From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Limits to Criticism: response [plus moderator's comment]
Date: 6 Sep 92 20:53:07 GMT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

WISDOM'S CHILDREN

It was noted earlier that not much discussion has arisen from the
recent postings in advocacy of the inerrancy position.  I have read
all the postings and the response by clh, and I do have a question to
pose. 

As a scholar I must respect scholarship (though I insist on seeing
modern biblical critics the same way *they* wish to see biblical
narratives, i.e., in their temporal and cultural context).  What
troubles me however is the following:

Jesus had little use for the intellectuals of his day.  He was
interested in "ordinary people" and especially in *children* -- I need
not dwell on the many references to children in the gospels, and how
we are in some way to be childlike, and especially the last line of
that strange parable of Luke vii, 31-35: "Wisdom is justified by all
her children."  Are we to be wise, or are we to be "widsom's
children"?

Let me put it to you point-blank what my concern is, and hope that
some of you who are concerned with inerrancy vs. scholarship can
respond to it (it is certainly not a new thought):

Sometimes a doctrine can be criticised merely on the ground that it
has unaccaptable implications.  Are we to conclude that God has given
mankind a special revelation of Himself and of ultimate reality, in
the form of the scriptures that we have, perhaps plus a body of "oral
law", but that the very same "ordinary people" whom the Founder of our
faith singled out almost exclusively to address, are incapable of
"correctly" valueing it?  

Are we not missing something here, something basic to Christianity
(and for that matter to Hasidic versions of Judaism)?  Isn't it
strange that the materials we academics labor over in our studies and
publish to the greater glory of our academic personae, were produced
by simple fishermen and the like?

I am not advocating anything here, I am just trying to articulate a
question that has bothered me for a long time.  Why would God provide
a revelation of himself that only a Ph.D. could grasp?  I can
very easily imagine this question asked of our age by the Founder of
Christianity. 

********************************** +.............................+
*- Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>* :All opinions expressed herein:
*There is no privileged position.* :are my own and are not to be :
*	-God, Derrida, others    * : attributed to my employer   :
********************************** +.............................+

[I have a feeling that you may be misreading the phrase "wisdom's
children".  This simply means those who are wise.  It's a Semitic
idiom.  

  Lk 7:35 Yet wisdom is justified by all her children.

  Mat 11:19 Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds."

The point is the wisdom is vindicated by its results, those things
done by those who are wise.  I would guess that Mat. has reworded the
passage to avoid the Semitic idiom, which might be confusing to Greek
(and English) speakers.  So this passage says nothing about children.

However the point that Christianity does not require a Ph.D. is clear
from other passages, such as I Cor 1:19ff.  God's wisdom is not the
same as the University's.  Yet I think the University's wisdom is not
valueless, when it is also used in accordance with God's wisdom.  God
can make use of all of our talents and experience.  

Jesus uses a child as a model for faith.  Yes, we should have the
innocent trust in God of a child.  But passages such as Heb 5 make it
clear that we are expected to combine this childlike faith with a
mature understanding.

I do believe that the basics of salvation are obvious on a quite naive
reading of the Bible.  You certainly do not need a Ph.D. to be saved.
Yet I also think that academic scholarship has a number of things to
offer the church.  These include

  - a defensive role
  - help in understanding details
  - seeing through cultural assumptions

1) Defense

One of the primary roles of formal theology has been defense.  I do
not doubt that one can lead a fine Christian life with a fairly naive
reading of the Bible.  As I've argued elsewhere, people do a fairly
sophisticated job of understanding other people, in the normal course
of events.  Where we start getting into these arguments is generally
where there's a challenge.  Challenges can occur from non-believers,
from believers who take a different position, or from external events
(such as discovery of certain scientific facts).  

I think someone simply reading the Bible in a naive way would take
neither the inerrant position nor a sophisticated critical one.  When
reading a statement about an object being 10 cubits in diameter and 30
in circumference, what normal reader would think to calculate pi as 3
and see this as a contradiction?  When it's pointed out, we get into
discussions about numbers of digits of precision that most believers
probably don't follow, and which doesn't matter to them.  When reading
several accounts of the resurrection, I doubt that most readers are
struck by the fact that in some details they contradict each other.
The amount of variation is well within what we are accustomed to
hearing when several people talk about the same event.  So most people
would accept it as a matter of course.  Similarly with most of the
other "contradictions" in the Bible.  But when the contradictions are
brought up as an issue, some come up with ways of defending inerrancy,
and others say that the differences are real and have to explain why
it's not a problem that there are real differences in the Bible.  But
the point I'm making is that in almost all cases, these issues become
relevant primarily in defending against attack.

This turns out to be true of a lot of theology.  The Trinity and
Incarnation were codified in response to Arian interpretation.  There
were generations of believers who got along fine without a formal
doctrine of the Trinity.  They understood God as Father, they have
Christ as their savior, and they felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.
They also knew they believed in one God.  But they didn't have a
precise way of relating these things.  Then the Arians started saying
that Christ was less than God, and pointing to various passages in
Scripture that supposedly proved it.  In order to deal with this
challenge, a lot of formal machinery had to be developed.

2) Help with details.

One of the major roles of scholarship has been to help understand the
details of what is being said in the Bible.  This posting is an
example.  An understanding of the original language, and of general
Biblical concepts, can often make sense of passages that are otherwise
obscure or even misleading.  We've seen many examples in this group
where understanding of history, language, or the conceptual world in
which the Bible authors are working can illuminate a passage.  People
sometimes spend years studying a single passage.  While sometimes this
just causes it to be Piled Higher and Deeper, I do think we often see
dividends from this work.  Jeremias' study of the parables helped
rescue our reading of the parables from a tendency in the church to be
overly allegorical in reading them.  If you look at any detailed
commentary, you'll see many examples like this, where studies of a
single concept or passage have helped us understand it.  I think this
is largely because of the time between us and the original authors.
Normally I think the real meaning would have been obvious to the
original readers.  The Bible is not like some sophisticated literary
works, where you need a commentary even to make sense of some 20th
Cent. works because of their obscure allusions.  But what would be
obvious to a fellow 1st Cent. Jew may not be obvious to us.

3) Seeing through our assumptions.

One of the major things scholars have done for us is help us see
through things that we take for granted but aren't true.  It's very
easy to read our own assumptions into the Bible (or any other work).
Ideally, scholars have training that will help them avoid this
problem, to at least some extent.  The Reformers all had reasonable
humanist training.  While they did not accept all the implications of
humanism, I believe this training was instrumental in helping them see
past a number of things that were being read into the Bible at the
time.  Thomas Aquinas did something similar for his generation.  More
recently, theologians grounded in the Biblical theology movement have
helped us see the ways in which Christian theology has been influenced
by neo-Platonic metaphysics, and understand the unique Hebrew
viewpoint.  (A classic example is Nygren's "Agape and Eros".)

--clh]