Dr. Platypus

Jeanie Miley has some very kind words to say about Formations adult Bible study curriculum, of which I am the editor:

For years we have used the FORMATIONS study material, written by moderate Baptists across the country.  The lessons are edited and printed by the publisher Smyth and Helwys.  I have been so impressed by these current commentaries on the prophets,  written by Brett Younger, that I ordered copies for each member of the class.  Brett has an unusual ability to peer into the biblical material and connect it with contemporary culture.  He has made the ancient material in Malachi, Micah, Habbakkuk and Zephaniah come alive for us.

Nicholas Carter: “Blogging: a great pastime for the elderly“:

Did you see that new Pew study that came out yesterday? It put a big fat exclamation point on what a lot of us have come to realize recently: blogging is now the uncoolest thing you can do on the Internet. It’s even uncooler than editing Wikipedia articles or having a Second Life avatar. In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It’s only geezers – those over 30 – who are doing more blogging than they used to.

I am such a blogger.

Update: This comment from Norman Geras requires reading and re-reading:

[Reading] tends to be more fun when the writing that you’re reading shows evidence of some reading by the writer. If there’s reading in the writing, reading can be riotous. It can be rolling-in-the-aisles rantabulous; rosy, red, rudely robust and rollicking. It can reap and rebel and renew; roam and refresh; react and reflect, recollect, reconnect. Writing without reading can be rotten – really really rotten.

Interesting article about the personal names in the opening chapters of Genesis by Richard S. Hess over at The Bible and Interpretation. I wish I knew more about onomastics than I do. The Medieval Names Archive does a fantastic job of tracking the naming practices of the period roughly AD 500–1500, and there are several online sources for information about ancient Rome. If something comparable exists for the ancient world, I would appreciate a heads-up.

The latest Biblical Studies Carnival is now posted at Abnormal Interests. I’m not sure how to do math involving both Roman and Arabic numerals, however.

Michael Byrd shares a very nice quotation from Kevin Vanhoozer:

“Catholicity” signifies the church as the whole people of God, spread out over space, across cultures, and through time. “We believe in one … catholic church.” The evangelical unity of the church is compatible with a catholic diversity. To say that theology must be catholic, then, is to affirm the necessity of involving the whole church in the project of theology. No single denomination “owns” catholicity: catholicity is no more the exclusive domain of the Roman Church than the gospel is the private domain of evangelicals. Catholic and Evangelical belong together. To be precise “catholic” qualifies “evangelical.” The gospel designated a determinate word; catholicity, the scope of its reception. “Evangelical” is the central notion, but “catholic” adds a crucial antireductionist qualifier that prohibits any one reception of the gospel from becoming paramount. (Drama of Doctrine, 27).

To those of you who would embrace both terms: Do you think of yourself as an evangelical catholic or as a catholic evangelical?

Katherine,

You write,

4) How can we know, as Christians, that we should put out faith in any part of the Bible? The old testament writings are sometimes historically inaccurate, contradictory of itself, and have many sources and translations; in the new testament, matthew tries to force the idea as Jesus as the Jews’ messiah, Luke and Matthew appear to take many of their ideas from Mark, and John is out on its own for the most part and very mystical in nature; we base most of our ideas of Christian living on the letters of Paul who was one man and never intended for his letter to be “God-breathed” scripture, and so many of his ideas of morals reflected the patriarchal culture of the times.

What does “faith” mean to you? Can faith be reduced to assenting to a list of propositions, or is there more to it than that? Surely faith implies trust, assurance, and (thus) relationship. When I say I have faith in my wife, it doesn’t mean that I believe a set of facts about her—although of course I do! It means I trust her: to be there for me, to exhibit a certain kind of character that I have observed in her consistently for the past fifteen-plus years, etc. Likewise, I can put my faith in the Bible to do and be all that God has promised it would (as for example, in 2 Tim 3:16-17).

It seems to me that God should have no problem teaching, reproving, correcting, and training me in righteousness through the use of literary genres other than objective historical reporting. Indeed, why should putting one’s faith in some part of the Bible be contingent on its genre? Do you put your faith in Psalm 23? But it’s a song—what does it mean to put your faith in a song? What sort of historical accuracy or inaccuracy could a song possibly possess? But if you’ve ever been in “the darkest valley,” you may well have turned to this psalm for comfort. I think that counts as putting your faith in Psalm 23.

Do you put your faith in the Parable of the Prodigal Son? If I told you that the man and his two sons were all fictitious characters, would you cease to put your faith in Luke 15:11-32? I suspect that, like me, you get the point of the parable and cherish its message about forgiveness despite whatever seemingly unforgivable things we may have done in the past. Thus, I suspect that, like me, you put your faith in the parable despite knowing full well that it is a fictitious story.

So yes, the Bible is a very diverse collection of ancient texts, written over a span of maybe 1,000 years, by dozens of authors who used a wide variety of literary styles, forms, and devices. But just as accepting the biblical, orthodox view of Jesus means accepting that he experienced a perfectly human process of development—physical, intellectual, emotional, social, and even spiritual (Lk 2:40)—I think it makes sense to say that a biblical, orthodox view of the Bible also involves accepting that the books of the Bible also underwent a process of composition that was perfectly normal for the times in which they were written. It doesn’t besmirch the divinity of Christ to say that he was once a baby who couldn’t feed himself and needed a mommy to wipe his bottom. On the contrary, that serves to demonstrate the full extent of the incarnation. Frankly, the stakes are higher with the divinity of Christ than they even are with the divine inspiration of the Bible!

So, the biblical writers used previous sources. That’s nothing that Luke doesn’t himself admit in Luke 1:1-4. And it is certainly nothing out of the ordinary for historical writing in any era.

And the biblical writers did not always understand the full repercussions of their words. For example, nobody in the Bible ever denounced the institution of slavery as such, but it was Bible-reading and Bible-believing Christians who led the way in abolishing slavery in the western world.

There is no point disputing that these things are so. The challenge of faith is to remember what else is also true: That God speaks to us in Scripture, and that makes it far more central to the Christian faith than an academic study of its various parts can explain.

Katherine, my experience has been (1) that faith gets stronger when it’s tested, and (2) that it never seems this is the case until the test is over! It’s clear to me that you have a deep love of God and that you receive the Bible as God’s holy word and try to live by its teachings. I hope that nothing I have said this semester would make you think otherwise, because that is what I believe, and how I strive to live, too.

I think I have touched on all of the things you originally wrote me about. If there are specific areas you would like to explore more fully, you know how to find me, and I hope you will.

God bless,

Dr. P.

John Hobbins offers a nice primer for telling the three apart in his post, “There are (no) myths in the Bible.” As I strive in explain to my students, these three terms refer to particular literary genres, and it is both possible and necessary to discuss whether there are examples of such genres in the Bible. John’s penultimate paragraph:

I know, I know. Some people will get their knickers in a knot at the thought that the Bible contains examples of myth and epic in the senses discussed. To them I can only say: use other words to describe the same things if you wish. The important thing is to read the texts on their own terms.

Do read it all.

Katherine,

You write:

2) Are other prophecy sections in the Bible ex eventu prophecy?

This is a subject of some debate. Many would point to the predictions in the Gospels of the impending destruction of the temple (see Lk 21:20ff.) as an example—assuming that this saying was fashioned by the early church and was not in fact something Jesus said. As you can imagine, there is always a danger of arguing in a circle with these kinds of assertions. If I say, “Jesus really said this and it proves something about his spiritual awareness,” then someone else can say, “Jesus could have never said this, and its inclusion in the Gospels proves they were written after AD 70.” This and Daniel 7–12 are probably the major examples some people would point to.

If you’re of a skeptical bent, then pretty much all of the prophecies of the Bible are ex eventu! If, like me, you don’t object on philosophical principles to the possibility of genuine divine intervention, then you have to decide about the date of any particular writing on the basis of other factors (how archaic is the language? what other cultural clues point to a later or an earlier date, etc.). But remember as well that most biblical prophecy had to do with anticipation of events unfolding in the short term, and came with a certain conditionality based on how the recipients of the prophecy responded. (We talked about Jer 18 in class; Jonah is also a good example.)

What we are not supposed to do with Revelation is try to play “pin the tail on the Antichrist” by trying to line up various Bible verses with tomorrow’s headlines. People have been doing that almost literally from the beginning, and so far they have all been wrong! Actually, John tells us we are to “keep” what is written in Revelation (Rev 1:3)—the same word Jesus used in the Great Commission when he said, “teaching them to keep (NRSV ‘obey’) everything that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:20). That sounds to me like John thought his book was filled with things Christians are supposed to do, not necessarily
things they were supposed to figure out.

What do I think about the end times? I affirm what is taught in the Nicene Creed, that Christ “is coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall not end.” Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Once again, I hope this is helpful to you. God bless!

Dr. P.

Katherine,

You write:

1) Job, Esther, and Daniel are all supposed to be fictional characters right? Is there anything else in the Old Testament that isn’t historically accurate, or are all the Writing just stories and legends? And if so much of the Old Testament was oral tradition before it was written down or the final product came from many different sources and then was edited, how can we believe in any part of it as God-inspired and infallible?

“Historically accurate” and “fictional characters” really belong in separate universes. If something isn’t even trying to be “historically accurate,” can it ever be said to be “historically inaccurate.”

For example, Jesus tells the story about a Samaritan who helps a man who lay wounded by the side of the road after he was ignored by a priest and a Levite. What does it mean to ask if this story is “historically accurate”? I would suggest that it means we have missed the point! Jesus is teaching us a lesson with several important theological themes—not least of which is what it means to be a “neighbor” to those around us. These lessons stand whether these incidents ever happened in history or not, and it doesn’t take too much perception to understand that the parabolic genre of the story gives us a strong basis for assuming that, in fact, it is a story that Jesus made up. Does that mean Jesus being “historically inaccurate”? Of course not, and I doubt that anyone’s faith has ever been challenged by acknowledging this fact. History doesn’t even enter into the question; Jesus is teaching a deep spiritual truth by means of fictitious characters and events.

The issue isn’t so much “Is this biblical account accurate?” but “Have I understood the genre of the literature I’m reading?” And there is certainly room for reasonable people to disagree here. Note, however, that the issue we would be debating is not the inspiration or infallibility of Scripture but how best to interpret it.

Furthermore, some genres look a lot like history even though they’re not (novellas, court tales, legends and sagas, etc.). And some “non-history” genres can contain genuine historical details. I’m thinking for example of Homer’s Iliad, written in epic poetry, which was long written off as pure mythology until Heinrich Schliemann found the ruins of Troy and subsequent archeologists demonstrated it really was destroyed by foreign invaders around the end of the Bronze Age. Although some classicists would no doubt disagree, others (like Barry Strauss in The Trojan War) make a pretty convincing case that, in broad strokes, the story of the Trojan War was more or less as Homer described it, even though the Iliad was written centuries before the earliest history writing in the western world (Herodotus, c. 450 BC). That doesn’t mean that Homer couldn’t use that historical core as the basis for a story he intended to tell on the theme of human wrath and arrogance.

The Iliad example also raises the issue of oral tradition, because almost everybody believes that the epic poems that eventually became codified as the Iliad were passed down for many generations in oral form before they were set to parchment. (The Greek alphabet didn’t even exist at the time of the Trojan War!). In preliterate societies, people relied on their memory far more than we do today, and there were often even specialists whose job was to remember the national epics, from the rhapsodes of ancient Greece to the griots of West Africa to the bards of pagan Ireland. So “oral tradition” need not imply second-rate or necessarily erroneous.

Personally, I’m probably more conservative than most when it comes to the essential accuracy of the biblical narratives’ historical core. I really don’t have any qualms about admitting the historical reality of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, or the United Monarchy—things that many scholars find highly dubious. The God I believe in works in history and cannot be constrained to a collection of “timeless truths.” Even so, my sense is that other factors are at play in the Bible than mere historical reporting. Like Homer, the biblical writers had a theme, a message, and they were often quite accomplished at using the literary devices of their day to get that message across.

How can we believe that a story that has come down to us through many generations—perhaps many centuries—of oral tradition and previous literary sources can be “God-breathed”? Well, how can we believe that Jesus is the Son of God if he ever had poopy diapers? How can we believe that he was the promised Messiah if he ever fell and scraped his knees as a child, or spoke in baby-talk before he finally mastered the Aramaic language? In other words, how can we believe that Jesus is who the New Testament claims he is if he was to all outward appearances a perfectly human human being?

Now, you know the answer to this. You learned it in Sunday school or through your pastor’s sermons or on a youth retreat somewhere along the way: Jesus was indeed perfectly human, but he was also perfectly divine. Neither his divinity nor his humanity is diluted in the least. To say otherwise is heresy: we don’t believe in a Jesus who floated three inches off the ground and was surrounded by a golden glow. Rather, we believe in a Jesus who, despite his divinity, experienced everything that being human implies—hunger, thirst, frustration, fatigue, pain, and death—yet without sin. If he hadn’t been truly human, we could never have understood him or embraced him. Far from a liability, his humanity was the one thing that made it possible for him to reveal the divine to us. No humanity, no  (meaningful) communication.

I think what you’re coming to grips with is the fact that the Bible is also a perfectly human document.  Human writers put it together much as they did any other literature from the same time and place, using the human languages in which they ordinarily spoke, the range of literary options available to them in their cultures.

What I hope you will realize, and I expect you already do, is that the Bible’s perfect humanity does not necessarily detract from accepting it as a book that is also “God-breathed.”

Dr. P.

On the first or second day of class I always tell students there are, broadly, three ways of reading the Bible. First, you can read it in a personal or individualistic way. We might call this devotional reading: just me and God and an open Bible, searching for spiritual insights that I can apply to my life. Second, you can read it in a communal way, taking full account of how one’s community of faith (or that of others) has received these texts, interpreted them, incorporated them into their worship, etc. And finally, there is the academic approach: striving (as much as is possible) to bracket our faith commitments out of the equation so that we can look at the Bible in a more or less objective way.

There are two things I want students to understand as they embark upon an Old Testament or New Testament survey course:

1. Ideally, all three of these methods of approaching Scripture should inform each other. If you’re a committed believer, there’s really no way around this. (I will draw a Venn diagram showing the intersection of the three. That’s my personal “target” when reading the Bible.)
2. The nature of university study means that the primary focus of the class will be in the academic realm, with occasional forays into the communal (history of interpretation and so forth) and very little of the personal. They haven’t signed up for a semester of Sunday school, and they are going to be exposed to ideas that may be different from what they have heard before.

A while back I received the following email from a student who I’ll call Katherine. She is a very bright and very committed Christian who raised some very good questions about what it means to handle the Bible the way I was teaching her in my OT class. I suspect she was also dealing with what someone else had previously taught her in NT. She wrote,

Dr. Pursiful,

I meant to ask you this after class today but I couldn’t quite get my head around what I wanted to ask. It started with Job, Esther, and Daniel but it relates to the whole Bible and I think it’s affecting my faith.

1) Job, Esther, and Daniel are all supposed to be fictional characters, right? Is there anything else in the Old Testament that isn’t historically accurate, or are all the Writing just stories and legends? And if so much of the Old Testament was oral tradition before it was written down or the final product came from many different sources and then was edited, how can we believe in any part of it as God-inspired and infallible?

2) Are other prophecy sections in the Bible ex eventu prophecy?

3) If Revelation is like the Apocalyptical literature in Daniel, how are we supposed to know how to read it? Can we really expect to have an end of times with an antichrist and tribulation like so many people interpret it? What do you think about the end of times?

4) How can we know, as Christians, that we should put out faith in any part of the Bible? The Old Testament writings are sometimes historically inaccurate, contradictory of itself, and have many sources and translations; in the New Testament, Matthew tries to force the idea as Jesus as the Jews’ Messiah, Luke and Matthew appear to take many of their ideas from Mark, and John is out on its own for the most part and very mystical in nature; we base most of our ideas of Christian living on the letters of Paul who was one man and never intended for his letter to be “God-breathed” Scripture, and so many of his ideas of morals reflected the patriarchal culture of the times.

I’ve never had a problem with having faith in the scriptures before, but then again, I’ve never had to question my ideas about it. I’m just having a difficult time with the fact that the Bible may not actually be internally consistent, historically accurate, or infallible like I thought it was. If I can’t believe all of it, I don’t know how I can believe any of it? Why should I take this scripture as truth over the Muslim Qur’an or the Hindu Bhagavad Gita? And how are you supposed to know the truth about God when there are so many different branches in Christianity and different interpretations of the Bible?

I appreciate Katharine’s willingness to let me (anonymously) reproduce our correspondence. Here is the first part of my response:

Hi Katharine,

My, you’re a fount of inquisitiveness today!

First let me say that I know much of what you’re going through because these things were also troublesome to me when I was first exposed to them. My response for a good long time was to circle the wagons on cherished assumptions and silently write off my professors as sub-Christian in their attitudes. I hope you don’t go down that road; it is not as satisfying in the end as it seems at the beginning.

You have raised several important questions about specific parts of the Bible. Let me begin to answer by helping you to see the “big picture” a little better. First of all, I actually spoke about this topic at FBC Forsyth a while back, and you can read my comments on my blog.

For me, the key thing to remember is that we all bring certain expectations of what we think the Bible ought to be like to our reading. Some of those expectations are right and accurate. For example, when I read the Bible, I expect it (when properly interpreted) to teach me how to experience a relationship with God, both now and in the life to come. I also expect it to be in some sense a “foreign” book to me. After all, the most recent parts of it were written nearly 2,000 years ago in a language very unlike English! I expect that the Bible can and will shape the way I pray, the way I relate to others,, etc.

Some of the expectations we bring to the Bible may seem reasonable, but really aren’t. For example, do we think the books of the Bible ought to be written in a literary genre that didn’t even exist when they were written (Herodotus was the “father of history” in western culture, and he lived around 450 BC)? Or do we expect that the biblical writers ought to have imagined how the world works in ways that correspond to what we currently understand based on modern scientific analysis?

A lot of these issues come down to having a deductive rather than an inductive approach to the Bible. Rather than reading it carefully, taking into account everything we can know about the culture in which it was written (= inductive), we can make some assumptions about what we are supposed to find before we even get to the Bible (= deductive). When we understand that the Bible is God’s word to us just the way it is, it’s easier for us to handle whatever phenomena we may discover in the text and receive them as gifts from a loving Father.

You’ve asked several specific questions that I would like to take a little bit of time to ponder before I fire off a half-baked answer. With your permission, I’d like to hold off on responding for now, but I promise I’ll get back to them. Also, if you don’t mind, I’d like to reproduce your email (anonymously, of course!) and my responses on my blog for the sake of future students who may have the same struggles.

Thanks for taking not only CHR 101 but also your faith so very seriously.

Blessings,

Dr. P.