Hitzonim | Outsiders

We Must Live in the Space of Reservation, Humility, and Suspension of Judgment

Introduction: Questions with Uncertain (and Uneasy) Answers

What is the Bible? Who wrote the Bible? When was the Bible written? How was the Bible intended to be used? Why do we read the Bible today?

Each of these questions raise answers that evoke challenges. Broad brushes can paint landscapes, but the devil is in the details, to bring a germaine pun to the conversation!

We may be inclined to offer responses like the following: they are correct, as far as it goes, but not complete in addressing the full context.

What is the Bible?

The Bible is a collection of source documents influenced by cultural exchange of ideas, composed, edited, and selected, with several major source traditions identified, for example, the Documentary Hypothesis (pentateuchal composition), Markan Priority, and the Two Source Hypothesis (synoptic tradition).

Who wrote the Bible?

The Bible was authored by ancient communities of storytellers and scribes, mostly anonymous, including prophets, religious and political leaders, evangelizers, and redactors.

When was the Bible written?

The Bible was written over (at least) an 850 year span of composition between roughly the 10th century BCE through the early second to mid first century BCE.

How was the Bible intended to be used?

The Bible was written as a book of songs, a collection of wisdom sayings, an etiology of peoples and events, lamentations, petitions, liturgies for worship, and histories of families and tribes.

Why do we read the Bible today?

We read the Bible to draw closer to the deity and to understand the lived experience of those in our religious traditions.

As quickly as we offer these responses, we are met with frustration and inadequacy. In short, these responses are unsatisfying: “A collection of source documents” seems to be missing the oral tradition and the acknowledgment of the ancient Southwest Asian context.

“Anonymous authors and scribes” fails to be informative. What was their ethnicity, gender, age, family and community relationships, cultic practices, and societal organization?

An “850 year span of composition” does not reflect the oral tradition, and Jewish traditions of Talmud—not quite scripture but not just prose—this genre stretched another five or six centuries after the Jewish and Christian Bibles were canonized—not to mention, there is no single agreed upon Biblical canon!

Why and how the Bible is to be used is certainly as diverse and pluralistic as the authors and readers themselves. I would suggest that reaching consensus on this question particularly escapes any broad characterization.

Beyond the vague responses, the best we can do with these answers is reach some sort of consensus but not unanimous agreement. For example, the Documentary Hypothesis for pentateuchal composition once posited four sources as a better explanation than Mosaic authorship, and isolating these sources, J (Yawhist), E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomistic Historian and Reactor), and P (Prieslty), as they are known among scholars, is upheld by some scholars today and resisted by others who claim, for example, that we have evidence only of the D and P sources and for the rest we say pre-P.

Similar debates continue within gospel source critical approaches, too, for example, did Matthew and Luke make use of Mark and an independent source of Jesus’s sayings (the hypothesized Q source)? Did the fourth gospel have access to Mark’s gospel? What even was the “Johannine Community”?

Bottom line, both by adequacy and accuracy—correctness and completeness, with respect to these basic questions about the Bible, we must live in the space of reservation, humility, and suspension of judgment. In the academic world, few questions are ever settled; prior beliefs must respond to updated evidence. Hence, these basic questions of what, who, and when are in flux—or seemingly so. The success of scholarship, paradoxically, is its failure. Progress in scholarship may be defined as much by identifying what we do not know as it is by what we do.

The More You Know

Fallibility in our beliefs and gaining awareness of what we do not know is the path toward wisdom. And yet, revision is often viewed by the nonspecialist as undermining the project of scholarship. A common, albeit unexamined, attitude is that Bible readers are in the business of discerning truth. If we’re in the truth business, falsity is bankruptcy. Applied to doctrine, false belief may be that which results in eternal, conscious torment.

So-called Right Belief (I gave that a proper noun treatment because I think it is “a thing,” so to speak) is paramount, and to admit that we do not know or to diverge from the authority of the Bible that our interpretive community taught us not only risks exclusion from our community, it may risk our lives! When scholars fail to reach consensus or change their minds about beliefs, this is not evidence of progress for many lay readers; rather, they say, this exposes the “relative, subjective ethics” and “false teaching” of scholars.

When the stakes are so high, critique is unwanted for its potential to expose the vulnerability of our claims, and so, we spend time strengthening our commitments rather than considering alternatives. Fallibility isn’t appealing when eternal life is on the line.

Discerning Truth and Matters of Fact

Aristotle offered this definition of truth: “To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.” When I claim that Bible readers, especially readers in confessional spaces, are in the truth business, it is easy to hear me saying that discerning the truth is tantamount to revealing matters of fact.

A “God-breathed” view of the Bible holds that the divine author establishes the authority of the Bible, and the people, places, and events as described by the Bible “latch onto” reality in a necessary way that renders the Bible true. That the Bible “says of what is that it is.”

At this stage I want to characterize a view of the Bible that many would suppose to be the opposite view of the God-breathed perspective: On the fully human-authored view, while I think mistaken, it is easy to then assert that the Bible is little more than a fantasy book; a work of fiction.

Herein lies the issue.

Both of these seemingly opposite views are not opposites at all! Each view is trapped within a broader interpretive framework that is bound by matters of fact. The former view holds that the Bible makes claims about the world and these claims are true. The latter view holds that the Bible makes claims about the world and these claims are false. These alternative readings are, in the end, disagreeing about the facts of the matter, but see that they are alternative responses to the same question: Is the Bible factually true?

So then, we get here: On one view, the God-breathed view, the Bible is certain and to suggest otherwise is heretical and offensive to doctrine and the deity. On the other view, fully human authored, claims made in the Bible are obviously false, and to read the Bible with truth in mind is akin to believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

These competing views are trapped in the same erroneous framework, namely, that the Bible sets out to make claims about the world. This is assumed, at best. I have not heard it argued, from either of these rival views, that the Bible itself has for its goal the task of describing the world. When we point out that problem, we immediately see the difficulty. For those who would hold that the Bible is true in its description of people, places, and events, and those who deny such a claim, both must argue that the Bible even seeks to do this, for their position to go through. If the Bible is to be evaluated on the grounds of its collision with reality—of what is that it is—a hidden premise goes unchecked here. The shared presupposition to both of these views is that Bible is describing facts about the world.

And things get more complicated: Recall where the essay began, above.

What is the Bible? A collection of source documents from multiple historical and cultural settings. And so, to argue on behalf of the view that the Bible sets out to describe the world, proponents of that view, on either side: God-breathed realism and human-authored nonrealism, must argue that for each distinct source in the multivocal Bible, that the author, apprentice, scribe, or school intended to describe the world. But this isn’t obvious at all.

From the separate creation stories in Genesis to the awkward, interwoven accounts of Joseph’s descent into Egypt; the rich imagery of apocalyptic literature, to the funny questions in the fourth gospel, for example, when Nicodemus asks Jesus how an adult may re-enter the womb to be born anew; and much more. Proponents would be hard pressed to make a coherent argument that Biblical authors saw their task as describing the world around them. It seems whatever these authors were communicating, facts about the world is not the first thing to come to mind.

What’s more, the variety of literary genres within the Biblical literature speaks strongly against any, single, univocal perspective within the Bible from which we may draw a primary goal or objective for the compiled body of the texts. For the reader’s part, there is no instruction to the reader for what to do with the texts or how to evaluate them.

In short, to evaluate the Bible in positive or negative lights with respect to its ability to make contact with matters of fact is to impose a reader’s own interpretive framework onto the text that isn’t there within a natural reading of the material. You cannot start with Genesis and read through Revelation and glean guidance for how to read the Biblical literature.

Jettisoning the Interpretive Framework

The Bible is not to be read for its factual representation of the world. The fact that some cultic practices are described accurately with respect to the Temple, that topographical features like the Mount of Olives can be identified, that a certain ritual bath, or the location of an ekklesia, or a gate into Jerusalem correspond with extra-Biblical evidence may be a necessary condition to argue on the side of factive truth, but these features are not sufficient. I argue that we should jettison that entire framework.

I said above that a common, albeit unexamined, attitude is that Bible readers are in the business of discerning truth, and I remind us also that I’ve said fallibility in our beliefs and gaining awareness of what we do not know is the path toward wisdom.

I am conversationally competent in Biblical interpretation and source criticism. I’ve learned enough to learn how much I do not know. One thing that I suggest I do know is that to read the Bible through the lens of matters of fact—that they are true or that they are false—is to impose an interpretive framework onto the text that doesn’t reveal itself through the text itself.

What do we do? We must live in the space of reservation, humility, and suspension of judgment. In practice, we read for empathy, we read to ask moral questions, we read to stretch our moral imagination to embody the lives of the ancient communities that were the audience to the Biblical literature. We read to discern truth, but not the truth of facts; instead, we read to discern the truth revealed in poetry, song, liturgy, lamentation and complaint, the urgent calls to justice of a prophet, and the violence of empire.

We read also to confront the condoning of chattel slavery in the Bible; we read to confront the stories of dominance, rape, war, genocide, and child sacrifice. We read a collection of source documents that compose the most popular book in the world, and if you’re asking me, we read to preserve our highest ideals, mindful of the problematic history enshrined in many parts of the Bible.

Blessed are those who wrestle with the text. Blessed are those who encourage others to do the same.