The Bible: a timeless monolith without contradictions, errors or fiction? The error of biblical inerrancy..
Friday, January 26, 2007
I told you a while ago about a guy I know, Derek, who posted a message on his Myspace called 'My Confession: Why I Can No Longer Believe in the Bible Nor the God Who Created It'. I recognized much of his critique on the Bible and on Bible-believers, so I sent him a laborious reply. I linked to that reply in a former post, but didn't realize that Derek's Myspace is set to private. All the more reason to publish the entire text of my reply here (you need to know that Derek pointed out that according to certain verses in Romans chapter 9, it's God who decides wether someone is saved or not, which would mean that we do not have a free will):
Hi Derek,
Thanks for your honest evaluation. I recognize much of what you bring up.
I cried when I first learnt that you've chosen to let go of your faith, but I fully respect it. Also, I kind of saw this coming: you aren’t exactly lucky in your religious experiences up till now. I think that one of the most wicked things about NCCG is that it offers so many truths among its poison, with the result that those freeing themselves from the cult throw away the truths with the poison. I must admit that I hope that the way you see things now are 'birth-pains' rather than a final conclusion.
Let me say that I'm glad that you are saying farewell to a fundamentalistic view of the 'inerrancy' of the Bible. On the other hand, I think you still haven't fully left this paradigm. You seem to suggest in the end of your text that one would have to choose between believing the whole Bible in a literal, fundamentalistic, 'inerrancy' way - or admit that it could have errors and therefore admit that it cannot be the infallible Word of God. I think this is a black and white choice that still originates in the black and white worldviews of fundamentalistic evangelicals and cults like NCCG.
To clarify the way I see things, I need to tell you a bit about myself. When I was around the age of fourteen, I gave up on faith because I felt I couldn't live up to God's standards, especially not in the area of sexuality. For years, I lived with the fear of going to hell. But more and more I detached myself from orthodox theology, thereby silencing my fear. I never came to the point though where I didn't believe anymore that the God of the Bible was real, that Christ had risen, and that the Bible was in some way true. But I figured this was due to the fact that I had been indoctrinated in my early youth. On the other hand, it wasn't just a matter of indoctrination: as a kid, I had experienced God as a fiery, loving, holy, personal power more than once.
Through the reading of certain books (in fact New Age garbage like the books of Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh) I came to appreciate the Bible in a new way: as a book with very human origins, many contradictions and a great deal of mysteries awaiting to be solved. This is one of the reasons that I decided to study theology. I signed up at the faculty of theology in Groningen; a theological faculty renowned and infamous for its critical-historical, liberal stance, especially with regard to the bible sciences. It’s a fact that many believing theology students on faculties like this lose their faith during and because of their theology studies. When the Bible is carefully dissected and its many historical layers and human voices – often contradicting each other and also manifest in many redactions and re-redactions of the texts - are laid bare, most students can no longer assume that the Scriptures are divinely inspired and are the Word of God in a literal sense – and therefore their view of God as all-powerful and utterly trustworthy (the traditional ánd biblical view of God) is crushed. Many do not simply lose their faith, but have it transformed into a liberal faith that is often no more than a kind of humanism dressed up with christianity and with those biblical themes that they find suitable (social justice is a popular one).
This was not the course for me: learning the truth about the development of the Scriptures couldn’t destroy my faith, since I had already lost it before beginning my studies. In fact, I went the other way around: studying the Bible, even in these very critical ways, had such an impact on me that more and more I began to come under the conviction that the Bible was true after all and was indeed the living Word of God, but in a (totally) different way than evangelical orthodoxy assumes. This led me to embrace my faith again. I was a semi-liberal believer for some years (‘semi’ because I believed that Jesus was actually alive), until through a series of events my life was turned upside down and I learned the hard way that Jesus has all power in heaven and in earth and will go to great lengths to save me from my egoism and have me accept his love. I ended up among those I had regarded as foolish, naive and fundamentalistic for so many years: my evangelical ‘brothers and sisters’.
In this process and ever since I re-embraced my faith, there were many times that I felt the seduction to embrace the belief that the Bible is inerrant and to embrace a fundamentalistic view of the Bible. Thank God I have never fully given in to these seductions. In fact, although I returned to an evangelical context, I never returned to a fundamentalistic view of the Bible. Instead, there was a growing conviction in me that the ‘inerrancy’-view of the Bible is wrong. Nevertheless, I decided not to make an issue of this, since I considered the shared relationship with God through his son Jesus Christ more important and I know myself as someone who can become overheated in theological discussions..
So, I don’t believe that the Bible is ‘inerrant’ in the traditional, orthodox sense of the word. No! The Bible is full of errors; full of contradictions; full of both historical inaccuracies and plain fictions. All attempts to deny this come down to pathetic twisting of the texts. But – and here I leave the black and white scheme – I still believe that the Bible is the living Word of the living God, yes, even that the Bible is infallible, in a certain (namely a biblical) sense.
How is this possible? It is very appropiate at this point to refer to a Dutch theologian named J.H. Gunning. He presented the conviction that the orthodox view of the Bible as the ‘inerrant’ and historically infallible Word of God is in fact a form of disobedience against the very Scriptures that believers who hold this view think to honour. This is because the Bible doesn’t present itself at all as an ‘inerrant’ and historically infallible collection of texts. On the contrary: innumerable logical contradictions, errors, and historical inaccuracies or fictions are contained in the texts, and many of these have been consciously contained. Gunning presents some examples, just for the argument – I could mention the fact here that right in the beginning of the Bible, there are two different accounts of the creation story that are totally contradictory from a historical-chronological point of view. Of course, the scribes of old were well aware of the discrepancies between the two accounts, but apparently saw no problem in this at all. Gunning’s point, accordingly, is that the ‘inerrant’, ‘historically accurate’ view of the Bible is typically a modern point of view that is at heart a form of rationalistic fundamentalism. This modern, rationalistic view is totally foreign to the Bible, wherefore it is a matter of utter arrogance and intellectual imperialism to force it upon the Scriptures and claim that this is the view that the Scriptures demand. The Scriptures never claim that they are ‘inerrant’ in the modern, rationalistic sense of the word, and on the contrary defy this claim by their self-presentation, as mentioned above. On the other hand, the Scriptures do claim that they are the Word of God and they do claim that they are infallible in a biblical sense – namely as a trustworthy guide with regard to getting to know God, yourself and relating to people around you, as well as with regard to the ways in which God acts in history with the final goal of restoring these relationships. In this sense, I believe the Bible to be ‘infallible’, by which I mean ‘utterly trustworthy’.
I guess you are familiar with the concept of docetism; the teaching that Jesus didn’t have a real human body and therefore didn’t really suffer on the cross. I think it wouldn’t go too far to say that the ‘inerrant’, fundamentalistic view of the Bible is at the root a docetic view of the Scriptures, in which their ‘human body’, i.e. their human origin, is really being denied. It’s as if the fundamentalistic believer says: ‘The Bible is 100 % divine, and therefore 0 % human’. Some liberal christians try to find a balance that could be formulated as: ‘The Bible is about 50 % divine and about 50 % human’. I think the formula most in line with the Bible itself would be: ‘The Bible is 100 % divine, and therefore 100 % human’. Just as Jesus did have a human body with all the weaknesses inherent in it, the Scriptures are the product of human efforts with all the weaknesses inherent in it. And just as Jesus was and is the sinless, divine son of God, so the Scriptures are never missing the mark and divine. When we judge the Scriptures, they may miss the mark in all kinds of ways, but when they judge us, we can be sure they will be honest – and lead us to the loving kindness of their ‘Conductor’.
Years ago my present-day wife, who hadn’t been raised with any kind of faith and was rather antagonistic towards religion and a so called ‘God’, decided to start reading the Bible because she was in love with me and she knew that I was studying theology and apparently appreciating these texts. So she started reading in Genesis and made it to Second Kings in a couple of months. At that point, she couldn’t bear it anymore and came to the blasphemous but very honest conclusion that ‘God’, if he existed, was an asshole.
In the course of time, she’s come to a very different conclusion, and not by any conscious efforts of myself or those of any indoctrinating community. Still, her prior conclusion was at the time very honest, like I said. But getting to know someone better can throw a totally different light on somebody.
It is my conviction, both from personal experience and from Scripture, that God is a fiery lover. That is the best short description, based on the Bible and on my personal experience, that I could give of God’s character. God is a fiery lover – and yes, He’s got blood on his hands. Far from being the ‘watchmaker’ god that watches the chaos on earth from a safe distance, He’s getting dirty hands – even to the point of sacrificing his own son and shedding his blood to reconcile the world to himself. Either this is insanity – or it is fiery love (well-known to be often nearly indistinguishable from insanity). The Bible is a bloody book, from the beginning to the end. That means it is a realistic book – violence has been a reality of life ever since the fall, or, if you like, from the beginning of human history. We may be disgusted by violence - many of us are disgusted by seeing blood – but turning our eyes away from it won’t make it disappear. Although we may wish that the Bible and its God were totally violence-free and free from bloodstains, such a Bible and such a God would have very little meaning in this world because they would be devoid of reality. Such a Bible and such a God would, again, be docetic: stripped of our human reality and denying the suffering that is part of it. Such denial is typical of the New Age-movement, where suffering is often being regarded as an illusion of which we have to free ourselves. Unlike Buddha, who invested all he had to escape from suffering, Jesus chose to take the road of suffering – and invites us to take this road with him and be glorified.
People who madly love somebody can do crazy things. Often we cannot truly judge somebody by just regarding his or her behaviours, but we need to know the motives behind someones actions to value them at their true worth. For my wife and me, this makes the difference between God being an – well, you know what, and God being a fiery lover. Because we believe that the heart of God’s motivation can be found, for instance, in Ezekiel 18:23: ‘Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?’. I know, I know – many passages in the Bible seem to fully contradict this verse. One of those would be the verses you mention in Romans chapter 9. But somehow we must accept that the Scriptures don’t seem to mind a bunch of contradictions – and, if you believe that the Scriptures are essentially one (which I do), these contradictions cannot but be necessarily different but still complementary ways of expressing the truth. In fact, the concept of expressing the truth by assembling differing and often contradictory statements and stories is a very Jewish one, as you will probably know. If God has chosen to reveal his truths through Hebrew writings (which I believe He has), He has obviously not chosen to avoid contradictions and to neatly reveal his truths in a modern, Western, logical way. The conclusions that you seem to rightly draw from Romans 9 should be countered by a verse like 1 Tim. 2:3b-4: ‘God our Savior (...) wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.’ It is true that the passages logically contradict each other,
but this might very well be the consequence of differing language fields belonging to different dimensions of truth. Even our logical, rationalistic view of the exact sciences is more and more being destroyed as we learn that there are several dimensions influencing the appearance of truth that we haven’t taken into account properly or haven’t taken into account at all, while on top of that there are very probably dimensions of which we still don’t know that they exist and these might influence the appearance of truth as well. Even exact scientific truths appear to be a lot more dynamic than we could have ever imagined – how much more so the truths that belong to a highly dynamic, fiery lover-God!
According to the Bible, God acts in and works through history. He takes his time, so to speak. He didn’t have a Holy Bible drop out of the sky, like the Quran, and he didn’t dictate beautiful spiritual half-truths at high speed, as the New Age-masters do. Instead, he worked through the lifes of hundreds, probably thousands of people who became inspired to write ‘holy things’ out of the reality of their every day lifes. He had to struggle with these people and they had to struggle with him, just like Jacob once struggled with the mysterious man who turned out to be God himself. Likewise, he didn’t come up with a Messiah out of the blue but had been working on him for thousands of years. It’s true that when we look at muslim legislation, we see many similarities with Torah – the same holds true when we compare certain legislative systems of cultures surrounding old Israel with Torah. A lot, perhaps even most of the building stones of both Torah and the entire Bible are not ‘new’ - it’s true to say that old Israel as well as someone like Paul ‘borrowed’ a lot of concepts, ideas and stories from surrounding cultures. But the point is that the authors of Scripture rearranged these materials in ways that seem very ‘unnatural’ - very ‘un-human’, so to speak – in ways that created a unique picture of who God is and who human beings are, of how the two got separated and how they finally find each other back. All modern comparative religion scientists agree that although the materials that Israel used for construing its holy Scriptures are ‘borrowed’ from its surrounding cultures, the final product is unique. In fact, creativity is really about rearranging materials to produce something unique – think of the fact that fruitflies and humans are genetically very similar; but still genetic materials have been arranged in such a way that human beings are actually very different from fruitflies and a lot more unique, I would say. In fact, the building stones of creation are relatively few – it is the arranging and rearranging of materials which accounts for the enormous diversity of all things living (as well as non-living).
An example of how Israel (probably) rearranged materials is the story of the flood. Many primitive cultures have their own account of a flood-story (in itself suggesting historical basis). Most modern biblical scientist assume that the Babylonian flood-story provided the material for the biblical account of the flood. In the babylonian version, the gods decide to destroy mankind because humans disturb their sleep with their noise. As you know, in the Bible God is tormented by the evil being practiced by all human beings, and therefore, with pain in his heart, decides to bring his judgment over the earth. If the mentioned scientists are right, this is not a subtle rearrangement – this is a fundamental transformation of the babylonian story. The babylonian story is very ‘natural’, very ‘human’ - the biblical account is ‘unnatural’ and ‘un-human’ - it goes to the heart of the human condition and shows a God, not disturbed in his sleep – but even in his anger deeply hurt by the evil practices of men. It shows a passionate God – a fiery lover. I believe that the biblical account, possibly a rearrangement of mostly mythical material, hits the theological mark. I suggest it hits the historical mark as well, since God is a God who acts in history. Of course, I do not use the word ‘historical’ here in a 21st-century, Western, modern sense.
In the case of Torah, it’s obvious that lots of building stones were borrowed from surrounding cultures. Still, the rearrangements of these materials turned out to form something unique – especially with regard to the relationship between God and his people. The metamorphosis of animal sacrifice from ‘food for the gods’ to a symbolical presentation of God providing the life (i.e., the blood) that had been lost because of sin is another example of a staggering rearrangement of materials that constituted deep layers of meaning that were ‘new’ on the one hand, but referring to ‘eternal’ truths (as Scripture claims) on the other.
Jesus himself suggests that part of the Torah has been given because of the hardness of human hearts – and this points, again, to the Scriptures being grounded in reality. At that stage of history, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, crude though it may seem to us, was really a revolutionary breaking of the vicious circle of neverending violence. Nevertheless, in ‘the fulness of time’, we are instructed not to insist on our rights but ‘overcome evil with good’. This clearly shows historical dynamics, and this also means that we cannot judge islam as if we still live around 1000 B.C. Instead of being God’s final revelation, as islam claims, it is rather hopelessly behind God’s historical dynamics. In short, Torah is not a timeless monolith, but a very pragmatic set of instructions guiding the painstaking process of creating heaven on earth. Messiah has taught us the final motives behind Torah, which in fact can only be realized through the saving and transforming relationship with him, as Paul points out in his letter to the Romans where he says that Christ is the goal of Torah.
You see, when you have a fundamentalistic view of the Bible, you will constantly need to supress your common sense and either close your eyes to all the problems arising from this view or twist around the Scriptures to make them fit into this paradigm. Lots of christians live either way – for instance, most christians whom I tell that there are two accounts of creation that logically contradict each other, are utterly amazed and have never even noticed this while reading these chapters themselves. I would say it is time to love God with all our mind, reason and intellect, as He asks of us. Christians shouldn’t be afraid of what will happen when they stop to defend Scripture against the ‘attacks’ of ‘liberal theologians’ - the Scriptures are well able to defend themselves. A fundamentalistic view of the Bible is a very weak basis for faith! In fact, as I see it, it is a lack of faith; it is based on the fear that God can’t be trusted if He turns out to have very different ways of thinking and of expressing himself than we do, and on the arrogance that we should defend God against his critics. Furthermore, the Bible itself shows us something which we won’t find, for instance, in islam – people who live in intimate relationships with God criticising him and debating with him over wether his actions are just. Abraham and Moses make strong examples of this. So, what God asks of us is to enter into an intimate relationship with him by trusting him, but not to become braindead, unpassionate, robotic slaves unaffected by the strange ways of their fiery lover.
For God is strange – He is ‘wholly other’. I find it very meaningful that Scripture compares our relationship with him to the relationship with someone of the other sex. Let’s be honest, Derek – women are strange. We will never fully understand them, no matter how hard we try. Still, they are ‘of our flesh and bone’ in a general sense within society as well as in a specific sense within marriage. You know, when I got to know my present wife, I found her not only very strange, but I even found many of her actions and many of the things I knew she did or had done repulsive – they drove me to the conclusion that she was in several ways a horrible person (close to being an asshole, although I wouldn’t use that word for a lady). It was only through a special dream I’d head about her that I ventured to begin a loving relationship with her, as a leap into the dark. While getting to know her better I discovered that I had been misjudging her – the motives behind the actions and behaviours mentioned were very different from what I had wrongly assumed. She turned out to be as beautiful as the dream I mentioned depicted her.
I guess you get my point?
Finally, you make a very good point about control. Obviously, we find God using very controlling measures in Torah. But we must place this in its historical context as well. When the snake asked Eve wether God had forbidden them to eat of any tree in the garden, he suggested that God is a control freak trying to destroy our freedom and our pleasure. In reality, they could freely eat of all the treas in the garden, including the tree of life – life was God’s will for them. Only that one tree was forbidden, not as some sort of ‘test’, but because its fruit would lead to death, which would be against the will of God. (The story, far from being a ‘historical’ account in the modern sense of the word, is so stuffed with truth and both tragedy ánd promise, that I regard it as a mountaintop of Scripture.) We all know the rest of the story, but my point is that is has never been God’s original will to control us. Therefore, I think it is highly appropiate when Paul speaks of the Torah as a ‘schoolmaster’ unto Christ. Christ, the ‘Torah become flesh’, was the goal of Torah, and through Christ, keeping Torah will, far from being a way of being controlled by a moody slave-driver, be a manifestation of the mutual love between our fiery lover (our Creator) and us, as beautifully and clearly expressed in John 4:18 and John 5:3-4:
‘There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.’
‘This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.’
Yeah... It may sound politically incorrect and cultic. But fiery love will never be known for its conformation to the standards of the world.
Derek, I’m sorry for the length of my writing, but I wished to let you know that there are other ways of relating to the Bible and its ‘Conductor’ than either being an ‘inerrancy’-fundamentalist or an agnostic, or, alternatively, a liberal ‘Jesus rose from the death symbolically’-kind of believer. It is possible to be critical, use your brain, and all the same enter into an intimate relationship with your Creator based on trust. But, this has to be admitted, reason will never be a safe basis for making this ‘leap of faith’ - love has a very irrational quality to it, and I’m convinced this is the reason why the christian faith is by far the most irrational of all. (But, mind you, ‘irrational’ does NOT mean ‘unintelligent’ and ‘anti-intellectual’ and not even ‘anti-rational’!)
I hope you will consider my thoughts and give them a place in your mind. If you have been reading up to here, I thank you for that and encourage you to take a break now.
With love,
Marten Docter
Labels: bible, faith, inerrancy, theology
posted by Marten @ 6:35 AM;
