The AI Mirage

Photo taken by Nathan Fox while we were driving MN 11 along the Rainy River

The conversation about AI, specifically generative AI, has grown in recent years from the hottest new thing to an out-of-control blaze sucking up all the oxygen in the room. (Or maybe all the water from the aquifer?) I hope you can forgive me for adding yet another voice to it and fanning the flames. Though the technology is being touted as the future of work, of the economy, of knowledge, of communication, of...virtually everything, its trajectory, the world AI is bringing into being, is far from clear. And while almost everyone has an opinion on it, those opinions range from excitement to wonder to anxiety to outright hostility.

Will AI free us from the shackles of work and usher in a techno-paradise where machines serve man? Will it turbocharge innovation and economic activity by letting one person do the work of ten? Or will it create even more unemployment than the Great Depression and drive billions to poverty or abject dependence? Will it gain sentience, stop obeying us and destroy humanity? Is artificial general intelligence, AI that outperforms humans in all areas and can even improve itself, really coming in the next few years? Public figures have made all of these claims (sometimes several of them at once!). That all of these futures are at times treated as plausible speaks to the fragmented, siloed nature of public discourse about AI as well as the importance of seeking clarity and answers about these and other important questions. I hope that what I write here will contribute to that clarity for those who read it.

Let me show my hand now. In case you couldn't guess, I am not a fan of generative AI. I have never used it (at least by choice) and have no plans to start doing so. The words, thoughts, and any mistakes I share on the subject are my own. My critique of AI can be broken up into six main points/posts, which I'll summarize here.

1. First and foremost, AI doesn't work. It fails persistently, egregiously, and unpredictably at the kinds of tasks it's supposed to be able to outperform and replace humans at, increasingly often as the complexity of those tasks increases. Working with AI means having a coworker or underling (or, God forbid, boss) that confidently lies and makes things up, thinks it knows everything but doesn't know what it doesn't know, can't be relied on or trusted, and whose every action and output must be verified for correctness. Contrary to what AI proponents would have you think, this is not an engineering problem that can be solved with more money and compute power, but an inherent limitation of the current technology.
2. Next, AI doesn't think and is not intelligent—and to suppose that it does, or that it is, is to do great violence to the "actual intelligence" (as Steve Wozniak describes it) that human beings possess. The human tendency to mistake machine use of human language for humanlike intelligence is not new, but it is being supercharged by generative AI's apparent fluency, versatility, and eagerness to please. Believing that AI is as intelligent as humans, or will soon be, and that thought is reducible to the kind of information-processing that computers are suited for, blinds us to the depth and breadth of our humanity and reduces our view of ourselves to slow, defective computers in need of technological completion.
3. Building off the previous two points, relying on AI is dangerous to our humanity. Outsourcing our cognition, creativity, competency, or other higher faculties to AI is a disastrous idea. We are still only beginning to reckon with the formative effects of computers, the internet, smartphones, and other technologies on how we think, learn, work, and interact with each other, and that caused by AI threatens to dwarf them all if the growth stories of AI prophets are taken seriously.
4. If these things are true and so obvious to many people, why does generative AI seem to be taking over everything? Because beneath the exciting hype, AI is not for us. The impetus to deploy AI at such breathtaking pace and society-transforming scale, and to rely on it so heavily in so many areas of life, is not driven by the actual value it delivers to its users or the potential they see in it, but by those who build, run, and stand to profit from AI services. Their vision of an AI-run future is not a place we want to go—it is neither desirable nor inevitable. We need to tell a better story than the tired old materialist, capitalist yarn of endless growth and progress that got us here.
5. Fifth, AI is not economically viable (at least with current technology). It is yet another economic bubble—the biggest one ever—and the fallout when it pops will be severe. Its rapid growth and takeover of society has been made possible by offering AI services for much, much less than they actually cost to provide, and most users balk when asked to pay something closer to the actual price. Even the biggest, most advanced AI companies are far from profitable, and it's doubtful they ever could be. Not only is it far from clear if using AI is actually more cost-effective than human labor (in part because of its unreliability), the increasingly-large gobs of money customers are paying for it go straight to corporate technocrats rather than to the human workers they are supposed to replace.
6. Finally, AI is unsustainable. The physical substrate that AI services run on—increasingly large data centers being built at increasing rates—has a huge economic and environmental footprint, one which is scaling in proportion with AI itself—that is to say, exponentially. We are recklessly pouring labor, resources, our physical and mental health, our very humanity at an accelerating pace into a silicon god which promises us a world freed from the need to work, to think, to experience uncertainty or ambiguity, to interact with other human beings.

But this promised world, I believe, is a mirage. It seems attainably close, but never seems to get any closer, no matter how many billions of dollars of funding we pour into keeping OpenAI and Anthropic afloat, how many hallucinations we put up with, how much electricity we burn and water we evaporate and silicon we feed this ravenous beast. If we want to see what the generative AI "revolution" is really doing, we need to see through the empty stories of its champions and think clearly about what is happening and what it means. I hope to do this, in some small way, in the coming posts.

Plans for the Blog

Christ is Risen! Indeed He is risen!

Now that I'm trying to write again and Holy Week is past, you may be wondering, dear reader, what I'm planning to do here after the 7-year hiatus. Obviously the things I write won't be exactly the same as they were before, since I and the world have changed so much. Most of my more fruitful thinking and reading recently has clustered around three main topics:

First, I hope to explore the relation between (and, ultimately, the complementarity of) faith and science. For the most part, modern Orthodoxy is not so much anti-science as it is not much in conversation with science at all. I'd like to do my small part to change that. In particular, I've done a good deal of thinking about how to bring the theory of evolution into conversation with my faith and worldview since my last post on the subject 11 years ago.

Second, I would be dishonest if I said that watching the Evangelical world I left behind largely rally behind the endless lies and cruelty of a would-be dictator over the past ten years didn't push me to do a lot of thinking about Christianity and the worldly powers, or that this thinking wasn't one of the things that drove me to revive the blog. Neither are Orthodox Christians immune to the temptation to an overly cozy relationship with worldly powers, to seek to build the Kingdom of God through worldly means deemed more "effective"—or else to withdraw from the social implications of the faith and focus on a purely otherworldly salvation. My meditations on this topic will be as much for my own benefit as anyone else's.

Third, I'd like to explore the ramifications of our increasingly rapidly evolving use of technology for our lives, our habits, and our spirituality. Increasingly large swaths of our lives are lived, or at least mediated, through screens, apps, digital technologies; the vast network that Luciano Floridi calls the "infosphere", and subject to the influence and surveillance of the multinational corporations that run them. As we use these devices, how are they 'using' us? What are they doing to us? How are they shaping our understanding of the 'good life', of what it means to be fully human—or whether being 'fully human' is even desirable anymore? In particular, I recently read Are We All Cyborgs Now? by Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, which has been very instructive in how to ask and think critically about these questions.

A technological subject that has developed drastically since before my hiatus, and on which I feel somewhat more qualified to speak than the average person, is artificial intelligence, specifically the generative AI that is disrupting industries, loosening peoples' grasp on reality, ostensibly replacing human labor, and insatiably devouring ever-increasing amounts of water, electricity, silicon, and cash as it pulls the whole global economy into its orbit. You can probably guess some of my thoughts on the subject already, but I hope to develop them more in the near future.

Related to technology and public life is a book I read last year that made a powerful impression on me and has influenced much of my reading and thinking ever since: Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. It's not an easy book to summarize succinctly, but if I might attempt to do so, it's a manifesto against the dehumanizing global industrial-economic-techno-political anti-culture Kingsnorth and others call "the Machine" that uproots traditional communities and cultures, exploits people, and pollutes the environment, turning them all into fuel for the idol we've made of endless growth and "Progress". The result is alienation, moral confusion, and spiritual blindness as the Machine remakes us in its own image as its willing servants. If any of this sounds familiar to you, you're in luck: I've taken extensive notes and am hoping to blog through the book in detail.

A Love Stronger Than Death

 

Today He who hung the earth upon the waters is hung on a tree.
The King of the angels is decked with a crown of thorns.
He who wraps the heavens in clouds is wrapped in the purple of mockery.
He who freed Adam in the Jordan is slapped in the face.
The Bridegroom of the Church is affixed to the cross with nails.
The Son of the Virgin is pierced by a spear.
We worship Thy passion, O Christ.
Show us also Thy glorious resurrection.

He who clothes Himself with light as with a garment stood naked for trial.
He was struck on the cheek by hands that He himself had formed.
A people that transgressed the Law
Nailed the Lord of Glory to the cross.

Then the curtain of the temple was torn in two.
Then the sun was darkened,
Unable to bear the sight of God outraged,
Before Whom all things tremble.
Let us worship Him.

The disciples denied Him,
But the thief cried out:
“Remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom!”

–From the Matins of Great and Holy Friday (source Fr. Stephen Freeman)

He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive him.
(John 1:10-11)

Ten Years

As some of you may have noticed, my previous post was my first in over seven years. I'm not sure who was more surprised: the sixty people who saw it, or me that there were sixty of them!

This extended hiatus was not just due to laziness or neglect (though there has been plenty of that, too). It was a reflection of my growing awareness that my adopted Orthodox faith is not just (or even primarily) a matter of intellect and ratio that can be expressed in words, especially disembodied blog posts. I'm sure I expressed this truth many times in my old posts during and after my conversion, but as long as I kept writing and posting like I had been, I had to question whether I was really, consistently living it. Consistency, harmony both within my faith and between faith and life, was one of the main things I was seeking in my conversion, after all.

If the life in Christ is a ladder, as St. John Climacus (whom we just commemorated a week ago on the fourth Sunday of Great Lent) depicted it, words and blog posts alone will only get you to its foot. Actually climbing it takes practice, discipline, prayer, obedience, watchfulness, and so much more (including the persistence to get up and back onto it as many times as you fall, which will be a lot). The older I get, the more I realize how insignificant, how insufficient merely reasoning about things is to the Christian life. But this only adds to my joy, because it means I am seeing more and more just how much more there is to the faith I grew up in than I once imagined.

In Orthodox spirituality there is a concept called phronema, a Greek word that originally meant something like "mind", "understanding", or "thinking", but like many other Orthodox terms has taken on a wealth of meaning that is difficult to encompass in a precise definition. Its full meaning isn't just intellectual, but involves values and an entire way of life, a way of life we don't choose or invent for ourselves but receive through our participation in Holy Tradition, the deposit of faith given by the apostles and nurtured by the Church through the age. The Orthodox phronema is a mindset that sinks down "into your bones", and acquiring it is not simply a matter of learning facts, but of discipline, of practice, of formation, of organic growth, of habit-building. It takes time and dedication, and after my conversion I began to sense that continuing to approach my faith in the intellectual, often polemical way I had been on this blog, among other places, was hindering me. This is why I stopped posting for so long.

You may ask: Why, then, are you back? Have you finished acquiring the Orthodox phronema? Of course not, though perhaps my phronema has at least caught up with my thoughts. Having come to understand just what all being a 'theologian' in the Orthodox sense of the word entails, I understand now that the kind of 'theologizing' I used to do so blithely on this blog needs to be done in proportion to one's growth in faith, in prayer, in the virtues, in Christ, to avoid being a mere intellectual exercise. As St Paul wrote, "though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." (1 Cor 13:2)

Today, St Mary of Egypt Sunday, marks the tenth anniversary of my chrismation (in church years), my reception into the Orthodox Church. I've been Orthodox for longer than I was evangelical and it feels even more like home than it did at first. As I've begun acquiring something of the Orthodox phronema, the parable of the talents (or, in Luke, the minas) has been weighing on my mind. I don't want to misuse my gifts, but I also don't want to sit idle on them. When does it become more perilous to continue keeping silence than to speak?

For much has changed in the world in the past ten years, at a seemingly ever-increasing pace. Technological 'innovation', or at least proliferation, aims to 'disrupt' every part of our lives and mediate more and more aspects of our lives through the web, through screens, through algorithms. The concentration of ever-increasing amounts of wealth into the hands of ever fewer continues, a self-reinforcing cycle aided by innovations in speculation like cryptocurrency, the short-lived fad of the 'Metaverse', and the increasing popularity of betting on everything from sporting events to deadly airstrikes. A global pandemic forced us into isolation, strained the fabric of society, and brought out a wave of science and public health denialism in response. More recently, generative AI has invaded everything from children's toys to refrigerators to news, insatiably consuming electricity, water, silicon, and money while further undermining our shared sense of reality, even as some of its proponents express worry that it might maybe possibly sort of be an existential threat to humanity (but that it's very important to keep feeding it to avoid being beaten to whatever future it's leading to). And the rising tide of secularization from the ashes of Christendom, once seemingly unstoppable, has met fierce opposition from a toxic white 'Christian' nationalism with a thoroughly anti-Christian ethos, leaving us caught in the crossfire of an escalating culture war with new frontlines in empirical reality and once-uncontroversial virtues like empathy and mercy.

How do we as Orthodox Christians in the world live in times such as these? How do we resist the gravity of modernity and remain centered in the faith, in the gospel, in Christ? Saints and spiritual fathers both ancient and modern have much more wisdom than I do, but the gap between the often older, often monastic context they are writing from and our rapidly-evolving situation as moderns creates room for us to fool ourselves into believing that we are living faithfully even as the counterformative forces of modernity work on us in ways we're unaware of. The words the Lord spoke to His disciples are certainly applicable to those of us in the world: "I am sending you out like sheep surrounded by wolves, so be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16) We must be watchful and discerning, as sojourners in a foreign country. (cf. Hebrews 11:13, 1 Peter 2:11) This is a good and (in my view) necessary application of the intellect for those who live in the world.

These are the questions and issues that I have spent a lot of time thinking about recently. Like when I first started this blog, my brain seems to be overflowing, and I hope that what comes out might be relevant and helpful to more than just me. Like the period from 2011 to 2014 that began my trajectory to Orthodoxy, there is a sense of tension that drives me onward--only this time it isn't a tension within my with, but between faith and life, or faith and world. I've been doing a lot of reading lately surrounding these subjects, particularly technological ones that as a (now senior) software engineer I'm at least a little more qualified than the average person to speak to. I hope to share the fruits of this reading and thinking here, as well as a separate project on church history I'm doing for my church. Please stay tuned, and thank you for reading!

Akathist of Thanksgiving: "Glory to God for All Things"

The following akathist (hymn devoted to a saint or theological theme), which my church has been saying on weeknights this fall, was found in the belongings of Protopresbyter Gregory Petrov after his death in a Soviet prison camp in 1940, but is attributed to Metropolitan Tryphon of Turkestan (died 1934). It is titled after the last words of Saint John Chrysostom before his death in exile. Liturgical text from Saint Jonah Orthodox Church in Texas.

Theologically, the akathist is a beautiful offering of thanksgiving to God for His glory as shone forth through the grandeur, the beauty, and the terror of the created world, the prayers and worship of the Church, the creative works of man, and the eternal life-through-death to come. Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes in For the Life of the World that "Eucharist (thanksgiving) is the state of perfect man... Eucharist is the only full and real response of man to God's creation, redemption, and gift of heaven." Fr. Stephen Freeman, on his blog (also named after St. Chrysostom's last words), adds:

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, in the last sermon of his life, said, “Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.” I would expand that and say as well, that everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of becoming human – for the fullness of our humanity is found primarily in communion. And the communion of thanksgiving is perhaps communion at its deepest level.

The mental image of Fr. Petrov leading bedraggled prisoners in a Soviet camp in this beautiful, joyous hymn of thanksgiving has the kind of paradoxical, "upside down", not-of-this-world quality I've come to associate with authentic Orthodox theology–not simply thinking about God, but knowing Him firsthand. Thanksgiving, it seems, is not only for when everything is just swell in your life. It is also (maybe even especially) for when all is not good in this fallen world.

 

The Unfiltered Scripture

Last time, I tried to lay down some helpful foundations for approaching questions and doubts about the Bible. To briefly summarize, the written word of God is given to lead us into knowledge of and participation in the true Word of God, that is, Christ; not to give us data points with which to build a system of theology or anything else. This came more or less naturally to Christians throughout most of the church's history, but more recent changes in how we read the Bible and how we think have made it harder (but not impossible) today. Reading the Scriptures is not about interrogating them to find "what really happened", but about letting them interrogate us, probe what's really happening in our hearts and lead us to better know the Truth.

What this approach to the Scriptures does for many of the "contradictions" people find is not answer or "explain" them so much as move them from the center of our spiritual life to the periphery. I'm referring specifically to questions like these:

• How is the seven-day creation account in Genesis 1 compatible with what we now know about the origins of the universe, the earth, and life? And, for that matter, how is it compatible with the other creation account in Genesis 2?
• Is the earth about 6,500 years old, as the Bible has been calculated to depict, or billions of years old?
• If Adam and Eve were the first humans, who was Cain worried would take vengeance on him after he killed Abel? And who did he and Seth marry?
• Who exactly are the "nephilim" in Genesis 6?
• Did the cataclysmic flood in Genesis 7 begin seven days or immediately after Noah and his family entered the ark? Where is the geological evidence for it that should exist? Where did the water making up the flood come from, and where did it go? And how do people and animals seem to have been living all over the world for up to millions of years when, according to the flood account, they all originated from the ark just a few thousand years ago?
• What do we do with 1 Kings 7:23, which seems to say that pi is exactly 3? Or with Leviticus 11:19, which implies that bats are birds?
• What are the "storehouses" of snow and hail in Job 38:22? Why does the previous chapter describe the sky as a solid object, "strong as a cast metal mirror", and what is the "leviathan" mentioned a few chapters later?
• Why does the city of Tyre still exist when Ezekiel prophesied it would be destroyed and never rebuilt? (26:14)
• Why is a miraculous event like Jesus' resurrection (and the various miracles that accompanied it and his crucifixion) so poorly attested everywhere outside the writings of the early church? The absences of other noteworthy events like the plagues of Egypt or Augustus' empire-wide census from the historical record are equally puzzling.

In this post I will be answering precisely none of these questions—at least not directly. In light of our modern-day background knowledge, these are all perfectly valid questions to ask, some better than others. People can and, in fact, should seek answers to them. What I am shedding light on is our perceived need to ask these kinds of questions in order to make any sense of the Bible. Our need to get them "out of the way" as a prerequisite for any kind of deeper engagement with it.

As I indicated last time, I think this need comes from how our reflex as modern people is to interpret the Bible "like any other book", to seek objective truths in its pages and fit them into our inherited framework of truth, one in which scientific inquiry seems to be steadily gaining ground against ignorance. We read about a seven-day creation, a global flood, and other scientific and historical anomalies and can't fit them in, can't reconcile them to this framework. At this point we might respond in a few different ways. We might, as so many do today, conclude that the Bible is hopelessly outdated, benighted, revealed by science as the book of ancient fables that it is. We might, on the other hand, conclude that the conclusions of science are the problem, and that science done correctly will inevitably confirm the claims of Scripture as we read them. We might hold the two sets of claims at a distance from each other, and say they are really about different things, never to come into conflict. Or we might try and come up with explanations to reconcile our reading of Scripture to science, hopefully changing it as little as possible in the process.

I don't think any of these approaches is really sufficient for the Christian. The first is, of course, a renunciation of anything like traditional Christianity. The second is deeply unsatisfying, pitting different forms of truth against each other, observation versus revelation, and denying in practice that "the heavens declare the glory of God" (Psa 19:1). In fact, not only can we learn nothing of value from studying the handiwork of God, we are likely to be deceived by doing so, by light that seems to have been emitted or fossils that seem to have been deposited before the creation of the universe. The irony of the kind of faith that claims to "trump" science is that it is likely to itself be a kind of science, a substitute for what it rejects, whose claims are considered infallible because of their divine source, no matter how many links of reasoning there are in between.

The third approach corresponds to Stephen Jay Gould's theory of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA), which strictly relegates religion to speaking about matters of values and other intangibles. While NOMA is insightful and helpful for calming the animosity between the clashing forces of "science" and "religion", I can't agree with its circumscription of the scope of religion, at least the Christian religion. It's not that there are areas about which Christianity has nothing to say (after all, we confess that God created all things), but it is not the only way of knowing about them that there is. While not a substitute for (say) scientific inquiry, the Christian faith can inform, guide, and fuel it, as scientists like Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître, and (more recently) Francis Collins have demonstrated. Lastly, given how central science is to the modern worldview, accepting NOMA virtually guarantees that our faith will be isolated from and irrelevant to whatever it touches; that is, most of life.

The fourth is the default for many Christians today, and it used to be for me. It seems sensible; denying the claims of science in favor of our interpretation of the Scriptures is a huge mistake, so isn't it our interpretation that has to give? So we look for ways to read the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, as true for us as modern people, as compatible with our more enlightened view of things, as if divine inspiration gave the biblical authors a scientific understanding of how things "really are", which instead of passing on they obscured beneath the trappings and language of a premodern worldview to which they were no longer bound. Examples of this tendency are attempts to match up the days of creation with ages or periods of time in natural history, or saying that biblical language like the "four corners of the earth" or the "fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven" (Gen 8:2) is merely a "poetic device" on the authors' part not meant to be literal descriptions of reality, in the face of the evidence that ancient people really did envision the cosmos in such terms.

So I think that even this way of reading the Scriptures, well-intentioned though it is, also fails to do them justice. It can't handle reading the Bible as the set of ancient texts that it is, and seeks to update, to "modernize" it to make it more sensible to us. This touches on a topic I hope to write about more in the future, how our modern, scientific worldview has become the exclusive lens by which we know anything, including the Bible. Everything must be filtered through the skeptical eye of objective inquiry in order to be believable, perhaps even comprehensible to us. This seems so obvious to us as to be hardly worth questioning. But I have to ask, why? Why do we approach the Scripture first as historians, scientists, or archaeologists, and only later as believers?

A common theme in the writings I've read of the Reformed theologian and philosopher James K.A. Smith, is on the power of formation: the Christian worldview isn't a matter of thinking certain thoughts, believing certain truths, and making certain decisions, but rather of ways of thinking, loving, and (as he calls it) "being-in-the-world" that sink into our bones through the repetition of habit and ritual. Christian worship, in his vision, is supposed to be such a formative force, shaping us into citizens of the Kingdom of God who are defined more by what we love than what we consciously believe. But there are plenty of counterformative forces in the world that would shape us in different ways; in a particularly memorable piece in his book Desiring the Kingdom, Smith depicts a trip to the shopping mall as a religious liturgy. I think the modern, scientific worldview is another such counterformative force, one far more powerful and pervasive than the mall. It is because this worldview is so formative for us as modern people that we can't help but view the Scriptures through it.

Not, of course, that I am anti-science—it's the second word of my degree, after all! But I think a healthier way to view it is as a useful tool for better understanding the world around us, not as an all-encompassing way of knowing everything, a universal litmus test by which any and every claim is to be evaluated. The Church is deeply compromised when its members are modern skeptics first, Christians second.

And I do mean the Church, as I now understand it. I don't feel able to speak to other Christian traditions, but hopefully these closing words are applicable them in some way. Though we are perhaps not as affected as other Christians, Orthodox, at least those in western countries, are not immune to such counterformation—especially converts like myself. But the Church is also well-equipped to resist it. In her liturgical life, events from the history of salvation are made present to us, and we become participants in them, as if we had been there. (Just recently we began the 40-day journey to celebrating the Nativity of Christ) There is an immediacy to this life that is lost if we merely study these events as historians, and perhaps try to glean from them some "timeless truths" to apply in our own day. As I mentioned last time, though our faith is based on events that happened in specific times and places, we don't partake in them, we don't know Christ "historically". Just as being present "there and then" was no advantage to many of those who encountered Christ in the first century, living in the "here and now" isn't necessarily a disadvantage for us. The life of the Church, her saints, her liturgies, her tradition, act as a sort of bridge that lets us close the distance the modern worldview can't help but see between us and the One we open the Scriptures to meet.

Postscript
Again, as I said before, this approach to the Bible, while (I think) helpful, is not the answer to all biblical doubt. This is particularly evident from the fact that the church fathers faced and wrote about many questions about it, questions which were just as apparent to ancient people as they are to us. Questions raised by seeming contradictions and tensions within the Bible, not between it and an externally imposed body of knowledge. To these I will turn in my next post.

The Meaning of Scripture

My sister recently sent me an Email recalling my struggles with Bible-induced doubt:

I was talking to a friend about commandments on the New and Old Testaments that seem to contradict each other (for example, "an eye for an eye" vs "turn the other cheek"). We were discussing this when I mentioned that you wrote in your blog about having doubts related to seeming contradictions in the Bible. ... How can God/the Bible be perfect with these contradictions? And how can we still consider the Old Testament a sacred text?

For context, she was referring back to how my struggles with religious doubt, much of it originating from the Bible, ultimately led me to join the Orthodox Church—a tale I later told in retrospect on this blog. Though I still earnestly believe this was the right move, my spirituality has (unsurprisingly) still been far from perfect since then; as Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick likes to say, "Orthodoxy is true, but not because of me." But one of my hopes as I was thinking about converting definitely came true: in the past few years, I haven't really struggled with biblical doubt at all! It's a night-and-day difference from earlier, when such doubt was nearly an obsession. As an Orthodox Christian, I know and feel that the biggest obstacle to my continued growth in Christ is myself, not any contradiction or inconsistency in the faith itself.

But this does make answering my sister's question harder. It's surprisingly hard for me to think about why I no longer struggle with contradictions in the Bible or the Christian faith. And any advice I can give will now be based more on my memories and studies than any lived experience. Nonetheless, I'll do my best to sum up the conclusions I've come to.

She wasn't wrong to call the Bible "perfect". David the psalmist has high praise for the Scriptures:

The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple;
the precepts of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever; the ordinances of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover by them is thy servant warned; in keeping them there is great reward.
But who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults.
Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me! Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:7-14 RSV)

But it's worth asking, especially today, in what way is the Bible "perfect"? There are an array of explanations. For one interpreter, the Bible is infallibly true in every detail; for another, it is only infallible when speaking to "matters of salvation". For some Christians, its words are considered the very words of God, spoken/written through human intermediaries; for others, they are the testimony of godly and wise, but ultimately only human, witnesses to the God who transcends all description.

This question is important to ask because it strongly influences our expectations of the written word of God. And these expectations, in turn, determine the "biblical contradictions" we find.

Our expectations of the Bible tend to be different than those of the apostles and early Christians. This is partly because of differences in the Bible itself. For starters, because of how rare and expensive books were before the printing press, almost no one except serious (and wealthy) scholars would have had their own copy of the Scriptures. For nearly all Christians, the way they experienced them was by hearing them read publicly in church. The books that make up the New Testament (with the exception of Revelation) originated as the set of writings that were to be read in church. Having our own copies of the Bible separated out by book, chapter, and verse (and, more recently, searchable electronic Bibles) has produced new ways of interacting with it, not all of which are necessarily good.

And speaking of the New Testament, it didn't even exist for the first few generations of Christians. The books that make it up only began to be written in the second half of the first century, a few decades after Christ, and it took longer still for them to begin to be collected together. The gospels, Acts of the apostles, and some of the letters of Paul quickly became standard reading among the growing network of Christian churches, but other letters (like that to the Hebrews) and the book of Revelation took much longer to become commonly read, i.e. treated as "scripture". In the meantime, some other books, like the epistles of Clement and Ignatius, the Didache, and the Shepherd of Hermas were popular reading in various times or places but ultimately didn't gain universal acceptance. For the earliest Christians, "Scripture" was identical with what we now call the Old Testament. (Or rather the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint)

Our expectations are also different because of the enormous shifts in thought that have taken place between the first century and now. For most people today, truth is objective—that is, impersonal. Subjectivity is equivalent to "fuzziness", to unreliability. We have become interrogators of texts; we want "just the facts"; we want to know "what it means" (that is, the original intent of the author), or "what really happened". This approach to truth comes naturally to most of us; it's the water we've been swimming in all our lives. But it is quite different than how people thought and read when the books of the Bible were being written, and for most of the time since.

All of these factors make it easy, even natural for us (I'm not excepting myself here) to approach the Bible in a way very different from that of the apostles and fathers, and to get tripped up on questions and "contradictions" that never even occurred to them.

What I mean is that it's easy to treat the Bible as source material, full of "data points" to be fit into some kind of framework or system to help us make sense of the big picture. We feel a need to reorganize Scripture, to filter it through some kind of lens, to make sense of it. If ours is a system of doctrine, like Calvinism or dispensationalism, it can easily take on a life of its own and lead us to reasonings and conclusions increasingly remote from the gospel. If it is the broader, modern project of scientific truth, we are likely to spend a good deal of time wringing our hands over questions like what day of the week the Last Supper was held on or how the days of creation match up with what we know of cosmology and natural history—or conclude that the Bible is a bunch of fairy tales because it does not give ready or consistent answers to such questions. We may say that because it is inspired, the Bible isn't just "any other book", but what this can end up meaning is that we read it like any other book and then take the meaning we find in it as absolutely true and worth building our life on. Is this a fitting way to handle the Scriptures? I don't think so—and I think it's responsible for a good deal of the hangups people have with them.

The early Christians' approach to Scripture can almost be summed up by the fact that the phrase "the Word of God" did not, for them, refer primarily to any written text or texts but to Jesus Christ himself, and to the apostolic proclamation of his incarnation, death, resurrection, and lordship. (Behr 50) This concept is a part of the Orthodox faith that fascinated me almost from the beginning. For them, the meaning (in Greek, the logos or "word") of Scripture, the message it had to communicate, was not any doctrine or timeless truth, but Christ himself. In Luke 24, two of the disciples meet the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus and, somehow, don't recognize him. Not only that, but despite spending years traveling with him and listening to his teaching, they still don't understand who he really is or why he's come. If this isn't enough to know Jesus, what is? It's not until they sit down and break bread with him, and listen to him expound on how "all the Scriptures" (v. 27) teach about him, that their eyes are opened and they recognize him. And then he immediately disappears from their sight.

This experience deeply informs how the Orthodox Church approaches the Bible. Christ is not known the same way we know historical events, through dispassionate research and objective analysis; despite being eyewitnesses his disciples were remarkably slow to "get it", and plenty of others who met him in person never did. Maybe living two thousand years after the Incarnation isn't as much of a handicap as we think. Instead, the Lord is known through the breaking of bread (understood to point to communion) and the opening of the Scriptures—the two focal points of how Christians worship every Sunday. Without denigrating the importance of what is today called a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ", this knowledge, this relationship, happens within the context of the Church. The liturgy, the doctrines, the traditions are not meant to be a substitute, much less a hindrance, to personal participation in Christ, but rather the fertile soil within which this participation can happen.

At the risk or repeating myself, the "Scriptures" from which Christ expounded himself in Luke 24 were what we now call the Old Testament. And to the disciples, it all really "meant" Christ. This is hard for us to imagine today with our emphasis on locating the "meaning" of a text in the original intent of the author. But this idea is a relatively recent one, and though some of the fathers practiced something like it, more popular among them (and, arguably, the apostles) was a typological approach that saw the whole of Scripture leading towards and finding its ultimate fulfillment in Christ. In the mind of the Church, God's resting on the seventh day of creation prefigured Christ's rest in the tomb on Holy Saturday; the burning bush through which God spoke to Moses was a type of the Mother of God, who bore the fullness of the Godhead within her and yet was not consumed; the telos ("end") to and about whom many of the Psalms are written (in the Greek) is none other than Christ himself. St. Irenaeus writes: "If anyone, therefore, reads the Scriptures with attention, he will find in them an account of Christ, and a foreshadowing of the new calling. ... The treasure hidden in the Scriptures is Christ, since He was pointed out by means of types and prophecies."

Hopefully I've offered a glimpse of how the inspiration of the Scriptures entails that they don't just mean more truly; they also mean differently than other texts. And though it's somewhat trite to say so, God can and does speak to us through them, reveal himself in a way that doesn't require us to analyze our way to the exact thoughts of the original author. But this brings me to one more difference: it's not enough to merely read the Bible; equally important is being read by it. We have become interrogators of Scripture; do we let it interrogate us? This is what the prayer in the second half of the above-quoted passage from Psalm 19 is about: opening ourselves to the Word of God; finding in and through the pages not just data points or puzzle pieces but a Person. The meaning of Scripture, the inspiration of Scripture are as much a matter of reading as of writing, of being guided by the same Spirit that guided its authors to communion with the Word of whom they wrote.

Postscript

I'm not claiming this approach is a panacea for all biblical doubt, an answer to every apparent contradiction. As I know well from experience, it's dangerous to claim that questions and doubts about the Bible always betray a problem with the interpreter and are better off not raised. But it is, I think, a better way than the more scientific approach to interpretation I used to follow, one that I need to keep learning to follow as well. The Bible is not primarily a knot to be untangled, a box full of puzzle pieces to be assembled, and it's unhealthy to dwell too much on "solving" apparent contradictions in it, forcing an artificial uniformity on the Scriptures that makes them into something other than what they are. The traditional approach to the Scriptures I sketched can go a long way toward reducing the confusion we can feel about the Bible as modern readers. In the next post, I'll apply this approach in more detail, particularly to some uniquely questions about the Bible. In the final post, I'll do my best to tackle some harder questions that aren't so easily dealt with, that the early church fathers often did notice and address.