Overheard
“If God wants to lay a mystical egg on my head, that’s fine, but I don’t want anyone else doing it!”
“Why is it that scholars always want to extrapolate from the obvious to the unnecessary?”
Michael Heiser, that’s who. His desk sits about fifteen feet of open air away from mine. Like the rest of us, he spends most of his time diligently working on the various products and services that our employer provides. [Stating the obvious: My employer pays me to do a job, and this isn’t part of it. My idiocy here should in no way reflect on them.] But every now and then I overhear bits of conversation, and I have to tell you: That Dr. Mike can be a pretty witty fellow.
If you’re not reading one of his many blogs, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
The Tyranny of False Choices
Not long ago I overheard someone say, “Which do you think is the right view of the crucifixion? Substitutionary atonement or christus victor?”
I wasn’t party to the conversation, but I piped up anyway, “Why does it have to be either-or? Why can’t it be both-and? Why couldn’t Jesus have had multiple objectives to accomplish, and why can’t he have accomplished them all? Why can’t a myriad consequences proceed from that single act?”
Begging the question, to be certain. Yet: Which do you think is the right view of my going to the store yesterday? Hunger or boredom? Yes and yes. In going to the store I gave myself something to do, as a consequence of which I was no longer bored. I also assembled the materials to fix myself dinner, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to overcoming my hunger, nourishing my body, adding enjoyment to my life, relishing God’s creation and providence.
A silly example? Perhaps. But even simple actions may have complex motivations and many levels of consequence. Imagine how complex the motivations and consequences might be for something as monumental as the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ!
Did Christ die to cover the sins of the elect? to break the power of sin and death? to pay the just penalty of the law? to bring many sons to glory? to earn a most excellent name? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All that and more.
Christ, no more or less than the Father, is a person, and as such his intentions, motives, and desires can be many and overlapping. Why must we choose among them? Why does it have to be either-or?
I blame Aristotle, or someone very much like him. When it was decided that a thing cannot be simultaneously one thing and its opposite, the western world was set on a particular path: If you find two truths to be contradictory in any way, you must choose among them.
Logic and reason are fine as far as they go. Damn useful, even. But logic will betray you at several spots.
For one thing, false premises lead inexorably to false conclusions. Reason is a ledger that once unbalanced remains unbalanced. The only way to avoid this trap is to ensure that all your premises are flawless, that all your assumptions are true. Good luck with that.
For another thing, “true” and “false” are discrete categories in a gradient world. (I will discuss this in more detail later under the rubric of postmodernism.)
Finally, experience routinely teaches us that “A is not A”. For just one example, take the “love/hate relationship.” Is it that sometimes you hate the thing, and other times you love it? That you vacillate between two discrete states? Rather, don’t you sometimes do both at the same time? It may not make sense, but it is nevertheless true. Does your experience therefore run counter to your assumptions about reason?
The Bible, as it happens, plays by different rules. It is not so much illogical as it is un-logical. Para-logical, perhaps. The methodologies of Reason are not so much violated by the biblical authors as ignored. Unknown, and beside the point in any event.
Take a simple example:
4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. 5 Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.
— Proverbs 26:4-5 (NIV)
These verses are taken by some to be evidence of “contradictions” in the Bible: Not only is the Bible sometimes erroneous in its claims about the natural world, they say, it isn’t even coherent. Look, it teaches that “A is not-A” all the time!
But Proverbs 26:4-5 stands in a tradition of wisdom that is different from — you might even say incompatable with — Aristotelian logic. Holding two opposing truths, considering how they are and are not opposite, compatible, or mutually exclusive, is a kind of contemplation that is encouraged by the Bible in various places.
Christ is fully God and fully man. At the same time. God is one, but he is three. At the same time. Salvation is by faith, and faith is by works, but salvation is not by works, lest any should boast. At the same time. Ponder these imponderables and you are off the path of reason, but heading toward wisdom.
Compare Romans 4:2-3 and James 2:20-24. Abraham is either justified by his works or by his faith, two mutually exclusive possibilities. Each author explicitly affirms one possibility and rejects the other. Paul teaches it one way in Romans (Abraham justified by faith, not works) and James has it the opposite way in his letter (by works, which are faith). Not only are these two premises baldly contradictory, they use the same verse from the Torah as support! It won’t do to say that Paul is talking about one thing and James another. It won’t do to subsume Paul’s point under James’ or (as is more usually the case) James’ under Paul’s.
(That was Luther’s solution, famously wishing James’ “epistle of straw” had not been written.)
Rather, consider them both. Imagine they are both true, both manifestly the case: We are saved by faith alone, a free gift of grace from God, not based on our works. Nevertheless, we are saved by our works, which manifest our faith.
You can’t have it both ways, they say. Yes you can. If you claim to be a biblical theologist, you must. Any doctrine of salvation that does not account for both Paul and James (never mind Jesus!) is incomplete. Besides, even a “Pauline” doctrine of salvation must account for Paul having it both ways as well, as in Philippians 2:12-13:
12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (ESV)
Well, which is it? God’s sovereignty or man’s free-will? Both. Scripture has it both ways so we ought to as well: Save yourself through works because God works to save you. Does that make any sense? By Aristotelian standards of reasoning, perhaps not. But by the standards of wisdom put forward by the Bible, yes and yes. And yes again.
Just this: Next time you find yourself reaching for “either-or”, ask yourself if it couldn’t be “both-and” instead.
Further to Ancient Science
My colleague Rick Brannan of ricoblog fame has found some rather curious science in the Epistle of Barnabas. Do check it out.
Never mind the plainly silly science, the exegetical method the author of EpBarn is using here is creative, to say the least. Of all the lines of reasoning I can think of not to be a pederast, this wasn’t one I thought of:
A — The Mosaic law declares certain kinds of hares to be unclean.
B — Hares grow a new posterior opening to the alimentary canal each year.
Therefore — A means, “Don’t (ahem) mess around with young boys.”
Clearly, when we read ancient texts, we are dealing with with a world view in most ways foreign to our own. Our assumptions concerning many facts about the natural world are different, and when that happens, the ancient folks are usually just wrong. Hares do no such thing. The causes of disease, the mechanisms of fecundity in mammals, the function of organs in the human body, the nature and composition of the stars and planets: Our assumptions now are fundamentally different from theirs then.
They knew what they knew then, and we know what we know now. So what?
There is an understandable impulse in believers to exempt the Bible from this phenomenon, along these lines:
A — God knows everything;
B — God wrote the Bible;
Therefore — The Bible doesn’t have any of these weird science moments.
I disagree:
Premise A — God may know everything but I certainly don’t, never mind the backward folk who have read the book throughout the centuries. It does not follow that God, when communicating his message to humankind, must freight it with facts that cannot possibly be understood by his audience. Sacrificing the comprehensibility of your message in favor of technical precision is a rather perverse way to communicate, and I tend to think of God as something other than perverse. To the contrary, he seems genuinely to want to get his message across.
Premise B — God didn’t “write” the Bible. He inspired human beings to write it. This is not the post in which I will wade into that particular patch of tall grass, but suffice it to say that this premise is an oversimplification.
Conclusion — Sorry, no. The Bible has plenty of bad science. For just one example, rain does not come from sluices opened in the firmament (Gen 7:11). Such plainly false assumptions about the world and its workings underpin both the imagery and argumentation of the biblical text.
There, I said it: Plainly false.
As an exegete, you have three choices: Ignore it, explain it away, or deal honestly with it. I choose the third path, but I don’t worry about it much. They knew what they knew then, and we know what we know now. And it’s okay for them to have been wrong at the time. We’re probably wrong now, too.
A Timorous Method
I’ve just begun reading Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, where he writes:
The characters of nature are legible, it is true; but they are not plain enough to enable those who run to read them. We must make use of a cautious, I had almost said, a timorous method of proceeding. We must not attempt to fly, when we can scarcely pretend to creep. In considering any complex matter, we ought to examine every distinct ingredient in the composition, one by one, and reduce every thing to the utmost simplicity, since the condition of our nature binds us to a strict law and very narrow limits. We ought afterward to re-examine the principles by the effect of the composition, as well as the composition by that of the principles. We ought to compare our subject with things of a similar nature, and even with things of a contrary nature; for discoveries may be, and often are, made by the contrast, which would escape us on the single view. The greater number of the comparisons we make, the more general and the more certain our knowledge is likely to prove, as built upon a more extensive and perfect induction.
If an inquiry thus carefully conducted should fail at last of discovering the truth, it may answer an end, perhaps, as useful, in discovering to us the weakness of our own understanding. If it does not make us knowing, it may make us modest. If it does not preserve us from error, it may, at least, from the spirit of error; and may make us cautious of pronouncing with positiveness or with haste, when so much labour may end in so much uncertainty.
— “Preface”, p vi
Seems that a “hermeneutic of humility” would look very much like this, don’t you think? And in all our efforts of reading and interpreting something as complex as Scripture, we ought to be willing to let our failure to fully understand at least answer a useful end: to make us modest.
And further, I am reminded of Php 2:12-13, Prov 11:2, and Ec 12:11-12.
Science is not Truth
Though many believe it so, it ain’t.
To say that science and truth are one and the same is to propose that the truth changes over time: that 120 years ago space was truly filled with a luminiferous ether that suspended the stars and planets in a fluid gel; that 500 or so years ago the planets in fact revolved around the earth; 1,000 years ago that disease was in reality caused by the imbalance of bodily fluids. Or offensive smells. Or evil spirits.
But wait! you say: Just because people were wrong back then doesn’t mean that underlying reality was different. They were just wrong.
Precisely.
Science does not proscribe truth. Rather, it is a strategy for coping with the limits of our faculties and a method for expanding upon what knowledge we can acquire. As such, the Bible is a scientific book. It is just that its science is a pre-Enlightenment one.
Go back 2,000 years ago and you will find that intelligent people believed all manner of glumdiggle about the composition and mechanics of the natural world, some of which forms the underpinnings of the world view of the biblical authors, and some of which makes it into the pages of the biblical texts.
But let us be fair: What we find in the Bible that we now consider jabberwocky was, in its day, cutting-edge. It was “known” to be “true” by learned and respectable men and women everywhere.
It’s downright uncharitable to hold Moses and his ilk guilty for being innocent of, for instance, the wave-particle duality of light, just as we hope that future generations will not ridicule us too much for believing such obvious (from their point of view) hogswallop today.
Imagine that Genesis began this way:
In the beginning, all matter and energy, as well as time and space, were compressed down into a single point. Something (let’s call it “God”) caused the point to explode into a million billion trillion quinta-gazillion stars and galaxies.
I barely understood that paragraph, and I wrote it. How could we expect an ancient Israelite to? Besides, within a generation or two that theory of cosmic origins, popularly known as “The Big Bang,” will no doubt be considered shamefully foolish. Superstitious, even.
Just this: Reality doesn’t (necessarily) change over time, but our models of it certainly do. And that is what the Bible gives us: a model of reality from a particular time and place. And that is precisely all that science gives us.
Models come and models go, but the newest models are not always the most useful. For example, nowadays it is held that the Bohr model of the atom Just Ain’t So. Nevertheless, it is indispensable to the task of stoichiometry. One must suspend disbelief long enough to use a model that is known to have little or no correspondence with nature in order to do something useful: Balance an equation so you can mix chemical A and chemical B without blowing your fingers off. For that particular task, a more accurate model of the atom is not only unnecessary, it’s downright unhelpful because it’s beside the point: Dr. Heisenberg would be well-advised to stand by and keep his opinions to himself while I determine precisely how much sulphuric acid to pour into this flask.
As stoichiometry, so hermeneutics: A more accurate understanding of the cosmos is not only unnecessary to understanding, say, the message of the Psalms, it is downright unhelpful because it is beside the point. Theories of interpretation that pound the square pegs of scripture into the round holes of scholastic and post-Enlightenment philosophy take an already brackish pond and muddy it further.
On the one hand,
Science thrives on open questions. So does faith rightly understood. Both are journeys into the unknown with the lightest of equipment: a metanarrative or mathematical formula for a compass, and a few fixed reference points on a map that may, who knows, be turned upside down.
— John F. Hobbins, ”Psalm 8: The Common Epistemology of Faith and Science”
On the other,
People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations.... For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.... You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that.
— G.F.R. Ellis in W. Wayt Gibbs, “Profile: George F. R. Ellis,” Scientific American, October 1995, Vol. 273, No.4, p. 55.
I conclude that humility is always a good idea.
A Stone Too Heavy
I for one am done with the philosopher’s God. I do not worship Reason or Reason’s God, nor the Unmoved Mover, nor the Greatest Thing Conceivable, nor the Universal Principle, nor the Great Watchmaker in the Sky. My God is none of that and more: He is a being with a real personality, who can move and be moved. He can be grieved (Eph 4:30), he can weep (Jn 11:35), and he can see good in all he has made (Gen 1:31).
He is not an abstract principle, nor a set of propositions. He is not “A or Not A”; he is Alpha and Omega (Rev 1:8, 21:6, 22:13). He is capable of both thought and emotion. As a personality, he is in no way impoverished or constrained.
In short, he is a living God, wishing to be known rather than arrived at. Knowing someone requires a certain amount of risk to be assumed by both parties, and knowing God is no different: He is both dangerous and kind; unpredictable yet trustworthy; brutally just and infinitely merciful; the author of truth and wisdom, but still able to spin a great yarn.
He is not a tame lion.
(And yet the real risk in the relationship is assumed by God. Why? Because he has never failed to hold up his end of the bargain with his human children, but we, individually and corporately, betray him again and again.)
If God exists, he does so whether or not you or I can come up with a logical proof that says he must. In the meantime, he extends his hand and entreats us to turn from our wicked ways and be reconciled to him (Ezekiel 18:32). Paradoxes? Proofs? Those are a stone too heavy for me to swallow.
A Stranger Pilgrim, Indeed
I have long wished to be one of those luminaries in the starry host that is biblioblogdom. The time is finally coming, and now is.
I’m Eli Evans, I’m a real person, I live in Washington state, I am a Bible-believing follower of Christ, and I don’t have any qualifications whatsoever. I intend here to write about the things that are most important to me. This is mostly just me talking to myself, but you’re welcome to listen in.
Why “Stranger Pilgrim”? I take Genesis 23:4, Hebrews 11:13, and 1 Peter 2:11 as inspiration. I’m a stranger and a pilgrim in the earth, just passing through, a citizen of a “better country” (Hebrews 11:16). That, and I may just be stranger than the average pilgrim. You’ll have to be the judge of that.
Shalom!
Ombudsman
pilgrim at strangerpilgrim dot com
