Marc Chagall Moses receiving the Tablets of Law (1966)
Debates over the nature and authority of scripture tend to divide Christians along three or four lines depending upon attitudes toward the nature of revelation in general, the nature of scriptural revelation in particular, and the role of the Holy Spirit. The dominant views on divine revelation, which cut across denominational lines, are embodied in Humanistic Theology and Conservative Theology. The former is largely the practice of enlisting the testimony of scripture to imbue socially progressive conventions with transcendental significance. Within this tradition, scripture serves as a scepter of authority, hallowed by its antiquity and ability to outlive any wielder, but empty of significance when wielded by anyone not authorized to do so. Conservative Theology, conversely, is largely the practice of reconciling physical experience and social convention to the apparent testimony of scripture. Within this tradition, scripture itself serves as an infallible or, some contend, inerrant authority. Much less commonly, a community may accept as authoritative an individual claim to direct, special revelation. Such communities tend to establish themselves as separate faiths that over time develop their own humanistic and conservative tendencies.
The most basic collective effort to know God, in any case, involves the establishment of a canon of scripture. Works generally become canonical because they are the ones most consulted or cited as authoritative. Scriptures become regarded as such because they are associated with someone accepted as the recipient of direct, special revelation. Reliable accounts of such a person’s life may also become canonical. A reliable national history will similarly become canonical if a people are regarded as the collective recipient of divine revelation. Depending on the desire for doctrinal uniformity, specific texts may be formally designated as canonical by representatives of a community. More rarely, specific editions of texts may receive canonical status in response to a proliferation of textual variants whose divergent wording reflect editorial intrusion with theological implications.
How does an individual or a class of individuals come to be regarded as the recipient of direct, special revelation? They may perform miraculous signs, their words may resonate for their hearers with more profound conviction, or an impeccable witness may attest to their reliability. The testimony of miraculous signs presents an interesting problem because, though traditional cultures may require miracles as evidence of divine authority, modern cultures tend to regard the miraculous as a mode of explanation rather than a type of phenomena—for modern readers, the physicality of miraculous signs are validated by the persuasiveness of associated testimony rather than vice versa. The miraculous presents a problem for modern readers not because of actual impossibility of miracles but because even a cursory survey of ancient religious literature reveals a human tendency to supplement the communication of profound insight with accounts of supernatural signs that become ever more wondrous with each retelling. Incredulity increases if direct experience or seemingly incontrovertible evidence indicates that a statement cannot be taken at face value. One response is reevaluation of the reliability of direct experience or similarly incontrovertible evidence. Another is reevaluation of the reliability of canonical scripture. A third response is reconciliation of the apparent contradiction.
The process of reconciling scripture to experience or expectation usually takes the form of explaining how and why a given passage should be understood either metaphorically or in some special sense. The practice is not always blatantly obvious—occasionally, scripture is simply interpreted through the invisible lens of established custom. For example, the institution of strict Sabbath observance on the Lord’s Day conflates two closely related themes in a way that imposes meaning on scripture. Though Acts 20:7 mentions the ancient custom of meeting on the Lord’s Day, the first day of the sabbatical week, scripture nowhere equates this day with the Sabbath. Moreover, Hebrews 4:1-13 clearly equates the Work of Christ with a permanent state of Sabbath, which Colossians 2:16-17 just as clearly distinguishes from the practice of Sabbath observance. The early church likely met on Sunday because the provinces of Asia Minor set this particular day of the week aside as a market day when people came in from the surrounding countryside to sell their produce, townspeople suspended the normal working day, and slaves were allowed to conduct their own business. Such a day, falling on the day Christ rose from the dead, would have had both practical and ceremonial significance.
Far more controversial is the metaphorical interpretation of the miraculous. Many Christians, for example, insist that the Lord’s Supper is the body and blood of Christ in a consubstantial (i.e. spiritual) sense. They reject the notion that the Lord’s Supper is the body and blood of Christ in a transubstantial (i.e. carnal) sense partly on the basis of sensory experience and partly on the basis of its unseemliness. A more telling example that cuts across denominational lines involves the interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2:3. Christians have traditionally contended that the world was created in six days (144 hours). More recently, Christians have begun to assert that the entire story must be understood paradigmatically as an explanation of God’s sovereignty—God first fashions dimensionality itself, then a world, and then creatures to inhabit areas of the world he has created. The perfect order of this world is disrupted when the creatures transgress their designated boundaries. This interpretation of the passage then carries over as an explanation of matters ranging from the definition of good to the dietary bans on creatures whose morphology does not clearly coincide with only one of the original boundaries of air, water, or land. A fundamental challenge, however, confronts any interpretation of scripture that recasts the plain meaning on the text metaphorically: what of the resurrection?
The Apostles Creed, plainly understood, clearly itemizes the minimum elements of faith beyond which a person’s beliefs are no longer recognizable as Christianity, and this creed affirms the historical nature of two unnatural events: the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ. These two events are inextricably bound up with the doctrines of inherited culpability and continuing reconciliation at the core of the faith, and the doctrine of inherited culpability itself presupposes the historical nature of Adam as ancestor of all humans. Because similar dependencies attach to other unnatural events recorded in Scripture, one cannot simply dismiss the unnatural as metaphor. Much is therefore made of the inerrancy (factualness) of the scriptures as originally composed. But who has ever consulted an original edition of scripture? Moreover, does the term original refer to compiled documents or to their sources? To contend that God is perfectly capable of the unerring transmission of truth in the original is academic if God has not also guaranteed the inerrancy of copies, which he manifestly has not. We need a theological approach to the scriptures we actually consult: nuanced translations of reconstructed editions of variant copies.
Straightforward readings of scripture are generally the most fruitful and these are almost certainly how the human authors of scripture understood their own words. However this does not mean that these authors, much less God, would endorse our readings because the understanding of what constitutes a straightforward reading undergoes subtle shifts over time and across cultural boundaries. We might assume that the Mount Sinai of scripture corresponds to the mountain that bears that name today, but scripture locates Mount Sinai in ancient Midian on the Arabian Peninsula. We might also assume that the text of scripture remained unchanged throughout the history of Israel, but the natural drift of language would have necessitated periodic redactions of scripture to avoid its gradually becoming unintelligible. Consider the opening line of Beowulf in Old English—Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Moreover, readers rarely consider that even the meaning of a perfectly recognizable word may have undergone a radical shift. Only a few generations ago, the word resent (literally: to respond with deep emotion) conveyed appreciation. Thus the statement ‘We resent your efforts’ meant exactly the opposite of what it would mean today. Editors of scripture encountering similar anomalies would likely have substituted other words or inserted brief clarifications resulting in variant readings.
Ironically, the extinction of Hebrew as a living language following the Exile created the critical precondition for establishing and preserving an authoritative text: the language itself ceased to change. Just as a smashed clock indicates the moment it stopped working, the main variants of surviving Hebrew scripture suggest a common source having two peculiar characteristics—the source was written in prose, a relatively modern style, using an alphabet modeled on Babylonian chancery script rather than the ancient Hebrew alphabet. Internally, the source shows evidence of merging at least three traditions, two of which likely diverged following the division of Israel and Judah into separate Kingdoms. The third tradition constitutes the massive interpolation of background information by a well-informed editor writing after the return from Babylon. In addition to annotating existing scripture, this same individual effectively authored several books that consolidate information culled from obscure sources such as the book of Yashar. Though these books—Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings—did not exist in ancient Israel, they are indispensable to our understanding of scripture in general because they establish the continuity between direct revelations to Moses, the prophets, and the apostles.
Beyond considerations about the transmission of scripture, we must address our underlying assumptions about the nature of conventions used by scripture. For example, the fluidity of genealogies in scripture indicates that these frequently express the authenticity of social relationships in terms of bloodlines. The situation is analogous to that of parents who adopt a child: the child becomes their flesh and blood in every sense with the exception of their ability to donate a kidney should the need arise. Thus Samuel assumes the role of high priest from his adoptive father Eli even though his natural father was from the tribe of Ephraim. More unexpectedly, scripture apparently uses genealogies to clarify social relationships between cultures. Though modern readers might balk at a genealogy that listed English-speaking nations as linear descendents of William the Conqueror, this is essentially how Genesis 10 presents the emergence of nations. Each nation arises from a single individual, and the founders of nations are closely related contemporaries. The purpose of such a genealogy is apparently the formalization of established relationships on a level less binding than a perpetual covenant but more enduring than a treaty.
This brings us back to the question raised above: How are we to understand scripture? The traditional exhortation to let scripture interpret itself blithely assumes that we understand how scripture interprets itself. William of Ockham offers a corrective corollary: we should prefer explanations that provide the simplest correlation of the most material. Scripture itself offers the only fool-proof advice: we should rely on God to guide our understanding and curb our natural tendency to invent truth as we see fit:
Who among you fears the LORD
and obeys the word of his servant?
Let him who walks in the dark,
who has no light,
trust in the name of the LORD
and rely on his God.
But now, all you who light fires
and provide yourselves with flaming torches,
go, walk in the light of your fires
and of the torches you have set ablaze.
This is what you shall receive from my hand:
You will lie down in torment.
(Isaiah 50:10-11 NIV)
