Category: Implications

To continue this discussion of the basis of our confidence in the Bible’s moral authority, we can demonstrate much more simply that the Bible appears to have been composed in much the same way as other literary products not attributed to the action of God, and so its authority does not come from a magical character. We do not need to settle definitively the questions of cosmogony (“how the world began”) or eschatology (“how the world ends,” presumed to be the subject of much biblical prophecy) that are likely to be the subjects of perpetual debate among readers of the Scriptures. We may simply observe the biblical writers at work.

At one point in his epistle, for example, the author of Hebrews is trying to warn his readers against spiritual complacency. The metaphor he chooses is “striving to enter God’s rest.” To demonstrate that “there remains a sabbath rest for the people of God,” he quotes the opening section of the book of Genesis, where it is written, “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” The only problem is, the author of Hebrews doesn’t seem to remember exactly where this is written, so he introduces this quotation by saying of God, “he has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way” (emphasis added).

If our expectation of the Bible is that it came about through a process that is qualitatively distinct from the normal process of composition, in that God inspired and aided the authors, would it not be reasonable to anticipate that God would at least have helped this author remember that the statement he wanted to quote came from one of the most conspicuous passages in all of the Hebrew Scriptures? If God were going supernaturally to override ordinary human weaknesses in the composition process in order to signal a divinely inspired product, this would have been an awfully good place to intervene!

But it is not the only such place. Paul confesses to imperfections of memory on his own part, even as he is composing what we consider an inspired epistle, when he writes to the Corinthians, “I do not know whether I baptized anyone else” besides Crispus, Gaius and the household of Stephanus (1 Cor. 1:14-16, emphasis added).

His admonitions to these same Corinthians about marriage provide another insight into the “ordinary” process of composition behind this epistle. He prefaces these various admonitions with statements about the source of their authority. “To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from her husband,” he says at the beginning of his discussion (1 Cor. 7:10). But shortly afterwards he writes, “To the rest I say, not the Lord,” that a believing husband should not divorce an unbelieving wife (v. 12). And he later writes, “Now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy” (v. 25).

It is important to explain that when Paul writes “the Lord says,” or speaks of a “command of the Lord,” he is referring to statements of Jesus on various subjects passed down to him through Christian tradition (as in 1 Cor. 11:23, “I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you”). He is not speaking of a direct revelation from God to him on a subject about which he was seeking guidance.

So the contrast here is not between (1) subjects on which God had “inspired” him and (2) those on which God had not sent inspiration but on which Paul was writing anyway. (This would constitute evidence that the Bible, by its own admission, is not uniformly inspired!) Rather, the contrast is between (1) instruction passed down from Jesus and (2) instruction that Paul is giving “as one who by the Lord’s grace is trustworthy.” In neither case does he consciously understand or describe himself to be inspired as he writes, even though the church has judged him to have been inspired as he wrote. Indeed, even within his own generation, the apostle Peter classified Paul’s letters with “the other Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:15-16). But in whatever way Peter, as an inspired writer himself, recognized Paul’s epistles as Scripture when he read them, it was not because he saw that Paul always knew just what to say because God told him directly as he was writing.

Nor was it because Paul never made a mistake, even when he was referring to the earlier Scriptures themselves. When he was warning the Corinthians against immorality, for example, he appealed to the experience of a previous generation of Israelites and wrote, “We must not indulge in immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day” (1 Cor. 10:8). The chastising plague Paul is referring to is described in Numbers 25, but we discover there that the total of its victims was actually twenty-four thousand. Some have suggested that the confusion arose in Paul’s mind because immediately afterwards a census is reported and the tribe of Levi, which was instrumental in stopping the plague, is reported to have had twenty-three thousand men of fighting age (Num. 26:62). But whatever the explanation, Paul got the number wrong, contrary to what we would expect if we understand “inspiration” to mean a divine overruling of the normal composition process, a process that ordinarily does include such lapses of memory.

Some Christians are so insistent, however, that inspiration must consist in such divine intervention that they have developed elaborate theories to account for phenomena such as the “missing thousand” of 1 Cor. 10:8. It has been asserted in all seriousness, for example, that the actual number who fell in the plague was 23,500, and that the author of Numbers is rounding up, while Paul is rounding down. There are many obvious objections to this assertion. Paul knew about the plague only by reading the Scriptures, where the number given is 24,000, so he really never faced the question of whether to round 23,500 up or down. Even if someone were to make the extreme claim that God supernaturally revealed the real number to Paul, why would he, as an inspired author, have rounded down, when the earlier inspired author had rounded up? What is the “inspired” way to handle a half-thousand? It seems to be different in the case of two different “inspired” authors. What this proposal is ultimately saying is that the Bible gives the wrong number in two places, not just one!

But what is most dangerous about such proposals is that they create a “meta-text,” that is, another version of events beyond that of the Bible’s. This “meta-text” ends up saying things that the Bible doesn’t say anywhere, such as that 23,500 fell in the plague, or that Jesus cleansed the temple twice. (This explanation is adopted to account for John’s description of the cleansing at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry even though Matthew, Mark and Luke place it at the end.) But even though it says things the Bible doesn’t say, this meta-text possesses greater authority, because the Bible is made answerable to it. We thus surrender the Bible’s supreme authority while trying to establish its inspiration, if we insist on understanding inspiration as divine intervention in an otherwise natural process.

In my last post, I argued that when biblical writers such as Matthew speak of a prophecy being “fulfilled,” they don’t mean that a foreseen future  has come to pass. Rather, they mean that sayings or events from an earlier point in the biblical story have taken on a fuller and deeper meaning in light of later redemptive-historical developments.

We may appeal to American history for an illustration of this sense of “fulfillment.” When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he said this to challenge the premise that kings rule by divine right and that their subjects therefore ow them the kind of unquestioning loyalty they would offer to God. (That is, he said this to justify a revolutionary independence movement.)

But when Abraham Lincoln observed in his Gettysburg Address of 1863 that our nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he meant instead that slavery was incompatible with the fundamental premises of American society.

And when Martin Luther King said, in his “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963, appropriately delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that he longed for the day when our nation would “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal,’” he explained that in such a nation, people would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” This is how the “true” or “fulfilled” (fullest and deepest) meaning of Jefferson’s words would be realized, according to King.

By this same analogy, in Matt. 1:23 the gospel writer is announcing that Isaiah’s words have taken on a fuller and deeper meaning. The Greek translation of Isaiah’s original words has helped this happen: Isaiah uses the term “maiden.” (The original Hebrew term refers to a young woman, married or unmarried, who has not yet had a child; in Isaiah’s original context, it probably indicates Ahaz’s queen, who became the mother of Hezekiah.) The Greek reads, more intensively, “virgin.” Moreover, “Emmanuel” is no longer the boy’s name, but rather an explanation of his identity — “God with us.” These two intensified aspects of meaning are brought out when the original statement is heard in the light of later developments as the plan of God unfolds.

The case is similar with “out of Egypt have I called my son.” “Son” is no longer a metaphorical description of the nation of Israel, but another accurate disclosure of Jesus’ identity.

As for “he shall be called a Nazarene,” the best explanation seems to be that this was a geographic term of derision (as in John 1:46, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”), much like “Okie” during the Dust Bowl years. This term “Okie” was applied to people from Oklahoma and nearby areas similarly affected by prolonged drought who migrated West in search of work and food. It ceased to mean “someone from Oklahoma” and came to mean something closer to “gypsy.” Matthew, in his appeal to the prophets, is summarizing their many statements that the servant of God would be “despised and rejected.” (The quotation here is indirect, not direct like the preceding ones, and thus does not belong within quotation marks, although some modern Bibles present it that way.) Other announcements of prophetic “fulfillment” may be understood similarly.

None of this should be taken to mean, however, that those who knew God could not have spoken in prescient ways about the deliverance He would send. They were able to do this, and did so, precisely because they knew the ways of God. Moreover, we must not rule out the existence of an actual “gift of prophecy,” given to humans, through which God discloses details of what He will work to bring about in the future, so that those in the present may take moral warning.

One clear example of prophecy-as-foreseeing is the prediction a prophet made to Jereboam, recorded in 1 Kings 13:2, that a king named Josiah would one day defile the altar he had built to rival the one in Jerusalem. This prediction was fulfilled, not in the Matthean sense, but quite literally, three hundred years later, as described in 2 Kings 23:15-18. Another example is Jesus’ prediction that Peter would deny him three times before the cock crowed the following morning (Luke 22:34 and 54-62, with parallels in Matthew and Mark). Jesus’ estimate of Peter’s impetuous character could certainly have led him to predict that despite his bravado, Peter would deny him. But how would Jesus have known, without divinely-granted insight, how many times, and by when? So there are indeed examples in the Bible of prophetic fulfillment in the sense of “a future foreseen come to pass.”

Nevertheless, these examples do not provide proof of the supernatural inspiration of the writer who recorded them. They take place, after all, within a single continuous narrative that has been recorded after the fact. So they are not offered to demonstrate prophetic insight on the part of the writer. These predictions and fulfillments are rather recounted for other reasons. The far-off but inevitable doom of Jereboam’s altar is proclaimed from its very foundation as a warning against idolatry. And Jesus’ prediction about Peter shows that even as he went to his death, he was full of divine power and knowledge, and that it was therefore willingly that he surrendered himself for our sakes. The account is meant to fill us with gratitude and admiration for Jesus, in other words—not for Luke!

As we seek to understand the Bible’s concept of “fulfillment,” we must also recognize the significance of “intertextuality,” that is, of the new meanings texts take on when they are read in the presence of other texts. For the Christian who believes that the Bible is the inspired word of God, one implication is that it is God Himself who has juxtaposed the texts in question. Divine intention can therefore be seen in connections that would have been impossible for the original authors to have made, since they wrote far apart from one another in both time and place.

The word spoken to the serpent in Genesis 3:15, for example, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel,” may have meant in its original context only that animals formerly subject to humans would now turn wild and dangerous. But within the pages of the biblical collection, there is now an intertextuality by which these words can be understood validly as a Messianic prophecy, even though the New Testament itself does not make this connection expliclity. This prophecy was fulfilled by the victory of Jesus over the devil at the cross.

But if such “fulfillments” are instead to serve as our guarantee of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, all of them, without exception, must be examples of uncannily accurate prediction. It simply does not suffice for Isaiah to look 700 years into the future, see a boy miraculously born to a “maiden” or “virgin,” but then get his name wrong. We have a right to expect better than this from God, if we are looking for supernatural proofs.

And if what we think should be happening really isn’t, then we must re-examine our expectations themselves. Has God really promised us that his word can be recognized as his word even without faith? Did not Jesus say that it is “an evil and adulterous generation that seeks a sign” (Matthew 12:39)? If no such signs were granted in the case of the living Word, we should not expect them in the case of the written word, either.

“God gives rain upon the earth and sends waters upon the fields.”

“God made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.”

“All Scripture is inspired by God.”

These three statements in the Bible all have something very significant in common. They all attribute to a supernatural cause, the action of God, results that appear, the more closely one studies them, more and more to have come about through natural processes. That is, these results look just like other results of their respective processes which are not said to have come about through the action of God. This does not mean that God is not the actor in these three cases; it simply means that God has not chosen to use a radically different process to bring about what is nevertheless a divine product.

We have already considered, in an earlier post, that rainfall in the land of Palestine (the rainfall that is arguably in view in statements such as the one quoted above) is produced by the same process as the rain that falls on other parts of the world. We have also seen in earlier posts that the biological diversity that results from a process even the strictest creationists would consider “natural” rather than “supernatural” (“variation within ‘Genesis kinds’”) is quantitatively and qualitatively equal to, if not greater than, the diversity that results from what is understood to be divine activity (“special creation”).

In this post and the three that follow, we will also establish that the Bible, for its part, bears all the marks of having been produced through the same process as human writings that are not considered divinely inspired. Once we have seen this and accepted it, we shall be free to ground our confidence in the Bible’s moral authority, which will still be entirely justified, on something other than the inevitably disappointing premise that it bears magical signs pointing to its divine origin.

My co-author has already discussed one of these sought-after signs. He has related how he was taught that God supernaturally gave the biblical authors natural-scientific insights far transcending the observations it was possible for them to make within their limitations of time, place and culture. He faced deep disillusionment when he discovered that the biblical authors’ statements about the origins of the natural world—when read literally, non-contextually, and cumulatively, in keeping with the approach characteristic of those who appealed to them as a sign—could not in any way be considered “accurate” by scientific standards. When he came to appreciate the beauty and truth of these statements within the observational, phenomenological perspective from which they had actually been made, this offered some reassurance about the statements themselves, but a substitute was still lacking for the role they had once been asked to play.

Before proceeding further with our discussion, it is instructive to recognize that even if the authors of the Bible had been given a supernatural awareness of true cosmology, and even if they had reflected this awareness in their writings, this would still not have provided an attestation of the Bible’s inspiration for just about any of its readers over the centuries. This is because, until the Copernican Revolution, the readers of the Bible held the same observational cosmology it actually presents. They would therefore have dismissed the Bible as inaccurate if it had instead painted a picture of a spinning earth and a stationary sun.

Indeed, there is actually no cosmology that could have been put in the Bible that would have provided an attestation of its inspiration to any but a tiny fraction of its eventual readers. A Copernican cosmology would have been considered outdated in Kepler’s day; Kepler’s cosmology would not have provided an attestation in the present day; and it is virtually certain that even if the Bible presented a cosmology identical to the one we now believe to be accurate, a few hundred years from now this, too, would raise the same question we are addressing.

The human understanding of cosmology has continued to grow and change over the centuries to such an extent that there is no period whose cosmology is correct by the standards of other periods. An observational cosmology, however, when it is recognized as such, travels to all periods, and was thus the best choice for the Bible itself. Even if God had somehow revealed the true cosmology to all humans right from the start, even this would not have permitted cosmology to provide an attestation of the Bible’s inspiration, because in such circumstances its cosmological insights, however true, would be nothing special.

Another “sign” that is often pointed to as proof of the Bible’s divine inspiration and consequent moral authority is the accurate fulfillment of the prophecies it contains. How could the biblical writers have known the future, the argument goes, if they had not been inspired by God? But once again, if we look closely and carefully at what the Bible means when it speaks of its own prophecies being “fulfilled,” we discover that there is no magical testimony to the Bible’s divine authorship in this case, either.

We do not have to look very far to make this discovery, in fact. The very first book of the New Testament, in its very first claim that a prophecy was fulfilled, rules out the understanding of “fulfillment”—a foreseen future coming to pass—to which appeal is typically made to demonstrate the Bible’s inspiration.

Matthew writes that when Mary had borne a son, and Joseph had called his name “Jesus,” the prophetic word was fulfilled that said, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel” (Matt. 1:22-25). We would expect that if Isaiah 7:14, the passage referred to here, really were a future foreseen and described, Mary would have actually named her son “Emmanuel,” not “Jesus.” So something different is happening here.

The early chapters of Matthew present several other problems along this same line. In Matt. 2:23, for example, it is said that Jesus dwelt in Nazareth to fulfill what was spoken by the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene. Yet nowhere in the prophetic corpus, nor indeed anywhere in all of the Hebrew scriptures, is such a prediction recorded.

And when Jesus’ flight into Egypt and return to Israel after Herod’s death is said to fulfill Hosea’s words, “Out of Egypt have I called my son” (Matt. 2:13-15), the reader is puzzled indeed, because Hosea is writing history, not predicting the future, when he makes this statement. He is describing the Exodus (Hos. 11:1).

The necessary conclusion is that when Matthew speaks of “fulfillment,” he does not mean that a foreseen future has come to pass. Instead, he means that words spoken at an earlier time in redemptive history have taken on a fuller and deeper meaning in light of later, more developed redemptive-historical circumstances. This, to me, is actually a much more powerful concept: not that humans were given an advance glimpse of what was going to happen in the future, but that the God who superintends and overrules human affairs has demonstrated His unchanging character consistently through time and has revealed more and more of his purposes while reaffirming the earlier-revealed ones.