Inspiration and Scripture, or, "This Calls For An Entirely New Post"

The book of First Kings (19:11-15) records an extraordinary scene in which God reveals himself to a despairing Elijah. The prophet is sent to stand on the mountain so that God may come near. When God arrives a violent wind rips at the mountain, followed by an earthquake and a raging fire; but the writer tells us that God was not in the wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire. After these phenomena had passed, there came to Elijah what the text ironically describes as the sound of an absolute silence, through which the prophet encountered God. In the absence of any audible sound, Elijah clearly heard the voice of God.

In addressing the question of what revelation means, I think it necessary to ask in what way Elijah “heard” God speak on the mountain. As it is recorded in the biblical text, Elijah’s experience did not come from reading a scroll, nor did it result from a physical sound such as a human voice coming into Elijah’s ears. Indeed, it seems that God did not use any physical or quantifiable means to impart his message to the prophet. Instead, Elijah experienced God’s presence internally, as if God communicated directly to the prophet’s soul.
I contend that this sort of peculiar and immeasurable experience is the way that God communicates to each and every one of us. Rather than using actual words, God reveals Godself to humanity by acting within us through our emotions, in visions, and by way of intellectual inspiration. In turn, as we have experienced God’s presence it becomes the task of the individual to understand and communicate the meaning of their unique divine experience. Because each of us are human and fallible, however, individuals confronted with such an experience (or the description and interpretation of another’s experience) cannot simply assume that any human interpretation can fully and/or accurately reflect the essence of God’s communication.

Because the divine message cannot help but to have a human filter if it is to be communicated to the rest of the community, theologians must carefully scrutinize any verbal or written account that purports to carry such a message for the tell-tale failings of that filter. This means that even the texts that have come to be accepted as being the authoritative “Word of God” must be subject to reevaluation in the light of our developing knowledge about the Universe and God’s continuing interaction with humanity. The only way to resolve the resulting uncertainties as to what should be considered authoritative is to compare our own experiences with the experiences that others have shared, and to look for commonalities that will trace our understandings and experiences to the same divine source. The similarities that we find in the religious experiences of other individuals and faith traditions can only strengthen our assurance of God’s message along those lines, and even the differences that we find among our various experiences and traditions may help to broaden our conception of God’s nature and will.

So to put all that more concisely, the Bible was not dictated by angels sitting on the shoulders of its authors. The collected writings that eventually came to be accepted as the Hebrew and Christian scriptures were the work of many people from different eras and locations, each of whom shared the same limitations of perspective and understanding that any of us experience. Many of the authors do demonstrate exceptional insight into God’s nature and will, and some (like the prophets) were likely able to receive messages directly from God. But despite their unusual spiritual awareness, these authors’ understandings of the world – and, I believe, of God – were frequently defined and limited by their historical setting, and therefore were not always complete. I have previously described the difficulties of this situation as follows:

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As children, many of us played the “Telephone Game”, in which one person starts a message through a chain of communicants and the last person in the chain attempts to recreate the original message for all to hear. But, of course, the words employed by the last person in the chain never precisely duplicate the first speaker’s words, and frequently the content of the message is lost or twisted as it gets passed from one person to the next. When the last player gives their version of the message that was passed on to them the results are frequently amusing, because the message may be radically different at the end of the line than it was at the beginning.

The reason that the game works is that whenever any human experiences communication from an external source, they interpret those sensations in accordance with a unique perspective that is defined by the listener’s particular circumstances or their life experience. Many factors could contribute to the garbling of the message. The listener could be distracted by something else going on, so that they just aren’t paying attention. The room could be too loud for the listener to hear clearly, or they could have internal hearing problems that prevent them from accurately receiving the communication. Or the listener could have certain pre-established sensitivities that inspire them to remember or perceive a slightly different message than the one they originally received. Regardless of the particular reason, the result is the same. The message changes in a very real way from the way it was communicated to the original listener to the way that it will later be communicated to others.

Religion, understood as the various systems of belief and morality that have been discerned from humanity’s experience with God, is the history of a message that has been passed from person to person and generation to generation. Every time the ideas, beliefs, and doctrines of a particular faith are passed on to a new listener, the message encounters a unique human filter. That filter may entail certain philosophical notions, social norms, personal predispositions, or any other of a variety of potential influences on how the message will be understood by the hearers. Even where the individual who has had a religious experience has been able to make a written record of their interpretation of that experience, there is no certainty that they will have recorded it in such a way that others who encounter it later will come away with the message that the writer intended, much less a full rendering of the writer’s experience with God. This is evident in the way that religious groups have splintered time and time again over differing interpretations of scripture.

My goal, at present, is not to trace the historical path of Christian doctrines and beliefs. But I believe it is of paramount importance to acknowledge that those doctrines and beliefs, as we have come to know them, have not (and do not) pass unmediated from God’s mouth to our ears. They have been altered somewhat in the transmission. And if we, as Christians, are to take seriously the task of discerning God’s will for our lives, we must necessarily determine why these changes have taken place and what we are to do with them.

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So that leads to the differences of opinion that many have about the historical precision of the Gospel accounts, the importance of sacrifice under the Mosaic law as opposed to Jesus's own sacrifice, and about Paul's authority to say that the Christian faith is worthless (i.e., Jesus's sacrifice was ineffectual) if Jesus's physical body was not revived after the crucifixion. I'll try to take these one at a time.

As for the Gospels, it is highly unlikely that any of them were authored by people closely associated with Jesus during his ministry. Mark is almost universally regarded as being the earliest of the Gospels that were included in the New Testament, probably written by a member of Peter's community twenty to thirty years after Jesus's death. Luke is likely the second-oldest of the New Testament Gospels, written sometime before A.D. 60 by someone who had spoken extensively with Jesus's disciples, but who had not known Jesus personally. Matthew was probably written at about the same time as Luke by a member of the same community - which is evidenced by the fact that they each draw heavily from the same source materials. Many (though far from all) contemporary Historical Jesus scholars believe that there was another written document (called the Q document) that Matthew and Luke relied on because the two gospels share significant similarities, not only in the stories related about Jesus, but in the structure and phrasing of those stories. It is highly unlikely that the author of Matthew is actually Matthew the disciple, for two primary reasons: 1) a man who had actually been one of Jesus's companions would have had no need to look to the Gospel of Mark (or whatever source the author shared with Luke) for stories about Jesus; and 2) the average lifespan for people in that day and age was very short, and if we assume that Matthew was about Jesus's age during his ministry that would put him at 55-65 years old when the book was written. Of course, these facts don't preclude the possibility that Matthew the disciple authored the book that bears his name, but it does call it into serious question.

The uncertainty about the authorship of Biblical writings, combined with the regular concerns that I have about the historical limitations of the authors' understandings and the way that humans filter their experiences, profoundly affects the way that I read the Bible. In my mind, these considerations do absolutely nothing to detract from the central importance of Jesus's unique relationship with God, his revelation of the Kingdom of God, or his eventual sacrificial death - but they do require me to think carefully about the way that various authors have interpreted Jesus's presence, teaching, and death. The difficulty that I find (and I hear it in questions raised by several of you in responding to the previous post) is that some will demand that only their understanding of Jesus can be correct or acceptable. While I appreciate the reasons that some of you may feel that way, I cannot share those feelings and I think that they warrant reconsideration. So I hope that answers that question.

Now, I briefly and specifically want to address Margie's concern about differentiating Christianity from any other religious tradition. Yes, it is entirely possible that God brought Jesus back from the grave as a concrete demonstration that Jesus was superior to all others who have claimed to be God's messenger/Messiah. But are you really suggesting that Jesus needs this sort of one-upmanship to justify our devotion? Jesus was unique in his teachings and in his status as the chosen Son of God. A physical resurrection would not change that, even if it would be a convincing demonstration. If someone dedicates their life to Christ simply because he was raised from the dead, I think that they've missed the point entirely. Again, in no way am I saying it didn't happen. I'm just saying that it's kind of beside the point. I am a Christian because I believe that Jesus brought the Kingdom of God into the world through his presence, words, and actions. I don't need any further proof, and I would hope that no one else would, either.

JR, to the extent that you question why Jesus would have even come to us if not for sacrifice, I would say something very similar. It is very possible that God does, in fact require blood in order to forgive sin. It may well be that Jesus had to die for our redemption. But even if God didn't require his death, Jesus came to perfect God's message to humanity, to correct the errors that had built up under the Mosaic law, to demonstrate with his life God's love for humanity and God's calling for each of us. That is, I believe, a perfectly valid alternative understanding of Jesus's mission, even if some will find it unsatisfactory.


Sacrifice and Resurrection

I'll start here with resurrection. Hannah raised the question about whether Christ needed to be resurrected to "defeat death." No, I don't think so at all. I think that we very frequently get distressingly and unnecessarily distracted about what God needs in order to be able to forgive. Let's not forget that God is God. God granted salvation (eternal spiritual life) and raised people from the dead (extended physical life) long, long before Jesus was with us. Death was already absolutely subject to God's desires. If God wanted to "defeat" death, it certainly wouldn't require God to come to earth in person, die, and come back to life. Christian theologians (perhaps even Peter - although I think it's not at all clear that this was what he was getting at in the passage you cited) seized upon the idea of Jesus's resurrection and attributed to it this additional layer of meaning - not only was this a concrete sign of Jesus's unique relationship with God, not only was his revival important to reassure the disciples that he really was the Messiah and that the Kingdom of God would continue beyond his death, but Jesus actually broke down the gates of Hell so that death no longer had any power! Well... no. Death has continued to function, in the wake of the resurrection, precisely as it has always functioned. Likewise, and to the best of my understanding, our redemption post-crucifixion is not at all qualitatively different from what God has always offered to those who chose to serve him.

This leads us to JR's quotations from the book of Hebrews, which (in turn) was quoting from the book of Jeremiah. JR, you seem to have quoted these passages to support the idea that Jesus's sacrificial death was different in effect from the ritual sacrifices offered throughout Jewish history. It's clear that the author of Hebrews, whoever he was, thought so. He purports to be quoting Jesus, though I don't know where (if anywhere) in the Gospels the quotes can be found, to the effect that Jesus recognized that the traditional sacrifices just weren't cutting it (the author of Hebrews says that they could "never take away sins") and needed to be replaced with one perfect, once-and-for-all sacrifice. But the author shows flawed logic. In Hebrews 7, he infers that the sacrifices of old were ineffectual because Jesus became a new and perfect sacrifice. ("If perfection could have been attained through the Levitical priesthood (for on the basis of it the law was given to the people), why was there still need for another priest to come—one in the order of Melchizedek, not in the order of Aaron? For when there is a change of the priesthood, there must also be a change of the law." - Hebrews 7:11-12)

[This is all I could write while I'm in Philadelphia today. I'll finish up my thoughts in the next day or so.]