Holy scripture
6
Holy scripture
said that the Enlightenment was, from one point of view,
shift in the location of reliable truth from a story to a set
of eternal laws capable (in principle) of mathematical statement
and independent of accidental happenings in history. It was
inevitable that this shift should lead to a reevaluation of that
which had formerly been regarded as the locus of reliable truth
namely, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. These
could no longer be accepted as the final arbiter of truth. They
must be examined and evaluated like any other ancient scriptures. Of course, the change was not immediate. Scripture retained for a long time and still retains among many Christians
in the modern world an authority which sets it apart from other
ancient literature. But the shift was obviously unavoidable. These
ancient documents had to be assessed by the criteria developed
in modern scientific work if they were to have any authority at
all. Whatever might happen within the life of the church, the
scholarly world had to distinguish a scientific approach to the
Bible from the confessional approach of the churches. And as
training for the Christian ministry was assimilated to the critical
methods of modernity, thousands of prospective ordinands in
their earliest months of theological training had to be gently but
firmly moved from the confessional position to the scientific
one. What came to be known as the "historical-critical method" grew to eventually be accepted as the only proper method for interpreting these ancient writings.
1. The principle of critical or methodological doubt: since any conclusion is subject to revision, historical inquiry can never achieve absolute certainty but only relative degrees of probability.
2. The principle of analogy: historical knowledge is possible because all events are similar in principle. We must assume that the laws of nature in biblical times were the same as now. Troeltsch refers to this as "the almighty power of analogy."
3. The principle of correlation: the phenomena of history are interrelated and interdependent, and no event can be isolated from the sequence of historical causes and effects.
It is helpful to have these principles set out in this way, and when this is done it immediately becomes obvious that this is a creedal position. These principles are assumed to be true in advance of anything that one might learn from the Bible. Clearly none of them can be demonstrated as matters of certainty. They are not called prejudices because, unlike prejudices, they are assumptions picked up from the plausibility structure that controls the world of modernity. It is worth looking at these three principles in turn and more closely:
(1) The principle of critical or methodological doubt is already familiar as the kingpin of the Cartesian method. We have looked at the impasse into which it has led modernity, and there is no need to repeat the story. To put it in one sentence, the biblical story is here judged by a criterion which is inoperable - inoperable because the idea that we can have a certainty not open to doubt is an illusion.
(2) The principle of analogy can be stated in a negative form as follows: there can be no event that is unique. Quite obviously, this proposition is strictly impossible to prove. It is an easy victim of the principle of methodological doubt. It is, of course, possible to believe that nothing unique has ever happened or could ever happen, but it can never be more than an assumption. The assertion (which Christians make) that something unique has happened can of course be doubted, but it cannot be dismissed as an impossibility. And there are two things which might be said to justify at least the keeping of an open mind. The first is this: there is no analogy known by secular historians for the creation of the world. However we think about the beginning of all things, about the transition from nothingness to something, it is not an event which can be listed in a catalogue of similar events. The Christian tradition, on the other hand, claims that there is one event which is genuinely analogous - namely, the event of the incarnation. Christian tradition speaks of this as the beginning of a new creation, for there is indeed no other appropriate analogy. It is, of course, perfectly possible to disbelieve this. It is possible and indeed natural to think that cosmic and human existence is bound by eternal laws which can never change, that there can never be anything radically new, and that as things have been they forever will be. This is possible, natural, and very common. But there is no logical necessity requiring us to believe these positions and to thus disbelieve the Christian analogy of a new creation.
The second reason for pausing before accepting the almighty power of analogy as the ultimate reality of the universe is this: Christians of all persuasions pray, "Your kingdom come." What are we, as Christians, asking for when we so pray? We already believe that God is the Supreme Ruler. If, nevertheless, we pray for God's kingly rule to come, then we are asking for something different from the present state of affairs. We are, surely, rejecting and rebelling against the almighty power of analogy. We are looking for something new, radically new If, however, there can never be within history something radically new, what is the point of this prayer? In truth, of course, we are emboldened to pray this prayer, to make this unreasonable petition, because we believe that in Jesus this kingly rule has in fact broken into our history in an event which is without analogy except the analogy of creation and the analogy of the final consummation of all things. Apart from these unique events, for which there are no other analogies, the petition would surely be a mere aspiration. without justification in the experience of human history.
(3) The principle of correlation affirms that all historical events are part of an unbroken nexus of cause-effect relationships. Here we seem to have a simple example of the reductionism I referred to during the discussion of Polanyi's hierarchy of levels of explanation. Certainly all happenings in history are part of a nexus of cause-effect relationships which can be explored at various levels. But this does not exclude the possibility that they may embody a purpose that is not exhaustively explained by tracing these relationships. Just as the physical structure of our bodies, explicable at various levels (atomic, molecular, mechanical, electrical, and so forth) does not prevent but makes possible the free exercise of our will in performing bodily acts; so - we must surely believe - the physical structure of the cosmos does not prevent God from effecting his will in the events of history. No doubt "all causes are adequate to the effects which they produce," but that does not mean that they can be totally explained in terms of their causes.
All of these three principles are easily recognizable as ele ments in the creed of modernity. We have noted the signs of the collapse of this creed and should perhaps also note that some biblical scholars find it hard to come to terms with the fact that their worldview is collapsing around them, even though they can still earn from the media the title of "radical" if they stick to this creed. But others have come to terms with the postmodernist development of modernism. As we have seen, it is characteristic of the postmodernists, following Nietzsche, that they do not expect answers in the form of eternal truths. They practice rather the "hermeneutic of suspicion" which leads the student of an ancient record to ask not What is the truth which is here articulated? but What is the interest which is here being advanced? The biblical material is thus interpreted in terms of the various power struggles in Israel and in the church. For example, a passage in the Old Testament is really an assertion of the claims of the northern kingdom against those of Judah or of the kingship against democratic forces. In the New Testament, the pastoral epistles are an attempt to assert the authority of the developing episcopate against the more prophetic and charismatic traditions of the early church. These are not the only examples; there are numerous others.
It is, of course, idle to try to refute these proposals by means of rational arguments appealing to more fundamental truths. The materialist interpretation with its "hermeneutic of suspicion" is itself a denial of the existence of such rational arguments or such fundamental truths. Perhaps the only possible way to respond to this kind of biblical interpretation is to point out that it is very easy to deconstruct the whole argument by employing its own methods. The materialist interpretation of the Bible must, on these principles, be regarded not as the unveiling of any truth, but as a concealed effort (rather successful so far) to assert the authority of academics over ecclesiastics. Perhaps one good fruit of this method might be that pastors and preachers have become less timid in dealing with the pronouncements of academics!
The practice of the historical-critical method, in spite of the useful results it has produced in our understanding of the ways in which the biblical material was formed, is nevertheless full of self-contradictions. Before proceeding to attempt a more positive statement about biblical authority, I will mention two of these self-contradictions.
It is a commonly expressed view among biblical scholars that, because all the biblical material is the product of particular times, places, and cultures, its truth claim cannot be absolute. All truth claims are relativized by their origin in particular cultural settings. But the historical-critical method is itself the product of a particular culture, and we have discussed the ways in which this culture was formed and the forces which now threaten it with collapse. The historical-critical method therefore must be applied to itself.
When the critic rejects the traditional Christian view of the Bible as the authoritative communication of God's acts in creation and redemption on the ground that it is a confessional rather than an objective interpretation, one has to ask for the justification of the critical enterprise itself. The biblical material contains only a minute fraction of all the material available to us from the ancient world. Why, then, are such disproportionate resources devoted to its study? Why do universities all over the world have large departments devoted to the study of the biblical documents, while the whole of the rest of ancient literature from all the ancient civilizations of the six continents has no comparable attention paid to it? The reason is obvious: it is because the Bible is the sacred Scripture of the largest faith community occupying this planet. It is only because the Bible is Holy Scripture for a large part of the world's total population that it is an object of special attention. Is it not odd that, for the purpose of scholarly study, the very reason for which it is studied should be set aside as unscientific? Interpreters of the Bible are often heard appealing to the "overwhelming majority of scholars" as grounds for setting aside the views of those who read the Bible within the faith commitments of the biblical writers themselves. If we take a global view and a long view, must we not say that the opinion of a very small minority in a culture that appears to be collapsing is asserting an authority that fits oddly with their real situation?
These two points are of minor importance. Majorities are not necessarily right. I make them only to draw attention to what seem to be self-contradictions in the defenses sometimes offered by the historical critics. I now turn to look briefly at one attempt to resist that erosion of traditional faith that has been brought about by the work of biblical criticism. Protestant fundamentalism is, like liberalism, a child of the Enlightenment. It has sought to reassert the authority of the Bible in the new situation created by modernity. The concern was right, but the method was wrong. 1 am referring to a kind of fundamentalism which seeks to affirm the factual, objective truth of every statement in the Bible and which thinks that if any single factual error were to be admitted, biblical authority would collapse. Human judgment would replace the word of God. The unavoidable existence of discrepancies in matters of fact to be found in the Bible was sometimes countered by the statement that the original text (now lost) was without error. In other words, the possibility of error was admitted in the long history of the transmission of the text from, say Isaiah, to a student in the twentieth century, but these errors only occurred at a date some time after the (unknown) moment at which the original Hebrew text was written.
This leads to absurdity and arises from a false concept of biblical authority imposed on the Bible by minds shaped by the Enlightenment. Once again we are dealing with concepts of objectivity, of facts, and of certainty which are typical of minds shaped by modernity. We have to be grateful to the scholars of the historical-critical period for doing so much to disentangle the various strands in the biblical material and to throw light on the ways by which each of its parts took shape in a long tradition, both oral and written. At every point in the story of the transmission of biblical material from the original text to today we are dealing with the interaction of men and women with God. At every point, human judgment and human fallibility are involved, as they are involved in every attempt we make today to act faithfully in new situations. The idea that at a certain point in this long story a line was drawn before which everything is divine word and after which everything is human judgment is absurd. I have every sympathy with the fundamentalist's rejection of scholarship that denies any real authority to Scripture, but I cannot accept a kind of defense of the Bible that rests on a surrender to the very forces threatening to destroy biblical authority. But the theological liberal, who is upset when he hears the Bible referred to as the word of God, is likewise led astray by allowing alien norms to control his judgment. The liberal's disapproval of this way of describing the Bible presupposes some beliefs about what it would mean to speak of anything as the word of God. One has to ask what these beliefs are and where they come from. Such a probing will always lead to some kind of faith commitment that is open to doubt.
Let me go back to the point made at the beginning of this essay, namely, that the launching of the Christian story into the life of the classical world of antiquity eventually required a whole new starting point for thought. The Christian story could not fit into and be judged by the assumptions that controlled classical thought. It had to be recognized as itself a new starting point for thought. By the same token, we have to recognize that we must allow the Bible to provide us with its own account of what it means to speak of the word of God. We have to learn by the actual practice of living with the Bible how and in what ways God speaks. In the words of the Prayer Book collect, we have to hear, read, mark, and learn and inwardly digest the Bible, taking it wholly into ourselves in a way that shapes the very substance of our thinking and feeling and doing. It is less important to ask a Christian what he or she believes about the Bible than it is to inquire what he or she does with it.
Christian discipleship, like all human activity, is embedded in a tradition and cannot live apart from that tradition. Traditions consist of memories cherished in oral or written form and shared practices and rituals. These memories and practices are the memories and practices of a community and have to be understood in the context of its life. For the Christian tradition the supremely authoritative memory is that embodied in the Bible, and the supremely authoritative practices are the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist. These together define what Christianity is and, conversely, are rightly understood only in the context of the Christian tradition. The ways in which people are drawn into the Christian tradition are enormously various but always include living contact with members of the Christian community. At some point, the new disciple is introduced to the Bible and learns to know it as an integral part of the church's liturgy and (if the new disciple is literate) as something for private reading. It embodies the story that shapes and interprets the community. Of course, the new disciple's reading will be shaped by his or her previous culture. If, for example, the new disciple is a Tamil and the Bible he reads is in Tamil, all the key words will initially have the meaning that they have in the mainly Hindu Tamil culture. Only slowly, as the movement of the story unfolds, will the reader discover that old assumptions have to be revised.
The reading of the Bible must therefore necessarily be a critical activity. Old beliefs are called into question. Moreover, the variety of the biblical material demands critical activity. How is the ferocity of Joshua's campaign to be reconciled with the Sermon on the Mount? Now is the exclusiveness of Ezra and Nehemiah to be reconciled with the universalism of Ruth and Jonah? How do we relate Paul's description of the Roman power as God's servant (Rom. 13) with the identification of the same power with the work of Satan in Revelation? Which of these is the word of God? There is no chance of the critical faculty of any serious reader of the Bible being put to sleep. But, as always, the essential question is this: on the basis of what assumptions are the critical questions being asked? From within the Christian tradition, the answer to that question is that the critical questions are asked on the basis of the fact that the word of God is Jesus Christ. On this basis, the reading of the Bible involves a continual twofold movement: we have to understand Jesus in the context of the whole story, and we have to understand the whole story in the light of Jesus.
On the one hand, we cannot understand Jesus except in the context of the Bible as a whole. To detach Jesus from this story is to create a mythical figure. In his teaching and in his actions he speaks and acts as one who brings the story of God's dealing with Israel to its point of crisis and decision. And the apostolic preaching is not the announcement of a new religion but the announcement that the God of Israel has now fulfilled his promises and declared his whole purpose for all the nations.
If we do not know the whole story and context of Jesus, then we cannot truly know him and thus cannot truly know God the Father. We need to see this God of Israel both in his wrath and his infinite mercy. We need to learn a holiness that rejects all compromise with evil and a generosity that seeks and saves the lost. We need to learn to know God as he is. There is no way by which we come to know a person except by dwelling in his or her story and, in the measure that may be possible, becoming part of it. The person who allows the biblical story to be the all-surrounding ambience of daily life and who continually seeks to place all experiences in this context finds that daily life is a continuous conversation with the one whose character is revealed in the biblical story taken as a whole. There is a world of difference between this and a concept of God developed out of reflection on life's experience apart from this story. As we live with the tension between the awesome holiness of God and his limitless kindness and as we bring this tension always to the person of Jesus himself in whom these seeming opposites are held together in a single life and death of judgment and mercy, we are led into a knowledge of God. To be more precise, we are enabled in growing measure to be admitted into that intimacy that Jesus had with his Father, an intimacy he spoke of when he said that no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son makes him known (Luke 10:22).
So, on the one hand, if we are to understand Jesus rightly, we need the whole story. On the other hand, we have to read the whole story from Genesis onward as having its true interpretation in the total fact of the incarnation - the birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and glory of Jesus. For our whole understanding of what it means to speak of the Bible as the word of God, it is absolutely essential to hold in mind that way in which Jesus communicated his knowledge of the Father. The manner in which Jesus makes the Father known is not in infallible, unrevisable, irreformable statements. He did not write a book which would have served forever as the unquestionable and irreformable statement of the truth about God. He formed a community of friends and shared his life with them. He left it to them to be his witnesses, and - as we know - their witness has come to us in varied forms; we know about very few of the words and deeds of Jesus with the kind of certainty Descartes identified with reliable knowledge. To wish that it were otherwise is to depart from the manner in which God has chosen to make himself known. The doctrine of verbal inerrancy is a direct denial of the way in which God has chosen to make himself known to us as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And, if Jesus is indeed the Word made flesh and therefore the one through whom we are to understand God's dealings with Israel, then we must conclude that God's way of dealing with Israel was not otherwise.
Jesus promised his disciples that they would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, and that the Spirit would interpret to them the meaning of his words and deeds and lead them into the truth as a whole. That promise was fulfilled. This gift of the Spirit, however, did not make the disciples infallible any more than the same gift given to the prophetic writers of the Old Testament made them infallible. Again, at the risk of wearisome repetition, we must guard against the imposition on the Scriptures of the dichotomy between objective and subjective ways of knowing. We are not required to choose between two alternative ways of understanding Scripture: either an objective account of the deeds and words of God or a subjective record of the religious experience of the writers. The prophets and apostles of the Old and New Testaments belonged to the same world as we do, a world in which knowing is a matter of the commitment of personal subjects to the clearest possible understanding of the reality of which we are a part. The church has defined the boundaries of Scripture as canonical and thus as having a position of decisive authority within the entire ongoing tradition, but that does not mean that the conditions governing all human knowing of God do not apply within the biblical canon.
In the course of those discourses in which Jesus, according to the Fourth Gospel, prepared the disciples for what was to come, he said to them, "I no longer call you servants, for a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I have learned from my Father I have made known to you" (John 15:15). This is the clearest indication of the nature of Scriptural authority. The truth is not imposed upon us, for indeed truth has not done its work unless and until we have learned to honor and love it from our hearts as truth. But we do not reach truth unless we allow ourselves to be exposed to and drawn by a truth which is beyond our present understanding. What was said about the nature of scientific discovery is relevant here. The important thing is not how we formulate a doctrine of biblical authority but how we allow the Bible to function in our daily lives. We grow into a knowledge of God by allowing the biblical story to awaken our imagination and to challenge and stimulate our thinking and acting. What we cannot yet understand or accept must nevertheless be allowed to challenge us to more daring thought and commitment. The apophatic tradition in the life of the church is a valid warning to us against supposing that we have all the mystery of the Godhead captured in our theology. We are compelled over and over again, as we allow the story to shape our minds, to exclaim with St. Paul, "Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!" (Rom. 11:33). But - and this is the important point - this sense of the ineffable mystery of God does not arise out of metaphysical speculation about the vastness of things; it arises from the contemplation of the story of God's dealing with his people. The mystery is not so much a metaphysical one as a moral one. It is the mystery of a holiness that can yet embrace the unholy. It is the mystery of the divine love for the unlovely. It is the mystery of grace.
We are, in the long run, shaped by what we attend to. In very many respects, we are not our own masters or mistresses. Events beyond our control impinge upon us all the time. But in one respect we are free: we are free to determine what we will attend to. If we allow the Bible to be that which we attend to above all else, we will be saved from two dangers: The first is the danger of the closed mind. The Bible leaves an enormous space open for exploration. If our central commitment is to Jesus, who is the Word of God incarnate in our history, we shall know that in following him we have the clue to the true understanding of all that is, seen and unseen, known and yet to be discovered. We shall therefore be confident explorers. The second is the danger of the mind open at both ends, the mind which is prepared to entertain anything but has a firm hold of nothing. We shall be saved from the clueless wandering which sometimes takes to itself the name of pilgrimage. A pilgrim is one who turns his back on some familiar things and sets his face in the direction of the desired goal. The Christian is called to be a pilgrim, a learner to the end of her days. But she knows the Way.