Abraham was getting on in years, and his wife Sarah was pretty old too. It looked as if they weren't going to be able to have any children, which was a big disappointment. Then the Angel of the Lord told Abraham that he was going to be the father of a great nation, despite his advanced age. Sarah laughed at this, but sure enough, she became pregnant with Isaac.
Now, Isaac was obviously pretty important to Abraham, and an integral part of God's promise to him. So it was no small request when God asked Abraham to take Isaac up the mountain and sacrifice him. He obediently took up his knife, and prepared to gut his son right there on the altar. This is taken as a sign of Abraham's great faith in God.
(Nota bene: Clearly, the Abraham in the story was suffering from some sort of delusional state, possibly paranoid schizophrenia. Hearing voices telling you to kill someone is mental illness, not visitation from God. But in the context of the Genesis narrative, it supposedly was God talking, and I'm going to assume that to be the case for the sake of the theological argument, notwithstanding the more realistic psychiatric interpretation of the event.)
So let's apply this parable to the modern Christian (or Muslim or Jew, or anyone who takes a book to be divinely authoritative). The Bible (or Koran) represents God's promise to the believer, a divine revelation about the nature of the universe and man's place in it, and how to obtain eternal reward, just as Isaac was the embodiment of God's promise to Abraham. If you believe that the Book was a divine gift to humanity, then you might well treat it as especially precious, just as Abraham must have felt about Isaac.
Now suppose God appears to you and tells you something that contradicts the Bible. Which do you believe, God or the Bible?
Most Christians I ask this question chuckle and say it's a meaningless hypothetical, because God would never contradict Himself. Stop to parse that one out logically: I describe a scenario where God contradicts the Bible, and they respond He'd never contradict Himself. Does that not imply that they assume the Bible = God?
When I point that, they usually admit that of course God is not a piece of text, but the Supreme Being and Creator of the Universe, which clearly this bound stack of papers on my desk cannot be. But they still insist that since the Bible is the Word of God, and God does not lie, He would never contradict His own word.
Yet logically, it still reduces to the same thing: they make the Bible text absolute and binding upon what God can and can't do. In other words, although they tried to evade the choice I presented them with (God or the Bible, and the Bible itself says you cannot serve two masters: Matthew 6:24), they've made it: To them, the Bible, and not God, is supreme.
That's not what Abraham did. He could have reasoned, "Wait a minute. God promised to make me a great nation, and this is my only son, the son God Himself gave me, the son through which my great nation will come to be. God wouldn't break His promise. Whoever this is asking me to sacrifice Isaac, it can't be God!" But he didn't do that. He took up his knife, and obediently prepared to sacrifice his son. To repudiate God's gift to him.
You see, Abraham placed his faith in God, not in God's gift to him. He didn't necessarily know how God could keep His promise after Isaac was ashes, but he didn't need to: he trusted that God was God and that meant God could do anything He damn well wanted.
In the same way, I think Bible-worshippers would do well to take their faith away from the Bible, and place it in God directly. If God wants to contradict the Bible, He certainly can; He's not obliged to conform to any text, especially not one that has been through so many fallible human writers, redactors, translators and interpreters. (And how is worshipping the Bible not a violation of the commandment against graven images, anyway? Why is worshipping a textual depiction okay, but a graphic depiction isn't? Aren't they both the wrong thing to be worshiping?)
Now, there's a happy ending here, just as there was (sort of) for Abraham and Isaac. If you are truly willing to cast your Bible into the sacrificial flame, to give it up completely and affirm that God and God alone is Supreme, you'll find out that you don't actually need to sacrifice it. You can keep it, and read it, and derive whatever meaning and value you can from it. But it will become a book about God, perhaps a deeply treasured book, but still just a book, and not God. Read it, interpret it, re-interpret it, criticize it, love it, hate it. Just don't worship it.
Agreed! And in truth, that is what most people of the particular version of Judaism I follow are taught. Very, very good post, Tom! More people need to think about this in just this way.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Johanus. In fact, there are many versions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that have a sensible approach to their respective scriptures, placing God supreme above any text, but this still seems to be a minority view.
ReplyDeleteThis is good, Tom. Scripture isn't God. And it has been tinkered with for ages. The Christians I know would, I think, say they value their bibles and study them, but we're not blind to textual problems (studied several of these issues at length in bible college). I don't hang out with Christians you've indicated, but I certainly am aware of them. I enjoyed a recent quote from Marilynne Robinson who said, "“In our strange cultural moment it is necessary to make a distinction between religious propaganda and religious thought, the second of these being an attempt to do some sort of justice to the rich difficulties present in the tradition.”
ReplyDeleteOne point to inform your observation that Abraham could have been suffering a psychotic break or other psychological disorder when he heard God tell him to sacrifice Isaac, is to recall that Abraham had been brought out of a culture that practiced child sacrifice. It's interesting to contemplate the idea that the God that called Abraham out of that culture seemed to be asking him to return to it. Except, the story goes, that his hand was stopped and a ram was found and sacrificed instead. If you were to go along with the idea that it was God's directive to ask Abraham to offer Isaac up as a sacrifice, what is God saying through the action of the entire story? It's interesting to think about. I bring it up because your note says that "Clearly, the Abraham in the story was suffering from some sort of delusional state, possibly paranoid schizophrenia. Hearing voices telling you to kill someone is mental illness, not visitation from God." And I don't think that much of ancient text could be so "clearly" interpreted, and I don't think you believe that either. There is a great deal of history and context that is left out of scripture. We have to be mindful of this whenever we visit ancient texts. No matter how holy the book, it contains only pieces of a much larger story.
In our fairly broad Christian circles, my guess is that the view that scripture is a book and God is God would be a sound one. But now I want to ask people!
Great post!
Thanks, Bonnie. You're right that Abraham's coming from a culture that practice child sacrifice might modify my assessment of his mental health, but not necessarily by a great deal. After all, it's more the hearing voices than exactly what those voices were saying that's critical. If I hear a voice (that I don't recognize as being the product of my own internal dialogue) telling me to stop at a red light, I'd be concerned. I'd stop, still, because stopping at red lights is the right thing to do, but I'd be a little worried about the voice, and I'd certainly not leap to the assumption that it was the voice of God.
ReplyDeleteBut of course, that's just a parenthetical caveat in the OP, the lawyer in me wanting to make sure I'm not advocating following Abraham's example with respect to killing people.
In your example, it would likely be a cop telling you to stop. heh heh.
DeleteMost Christians I ask this question chuckle and say it's a meaningless hypothetical, because God would never contradict Himself. Stop to parse that one out logically: I describe a scenario where God contradicts the Bible, and they respond He'd never contradict Himself. Does that not imply that they assume the Bible = God?
DeleteNo, to say that the Bible is God's word does not logically imply: Bible = God. Your words are not equal to you are they? In any case, the scenario you posit presents no logical bind and even a professing atheist who was being intellectually honest would agree that if the Bible is God's word and if God cannot contradict himself, then the Bible cannot contradict what God would say if he appeared to you.
I am not equal to my words, no. So a clearer way to speak would be to say, "God would never contradict His own words." Yet I rarely hear it that way, which is unfortunate, because expressing it that way would make the distinction clearer and lessen the tendency toward idolatry of the Bible.
DeleteIf the Bible is God's WORD and not God, then we can look at the chain of transmission of that word, and in so doing it's hard not to notice the role of countless human beings in the process of observing, remembering, retelling, eventually writing down (decades or centuries later in some cases), transcribing, translating, editing and redacting the texts. So what the claim boils down to here is, "God would never contradict the version of His word that has been transmitted through generations of human intermediaries." In other words, you are holding God to be bound by what certain humans have said He said.
Perhaps my problem is that I simply can't get away from my view of the Bible as a human artifact, and when humans engrave an image (or a textual depiction), it's inherently tainted by their fallibility. And it seems to me that to postulate those humans to have been divinely guided in producing these artifacts is the very essence of idolatry: endowing a human-made artifact with divinity. You don't get around the third commandment by saying, "Oh, THESE humans were divinely guided in producing THIS holy object, while all those others are producing heathen idols." That's just special pleading.
Another problem is that the Bible itself depicts God as contradicting or reversing Himself, and even saying things that are literally untrue when He says them. In fact, the VERY FIRST THING God says to any human anywhere in the Bible turns out to be literally false: He tells Adam that he will die on the day he eats from the Tree of Knowledge. Yet Adam did NOT die on that day. Some try to weasel around the interpretation by saying it was a "spiritual" death, and hey, I'm fine with figurative interpretation of the Bible, but then what does that do for the claim of biblical inerrancy?
What it does is this: it renders it completely irrelevant. Because divinely inspired or not, WE have to do the interpreting, and we are fallible. There is no guarantee against error for our individual act of interpretation, and while you might believe YOU are divinely guided against error in reading your Bible, I decline to pretend to such authority. The opinions I form are my responsibility, and subject to my fallibility.
Tom, I'm sorry you don't hear more often that the Bible is God's word, and that in your experience people have equated the Bible with Trinity-God. Regarding the human element in transmission, certainly the God of the Bible is capable of bringing to pass his word without error, given that he is sovereign. That men at sundry times and in sundry places given divine revelation hardly implies idolatry as you say. As for your problem with contradiction eg., spiritual death - do you really think that the author who penned "death" and then did not describe the death you think "death" implied thought he was writing a contradiction? Of course not, which only reaffirms that there was no contradiction at all. Moreover, the death was also physical, for apart from that sin there would have been continued life. Accordingly, the death in view was both spiritual and physical, but even if you don't accept that, it still stands that you have no basis to believe that the one who authored Genesis thought his words were contradictory, which as I said implies that death did not mean drop dead at that moment but rather spiritual and finite bodily existence.
DeleteI hear very often the claim that the Bible is God's word; I was referring instead to a shortcut of speech that people use in talking about the Bible, when they say God would never contradict HimSELF, though they should be more precise in saying God would never contradict His word.
ReplyDeleteOf COURSE it's possible for God to do whatever the heck He wants, including transmitting His word without error through human intermediaries. My argument is not that God could not have intervened to preserve His word, but that we are not qualified to assume that He did, much less to insist that God conform to this putatively divine text. God must be the standard against which the Bible is tested, not vice versa. Either you measure God against the Bible, or you measure the Bible against God. It's one or the other, and you have to choose.
With respect to Genesis, hey, fine. I don't claim to know what the original author(s) meant to say. But that's kind of the whole point: we don't know what it means, and so even if we assume it's the Word of God, it doesn't help us much if we don't understand it. And when we think we DO understand it, and then God comes along and perhaps does or says something that contradicts our interpretation, and we say, "Oh, that can't possibly be God, because it contradicts the Bible," well, we're elevating our own judgment beyond its legitimate authority.
So even if the Bible IS the word of God, it is still necessarily possible for God to APPEAR to contradict it, because our our fallibility in interpreting it: we can get it wrong. And if that happens, which do you choose to hold supreme? I'm arguing that the truly pious Christian simply must answer "God, of course!" Any other answer violates at least one and probably all three of the first three commandments.
Of COURSE it's possible for God to do whatever the heck He wants, including transmitting His word without error through human intermediaries. My argument is not that God could not have intervened to preserve His word, but that we are not qualified to assume that He did, much less to insist that God conform to this putatively divine text.
DeleteIf God cannot lie or deceive, then his word must be true. Your statement that we aren’t “qualified” to assume that he didn’t lie or deceive contradicts the premise that he cannot lie or deceive, assuming we are qualified to realize a tautology, that if God cannot lie or deceive then he cannot lie or deceive. What you would like to say is that we cannot discern whether the Bible is God’s word, but that’s another matter and one that is easy to defend. Notwithstanding, your assertions aren’t getting to the heart of your skepticism.
God must be the standard against which the Bible is tested, not vice versa.Either you measure God against the Bible, or you measure the Bible against God. It's one or the other, and you have to choose.
Obviously that’s an incoherent false dilemma, for if the Bible is God’s word, then to reject the Bible is to reject a subset of God’s thoughts, which is to reject his precepts and his disclosure of himself. One does not choose between God and his word anymore than one chooses between believing a man and believing his word. All we know about a man is contained in his words and deeds, just like all we know about God is contained in his word and his acts of creation, providence and grace.
With respect to Genesis, hey, fine. I don't claim to know what the original author(s) meant to say. But that's kind of the whole point: we don't know what it means, and so even if we assume it's the Word of God, it doesn't help us much if we don't understand it.
You don’t speak for me and all Christians who do understand and know what the rudimentary doctrines of Genesis reveal.
You are taking some shortcuts here. I did not say we aren't qualified to assume God didn't lie or deceive; I readily agree that God cannot do either (except insofar as He may suffer us to deceive ourselves), What I said was that we are not qualified to infer that the TRANSMISSION of His word through the long chain of human intermediaries has been divinely reliable. God may speak absolute truth, but if it's heard by a human, retold to other humans until one decides to write it down, then copied, transcribed, translated, retranslated and edited before we get to read it, we may not be getting a pure version of the original message. Doubting the fidelity of transmission is not the same as doubting the authority of the original.
ReplyDeleteYou see, the claim that the Bible we have today is the word of God can only be sustained if we postulate divine guidance for the entire process of transmission, which amounts to ascribing divine authority to those humans involved, even if it's only limited to their involvement in the process and leaves them fallible in everything else. I am too acutely aware of human fallibility to accept this claim on the mere sayso of a few passages in the text itself claiming divine authority, because it is the fidelity of that very text which is in question.
if you admit any possibility whatsoever that someone along that whole chain of transmission might have made the slightest mistake, then you can no longer hide from the conflict you have sought to deny could exist: a discrepancy between the Bible and God's actual intended word. Even if it's only a theoretical possibility, the dilemma exists. Now, clearly you deny even that the theoretical possibility exists, but that calls for a level of certainty on your part that is, again, beyond what we mere mortals are entitled to claim. If a theoretical possibility exists (whether or not you recognize it), the dilemma remains, and denying the existence of the dilemma in this case still amounts to choosing the Bible over God.
No, I don't speak for you. You claim to know the meaning of Genesis, and I claim not to know. That's not to say I don't have my own ideas and interpretations about it, just that I decline to assert that my interpretations are God's. I can be wrong, and I suspect you can be too.
You see, the claim that the Bible we have today is the word of God can only be sustained if we postulate divine guidance for the entire process of transmission, which amounts to ascribing divine authority to those humans involved, even if it's only limited to their involvement in the process and leaves them fallible in everything else.
DeleteTom, I think I'm done after this. That God can ensure that things fall out as planned does not mean that those instruments in his hand, whether human or simply natural causes, enjoy divine authority. Scripture teaches that Judas was to sell out the Lord. Should we ascribe divine authority to Judas' act of betrayal? In another sense we see this sort of thing all the time. If a feeble old woman were to drop her purse in front of you while you both were the only ones in an elevator, I trust you would pick it up for her. In a sense, the woman could orchestrate such an outcome and you would act just as she "determined." Now of course, you might not and she couldn't *know* the outcome, but just the same the illustration demonstrates that should she have success in getting you to act just as she purposed, you would need not take on a divine quality. All the more the case with God who does know how we will behave. Of course, the Scriptures were not brought into existence through ordinary providence but rather by God acting directly without causal means, yet notwithstanding the material point is that God can achieve his ends through volitional creatures, which does not imply divine authority for the creatures. It's the Word that has authority, not those who penned the Word. BTW, I'm R.A. whom you met on my site.
So Long.
So long, then.
ReplyDeleteI will, however, respond, not necessarily for your benefit but because of my view that this is a public dialogue, and others might be interested in a response, even if you're not one of them.
You are presupposing a whole lot of little miracles to preserve the message of the Bible intact through generations of human transmission. I do not deny that God could so intervene. What I challenge is the reliability of your insistence that He did, for such a claim goes far beyond simply having faith in God.
I can have faith in God alone, without making any claim to knowledge whatsoever; I simply take as a working assumption that God is just and true, and can then proceed trying my best to strive for justice and truth, wherever they may lead me (even if it leads me to the conclusion that God probably doesn't exist). Such a faith is practically unassailable, as it could only be undermined if the path of truth and justice led to the conclusion that God is unjust and untrue, but even then, human fallibility provides an out: maybe the evidence was misread?
But your claim goes far, far beyond that kind of faith in God. It amounts to a historical claim about contingent events in the universe itself, events which are in principle empirically testable. All we need to do is find actual discrepancies between versions of the Bible to demonstrate that this divine guidance you postulate does not apply. (As a matter of fact, such discrepancies abound, and we even see efforts like the "Conservative Bible Project" which clearly demonstrates that it is possible to distort the text, regardless of whether you believe the CBP is correcting distortions or introducing them.)
But ultimately the real consequence of asserting that the Bible is a divinely infallible record of the Word of God is that you elevate your own reading of it to an unwarranted authority. You must claim for yourself a kind of certainty that is beyond the capacity of fallible mortals. Indeed, I can't help but think it sacrilege to pretend to know the mind of God. The Third Commandment forbids the vanity of speaking in God's name, and yet you have the audacity to deny that you are speaking only your own thoughts and beliefs, but claim to KNOW?