I have been discussing Genesis as history, or perhaps more precisely, a story which preserves much history. I haven't gone much into the theology of Genesis. I find the latter more fascinating, because even more than suggestions of historical events, Genesis encapsulates a great deal of later understanding of God into relatively few, spare stories.
The contrast deserves some attention. Archaeology is well and good - it illuminates some customs and comparisons of the Jews with their neighbors - but even extreme, exhaustive knowledge of the peoples of Persia, Egypt, and Palestine would leave important things out. I will go further: if we had a hundred years of video of Abraham's life, divvied it up and reported back on it, a lot of the most important stuff simply wouldn't be there.
To illustrate this, look at the story of Job. It is perhaps the oldest story in the Bible, in the sense of first appearance of the telling of the story in something like its present form.
Job is all folk tale. There may have been an actual person by that name and similar experience, but the crafting of the story is very once-upon-a-time. As Jesus began the parables with elements such as "there was a man who owned a vineyard," or "there was a woman who had ten silver coins," Job begins with the story of a rich man. How rich? Why, he was the richest man for miles around, son. He had (big number) donkeys, and (big number) camels. He lived a righteous life. How righteous? Well son, he was so righteous that he would offer a sacrifice on behalf of his children just on the chance they had sinned. He led a happy, comfortable life. How happy?
You get the picture. These are oral formulaic elements, setting the story in the realm of the universal. Unlike other Bible characters, Job is not tied to the reign of a particular king, or to an identifiable area, or within a clear genealogy. He is not meant to be. He is meant to stand very emphatically for all humankind in time of doubt and suffering. He asks the questions of God that humanity asks.
The framing of the story is also mythic. Satan has a conversation with God and sets Him a challenge. How would we know this? Job doesn't appear to know it. If he repeated the story of his experience to his grandchildren, that part wouldn't be there, unless God had specifically revealed it to Job at some other point. As with Jesus's temptation in the wilderness, there is no way for human beings to have this knowledge unless they are told it. Presumably Jesus told the disciples what happened during his fast, which is why we have a highly condensed version of those forty days. How long the actual temptations were which Jesus boiled down to their essences we have no way of knowing unless He tells us.
So too with Job. He doesn't know what is happening in heaven, he only knows what is happening to him. It is the storyteller who intuits what the story must mean, framing it in the structure of a conversation between God and Satan. We are given a few words, but we know that argument has been going on since before any time we know.
The ending, also is a storybook ending. Job gets back double what he lost. Sounds great in a story, but thinking about it as a human being, it doesn't sound so great. That doesn't matter in terms of this story. We just need the storyteller's wrapup that it all came out right for Job in the end.
If we had a video of Job during this experience, we would not learn anything about him worth knowing. The actual history would be worse than irrelevant, it would be a distraction. We would not know more about Job, we would know far less if we knew his history. Apply this back to Genesis. It is good to know historical and archaeological things. It is mildly gratifying when identifiable historical or prehistorical events show up in the text. But those aren't what the story is about.
8 comments:
"The framing of the story is also mythic. Satan has a conversation with God and sets Him a challenge. How would we know this? Job doesn't appear to know it. If he repeated the story of his experience to his grandchildren, that part wouldn't be there, unless God had specifically revealed it to Job at some other point."
It sounds as if you're dismissing a story from the bible as merely folk tale and myth which I find uncomfortable. If the story was recorded by Moses, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, then Moses would/could very well know those details that were unknown or unknowable by Job.
It sounds as if you're dismissing a story from the bible as merely folk tale and myth which I find uncomfortable. If the story was recorded by Moses, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, then Moses would/could very well know those details that were unknown or unknowable by Job.
AVI,
This is an example of what I was getting at in my post...which it seems your post here might be addressing.
The average Christian makes no distinction between history and "myth" when it comes to Scripture.....because if it's in the Bible then it must be "true" in a very literal sense.
While many people are aware of the different distinctions of genre and purpose of the various books of the Bible....we are almost never exposed to it in common church life or from the pulpit. Even teachers who teach Job speak of him as a real person.
So this is what we get with Abraham....or Genesis. When we start talking about myths and metaphors....we lose a large swath of Christians who see such talk as bordering on blasphemous.
Seeing things from the point of view you describe, which I actually agree with, is uncomfortable for many people because there are a whole host of theological assumptions lurking under the water.
Boxty
Does it make a difference if Job were a real historical person.....or if Satan really had a bet with God? The point of the story is that people sometimes suffer through no fault of their own and with no explanation from God.
Seems pretty true from general observation.
Boxty, a decade or so ago I would have agreed with you, at least in part. I would have taken a slippery slope argument that says if we give up one part of literalness, then all parts are in jeopardy.
I have changed my mind on that not from theological studies, but from an odd direction - European history. In the 15th-16th Centuries several factors came into play that caused us to look at words and literalness differently. The Reformation encouraged lay people to read the Scriptures, which encouraged literacy. Gutenberg made much print material generally available. And lastly, the acceptance of the scientific method, which involved keeping exact records for repeatability. From these three forces there came an increasing view of words on the page as almost magical in and of themselves. The intense literalness, and especially KJV literalness, of the American frontier Christianity became prominent because churches and theological training were less available and common. The theology that said "I got saved, and I've got my Bible, that's all I need" is a recent, not ancient phenomenon.
I don't want to oversell that. Most Christians even before the American theology spread out from the Appalachias believed that the words of Scripture were reliable and historical. But the usage of Word of God for the Bible, instead of for Jesus as it more properly should be, is extremely uncommon before the Reformation Pietist movements. It is magic-word biblicism that has more in common with spell-casting and superstition than it does to historical Christian usage. As far back as Jerome, Bible scholars considered it possible, and even likely that much of Genesis was not intended to be historical, but instructive. What you view as the traditional view of scripture is actually a fairly modern phenomenon.
"But the usage of Word of God for the Bible, instead of for Jesus as it more properly should be..."
I seriously don't understand this statement. Can you expand upon it?
"It is magic-word biblicism that has more in common with spell-casting and superstition than it does to historical Christian usage."
This doesn't make any sense to me either.
"I have changed my mind on that not from theological studies, but from an odd direction - European history."
I'm a new Christian and haven't read more than a few books of the Bible in depth. But man, that sounds like some serious heresy there. I don't mean to throw that word around lightly either. I really hope you'll expand upon your comments so that I can understand where you're coming from.
Boxty, not to tread on AVI's toes here, but I have heard similar thinking from people who use the word, "Bibliolatry" - worship of the Bible. In that we sometimes see people making the mistake of taking the literal words of the Bible as though the Bible were a member of the Trinity.
Also, I would suggest you consider that something can be true without being factual. For example, there is a lot of poetry in the Bible which doesn't try to lay down facts so much as it describes spiritual truth. It's not necessary to literalize poetry to acknowledge the truths contained in it. Likewise, a mythological story can tell important truths, whether it's factual or not.
I mention this mostly to explain that it's possible for someone to accept the story of Job as the truth, even if you don't think these exact events happened to a person named Job.
Or here's perhaps a better example. Jesus often told parables, stories that encapsulate spiritual truths. These stories aren't about actual people; someone who asked "What was the name of the Prodigal Son, where did the family live, exactly how rich was his father?" would be missing the point of that story through taking it too literally, at the level of fact rather than truth.
Boxty, we evangelicals have a habit of using the phrase "Word of God" for the Bible. It's not bad as a shorthand, but it is imprecise. Jesus is the Living Word - see the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Compare it to 1st John Chapter 1 and the first verses of Genesis. Luther used the image that the Bible is the manger that holds Jesus.
I sent my sons to Christian schools, mostly Baptist, and they chose Wesleyan Methodist (think camp meeting, Salvation Army, circuit-riding preachers) and Baptist colleges. I am very familiar with the strengths of the type of Bible focus that puts a lot of emphasis on memorization and exalting the Scriptures, but I am also aware of the weaknesses of that style. People really do get into a mentality of quoting scripture at others because "my word will not return to me void," which they interpret to mean that the very words of scripture have an automatic power of their own. This is not so, and trends into heresy. The Holy Spirit has power, and often uses scripture as its vehicle.
At the far extreme, it was common - it still is found - for Appalachian superstitions to involve words of the Bible: "Say the Lord's Prayer while walking around a stump three times in the moonlight to cure warts," or "put a Bible under a sick baby and he will get well." While those sound ridiculous to us, they are not far removed from the practice of opening the Bible at random for God to give direction, or "throwing a fleece" which you can still find people doing and approving of. That in turn is not very far from "Bible promises," which are very much still in evidence. There are promises and promises. In some places, God tells us through the scriptures some things that we can absolutely rely on regardless of circumstances. But stretching that and extending it to the general wisdom and advice of Proverbs and other wisdom literature can lead to such demands as "train up a child in the way that he should go and he will not depart from it" as something more than general advice but an actual claim we can make on God, overruling the child's free will and God's sovereignty. That is why I said that this approach moves in the direction of spellcasting. It is not equivalent, but it moves in that direction.
Bibliolatry involves our telling God how the scriptures are supposed to be used. We set the rules and say they are God's rules. I don't know anything about what your Christian teaching is, but I do know what some of the common pitfalls are. There are modern teachers who say they are encouraging you to study the Scriptures for yourself, but are in actuality steering you into how you must read them. At the end of a few years, a new Christian will have those ideas implanted, but be utterly convinced that they have received them from their own study. It is subtle that way. A good defense is to expose yourself to recognised giants of the faith: Luther, CS Lewis, Wesley, Calvin, Augustine, Chesterton. If you are not trained in reading writers from another era you can take it it small sections or in summary.
Anyone who preaches that they are only teaching straight from the Word of God and that it is simple if you just follow their path through the scriptures should be viewed with extreme suspicion. This is what the Benny Hinns and Kenneth Hagin followers, and popular preachers do, and they are dangerously misguided.
AVI, I have a strange feeling that I have known what you are saying about the difference between the Word of God and the Scripture for some time...
But this was a strange knowledge, a knowledge that existed without the ability to reproduce the meaning in words.
I know that the tradition I grew up in is...friendly to the errors you mention. I've known people to fall into them, and known people not to fall into them.
Thank you.
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