LongDistanceConversations
Last week I finished a book called "Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?" by William G. Dever. This archaeologist reinforces what I've been learning for the past couple of years; the Bible is not a history book. It most certainly is a history of a people in the ancient Near East. But we'd do better to understand it as an imaginative telling of history. Tat may seem frustrating to some (myself included) but ultimately the issues of social justice and subverting oppressive authorities in the name of YHWH lies at the heart of the OT.
In my opinion this affords us the opportunity to view our faith in much more realistic terms. Rather than beating the drum of literalistic foolishness where the earth is 7,000 years old and dinosaurs don't quite fit, we ca embrace what scholarship has to say. We can engage the world around us instead of hiding in the wilderness on our compunds.
Okay, so I'm exagerating a bit. But, the fact still remains that we'll do better by wrestling with our faith, even if we wind up a little hurt at the end of the night, than we will being idiots believing in fairy tales. Does that mean that I don't believe in things like the bodily resurrection of Jesus? No, I still believe that. In fact none of the essential elements of my faith are lost by saying that the Flood, Exodus and quite a few other OT things didn't take place in the same way or scale that the Bible says. I believe that there was a monotheistic group in Canaan who posed a social, political and reliious threat to the rulers of their day. That group eventually became Israel, a nation totally different from the pagan world around it that cried out for and yielded a messiah (king), lord and savior to deliver them from these wicked kings and emperors. But that king ended up doin for the world what so many only wanted for themselves.
That's an incredibly over-simplified way of telling that tory. But we all get the point; truth is bigger than facts.
Grace and Peace
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I am becoming more perplexed by these conversations. Scott and I were talking about Brueggemann's thoughts on Ecclesiastes, and we both agreed that it seems like he makes it his entire goal to both deny the authorship of a book and its historicity. The interpretation must come after making it vehemently clear that the Bible is not a historical book of "facts." The Enlightenment is over, and maybe we shouldn't "fight" for its historicity, but should we be fighting against that? If so, my big question, which I have yet to find a solid answer for is, WHY? I could try to get an answer to that question from Brueggemann, but I guess my understanding of his answer will have to wait for my doctorate.
Ironically, the first endorsement for a book like this is from Brueggemann. These are guys that I know are fighting for the historicity of the Scriptures. So, I am again confused.
Well, I don't think we need to work against the histioricity of scripture. But archaeology began as an attempt to prove that the people, place and events in the Bible really happened. At first they were amazed to find so muh support for so much of the OT. But then everything started working against them. That's the point we find ourselves at today.
If an hitorian from the Christian faith wants to write a history of early Israel, he or she will have to take into account the things that modern science is discovering. The issue here is honesty. Are we imaginative enough to face challenges to our perceptions and keep faith? I think that someone like Brueggemann, who can still find substance in the OT without the need for historicty, is bringing up more of the major themes that were present in the OT than someone quoting those stories as though they really happened. I think that if this is merely the chronicle of some desert people and their religious acts, rather than a narrative about a god who longed to reveal to all creation the there is only one god and that the injustices they are doing to one another and hom will stop, it doesn't carry as much weight.
I started reading that Biblical History of Israel, which I mentioned in my first comment. If I had it here with me at work, I could say more.
But, I've gotten through the long introduction, and it was really interesting to me. Their basic premise is that most of the work that has been done regarding the history of Israel has refused to even acknowledge the validity of the Old Testament Scriptures. They place almost infallible reliance on archaelogy, while "imagining" stories that might relate to what they have found (with absolutely no "evidence" that their stories are even close to true), while paying absolutely no attention to the text. The authors think this is extremely dishonest. That, of course, is the extreme view.
I think it is an interesting book. I'm still not ready to "let go" of Scripture, within the context of the "interpretive community." Archaelogy, while interesting, bears no weight against what we as a community believe the text to be. Our understanding comes through each other. Without that, the only alternative, in my mind, is to either throw it out completely or join parades to keep the Ten Commandments in places where they don't belong.
Well, I think that archaeology is a very useful tool to determine what, exactly, scripture is. Is it an historical record of what happened to a tribal community in the Near East or a creative and (partially) fictionalized collection of preserving a group of people emerging from different tribal communities that form one group bound by their being drawn into covenant with a certain god? Those two are really very similar, and I think that it is tempting for us to think that if it’s not the former it’s not worth believing. But the other is much more dfficult and makes us have to iron out some hard issues together.
I keep coming back to what Newbigin says about "facts." He says the modern use of the word has been hijacked, in that "fact" refers to something that can be undubitably proven. But, in its true sense, "factum" means "something that has happened." In that sense, Scripture is full of things that have happened. But, in the modern sense, we cannot "prove" anything in Scripture (just as we can't without a doubt prove anything else). For that kind of certainty, we must wait for the consummation.
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