letters. Did Paul have a miraculous conversion experience (are they not all miraculous)...sure. Did he actually perform miraculous cures...he claims in the first person to have done so. Did God reveal himself to Paul in some direct way, in short, give him the "gospel" directly as he emphatically states in Galatians? Paul surely believes this, and I have not reason to deny that some kind of special, direct revelation occurred (whether that involved any interaction with the earliest Christian doctrines, the kerygma itself, is open for discussion....Saul thought the Christians were heretics for some reason). But does this mean that every word Paul wrote back to the churches he founded, every letter to support them, encourage them, and address specific concerns, does that mean that GOD wrote each line of those letters, that every bit of advice given and viewpoint taken are Divine? To me, such an assertion is preposterous. It is not only preposterous, the letters themselves neither claim nor support such a view: they reveal an apostle (and those with him) reconstructing the Jewish faith in light of the radical news of the resurrection and the growing reverberations of Jesus' teaching/life-impact. To illustrate this would take some time, and I must assume it has already been done in detail.
To wit: Paul's emphasis on the eschatological eminence of singleness...of (according to my NRSV translation anyway) not marrying one's fiancee because singleness allows to one to focus more directly on the things of God...this is a very personal position. I will say idiosyncratic. It violates, to me, much of what Ben Witherington (a scholar in whom I find much to like even if we disagree on about everything I am going to say in this post, and whose name I have long just typed out as BW3) says about the imago dei as a critical procreative union. Paul really did seem to think Jesus would return within his own generation, or easily could (evidence, if nothing else, that he was utterly convinced of the resurrection and ascension). In light of this, Paul recommends individuals who can remain single do so.
This seems rather odd two millenia later. I am not even so sure the single person can be more focused on the things of God than the married person whether the return of Jesus is immminent or not. My family has had enormous positive spiritual impact on me. In short, Paul was wrong in my opinion. He was expressing a personal perspective, and while he may be right for some, while those words may lead some to lives of tremendous spiritual accomplishment, they surely do not apply to most.
This is one small example. But in fact there are many. BW3 and others in the long threads at his site on Bell are right: the Bible condemns homosexual activity between men in the Torah and between men again in Paul and calls it unnatural, condemns it implicitly (probably, am thinking of Romans 1) for both sexes again in Paul. And I have to echo the quote attributed to Marcus Borg on BW3's site: we just know more about these things than did the Biblical writers. I have, have to agree. Even if gay orientation is set aside, the NT letters absolutely bleed human influence throughout. Do they contain the gospel as we know it? Sure. But plenty besides.
The four gospels are even more complex. NTW (N.T. Wright) rather sidesteps the synoptic problem (something BW3 mentions someplace) by arguing that the four gospels may simply rely on many tradition strands for their sayings content, hence their differences (and no need for Q). He might be right, at least with Q (though the order of that material is rather suggestive) but surely, the four gospels represent four different collections/interpretations of the words and deeds of the most extraordinary figure in human history. They do not agree on every detail or point, divergent sayings traditions aside! To argue that they do is simply silly. I have read some of Geisler on this, on that need to make every detail of the NT and (worse, for me) the OT products of the Divine voice and I find these efforts completely fruitless.
Let me close with two things (and my time is so short for these posts, let alone the time I get to read sources). One, I completely understand the need for believers (and we see this in several large religions) to feel they can place their sure faith in something concrete...in a book. A perfect, divinely authored book from the sky. When I explain my views on scripture (as embryonic and amateur as they are) to Christian friends I often see that anxiety well up, or see it quickly shut down. Or better, they simply cannot conceive of Christian faith without having a God-written book we must spend our time decoding. Without the Book, what do we have? It's easier to reach this point with liturgicals, it seems, as we can always look to the Eucharist, or the church structure, or tradition, but I think those things are also simply vehicles God uses to reach us. So let me say, and I will say it many times on this blog: I understand the need, the emotional need (in my view, though it is often cloaked as theological/intellectual necessity) for a perfect Book. I'm sorry, but we don't have one. The NT is a remarkable record of the life of Jesus, but is is culturally time-bound as any other human document, or at least culturally influenced. I can assure any reader, very honestly, that I have no ancillary motive for this. There is no personal sin I need to justify by seeing the NT as a human product. This is simply how it reads to me after years of reading it.
Does that make it the same as the other religious books in the world? For me, no. It is the historic ripple of the God-man himself.
Which brings me to point two as in closing: just because I do not believe the NT to be inerrant, or infallible, or Divinely written on every line, just because I think the writings are human productions does not mean I toss the entire thing out. This is the sad case of things, it seems, in North America. I tell friends I don't think the entire NT is God's Word and they assume I am a Jesus Seminarian. Far from it. Responsible literary scholarship leaves me very optimistic that we can know many things about Jesus, and certainly the central things: Jesus lived, healed, taught as no one else ever has, died and rose from the dead. At the very least, this was the message carried forward by his earliest followers (and Jesus is Divine even in Paul...that belief entered monotheist Judaism so fast via Christianity even I can hardly believe the speed with which is appears in the record).
For NT buffs, I find myself firmly on the eschatological highway. Wright is very strong here, though I admit I am not as widely read as I should be among those on the "wredebahn," those who view the gospels as ahistorical not just in terms of the miraculous but also in terms of Jesus' teachings, deeds, even passion account. No, I think the core events and certainly the teachings, even if imperfectly depicted in the four gospels we have, those are as the gospels give them to us. And I think historical immersion the finest, the first and most significant, way to read the gospels. Here, again, I agree with BW3 and NTW, both men with higher views of the bible books than me.
So, I see several things coming out here: one, the bible, including the NT, is NOT one book but a collection of writings; and I find those writings, on repeated examination, rife, rich, absolutely soaked in the cultural contexts which produced them. Do I think God himself enters the texts at any place? That is a good question, and one I will have to save for another time. But you see, this is why I do not find the last word on homosexuality to be what the biblical writers have to say by any means. Nor, despite some pretty creative attempts to the contrary, do I think Jesus addressed this specific issue. Nor, and now I really go out, do I think every word that came out of Jesus mouth was necessarily Divine will either...Wright is strong as he suggests an extended struggle/growth period within Jesus as his ministry and mission came into focus. Jesus was also a human being; we cannot forget that.
Still, God was with/in/was Jesus in a way unique in all history, and that is why I unabashedly place the gospels over any other texts in the biblical record. What Jesus says (via Luke, say, or Mark) is much more significant to me than what Moses tells me, or Paul, or Peter, or any other biblical writer.
This is something of a via negativa, and I know this. All I have mostly said is what the bible is not: a single divinely inspired book; or left one with the impression that the bible is no different from any other religious text. Here is where I want to get a hold of Barth on this issue. For the Bible is God's Word when he uses it as such. It contains the Great Thread, the writings of those who were interacting with the Divine in a very special (if not perhaps unique) way. I do not want to get into the Torah in this post, but one thing that strikes me is that when the ethical teachings of the Torah seem most elevated (and really, Deuteronomy is a bit of a revision of other materials, or a differing application anyway) is when it reminds the Hebrews of their own release from slavery: you will treat the alien well for you were once aliens; you will treat the slave well for you were once slaves until God rescued you...that experience they had, that belief that God rescued them from oppression leads to some of the most empathic moral content in the Torah. We see the same thing happening in the NT in my view; we see the same thing happening now as our knowledge of God and his love for us grows. The Bible is not a Divine rule book to whose authority we must bow on every point; rather it points to the One for whom our treatment of each other matters the most.
Now, bear with me with this analogy please: in Bruce Lee's film Enter the Dragon, he tells a student who is not kicking him with the right energy, that if one points at the moon and concentrates only on the pointing finger and not on the moon, he will miss "all that heavenly glory." To me, the Bible is a little like that. I have not read this essay in many years, not since my (re)conversion in 99, but I think of C.S. Lewis' essay "Second Meanings in Scripture" in Reflections on the Psalms.
I recall thinking the Bible is something like that. I know I need to branch out, read Borg and others who hold a similar view to mine with a lot more education, but I have not yet done so.
I realize this view raises as many questions as answers, more, but if there is one thing I feel strongly about at this time, or rather certain about, it is this: I apparently hold to a "low" view of scripture though I hate that term. I am all for getting as deep a cultural reading into the Torah as I am the gospels; we must have this to understand what the material is trying to say. But we must also be open to the cultural limitations such study reveals! Just because something leads us to the Divine does not make it a perfect divine revelation. Believe me, I wish it were so! We would not really need apologetics. But the book we have, the collection of books, is not perfect, not authoritative in my view in the way BW3 and others keep insisting. That does NOT mean an end to what I still consider orthodoxy; it certainly does not mean an end to Christian faith.
More later. Late now and very tired. I rant and rave all day to my students that they must pre-write, you know have some notes of where they're going, draft, and then EDIT their essays. I have done none of that with this post nor most of the rest of the stuff I toss up here. Tomorrow, if I have time, will take a second look (all writers need to); for now, up this goes as is. It is a start, at least.
Love to all.
So, this little post is not about Rob Bell.
Nor is it a full treatment of the Bible, homosexuality, or any of the other things I have said I would write on here. But is is a beginning. A snapshot of my current struggle/thought.
My understanding of the Bible must begin with how I read the NT. I am no NT scholar, but I know its contents decently well, with maybe a weakness in Hebrews...for some reason I have never gotten around to reading that entire letter. But the four gospels I know, and the epistles, decently. And let me just say this: I think Paul's letters are just that, Paul's letters. Did Paul have a miraculous conversion experience (are they not all miraculous)...sure. Did he actually perform miraculous cures...he claims in the first person to have done so. Did God reveal himself to Paul in some direct way, in short, give him the "gospel" directly as he emphatically states in Galatians? Paul surely believes this, and I have not reason to deny that some kind of special, direct revelation occurred (whether that involved any interaction with the earliest Christian doctrines, the kerygma itself, is open for discussion....Saul thought the Christians were heretics for some reason). But does this mean that every word Paul wrote back to the churches he founded, every letter to support them, encourage them, and address specific concerns, does that mean that GOD wrote each line of those letters, that every bit of advice given and viewpoint taken are Divine? To me, such an assertion is preposterous. It is not only preposterous, the letters themselves neither claim nor support such a view: they reveal an apostle (and those with him) reconstructing the Jewish faith in light of the radical news of the resurrection and the growing reverberations of Jesus' teaching/life-impact. To illustrate this would take some time, and I must assume it has already been done in detail.
To wit: Paul's emphasis on the eschatological eminence of singleness...of (according to my NRSV translation anyway) not marrying one's fiancee because singleness allows to one to focus more directly on the things of God...this is a very personal position. I will say idiosyncratic. It violates, to me, much of what Ben Witherington (a scholar in whom I find much to like even if we disagree on about everything I am going to say in this post, and whose name I have long just typed out as BW3) says about the imago dei as a critical procreative union. Paul really did seem to think Jesus would return within his own generation, or easily could (evidence, if nothing else, that he was utterly convinced of the resurrection and ascension). In light of this, Paul recommends individuals who can remain single do so.
This seems rather odd two millenia later. I am not even so sure the single person can be more focused on the things of God than the married person whether the return of Jesus is immminent or not. My family has had enormous positive spiritual impact on me. In short, Paul was wrong in my opinion. He was expressing a personal perspective, and while he may be right for some, while those words may lead some to lives of tremendous spiritual accomplishment, they surely do not apply to most.
This is one small example. But in fact there are many. BW3 and others in the long threads at his site on Bell are right: the Bible condemns homosexual activity between men in the Torah and between men again in Paul and calls it unnatural, condemns it implicitly (probably, am thinking of Romans 1) for both sexes again in Paul. And I have to echo the quote attributed to Marcus Borg on BW3's site: we just know more about these things than did the Biblical writers. I have, have to agree. Even if gay orientation is set aside, the NT letters absolutely bleed human influence throughout. Do they contain the gospel as we know it? Sure. But plenty besides.
The four gospels are even more complex. NTW (N.T. Wright) rather sidesteps the synoptic problem (something BW3 mentions someplace) by arguing that the four gospels may simply rely on many tradition strands for their sayings content, hence their differences (and no need for Q). He might be right, at least with Q (though the order of that material is rather suggestive) but surely, the four gospels represent four different collections/interpretations of the words and deeds of the most extraordinary figure in human history. They do not agree on every detail or point, divergent sayings traditions aside! To argue that they do is simply silly. I have read some of Geisler on this, on that need to make every detail of the NT and (worse, for me) the OT products of the Divine voice and I find these efforts completely fruitless.
Let me close with two things (and my time is so short for these posts, let alone the time I get to read sources). One, I completely understand the need for believers (and we see this in several large religions) to feel they can place their sure faith in something concrete...in a book. A perfect, divinely authored book from the sky. When I explain my views on scripture (as embryonic and amateur as they are) to Christian friends I often see that anxiety well up, or see it quickly shut down. Or better, they simply cannot conceive of Christian faith without having a God-written book we must spend our time decoding. Without the Book, what do we have? It's easier to reach this point with liturgicals, it seems, as we can always look to the Eucharist, or the church structure, or tradition, but I think those things are also simply vehicles God uses to reach us. So let me say, and I will say it many times on this blog: I understand the need, the emotional need (in my view, though it is often cloaked as theological/intellectual necessity) for a perfect Book. I'm sorry, but we don't have one. The NT is a remarkable record of the life of Jesus, but is is culturally time-bound as any other human document, or at least culturally influenced. I can assure any reader, very honestly, that I have no ancillary motive for this. There is no personal sin I need to justify by seeing the NT as a human product. This is simply how it reads to me after years of reading it.
Does that make it the same as the other religious books in the world? For me, no. It is the historic ripple of the God-man himself.
Which brings me to point two as in closing: just because I do not believe the NT to be inerrant, or infallible, or Divinely written on every line, just because I think the writings are human productions does not mean I toss the entire thing out. This is the sad case of things, it seems, in North America. I tell friends I don't think the entire NT is God's Word and they assume I am a Jesus Seminarian. Far from it. Responsible literary scholarship leaves me very optimistic that we can know many things about Jesus, and certainly the central things: Jesus lived, healed, taught as no one else ever has, died and rose from the dead. At the very least, this was the message carried forward by his earliest followers (and Jesus is Divine even in Paul...that belief entered monotheist Judaism so fast via Christianity even I can hardly believe the speed with which is appears in the record).
For NT buffs, I find myself firmly on the eschatological highway. Wright is very strong here, though I admit I am not as widely read as I should be among those on the "wredebahn," those who view the gospels as ahistorical not just in terms of the miraculous but also in terms of Jesus' teachings, deeds, even passion account. No, I think the core events and certainly the teachings, even if imperfectly depicted in the four gospels we have, those are as the gospels give them to us. And I think historical immersion the finest, the first and most significant, way to read the gospels. Here, again, I agree with BW3 and NTW, both men with higher views of the bible books than me.
So, I see several things coming out here: one, the bible, including the NT, is NOT one book but a collection of writings; and I find those writings, on repeated examination, rife, rich, absolutely soaked in the cultural contexts which produced them. Do I think God himself enters the texts at any place? That is a good question, and one I will have to save for another time. But you see, this is why I do not find the last word on homosexuality to be what the biblical writers have to say by any means. Nor, despite some pretty creative attempts to the contrary, do I think Jesus addressed this specific issue. Nor, and now I really go out, do I think every word that came out of Jesus mouth was necessarily Divine will either...Wright is strong as he suggests an extended struggle/growth period within Jesus as his ministry and mission came into focus. Jesus was also a human being; we cannot forget that.
Still, God was with/in/was Jesus in a way unique in all history, and that is why I unabashedly place the gospels over any other texts in the biblical record. What Jesus says (via Luke, say, or Mark) is much more significant to me than what Moses tells me, or Paul, or Peter, or any other biblical writer.
This is something of a via negativa, and I know this. All I have mostly said is what the bible is not: a single divinely inspired book; or left one with the impression that the bible is no different from any other religious text. Here is where I want to get a hold of Barth on this issue. For the Bible is God's Word when he uses it as such. It contains the Great Thread, the writings of those who were interacting with the Divine in a very special (if not perhaps unique) way. I do not want to get into the Torah in this post, but one thing that strikes me is that when the ethical teachings of the Torah seem most elevated (and really, Deuteronomy is a bit of a revision of other materials, or a differing application anyway) is when it reminds the Hebrews of their own release from slavery: you will treat the alien well for you were once aliens; you will treat the slave well for you were once slaves until God rescued you...that experience they had, that belief that God rescued them from oppression leads to some of the most empathic moral content in the Torah. We see the same thing happening in the NT in my view; we see the same thing happening now as our knowledge of God and his love for us grows. The Bible is not a Divine rule book to whose authority we must bow on every point; rather it points to the One for whom our treatment of each other matters the most.
Now, bear with me with this analogy please: in Bruce Lee's film Enter the Dragon, he tells a student who is not kicking him with the right energy, that if one points at the moon and concentrates only on the pointing finger and not on the moon, he will miss "all that heavenly glory." To me, the Bible is a little like that. I have not read this essay in many years, not since my (re)conversion in 99, but I think of C.S. Lewis' essay "Second Meanings in Scripture" in Reflections on the Psalms.
I recall thinking the Bible is something like that. I know I need to branch out, read Borg and others who hold a similar view to mine with a lot more education, but I have not yet done so.
I realize this view raises as many questions as answers, more, but if there is one thing I feel strongly about at this time, or rather certain about, it is this: I apparently hold to a "low" view of scripture though I hate that term. I am all for getting as deep a cultural reading into the Torah as I am the gospels; we must have this to understand what the material is trying to say. But we must also be open to the cultural limitations such study reveals! Just because something leads us to the Divine does not make it a perfect divine revelation. Believe me, I wish it were so! We would not really need apologetics. But the book we have, the collection of books, is not perfect, not authoritative in my view in the way BW3 and others keep insisting. That does NOT mean an end to what I still consider orthodoxy; it certainly does not mean an end to Christian faith.
More later. Late now and very tired. I rant and rave all day to my students that they must pre-write, you know have some notes of where they're going, draft, and then EDIT their essays. I have done none of that with this post nor most of the rest of the stuff I toss up here. Tomorrow, if I have time, will take a second look (all writers need to); for now, up this goes as is. It is a start, at least.
Love to all.
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