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.

Position Paper: Bibliology

The following is the unabridged version of a paper I wrote for my systematic theology class. The prompt was simply to write a paper stating and defending my view of the Bible, providing a snapshot of my beliefs. I'm quite satisfied with the result.

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I'm reticent about developing a "theology of Scripture" not because I don't respect the Bible, but because I do. Nowhere in it do we see the Bible give a sustained discourse about itself; the church fathers similarly focused on matters like God, Jesus, the Incarnation, salvation, and the everyday moral and practical challenges of living as a Christian when the religion was still underground. Additionally, dwelling too much on bibliology risks giving the impression (to myself, if no one else) that these kinds of rational systems of propositional knowledge are the end goal of studying Scripture, when this is only a shadow of the truth. But nonetheless I find myself doing so, not just because I was assigned to but because of its singular and important role in the Church as a window to the glory and mysteries of God, a "verbal icon" of Christ,¹ His written Word to His children. As the written record of God's revelation, the Bible is divinely inspired, an infallible bearer of truth, and authoritative divine speech in human words that resound through the centuries.

My view of the Bible falls under three main heads. First, the Bible is inspired. It almost seems cliché to bring them to bear here, but 2 Timothy 3:16-17 and 2 Peter 1:20-21 both help illuminate what inspiration entails. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says that "all Scripture is inspired by God [literally theopneustos, "God-breathed"] and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." (RSV) Here we learn what the (inspired) nature of Scripture means for its usefulness and its purpose: it is good for "training in righteousness", to build Christians up as citizens of the kingdom of heaven. St. John of Damascus similarly testifies to the salvific purpose of Scripture: "He [God] Himself worked out our salvation for which all Scripture and all mystery exists." We must not become exclusionary about this truth and deny that salvation can come through other means, but God has given the Bible a unique place in our salvation just as it is a truly unique collection of writings. 2 Peter 1:21 adds that "no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." The Bible testifies to its own transcendent nature: inspired writing is speech "from God", divine as well as human in origin. Of course, both of these passages were referring to the Old Testament, which was the only Scripture anyone had in the first century, but the Church has always believed that the New Testament is inspired as well, and they apply equally to it.

I find the "incarnational hermeneutic"² helpful for understanding the inspiration of Scripture. In light of the fact that Jesus Himself, God in the flesh, is the true Word (Jhn 1:1), the fullest revelation from God (Hbr 1:1-2), and the Truth of God (Jhn 14:6), we can draw a parallel between Christ's dual divine/human natures and the natures of the Bible. "As Christ is both God and human, so is the Bible."³ This means that the Bible is divine speech clothed in human words, human language, human cultures. Though this can sometimes make it hard for us as modern people to understand it, it also reassures us that God does not dispense abstract spiritual truths but incarnated truth (namely His son), coming to us wherever we may be. This also ties in with the fact that all of the written word, teleologically, serves for the Christian as a witness to the person and work of the living Word Jesus (see Luk 24:27, Jhn 5:46). "The center of the Bible as the written Word of God in human form is the person of the Living Word of God in human form, Jesus Christ."⁴ Though His written word, I believe God is able to speak to us as He did in the first century and before, and to bring us to a fuller knowledge of the living Word, that is, Christ.

Second, the Bible is infallible, and reliable. (I will also affirm that it is inerrant, after an extensive qualifying discussion below) Proverbs 30:5 says that "every word of God proves true". Jesus, probably at least obliquely referring to Himself, says "your [the Father's] word is truth" (Jhn 17:17), which certainly describes Scripture fairly. What this means, practically, is that we can trust God to lead us truly us through His written word. It is a profitable well from which to draw truth of God, and there is no better written foundation on which to build our lives. (Of course, this point is not proof against our misunderstanding the Bible any more than Jesus in human flesh was immune to the abuse of the Jewish and Roman authorities)

Third, the Bible is authoritative. This follows straightforwardly from the fact that it holds the words of the Lord of the universe, the ultimate authority. But what does this authority entail? Commonly it is thought of as "the right to command belief and/or action",⁵ and it does certainly involve this. But not all of the Bible is composed of didactic teachings or commands, and not all of these necessarily apply to modern Christians. How is a historical narrative authoritative? A parable? A Psalm? By finding the propositional content and making it mandatory to believe? N.T. Wright offers an interesting alternative: he imagines a Shakespeare play whose fifth act has been lost. The actors are tasked with devising and carrying out the fifth act themselves. The "authority" of the first four acts would not manifest in a definite script for the fifth act, but there is no denying that it would be authoritative for the actors.⁶ In a sense, their authority would create the fifth act of the play according to the pattern or vision they lay down. And so with the scriptures, whose authority comes not just from the God who is Lord over us but who spoke the world into being, an authority to create a people for Himself or recreate a troubled creation as well as to command. It is not so much that God has delegated His authority to the Bible as He exercises His own authority through the Bible, just as the Bible itself depicts Him doing in its pages.

I identify and agree with the Catholic/Orthodox view of Scripture as existing within the Church and its traditions, not separately from (and over against) them. Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware wisely says that "it [the Bible] must not be regarded as something set up over the Church, but as something that lives and is understood within the Church (that is why one should not separate Scripture and Tradition)."⁷ He explains that we both receive and interpret Scripture through and in the Church.⁸ Regarding our reception of the Bible, obviously the Church has produced and preserved the Bible we have today, and it was the Church that did the important work of establishing the New Testament canon in the first few centuries AD. Of course this was not an arbitrary decision that conveyed authority to the books of the NT, but a recognition of the inspiration that produced them and their pre-existing authority. Nonetheless, the decisions that hammered out the canon were also made authoritatively, and no individual Christian is up to the task of it (as, for instance, Luther's doubts about certain books show). This process points to an organic relationship between Church and Bible, not simply the Bible's being set up as a sort of charter for the Church to abide by (the early Church went well beyond the "bounds of Scripture" before the New Testament was written and collected). God exercises His authority and gives His Spirit through both.

We also interpret Scripture through the Church. The Bible is authoritative, we say, but it can be misused. It never speaks to us without a (fallible) act of interpretation on our part. How does the Bible's authority transfer through this process? Is a flawed interpretation still authoritative in some way? Who determines which interpretation is correct? Sola scriptura Protestants who reject the notion of an authoritative arbiter of interpretations try to fill this gap in a variety of ways, usually by prescribing a correct, authoritative method for interpreting Scripture authoritatively. A common one is the method of "Scripture interprets Scripture", based on the idea that "the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture, is the Scripture itself;⁹ in other words, we can discern the meaning of unclear passages of Scripture in light of the clear ones. But this only works if what is "clear" about Scripture is the same to everyone involved, which (due to varying presuppositions, cultural backgrounds, hermeneutical priorities, etc.) is seldom the case.¹⁰

What is there to prevent hermeneutical anarchy from prevailing? Tradition. A tradition is simply "an opinion, belief, or custom handed down from ancestors to posterity."¹¹ Every Christian sect or denomination is guided by traditions, even those that explicitly reject their authority. These traditions form an underlying rule or structure for making sense of the Bible, like the "rule of faith" that guided the early Church. Atonement theories, ecclesiologies, and even the "Scripture interprets Scripture" approach are traditions, as are styles of worship, forms of prayer, and even religious music and works of art. Protestants who recognize this maintain that tradition should be based on Scripture, always under its authority, never replacing it, metaphorically serving a "judicial" rather than "legislative" role.¹² But this view misses the fact that all of our handling of Scripture, including using it to verify traditions, is itself conditioned by tradition. We can never "step outside" traditions to evaluate them purely objectively. The line between allowing tradition to guide our interpretation of Scripture and allowing it to generate new beliefs is porous, not rigid. Even doctrines like the perpetual virginity of Mary, purgatory, or the veneration of icons have scriptural correlations, if not scriptural "proofs". Rather than seek to elevate Scripture above tradition or draw a distinction between the two, Catholics and Orthodox see Scripture as part of Holy Tradition (albeit the most authoritative and valuable part), the whole of which is the living fulfillment of Jesus' promise in John 16:13 that the Spirit will guide the Church into all truth. I agree that this is the way to position the Bible within the Church.

Half a century ago my work might be done, but I would be remiss if I did not address the (relatively) recent challenges that have been made to the Bible's truthfulness. Atheists, liberal Christians, and other skeptics have challenged—not always groundlessly—the Bible's factual claims, the morality it expresses, and the historicity of the events it depicts. In response a good deal of attention has been devoted in conservative Christian circles to upholding the reliability of the Bible to speak truth, under the doctrine of inerrancy. This the view that the Bible, being inspired by God and effectively His speech in written form, in light of the fact that God speaks only truth and does not lie (Num 23:19, Prov 30:5, Titus 1:2), is thus "without error or fault in all its teaching",¹³ authoritatively true in all that it affirms. For Scripture to be incorrect in any of its statements would be for God to speak falsely in His (apparently unreliable) revelation, which cannot happen. Some qualifications are important to avoid misunderstandings: inerrancy applies to things that the Bible affirms, not merely reports. For the Bible to record the words of a person who was speaking falsely does not jeopardize its inerrancy. Additionally, the words of Scripture are inerrant when judged in the context of the (ancient) cultural setting from which we have received them and the purpose for which they were written. This includes the propensity of the Bible's prescientific authors to use phenomenal language (describing the way things appear to the eye), making no attempt to scientifically describe what was happening as we might expect.¹⁴

These statements and deductions must be tested and integrated with the phenomena of Scripture, however. There are a great number of places in which the Bible actually does seem to say something false, or at least difficult to believe with intellectual integrity, and it will not do to simply say over them, "we have not found an explanation for this yet." First, the Bible appears to make a number of historical errors, disagreeing with the external evidence and even itself. For example, in the flood narrative, Gen 7:10 says that the flood began seven days after Noah and his family entered the ark, but 7:13 says that he entered it "on the very same day" that the rains began. Gen 7:12 says it rained for forty days; 8:2 says the rains continued until at least after 150 days (7:24). A common theory for resolving these discrepancies is that it consists of two distinct narratives interwoven, but this hardly resolves the issue. If the Bible really is inerrant divine speech, why did God not at least inspire the editor of the combined account to resolve such obvious contradictions? Additionally, there is no geological or archaeological evidence of a global flood as we would expect,¹⁵ to say nothing of how people of every race could have come to live all over the world after the flood left only eight alive. As far as we can tell, the flood never actually happened, even though the Bible seems to regard it as history.

The Bible exhibits a number of examples of ancient science which we see paralleled in contemporary ancient Near Eastern literature. For example, it expresses a belief in the ancient view of the universe as consisting of three tiers (Phil 2:10) with foundations supporting the earth from below (Job 38:4-6, 1 Sam 2:8, Psa 104:5), an earth surrounded by a circular sea (Prov 8:22-31, Job 26:7-14) and having actual ends (Dan 4:12, Gen 11:31, Mat 12:42), an underworld (Num 16:31-33, Prov 5:5), a flat (Matt 4:8), fixed/immobile earth (1 Chr 16:30, Psa 83:1), a solid firmament fixed as the sky over the earth (Gen 1:6-8, Psa 19:1) holding back the waters above the heavens (Psa 104:2-3, 148:4) as well as storehouses of snow (Job 38:22-23) and the sun/moon/stars (Gen 1:14-19), that stars were small enough to fall to Earth (Dan 8:10, Mat 24:29, Rev 6:13), that the heavens could be rolled up like a scroll (Isa 34:4), that rabbits chewed the cud (Lev 11:5-6), that bats were birds (Lev 11:13-19), that seeds died before sprouting (Jhn 12:24-25, 1 Cor 15:36-37), and the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds (Mat 13:31-33, Mar 4:30-32), all of which we now know to be false just as surely as we know that it gets dark at night. There is far too much biblical evidence like this to believe that the biblical authors were expressing something like our current knowledge of the universe and simply speaking phenomenologically or poetically, especially given the correlating evidence of the same ancient worldview in contemporary ancient cultures.

In the story of the exodus and Canaanite conquest, God does and commands some things that are dramatically at odds with Jesus' later teaching of love for one's enemies (Mat 5:44). In Deuteronomy 20 God commands the Israelites to enslave those who surrender to them and either slaughter or enslave those who resist (He especially commands them to "save alive nothing that breathes" of the towns in Canaan in 20:16-18). We see Israel carrying out these orders in the book of Joshua, especially chs. 6-8. Joshua 10:40 says that Joshua "defeated the whole land, the hill country and the Negeb and the lowland and the slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded." 11:16-23 boasts of Joshua's complete extermination of numerous Canaanite tribes; verse 20 confirms that this extermination was the Lord's will. (The whole book takes pains to assert that this whole conquest was the Lord's will) In any other book, we would immediately (and rightly) deplore these conquests as genocide, the systematic extermination of nations to take their land and their possessions. And yet the Bible says that it was commanded by God, making no attempt to reconcile these commands with Jesus' teachings. Such "texts of terror" paint a seriously morally ambiguous picture of God, as countless biblical skeptics are happy to point out.

For one last example, the Old Testament does a surprising amount of hemming and hawing about the number of gods out there. For all the emphatic assertions that the Lord alone is worthy of worship, the Old Testament (at least, parts of it) doesn't seem to rule out the existence of other gods. For instance see Psa 86:8, 95:3, 96:4, 97:9, 135:5, 136:2, which praise the Lord by comparison with unnamed other gods; Psalm 82:1 and 89:7 refer to His presiding over some kind of divine council. Yet Isaiah (45:5) and Paul (1 Cor 8:4) both exclude the existence of any gods other than the true God. Wouldn't we expect God, in inspiring His inerrant revelation to His people, to get such a basic fact crystal clear?

These are undeniably difficult issues, but I believe that the aforementioned qualifications to inerrancy, when applied consistently, are able to explain them. For example, ancient historiography operated by a considerably different set of rules than modern historical studies. We see abundant evidence of this in contemporary literature such as the Atrahasis and Gilgamesh epics, which both have numerous parallels with the Genesis flood narrative(s)¹⁶ and which preceded it by centuries,¹⁷ indicating that the Genesis account was at least partially based on them. Ancient history was an outgrowth of ancient storytelling, which was heavily based on oral tradition,¹⁸ which made it considerably more fluid and prone to evolution and embellishment than modern history. The goal was not to provide an objective account of "what really happened", as in modern journalism and history, but as a way for a people to creatively interact with and retell its past so as to address present concerns and answer important questions of origin, identity, and meaning.¹⁹ Ancient history had a lot in common with mythmaking, though it had a basis in actual past events and was not simply "made up". If we evaluate the Old Testament by the standards of its own culture for doing history, rather than our own, our objections lose their grounding.

Add in the ancient perspective on science and the nature of the universe (which we have every indication Israel shared with its ancient neighbors,²⁰ and on which the flood narratives rely), and we begin to realize a way to make sense of discrepancies in the Bible's witness by respecting its ancient viewpoint. Most evangelicals, especially conservatives, tend to be uncomfortable taking the reasoning this far, to the point of allowing the Bible to affirm things that we now know to be factually untrue like a geocentric universe or a flat earth. I see inconsistency in this refusal. If we have established that we must judge the truthfulness of Scripture by the standards of its ancient culture²¹ and this ancient culture did history and viewed the cosmos in ways that we consider false today (should we be surprised at this?), then Scripture should be allowed to make statements that hold together in its ancient worldview without their also being forced to conform to our modern one. Simple assertions that the Bible does not affirm anything that is contrary to fact fail to make the distinction between something being considered factual in the ancient Near East and its being considered factual today. A Bible that envisioned a heliocentric (much less a galaxy-based) universe, a spherical earth, and the vacuum of outer space would have been considered seriously in error (if not incomprehensible) by the ancient Hebrews! In light of this, it seems as though the traditional doctrine of inerrancy will have to be adjusted—but it already has.

It is true that the Church has historically affirmed that the Bible is true and without error in everything it affirms.²² But this is slightly misleading. Before the Reformation, and especially in the early Church, theologians believed that divine inspiration allowed Scripture to speak in multiple senses,²³ and routinely appealed to the truth of the higher, more spiritual or allegorical senses when a passage appeared to be factually untrue/nonsensical or to portray God in an unworthy manner. Historically, the church fathers have been much less attached to the literal, factual truth of Scripture than modern defenders of inerrancy. Additionally (and this should go without saying, but I will say it anyhow), throughout most of the Church's history no one had a reason to doubt the Bible's scientific or historical accuracy. Until the modern age, no one had any idea that there was no archaeological evidence for many of Israel's conquests in Canaan,²⁴ that geological evidence and radiometric dating indicate that the earth is much more than about 6,000 years old,²⁵ or that there is not a layer of water above the sky. The few exceptions (such as the spherical shape of the earth which was established by Plato, albeit for philosophical and aesthetic reasons²⁶) were accommodated to the Bible fairly easily, using allegorical interpretation if needed.

Our much more extensive knowledge of the differences between the Bible's claims and the way we know the world through science, combined with the unacceptability among defenders of inerrancy of interpreting troublesome passages allegorically, have tended to lead them to one of two options. First, they can change their reading of the Bible so that it supports new knowledge about the world. Prima facie, this doesn't seem like an option at all, since it makes our reading of Scripture dependent on current trends in academia and prevents us from reading the Bible the same way our Christian forebears did. Yet this method is commonly used, albeit subtly; when we read Genesis 1, how often do we envision God hovering over a spherical earth and creating the Sun at the center of the Solar System? (No one did the latter until after Galileo) In this way we lose sight of the Bible's ancient worldview as we read it as speaking to our modern one instead, often without noticing how much strain we are placing on its ancient words. Alternatively, they can not accept this outside information that would seem to contradict the Bible's claims, reaffirm the Bible's truth and consistency despite appearances, and in the case of scientific knowledge hold out hope that it will eventually be corrected by more complete information. But this means setting up an adversarial relationship between the Bible and what we can learn from the rest of creation, which is unacceptable if God created us to know Him through both sources.

How are we to understand the Bible's inerrancy in light of its proclamations about itself and the way it actually behaves? How can we trust the Bible to speak truth on spiritual matters if it gets empirical facts wrong?²⁷ I believe we can, and that doing so is not a denial of its inspired nature but an affirmation of its dual human/divine nature, analogous to Jesus. Like our Savior during His ministry on Earth, the Bible is situated in a particular historical and cultural context. It occupies that context, rather than speaking abstract spiritual truth into it from outside. It was written by human authors who, though lovers of God and inspired by His Spirit, still had a limited, human perspective of the world, just as we do. We should expect Scripture to communicate the truth we need, most especially Jesus Himself, in that context and through that perspective—and so it does. Just as Jesus had a limited, mortal human body but was able to truly say "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jhn 14:9), so the Bible is able to lead us to the truth of God not just in spite of its human nature, but through it. Whatever errors exist in Scripture are due not to any ignorance or deception on God's part, but to the limited perspective of its human authors which in no way imperiled God's speech through their words. Realizing this frees us to read the Bible as God's word without being obligated to defend it where its ancient authors' cultural, historical, or scientific perspectives clash with our own.

I see two specific ways to do this. First, we can seek to understand the Bible's ancient viewpoint as best we can in order to discern what would have been revelatory for its first hearers (e.g. that God created the cosmos alone and made the first man for a personal relationship with Himself) and what would simply have been background knowledge (e.g. that there was divine act of creation or a first man). Theologian and biologist Denis Lamoreux calls this the "message-incident principle", which distinguishes between the inerrant "messages of faith" in Scripture and the incidental ancient history.²⁸ Second, drawing on Christian interpretive tradition can help us to see what earlier theologians thought of "problem" texts before their factual accuracy was under debate, and so indicate how to constructively move past these debates. This helps us "do" theology as involved participants of the same body, not merely as quasi-historians studying ancient documents and reconstructing the beliefs of the authors for our own time (which is a risk of the first method). The inerrancy of Scripture means a lot more than its communicating correct information; in our sparring matches against modern skeptics we are apt to forget this, but the living tradition of the Church is there to remind us of the ineffable richness of God's written word.

Like the early church, I believe Jesus is the key to the Bible. In his unity of divinity and humanity we see how it can be written from an ancient perspective that we now consider primitive, yet speak the truth to us with the very voice and authority of God, making them manifest to the Church wherever she meets. And in Jesus' identification of Himself with the truth of God and the way to Him (Jhn 14:6), we understand the true purpose of God's written word for us: to manifest Christ, the true Word (logos) of God, to us and to make Him known long after His ascension, even as He makes God known to us. He is the center of the Bible, the key to its interpretation (see Luk 24:44), and the reason a two-thousand-plus-year-old collection of writings matters to us at all. May we come to the scriptures seeking to know Christ as well as to know of Him!

---

[1] Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 201.
[2] Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 17–21.
[3] Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 17.
[4] Thomas Hopko, "Sources of Christian Doctrine," The Orthodox Faith, 1981, (13 September 2014).
[5] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 212.
[6] N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: Fortress Press, 1992), 140–143.
[7] Ware, The Orthodox Church, 199.
[8] Kallistos Ware, "How to Read the Bible" in The Orthodox Study Bible (eds. Jack Norman Sparks et al.; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008), 1760–1763.
[9] Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.9. (13 September 2014).
[10] Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, 21–22.
[11] Ware, The Orthodox Church, 196.
[12] Erickson, Christian Theology, 228.
[13] Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, (13 September 2014).
[14] Erickson, Christian Theology, 202–205.
[15] Denis Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 280.
[16] Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 27–29.
[17] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 221.
[18] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 180–182.
[19] Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, 40.
[20] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 148–176.
[21] Erickson, Christian Theology, 203.
[22] Erickson, Christian Theology, 194–195 and Michael Graves, The Inspiration and Interpretation of Scripture: What the Early Church Can Teach Us(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 87–92.
[23] Graves, The Inspiration and Interpretation of Scripture, 48–55.
[24] Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It (New York: HarperOne, 2014), 58–60.
[25] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 422–427.
[26] E. Edson and E. Savage-Smith, Medieval Views of the Cosmos: Picturing the Universe in the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages (Bodleian Library: Oxford, 2011), 22.
[27] Erickson, Christian Theology, 196–197 asks this question in more words.
[28] Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 239.

My Journey, Part 5: The Big Question

This is part 5 of my rebooted series on my journey from Evangelicalism to Eastern Orthodoxy. The full series can be found here:

1	Back to the beginning
2	Cracks appear
3	Questions multiply
4	Questioning the "gospel"
5	The big question
6	A better hermeneutic
7	Explorations in epistemology
7.5	Excursus on oversystematization
8	Back to the gospel
9	The new direction
10	Ecclesiological foundations
11.1	Sola scriptura
11.2	The insufficiency of Scripture
11.25	Addenda on sola scriptura
11.3	Holy Tradition
12	Bridging the cracks
13.1	Orthodoxy and Genesis 1–3
13.2	A Better Atonement (Against Penal Substitution)
13.3	Faith Alone?
13.4	The Colour and the Shape of the Gospel
14	Worshipping with the Church
15	Mary, Saints, Baptism, and Other Odds/Ends
16	Looking Back, Coming Home

As much as I had begun questioning the gospel I'd been taught, all of these questions were still at least somewhat external. Though I was growing tired of hearing them, I didn't believe these teachings were actually true, and I was fine with simply not believing them, or at least seeking to modify them into a better form. At least at first, I expected to still remain an evangelical after doing so. What I was struggling against were caricatures and 'bad habits' of the evangelicalism I saw around me—something that I have more recently been tempted to forget. I 'knew' they weren't true and sought better alternatives; they didn't have to characterize the Church.

But there was one doubt that plagued me singularly, wreaking havoc on my ability to see any kind of coherent biblical narrative or make sense of large swaths of Scripture. It wasn't a disagreement with something I was being taught; in fact, it was an issue I almost never even heard mentioned. It was an apparently inescapable contradiction in what the Bible itself said. And not just something surface-level that could be explained away by an appeal to genre or ancient literary conventions, like the disparate genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, but a fundamental discontinuity in the theology and overarching narrative of the Bible. It could be stated succinctly:

Is the gospel a God-given solution to a God-given problem?

My starting point

It began as an offshoot of my quasi-dispensationalist dissatisfaction with biblical interpretation that seemed to disregard the original context and meaning of a passage in favor of its retrospective, 'Christological' meaning. Applying this, evangelical theology viewed the law in light of Christ: it was given to point out our sin by contrasting it with God's standard of perfection, both to mitigate sin and to convict us of it to point us toward Jesus. (Rom 3:20, Gal 3:19) The law was like a stern babysitter or tutor (Gal 3:24) that imprisoned us in our sins, condemning them but not healing them, until Christ should come and set us free. Everyone's default state is to be sinful, under the law's curse (Gal 3:13). 'Sin' is, in some form, trying to add some kind of law to the all-sufficient salvific work of Christ, trying to be justified apart from Him, which is impossible (Rom 3:20). By faith in Christ, we are justified apart from the law (Rom 3:28) as Christ takes the curse and penalty of the law on Himself and gives us life. (Rom 3:24-25) 

This is, roughly, the view of the law I was given: we start out under law, which screams to us, "Sinner!", and by nature objects of God's righteous wrath (Eph 2:3), but thanks to Christ we are no longer under law but under grace (Rom 6:14), able to either live free from the law's demands or finally fulfill them by His grace, not our own moral effort. My church kind of waffles between the Lutheran and Reformed extremes on the law, but from either perspective it's clear that salvation has always been by grace through faith; we were never expected to save ourselves by obeying the law.

Cracks appear

In the biblical theology class of 2012-2013 I took at my church, I started thinking and wondering more critically about how the Old and New Testaments, or the covenants of law and grace, fit together. Part of this was simply the practical question: how do the precepts of the Mosaic law relate to us as Christians today? We talk about how the purpose of the law is to convict us of sin—so why aren't we letting us convict it of breaking the Sabbath (Exo 20:8-11), not circumcising our children (Gen 17:9-14), eating pork (Lev 11:7-8), or wearing different kinds of fibers (Lev 19:19)? Reflecting on these differences between the Mosaic law and how Christians seem called to live, I (reluctantly) gravitated towards a view that, again, seems shockingly dispensational to me today.

I think each covenant is a way God chooses to relate with His people and how He chooses His people. There is nothing intrinsic or necessary to His nature about either covenant. They are totally arbitrary—there is no ethical concept of 'good' apart from God's commands, and right is right only because He says so. What troubles me isn't that there is no external definition of good apart from God, but that His decrees are not intrinsically based on His nature—either in the old covenant, or presumably the new. Each covenant has its own system of ethics. (2012-9-23) 

But continuing that journal entry, I glimpsed (maybe for the first time) the troubling implications of this view of the covenants. I couldn't see how God could make such a covenant with the Israelites, but so radically change it at the advent of Christ and, in doing so, reveal that the original covenant was deeply inadequate.

The bad news is not the good news. Showing the hopelessness of Israel's condition under the law does not equate to promising Jesus. … So the question becomes, why did God make a doomed, futile covenant with His 'chosen' people? (2012-9-23)

I was beginning to think about this law-grace dynamic historically. The view of the law as existing to show us our hopeless sinful condition and drive us to Jesus as our savior worked on an individual level for modern people—but I was getting tired of thinking of salvation in individual terms. On a national, historical level, it made no sense. The law was given to Israel specifically as a nation, not to all of humanity as individuals. And it was given over a thousand years before Christ came. So what are we to make of the plight of God's 'chosen' people the Israelites, who spent all that time with a flawed, imperfect (Hbr 7:18) covenant that could only point out their sin but offer no solution, with only a distant, poorly-seen hope of the future Messiah (to say nothing of the other nations)? What kind of a gift is this for a good God to give His children? Why did He leave them for so long with only half the gospel—the bad half? I kept thinking about the implications:

The law doesn't 'point to Jesus' because the provision for what to do if/when you break the law is contained in it. If it was put in place to show us our transgressions, then why aren't we repenting of our failure to make the sacrifices, or wear the right clothing—if it is by our failure to uphold the law that we are condemned? (2012-9-24) 

Again: if the Mosaic law really was given to point out our sin, why do we refuse to let so much of it do its convicting work? I began to suspect that we had lost the ability to think about the 'law' in its original context, and could only see it Christocentrically.

I looked for a better way to think about the law and how it related to salvation, later writing:

God didn't give the Israelites, His people, a faulty system to keep them from being saved. The thing that saved them, then like now, was faith. The punishment associated with breaking the law was temporal, not eternal—they broke the covenant, so He punished them as He'd warned from the beginning. They had to earn God's blessings, but not salvation. But at any rate, works were never the basis for man's relationship with God, but faith—faith inextricably tied to obedience. We do not obey God to be 'saved', we obey because he is Lord and we love Him. The gospel does not free us from having to obey God, it frees us to obey Him as He intended. (2012-12-11)

I was beginning to see beyond the simplistic 'faith vs. works' dichotomy, that the law was not simply about "works" that could never save, but that justification was always from faith. Giving the law was not equivalent to commanding them to seek salvation by works. I hinted at a concept I would expand on later, that obeying the law might not be for the sake of earning your salvation by "works" but about enjoying the blessings of pre-existing salvation. My view was kind of similar to the Reformed one (especially that last sentence), still well within the bounds of evangelical orthodoxy. Unfortunately, the biggest problem with this perception of law and grace was the Bible.

Why does God seem to command people to seek life through [the law] if it was never intended? ... God never wanted Pharisees—He never intended for anyone to actually try to be justified by obeying the law. So how do you explain His commanding them to obey it all so they would live? I picture Him saying it with a wink—'By the way, this is all impossible, but just play along.' If God never intended anyone to be saved by the law, why was He so emphatic about obeying it so you might live? Lev 18:5, Deu 6:25... And this after the establishment in Abraham of justification by faith—what were they supposed to think? 'Wait, so if we disobey the law, does that nullify our righteousness by faith?' (2012-12-13) 

It almost seems like God did expect the Israelites to be justified by law. Was the whole system of law a big joke, delivered with a wink, with Christ the punchline that God expected the Israelites to 'get'? 'You will be declared righteous by obeying the whole law (only you can't, this way doesn't work, you just have to believe like Abraham)' (2013-1-12)

If God never intended for people to seek salvation through the law, why did He tell them to and say they could do it? [Deu 30:11-14] If Abraham had already established the precedent of salvation by faith, why was the law then given at all? (2013-1-20)

This view of faith and obedience made much better sense of the Old Testament than saying that God gave the Israelites the law simply so they would fail at it, realize their hopeless sinfulness, and turn to Jesus. I wanted to believe that God had never sent the Jews from Mount Sinai on a hopeless quest for self-justification by works. But standing firmly in opposition to this more optimistic view of the law was the apostle Paul.

The problem of Paul

I was back to my meta-question of "why does the Bible not say what it means?" But it got worse as I realized the tension was not just between the Bible and evangelical teaching, but (as far as I could tell) within the Bible itself. God told the Israelites to seek life and righteousness by keeping His commands.

You shall therefore keep my statutes and my ordinances, by doing which a man shall live: I am the LORD. (Lev 18:5 RSV)

And it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful to do all this commandment before the LORD our God, as he has commanded us.' (Deu 6:25 RSV)

And further, in Moses' final, summary address to the Israelites at the end of Deuteronomy, he tells them that they are able to obey the law today, not after Christ rescues them. There is no hint of the law being impossible; the message simply seems to be that you are able to obey this law, so you should.

"For this commandment which I command you this day is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it. (Deu 30:11-14 RSV)

So then how can Paul say that no one will be justified (or, equivalently, declared righteous) through the law, that no one could ever follow it, and that it simply brings knowledge of sin?

For no human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (Rom 3:20 RSV)

We ourselves, who are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners, yet who know that a man is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law, because by works of the law shall no one be justified. (Gal 2:15-16 RSV)

Paul's answer to the question "why the law?" seemed to fit the evangelical teaching: it was added "because of transgressions", to consign all things to sin, to confine us, to be our "custodian" (Greek: paidagogos, as in "pedagogy"), to lead us to justification through faith in Christ.

This is what I mean: the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. For if the inheritance is by the law, it is no longer by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made; and it was ordained by angels through an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one; but God is one. Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not; for if a law had been given which could make alive, then righteousness would indeed be by the law. But the scripture consigned all things to sin, that what was promised to faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; (Gal 3:17-25 RSV)

In Romans 10, Paul mourns his fellow Jews who have not found their righteousness in Jesus, but sought to establish their own righteousness by law—yet he describes this righteousness by citing Leviticus 18:5! In other words, he seems to be saying that God commanded the Jews to seek the righteousness through the law that led them to reject the righteousness of Jesus, for which they are now condemned!

Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law, that every one who has faith may be justified. Moses writes that the man who practices the righteousness which is based on the law shall live by it. [Lev 18:25] (Rom 10:1-5 RSV)

Hebrews' treatment of the law was, if possible, even worse. The law that was supposed to have been given by a perfect God to His chosen people as a treasured gift was called "weak" and "useless", merely a shadow of the grace to come, whose sacrificial system was secretly defective.

On the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect); on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God. (Heb 7:18-19 RSV)

For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices which are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered? If the worshipers had once been cleansed, they would no longer have any consciousness of sin. But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin year after year. For it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take away sins. (Heb 10:1-4 RSV)

This was my biggest doubt yet. I tried reading those verses every way I could think of, looking for some way to avoid the seemingly inescapable contradiction between them. Paul's view of the law not only seemed incommensurably different from the view depicted in Deuteronomy, it turned salvation history into a farce. At worst, the law seemed to be something that Jesus saves us from; at best, it was a stopgap measure, a deliberately ineffectual solution to the problem of sin which Jesus would later solve in earnest. Neither view made any sense in light of the fact that the law was itself given by God, supposedly for a redemptive purpose. I kept looking for ways to make sense of this tension, to coherently tie together the old and new covenants, but each time I came up with an idea, another unaccountably strange verse from Paul would jump out at me and shoot it down. That darned Paul!

Accepting doubt

By early 2013, my faith was in shambles as as result of all of these doubts about both what the Bible said and the questions my biblical theology class was raising. What really didn't help matters was that, at first, I was reluctant to address my growing doubts. I saw it as allowing my intellect to control and lead my relationship with God, which I knew was bad. Early in the fall semester, still wrestling with my doubts about God's goodness, I journaled:

I thought the answer was just to trust God more, in spite of my doubt, to not let it come between us. But that doesn't mean I set it aside and let it grow. It means I deal with it to know God better. But what else was I supposed to conclude from all the times I heard Christianity contrasted with an 'intellectual assent'? It led me to deny a (big) part of who I am. I didn't rigorously answer these doubts before because I thought having complete answers was unimportant. (2012-9-26)

What Don Miller's railing against Christianity as 'lists and formulas' seems to say, my questions don't matter, I just have to 'know God relationally'. But suspecting someone to be a liar puts a damper on a relationship. (2012-10-2)

I realized that I couldn't simply marginalize my intellect and "trust Jesus" instead, or put my relationship with Him ahead of "having all the answers", as I viewed my questioning quest. These things couldn't be set in opposition to each other without denying a vital part of who and why God had made me to be. My doubts weren't being actively suppressed, but it did feel like they were being swept aside or relativized.

In the tradition I'm from, questions aren't so much fearfully suppressed as they are buried under 'the gospel' or a wash of platitudes. (2013-1-2)

Not long after this I published my post on the denial of doubt, which expanded on an idea I had had on the value of doubt a few months ago:

This is why skepticism is needed—it is so easy to believe that my ineptitude in missions in a serious problem that must be repented of, that I am not properly applying the great commission to my life, to get swept up in the evangelical tide and accept it 'on faith' as a given, labeling your doubts as sin. Because God calls us to put on faith—in what?—and cast off doubt. If the church stops questioning and doubting itself, it veers off into catastrophe. (2012-11-2)

So I held onto my doubt, rather than simply 'laying it down' for the sake of a shallow 'faith' that shied from tough questions. My 'faith' (actually my ability to make rational sense of Christian theology) reached its nadir in late January 2013. As I described in my post on sola scriptura, I finally admitted to God what I had been fervently denying for so long: "Your Word has contradictions in it. What do I do now?" It was then that I think I realized what faith truly was.

I am unwilling to reject God even as my mind is telling me to do so and doubting. So my intellect and will are distinct after all. If God really is faithful, it doesn't matter whether I believe that He is. The 'strength' of my belief is secondary—that is, my certainty/level of understanding. (2013-1-27)

For the first time, I actually saw that my faith was different from my intellectual conception of Christianity. The latter was utterly defeated, yet somehow I still had faith. I still wanted to trust and believe in God. Even when He made absolutely no sense to me and I could see no reason to trust Him, I continued to trust Him to bring me light and restore order in my troubled soul. The day after, I reflected:

I think God is separating my faith/will and intellect from each other. I now have to learn how to have faith that isn't coterminous with rational thought. (2013-1-28) 

In a post on my big doubt last February, I came to some preliminary conclusions about the relationship between the covenants. I tried to free the Mosaic law from the straitjacket our exclusive focus on its Christocentric meaning had become and situate it in its ancient Near Eastern context. I tentatively concluded that the context in which the law was viewed and the way it was treated had changed from when it was initially given to the first century AD. I was still a long way from figuring out the questions raised by Paul, but my admission about the Bible and discovery of a faith that wasn't in thrall to reason had freed me to begin to seek a new, better way to approach Scripture.

The difference between law and grace

The following was written in response to the question, "What is the difference between being 'under law' and 'under grace'?"

The intrabiblical tension between law and grace is one that I've struggled with a lot in the past. The Law (i.e. the old covenant) is presented in totally different ways in the Old and New Testaments. In the OT, the law is given as a blessing, a set of rules to live by. The Israelites are promised that if they obey, they will live by their obedience (Lev 18:5) and it will be their righteousness (Deut 6:25). They are also told that the commandments of the law are not too difficult or too far off, but are "in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it." (Deut 30:14) Numerous Psalms, especially 119, treasure the Law as a gift and a blessing to be celebrated. Everything seems peachy, until the New Testament.

In the New Testament we learn that no one is declared righteous before God by observing the Law, only made conscious of sin. (Romans 3:20) Instead of a gift, the Law is now seen as a jailer that imprisoned the Jews under it, or at best a stopgap measure to hold us over until Christ came (Gal 3:23-24). The Law is revealed to have been weak and useless, making nothing perfect (Heb 7:18-19), its rituals incapable of taking away sins (Heb 10:4) as advertised (Lev 16:30). In Romans 10:5 Paul uses Moses' earlier promise that that the person who does the commandments will live by them to contrast with the "proper" kind of righteousness, the kind that is by faith.

This would all be well and good, except that God also gave the Law, which makes the gospel seem like a God-given solution to a God-given problem. It completely undermines the spirit in which the Law was given, making it into a burden rather than a blessing. It makes God's "chosen people" seem singularly unfortunate because they happened to live in a time before salvation by faith was revealed and instead got stuck with God's second-rate blessing, the Law, which doesn't save anyone. What is the point of the Law revealing their sin problem as in Romans 3:20 if they didn't live to see the solution? Commentators are quick to point out that this discrepancy is not because of a deficiency in the Law but because of our sinful inability to keep it, but was God unaware of this when He gave it, or taken by surprise? Placing moral burdens on people without helping them to carry them is what the Pharisees did, for which Jesus condemned them. (Matthew 23:4 What is going on here? How could God give the Israelites such a bad covenant deal and pass it off as a huge blessing—the covenant Christ has to deliver us from?

These are very tough questions and I definitely wouldn't say I have figured out all the answers. But I think one mistaken assumption in the questions is that the New Testament authors are making a "bad vs. good" contrast between Law and grace. I think a more fitting description of the two would be "good vs. much, much better". The key to seeing the Law as good, as I believe Paul and the author of Hebrews really did, is to stop seeing it as codified legalism—that is, as a covenant system designed to produce Pharisees. The Pharisees, including Paul (Phil 3:6), obeyed the Law perfectly—if all there was to the Law was doing what it says, they would have been "good" with God. But clearly they weren't.

The point has never been simply to do the right things, says the right words, and perform the right rituals to get into heaven, and God never told us to do so. This kind of legalism was just as much a perversion of God's Word before Christ as it is today. But there is another problem with legalism which is not synonymous with the Law, as it is just as easy to do with grace. This is treating the attainment of salvation from God as our be-all and end-all goal. Eternal life is not a "spiritual object" that God can wrap up with a bow and hand to us in exchange for good works, faith, or anything. Life is found not from Christ, but in Christ Himself (John 14:6). Eternal life is not something we receive from God, but simply knowing the true God (John 17:3). If we treat faith as something we "do" to receive a salvation that is not coterminous with knowing Christ, we may as well be legalists.

With all of this in mind, I can finally answer the question, what is the difference between being under law and under grace? It is not that we were stuck in a system of legalism and are now freed to receive our righteousness by grace through faith. This may be true of some Christians' experience, but God never commanded anyone to live this way so He could later get more glory by freeing them. What changes from Law to grace is not whether we know God or not, but how we know God. Through the Law God did provide a means of knowing and communing with Him, albeit a difficult, ritualized, and highly regimented one. The Law was also very communal in its role a the prototypical mediator between God and man; there was one tabernacle/temple for the nation where God was said to live, and where people would go to seek Him, and His commands were given on Mount Sinai for all the people.

But by grace we now know God more clearly in the person of Jesus Christ. So the book of Hebrews begins, "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets,but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world." Whereas the Law was previously the mediator between God and man, we now have Christ (1 Tim 2:5). Through His death and resurrection we are able to know Him in ways of which the regulations of the Law were merely types and shadows (Heb 10:1). Though those under the Law could and sometimes did have a real relationship with God, by comparison with us they were prisoners. Now we ourselves are temples for God's spirit (1 Cor 3:16) and His word is written on our hearts instead of on tablets of stone (2 Cor 3:3). The precepts of the Law are fulfilled (or completed) through the grace shown to us by Jesus, who is the end of the Law (that is, the fulfillment of all it set out to do) for righteousness to everyone who believes (Rom 10:4).

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Addendum: I can't help but wonder if the term "Law" underwent a semantic shift similar to what has happened to the term "religion" today. Whereas initially it referred to the old system of instructions by which Israel would worship and experience its God, by Paul's time it seemed to have become more synonymous with the onerous legalistic burdens laid by the "teachers of the Law", and it is this usage that Paul adopts in his writing about how grace releases us from the Law. Similar to how, today, people say that "Jesus came to abolish religion" which would have sounded absurd to a first-century Christian.

Slavery, misogyny, and other adventures in the world of the Old Testament

Fun Stuff

A commentor on my post on Biblical literalism brought up ten of the passages in the Old Testament that give him the most trouble. I'll lay them all out for you (I'm surprised he didn't mention anything from Joshua; there's some seriously juicy material in there!):

Exodus 21:7-11:

When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who has designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has broken faith with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money.

Exodus 21:20-21:

When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.

Exodus 21:32:

If the ox gores a slave, male or female, the owner shall give to their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.

Leviticus 21:18-20:

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, "Speak to Aaron, saying, None of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach to offer the bread of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or a man who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback or a dwarf or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles."

Leviticus 25:45-46:

You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly.

Numbers 31:17-18:

Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.

Deuteronomy 21:10-14:

When you go out to war against your enemies, and the LORD your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.

Deuteronomy 22:13-21, 28-29:

If any man takes a wife and goes in to her and then hates her and accuses her of misconduct and brings a bad name upon her, saying, ‘I took this woman, and when I came near her, I did not find in her evidence of virginity,’ then the father of the young woman and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of her virginity to the elders of the city in the gate. And the father of the young woman shall say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man to marry, and he hates her; and behold, he has accused her of misconduct, saying, “I did not find in your daughter evidence of virginity.” And yet this is the evidence of my daughter’s virginity.’ And they shall spread the cloak before the elders of the city. Then the elders of that city shall take the man and whip him, and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name upon a virgin of Israel. And she shall be his wife. He may not divorce her all his days. But if the thing is true, that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father’s house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.

Deuteronomy 25:11-12:

When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity.

Judges 21:20-23:

And they commanded the people of Benjamin, saying, “Go and lie in ambush in the vineyards and watch. If the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then come out of the vineyards and snatch each man his wife from the daughters of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin. And when their fathers or their brothers come to complain to us, we will say to them, ‘Grant them graciously to us, because we did not take for each man of them his wife in battle, neither did you give them to them, else you would now be guilty.’” And the people of Benjamin did so and took their wives, according to their number, from the dancers whom they carried off. Then they went and returned to their inheritance and rebuilt the towns and lived in them.

Wait, what?

If you're a Christian, verses like these might make you feel very uncomfortable and may even become a significant source of doubt. If you're not a Christian, you might point to verses like these (probably in in the more archaic language of the KJV) to show why! Lots of Christians, though they would never say as much, maintain a kind of separation from the "angry, vengeful" God of the Old Testament with His crazy laws and genocide and the "loving, forgiving" God we see in the New Testament through Jesus, picking the parts of the Bible that best fit with their cultural and moral norms to learn from while treading very carefully in Old Testament territory, sticking with "safe" stories like Genesis 1-3, the Ten Commandments, the (non-imprecatory) Psalms, or Messianic prophecies or presenting cleaned-up, Sunday school-ready accounts of such gems as the flood, the life of Abraham, or the exodus. The Old Testament is a potential source of embarrassment for them, so they do their best to sweep it under the rug. When confronted (probably by a skeptic with no sympathy for their faith), they get evasive or may say something to the effect that God was different "back then".

Christians who accept that both Testaments depict the same God and try to work both into their faith instead of minimizing one face an uphill battle. The simple answer, which is heavily informed for me by Peter Enns' incarnational model of Scripture, is that the Bible depicts a transcendent, timeless God speaking into specific, temporal human contexts and moral vocabularies that are far removed from our own. Obviously, cultural norms and morality in the Ancient Near East (ANE) are very different from our own, so it's important to draw comparisons between the Israelites and their contemporary neighbors, not between "backward ancient people" and twenty-first century western civilization in such a way that God seems similarly dull and backward for interacting with them. In this light, the treatment of women, slaves, and the poor dictated in the Mosaic covenant was progressive when understood in its context. There is apparently not one "right" way that society is always supposed to be that the Bible espouses from cover to cover, so let's not fault the OT for not depicting a "perfect" society.

I can understand how this can seem unconvincing. This doesn't really seem to answer the obvious questions: how can God not only tolerate but make provisions for slavery, draconian punishments, or misogynistic practices in the law He gives? It seems like a cruel joke to us to say that the Mosaic law was "progressive" because it mandated good treatment of slaves while still upholding the institution of slavery, or that it gave women some rights while still treating them largely like property. As soon as Christians start arguing that slavery is not always inherently evil, you can almost hear people stop listening. (Bear in mind that the ancient practice of slavery was drastically different than the racially-motivated colonial-era slavery we now associate with the term)

But again, these doubts largely arise from the tension between the culture and morality depicted in the Old Testament and our modern culture. Let me quote myself on this kind of imperialism:

When we clearly spell out the kind of moral expectations for the Bible this kind of trans-cultural comparing implies, the absurdity becomes more evident--how dare God command Abram to go to Canaan without first having him free all his slaves, rehire them as paid laborers with benefits, anti-discrimination policies, and minimum wage, accept total gender equality with his wife and the other women in his household, renounce the barbaric culture of clan rivalry and warfare he was steeped in, see all the gods of the surrounding pagan tribes as primitive superstition, etc...

How would you expect God to relate to an ancient people, if not something like this or what we actually see in the Old Testament? When a preschooler in my Sunday School class draws a talking mountain, I don't tell her that mountains can't talk and aren't alive; I just tell her that it's cool and that she's a good artist. She'll learn about mountains later. This in no way invalidates the fact that I know perfectly well that mountains can't talk. I think something analogous happens between us and God, must happen because the difference between us and Him is much deeper than the one between me and a four-year-old.

Let me try to approach the problem from another angle. Imagine, if the Bible were written today rather than thousands of years ago, what kinds of things in it might raise some eyebrows in a few thousand years? A future reader of a Bible written today might ask, "How could a good God still let His people keep using money? Or use such an impersonal, dehumanizing form of communication as the internet? How could He let them treat dolphins and chimpanzees as sub-persons?" (Let me stress that futurism is not a talent of mine)

Just as the existence of slavery or the primacy of men was uncontroversial in ancient Palestine, so things that even diehard social activists take for granted today might seem unthinkable to future audiences. We always expect God to act in the Bible according to our current moral standards, never questioning whether they are really perfect enough to expect God to conform to them. We can't imagine how He, being so perfect, can tolerate the evils that are considered "normal" in the cultural context the Hebrews are situated in while in covenant with them, never wondering if He might be doing the same thing with us. Remove the plank in your own eye first.

Dehistoricized Abstract Ethical Judgments

Let me propose an even more radical thesis. What if God's righteousness can't be encompassed or summarized by ethical propositions or simple value judgments like "all men and women should have equal rights" or "one human owning the rights of another is unethical"? A common conception among Protestants that I once held is that the commands God gives us, whether in the laws of the Mosaic covenant or the teachings of Jesus, are "good" not arbitrarily but necessarily because they are based on God's eternal, unchanging character or nature. In other words, God's character readily supports the deduction of moral precepts, and His righteousness easily distills down to a series of do's and don'ts that, as we become more like Him, we will live by. A bit more extremely, God's character consists of a series of moral precepts.

Aside from the fact that this view completely fails to account for all the times God's commands change (the Jewish dietary restrictions and sacrificial laws are two simple examples), this view also conflates an effect of righteousness (moral precepts and right judgments) for righteousness itself, which I don't think is biblical. God gives ethical commands to various people at various points in the Bible, but we must not think that these commands are somehow essential to His true, unchanging nature. God's righteousness runs deeper than the laws and teachings by which it manifests itself. N.T. Wright writes on a recent Q&A on Rachel Held Evans' blog: "Part of the problem the way the question is posed is by assuming that we can abstract an ethical ideal from one part of scripture and use it to judge the actions of God in another part of scripture, as though scripture were given us so we could form such dehistoricized abstract ethical judgments! Life just isn’t like that." (See also a longer article by him on the tension between the testaments)

I love his phrasing, "dehistoricized abstract ethical judgments". We Christians are strangely eager to reduce our faith to a list of do's and don'ts, even if we don't think doing the do's and don'ting the don'ts will save us. Donald Miller in his book Searching for God Knows What strongly emphasizes how Christianity comes down to a relationship, not a formula. But cases like doubts about these OT passages makes me wonder if moral formulas, even applied with the best of intentions (e.g. trying to "discern God's will" by deriving ethical precepts from scripture to apply to a situation) might be distracting. If God made us to be primarily relational beings, not moral ones. If we're more concerning with knowing what's right and what's wrong than with knowing God Himself. And then Genesis 2:16-17 finally made sense to me:

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

I set down Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics in frustration as he went on about how knowledge of good and evil and knowledge of God were mutually exclusive, but now I understand. The higher and more sophisticated an idol is, the harder it is to identify as such, and Biblical morality--seeking God's will for our lives rather than God Himself--is one of the highest idols there is.