I happened to listen, briefly, to Fresh Air this afternoon (is it just me and my increasingly inattentive and infrequent listening, or is Terry Gross becoming an actually bad interviewer?), and heard a conversation with Francis Collins about science and faith. It was moderately interesting, a repeat of a show that had this piece as a sidebar to a Richard Dawkins interview on the same topic from a different angle.
Mr. Collins has what I think of as the default Scientist/Believer attitude. The universe is a wonderful thing, a Divine Gift. Our nature as humans is also a wonderful thing and a Divine gift. Using one to explore the other is an activity not unlike worship; further discoveries of the universe (or of our nature as humans) inspire awe at the Divinity of the Gift. Faith and Reason do not conflict, because they are different tools for different tasks. The way nature works yields to the scientific method, and so that method is appropriate to the task.
Now come we to Scripture. Mr. Collins appears to consider the Christian Bible to be Scripture, although not (of course, I am tempted to say) literal and inerrant. The creation story is a story; evolution is a fact. No conflict. The purpose of Genesis 1:1 is not to tell us how the universe was actually created, the Divine gave us our intelligence for that. And physics and so on; the Divine Gift includes the fact that our measuring, observing and recording devices can actually work. The point being that Scripture is not our only Gift.
I think of all of this, as I said, as a default Scientist/Believer attitude. It isn’t surprising to find a fellow who has it, and in the brief interview, he didn’t go much further than stating it (with, admittedly, a rambling explication of how his specialty, genetic coding, is awesome in every sense) (well, almost every sense). I was left with a bunch of questions.
What is Scripture? How does it differ from what is not Scripture? How can you tell what is and what is not Scripture? Are those questions susceptible to scientific inquiry, as for instance, textual emendation or archaeological insight?
To the extent that a text is Scripture, do you feel that it is intended to carry a message from the Divine to individuals? To all individuals? Is the message coherent, in the sense that it is interpretable the same way by different people, or is it in some way a different message to different people (at different times)? Is that message or that process susceptible to scientific inquiry?
I don’t mean to imply that Mr. Collins doesn’t have answers to these questions, answers that he is happy with. But I don’t know what they are. I have flipped through his book, and I’ve looked through the index, and I haven’t seen that he addresses the questions. It’s possible that he isn’t actually very interested in Scripture, which would make the answers less interesting. I have a very Scripture-based view of religion (being, you know, Jewish), and forget sometimes that other people don’t. Maybe he’s just another Jeffersonian theist. I’m curious, though; I’d like to know.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Well, and I know you aren’t asking me, but rather Mr. Collins, but you go to blog with the readers you have.
The way I approach it is through the lens of the Principia Discordia (or through a lens of the Principia, or perhaps tangential to a lens of the Principia), which says among other things that all things are true. In fact, this is the only thing in the entire Principia that I believe to be true.
Moving right along, ’cause now my head’s whirling trying to figure out the difference between things that are true and things that I believe to be true in a universe where I believe all things are true is true, but I don’t believe that George Bush is competent and well-meaning…
Anyway, moving right along, it is my belief that if all things are true, then all things are Scripture. However, I’m not so vain as to believe that, for instance, the ISBN of the C# book in the cubby up there is intended for ME to learn something from the Divine. The trick is really to figure out when the Divine is trying to tell me something; when she was trying to tell some desert nomad something, 4000 years ago; when I need to learn the same lesson as that nomad (And, lo! Down came the Divine unto Matthew and She spake, saying, “Cook your shrimp longer, dummy!”); and when she’s trying to tell something to a hypothetical sentient rat 4 million years in the future (And, lo! Down came the Divine unto Longtail and She spake, saying, “There was a literate culture here, 4 million years ago, and they wrote in a language called C Sharp, dummy!”).
It’s a living.
The C#, I mean. Getting the theosophy to pay would really be something, n’est-ce pas?
peace
Matt
Having no answers for the difficult questions, I will instead provide one for the easy one:
No, you’re not wrong about Terry Gross. Not by half.
So I’m curious: What do you think? Or do you not have “the default Scientist/Believer attitude”?
(I think that stories are good and can inspire you to understand things about the universe, and I think that some stories are better than others, by various measures, but I don’t think that any stories are Divine, which I guess means that I don’t believe in Scripture.)
As I understand it (and what I tell my students), ascribing scriptural status to a text means that the text itself, exactly as written/transmitted, is regarded as being special, that its contents are treated as specially authoritative, and often that the text is considered appropriate for liturgical use. None of the texts in the Christian NT were intended by their writers to be scripture (with the possible exception of Revelation), nor were they taken as such by their earliest readers; that practice develops only in the second century.
On that view, Scripture is an entirely human product, both in the composition and in the decisions about which texts to read as Scripture and how to read them. Scripture encodes the best understanding(s) about the divine of the people and communities that produce and use it, which is about as close to human/divine communication as I personally expect to get, but I don’t believe that the Christian scriptures are direct divine communication — nor do the individual texts present themselves as such. So, pace Josh, I don’t think that the contents of a text have to be (regarded as) divine (i.e. divinely inspired?) for the text to be scripture (or worthy of belief, but that’s another level of discussion).
Prima facie, those texts don’t present the same message to all readers, and never have done, partly because that’s the nature of readers and books, and partly because the texts don’t address a great many questions that believers need/want to have answered. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling either themselves or you.
Everything I know about scripture — well, almost everything — comes from Hans van Campenhausen’s The Formation of the Christian Bible, a surprisingly easy read for a magisterial tome. Highly recommended.
Clink. Clink. (my two cents on the table).
In the Scientific Inquiry of Scripture department, you might check out The Oxford History of the Biblical World. I got part way through this tome, but found several facts and hypotheses I had never heard before, including one hypothesis that stories such as Esau and Jacob or Abram passing Sarah off as his sister began as simple tricksters legends of the ancestors, told around the campfire for the amusement of les comrades and containing no intended spiritual value.
And as a former student of Asian religions, I find it interesting to apply your questions to the Scripture and Sutra of India, China, and southeast Asia. My understanding is that Hinduism is a very pluralistic religion that allows for all sorts of contradictory answers to the very questions you raise. And of course, the original Buddhist sutras make no claim to Divinity, though that did change for some cultures over time.
None of the texts in the Christian NT were intended by their writers to be scripture (with the possible exception of Revelation)
Really? That surprises me. I’m thinking of the Gospel of John, particularly, which reads to me like it was intended to be considered Scripture. In English, anyway; I have no Greek. And certainly the idea of reading Scripture as part of the liturgy is hundreds of years old at that point (even if you don’t buy that it was introduced by Ezra at the same time as he “found” Deuteronomy). By the time John is writing, you have something that could reasonably be called Christianity, with a liturgy that is distinct from the Jewish one (well, ones, but the point is that there’s a new Christian version competing/alongside old and new Jewish non-Christian versions). So I always figured it as being written for liturgical use.
And then there are are the non-Pauline Epistles, although I haven’t studied the issue. Assuming they were not written by Paul, they still don’t seem to have been written/edited/redacted for liturgical use as much as to steal his authority. Which is another aspect of Scripture, after all.
As for my bigger ideas about Scripture, well, I’m working on a note about them. Sometime this week, I hope.
Thanks,
-V.
The first Christian texts (that we know of) to be treated as Scripture alongside the LXX are the letters of Paul (so cited by 1 or 2 Peter, I forget which). Into the early 2nd cen., Christian writers describe the words of Jesus as Scripture, but don’t ascribe that status to the gospel texts in which they’re transmitted until the middle of the century — including John, as far as I know.
Liturgical use is slippery. If you read a text out loud to the community gathered in the same house where it meets for worship, as one assumes happens with Paul’s letters, is that liturgical use? Liturgy isn’t my specialty, but the first writer I can think of who explicitly attests reading “the memoirs of the apostles” alongside “the prophets” in worship is Justin Martyr, c. 155.
I agree that authority claims are related to scriptural status, but I see that as a distinct issue. Lots of texts claim authority of one kind or another; very few aim at scriptural status.