JUST WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE BIBLE?

Noel Rude

Pendleton, Oregon

Below are random comments generated by an article of the above title that appeared in THE JOURNAL, Issue No. 139 (Vol. XIV, No. 2, June 17, 2010).[1]  The following appeared on page 10:

So the debate occurred and I’d say that as a debates go Dennis Diehl won—but not because I think his ideas have merit.  Nobody seemed aware of intelligent design.[2]

Believers sometimes refer to the Bible as inerrant—which sounds suspiciously like the proposal that (John 10:35) “the scripture cannot be broken”[3]—but which is a pretty strong claim that few respectable scholars would make today.  Though the Bible makes such a strong claim, it has become de rigueur among sophisticates to make no claims at all that could ever be proven false.  On the other hand there are those out on the margins that do proclaim inerrancy but never put their exegesis of the Scriptures to the test.

Scientific theories, at least in the Popperian sense,[4] are not theories unless they make bold predictions that could be refuted by evidence.  In serious science one begins with the strongest possible claim.  This, I believe, is how we should approach the Bible.  For unless we are willing to step out with bold claims that might be shot down and leave us embarrassed, we will never really learn anything.  Rather we will be, as Paul puts it, “Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”

Don’t Begin with a Weak Claim

If we do not begin with a strong claim of inerrancy, we will never know whether such a claim might be true.  But if we make the claim we can weaken it and adjust as further research and facts demand.

Don’t get me wrong, however.  I do not believe that there is such a thing as “the scientific method.”  Popper’s refutation works for theories; mathematics, on the other hand, has no need of it.  Theory is what physicists do, biology is mostly just descriptive.  Inerrancy is a theory and therefore it should be put to the test.

Now—once we accept some form of inerrancy—then there is the problem of which text.  The Jewish view of the Massoretic text is supported by Paul (Rom 3:2), “…because that unto them were committed the oracles of God.”  But, as we know, the text of the New Testament is controversial.  Some align themselves with the Byzantine Majority camp, whereas at least in practice the Church of God often would defer to the textual critics.  In this instance I think the Church was right.  Bart D. Ehrman makes a pretty good case for discernable corruption in the majority text.

But even here I think we should go with the strongest case for inerrancy: Choose the reading you think coheres best but only when there is textual evidence for it, otherwise do not emend the text.  Matthew 1:18-25, for me, is still problematic because it seems to contradict the Tanakh and logic, and though there is evidence for the reading “and Joseph begat Jesus,”[5] there is still the fact that in all manuscripts I know of Joseph seems to think Mary has committed adultery.  Interestingly in verse 20 the angel says, “…for that which is begotten [γεννηθὲν] in her is of the Holy Spirit.”  The word implies being sired by a father, yet of course the Holy Spirit is not the father, nor according to the Trinitarians was God the Father of Jesus by contributing a sperm (however produced) to unite with an egg in the womb of Mary—they do not accuse God of adultery.  For them Mary was a surrogate mother and the creeds speak of “the Father eternally generating the Son”.  Anyway I can’t emend the text, but I can suggest that either there has been some corruption or that there is something there that I don’t understand—the latter being the more likely.

One point of particular interest to me was the comment by Dennis Diehl: “All the people that are related to Jesus in the genealogies are not related to Jesus if God is Jesus’ literal Father. You can’t have genealogies and the story of the virgin birth. They’re exclusive. Either one stays or one goes.”

Ron Moseley wasn’t quite right when he responded, “In Judaism it doesn’t matter who your father is—if your mother is a Jew—and it gives Mary’s genealogy back to David.”  The rabbis don’t say that at all!  They insist that the scepters (such as David’s and Aaron’s) must be inherited through the father.[6]  And isn’t this implicit in Jeremiah 33?

The other question is content.  Our theory of inerrancy is strengthened if Scripture makes no outlandish claims, such as in the contemporary pagan literature with its satyrs and minotaurs and other fantastic beings.  The Church fathers and also the rabbis take for granted the four classical elements (earth, fire, water, air), which we now know to be a false picture of reality.  The New Testament never makes that mistake.  The Bible sometimes uses fantastic imagery, seven headed dragons and such, but always symbolically.

Inerrancy is also strengthened by the internal coherence of Scripture.  Rudolf Bultmann insisted that pastors not assume coherence and therefore should avoid “proof texting,” and sadly like sheep most respectable pastors have complied.  But why assume the negative?  Why not first take the Bible seriously for its claim that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God”?

How will we ever know that the claim is false if we never put it to the test?

The two central events of Scripture—the Exodus and the Resurrection—do not appear to be subject to refutation nor perhaps to scientific confirmation.  How could you prove they never happened?  And so the atheists turned to Genesis which supposedly does make refutable claims, claims which Richard Dawkins says have been refuted.  Richard Dawkins is right when he says that Young Earth Creationism (YEC) is scientific[7]—as opposed to the mushy BioLogos Forum[8] which claims that science and religion never the twain meet.  At least Young Earth Creationism (YEC) does stick its neck out and make claims that could be proven wrong—which, as Richard Dawkins loudly trumpets, supposedly has happened.  In my opinion the YECs are blinded by an unwillingness to question theological doctrines such as original sin and the fall of man which they see as demanding the YEC position.[9]  It turns out the real reason they want a young earth is because all evil and death is supposed to have entered the cosmos through Adam’s sin (Romans 5), therefore the dinosaurs couldn’t have died before Adam sinned, etc.

But are there any real difficulties for the inerrantist?  There always are, of course, but no reason to throw in the towel.  One difficulty that remains unsolved for me at least is the “firmament” that was created on the 2^nd day in Genesis and which God called “heaven”.  “Heaven” in Hebrew is equivalent to our “sky”, and “firmament” is supposed to refer to something solid or hammered out.[10]

I already believe that Genesis 1 is more prophecy than history—that its historical sense is local (as in Genesis 2) but that it acts out God’s plan for seven thousand years into the future—yet I’d like to believe that God isn’t using a falsity to picture a truth.  I don’t want to believe that the Hebrews believed the firmament was solid, though interestingly the Indians I work with believed just that—that the “sky” (túχɨn) is a solid sheet above.  In one myth they shoot arrows into it.  So if it turns out that the Hebrews believed the firmament to be solid then perhaps that’s no worse then God using the imagery of Leviathan (in Isaiah 27:1 even with vocabulary identical to that in a Ugaritic text[11]).  But I’m not ready to concede just yet that Genesis 1:6-8 & 14-19 pictures a solid sky.

Modernists believe it’s all metaphor—except for trivialities it’s always just meaningless metaphor—but that’s an oxymoron.  The Bible’s metaphors better mean something more than fluff or the proverbial “Don’t worry everything’ll turn out OK.”  Scripture better cohere and not only not say things that are wrong, it should make predictions that confirm its validity.  Those predictions may be couched such that those without the spirit of God will miss it, but it better be there for those with ears to hear.

Where would one start should he want to do a study of inerrancy?  One article I’d recommend—though it’s been a while now since I read it—is Bill Dembski’s article in Dembski & Richards (2001).  To me it seems that those who opt out of any kind of inerrancy are really left with nothing but mush.

Yet once we accept the Bible as the word of God there remains the question of interpretation.  Sjødal (2009) rejects the New Testament and rabbinical mode of midrash, but fails to realize that the Prophets and Psalms employ it too.  Modernist scholars too refuse to take seriously this style of interpretation.  Moisés Silva, however, argues that we ourselves should return to this kind of allegorical interpretation: [12]

What are the Consequences of Demoting the Bible?

Is what some call “bibliolatry” really a negative?[13]  I don’t think so.  Ministers and laymen burned by Ezekiel 34 style corruption and tired of know-nothing religious fanatics often forget that the battle for the West has been won.  Not for nothing do we call it the post-Christian West.  On this let me recommend Melanie Phillips’ recent The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth, and Power.  Phillips herself is an agnostic, yet she writes (page 325), “Far from being in opposition to religion, Western science actually depends on it—and, contrary to much popular assumption, specifically on the Hebrew Bible.”  She is alarmed by the accelerating demise of reason and subsequent rise of anti-Semitism, “Indeed, the history of thought since the Enlightenment might be summed up as man first dethroning God in favor of reason, then dethroning reason in favor of man, and finally dethroning man himself.” (pg. 303)

Western civilization was tamed, not by Christendom, but by the Bible.  Whenever churchmen strayed from the Scriptures they were worse than the pagans.  But in the end their inquisitions and pogroms tended to be moderated by a return to the Bible.  Islam rejects the Bible and so doesn’t have that safety valve.  Secularism has no safety valve either. 

Throw out the Bible and there is no way to hold on to our historic belief in the sanctity of human life—just ask Peter Singer.[14]

I remember Mark Falcoff[15] (my Latin American History teacher—excellent teacher, by the way—he was later a consultant for the Reagan administration) describing so eloquently how Bartolomé de las Casas petitioned Carlos V regarding the Spanish mistreatment of the Indians.  Las Casas quoted Scripture whereas his opponent reasoned from Aristotle.

The United States has been great for one reason only, and that is the love and respect its founders had for the Scriptures—a love and respect that remained strong until recent times.  The Scriptures, according some interesting articles by David Gelernter in Commentary,[16] played a much larger role in our founding than scholars realize, this in large part because today’s scholars do not know the Scriptures and thus do not catch the Scriptural language and imagery in the founders’ writings.  We are limping on the last legs of the moral capital of centuries of Bible reading, and now those legs are buckling under, and when they have collapsed altogether there will be no restraint whatsoever.

Dennis Diehl still believes in God—how long can that last?  He thinks Darwin explains our origins, which—as Phillip Johnson has reminded us—renders God unemployed and therefore unnecessary.[17]

Larry Arnhart[18] believes we can derive conservative values from Darwinism.  He was kind enough to exchange some emails with me some time back, but I have to say that besides the fact that Darwinism finds no support in the book of Nature, it fares even worse than the pagan gods when it comes to values.[19]

Ethics in paganism has no connection to the gods.  The Indians end their myths with, “Now children let that be a lesson.  Don’t ever do like the gods.”  The Greco-Roman or Nordic or Hindu gods were no better.

The difference between biblical faith (the Judeo-Christian) and all others is its particularism and exceptionalism—something that is passionately rejected today.  God has revealed himself—not to everyone but to a few through the ages—most notably the patriarchs and those at Sinai and the five hundred or so who saw the risen Jesus.  Secularist or Islamic univesalism will not save us, rather the law will yet go forth from Zion.  Without the hope of the Scriptures there is no hope.

I have found that after you dig to the bottom of the activist’s unease and the hater’s hate—what they’re all really against is the Bible.  Hitler even admitted this.[20] He thought if he could do away with the Jews he would finally do away with the Bible. This is the whole foundation of the International Left, of fascism and Marxism and militant Islam and today’s Democratic Party.  It isn’t so much religion or deities or spirits or Islam that they passionately loath—it’s the Bible.

God can hear our prayers and we can see his hand in history and in our lives.  But God does not speak to us audibly.  There is no knowledge of the God of Israel apart from the Book that reveals him.  Of those who had not been privy to the Bible Paul says (Eph 2:12), “That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world”.

That which separates us from the beasts is human language, in other words, the word.  It makes possible our receiving of a verbal revelation from God.  In my field we define human language—as opposed to animal communication—as having the ability to communicate complex information.[21]  The pagans mumble mantras but it’s not the truth they seek—their enlightenment is nonverbal—it’s an experience on another level of consciousness.  And now postmodernism—which denies that language communicates anything but power politics—has infiltrated ALL the humanities and much of the hard sciences.  Neither paganism nor atheistic nihilism provided the foundation for our Western world, of its science and pursuit of knowledge, of the thinking that went into our national founding.  At the root of it all was the Bible.

But they don’t like the biblical God because—aside from his strict moral code—they say he can wipe out thousands in an instant and sometimes does.  Yet the sugar and spice god or gods of their imagination are utterly unrealistic.  The reality is that people are wiped out in an instant—in natural disasters and in sickness and in wars and human cruelty—and standing by when you could stop it all is as bad as instigating it in the first place.  Here I think Art Mokorow gets it right: “God did flood the world and kill everybody.  But God cannot murder.  The reason He can’t murder is because He can resurrect you.”  All death, in fact, is in one sense by God’s design, for it is he who has made us mortal, as it says (Heb 9:27), “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment”.

Yes, there’s a book of Nature too.  But it should be held at some distance from the book of Scripture—which has been the genius of intelligent design.  Our physical environment doesn’t speak in plain words but rather in brute physical facts to which we must apply reason.  None of this can tell us why we are here or the way out of our mess.

I’m a mathematical realist (such as argued in Hersh 1999) and I believe in natural law (such as argued in Budziszewski 2004), yet I don’t believe that is near enough.  Humans require a verbal revelation.  The Gospel is framed in the written word and “the foolishness of preaching” (Rom 10:14): “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?”

As for bibliolatry—note that it says, “and the word was God.”  I take this in the sense that the word is our judge (John 12:48): “He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day.”

So let me take issue with the notion that the Bible isn’t the word of God.  What, pray tell, other word of God do we have?  The Bible may not contain all the word of God, nevertheless it is the only word of God we have.

The Scripture (ἡ γραφή) or Scriptures (αἱ γραφαὶ) are referred to 51 times in the New Testament.  “...and the scripture cannot be broken,” John has Jesus say (John 109:35).  Paul writes (2Tim 3:16), “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness”.  Whatever is the sophisticated thinking today, there can be no doubt that for Jesus and the apostles the Old Testament was the Word of God.

But does the Bible actually call itself the word of God?  One place I can think of is 2Chronicles 34 where in the reforms of Josiah they found the book of the Torah (סֵפֶר הַתּוֹרָה)—verse 15.  And thus they explained their misfortune (verse 21), “…because our fathers have not kept the word of the LORD [אֶת־דְּבַר יהוה / τῶν λόγων Κυρίου], to do after all that is written in this book.”

Why should we position ourselves before the fact against inerrancy?  Why not at least be agnostic?  Or, if scientifically inclined and as I argued before, why not take the high road?  Weak theories are worthless—strong ones can be adjusted as required.

I make three suggestions: 1) Go with the strong horse—or rather theory; 2) Be willing to adapt to facts as they arise; and 3) Know the consequences of joining today’s culture in sloughing off the Bible.

I would argue that the words of life that Jesus spoke (John 6:63, 68; etc.) were his understanding of the Scriptures.  The word came by Moses and the Prophets, understanding Moses and the Prophets came by Jesus Christ.

Does the Bible Merely Contain the Word of God

Whether the Bible is the word of God or whether it contains that word—continues to cogitate.  It’s that slippery slope again, the one where we pick and choose and in a couple of generations can’t agree on what we agreed on in the first place.  America was a Judeo-Christian nation and though deeply divided on “doctrine” was nevertheless united on ethics—on the sanctity of life, marriage and the family, the right to property, the rule of law—this whether Protestant, Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish.  That day is now past and it was the abandonment of the Bible as our common heritage that opened the floodgates of utilitarian materialism.

Bolstered by faith in the scientific merit of Darwin’s creation myth it was easy to abandon the Bible and believe that reason alone would provide us our ethics.  Now the big question for our top ethicists is defining personhood.  Though nowhere is the unborn a person, in Spain the chimpanzee now is.  And there is serious debate on whether to confer personhood on robots.[22]

Yes, some of those smitten of materialism were nevertheless great biblical scholars, and they proved no less ambitious in weaving together speculative stories than the apostles and rabbinical sages whose authority they rejected.

Maybe that’s why I liked reading these guys—at least they say something based on biblical motifs, word connections and typologies.  And though disrespectful of Scriptural authority they knew the languages and noticed things that neither our antifundamentalist churchmen nor those committed to church orthodoxy could ever bring themselves to see.

The really important things that we know we know provisionally, for who among us has encountered God directly or returned from the World to Come?  But that doesn’t mean we should have no passion.  We have passion because we know the secularist alternative—humility because we know provisionally.

Dennis Diehl says, “I have examined Scripture. But, from my point of view, Scripture can never mean what it never meant.”  At first brush this sounds intelligent, and I think it connotes more than “don’t misinterpret the text”.  I think it eschews any kind of inspiration, or any notion that the Bible could be a coded book (which of course implies a divine hand).  It means, “I’m wise enough to determine what it never meant.”

From what Mr. Diehl says it appears he would agree with Rudolf Bultmann,[23] that we should expect no behind the scenes guiding hand giving coherence to the whole Scriptural enterprise.  Rather each passage must be interpreted only in its immediate context (textual, historic, etc.).  The Prophets contradict Moses, the Gospels don’t harmonize, Paul cannot base his theology on Jesus’ teaching.

Mr. Diehl, I think, took his interlocutors aback—he says the most in the fewest words and they were not used to hearing such straight talk from a nonbeliever.  They didn’t want to think that what they were hearing was blasphemy.  But there was nothing new there—the Torah cobbled together by postexilic redactor(s) (though Diehl suggested it happened in Babylon), Peter and Paul battling it out for political hegemony, Paul lying about his Jewishness, etc.  None of this is new—all of it Mr. Diehl has absorbed from the culture.

Few, it seems, survive the materialism of the academy.  It isn’t always explicit but it’s always there, however subtle and assumed without dispute.  Should any challenge arise it is dealt with swiftly and decisively, for there can be no compromise whatsoever without risking the collapse of the whole house of cards.  As Bill Dembski has noted, not the tiniest aspect of ID can receive the slightest nod of acceptance.[24]  The naïve student supposes he walks the hallowed halls of intellectual freedom, and deep down even the dullest knows that none of the smart people respect the Bible.

I’ve been reading Jon D. Levenson—he’s a sort of Jewish N. T. Wright with his focus on the resurrection.  I recommend him but not to those whose faith is shallow.  In his earlier book he thinks YHWH originally commanded human sacrifice and to support his point he sites, among other scriptures, Ezekiel 20:25,

וְגַם־אֲנִי נָתַתִּי לָהֶם חֻקִּים לֹא טוֹבִים

καὶ ἐγὼ ἔδωκα αὐτοῖς προστάγματα οὐ καλά

‘and also I gave them statutes not good’

Which in context he takes to mean human sacrifice.  The early secular scholars pooh-poohed the biblical claim that child sacrifice was rampant in the ancient world, but now that archaeology has confirmed this it is popular to blame YHWH.  Jeremiah 19:5-6 is seen as a revulsion against what YHWH had originally commanded, and Leviticus 20:1-5 is easily dismissed via the documentary hypothesis.

Such speculation is second nature for materialists, and the Bible is written such that whatever framework of interpretation we operate under there always will be difficult scriptures.  Rashi paraphrases Ezekiel 20:25 as “I delivered them via their evil inclination to statutes not good…”  I believe this is also how some of us interpreted it long ago.  In much of the first chapter of Romans Paul argues along this line, as in verse 28, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient…”

But what happens if the Bible contains the word of God?  Then we are justified to go with Jon D. Levenson and assume that YHWH—as the concept of him evolved—had earlier commanded human sacrifice but later through the protest of the prophets came to be seen as proscribing it.  If we can pick and choose we also can dispense with miracles such as the Exodus and the revelation at Sinai, and we are free to speculate wildly as long as we frame it with valid linguistics, archaeology, etc.  But the day also arises when postmodernism seeps into our discipline, when all objective truth is rejected and one is left only to tell stories of oppression by white, heterosexual males.  And in that day—a day which is mostly here already—the greatest evil in the world will be those Israelis and right wing American fundamentalists who still cling to their Bibles and their guns.[25]

References:

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