 |
| Noah and the dove. Image source. |
I'm been reading "Inspiration and Incarnation" by Peter Enns, and blogging about it. I already wrote my post about chapter 2, but here's another fun little paragraph I want to talk about, from that same chapter.
This is in the section discussing the creation story and flood story from Genesis. They are very similar to myths from other ancient cultures. And the myths from other cultures are older. So, what do we do with that? It looks like the bible stories are just borrowed from other myths, rather than being directly from God, but that can't be right, can it? Page 41 talks about what you would do if you're a Christian in an apologetics argument:
If pressed, one could attempt to mount the argument that the Israelite stories were actually older than all the ancient Near Eastern stories but were only recorded later in Hebrew. Such a theory-- for that is what it is, a theory-- assumes that the biblical stories are the pristine originals and that all the other stories are parodies and perversions of the Israelite original, even though the available evidence would be very difficult to square with such a conclusion. But could it have happened this way? Yes, I suppose one could insist on such a thing, but it would be very difficult for someone holding to such a view to have a meaningful conversation with linguists and historians of the ancient world. To argue in such hypothetical terms can sometimes become an excuse for maintaining a way of thinking that is otherwise unsupportable. It is just such explanations that some readers might find problematic, for these explanations seem motivated by a desire to protect dogmatic commitments rather than to engage the available evidence.
!!! This is so real! This is exactly what it's like, to believe in biblical inerrancy, and to do apologetics.
It's like... you start with the idea that if you're a Christian, you have to believe all these things about the bible. You have to believe it's inerrant. You have to believe there are no mistakes or contradictions- that it's telling 1 consistent story throughout. You have to believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. And that basically every book in the bible was written very close to the time of the events that happened, by whoever seems like the author when you do a very superficial reading of it. Yeah, any talk of "the book of Isaiah was pulled together from multiple authors" or "this was written hundreds of years after these events happened" is bad- you can't even consider that. It would be going against God.
You start with an idea of what the bible is, and then when someone brings up evidence that seems to contradict that, you have to come up with an explanation for why we can totally ignore that evidence and it doesn't matter.
Someone says "other cultures also have flood stories which are similar to the Noah's ark story." You have to say, well, yes, there really *was* a global flood, so that's why there are stories about it. But the Noah's ark story is the truth about it, and all the others are inaccurate. See? Easy. So we can just ignore all those other flood stories, because they're wrong and our version is right. No need to read them or care about what they say.
Someone points out that the 4 gospels don't exactly agree on who saw Jesus and when after the Resurrection. So you have to come up with some convoluted timeline that fits everything in, such that nothing the bible says is *technically* wrong. Even though, if your timeline is the truth, then the biblical writers wrote in a very misleading way, giving their readers an incorrect impression of what actually happened. But, no need to think about that! The important thing is that every isolated statement in the bible is true in some sense. Move along, nothing to see here!
Or any of the other little inconsistencies in the bible. Someone points them out- ugh, probably some internet atheist just looking to cause trouble. You go through and explain why each of these supposed contradictions is actually fine, nothing to see here. You make up all kinds of fan theories for how 2 seemingly-contradictory statements from the bible can both be true at the same time. That's what being a Christian is about, right? (It often goes so far, with Christians taking these fan theories so seriously because they're necessary to uphold the idea of inerrancy, that we don't even realize that they're fan theories and we actually think they are taught by the bible itself.)
And all of your explanations are like... well, it's not *impossible* that it could have happened that way. But if you just look at the evidence we have, other explanations seem far more likely. You're not really engaging with the evidence- you're viewing the evidence as a nuisance, and your task as a good Christian is to find excuses so we can ignore all that evidence.
If you're able to make a case that "it's not impossible" that your beliefs about the bible are right- well, that's good enough! That's what we're going for - "not impossible." You became a Christian for other reasons totally unrelated to biblical inerrancy and apologetics, and then you found out that one of the requirements to be a Christian is to believe certain things about the bible, so you hack a path through the jungle to show it's "not impossible" that those beliefs about the bible are true. There, all done!
But as Enns says, if that's what you're doing, you're not going to be able to have a meaningful conversation with the experts who are actually studying these things. With people who look at the actual evidence and explore the implications of it. People who really take the bible seriously, and spend their careers working to learn more about it. People who ask questions about *why* the biblical writers wrote things which are inconsistencies or mistakes- these are fascinating questions, but of course good Christians who believe in inerrancy are not allowed to ask them.
---
Posts about "Inspiration and Incarnation":
Inspiration and Incarnation: Introduction
Inspiration and Incarnation: Other Ancient Near East Literature
Inspiration and Incarnation: An Aside About Apologetics
Related
The Bible and the Pixar Theory
My mind is blown by how cool the Synoptic Problem is
"The Wise Men Came 2 Years After the Shepherds" Is Just a Fan Theory
Adding Incest to the Story of Cain
The Bible Stories As I Read Them Were Never Actually In The Bible
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is)
No comments:
Post a Comment