Question?

I want to set myself strongly within the tradition of Christianity that sees the Bible not as some Divinely dropped document, but rather as the greatest literary work the world has ever seen. The Scriptures were written by people; by humans with emotions, goals, dreams, thoughts, histories and disappointments. When we emphasize the Divine inspiration of the scriptures so much that we forget that each part was written by a person, we lose the beauty of our spiritual history.

Within context, each part of the Scriptures is one part in a continuing journey of discovery, judgement from, and interaction with the true Creator God. When we take passages that we like and divorce them from the context both of the time and the author, we do violence to the text.

I have read a plethora of good articles by people online and in written format about what is wrong with the church at present. There are articles that call for all kinds of reforms and many of them I think would be great. There are articles calling for a change in the way that Churches interact with politics, there are articles calling for churches to act less like businesses and more like the church, there are articles calling for unity, for honesty, for education, and generally for reform. Many of these articles and ideas flow out of these people's interactions with the Scriptures. Yet, there are very few who actually are pointing out that many of the problems with the church in the U.S. is a misunderstanding of scripture.

Good exegesis is not just an academic exercise; it is not just a personal spiritual exercise. Rather it is the tool that can lay bare the misunderstandings and misuse of scripture within this world. Never before have so many people had access to the Scriptures. But, where before has personal experience so shaded our eyes against what the authors of Scripture are actually saying?

My conviction is: there is no better use of a quality education than making good exegesis understandable and visible to all.

When people think of Jonah (the one in the Bible that gets swallowed by a fish), what ideas, questions and comments come to mind? Last week our pastor gave a sermon on Jonah and emphasized things that I never would have. Interestingly enough this week I am teaching in our small group at church about Jonah. And though I think I could do a good job, I would like the online community (if it still exists after my long absence) to give me their questions, and ponderings on this interesting character.

As a side note, the historicity of this particular character has long been in question because of many elements in the story that seem difficult, not least of which being a human undigested in a giant fish for three days. The argument of whether the story is factual really has little importance since the story itself is claiming to give a particular story about God and his unstoppable forgiveness. The true power of the story lies not in its "unbelievable" parts but rather in the unbelievableness* of God's mercy.

Whoops, maybe I influenced the outcome too greatly. Still, please give me some comments, to help me think through Jonah.


*Yes, I do know that "unbelievableness" is a made up word. Yet I defy you to find a better one!

There are many ways that one can approach the interpretation of Genesis, not all of which are warranted by the text or experience. Those today who would wish to forward the view that Genesis has been and can only be interpreted within a particular tradition's view of literalism is patently wrong. There are no portions of Genesis that demand to be taken in a scientific¹, literal view. But to further muddy the waters, those that have a high view of scripture do believe that though Genesis is not speaking scientifically (according to modern views of science), it does make the implicit claim to be speaking historically (even so, not necessarily according to the rules of modern history).

This of course begs that question of how then we should approach this important document written most likely by the Moses of Jewish antiquity? We should approach it as a historical document that claims to be giving a history of the Jewish nation that tied that nation in with the creation of the world. The first important step in placing Genesis according to this approach is looking at its implicit goals.

Though obviously debatable², my brief summary of the goals of Genesis can be separated into two parts. First, the God of Israel was giving to Moses a history of the Israelites that tied them into the original creation of the world. Secondly, Genesis functioned as a more recent history of the Jewish people from Abraham on. Furthermore, the next four books after Genesis chronicle the change from Israel as the sons for Jacob (Israel) to a Nation chosen out of slavery, by God, to be blessed and be a blessing.

Since the overall purpose of Genesis is to discuss beginnings (genesis), it is fitting that it would discuss ultimate beginnings in and through the Creator. This was especially significant because it separated the Jews out from all other cultures on earth. Their claim carried more conceit than any other. Genesis was explicit: their God was the same God that brought this world into existence. This can be called, to distinguish it simply from theism, "Creational Monotheism." This new culture thus redeemed as children of God, through the Exodus, was given divine laws and a history through Moses. This history served not just as an accurate, disinterested history, but as the framework for their society, religion, and life.

The structure of the Creation act has been broken down, dissected, disavowed circumvented and written off, but at the heart it is a narrative, like other creation narratives of antiquity. There are some important notes to keep in mind as approaching the creation narrative in the Torah, for starters, there is repetition, not quite to the point of poetry, but perhaps closer to hymnody. Secondly, the repetition and importance of particular numbers give added and expanded significance. Lastly, there is a key difference between this narrative and all other creation accounts from antiquity: Monotheism.

My belief is that this account should be taken seriously for what it was: a narrative confirming that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was also the creator of the cosmos. But it should not be taken to refer to the method that God used to create. Using this account as a guidebook for the creation of the world is forcing the text into spaces it was never meant to occupy.

After looking at the purpose and scope of the account of Genesis, I am not forced to delegate all of science to the rubbish bin. Rather, after looking again at Genesis, I can affirm the wonder and beauty of the created world and our unique ability to understand its rationality.

*Though this information is original and I am alone to be blamed for errors, inconsistencies and poor writing, many ideas were gleaned from: Wright, Richard. “Biology: Through the Eyes of Faith,” (1989, New York).

1.Those that attempt to assert that the Bible should be taken literally/scientifically, come to difficulties and of interpretation that necessitate even greater conspiracies about modern science. For evidence, see: http://www.geocentricity.com/

2.If you disagree, please chronicle those disagreements!

Francis Bacon, who was first credited with the scientific method that we enjoy today, has had a profound impact upon the world of science, scholarship and even faith. Francis Bacon suggested that knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, should be gained through induction starting with observable “facts.” This method held sway especially in the scientific community until very recently.

In the scientific community today, this method is still used but in a modified way. No longer is there the amount of certainty attached to this method that there once was. Because of many philosophical and practical shifts now there is much more of an emphasis on repeatability and peer review. This necessary shift has pointed out many of the problems with Baconian certainty, chiefly that knowledge is rarely as cut and dry as his methodology would have one believe.

You may ask, “Why discuss Baconianism in a post purportedly about Biblical interpretation?” The answer is many sided but all of those sides have to do with certainty. Undoubtedly Bacon’s philosophy was the framework for modern science. Nevertheless, his methodology has been recently discredited as simplistic. His suggestion that one can get beyond one’s biases to the “real truth” no longer seems to fit with the world in which we live. Today, we aim toward truth without the false certainty that full understanding will ever be achieved. This is as true for the sciences as it is for all other disciplines (i.e. the constant revision and fine tuning of previously accepted theories). So though the overall method hasn’t been overturned, the certainty asserted by the method has been rejected.

In the humanities, especially historiography, this shift has been perhaps even more stark. No longer do we research the facts, find the truth publish and move on. And if we did, we would quickly be shown for the shoddy historian that we were. Rather years of research are put into understanding archeology, original manuscripts, geography, political climates, social norms and expectations before we would presume to publish a true history. During the whole process, we would have to put forth reasons why our interpretation of this period matches the data better than the hundreds of other historians that have done the same research but have come to different conclusions. To top it all off, our entire, “foolproof” history could be shown to be entirely false with the next document discovered. Where is the certainty that Bacon promised?

In Biblical interpretation there are two main strands today. The first is for the most part secular and scholarly. It takes the Bible seriously as a group of historical documents, but treats them as historical documents rather than sacrosanct. Could there have been scribal errors? Could there be more behind a passage than the “clear reading?” Could the writer have had an agenda? Etc. The second method of Biblical interpretation also takes the Bible seriously, but for different reasons. The modern Conservative Christian interpretation relies so heavily on Baconian influence that it has melded Certainty into the original texts. This interpretation uses a Baconian style logic that is unarguable (but not necessarily correct).

The framework for this second view is as follows: The canon is “inspired” by God and thus truth. Since the Canon is inspired and all true, then it is inerrant and infallible. If it is all of those things than for sure it should be the final authority, and thus authoritative. We now have a set of words that we put in the category of facts unalterable according to Baconian process. From these facts, we can process the information in the canon. So quite simply, Baconism, which has been discredited to some degree in all scholarship, has been adopted as the Protestant Church’s preferred method of biblical interpretation.

To presume a complete understanding of the history of biblical interpretation would be ludicrous, nevertheless I will attempt to outline in summary the major shifts in biblical interpretation.

There has always been an array of ways to approach Biblical interpretation, obviously some more valid than others. From my limited amount of research, I will lay out these main shifts. Before the Reformation, there were two main types of biblical interpretation, allegorical, and scholastic (usually they would not be seen as divergent, but as complementary). With the Reformation came slightly divergent views that specifically attacked the scholastic view. This slight shift moved even further with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Within these movements we see for the first time a true split in Biblical interpretation that we still feel the effects of today.

The Allegorical interpretation was seen in many of the early church father’s writings and had a heavy influence until the time of the Reformation. The allegorical approach asked the question, “What is the spiritual significance of this particular story.” Those that held strongly to this approach wouldn’t have asked the question of whether the story was true, rather they would have assumed that though the story was in one sense true, its real truth would lie in the spiritual/allegorical interpretation. Nevertheless, for the most part there was little question about the authenticity of the Biblical accounts.

The Allegorical interpretation has its roots in Jewish traditional interpretation. The whole question of apocalyptic literature (see earlier post) was simply a question about allegory. The allegorical goal of the Old Testament, in contrast, was not assuming a spiritual reality for a story, but rather a spiritual story with a literal referent. When Daniel speaks about beasts he is not referring to some crazy looking animal; he is referring to the princes and powers of the world, for him: Babylon. Daniel is the clearest of the Old Testament books that begged to be read in allegory, but portions of Ezekiel (dry bones) could hardly have been read literally. Further, in reading the Old Testament, one is struck by how often later authors reinterpreted in an allegorical way previous revelation. For instance, the passage in Hosea 6:6 discusses how God wants faithfulness, not sacrifice. This passage is quite obviously a passage reinterpreting what it means to follow God.

The Scholastic view really came to full fruition in the work of Aquinas, but its groundwork was laid as early as the first councils. Scholasticism attempted to interpret the Bible only through the lens of the church and its confessions. It relied heavily on the philosophy of Aristotle as its intellectual framework. This was not another biblical interpretive framework as much as an intellectual and philosophical bulwark to support the church’s interpretation whatever interpretive model that happened to be.

With the Reformation, both scholasticism as well as much of the allegorical interpretation was tabled both in the Protestant churches as well as the Catholic Church. Within many different reformers' writings there came to be an emphasis on a plain reading of the texts. This was one step closer to a literal interpretive method since it largely relied on the interpreter for meaning rather than the slower moving force of the church as a whole. Nevertheless, within many of the reformers and renaissance humanists of this time, there was a move toward finding original sources and using them as the basis for translation and interpretation (especially in Erasmus and only slightly less in Luther himself).

The next main shift happened when the scientific revolution started to systematize knowledge into a testable procedure. With the enlightenment and the felt need to submit all of life to the scientific method, the textual critics applied this philosophy to the Bible. With this, largely secular, shift toward looking at the bible with a critical pen came the strong reaction from the other side. The church (protestant) now wanted to give an intellectual basis for their reassertion of both a plain reading as well as answering the critics who questioned the authenticity of much of the biblical account. This reaction for the first time started to use words like “inspired, authoritative, inerrant, and infallible.” These enlightenment words then created a pillar of interpretation that many Bible scholars still rely upon as their framework, though they are at least as arbitrary as the Scholasticism’s reliance on the Church for interpretation. The pinnacle of this movement can be seen in the writing of “The Fundamentals.”

Darwin and his observations on the mutability of life subsequently crashed head to head with words like authoritative, inerrant and inspired. Though in the past it would have been difficult for Christians to accept his discoveries, with the reliance on enlightenment phraseology and the layers of tradition that these words represented, it is hardly surprising the conservative backlash that has accompanied this controversial topic.

Sorry both for the long post and my failure to address the interpretation of Genesis. See future posts for my beliefs on the synthesis of all of these interpretive trends.

Heaven is the Realm of God (see previous post). Never do we see in the Bible (or even much of the extra-cannon literature) the idea of Heaven being the final destination of good people (Christians). The question then is how we get to the point in Biblical exegesis where we embrace and make manditory this belief?

There are many points in the Bible where resurrection is discussed, not least when the resurrection of Jesus himself is discussed. This was the hope of both Jews and Christians during the period of the first century. The previous statement is not all that extraordinary since most Christians believe in Resurrection (since both Jesus and Paul emphasized it greatly). But most Christians today are not content with Resurrection as spoken of in the Cannon (and the Maccabees), rather they desire some Greek idea of disembodied bliss in Heaven rather than the renewed earth spoken about in the Gospel. Thus, a miraculous transformation in exegesis is enacted by much more subversive idea of Resurrection for the not so subversive idea of disembodied bliss.

I only bring this up because it seems to be an essential missunderstanding of the original texts. Furthermore, this missunderstanding plays into many problems with the way that Christians tend to interact with both the world and those that live in the world. Yes, there are many passages, especially in John's three letters that speak of how to live in the world. This is often taken to be referring to the world that we live in. But again, the appropriate understanding has less to do with a spiritual physical dichotomy and more to do with interacting with the powers of the world (governments).

Since this world is good, created by God, and in fact very much like the future world that Resurrection bodies will reside on, maybe we should actually care about how we take care of it!

There is so much more to cover when discussing this topic, but this post is long already and must come to an end.

Conclusion: heaven exists, but you and I are not going there; furthermore, we should be ok with that, cause Paul sure was.