Monday, May 18, 2009

How do You kow Which Parts of the Bible Are Inspried?

On the other thread by me Magus asks me:

Quote:
Which parts of the bible are the "true" word of god, if any? Do you believe that the bible is only a reflection of the way that the people who wrote it or do you believe god wanted it to turn out the way it did? If you believe some parts come from god and other do not, how do you determine which is which?
He didn't like my answers so I'll try again.

Quote:
Which parts of the bible are the "true" word of god, if any?

Not a matter of Parts. You can't dissect a narrative line by line and ask "what parts of this narrative are the result of the writer's genius and what parts are just banal filler?" You can criticize different aspects of course, but you can't say 'this sentence is genius and this sentence is not a product of genius." The whole narrative works together to create a solid word. Narratives communicate in many subtle says. you can't limit the number of insights one can deduce from a work of art.

Fundametnalists look at the Bible in a certain way and atheists look at it in reaction the fundamentalist way. The basic assumption is made by both that the text of the Bible is, from the "In the Beginning" of Genesis to the "even so come quickly Lord Jesus" of Revelation as words transmitted from God to the mind of the authors. As though Moses sits down, takes pen in hand and a lights shines on him and a voice in his head says (in a booming echo like way) "write write write, this is is...."In in in The the ther beginning ing beginning beginning...." I don't think it works that way. I am willing to understand that when the prophets say "this is what the Lord says" they may be repeating word for word the exact verbiage God gave them to say, although not necessarily. But for most of the Bible I doubt that it works that way. I think people were just using the ideas that came to them as a result of their religious experinces, and as a result they used those concepts and feelings in the different ways that it occurred to them to use such material. They put their ideas of God into the stories and those who had real experinces really captured the nature of God's grace, and those who did not genuinely experince God failed to capture such things.

The real problem is the model. The model of the fundies says that God is writing a memo. The Bible is the word form "the Big man upstairs" and just like an executive writing a memo. Moses is taking dictation. But that model assumes directly handed down verbiage, it's even called "verbal plenary" meaning "all the verbiage is inspired." That's the model I use. I go by a model that views the Bible as a collection of writings which are based upon human encounters with the divine. People experience God in different ways, usually beyond words; to speak about that they must call up from the deep recesses of their spirits (minds) that intangible part that produces art and literature, and they formulate into words their experinces. That means they have to load the experince into cultural constructs.

A cultural construct is an idea that is suggested by culture, by association with other people in society and the symbols and analogies and metaphors that tacitly speak to us at a level we understand but can't necessarily articulate. In the ancient world life was cheap, people were used to thinking in terms of either wiping out the other guy or being wiped out. The ancient Hebrews magnified their culture, but a romanticized view of themselves and their struggles into narrative form and used that framework to express the wordless sense of the numinous that they experienced through contact with God. The tendency to want to wipe out other people, to destroy totally every trace of their existence and lives, is part of the cultural constructs which act as a lens to give words to the writer's deep and hidden senses of God communicated through wordless sensations on the mystical level. So they build into the narrative a bunch of stuff about wiping these guys and those guys but what we need to understand is the major point being made.

For example, in the bit about the Amalekites, I'm pretty sure the bit about the infants is added in latter. I think we see real evdience in the text that it's been tweaked. But the real point is not wipe out the Amalekites nor is it that it's ok for us to wipe our enemies, the real point is obey God. Saul didn't obey God and the incident was a down fall for him. Now it doesn't matter that the incident is this failure to wipe out the infants it could have been anything. They wrote it like that. The real point is do whatever God tells you to do. But that God is not going to tell us to wipe out our enemies and destroy their kids is pretty obvious to most of us. We can defend that description well enough to say "God did not command this." We can even put it up to religious experince. My experinces of God tell me God doesn't want this. But why did the author of that part of the Bible (presumably Samuel) think that God did tell him that? Because he's filtering the experince through his cultural constructs.


Now you might ask "but then how can we learn moral truths? Our moral understanding is not static. Our understanding evolves over time. The ancient Hebrews could not understand this was wrong because it was common place in their day. We understand the wrong of it because culture evolves. Jesus understood it was wrong. Jesus did not say "wipe out the Amalekties" he said "turn the other cheek." He even corrected the understanding of the OT generations when he said "you have heard it said an eye a tooth for a tooth, but I say to you turn the other cheek." With the Bible we do not proof text. We don't determine what to do by one verse. We use the preponderance of the evidence, meaning everything we can understand about the Bible. We don't stop there, we study and understand what others have said about it. We use the words of the saints and the great theolgoians as precedents and bench marks to help us interpret. Samuel was not speaking with authority for all time in telling that story. He was merely telling a story he heard soem someone and putting down on paper some tradition (probably the real author was writing from Babylon in the exile--that's the most heavily redacted part of the Bible). He was putting into the work his understanding of God from his experinces as well what he had been taught. But the end result is a narrative and like all narratives it only works to accomplish its task when we try to understand it as a narrative and not force it into molds where it doesn't fit such as memo from the boss, military communique, or auto owner's manual.



It doesn't make sense to say "this is inspired and this isn't." That would be like saying "which feet of Elliot's The Wasteland are inspired and which aren't. You can't segment things in that way. We need to understand the bible as literature. It's major function is to bestow grace upon the reader. you read it to be healed to find spiritual edification and to understand God's laws. There are those who think it should be read like an instruction Manuel for a car. They seem to think it's going to tell us ever move to make in the same way that the owner's Manuel tells us how to change the oil. Since the Bible is a collection of different works written over a long period of time it doesn't make sense to try and fit the whole collection into one model and understand it all in the same way.

We don't have to understand exactly the role of inspiration nor do we need to look for the inspired parts as opposed to the banal parts. What we need to do is understand the over all preponderance of teaching and weigh that in light of what God shows us in our own lives. When we do this grace is bestowed, we are healed, we are drawn closer to God but we do not have to relate to it as if we are reading the instructions to change the oil in the car.


Magnus, if you think this is still inadequate, tell me why. I want you to have questions. I am sure you will and I'm ready to answer them.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems to me to be completely disingenuous to try and separate the lesson of obeying God from context of the story which contains that lesson. In the story God not only approves of the massacring of an entire people He is reportedly upset when the Israelites don't carry out His commands and orders them back to finish the job. The lesson is not just to obey God, it's to obey Him no matter how extreme His wishes seem to be.

How can it be "obvious" that "God is not going to tell us to wipe out our enemies and destroy their kids" when that's the context of the lesson? Why would a loving God choose to use that cultural "lens" to deliver that lesson? Surely if such a God exists He must understand how that lesson would be interpreted.

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

that's just what I'm not doing. I'm not separating the context from the story or the point of teaching form the story. I'm saying read it as a story and get the meaning, don't' read it as an attempted science book, history book, or automobile owner's Manuel.

that separating thing is what atheists are doing and fudnies are doing.

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

How can it be "obvious" that "God is not going to tell us to wipe out our enemies and destroy their kids" when that's the context of the lesson? Why would a loving God choose to use that cultural "lens" to deliver that lesson? Surely if such a God exists He must understand how that lesson would be interpreted.


you simply don't have to take the story as prescriptive. But to think the point of the sotry is let's go kill the guys down the street is stupid and obviously not the point of the story.

Anonymous said...

You are absolutely separating the context from the lesson you want us to see; you're asking us to ignore the massacres; it's not just that God is expecting to obeyed here, it's that He's expecting to obeyed to the point of violating every human instinct against harming innocent people. How can you pretend that isn't relevant?

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

You are absolutely separating the context from the lesson you want us to see; you're asking us to ignore the massacres; it's not just that God is expecting to obeyed here, it's that He's expecting to obeyed to the point of violating every human instinct against harming innocent people. How can you pretend that isn't relevant?


You can treat the slaughters as not literal history without seperating the context from lesson.

Those are not the same thing. Refusing to understand it as a literal event that happened is not the same thing as separating the context. You can treat the final battle in Tolkien as a fantasy, which it is clearly is, without separating it from context or story.

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

I think what has you confused is that one would have to say "do this, don't do that," to use that incidence as a "lesson." But my approach the OT in general is to understand it as cultural context for the mission of Messiah, not as literal history, science, or a teaching Manuel.

You think I'm saying its' all there as a lesson, that's exactly what I'm not saying. The point the story makes is more important than the literal history, but we don't have to approach every book as some kind of guide book that has a teaching mechanism.

Anonymous said...

I'm certainly not reading the story as literal history; even as a believer I never did that, but the context of bloodshed, vengeance and blind, indiscriminate slaughter is still inseparable from the lesson of obedience here. How does that horrific context further the cause of a God of love?