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<blockquote>I do completely agree with him that the historical-grammatical approach to reading scripture does not work because it assumes that everyone can derive the same correct interpretation on their own which the Bible denies can be done (cf. Luke 24:27, 2 Pet. 3:16) and it forces a singular monist conformity of the texts which are all shaped by different backgrounds and written in different styles.</blockquote>
I never made any such argument, so this reader is “completely agreeing” with a misunderstanding. There is no reason whatsoever that a historical-grammatical reading of the text should prevent us from recognizing the different backgrounds and genres of the texts. In fact, that’s precisely what the historical-grammatical approach sets out to do.
<blockquote>Stark rejects progressive revelation because he thinks that it is too easy but really progressive revelation is what makes sense and if we believe that God speaks through scripture then he have to understand how God might do this.</blockquote>
Again, this reader is not a careful one. I do not reject progressive revelation. I reject “progressive revelation” as an explanation for contradictory views about God, both of which purport to be revealed to us by God. I believe in progressive revelation, but not as a way of explaining away contradictions.
<blockquote>Progressive revelation makes sense because otherwise everything would have been revealed from the start and there would be no such thing as revelation at all.</blockquote>
Yes, quite obviously.
<blockquote>Paul may have affirmed a form of progressive revelation as well (eg. Gal. 4:4).</blockquote>
This is an inadequate prooftext to use to assign progressive revelation to Paul. Nevertheless, obviously Paul (like everybody else) believed in progressive revelation, as do I. The reader is confusing the issue.
<blockquote>Furthermore I think it is a severe mistake when someone reads scripture as if the Bible is some immutable dictation and treats it as if it is God. But it is also a severe mistake to treat scripture as if it is just a cultural byproduct that has nothing to tell us other than the theological views of an ancient culture. I feel that Stark tends to go down the latter path. He seems too eager to wholly assume a political agenda behind the formation of the Bible and that seems to be his starting point in trying to understand it instead of treating it like it is inspired by God.</blockquote>
It’s clear that the reader is offering criticisms from a non-scholarly perspective, which is fine, but not very useful. This also reflects circular reasoning. Moreover, I do not assume a “wholly … political agenda” behind the texts, but it is obvious that politics played a large role in the formation of many of our texts, particularly the ones written inside the king’s court. If the reader wishes to dismiss wholesale critical scholarship as an enterprise, that is his or her prerogative, but such a dismissal does not constitute a rejoinder to the conclusions of critical scholarship. Such a dismissal simply asserts the superiority of an alternate paradigm.
<blockquote>My approach to scripture is to recognize the human elements as well as the divine working through them. I think this is the approach that Jesus and the Biblical authors took.</blockquote>
No argument from me, neither now nor in my book, since this is in fact what I argued.
<blockquote>They recognized that scripture did not flat out say certain things but at the same time they knew that scripture speaks the truth and that we can derive truths from passages even if the passage does not explicitly say what is being derived and even if we do not agree with everything the passage says.</blockquote>
Again, this is precisely what I argued in my book.
<blockquote>When Jesus was confronted by the Sadducees about the resurrection (Matt. 22:23) He didn’t respond by finding a passage that explicitly talked about the resurrection but rather interpreted God’s address to Moses as being compatible and implicit of the resurrection. The author of Exodus may not have been aware of the implications but Jesus knew that the resurrection is true and that God speaks the truth through history and scripture so Jesus saw the conclusion that this passage supports His view. This is what Mathew did in that he knew that the virgin birth was true so he derived the truth by reinterpreting Isaiah 7:14. Paul also did this in reinterpreting the law about the ox eating the grain. Instead of expecting scripture to be a straightforward dictation that says everything we affirm out right we need to recognize that it is written by humans guided by the Spirit. So every statement in scripture is `yes tainted by human hands and thinking’ but also lead into truth by the Holy Spirit.</blockquote>
This reader is simply articulating the hermeneutic of second temple Judaism that I outlined very plainly in my book. S/He is adopting it, which is fine. Again, this is not a rejoinder to my conclusions or to the conclusions of critical scholarship. It is simply the assertion of the superiority of a different paradigm, without argument. Whereas I offered explicit arguments in the book why more honesty with the “human side” of the texts is requisite for faithful interpretation. These arguments have not been addressed by this reader.
<blockquote>If we affirm that God is ineffable then we of course can’t expect for any single verse to fully capture and understand the divine because “the Spirit speaks with sighs too deep for words”, but the alternative isn’t to say the verse completely got God wrong either (which I don’t think Stark would believe that but he doesn’t seem to share the view that God speaks real truths through the authors either).</blockquote>
What seems clear to me is that the reader doesn’t know how to accommodate the perspective I articulate, thus s/he keeps getting it wrong. I obviously don’t believe that the Bible as a whole completely gets God wrong. I expressly state that it very often gets God right. I also expressly state in my book that God often speaks “real truths” through the biblical authors, just not in every case.
<blockquote>So some verses have a fuller picture of God than others because the writers had a better understanding at that point, but that does not mean that the other verses were not inspired.</blockquote>
Whether the genocidal texts, for instance, were inspired or not is beside the point. The point is, this idea that certain discrepancies between texts or ideological opposition between texts can be explained away this idea that one author didn’t have “the fuller picture” is completely wrong. I’ve argued this at length, but the reader (who says I get my “facts” right but my “truths” wrong) hasn’t offered a rejoinder to any of my actual arguments. Some texts, yes, reflect an incomplete picture that is filled out later, and that is fine. Some other texts, however, contain clear and important contradictions. This cannot be explained away by identifying them as an “incomplete picture.” If this reader wishes honestly to disagree with my conclusion, it is incumbent upon him or her to engage in actual specifics.
<blockquote>We have to read scripture in light of reason, all of scripture as a whole, and guided by the Holy Spirit through the Church. So when it seems that something in scripture has not been fulfilled or is not true that is only because we are looking at it from a human perspective and focusing on the human side but if we trust in God and see that He will fulfill and has inspired every verse then we can trust that what it says is the truth. This is how prayer works and I can affirm that God answers prayers, He just may not answer them in the time frame that I expect Him too. We should approach scripture from the view point of how prayer works not how we expect human speeches to work. This view seems to be incompatible with sola scriptura though because the approach goes outside of the direct explicit words in scripture but I reject sola scriptura.</blockquote>
Again, the assertion of a different paradigm (without argument) does not a rejoinder to critical scholarship make.
<blockquote>So I agree with Stark that we cannot look at the human elements of the Bible and think that is how God inspired the Bible by making the authors write down exactly every detail as it happened or in the way they should be understood. So we shouldn’t read stories like the conquest of Cana [sic] or Jonah as if they are history. There may be some historical truth to them but we need to recognize that their style of writing is legendary and not strict history and that not everything they affirm about God or history may be completely factual. But we can recognize the divine truths in them.</blockquote>
I recognize the divine truths in Jonah (and I advocate that recognition in my book). I also recognize what the authors of the book of Joshua were attempting to do with these legends, and I gave an exhaustive list of reasons why (if we are in fact to use reason) the authors’ intended moral message in the book of Joshua should not be accepted as a divine truth. If this reader wishes honestly and actually to engage my conclusions, s/he needs to engage the specifics of my arguments. Otherwise, this is all so much hand waving.
<blockquote>Likewise if certain authors of the Bible didn’t believe in the afterlife we can still see the Sprit speaking through their attempt to understand the necessity or possibility of it (also the Jewish idea of Sheol doesn’t disaffirm the afterlife only it looks to the afterlife as a state of dullness and not a heavenly paradise but that is compatible with theology and scripture as a whole because Christ opened the gates to heaven).</blockquote>
I’ll ignore the fact the this reader obviously doesn’t really understand these issues and is apparently unfamiliar with the relevant scholarship, and just remind him or her that an adequate response to an argument necessitates actually engaging with it. Please examine the specific arguments I make and respond to those. Otherwise one is simply preaching to the choir.
<blockquote>A point I was uncertain on is that Stark argues that belief in the resurrection came later which is apparently true but he says that the Sadducees didn’t believe in the Resurrection because it was a relatively new idea but my understanding of the Sadducees’ approach was that they only accepted the Torah not that they only rejected recent material like Daniel and the Maccabbees, which is why Christ used the passage from Exodus to argue for the Resurrection because it is in the Torah.</blockquote>
As this reader has already noted, Jesus’ use of this passage in Exodus was novel and not historical-grammatical. He invested new meaning in the passage based upon later revelation which the Sadducees rejected. Thus, they had no reason to accept Jesus’ innovative reading of Yahweh’s statement in Exodus. I’m not sure what this reader’s point is or where exactly the confusion lies.
<blockquote>In one of the chapters in his book Stark argues that ancient Israel believed in human sacrifice. The main disagreement I have here is that one of the passages that he uses for support is Micah 6:6-8 because it says “Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression” but I am not sure that this verse proves Micah was talking about human sacrifice in the sense of killing because in Ex. 34:20 it says “all the firstborn you shall redeem”. Stark says though that this verse was not used as the normative but was utilitarian. That may be true but that doesn’t mean that Micah didn’t understand it to mean `that the firstborn were not to be sacrificed but to be redeemed as the normative’. Micah could have been talking about offering the firstborn while still redeeming the child.</blockquote>
This is of course utter nonsense, and a cursory look either at the text itself or at my treatment of the text will show why. In Micah there is a crescendo from lesser sacrifices to greater sacrifices, culminating in the greatest sacrifice of all—the sacrifice of one’s firstborn son. If Micah is envisioning the redemption of his son, that would amount to the sacrifice of a lamb, which is anticlimactic after the previous line’s mention of the sacrifice of “thousands of rams.”
<blockquote>Stark also implies that Jesus’ atonement is an example of human sacrifice in the same sense as child sacrifice, but Jesus’ sacrifice should be understood in its own context which is in the backdrop of the Maccabean sense of self sacrifice for others and not in the sense of child sacrifice to appease a blood thirsty deity.</blockquote>
This is false because it’s a quarter-truth. There are many interpretations of Jesus’ death in the New Testament. Paul identifies the death of Jesus as a “hilasterion” (Rom 3:25), which is a propitiatory sacrifice meant to appease an angry deity. Moreover, in the Gospels Jesus himself regularly cites the Isaian Suffering Servant as predictive of his death, investing it with a sacrificial, propitiatory meaning.
<blockquote>Stark says that today’s society still sacrifices people by sending soldiers to die for their country, an example he did not mention though is that parents still sacrifice their children through the act of abortion.</blockquote>
OK.
<blockquote>Stark seems to view Jesus as if Christ was just a person of His times. Stark not only thinks that it is problematic to view the Bible as if it fell from heaven but equally problematic to believe that Jesus came down from heaven! Stark argues that Jesus falsely predicted His Second Coming and while I agree with Stark that Jesus was fully human so He must have held human views which possibly may have not been correct it is important that we recognize that Jesus was also fully God as well. I do not think that Jesus was mistaken about His purpose so I cannot agree with Stark that Christ was mistaken about His Second Coming.</blockquote>
This is a fine example as any of circular reasoning. Please engage the actual texts and the specific arguments.
<blockquote>Stark says Christ wrongfully predicted His Second Coming in Mark 9:1 where He says “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” And then again in the Olivet Discourse found in the Synoptics (eg. Math. 24).
I don’t see why Christ’s words in Mark 9:1 are referring to the Second Coming. They could simply mean that some of Christ’s followers would have a realized eschatological view of the resurrection within their own life or they could be in reference to the Transfiguration. Stark doesn’t deal with the first alternative.</blockquote>
In fact I do. Please read it again.
<blockquote>but he does say that the Transfiguration can’t be the fulfillment because it occurred a week later so the promise wouldn’t have been that great, also angels weren’t present, and it doesn’t follow the logic of the discussion. First off we don’t know if the statement in Mark 9:1 was made in the context of the other statements because it is even included in a new chapter in Mark’s Gospel, while at the end of the chapter in Mathew and Luke, but regardless if could have been made at a different point in time than the preceding statements.</blockquote>
This is quite humorous. This reader seems to think that the author of Mark included the chapter demarcations in his original text. In fact, the chapter demarcations were added by Stephen Langton in ca. 1200 CE.
<blockquote>If it was made at the same time though as the preceding remarks there is still no indication that because Mark 8:38 talks about the Second Coming that Mark 9:1 has to coincide with the same statement. Jesus could have been saying `I will come and repay but don’t worry some of you will already know what the Second Coming will be like because I will reveal it to you ahead of time when I am Transfigured before you.'</blockquote>
That is clearly not what Jesus is saying; this reader is simply rewriting the Bible to suit his or her own purposes.
<blockquote>Also I don’t read Greek and maybe the English reads differently but the fact that Jesus said “not taste death until” or “not taste death before” seems to indicate that the Apostles would still die only they would see the kingdom first which would be fulfilled at the Transfiguration.</blockquote>
Yes, this reader doesn’t read Greek.
<blockquote>Now to address the Olivet Discourse. This place is very tough because it does seem that Jesus links the destruction of the Temple with His Second Coming. It is also difficult because each of the synoptics has different wording so it is impossible to know exactly how the conversation went. Mathew’s account is the only one where the disciples ask about the end of the age “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age? (Math. 24:3b)” and is the only one that mentions “the sign of the Son of Man (24:30)” and is the only one that talks about the immediacy of the events following the desecration (24:29).</blockquote>
No, it isn’t. The Son of Man coming on the clouds is referenced in all three synoptic accounts, and all three accounts place the coming within the generation of Jesus’ disciples.
<blockquote>In both Mathew’s and Mark’s account Jesus says that the Gospel must be preached throughout the world (Math. 24:14, Mark 13:10) and Luke says the time of the Gentiles must be fulfilled (Luke 21:24). Mathew and Mark mention the abomination of desolation but Luke mentions Jerusalem being surrounded by armies. But those can be seen as two separate things because armies are not an idol being set up in the temple which is what the abomination of desolation is a reference to though it is unclear exactly what idolatry actually took place as the indication.</blockquote>
They are clearly references to the same event.
<blockquote>Jesus also said that He didn’t know the day or hour that all these things would be fulfilled, but Stark says that that is only in respect to the exact day that they would be fulfilled within the next 40 years and shouldn’t be understood as showing complete ignorance of the time of the event.</blockquote>
Correct. I’ve argued this at length in the book and at further length on the book’s website.
<blockquote>While all of Jesus’ words were fulfilled before the destruction of the temple they were not perfectly fulfilled because the Gospel was not proclaimed to all the nations, some (but not many) false prophets arose and I don’t know if any claimed to be Jesus having returned, and a complete fulfillment of the abomination of desolation may not have occurred (although there would have been some sign to indicate as perhaps some form of idolatry or even the armies as Luke indicates).</blockquote>
This is all nonsense. The Gospel had proceeded to the known world by the time of the temple’s destruction. Many “false prophets” had in fact arisen between Jesus’ death and the temple’s destruction. As for the abomination that causes desolation, the Roman standards were erected in the temple, and the temple was destroyed. That seems pretty complete to me.
<blockquote>So we are still waiting for all of Jesus’ words to be fulfilled.</blockquote>
The only thing left unfulfilled is his promised return, which is some 2,000 years past due, according to Jesus’ prediction.
<blockquote>Scriptural prophecy often times has multiple fulfillment as when something is not properly fulfilled at one time it is completely fulfilled at another.</blockquote>
This is a hermeneutical strategy, not an actual property of biblical prophecy, unless expressly delineated in the prophecy.
<blockquote>For example God warned Adam that if he ate from the tree he would die on that day, except that Adam did not die on that day.</blockquote>
The story of Adam and Eve is a fable, not a prophetic prediction.
<blockquote>Christ though being the second Adam did die as He was hung on the tree and said to the thief “Today, you will be with me in paradise (Luke 24:43).”</blockquote>
Terrific.
<blockquote>Another example is that David was promised an everlasting kingdom (2 Sam. 7:16) but David’s earthly kingdom is not around anymore, that is because it is fulfilled by Christ who has an everlasting heavenly kingdom and is the fulfillment of David. This is how Acts 2 applies Psalm 16 and 110 to Christ as well.</blockquote>
Yes, this is a hermeneutical strategy, not a property of the original prediction. The original prediction of David’s eternal kingdom was false.
<blockquote>There are many more examples and the principle of multiple fulfillment can be applied to the Olivet Discourse as well (this idea is argued by Fr. William Most SJ. In his book Free from All Error). So it is possible that after the Gospel has been preached to the whole world that these events will be fulfilled again in the wars, earth quakes, false messiahs, and abomination of desolation which could be the antichrist since Christ’s body is the true temple (John 2:21) and the antichrist may come and establish himself as if he is the second Christ in imitation of Christ and will be the abomination of desolation (but I obviously don’t know).</blockquote>
I agree with that last bit.
<blockquote>Furthermore, Stark brought up that Jesus said “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” as indication that the Second Coming would occur within the next 40 years but while the things leading up to the destruction of the temple did take place within the next 40 years Jesus’ Second Coming and the things that would be needed to fully take place in order (like the preaching to all the nations) for that to occur had not so we can conclude that the generation has not ended.
There is no reason to think that generation must mean a 40 year span, it can be understood to mean establishment (as well as have a double sense like the other aspects of the discourse). So Jesus can be understood to mean this established mindset of people which is the way the word is possibly used in Math. 11:16, 12:39, 16:4, 17:17, and Duet. 32:20. Jesus spoke in universal terms that transcend time, so He would not be bound to mean people of the next 40 years when He uses the term generation.</blockquote>
No, “generation” cannot be understood to mean the “established mindset of people.” It does not mean this anywhere in Matthew, nor in Deuteronomy, nor anywhere else in all of world literature.
<blockquote>Stark also argues that when Christ said “flee to the mountains” that the expectation was that Jesus would come and rescue them and destroy the Romans. But that is not stated anywhere in the text. Jesus told them to flee to the mountains because Jerusalem was going to be destroyed by the Romans. Fleeing to the mountains is an indication to wait for destruction. There is no indication in the text that the followers were to wait for Christ to return and destroy the Romans there or anywhere in scripture.</blockquote>
Yes, there clearly is, as I showed in my book. This reader simply ignores the argument.
<blockquote>Stark implies that Jesus’ kingdom is viewed as earthly in the synoptics because in the Lord’s Prayer Jesus says “thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is heaven” but this is not an indication that Jesus’ kingdom is earthly. It is prayer for this world to reflect and imitate what God wants.</blockquote>
This is just one example of the earthly kingdom envisioned in the synoptics, and, despite this reader’s objection, it remains a firm example. We cannot change the meaning of Jesus’ words by using other words with different meaning to define them.
<blockquote>Stark says in John’s gospel the kingdom is spiritualized but there is no evidence that John’s Gospel takes back anything from the synoptics nor is there any evidence that John’s Gospel is unhistorical or inaccurate.</blockquote>
Yes, in fact, there is, on all counts, and ample evidence at that.
<blockquote>But it still must be addressed why Jesus answered His followers’ questions about the destruction of the temple and the end times by talking about things that happened and included things that weren’t fully fulfilled.</blockquote>
He didn’t.
<blockquote>To understand this I think that we must understand what Biblical prophecy is. Biblical prophecy is not fortune telling. Rather it is speaking divine truths that we know that God will eventually fulfill, after all the only sign that we will get is that of Jonah.</blockquote>
This reader mischaracterizes my presentation of the character of biblical prophecy, and goes on to display that s/he doesn’t understand what biblical prophecy is either. An education would be useful here. Further, s/he misreads the sign of Jonah. Jesus did not say that “we” would only get the sign of Jonah; he said that his religious opponents would only have that sign. He gave many other signs to those amenable to believing in him.
<blockquote>Stark has a problematic outlook. He thinks that looking for God to intercede in the world and solve all our problems is just looking for a way out. Apparently Stark wants us to try to figure things out on our own (or at least that’s what it seems like) the problem with this is that that approach fails. That is what Adam and Eve wanted in the Garden. In actuality we need God to be the one who comes and saves us and ends our suffering. The best way for suffering to end is to follow Jesus but that means actually following Jesus and not just picking and choosing what we like about His message. If we actually did follow Christ then earth would be as it is in heaven.</blockquote>
I never argued that God’s involvement with our salvation is problematic. It is essential. What I argued is that God struggles with us, and guides us, and corrects us, but a Deus ex Machina doesn’t help us. It simply consigns us to failure. This reader can call my outlook “problematic,” and most Catholics and Evangelicals will agree. That’s fine. They are entitled to disagree. I find their expectations of a Deux ex Machina both factually and morally problematic, for the reasons I articulated in my book.
<blockquote>Stark has a problem though with treating reality with the same sort of consistent logic that he wants people to treat the Bible with. For instance he says that God is beyond categories of monotheism and polytheism. I am confused what sort of category God can be placed in then.</blockquote>
Um, Trinity?
<blockquote>Stark also wants the Bible and religion to totally be about morality. He thinks the message of Christianity should all be about social justice, except again that is an attempt at making heaven on earth on our own means. Christianity is about conforming to the image of Christ.</blockquote>
Am I to understand that conforming to the image of Christ does not involve the pursuit of social justice?
<blockquote>If we do that then earth will be better but until God comes and drives out evil then we are not in paradise because there are people who reject God and prefer darkness to the light.</blockquote>
Who ever said anything about paradise?
<blockquote>Stark doesn’t like the idea of black and white though because he says things are more complicated than that. Except we are all sinners so at the end of the day we either follow Christ and are conformed to His image or we are not.</blockquote>
In other words, black and white because, well, black and white. Apparently there are no shades between conformity and non-conformity to Christ’s image, and apparently the long history of disagreement over exactly what conformity to Christ’s image entails shouldn’t be seen as evidence that such conformity isn’t a black and white matter.
<blockquote>We can’t do it on our own! That is why we must have the Catholic Church and the sacraments in order to guide us in interpreting scripture and help us conform to the image of Christ by the grace we receive through the sacraments.</blockquote>
That’s actually precisely what I argue in my book.
<blockquote>I appreciate Thom Stark for writing this book because he brings forth a lot of good evidence in a clear fashion and he speaks from a sincere perspective and I would recommend that people read this book as I learned a lot from it. It must be read with proper discernment though because Stark is mistaken in his overall conclusions.</blockquote>
I appreciate that this reader learned from my book, but I would also appreciate it if s/he would provide evidence, rather than mere assertions, in substantiation of the claim that my “overall conclusions” are mistaken.
My thanks to Jim Tweed for writing this good critical review of my book. It’s really a breath of fresh air to me, because the vast majority of critical reviews have so distorted my arguments that it’s nice to see a reviewer who, while disagreeing with my conclusions, still takes care to describe them accurately. Tweed’s summary of my overall argument is pretty good.
I also thank Tweed for taking the time in his review to point out the parts of my argument he thought were successful, specifically, he thinks my arguments against CSBI inerrancy and their hermeneutic of convenience were successful.
Of course, Tweed goes on to state that he was not convinced by most of my arguments, but he only engages one of them in his review, namely, my argument in the fourth chapter on polytheism in the Hebrew Bible. He believes that by exposing the serious problems with my argument here, he will have shown that the remainder of my arguments cannot be taken as seriously.
Unfortunately, Thom’s affable style is perhaps too breezy, particularly in the first few chapters of the book (and also in the meatier middle chapters) he regularly develops his own arguments just enough so as to complete them by citing the relevant critical consensus, and since he seldom (if ever) critically engages that consensus one slowly gets the sense that Thom is uncritically employing that consensus in his arguments.
Either that, or in these particular cases I am in agreement with the consensus.
This isn’t helpful because those who will be most challenged by this book will rightly suspect that Thom is replacing one kind of authority with another when it comes to interpreting their scriptures (i.e. that of the critical consensus).
This strikes me as ludicrous. The only hermeneutical authority I recognize is reason.
It also isn’t helpful for those of us who want to evaluate the success of Thom’s arguments as he does not interact much with those scholars whose analysis is significantly different from his own (the notable exception of Wright in Ch. 8 notwithstanding); rather, the only opposing arguments that he does regularly engage with are the soft balls pitched by inerrantists.
Well, first of all, my book is an argument against inerrancy; hence all the engagement with inerrantists. Second, in many cases, virtually the only people disagreeing with the position I’m arguing are the inerrantists (e.g., the David and Goliath legend). Third, it is simply not the case that my engagement with Wright is “the notable exception.” I engage extensively with several scholars in my chapter on the Canaanite genocides, for instance.
Also Thom’s prescription for reading the more problematic parts of scripture as “condemned texts” must also be judged as inadequate for the reason that it misses the point of why many protestant Christians hold to the CSBI doctrine of inerrancy in the first place. The reason being that such a doctrine serves as a kind of epistemological foundation for the purposes of deriving Christian doctrine from Christian scripture.
I missed no such point; I explicitly addressed this point in my final chapter, at some length. It’s precisely the assumption of the need to make such an epistemological foundation out of scripture that came under my fire in the concluding chapter.
to wit, if our texts are a reasonable approximation of what inerrantists claim to be inerrant texts then it follows that the task of deriving Christian doctrine from these texts can for the most part be reduced to that of interpreting the texts we do have, which is a difficult enough task in its own right. If Thom wants inerrantists to adopt a lower view of their scriptures then he needs to show how they can do so while still recovering those doctrines that are most essential to the faith.
I’m not sure why I need to do this, other than that Tweed has asserted this is what I need to do.
On the other hand, if Thom feels that the whole task of deriving Christian doctrine from Christian scripture is misguided in the first place then he needs to explain why that is so as well.
I think this is imbalanced. At any rate, my job wasn’t to provide a sure way to find “right” Christian doctrine in scripture. That’s not my approach, as Tweed should know since he’s read my book.
The remainder of Tweed’s review engages on section of my fourth chapter—the section on the Song of Moses, specifically the interpretation of Deut 32:8-9.
Thom interprets vv. 8-9 as an etiological narrative that describes the head god of the divine council, Elyon, giving his sons responsibility for governing the different nations as tutelary deities and that Yahweh (the God of Israel) is depicted as being but one of Elyon’s sons who receives governance of Israel from Elyon so that not only is Yahweh not unique as one of the sons of Elyon but that he is not even the head god of the divine council.
A basically accurate summary. Except that I would clarify that my argument is not that Yahweh is not “unique,” per se. Rather, simply that Yahweh is not species unique here.
Needless to say, this interpretation couldn’t be more inconsistent with Christians who confess that Yahweh is the only such god of his kind and that there is no other god greater than him.
I suppose not, at least, if one is an inerrantist. If one is not an inerrantist, then the consensus reading of this text doesn’t stand in the way at all of the Christian confession of Yahweh as the only true God who is species unique.
Thom arrives at this conclusion by saying that Elyon must be considered separate from Yahweh in vv. 8-9 for the following two reasons (see pg. 73n6):
(1) It is said that Yahweh is given an inheritance. A father does not give an inheritance to himself, but to his child.
(2) The text says that Elyon divided up mankind according to number of his children, not according to the number of his children plus himself. Thus, Yahweh is portrayed here as the son of Elyon.
It needs to be pointed out that the one argument Tweed chose to engage in his review is an argument I made in a footnote. The purpose here was not to make an extensive argument, but to summarize the consensus reading, with which I am in agreement. As it happens, I have defended this reading at considerable length here on humanfacesofgod.com.
Let’s assess Thom’s arguments. The problem with his first argument is that nowhere in the text is Yahweh said to be given an inheritance, it is only said that “Yahweh’s portion is his people” and that “Jacob [is] his measured possession,” neither of which mean that Yahweh was given “his people” or “Jacob.”
Tweed’s contention here is absolutely incorrect. The text reads, “Jacob is his allotted inheritance.” The word used for “inheritance” here is nachalah. It is the same root used in v. 8 when the text says that Elyon “gave the nations their inheritance” (the verb is nachal). Nachalah, the noun form of the verb (“to inherit”) is used over two hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, and in all but a small few of those instances, its meaning is unequivocally “inheritance” or (in a few cases) “gift.” While it can at times be translated possession, what Tweed fails to mention/realize is that a nachalah is a possession that is given by means of inheritance. Here are some examples where its meaning is unequivocally “inheritance”: Gen 31:14; 48:6; Num 16:14; 18:20-21; 18:23-24; 18:26; 26:53-54; 26:56; 26:62; 27:7-11; 32:18-19; 32:32; 33:54; 34:2; 34:14-15; 35:2; 35:8; 36:2-4; 36:7-9; 36:12; Deut 3:28; 4:21; 4:38; 10:9; 12:9; 12:12; 14:27; 14:29; 15:4; 18:1-2; 19:14; 20:16; 29:8; over forty times throughout Joshua; Judg 2:6; 2:9; 18:1; 21:23-24; Ruth 4:5-6; 4:10; 2 Sam 20:1; 1 Kgs 8:36; 12:16; 21:3-4; 1 Chron 16:18; 2 Chron 6:27; 10:16; Neh 11:20; Job 20:29; 27:13; 42:15; Ps 2:8; 16:6; 47:4; 78:55; 105:11; 135:12; 136:21-22; Prov 17:2; 19:14; 20:21; Eccl 7:11; Isa 49:8; 54:17; 58:14; Jer 3:19; 17:4; Lam 5:2; Ezek 44:28; Ezek 45:1; 46:16-18; 47:14; 47:22-23; 48:29; Mal 1:3.
Moreover, in the Ugaritic texts (texts Tweed will himself mention later), the sons of God (i.e., junior deities of the pantheon) are also said to have been given “peoples” as their inheritance (nachalah; same word).
So much for Tweed’s objection to my first argument. Now his objection to my second argument:
The problem with his second argument is that it implicitly assumes that the reference to “the nations” and/or “the peoples” following the separation of the sons of Adam in v. 8 must also include the nation Israel. In fact, the writer/redactor of Deuteronomy was quite capable of referring to all the nations and/or all the peoples with the nation of Israel implicitly understood as not being counted among them (Deut 26:19; 28:1, 10, 64; 29:24).
This objection misses the mark. The author/redactor of Deuteronomy was not the author of this Song. This Song is one of the earliest compositions in the Hebrew Bible, predating the composition of the book of Deuteronomy by about three or four centuries. So what the author/redactor of Deuteronomy says about the nations is moot. This is a mistake Tweed will make time and again in his critique.
Tweed writes:
So much for Thom’s arguments, but are there good reasons for identifying Elyon with Yahweh in vv. 8-9? Yes there are! Consider the following:
We will consider the following, and show why each of Tweed’s arguments is based on poor assumptions about the composition of this text:
(1) At the very least the writer/redactor of Deuteronomy that put the work in its final form believed that Yahweh was for all intents and purposes the most high god in Deut 10:17 (“Yahweh your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God”). Therefore, it seems unlikely that we would find any tradition in Deuteronomy that represents Yahweh as something other than the most high god.
Of course the author/redactor of Deuteronomy believes that Yahweh was the Most High. Tweed ought to have noted that this fact is part and parcel of my argument in chapter four. By the time Deuteronomy was composed, Yahweh was already considered to be the Most High God. Tweed’s objection that “it seems unlikely” that the author would include a heterodox tradition in his composition misunderstands the distinction scholars make between a diachronic and a synchronic reading of a text. The diachronic reading of a text seeks to understand what the different compositions in a given text would have meant as they were originally composed. The synchronic reading of a text seeks to understand how those parts are woven together to form a coherent new composition, giving each part often a new meaning. The reading of Deuteronomy 32 I offered in my book was obviously the diachronic reading, not the synchronic. The synchronic reading is obvious. Nevertheless, the fact that the Masoretes (or some earlier scribes whose recension was preserved by the Masoretes) felt the need to change v.8 from “sons of El” to “sons of Israel” probably indicates that the original language was still considered problematic in a stanchly monotheistic context. At the time Deuteronomy was put together, however, monotheism as we know it now was not yet full grown in Israel’s theology.
(2) Yahweh is said to be the one who “created”, “made” and “established” Israel in v. 6, which is hardly consistent with a reading of vv. 8-9 that understands Yahweh to be one of Elyon’s sons who merely receives Israel from his father Elyon.
This is false. All tribal deities were thought to be the “creators” of their peoples. The word “create” just means “fashion,” “shape,” i.e., out of raw materials. For instance, in Numbers 21:29, the Moabites are said to be the sons and daughters of their deity Chemosh. The idea is that all such deities guided and protected their peoples from infancy to full-blown nationhood. The Code of Hammurabi, again, identifies several junior deities who are said to have “laid the foundations” of their respective nations. This is the same sense in which it is said that Yahweh “created,” “made,” and “established” Israel.
(3) It cannot be the case that Israel is one of the nations in v. 8 because its “boundaries” cannot be “established” as being “separate” from the nations whose lands Israel dispossessed (cf. Deut 4:38; 9:1). In other words, since the task of establishing separate boundaries for Israel and the other nations that Israel displaced is not possible it follows that Israel cannot be one of the nations in v. 8. But since Israel belongs to Yahweh that means Yahweh cannot be one of the sons of Elyon to whom the nation of Israel is not given, which means that Yahweh must be Elyon by process of elimination.
This is a pedantic objection that presses this non-historical, etiological myth for chronological consistency. At the time this was written, Israel was already long established in their territory. New nations were regularly coming up and other nations were disappearing. There is no specific set number of nations here in this text. Moreover, as Paul Sanders shows, it is the peoples, not the land, that are given as an inheritance to the gods. The setting of the myth is, as all scholars recognize, at the dawn of history, before any of these nations had yet come into existence. As such, pointing out that Israel came to its land late means nothing, since at the time the myth is set, no nation yet occupied their land. We’ll talk more about this when Tweed brings up the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.
(4) Yahweh is frequently and explicitly identified with Elyon in the Hebrew Bible (Gen 14:22; Ps 7:17; 9:1-2; 18:13; 21:7; 46:1-7; 47:2; 50:14; 73:11; 77:10-11; 78:17; 83:18; 87:5-6; 91:9; 92:1; 97:9; 107:11) and is also distinguished from the sons of God in Job 1:6. If at least one of these traditions are in continuity with vv. 8-9 then it follows that Yahweh must be identified with Elyon here as well.
This argument completely ignores the point made by the consensus that Deuteronomy 32 is a very early text, predating all of the texts Tweed cites by centuries. By the time those texts were written, yes, Yahweh was identified as El Elyon. But Tweed here ignores that that’s part and parcel of my argument, and of the consensus position. Israel’s theology evolved, so that by the time these texts were written, Yahweh was seen as head of the pantheon. In short, this argument does not at all address my own, and my position is perfectly consistent with all these data.
(5) In the Ugaritic tradition that is paralleled by vv. 8-9 El is the father of 70 sons. Furthermore, the only other reference to the separation (parad) of the nations is in Gen 10, which lists the sons of Adam as separating into 70 different nations after the flood following their dispersal by Yahweh at the tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9), suggesting that the number of Elyon’s sons in v. 8 is 70.
This suggests no such thing. The Table of 70 Nations in Genesis 10 is dated by scholars to about the seventh century BCE. There are nations listed there that weren’t yet even in existence at the time of the composition of Deuteronomy 32. There is no reference to the 70 nations in Deuteronomy 32. If the Ugaritic tradition is in the background, we have no reason whatsoever to think that Israel is not considered to be one of them at this early period. Tweed is doing the very non-historical-grammatical hermeneutics that he says I successfully exposed in the work of the Chicago inerrantists.
He continues:
Moreover, the later MT reading of v. 8 also identifies the sons of Elyon as being 70 in number by playing off a tradition that understood 70 people from the house of Israel as entering Egypt before the Exodus. Therefore, it is almost certainly case that Elyon has 70 sons in v. 8 who are each given a nation, hence 70 nations. Now, the only part of the Hebrew Bible that lists these nations is in Gen 10, which doesn’t list the nation of Israel, suggesting that the nation of Israel was not counted among the nations in v. 8 (cf. Num 23:9). In sum, Israel cannot be one of the nations in v. 8 as the separation of the nations that is recounted in v. 8 took place during a time before which Israel even began to exist as a nation according to the biblical tradition in Gen 10. However, if Israel is not one of the nations in v. 8 then Yahweh cannot be one of the sons of Elyon by the same argument used in (3).
As Tweed well knows, the MT reading is not the original, and we know this by comparing the DSS recension to the LXX reading. Moreover, not even the MT (as Tweed claims) identifies the number 70. It reads, “according to the number of the sons of Israel.” This could refer to 70, or to 12, or may not be specific at all, but at any rate it is moot, because we know that this was a change made by the Masoretes. The original text reads, “according to the number of the sons of El,” which is a reference to the junior members of the divine pantheon. Genesis 10 does not shed light on Deut 32:8-9 because it was composed several centuries later, and several of the seventy nations identified in Genesis 10 did not yet exist at the time the verses in question were composed.
To sum up, Jim Tweed has chosen one of my arguments (one which I made briefly in a footnote) to use as an example to his readers that my arguments in general are not persuasive. Unfortunately, all of Tweed’s objections and criticisms are either factually incorrect or ignore the actual argument I’m making. Much of the data he cites against my position, I myself cite, and they do not in fact challenge my position. Tweed simply doesn’t seem to understand the way that scholars address these texts in terms of provenance, composition, and the like.
At any rate, my thanks to Jim Tweed for his courteous engagement.
Another Attempt To Discredit My Book Discredits Itself
Denny Burk, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Boyce College (of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), has published a review of my book, The Human Faces of God, in the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. (For a previous engagement of mine with Burk, see here.) On his blog, his review is entitled, “Another Attempt To Discredit Inerrancy Falls Flat.” In the review, Burk attempts to argue that my book fails in both of its objectives: (1) to discredit the doctrine of inerrancy on a number of grounds, and (2) to provide an alternative way of reading the Bible as Scripture that isn’t confined by the artificial strictures of Christian fundamentalism (these are my words, obviously not Burk’s). But in order to make his case that I have failed on both points, Burk is forced blatantly to mischaracterize my arguments and positions at almost every turn. I hardly recognized the book he was reviewing.
Now, in a number of places, I will willingly chalk up Burk’s mischaracterizations either to sloppy reading habits or to a simple inability to understand my position due to an inability to see these issues from a paradigm other than his own fundamentalist paradigm. Indeed, Burk can only claim that I have failed to provide an alternative to fundamentalism because in order to understand that alternative paradigm, one must first have a paradigm shift. As I stated clearly in the preface to my book, I do not expect my arguments to induce such a paradigm shift among the most devout adherents to fundamentalism. This is not because my arguments are deficient, but because I know from decades of experience in the world of fundamentalism (including years within that world where I myself was no longer a fundamentalist) how powerful the anti-intellectual grip is that fundamentalism tends to have on otherwise very intelligent people.
That said, there are certain points in Burk’s review where it is very hard for me to believe that his mischaracterizations are unintentional. Not infrequently, Burk has taken to changing the wording of my own positions in such a way as to give his summaries of my positions a very different meaning than my actual positions themselves. In one case, Burk deliberately changed the wording of a quote of mine, which had the effect of giving my authentic words almost the opposite meaning. I want to give Burk the benefit of the doubt and say that he didn’t do this intentionally, but if it wasn’t intentional, the best I can offer is that Burk must be incredibly dense. So, I’m put in a position where giving him the benefit of the doubt isn’t really an act of charity on my part. I just see no way to be charitable, as much as I would like to be.
Burk begins his review by comparing my book to the books of Bart Ehrman, which ordinarily I wouldn’t have a problem with, even though I find myself in disagreement with Ehrman almost as often as I find myself in agreement with him. Burk says that my book belongs to “the Ehrman-genre,” though he notes that unlike Ehrman, I wish to preserve the whole Bible as scripture. This latter clarification is one of the few accurate statements made in Burk’s review. But he’ll undo it almost immediately. The problem I find, however, with Burk’s comparison of my work to Ehrman’s is not found in anything he explicitly says, but in the implicit import of the comparison: to Burk’s audience, as he well knows, Ehrman is anathema. And so, Burk is playing a little guilt-by-association game. He’s informing his fundamentalist audience that they have permission to categorize me as “another Ehrman,” which when translated means, “anathema.” The end result is fine I suppose. My position should be as much anathema to fundamentalism as fundamentalism is anathema to me. I just would rather Burk bring his audience to that conclusion after a careful consideration of my arguments (to which we are never treated) or at least an accurate summary of my positions (which we don’t get either), rather than shortcutting the process by painting a scarlet “E” on my forehead at the outset. But don’t hear me playing the victim. I really don’t expect much better from most fundamentalist apologists, and I’m not wounded in the slightest by such tactics. I just point it out to make clear what kind of a “book review” it is that we’re dealing with here. And all that aside, come on. Ehrman did not invent this genre. There’s a long tradition of such books going back long before Ehrman came on the scene, and I’ve read more of those books than I have of Ehrman’s. Apparently Burk has not.
Another thing Burk points out here is that I am, like Ehrman, a former fundamentalist, as I state also in my preface. Again, Burk points this out because, implicitly to his audience, this means that I am doing what I am doing because I am disgruntled and disillusioned. Burk is stating the fact of my former fundamentalism in order to afford his audience the opportunity to make the standard armchair psychoanalysis that fundamentalists use as a defense mechanism against scholars like Ehrman. Of course, what Burk doesn’t know, because he doesn’t really know my story at all, is that between my fundamentalist years and the time I wrote Human Faces, there were about five or six years in which I was neither a fundamentalist nor what Burk would characterize as a “liberal.” I was what’s called a postliberal Christian, Wittgensteinian to be precise, on the model of such Calvinists as D.Z. Phillips and Rush Rhees, or such Lutherans as George Lindbeck. Of course, to a fundamentalist like Burk, it must be hard to tell the difference between Lindbeck and, say, Ehrman, or, say, Satan. But just because a fundamentalist can’t see the distinction doesn’t mean there isn’t a world of difference. And I was a Wittgensteinian postliberal Christian when I began the work that became Human Faces, and in many, many ways, I still am. Of course, in many ways I no longer am, but that’s actually what Human Faces is about for me, as I also stated in the preface. It wasn’t just aimed at fundamentalists or those struggling on the fringes of fundamentalism, but also at my postliberal kin, because I wanted to make it clear why postliberal hermeneutics does not have all the answers for all the problems inherent in Scripture either. So as much as Burk might like his readers to think that I’m yet another disgruntled “former employee” (as I would characterize Ehrman in some of his early books), the reality is that I wasn’t writing from an anti-fundemtnalist paradigm, but from a postliberal paradigm, even as I was forced to move beyond that postliberal paradigm in significant ways.
The second paragraph of Burk’s review consists of another attempt to implicitly discredit my book, by pointing out that the arguments in my book don’t offer anything new to scholarly debates. Burk can mask his motivation in pointing this out by quoting me saying as much in my preface. Burk can pretend he’s simply describing my book as I myself have described it, but he knows that by doing so, he’s providing another reason for his audience not to take my arguments seriously. He characterizes the arguments in my book in his own words as “well-worn,” which obviously has a useful double connotation. It can simply mean, “old,” “tried and tested,” or, as the dictionary defines the term, “repeated too often; trite or hackneyed.” So it’s clear that Burk is bringing this fact up not really to be neutrally descriptive of the content in my book, but rather in order to discredit the same, under cover of a convenient quote from the author himself.
But I have two things to say in response to this. First, while I did say that it wasn’t my goal to offer new hypotheses or material to scholarly discussions (but rather to make the discussions available to a non-scholarly audience), I was being a bit modest. The truth is there are important arguments that I make in Human Faces of God that I think are original contributions to scholarship. Burk no doubt did not identify them when he read the book, and I won’t guess as to why he failed to do so.
Second, see, from my perspective (and I do believe that my perspective is really quite sane here), writing a scholarly book that doesn’t offer radical new hypotheses is a good thing. In scholarship, at least as I was trained by Christopher Rollston, “new” is often a euphemism for “irresponsible.” That’s not to say that advances aren’t made in scholarship, and that new hypotheses aren’t essential to coming to a consensus. It’s just to say that most of scholarship consists of restating what’s already been said but with different details in different contexts. While every generation or so in a given field, some groundbreaking work will be done by one or two scholars, in every generation, most of the scholars who attempt to do groundbreaking work find themselves suddenly on the fringes of the academic community. (#coughtabor.) So from my point of view, taking the consensus, and restating it, either for new audiences, or in the context of a new question, is the meat and potatoes of scholarship (forgive the metaphor, vegans). It’s what most scholars do with themselves, most of the damn time. And I most certainly wasn’t going to be caught dead doing anything else with my first book. It’s called being sane.
Thus, the fact that I am articulating consensus positions in a popular voice (and in a clearer way, in some cases, than I think has been done before), does not mean that my arguments are “well-worn,” as in “hackneyed” or “outdated.” It means, rather, that the scholarly consensus, for the most part, stands firmly behind me as I make my case. In any other world but the world of fundamentalism, that’s rather a good thing.
Now, Burk’s first distortion is rather mild and may just be a case of a bad grammatical choice, but it’s a distortion that is repeated several times subsequently, so while I can give him a pass here, I won’t be able to do so later. Burk writes, “Stark hopes his book will speak to Christians who struggle with biblical inerrancy and who have not found answers to their questions about the Bible. Stark wants them to know an ‘alternative way of being Christian’—a way that vehemently rejects the Bible as inerrant (xviii).”
I do not in fact “reject the Bible as inerrant.” Rather, I reject the inerrancy of the Bible, while embracing the Bible in its entirety, in various different ways, as Burk knows, but will obfuscate later. He should not have said, “vehemently rejects the Bible…” but rather, “vehemently rejects the doctrine of inerrancy.”
Now immediately on to other distortions. Burk writes, “Chapter one contends that the Bible is ‘an argument against itself’ and is hopelessly self-contradictory (1).” Burk here actually changes my vocabulary inside a supposed quote. I do not say that the Bible is an argument against itself. I say that the Bible is an argument with itself. That may appear a minor distinction, but the implications are significant. “Against” itself has a much more negative connotation. “With” itself was my choice of words precisely because I am, with John Collins, characterizing the debate that takes place within the pages of the Bible as a healthy thing. If I had actually said that the Bible was an argument against itself, my meaning would have been that the Bible nullifies itself, which I do not believe. Moreover, “hopelessly self-contradictory” is again Burk’s choice of words, not mine, and mischaracterizes the portrait I am painting. I think Burk’s mischaracterizations here are probably just due to his inability to understand my actual position; an inability to come around to seeing that a Bible with contradictions can actually be a good thing. That I think it is a good thing is abundantly clear in a number of places throughout Human Faces. It’s clear in my approving quote of John Collins at the beginning of chapter 1, where Collins says that the Bible is a “collection of writings that is marked by lively internal debate and a remarkable spirit of self-criticism.” See. That’s a good thing. Again at the end of chapter three, I argue that the Bible is not the problem; the problem rather is the artificial construct of inerrancy and the limitations it imposes upon us as moral agents. The solution is to go back to a more ancient way of engaging the biblical texts, which is the form of engagement modeled within the texts themselves, that is, one of engaging in an ongoing argument, with ourselves, and with certain biblical texts. The Bible doesn’t present us a single point of view, but offers us options, and encourages us to struggle to find God in the mix. To engage in that argument with the text, from my perspective, is to participate in the oldest of biblical hermeneutical traditions. And it is the process of the struggle and the argument itself that makes us into properly moral agents. That this is my perspective is abundantly clear, but it is a perspective that becomes distorted in Burk’s fundamentalistic recasting of my argument.
Burk continues to summarize chapters two through ten in one-sentence each. They are more or less accurate, with the exceptions of his descriptions of chapters five and six. Burk writes, “Chapter five attempts to demonstrate the moral inferiority of the Bible by showing that the authors believed in the ‘nobility and efficacy of human sacrifice’ (99).” This is a fairly obvious distortion that Burk could have easily avoided by adding the qualifier “some of” before “the authors,” but this is a distortion that Burk produces consistently throughout his review, as he continually fails to acknowledge that I see different perspectives at work in the Bible. Without fail, he characterizes my criticisms or descriptions of some biblical authors as criticisms or descriptions of “the authors” of the Bible, or simply, “the Bible.” This creates a serious misunderstanding and the primary point of a book review is to inform people who have not read a book about its contents. Anybody who has not read my book will come away from Burk’s review with a very distorted picture of the very clear and consistent view of Scripture that I articulate from the first page to the last. And anybody who has read my book will know that Burk’s review distorts my view. This is unfortunate. For instance, there’s no way that Burk could have even skimmed my chapter on human sacrifice in the Bible without realizing that I argue that the voices that see human sacrifice to Yahweh as noble are earlier voices that were drowned out by later voices from the seventh century on, and it is these voices which became the orthodox ones on the issue. But Burk’s review will lead the reader to believe that I argue that “the authors of the Bible” think that human sacrifice is noble, which makes me sound like a nutcase, which of course works well to Burk’s advantage. Go figure.
And his one-sentence summary of chapter six, while not technically inaccurate, is a bit misleading: “Chapter six highlights ‘Yahweh’s Genocides’ in the Old Testament and concludes that God never commanded such things as the conquest of Canaan.” While it’s true that this is what I conclude, Burk’s description may easily lead the reader to think that my conclusion is based upon a textual argument. But it is not. Rather, it is based upon a moral argument, and on the working assumption that the true God is a moral God. In other words, if the genocides cannot be morally justified (as I extensively argued in one of the longest chapters in the book), and if God is unswervingly moral, then it is not very likely that these genocidal commands came from God. I believe that they did not, because of these two premises, and not because of any textual argument.
From here on out, Burk’s deceptive and distorted statements begin coming in full force, one after the other. As I said at the outset, I would chalk these up to a simple inability on Burk’s part to comprehend a paradigm different than his own, were the distortions not so blatant and, indeed, deliberate. It is almost as if Burk feels he needs to rewrite my book in order to make it easier to dismiss. But certainly an accurate summary, and criticisms of my actual positions, would be more useful and still well-received by his fundamentalist target audience. I just see no justification for Burk’s maneuvers, not even a pragmatic justification. What this displays to me is the profound cynicism embedded into the fundamentalist worldview.
After his single-sentence summaries of my chapters, Burk launches into an attack on a flagrantly straw-man version of my concluding chapter. He writes:
“It is in this final chapter that the futility of Stark’s quest comes into full view. After nine chapters of attacking the historical, theological, and moral authority of the Bible, he thinks he can offer a way of reading the Bible that will preserve it as Christian Scripture for the church. Since the biblical text taken on its own terms has an ‘evil,’ ‘devilish nature’ that reveals God to be a ‘genocidal dictator’ (218, 219), Stark argues that the only way to read the Bible faithfully is to read it as ‘condemned texts.’”
The distortion here is flagrant. Burk describes me as arguing that “the biblical text” (singular!) has an “evil,” “devilish nature,” that reveals God to be a “genocidal dictator.” He has the nerve to claim that my proposition is to read “the Bible” (singular!) as “condemned texts.” Not only is this utterly deceptive, it is profoundly cynical. As Burk (and anyone who skims my book) well knows, I argue that some texts in the Bible depict God in “evil” and “devilish” ways. At the same time, I show that other texts dissent from these portraits of God and portray God in a morally consistent way. It’s in the very title of my book, The Human Faces (plural!) of God. There is not, on my view, any “God of Scripture.” There are different depictions of God, by different authors in the Bible, and not all of them are in agreement with one another. I argue this from chapter one to the very end. Burk could not have missed it; instead, he opts to utterly hide this fact from his audience. Even when he summarizes my characterization of the Bible as an argument, as we noted, he mischaracterizes this as an “argument against itself.” The reader of Burk’s review has no way of knowing what the very premise of my book is.
And Burk picks up my strong language, again in an effort to discredit me in the eyes of the pious evangelicals. Stark called God evil? Devilish? Anathema! But of course, I did not call God evil or devilish. I argued that there are some wonderful depictions of God in the Bible, and some morally deficient depictions of God in the Bible, and I gave argument after argument in order to support my conclusion that some of these depictions of God are morally deficient. It’s not a conclusion I came to lightly. But the Stark of Burk’s fictional world is a God-hater. In reality, of course, I stand in a long tradition, going back to many of the biblical authors themselves, of believers who in their zeal to honor God have in no uncertain terms rejected deficient depictions of God. I even cited prominent orthodox figures from church history in whose tradition on this I stand.
For instance, I quoted at length from Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Cappadocian Fathers, one of the chief architects of the doctrine of the Trinity, and a thoroughly orthodox theologian by any current standard bearing the name. Gregory found a huge moral problem with the tenth plague (the slaughter of Egypt’s firstborn children). In his Life of Moses, Gregory asks, “How would a concept worthy of God be preserved in the description of what happened if one looked only to the history? The Egyptian (Pharaoh) acts unjustly, and in his place is punished his newborn child, who in his infancy cannot discern what is good and what is not. His life has no experience of evil, for infancy is not capable of passion. He does not know to distinguish between his right and his left. The infant lifts his eyes only to his mother’s nipple, and tears are the sole perceptible sign of his sadness. And if he obtains anything which his nature desires, he signifies pleasure by smiling. If such a one now pays the penalty of his father’s wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries: The man who has sinned is the man who must die and a son is not to suffer for the sins of his father? How can the history so contradict reason? (Mos. 2.91)”
Gregory argues that if we are to understand the tenth plague as actual history, then God would have been a perpetrator of a gross injustice. He states in no uncertain terms that there is no holiness in the slaughter of the firstborn, no piety, no justice. He emphatically avers that such a plague would be contrary to moral reason itself. To put it in contemporary terminology, Gregory is arguing that if the tenth plague is historical, and God actually killed the firstborn of Egypt, then God is a moral monster. So much for Burk’s insinuation that I’m a God-hater who comes to the conclusions I come to because I’m disgruntled. Rather, it is my zeal for God that compels me to condemn certain (but certainly not all) texts in the Bible as immoral depictions of God, in Gregory’s words, depictions not “worthy of God.”
Gregory’s solution, of course, is to opt for an allegorical reading of this passage, because morality demands that we reject a historical reading. And as I state clearly in my book, while I am sympathetic with Gregory’s approach and appreciate its intent, I ultimately believe that allegorical readings don’t solve the problem; they just sweep the problem under the rug by changing the subject. That’s not to say that I think we should never use allegory, but my position, as I argue in the book that Burk didn’t review, is that we must first have confrontational readings, much as Gregory’s confrontation with the tenth plague text.—As I stated clearly in the book, it’s not that allegorical readings are a problem in and of themselves (except for the Chicago inerrantists who insist on a historical-grammatical reading). Allegorists like Origen and Gregory consciously chose allegorical readings for texts where the biblical morality could not be salvaged. The problem with them is that over time, this original moral consciousness is lost on subsequent generations, and only the allegories remain, which has the effect of sweeping the moral problems under the rug.—Moreover, just as I do, Gregory used scripture against scripture. He cited Ezekiel favorably in order to condemn a historical reading of the passage in Exodus. And Gregory’s position is mine as well. The Bible has different perspectives, and we can be enlightened enough by the good perspectives in order to identify and confront the bad ones, just as Gregory and so many others of our forebears have done before us.
But according to Burk, I argue that “the Bible” is a condemned text, and that “the God of Scripture” is devilish. This is a monumental deception, and if you’re not convinced that Burk is being deceptive (maybe he’s just being dense), then let’s proceed to his very next sentence:
“It will be useful to read Stark’s prescribed hermeneutic in his own words: ‘[The Bible] must be read as scripture, precisely as condemned texts. Their status as condemned is exactly their scriptural value. That they are condemned is what they reveal to us about God. The texts themselves depict God as a genocidal dictator, as a craver of blood. But we must condemn them in our engagement with them’ (218).”
The comic irony here is that while Burk claims to be offering “Stark’s . . . own words,” Burk deliberately changes my words and gives them a radically different meaning. So much for my “own words” being “useful.” Burk quotes me: “[The Bible] must be read as scripture, precisely as condemned texts.” And he inserts his own words (“The Bible”) into brackets in place of my actual word. My actual word was “they” (plural, not singular) and “they” referred to certain biblical texts, like the text that Gregory rejected on moral grounds. “They” emphatically did not refer to “the Bible” as a whole, but for some reason, this is the narrative that Burk wants to spin, and he goes so far as to deliberately change my words in a direct quote in order to spin this narrative. I’ll quote the preceding portion of this section of my book in order to make it clear to any interested parties what I was really saying:
The question looms: what are we to do with those texts we find ourselves wanting to condemn? While the scriptures advocate monotheism, the dissolution of the sacrificial system, and the love of enemy, they also advocate a polytheistic tribalism, human sacrifice, and religiously motivated genocide, among other deplorable things. What should our strategy for dealing with these damnable texts be? Should we simply ignore them? Excise them from our canon? The only honest answer to the question I have been able to come up with is this: they must be retained as scripture, precisely as condemned texts. Their status as condemned is exactly their scriptural value. That they are condemned is what they reveal to us about God. The texts themselves depict God as a genocidal dictator, as a craver of blood. But we must condemn them in our engagement with them—sometimes with guidance from other passages of scripture, sometimes without. That they stand as condemned is what they mean for us as scripture. (217-18)
Burk can reject this approach to Scripture. In fact, that’s what I would expect him to do. What I wouldn’t expect, however, is for him to fail even to engage my approach, but rather to distort it into a different approach altogether, so that he can portray me as a more radical critic than I actually am, to the good pleasure of his constituents.
Burk continues: “Stark anticipates an objection: If the texts deserve censure, then why pay attention to them at all, much less give them some kind of authoritative, canonical status? He answers:
To do so is to hide from ourselves a potent reminder of the worst part of ourselves. Scripture is a mirror. It mirrors humanity, because it is as much the product of human beings as it is the product of the divine…. It mirrors our best and worst possible selves. It shows us who we can be, both good and evil, and everything in between. To cut the condemned texts out of the canon would be to shatter that mirror. It would be to hide from ourselves our very own capacity to become what we most loathe. It would be to lie to ourselves about what we are capable of. It would be to doom ourselves to repeat history (218-19).
“So Stark says that the church must appropriate Scripture’s regulative authority in two ways: one, it must face head-on the Bible’s moral and theological deficiencies, and two, reject for its own life the negative examples in the Bible. In other words, the church should learn to shun the evil ways of the God of Scripture.”
Another flagrant deception. Burk knows full well that I argue that there are multiple depictions of God in the collected works that we call Scripture. I do not believe in a “God of Scripture.” I contend that there are “Gods” in the collected works that comprise the Bible, and some of them are good depictions of God, while others are morally or theologically deficient, for reasons I have provided in detail, none of which Burk has engaged in his “critical review.” So again, the reader of Burk’s review will come away with the false impression that I reject both “the Bible” and “the God of Scripture,” when in fact that is not what I do at all. Burk cannot but impose his own fundamentalist view of the Bible onto me in his attempts to discredit me. Once again, the problem is not with me, or with the Bible, but with the fundamentalist approach to the Bible. Burk’s fundamentalist mind seems to be incapable of even entertaining a perspective other than his own. He is forced to cast me as his opposite within the same fundamentalist paradigm, rather than rightly identifying me as someone with a different paradigm altogether.
Burk continues: “Stark gives several illustrations of how his hermeneutic works out in practice. Since Scripture reveals that both polytheism and monotheism underwrite ideologies of slavery, war, genocide, and racism, the church must reject both polytheism and monotheism. Instead, Christians should embrace a new ‘conception of the divine nature’—one that recognizes its non-trinitarian ‘plurality’ (221).”
Yet more flagrant distortion, made possible by the insertion of words into my mouth that I never uttered. First, I never stated that what we needed was a “new” conception of the divine nature. “New” is Burk’s word. And neither am I rejecting monotheism, although I’ll allow for some honest misunderstanding here. I am not rejecting monotheism, but critiquing aspects of its origins on the theological scene. Perhaps Burk just can’t fathom that I can be critical of how a perspective came into existence historically (for dubious political reasons) without rejecting that perspective wholesale.
But here’s the real distortion. Burk claims that my “new” conception of the divine nature is one that recognizes its “non-trinitarian” plurality. “Non-trinitarian?” Again, Burk has put words in my mouth that totally distort my actual position. What he describes as my “non-trinitarian” conception of a divine nature in plurality is actually my description of Trinity! My words:
The inadequacies of the text reveal the need for a conception of divine nature that is difference in harmony, unity in diversity. The divine is not one, but neither—in its plurality—is the divine at odds with itself. Thus, while polytheistic and monotheistic conceptions of God have been exposed as mirror reflections of our worst selves, a conception of the divine as difference in harmony represents an ontology—a divine reality—that calls upon humanity to better itself and to become the mirror image of the sacred reality.
I’ll grant again that my words are open to some misunderstanding, but part of that is intentional in order to challenge the reader to stretch a “well-worn” paradigm. But never did I use the term “non-trinitarian,” and while I did say that the divine is “not one,” I also described it as “unity in diversity.” Last time I checked, “unity” means “oneness.” So Burk’s misunderstanding just comes from a refusal to accept the challenge my language presented. When I said that the divine is not “one,” I was referring back to my earlier critique of monotheism as an originally imperialistic ontology. If my language is confusing to Burk, my response is that all Trinitarian language is similarly confusing. That’s because we’re talking about God. So deal with it.
Burk continues: “Since Scripture affirms the nobility of human sacrifice, Christians should recognize their own evil propensity for human sacrifice. Once again in Stark’s own words,
Yet we continue to offer our own children on the altar of homeland security, sending them off to die in ambiguous wars, based on the irrational belief that by being violent we can protect ourselves from violence. We refer to our children’s deaths as “sacrifices” which are necessary for the preservation of democracy and free trade. The market is our temple and must be protected at all costs. Thus, like King Mesha, we make “sacrifices” in order to ensure the victory of capitalism over socialism, the victory of consumerism over terrorism (222).”
A couple of things should be noted here. First, again, Burk has stated that my position is that “Scripture” affirms the nobility of human sacrifice. But of course, my actual position is that some earlier texts within Scripture affirm the nobility of human sacrifice (to Yahweh only), while others from later periods reject the institution of human sacrifice as immoral. Once again, Burk has hidden from view a major and crucially significant aspect of my argument.
The other thing I’ll point out is how transparent Burk’s motivation for quoting this particular excerpt from my book is. He is writing to a conservative Evangelical audience, for whom U.S. wars and so-called “free trade” are as sacred as the doctrine of inerrancy itself. So Burk doesn’t have to comment on this quote; he just has to quote it, and I’m further discredited in the eyes of many if not most of his constituents. The irony of course is that I’m the one here actually critiquing worldly values that contradict both Hebrew Bible (economic) and New Testament (economic and peacemaking) values.
Burk continues with a left-handed compliment: “This is a learned book that is well acquainted with critical biblical scholarship.” My book is, for Burk, acquainted with “critical” scholarship, but not well enough acquainted with fundamentalist scholarship. As if I didn’t undergo four years of training in fundamentalist scholarship at my conservative Bible College. Burk continues:
“Nevertheless, for a number of reasons, The Human Faces of God does not deliver on what it promises. Stark attempts to offer both a convincing case against inerrancy and a viable, alternative way of reading the Bible as Christian Scripture. He fails at both aims.”
It will be interesting to see how Burk supports his claim that I failed at both aims, especially how he supports his claim that I failed the second. But first the first:
“None of the arguments that [Stark] offers against inerrancy are new (as he himself acknowledges on page xvii), yet he treats his interpretation of the material as if it were the settled scholarly consensus.”
Actually, while I did say something like this, the fact remains that I have carried some of the debates forward in new ways, for instance in my discussion of the David and Goliath legend, and in my extensive critiques of the genocide apologists, as well as in my extensive critique of Tom Wright’s reading of the Olivet Discourse. But whatever. Nothing new. That’s apparently a criticism. (See why that’s ridiculous above.)
Burk continues: “He promises to pay inerrantists the ‘deep respect of extensively engaging their arguments’ (xvii) and then neglects to interact with leading scholars who have defended inerrancy over the last thirty to forty years.”
Now this, I am forced to say, reflects Burk’s agenda very clearly, and an actual problem with my statement about engaging inerrantists not at all. The reason this reflects Burk’s agenda is because this is an initial criticism he made of my book several months ago, before he had finished reading it, to which I responded on his blog. In that early blog post, Burk quoted me saying that I wished to pay inerrantists the deep respect of extensively engaging their arguments, and wrote in response: “I have to say that I am forearmed against believing that Stark will meet the ideal of that last sentence. I have just perused Stark’s bibliography, and there is not a single reference to the work of Greg Beale, Timothy Ward, D. A. Carson, or John Woodbridge. Has he really paid his respects? It doesn’t sound like it. So far, not so good.”
But in the comment thread I responded directly to this criticism, which is based upon a misunderstanding of my statement. I wrote: “I had in mind my extensive engagement with different Evangelical apologists, Denny, such as Christopher Wright, Tom Wright, Gleason Archer, Walter Kaiser, Norman Geisler and the other drafters of the CSBI, etc. But many of the arguments made by your favored apologists are not original to them, and are of course addressed in my book as well. I look forward to reading your book review.” In a later comment, I stated again, “I’m sure Denny will have much to say by way of criticism, but it’s probably not the best idea to critique it for being something other than what Denny ostensibly expected it to be.”
I then wrote: “The main object of my criticism when it comes to inerrancy is the CSBI, and that’s because of the controversial role it has played in recent years within the ETS. I engage the CSBI extensively, and that took up enough space. Moreover, my arguments there cover the kind of argument Beale makes when he tries to prove inerrancy by arguing that certain texts claim something like inerrancy. At any rate, the quote Denny pulled from my preface says that I engaged ‘extensively’ with Evangelicals, not ‘exhaustively.’ Denny’s rhetoric depends upon a conflation of those two domains. I’m sorry if I disappointed him, but again, I think this has more to do with Denny’s own expectations than anything I actually claimed about the content of the book. Nevertheless, I still look forward to his review. I expect that after he’s finished reading it, he’ll have a better grasp of the approach I’m taking and the primary arguments I’m making. It’s difficult to have a whole perspective based on having read the preface and bibliography.”
Apparently I was wrong. Or rather, even after acknowledging my response to this misguided criticism, Burk was not diverted from his agenda of portraying me as dishonest by claiming to engage inerrantists extensively, which I in fact did. Burk is certainly within his rights to critique me for not engaging his pet inerrantist scholars, but he’s being deceptive by trying to pit my selected bibliography against the statement in my preface, once he had been informed that he was misreading my intent. Once again, “authors intended meaning” doesn’t always play a role in fundamentalist hermeneutics. But let’s move on and address Burk’s specific concerns about whom I failed to engage in my book.
Burk writes: “For example, Stark lodges extensive complaints against New Testament authors’ use of the Old Testament (19-20, 29), yet he has not one word of interaction with the work of Greg Beale or other inerrantists who have done extensive work in typology.”
Burk seems to think my discussion of pesher is some sort of attack on the Bible. Rather, what I’m doing is describing the hermeneutic operative in the late second temple period. My aim here isn’t to discredit the Bible but simply to describe the hermeneutic that was operative among many apocalyptic sects, such as the Qumran sect, and the Jesus movement. The actual response of many of my readers, even those who aren’t Christians, was very positive in the sense that they were able to see that, for instance, when Matthew alluded to Isaiah 7 in his virgin birth narrative, Matthew wasn’t “abusing” the text; he was simply doing what biblical interpreters did in his day. This is only a problem for the specific brand of inerrantists who insist upon a strict historical-grammatical interpretation of Scripture. But my point was that that is a foreign imposition onto the text that isn’t at home in the world of the late second temple writers. So many of my readers were able to look at Matthew with new eyes; even some who formerly thought Matthew was just a bad or dishonest interpreter came to appreciate him for what he really was: a first century Jewish author operating as first century Jewish authors operated, and with a good deal of artistry. The reason I didn’t engage with fundamentalist perspectives on “typology” is because that would have been peripheral to the point of this section in my book, which in my mind was a point that very much respected the biblical text. I could engage Beale in another context, and point out all the reasons why much of his language hasn’t been adopted by the consensus, or I could write the book I set out to write. So Burk’s criticism just misses the point.
He continues: “Stark dismisses out of hand the notion that inerrancy is the established position of the church (17, 32), yet he has not one scintilla of interaction with John Woodbridge’s work (nor does he cite the Rogers and McKim proposal).”
Now this is ridiculous. I do not “dismiss out of hand” the notion that inerrancy is the established position of the church. I provide numerous reasons why it’s not as simple as all that. I’ve read Woodbridge’s book and the Rogers and McKim book twice each, but I didn’t cite them because I think both approaches are very much wrongheaded. The debate they have between them goes in all sorts of directions it doesn’t really need to go, so to engage them would have been, from my perspective, a huge diversion. The incontrovertible fact is that, for much of church history, while certain important figures made statements about the infallibility or inerrancy of the Bible, they did not share the Chicago inerrantists’ commitment to a historical grammatical hermeneutic, and that makes all the difference. This is a fact which Woodbridge bungles in his work. And this is a point I made very clearly and with extensive primary-source support in my book.
Recall our discussion just above of Gregory of Nyssa, a hugely important figure for early orthodox Christianity. The Bible could be inerrant for him, but emphatically and clearly not in the same way it was for the Chicago inerrantists, because for Gregory, the historical-grammatical reading of certain texts could produce an image of God that is morally reprehensible and must be rejected. Thus, he opted for allegory, which the Chicago inerrantists (due to their apparently unconscious commitment to a modernist epistemology) emphatically reject. So here’s one big case where church history is at odds with the claims made by these modern-day inerrantists. And I detailed others as well in my book.
Origen does precisely the same thing as Gregory: he is confronted with a text that on a historical-grammatical reading is offensive, a text that portrays God in ways that are not worthy of God. (For Origen, it was the Canaanite conquest texts.) He confronts these texts as immoral, and denies that a literal interpretation is possible, if the Bible’s authority is to be preserved. So, like Gregory, Origen opted for an allegorical interpretation, which the Chicago inerrantists reject. And as I pointed out in my book, even Augustine, who had a change of mind on allegory, and later adopted a “literal” hermeneutic, still did not have a commitment to a historical-grammatical hermeneutic. For Augustine, as I showed, the “literal” meaning of the text was not the same thing (necessarily) as the historical-grammatical meaning. In fact, even up until Luther, the “literal” meaning was understood as the theological meaning, which sometimes corresponded to the historical-grammatical meaning, but certainly not always. This is incontrovertible, and is the established consensus position of actual patristic scholars the world over.
I studied these issues under Prof. Paul Blowers (PhD. Notre Dame), who served as vice-president and then as president of the North American Patristics Society. Dr. Blowers himself has written quite extensively on patristic hermeneutics, and I had discussions with him about just this issue as I was writing my book. The fact is (as I showed amply well), while the fathers did make statements about the authority of scripture, the infallibility of scripture, and in a few cases about the inerrancy of scripture, their hermeneutic was so radically different from the Chicago inerrantists that what we actually have are two very different doctrines of inerrancy, one in which the Bible is authoritative or inerrant, but its “inerrant” meaning may not be the historical-grammatical meaning, and one in which the Bible must be deemed inerrant in a strictly historical-grammatical sense.
Of course, Burk discloses none of my extensive discussion of these issues to his readers. Rather, he lies by stating that I simply “dismiss out of hand” the view that I spend several pages undermining. So I do apologize if Burk was offended by the fact that I didn’t refer to Woodbridge, even though my arguments had people like Woodbridge in mind. But what we see here is not a deficiency in my argument, as much as a tactic employed by Burk to make me look uninformed, a tactic which also has the virtue of hiding all the actual information I provided from his readers.
Burk continues: “I daresay that there is not a single objection to inerrancy that he raises that has not already been ably answered in the relevant literature. Yet Stark goes right on as if his case is the only one to be made.”
This is of course hogwash. How can I be “going right on as if my case is the only one to be made” when I’m arguing against other cases the whole time? Pure rhetorical maneuvering here. And as for this claim that there is “not a single objection to inerrancy . . . that has not already been ably answered in the relevant literature,” all I can say is, citations please! Where is the inerrantist, for instance, who “ably answers” my point in the David and Goliath text that while all of the Philistine giants had Philistine names of Indo-European (and not Semitic) origin, we’re supposed to believe that Goliath’s parents named his brother “Lachmi,” a Hebrew word meaning “my bread,” which is actually taken from the word “Bethlechem” as it appears in the original version of the story? Who has “ably answered” this objection? I could go on with a list a mile long of objections I made that I know have not been “ably answered.” But of course, as I showed in my book, for an inerrantist, any “possible” answer that preserves inerrancy is to be preferred to any “plausible” answer that disproves inerrancy. Yes, yes, inerrantists are forever writing “answers” to the challenges posed to their worldview by consensus scholarship. Why then does the scholarly consensus not affirm inerrancy? It must be a massive liberal conspiracy.
Burk now attempts to provide an actual example of a case where I “trot out old objections that have already been answered.” Of course, for his sole example he selects a text that is entirely peripheral to my main arguments, and he also completely misunderstand the nature of my argument in this section, but we’ll get to that. Burk writes:
I could multiply examples in which Stark trots out old objections that have already been answered, but I will limit myself to just one. In an attempt to show that inerrantists do not really accept the Bible’s literal sense, he appeals to 1 Timothy 2:12-14 and the fact that many inerrantists allegedly reject Paul’s teaching that women are “inherently more susceptible to deception” (16- 17). Stark says that “the most common strategy to explain away this blatant misogyny” is to impose a distinction between the cultural and the universal (41). For Stark, this is prima facie evidence that inerrantists cannot accept what the Bible really teaches and that they do not practice the hermeneutic that the Chicago Statement preaches. Yet anyone familiar with the literature knows that this is not the “most common strategy” used by inerrantists in dealing with this text. Stark appears oblivious to the work of Doug Moo, Tom Schreiner, and many others who argue on exegetical grounds that the prohibition on female teachers has to do with the order of creation, not with the relative gullibility of women.
All right. Let’s break this down. First, another distortion. Burk writes, “In an attempt to show that inerrantists do not really accept the Bible’s literal sense, he appeals to 1 Timothy 2:12-14 and the fact that many inerrantists allegedly reject Paul’s teaching that women are ‘inherently more susceptible to deception’ (16- 17).” By quoting my words, “inherently more susceptible to deception,” Burk has made it seem as though I have argued that inerrantists reject “Paul’s teaching” (in Burk’s words). But no. Obviously the majority of inerrantists don’t believe that this is what the author of Timothy is saying. So, contrary to Burk’s characterization, I am not saying that inerrantists are “rejecting Paul’s teaching.” Rather, they argue that Paul is teaching something else. That’s my whole point. That the author of Timothy taught that women are “inherently more susceptible to deception” is my position, not that of most inerrantists, although I do know quite a number of inerrantists who interpret this passage correctly and agree with it!
Next point: “Stark says that “the most common strategy to explain away this blatant misogyny” is to impose a distinction between the cultural and the universal (41). For Stark, this is prima facie evidence that inerrantists cannot accept what the Bible really teaches and that they do not practice the hermeneutic that the Chicago Statement preaches. Yet anyone familiar with the literature knows that this is not the “most common strategy” used by inerrantists in dealing with this text.”
This is incredible. Burk has tried to correct my statement that the “most common” strategy among inerrantists is to take the cultural vs. universal route. He objects by pointing out a handful of scholars who don’t take this approach. Give me a break. I’m not denying that there are other strategies; that’s in fact implicit in what I said. But go into any mainstream Evangelical church in North America and take a poll: the majority will say that this passage applied to that cultural context, but not to our context today. There are countless evangelical scholars who have argued this over the past several decades. Burk is really stretching to portray me as uninformed. But, Burk has put his foot in his mouth, because Douglas Moo himself (whom Burk cites against me) referred to the cultural vs. universal interpretation as “by far the most popular approach among those who do not think that 1 Timothy 2:12 has general application.”1
Of course, I’m familiar also with Moo et al. who try to do away with the second clause of the author’s justification for his rule that women should be silent in the church. But of course, their arguments fail, and certainly haven’t persuaded the consensus of critical scholars (and “critical” applies to a number of relatively conservative believers as well). Here’s Moo’s argument. I’ll break it up and respond piecemeal:
If the issue, then, is deception, it may be that Paul wants to imply that all women are, like Eve, more susceptible to being deceived than are men, and that this is why they should not be teaching men! While this interpretation is not impossible, we think it unlikely. For one thing, there is nothing in the Genesis accounts or in Scripture elsewhere to suggest that Eve’s deception is representative of women in general.
This objection is only relevant to inerrantists who require that all scripture must agree with itself. Moreover, it ignores the time period and the contemporaneous Jewish literature. In fact, although not for Moo, Ben Sira was a part of the Bible of the earliest Christians. And in Ben Sira we find statements such as this one: “From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die” (Sir 25:24). Misogyny was pervasive throughout the Greco-Roman world and in its literature, and it was rampant in second temple Jewish literature as well, in which Eve frequently played the role of the evil woman responsible for all the world’s ills. Eve was representative of the folly of all women as well. This is the case in Ben Sira. Let’s look at the preceding verses of the same passage:
Any iniquity is small compared to a woman’s iniquity; may a sinner’s lot befall her! A sandy ascent for the feet of the aged— such is a garrulous wife to a quiet husband. Do not be ensnared by a woman’s beauty, and do not desire a woman for her possessions. There is wrath and impudence and great disgrace when a wife supports her husband. Dejected mind, gloomy face, and wounded heart come from an evil wife. Drooping hands and weak knees come from the wife who does not make her husband happy. From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die. (Sir 25:19-24)
As is clear, the author attributes the folly of all women to its source in the first woman, Eve. So Moo’s first objection really has no import except to those predisposed to exclude Ben Sira from consideration, even though it was in the canon of the Christians at the time 1 Timothy was written.
And let’s not forget how prominent early Church Father Tertullian understood this passage from 1 Timothy:
God’s judgment on this sex lives on in our age; the guilt necessarily lives on as well. You are the Devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that tree; you are the first foresaker of the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the Devil was not brave enough to approach; you so lightly crushed the image of God, the man Adam; because of your punishment, that is, death, even the Son of God had to die. And you think to adorn yourself beyond your “tunics of skins”? (CSEL 70.59)
Moo continues:
“But second, and more important, this interpretation does not mesh with the context. Paul, as we have seen, is concerned to prohibit women from teaching men; the focus is on the role relationship of men and women. But a statement about the nature of women per se would move the discussion away from this central issue, and it would have a serious and strange implication. After all, does Paul care only that the women not teach men false doctrines? Does he not care that they not teach them to other women?”
This objection is just a grasping at straws. Citing the woman’s deception in the Garden as a justification for the prohibition of women teaching men is not a “move away” from the point; it’s an argument in support of the point. The argument is that, since man came before woman, a woman ought not to have authority over a man, and since woman was deceived (and not man!), a woman ought not to teach in the church. Note that 1 Timothy 14 actually does say, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived,” which is of course patently false. Adam was deceived, by Eve, who was deceived by the serpent. But moving on from that point, Moo’s objection that this reading doesn’t make sense because, “does Paul care only that women not teach men false doctrines? Does he not care that they not teach them to other women?” is a total red herring, for two reasons: (1) The context is teaching in the church, not just teaching in general. So in the church, if a woman were teaching, she would have been teaching over men and women simultaneously. So Moo’s rhetorical question just misses the point. (2) Paul doesn’t have to be concerned about women teaching other women in the privacy of homes if in fact women are to be in submission to their male masters, which is also Paul’s point, because “Adam was formed first, then Eve.” So Moo’s objections just fail utterly to dispense with this deeply misogynistic perspective enshrined in our canon. The plain fact is, as the consensus holds, the author of 1 Timothy argued that women should not teach in church because they are inherently more susceptible to deception than men, as evinced by Eve, before the fall.
Moo continues:
More likely, then, verse 14, in conjunction with verse 13, is intended to remind the women at Ephesus that Eve was deceived by the serpent in the Garden (Genesis 3:13) precisely in taking the initiative over the man whom God had given to be with her and to care for her. In the same way, if the women at the church at Ephesus proclaim their independence from the men of the church, refusing to learn “in quietness and full submission” (verse 11), seeking roles that have been given to men in the church (verse 12), they will make the same mistake Eve made and bring similar disaster on themselves and the church. This explanation of the function of verse 14 in the paragraph fits what we know to be the general insubordination of some of the women at Ephesus and explains Paul’s emphasis in the verse better than any other alternative.2
But against Moo, we’ll quote Moo:
However, Paul tells us remarkably little about the specifics of this false teaching, presumably because he knows that Timothy is well acquainted with the problem. This means that we cannot be at all sure about the precise nature of this false teaching and, particularly, about its impact on the women in the church—witness the many, often contradictory, scholarly reconstructions of this false teaching. But this means that we must be very careful about allowing any specific reconstruction—tentative and uncertain as it must be-to play too large a role in our exegesis.3
So according to Moo, this must not play too large a role in his exegesis, but after all else fails, he’ll use it to salvage a problematic text. And Moo, who argues that 1 Tim 2:12-14 is not limited to a specific context, but is of universal import, finally winds up arguing that one part of verse 14 was limited to a specific context, even though he argues that Eve’s deception is pre-fall and therefore technically a part of the order of creation argument.4 He also cites 2 Tim 3:6-7 as evidence that women were being deceived by false teachers at Ephesus. Let’s look, indeed, at how women are described by the author there:
For among them are those who make their way into households and captivate silly women, overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires, who are always being instructed and can never arrive at a knowledge of the truth.
What a fair-minded description of women! “Silly.” “Swayed by all kinds of desires.” “Always being instructed, never making up their minds.” “Overwhelmed by their sins.” Sounds remarkably like another women we’ve met in the previous letter, who was used to provide a universal justification for the subordination of women to men: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.”
Moo hasn’t “ably answered” any objection here. He’s simply providing a way out for inerrantists who don’t really like what this biblical text says about women.
And as for Burk’s claim that I’m apparently “oblivious” to the arguments of Moo et al., that’s of course just nonsense, as I myself entertained Moo’s views back in my fundy days. Burk’s whole criticism here, of course, founders on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of my argument in this section of the book. I’m not arguing that every inerrantist adopts the example inerrantist position I’m providing. But I was offering a long series of different texts and pointing out that every inerrantist will have trouble with at least one of them! Every inerrantist is inconsistent somewhere. If not with 1 Timothy 2, then with one of the other texts I cited, surely. That was point: not that inerrantists don’t exist because they don’t agree with any of these biblical passages, but that inerrantists don’t exist because all it takes is for them to disagree with one! That’s the point I made very explicitly in the book; it’s very clear. And so Burk’s criticism here just displays either that he wasn’t reading me very closely, or that once again he is intentionally distorting my argument in order to make it appear that I’m a little nutty. Once again, I can’t decide which option would be giving him the benefit of the doubt, because neither is very desirable, I wouldn’t think.
Burk now moves to his criticism of my alternative proposal for how to retain these problematic texts in the Bible as scripture:
Not only does Stark fail to produce a convincing argument against inerrancy, he also fails to offer a viable alternative. His proposal to read the Bible as a “condemned” text is clever but transparently bogus. It is a little bit like asking an abused wife to admire her abusive husband because of the “mirror” he provides into her own corruption. It is patently absurd, and I doubt that very many actual churchgoers will be compelled to respect the Bible as “scripture” based on the mountain of deficiencies that Stark alleges. If anything, Stark has given readers more reasons to give up on the Bible altogether.
What Burk does here is to replace my metaphor for the condemned texts with his own metaphor, and then to ridicule his own metaphor as absurd. My metaphor of course was to treat the problematic texts as we do the alcoholic uncle in the family:
Certain texts in our scriptures are like that alcoholic uncle we all know. It is easy enough to avoid the problem. Like the uncle, many of the texts don’t show up on our doorstep very often. But when they do show up (and they inevitably do) they are only going to do damage to the family unless the family is willing to sit down and hold an intervention, to confront the problem directly, and to set the ground rules for interaction within the community. Once these ground rules have been set in place, fruitful interaction between the troublesome text and the faith community becomes possible. The “alcoholic uncle” can continue to be a part of the family, and he can actually learn to participate in unique and fruitful ways, providing he is able to acknowledge that he has, and always will have, the disease. In order to save such texts, they must be confronted, their troublesome nature must be truthfully characterized, and they must be branded for life. Only then will they be able to serve a useful function within the life of the community. . . . The reality is that they are a part of our tradition whether we like it or not. Thus to extricate them from the canon would be a massive dishonesty. In condemning them, we must own them. As participants in the Judeo-Christian tradition, we are responsible for these texts, just as the good family takes responsibility for the alcoholic uncle. In order to mitigate the damage these texts can do—the extent of which history has borne out—we must keep these texts close to us. Casual dismissals of the Crusades and of missionary colonialism as aberrations of the faith fail to take responsibility for the complicity of our scriptures in such moral atrocities. The true modern-day Marcions are those who refuse to take responsibility for the Bible’s role in the violent expansion of Western civilization.
My metaphor is perfectly apt. It’s Burk’s own metaphor that doesn’t fit; and that’s why it doesn’t appear in my book. He clearly just can’t understand the words I wrote (what does that say about his ability to interpret texts he doesn’t like in general?). I’m not suggesting that we should “admire” these morally problematic texts, like “asking an abused wife to admire her abusive husband.” I’m saying we must confront these texts for what they are, but that we must also take responsibility for them, because they’re part of us whether we like it or not. That doesn’t mean we allow them to abuse us, as per Burk’s ridiculous metaphor. On the contrary, I’m saying that they have been abusing us. They’ve been abusing our intellect, our moral integrity, abusing our politics and abusing the Other through us. What I’m calling for is for us to stop letting these texts abuse us, to confront them, but also to allow them to remain as reminders to us that we are always capable of being the abusers. How hard is that to understand? Apparently for Burk, it’s very difficult. In reality, the real abusive husbands in this scenario are the inerrantist pastors and apologists who tell those who are struggling with these morally monstrous texts to suck it up and deal with it. I’ve seen this kind of spiritual abuse over and over and over again, and I’ve seen its devastating effects on Christians all too often. And God damn it, I’ve had enough. Haven’t you?
Burk continues with a final bout of nonsense: “In the end—even though he does not say so in so many words—Stark himself has given up on the Bible.” Actually, if he had been paying attention, exactly the opposite is the case. My position is marked rather by a stanch refusal to give up on the Bible. What I have actually given up on is the debilitating and demoralizing fundamentalist approach to the Bible.
Burk continues: “He confesses that he rejects monotheism and the substitutionary atonement of Christ and that he is not in any sense an orthodox Christian (242).”
No, I have not rejected monotheism. It’s just that Burk has rejected basic reading comprehension. I did not state that I have rejected the substitutionary atonement of Christ; I simply was critical of a bastard but popular version of the biblical doctrine. I understand the doctrine rooted in its Jewishness, not in a medieval Anselmian sense, and I quite like it actually, when properly understood. And I did not say that I was “not in any sense an orthodox Christian.” I said that I am not an orthodox Christian, because no such thing exists—a point obviously lost on Burk.
Burk continues: “We have to conclude that Stark’s approach is less a reading of Scripture than it is a raging against it.”
I agree that Burk has to conclude this. But he doesn’t have to conclude this because it’s true; he has to conclude this because he read a very different book from the one I wrote. It’s his own fundamentalist paradigm that forces him to see things this way. But of course, take a look at the blurbs by all the Christians in the first pages of my book, and on the back, and it’s clear that the Christians there don’t share Burk’s opinion about the nature of my reading of Scripture. I do not “rage against” the Bible. I love the Bible; and because I love it, I am compelled to confront the problematic texts within it, while also being compelled to keep those selfsame problematic texts very close to me, for my own benefit.
Burk continues: “Stark loathes the God of the Bible and filters out any depiction of God in Scripture that does not fit into the Stark moral universe. Stark stands over Scripture as its judge. Indeed, his hermeneutic requires it. And he wants readers to join him in his cynical scrutiny of the Bible. The shortcomings of The Human Faces of God, however, are extensive and serious, and there are more than enough reasons for readers not to follow Stark down the dead-end trail that he is walking.”
More cynical waste and distortion. Burk should really be ashamed of himself for writing such a terrible book review. I don’t loathe the God of the Bible. Once again, there are many depictions of God in the Bible, and many of them I absolutely love, many I approve of while they make me yet very uncomfortable, and many of them I condemn, out of zeal for God and justice, which must be the same thing, if God is to be worthy of any praise. And yes, with Gregory, and Origen, and C. S. Lewis, and so many other Christians, there are times when we must stand in judgment over certain parts of the Bible. As Lewis said:
Yes. On my view one must apply something of the same sort of explanation to, say, the atrocities (and treacheries) of Joshua. I see the grave danger we run by doing so; but the dangers of believing in a God whom we cannot but regard as evil, and then, in mere terrified flattery calling Him ‘good’ and worshiping Him, is still greater danger. The ultimate question is whether the doctrine of the goodness of God or that of the inerrancy of Scriptures is to prevail when they conflict. I think the doctrine of the goodness of God is the more certain of the two. Indeed, only that doctrine renders this worship of Him obligatory or even permissible.
To this some will reply ‘ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognize good when we see it.’ But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: ‘Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?’ — ‘What fault hath my people found in me?’ And so on. Socrates’ answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham’s, Paley’s) leads to an absurdity. If ‘good’ means ‘what God wills’ then to say ‘God is good’ can mean only ‘God wills what he wills.’ Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.
I happen to stand in a long and serious tradition of Christians who take the Bible seriously by refusing to allow its worst texts to deform our moral integrity as agents of God. Burk thinks that I have “failed” to provide an alternative to his fundamentalism, but all that means is that I have failed to provide a fundamentalist alternative to fundamentalism. He thinks that not many Christians will or ought to follow me on this road. I’m of course following my forebears, going back to the great debaters in the Bible itself: Job, Qohelet, Amos, the author of Jonah, Jesus of Nazareth, and so on. And Burk may not realize it because he lives in a fundamentalist bubble, but when it comes to Christians, my ilk have his ilk outnumbered. Neither of course is he aware of the literally hundreds of emails and messages I’ve received from Christians who have affirmed their solidarity with me or thanked me for helping them salvage a faith crumbling under the oppressive weight of fundamentalist Evangelicalism. And while my faith was never so much in jeopardy as the many I’ve encountered wandering near this road, I too owe a debt to my forebears who have preceded me on it, who have lit this terrifying and oft times ambiguous path with lamps of unflinching candor. If it were a choice between the God of Denny Burk and no God at all, then it would be out of zeal for God that I would proclaim myself an atheist. Fortunately, as the majority of us realize, this sacred world ain’t so goddamned black and white.
Moo, “What Does It Mean Not To Teach or Have Authority over Men?” in Piper and Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (Wheaton: Crossway, 1991), pp. 184. [↩]
Mike Warren has written a response to my response, which is quite extensive. It is full of his standard confusions, obfuscations, ignorance, etc., but I’ve responded to a large bulk of his material. Below is a chapter outline of his latest response. I’ve included an asterisk next to the parts to which I’ve responded in this post. I’ve been working on this bit by bit for several months, but I’ve just been too preoccupied with other ventures to give it the attention it doesn’t deserve. What I’ve included should suffice to show that Warren’s general penchant is to find any way possible to ignore the relevant facts and to obfuscate the facts he does address. I may or may not at some time in the future finish responding to the remainder of his material. To be honest, the confusion is so entrenched, knowing where to begin responding often results in dizziness. I’ve offered a complete response to the first seven of Warren’s fifteen chapters. (Note: I haven’t proofread this, so be forgiving of any typos.)
Part 2: Review of Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God
By Mike Warren
• Why Inerrancy is Important (*)
• Resolving Apparent Contradictions and the Liberal Assumption of THOMAS (*)
• Some Minor Disputes About Church History (*)
• Ezra’s Divorce Command (*)
• Pesher vs. Historical-Grammatical Interpretation (*)
• Child Sacrifice Commanded by Yahweh? (*)
• Jesus’ Prediction of the Destruction of Jerusalem (*)
• Polytheism Taught in the Bible and Liberal Bias
• Circularity and Inerrancy
• Archeology vs. the Bible
• Christianity as the Basis for Science
• The Morality of Israel’s Holy War
• The Foundations of Morality: The God of the Bible or Human (Modern Liberal) Consensus?
• Mr. Stark’s Jesus as Savior and Lord
• An Infallible Jesus vs. a Human Jesus
Why Inerrancy is Important
Why bother defending the claim of inerrancy? Why can’t we say that the Bible is God’s word but with errors?” I have seen this question raised by several liberals who have commented on Mr. Stark’s book, as well as being raised by Mr. Stark himself in his book. Here is a brief answer: Inerrancy follows from the Biblical doctrine of God. The type of God presented in the Bible must be an infallible God. He is the all-knowing Creator of all that exists who “works all things by the council of his will” (Eph. 1:11). It’s impossible for that kind of God to be mistaken about any facts, even the most insignificant historical fact. There is nothing more ultimate than God that would surprise him with new facts. He determines the denotation and connotation of all facts. I could write at length on the Bible’s teaching on this.
Yes. I have no argument with this. I never argued that God could be mistaken.
But Mr. Stark claims that this view of God is a “purely philosophical assumption” that has “no rootage in the Bible” (p. 47).
No, again. That’s not what I argued. Warren is attacking a straw man. What I argued is that it does not follow from divine inspiration that the Bible must necessarily be without error. This is the philosophical assumption that Warren and other inerrantists impose without justification.
Mr. Stark’s claim [is?] that the Bible teaches that Yahweh is just one finite god among a number of other similar gods (at least at the beginning; he says that later in the Bible the view of God as absolute becomes prominent).
This has nothing to do with my statement that inerrancy does not follow necessarily from inspiration. This is a distraction, based, apparently, on Warren’s confusion.
I deal with this objection below. Infallibility would not make sense in terms of Mr. Stark’s kind of god. Given his view of God as a finite being that was given birth by the universe, it makes sense that Mr. Stark cannot make sense of the doctrine of inerrancy.
My “view of God as a finite being that was given birth by the universe”? Say what? Warren is concocting this position out of whole cloth. Nowhere did I indicate that my view of God even remotely resembles this. More straw men from Warren.
But even if the Bible does teach that Yahweh is an absolute Creator, you may still ask, “Why believe in an absolute Creator? Even if the Bible teaches it, why should I find that attractive?” The answer to that is that an absolute Creator is the precondition for intelligible experience. If an absolute God did not exist, then reason, ethics, and knowledge would not be possible. Science and language would not be possible. Those who deny such a God can still reason, act ethically and gain knowledge to varying degrees, but their belief system cannot justify it. They can only do these things because the God that they deny actually exists, and they are made in God’s image. For more on this, you’ll have to see my essay here.
I’ll ignore the fact that this is nonsense, and just point out that it has nothing to do with criticism of my book.
Even though God could not be mistaken, the question must be asked whether God could deceive or deliberately allow a deception. Since God is absolute Truth, God could not lie or command something evil. If God allowed a deception, we would expect that the deception would be in the service of promoting the truth somehow, as in a means for bringing destruction on those who reject God. And that is what we find in Scripture, as with the lying spirit sent to King Ahab’s prophets (1 Kings 22:19-23; cf. 2 Thess. 2:11-12).
Note the equivocation. First, Warren refers to God “allowing” a deception. Then he goes on to cite 1 Kgs 22:19-23 and 2 Thess 2:11-12. But in both of those cases the text does not say that God “allowed” people to be deceived. Both texts state expressly that the deception originates from God Godself. It wasn’t that a lying spirit decided to go deceive the Israelite King—the text says that God sent the lying spirit to accomplish God’s own purpose. The same is true in 2 Thess 2:11-12. If I send an agent to do something on my behalf, I am responsible for what the agent does. If I hire a hitman to kill somebody, that doesn’t mean I’m not a murderer. In the same way, if God sends a lying spirit to lie, then God (at least sometimes) lies. It’s quite elementary.
Mr. Stark attempts to prove that for several hundred years God deceived Israel, the nation that he chose to be his holy possession and to give his holy law, by commanding them in his holy law to engage in human sacrifice, even though God would later declare this practice to be most unholy.
No, I don’t attempt to prove that. Warren mischaracterizes my argument. My position isn’t that this is what God did. My position is that this is what the text says God did, but the text was written by Ezekiel, and this is simply his strategy for condemning the institution of human sacrifice in Israel. I don’t argue that this is what God really did; my argument is simply that one cannot claim to be a bible-believing Christian and assert that God doesn’t lie. The Bible clearly says that God lies. Hence, inerrancy terminates in a paradox.
Beyond contradicting God’s nature as absolute Truth, I show below why his argument fails in the exegetical context.
First, note the assumption underwriting Warren’s objection here. The text cannot say that God lies, because God is absolute truth. How do we know that God is absolute truth? Because the text tells us so. The effect this has on Warren is that he has to lie to himself about what the text says in order to preserve his belief that the Bible is without error in everything that it affirms.
As for the infallibility of the human authors, when it comes to this issue Mr. Stark and his crowd have a stronger view of man’s depravity than Calvinists do.
Yeah, no.
They claim that human fallibility prevents prophets from recording God’s message with verbatim accuracy.
Nope. Not what I claimed. Again, Warren has to mischaracterize my argument in order to defeat it. I never did nor would I ever claim that human fallibility prevents prophets or anyone else from writing something without errors. I write documents that do not contain errors all the time, as does Warren. A secretary taking dictation will usually produce an error free transcript of a superior’s words. So, contrary to Warren’s deceptive portrayal of my argument, no, I did not argue that a human is incapable of hearing from God and copying accurately. My claim was merely that, if we believe in free will (which Warren does not, at least not in the sense that I do), it is God who is restrained from preventing error when God’s agents write scripture. And here I do not mean that God is restrained by lack of power, but that God is restrained by God’s own choice, which is a choice rooted in God’s own character.
The Calvinist doctrine of total depravity does not mean that people are as evil as possible. It means that all aspects of man’s life involve rebellion against God. The Bible affirms that unbelievers can act in accordance with God’s law (Rom. 2:14-16). The image of God was marred with the Fall, but it was not totally erased. As the opening chapters of Genesis show, God made man to be in communication with God, and the Creator did not become unable to communicate with his creatures as a result of the Fall.
All of this is attacking a straw man.
There is no reason that God cannot communicate exactly what he wants to be said through humans who are “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).
I agree. God is not restrained in God’s ability to communicate clearly.
God is able to suppress human sinfulness in order to have humans proclaim his message exactly as God intends it to be proclaimed (e.g. Balaam, Num. 22-24).
No. Balaam is not evidence in support of this claim. Within the context of the piece of literature here, Balaam chose to do what Yahweh asked. Why? Because he was afraid of Yahweh. Balaam could have chosen to lie, but he didn’t—at least not in this case, according to the narrative (written by a human who may or may not have been making the whole thing up to begin with).
Their inspired writings can even reflect their unique personalities, because their personalities are created by God.
Sure, Warren. Their personalities are created by God, not by genetics, social conditions, life experiences, personal decisions. (Of course, for Warren who is a Calvinist, God personally orchestrated all of this stuff anyway. So this is where it does neither of us any good to argue this point. Warren believes God controls everything that happens; I—and the majority of Christians in the world—don’t.)
Because there is a God who is sovereign over all of his creation, the Bible does not have to be “dropped from heaven” to be inerrant, contrary to Mr. Stark (p.67).
Another straw man. I never said it had to be dropped from heaven in order to be inerrant. I said that this is effectively what the doctrine of inerrancy amounts to. I’m well aware that inerrantists make room for individual authors’ personalities, but, as Warren has made clear he believes, even their personalities were designed by God, which makes my statements that “the doctrine of inerrancy claims that the Bible was, in effect, dropped from heaven” (emphasis added), perfectly appropriate.
Resolving Apparent Contradictions and the Liberal Assumption of THOMAS
Before I begin with my responses to Mr. Stark’s comments about my review, I need to address one of the claims that he makes in his book that I didn’t mention in my previous review. It’s best to bring it up now because it illustrates a difference between Mr. Stark’s liberal, skeptical approach to the Bible and a conservative, inerrantist approach, and it’s a difference that runs throughout his criticisms of the Bible.
Mr. Stark claims that David didn’t really kill Goliath. He claims that the story found in 1 Samuel 17 was inserted later, and yet Mr. Stark says that the truth of what happened can still be found in the same book.
So far so good.
2 Samuel 21:19 says that an obscure soldier named Elhanan killed Goliath. A very plausible resolution to this contradiction is in terms of minor scribal error.
No, it is not at all plausible, let alone “very plausible.”
Mr. Stark explains much of it himself. 2 Samuel 21:19 contains an “untranslatable marker indicating that the direct object of the verb is about to follow” (p. 156). This occurs right before the word “Goliath.” Yet, as Mr. Stark explains, “with just a jot and a tittle’s difference (literally), we get the word meaning ‘brother of.'” It’s easy to see how 2 Samuel 21:19 could have originally said that Elhanan killed the brother of Goliath, but a copyist missed writing the jot and tittle so that “brother of” became the accusative marker.
No, it is not “easy to see” this, for all the reasons I provided, with which Warren will attempt (and fail) to dispense presently.
But Mr. Stark doesn’t see that this slight difference could be used to resolve the contradiction.
This is humorous. How is it that I “don’t see” the very position against which I am arguing?
Showing his bias, he assumes that the accusative marker was original and “the brother of,” as the account at 1 Chronicles 20:5 reads, was added by a devious redactor rather than dropped by mistake.
More humor from Warren. That I see the definite direct object marker as original is not due to any “bias” Warren thinks I possess; rather, it’s due to all the reasons I offered, which include the contradictions between the stories in 1 Sam 16 and 17 respectively, the utter implausibility of a Philistine giant being given a Semitic name when the Philistine language was not Semitic, and when none of his brothers or fellow Philistine giants had Semitic names, and the fact that we know Elhanan’s father was from Bethlehem from elsewhere in the book of Samuel. But if we ignore all of the reasons I gave, we can then conclude that I choose to see a contradiction here because I’m blinded by my liberal bias.
When faced with an alteration that makes the text contradictory, and an equally easy alteration that removes the contradiction, Mr. Stark chooses the scenario that makes the text contradictory.
When faced with a patent contradiction in the Bible, Warren chooses rather to believe that those who point it out must have a personal investment in defaming the Bible.
Then Mr. Stark goes on to criticize a resolution offered by Gleason Archer. Archer argues that 1 Chronicles 20:5 is the original reading. This verse is very similar to 2 Samuel 21:19, but 1 Chronicles 20:5 has Elhanan slaying the “brother of Goliath,” like 2 Samuel 21:19 probably originally read, and rather than identifying Elhanan as a “Bethlehemite,” the “Beth” part of the word is dropped and the verse reads like the second part of the word, “Lahmi,” is the name of the brother of Goliath. Archer speculates that the “Beth” in 2 Samuel 21:19 was added by a copyist to make the word “Bethlehemite.” But this view has problems that Mr. Stark points out, like that “Lahmi” is not known to be anyone’s name, and it is a Semitic word, not a Philistine (Indo-European) word. Contrary to Archer, it makes more sense to say that “Bethlehemite” is the correct reading, and the “Beth” in 1 Chronicles 20:5 was mistakenly skipped by a copyist at some point to make that word into “Lahmi” (another very slight change is the difference). So I would say that the best explanation is that both of these parallel passages have a copyist error, with the errors being at different points for each verse.
So Warren accepts my criticism of Archer (and the rest of the inerrantists) that “Lachmi” could not have been the name of a Philistine giant. What he proposes then, interestingly, is that the hypothetical original text read, “And Elhanan the son of Jaar the Bethlehemite slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite.” In short, Warren argues that the text says that Elhanan slew an unnamed Philistine giant. Is this hypothetical reconstruction grammatically possible? Yes. Is it grammatically and literarily plausible? Not at all. Of course, inerrantist interpreters, as I’ve shown, aren’t interested in what’s plausible as long as an inerrant reading is possible. I’m reminded of Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber.
“What are my chances?”
“Not good.”
“You mean ‘not good’ like one out of a hundred?”
“I’d say, more like one out of a million.”
. . .
“So you’re telling me there’s a chance! . . . YEAH!”
Here’s why Warren’s reconstruction isn’t at all plausible.
(1) The definite direct object marker is used in both verses 17 and 18 in reference to the slaying of the Philistine giants Ishbibenob and Saph, by Abishai and Sibbechai respectively. But in Warren’s reconstruction of verse 19, there would be no definite direct object marker preceding the identification of the giant slain by Elhanan. In every case here, where a proper or definite noun follows a transitive verb, it is preceded by the object marker. This alone is instructive, but not determinative.
(2) Although the definite direct object marker does not appear before every proper and definite noun in biblical Hebrew, the vast majority of the time an accusative proper noun or definite noun is preceded by the object marker. Thus, probabilistically speaking, we would expect to see it here (as we do, but not in Warren’s reconstruction).
(3) If verse 19 did not have the definite direct object marker (as in Warren’s hypothetical reconstruction), it would be a very poorly written sentence. Of course, God’s perfect Word is not without its grammatical problems, but the author of Samuel was quite competent in his Hebrew. The reason it would be a very poorly written sentence is because the subject of the clause consists of a very long construct-chain. Literally, it reads like this: “and slew Elhanan son of Jaar-oregim the Bethlehemite Goliath the Gittite” or (on Warren’s rewriting), “and slew Elhanan son of Jaar-oregim the Bethlehemite the brother of Goliath the Gittite.” Without the direct object marker, this sentence is very awkward. One reason the object marker is there in the actual text is to establish the break definitively between the lengthy nominative construct-chain and the direct object. That’s why the Chronicler (in his own rewriting of the text) retained the object marker by changing the bet (from Bethlehem) into an ‘et (the object marker). The sentence begs for an object marker. If it didn’t beg for one, the Chronicler could have just dropped the object marker along with the word directly preceding it (“oregim”), which he did drop. A little reading knowledge of Hebrew goes a long way.
(4) Warren is arguing for a reading of the text that is preserved by neither 2 Samuel nor 1 Chronicles. Rather than one or the other preserving the right reading, according to Warren, both are wrong. Warren has created a third text (which exists in his mind). Inerrantists, when confronted with patent contradictions, are forever making these magical appeals to “copyist errors.” They can do this because often there is no way to prove them definitively wrong, even if their reconstructions lack any degree of plausibility. That’s fine with them, because if the reading is inerrant, it is to them more plausible than any other reading that is not inerrant. Here is where their faith introduces itself into the hermeneutical process.
One thing we can say for sure, in Warren’s favor, is that he stands within the tradition of the Chronicler, in that he has no problem rewriting the text to suit his own needs.
Mr. Stark agrees with Archer that “Lahmi” is the original reading of 1 Chronicles 20:5, but claims that the absurdity of the name is proof that the author was making up history for the purpose of political manipulation.
I offered another alternative to political manipulation, namely, piety. But yes, it is clear that the Chronicler altered the text. Perhaps the Chronicler just thought he was correcting his source. Nothing deceptive in that scenario. I’m fine with that. But in any case, the Chronicler’s solution was wrong.
Ignoring the possibility of innocent copyist error in both of the parallel passages, Mr. Stark offers this scenario: The story of the future king David killing Goliath was added after David had reigned in order to enhance his image and the political power of his supporters. The author of Chronicles saw that 1 Samuel 17 contradicted 2 Samuel 21:19, so he attempted to fix things by making “Bethlehemite” into the name “Lahmi.”
Warren here fails to mention the other relevant arguments. For instance, it’s not just that 1 Sam 17 contradicts 2 Sam 21:19; remember, 1 Sam 17 also contradicts 1 Sam 16. Both contain a story narrating how David first entered Saul’s court. I discuss this at length in my book, but here Warren gives the reader the impression that my case hangs solely on the discrepancy between 2 Sam 21 and 1 Chron 20. It does not. He will address 1 Sam 16 and 17 below, and I’ll respond when he does.
But if this scenario were true, then the author of Chronicles was a moron, and so were the original redactors who inserted the story of David killing Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 without fixing the “true” account in 2 Samuel 21:19.
Wrong! False dichotomy. We’ll get to why this is a false dichotomy shortly.
As Mr. Stark points out, 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel were originally one book, which would mean that the political schemers who added the myth of David killing Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 were too inept to fix the true account in the same book.
Nope. That’s not what it would mean.
All the author of Chronicles or other scribes had to so was add the jot and tittle to the untranslated marker to make it into “the brother of.” But no, the author of Chronicles leaves the contradiction in Samuel, and makes up a name for Goliath’s brother that no one has ever heard of, and which doesn’t make sense in the Philistine language, and which wasn’t necessary to fix the contradiction.
Boy this is confused. First, how does Warren suppose that the author of Chronicles would know what does or doesn’t make sense in the Philistine language when the author of Chronicles lived centuries after the Philistines had disintegrated as a people? That’s a head-scratcher.
Second, the name was necessary to fix the contradiction, because without it he would lose the direct object marker, rendering the sentence too awkward and uncharacteristic to have been correct.
Third, the fact that two different books have two different versions of the same sentence, each with a significantly different meaning, gives serious weight to the consensus position that something was wrong with the original. That both preserved accounts contain two different copyist errors, each of which changes the meaning of the sentence considerably, is just a desperate hypothesis. That would be a coincidence with a probability of astronomical proportions. The simplest and by far the most plausible explanation is that the account in Samuel was the original, and that the Chronicler intentionally changed it, motivated either by piety, politics, or the assumption that his source was in error.
And this was a time when all of his readers spoke Hebrew as their native tongue, and at least some of them would have known the Philistine language.
Nope. The Philistines no longer existed. By this time they had already been entirely absorbed into the Babylonian and Persian empires.
And, yes, while all of his readers spoke Hebrew, not all Hebrews could read. In fact, the vast majority could not. And at this stage, anyone who could would have shared the Chronicler’s pro-Davidic slant, as would the illiterate populace. If any Jews at this time didn’t share the Chronicler’s pro-Davidic slant, well, they wouldn’t have had access to his book, not being in his circle and all.
The falsehood perpetrated by the author of Chronicles would have been obvious.
Not in the slightest. Not when the legend of David’s slaughter of Goliath was so popular, and not when the vast majority of the people knew little more than how to spell their own names.
But Mr. Stark thinks that it is more reasonable to assume that they were all morons.
Yeah, this is a deliberate lie on Warren’s part. He knows this isn’t what I think, because he’ll attempt to engage what I actually think below. Warren is very adept at concocting straw men based upon his pet false dichotomies, but now we see that his straw men aren’t always created based upon a misunderstanding of me or on his own confusion. In this case, Warren is lying. We’ll see this clearly in a little while.
Mr. Stark says that the insertion of the story of David killing Goliath is like the myth of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and then confessing to his father, as first published in Mason Locke Weems’ biography of Washington that was published a year after Washington’s death. But the scenario that Mr. Stark imagines happened to the story of David and Goliath is more like Weems’ including the story of Washington cutting down the cherry tree in his book, and also saying later in the same book that the gardener had cut down that same cherry tree. If Weems would have thought that this would convince people that Washington cut down the cherry tree, he would have been a moron. And anyone who read the book that included both the fable and the truth, and still believed the fable, would also be a moron.
Someone here may be a moron, but it’s not any of Warren’s hypothetical characters. This is a false analogy, because while Weems’ biography of Washington was written by one author (Weems), the book of Samuel is composite, and was composed as it is preserved today over the course several generations. Moreover, Warren’s false dichotomy presumes that Samuel always took the same shape wherever it appeared. It further presumes that anyone who spotted the contradiction couldn’t have said, “Well, the account of Elhanan must be wrong.” It presumes that such readers would have had the expectation that the book of Samuel must be inerrant, which is a bad presumption. Warren’s false dichotomy just presumes a lot of things that are entirely without warrant, and display nothing more than the poverty of Warren’s education in ancient literature. More on this below.
Even Mr. Stark observes, “One would think these conflicting accounts would have been problematic, potentially tarnishing David’s reputation. One would think someone would have noticed” (p. 154). At least a few people would have noticed, unless they were all morons.
Nice to see that Warren isn’t above stopping a quotation just short of the sentence that undermines his caricature of my position. Immediately after the portion Warren quotes, I write, “Well, in fact, someone did notice. The Chronicler noticed.” I never said no one noticed. And my position never entailed that anyone was a moron. That’s, again, Warren’s false dichotomy, based on his uninformed expectations of the aesthetics of ancient texts, as I’ll discuss below.
And continuing with the Weems analogy, rather than fixing the contradiction in the Weems biography, another author attempts to fix the problem by writing a second biography of Washington in which the gardener cuts down a cherry tree by the driveway, not the cherry tree by the back porch that Washington cut down; and he adds a further alteration of the story that wasn’t necessary and doesn’t make sense by saying that the cherry tree by the driveway was called the “lahmi cherrytree.” “Lahmi,” the Hebrew word for “my bread,” is a name that no one has ever heard a cherry tree being called and makes no sense as a name for a cherry tree. What a moron! (It would make more sense to say that “lahmi” was a typo by the second biography’s publisher, maybe for the word “lame” or some other similar word, rather than a moronic attempt at deception.) Furthermore, the first biography with the true story and the false one that contradicts it remains in circulation, so people will continue to read both biographies and can see that the accounts contradict each other. This is the scenario that Mr. Stark offers as the most plausible explanation for the different accounts in the Bible of who killed Goliath.
Well, no it’s not the scenario I offer as the most plausible explanation. It’s a ridiculous scenario that Warren has concocted because he doesn’t understand how this literature was transmitted in the ancient world. Warren presumes that the book of Samuel was in “circulation,” when in reality there would have been very few copies, and they all would have been locked up in rooms by the minority elite class. They weren’t “circulating” at this stage.
He further presumes that the Chronicler had access to “the book of Samuel.” Well, he might have. But it may just be that he only had access to the same royal records from which the book of Samuel was composed. Regardless, if there were multiple copies of the book of Samuel (either in circulation as Warren ignorantly claims or, in actual fact, in the possession of a few elite scribal groups, locked away in a “vault”), what good would it do the Chronicler to change his copy of the book of Samuel? None whatsoever. But, what the Chronicler was more than capable of doing was keeping Samuel in the vault and reading his version to the people. The people didn’t have access to these books. Only the elite did. Warren’s portrait isn’t clearly distinguished from the post-Gutenberg world. But in the actual ancient world (not the one in Warren’s imagination), the elite controlled what texts were read to the populace, and when they were read, if they were read to them at all (which would have been rare). Warren’s humorous caricature of the scenario just doesn’t reflect the reality.
Warren’s false dichotomy also refuses to allow that ancient people just didn’t have Warren’s post-Enlightenment aesthetic sensibilities. But in oral cultures, multiple versions of stories circulated. That was their world. Warren doesn’t understand it because it’s not his world. That’s understandable, but not excusable for someone trying to engage in biblical studies.
Finally, Warren himself feels competent enough to tell us what the Bible really said, despite what it says in the two contradictory accounts we have preserved, but apparently he doesn’t think that any ancient readers would be clever enough (at least as clever as he is) to harmonize the texts in their own minds, like he’s done. No, in Warren’s world, either the books don’t contradict each other, or everyone who touched them (whether to read them or to write them) was a moron.
Rather than the plausible explanation of minor scribal error, Mr. Stark prefers the explanation of a convoluted tale of moronic political intrigue.
No, I prefer my actual position, the one Warren can’t seem to wrap his brain around.
If a copyist simply left off the jot and tittle that made the word “brother of,” and we still find the error in our extant copies, this shows that the copyists were so concerned about copying the holy scripture accurately that, after the error had been made, they kept copying it the same way, rather than messing with the text in a way that would have been very easy in order to resolve the contradiction or push a political agenda.
Well, if Warren knew the first thing about Jewish scribal traditions, he’d know that scribes fixed copyist errors all the time. So this argument is another diversion from reality.
There are a couple of other arguments that Mr. Stark offers to prove his case about the David and Goliath story. He points out that in 1 Samuel 16, Saul writes to David’s father Jesse to get permission for David to be employed by the king to play the harp and be his armor-bearer; but in chapter 17, which describes David’s defeat of Goliath, Saul has to ask whose son David is. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that Saul had forgotten who David’s father was by the time of David’s defeat of Goliath. The permission letter sent to Jesse probably wasn’t written by Saul himself. A king would most likely have had a secretary write the letter (one of the servants of Saul mentioned in 1 Sam. 16:15-22), and Saul would have simply stamped his seal on it before a messenger took it off for delivery. (The same secretary probably had to remind Saul of all of his wives’ anniversaries and his kids’ birthdays as well because he could never remember them.) While it’s not unreasonable for the king not to have remembered the name of the father of a young musician and armor-bearer in his employment, the name of David’s father became very important after the defeat of Goliath because Saul had promised his daughter’s hand in marriage to whoever defeated Goliath (1 Sam. 17:25), which brings the hero’s family into the royal family.
Warren again seeks to win an argument by failing to engage my actual argument. Here Warren only discusses the issue of whether Saul would have remembered David’s father’s name. But that’s not the real issue. Yes, it’s perfectly plausible that Saul would forget who David’s father was. What’s not plausible is that Saul would forget who David was! And that’s what is clearly going on here. Warren totally ignores my actual argument. So I don’t have to repeat myself, I’ll just quote my actual argument straight from the book. It will quickly become obvious that, in order to give his reader’s the impression he has resolved the contradiction between the two accounts, Warren has responded only selectively to my argument, and in fact, the one part he responded to was expressly the least important part of the argument:
The independent nature of 1 Samuel 17 is also clear from the obvious discontinuity between 1 Sam 16:21–22 and 1 Sam 17:55–58. In the former passage we learn that “David came to Saul, and entered his service. Saul had considerable affection for David, and David became Saul’s armor-bearer. Saul sent a messenger to Jesse, saying, ‘Allow David to remain in my service, for he has found favor in my sight.’” As you can see, Saul clearly has intimate knowledge of David, including knowledge of his family background. Yet in chapter 17, after “Saul saw David go up against the Philistine, he said to Abner (his military commander ), ‘Abner, this boy—whose son is he?’ Abner said, ‘King, As your soul lives, I do not know.’ The king said, ‘Find out whose son the youngster is.’ When David returned from slaying the Philistine, Abner took him and brought him to Saul, with the Philistine’s head in his hand. Saul asked him, ‘Who is your father, boy?’ And David answered, ‘I am the son of your servant Jesse, from Bethlehem.’”
The disparity is obvious. In chapter 16, prior to the events of chapter 17, Saul has intimate knowledge of David and has singled him out as one favored among his servants. Yet in chapter 17, Saul not only does not know who David’s father is, he does not even know who David is. It cannot be the case that Saul simply did not recognize David until he summoned him, because Saul and David spoke, at some length, just prior to David’s going out against Goliath (17:31–40). Gleason Archer, an avowed inerrantist, attempts to resolve this contradiction by arguing that Saul is not inquiring about David’s identity in 17:55–58, but only that of David’s father. However, Archer’s explanation fails to convince for a number of reasons. First, when David is initially suggested to Saul in 16:18, David is commended to Saul as “a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite.” Saul then proceeds to dispatch messengers to Jesse in order to request David’s service (16:19). After David came into Saul’s service and Saul developed a strong fondness for David (16:21), Saul sent messengers again to Jesse, asking him to allow David to remain in his service more permanently (16:22). Are we really to believe that Saul did not know the identity of David’s father in 17:55?
More problematic still is Archer’s basic claim that the issue in 17:55–58 is not David’s identity but Jesse’s. In the ancient world, a person’s identity was not distinguishable from their lineage. This is why when David was first suggested to Saul in 16:18, David is not named but simply referred to as “a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite.” Thus, when Saul inquires as to David’s lineage, this is actually an attempt to familiarize himself with David. Moreover, nowhere in 17:31–58 does Saul refer to David by name. He refers to him with language indicating their unfamiliarity, i.e., “boy.” Are we to believe this is the same “boy” who had recently found such favor in Saul’s sight?
It is obvious, therefore, that the story of David and Goliath was not an original part of the narrative of the book of Samuel. What we have in chapters 16 and 17 are two different (and conflicting) accounts of David’s initial entrance into Saul’s court. The account in chapter 17, the more ostentatious of the two, was a later addition.
Warren ignored everything I argued about the fact that Saul did not recognize David, and just made it an issue of Saul remembering David’s father. According to 1 Sam 16, “Saul had considerable affection for David.” But when we come to 1 Sam 17, Saul converses with David face-to-face prior to David’s battle with Goliath, referring to David merely as “boy,” and then when the battle was over, Saul had to ask Abner who David was. The discrepancy is patent to all but the devoted innerantist.
Warren’s debate tactics are both underhanded and transparent.
Mr. Stark also argues that 1 Samuel 17:54 is an anachronism because it says that David took Goliath’s head to Jerusalem, yet “at this time, the people of Israel had no relationship to Jerusalem; it was still under the control of the Jebusites. According to the book of Samuel, it would be many years before David conquered Jerusalem (see 2 Sam. 5:6-9)” (p. 153). But the people of Israel did have a relationship with Jerusalem at this time in that Israelites lived there even though they had not conquered it. When the Israelites initially invaded the land, Jebusites maintained control of the city of Jerusalem, yet Israelites lived with them in the city (Joshua 15:63; Judges 1:21). If 2 Samuel 5:6-9contradicts 1 Samuel 17:54 (again, the same book!), as Mr. Stark claims, the redactor and his comrades must have been pretty careless in carrying out their political scheme of creating government propaganda, or too stupid to see the contradiction.
More confusion from Warren. First, note that in Joshua 15, it is the Judahites who fail to drive out the Jebusites in Jerusalem, but in Judg 1:21, it is the Benjamites who fail to drive out the Jebusites in Jerusalem. One text says that the people of Judah live among the Jebusites in Jerusalem “to this day.” The other says that the people of Benjamin live among the Jebusites in Jerusalem “to this day.” Are we really to believe that the Jebusites successfully defended the city of Jerusalem against two separate attacks from two different tribes, and then opened their gates to their enemies and allowed them to live with them from then on? Joshua 15:63 says that the people of Judah were unable to drive them out. It doesn’t say that they chose not to drive them out. It says they were unable to do so. If they had really conquered the city, then why were they unable to drive them out? If they didn’t conquer the city, then why would the Jebusites turn around and say, “OK, enemies, come on in and live among us”? This is utterly implausible.
These historical problems reflect the aetiological nature of these two contrasting accounts. They are meant, on the one hand, to explain the persisting existence of the Jebusites at the time of the writing of Joshua and Judges (i.e., about the sixth century BCE, several centuries after even David’s time), and, on the other hand, to play into the narrative in which all of the land now possessed by Israel was in some way acquired during Joshua’s conquest. It is a mythical portrait of conquest, and the reason the portrait needed to state that the Judahites/Benjamites were unable to drive the Jebusites out is because at the time this history was being written (again, sixth century BCE, not the thirteenth century when it is set), the Jebusites were still there living in the city.
The actual earliest account of Israel’s conquest of Jerusalem is in 2 Samuel 5:6-9, and there it is David (not Joshua, and not the tribes of Judah or Benjamin) who takes the city. Tellingly, in 2 Samuel 5:6-9, there is no mention whatsoever of an Israelite presence in the city. If there were Israelites living in the city, one would think the Jebusites would have used them as leverage when they were resisting David’s assault. But in 2 Samuel, no Israelite presence is mentioned. In fact, Jerusalem is only mentioned once in the book of Samuel prior to David’s conquest of the city in 2 Sam 5:6-9, and that’s in 1 Sam 17:54, which is, as I’ve argued, an anachronism.
The other thing to note is that, even if we were to concede (against all reason) that there was an Israelite presence in Jerusalem before David conquered it after he had ascended to the throne in Hebron, there’s still no reason why David would take Goliath’s head to Jerusalem when 1 Sam 17 says he did. At this time, David was part of Saul’s retinue. He would soon become Saul’s son-in-law. But Saul didn’t live in Jerusalem. Saul lived at Gibeah, and his domain did not extend to Jerusalem. David was from Bethlehem. If David lived with Saul, why on earth would he take Goliath’s head to the Jebusite city of Jerusalem? What nonsense. It’s an obvious anachronism. It’s probably a gloss, added even later than the story in 1 Samuel 17, which itself was a late addition to the book of Samuel.
The general principle that I am illustrating with Mr. Stark’s handling of the account of David and Goliath is how liberals think that it is reasonable to assume that the authors of the Bible were morons as a resolution to perceived difficulties in the text.
The only way Warren is able to “illustrate” this “general principle” is to incessantly put it on my lips in spite of the fact that my argument entails no such thing, nor does it need to. I do not think that the authors and redactors of scripture were morons just because there are discrepancies in the collection of texts that comprise the Bible, any more than I think any ancient author or redactor is a moron because of discrepancies in any ancient text. It’s just that I have a better understanding than does Warren of how ancient texts were produced and transmitted, and a better understanding than does Warren of the storytelling aesthetic of ancient oral cultures.
The normal rule followed for interpreting authors, followed at least since Aristotle taught it in his Poetics (Ch. XXV), is that one should be gracious enough not to conclude that an author has contradicted himself until every possible way to resolve the apparent contradiction has been exhausted.
Yes, this would apply to individual authors, but not to composite texts that have been handled by untold numbers of anonymous authors, compilers, and editors. Following Aristotle, I give Paul the benefit of the doubt that he doesn’t contradict himself in a single text. I’ll even give him the benefit of the doubt (at least initially) that he doesn’t contradict himself between multiple texts. Of course, we have to allow that there may be contradictions over multiple texts by a single author, given that most human beings tend to change their minds on things. And any reasonable person will allow that there may even be contradictions within a single text by a single author, without concluding that that author is therefore a “moron.” In fact, it would be moronic to come to that conclusion, but that’s the only alternative Warren sees (when it comes to biblical texts), other than sticking his fingers in his ears, closing his eyes, and shouting at the top of his lungs, “There are no contradictions!” But when it comes to texts that were composed over many generations, texts that are composite in nature, that have been handled by untold numbers of anonymous authors, compilers, and redactors, Aristotle’s hermeneutical principle becomes more of a hindrance to sound hermeneutics than a help. Does that mean we should be finding contradictions where there are none? No. Scholars have no trouble pointing out the thousands of cases where two biblical texts agree. Even “liberal” scholars have no trouble reconciling some apparent discrepancies in the Bible. But, because they have good sense, they don’t allow a precommitment to a doctrine of “inerrancy” prevent them from identifying actual contradictions where actual contradictions exist. Critical scholars treat the biblical texts the same way they treat any ancient text. It’s Warren and the other inerrantists who change the hermeneutical rules for the Bible, and the Bible only.
But modern liberals promote interpretations that make the Bible into a confused hodge-podge of stories stuck together by redactors trying to assert their political power over others in such a moronic way that they ignore blatant contradictions created by their cutting and pasting. They judge the plausibility of an interpretation without regard to whether it makes the author say contradictory things.
No they don’t. That is frequently a factor considered by “modern liberals” as they approach the texts. Warren just must not be reading them very much.
We might call this approach The Hermeneutic Of Morons Authoring Scripture, or THOMAS for short.
Brilliant. Use my name as an acronym for a straw man hermeneutic that neither I nor any of my “liberal” comrades employ.
Several other examples of THOMAS will be seen in Thom Stark’s treatment of other passages that I discuss below.
Warren is going to have to pull off the impossible here, since my argument never entails that the biblical writers and redactors are morons. He’s beating a straw man to death, because that’s all he’s got.
And I have picked only a few from his book since a critique of every error in his book would take a book itself.
Well, so far we’re yet to see a single one.
Now we get to the evidence that Warren has been lying this whole time when he claims that my position is that the biblical writers and redactors were morons. He quotes one of my blog posts which explicitly explains that my arguments do not entail this conclusion at all:
In a response to a critic in a blog, Mr. Stark makes an attempt to address this issue:
What source critics understand is that (1) ancient redactors weren’t as bothered by these sorts of contradictions as we moderns are, and (2) for the most part their M.O. was to faithfully preserve their source material, allowing contradictions to stand. (They hadn’t heard about the doctrine of inerrancy yet.) So a few tiqqune sopherim (pious scribal alterations of the text) notwithstanding, scribes were interested in preserving their source material intact.
How does Mr. Stark really know what the intentions of the alleged redactors were? There is no statement by a redactor declaring his intention. It’s speculation that there were redactors to begin with (especially since no actual copies of these original sources have ever been uncovered by archeologists), and their intention is speculation on top of speculation, a penumbra formed by emanations. Regarding his first claim that ancient redactors weren’t bothered by contradictions, what’s the proof? The only proof he offers is an example of an alleged contradiction in the Bible. How apparent contradictions are to be understood is the very point in question, so that’s nothing but question begging.
What a web of confusion. First, this hilarious statement that the presence of redactors in the text is just “speculation” exposes, probably better than anything else so far, how profoundly uninformed Warren is. There’s a big difference between “speculation” and a hypothesis that has been tested and proved over and over and over again for centuries, and has been accepted even by large swathes of Warren’s fellow Reformed Calvinists. We’re in lunatic fringe territory now.
Second, Warren’s claim that archeology hasn’t produced evidence for the existence of redactors is even crazier. Perhaps Warren is unfamiliar with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Perhaps he hasn’t read Jeremiah both in the LXX and the MT. Perhaps he hasn’t read the book of Daniel in a Roman Catholic Bible. Perhaps he’s unaware that the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8 was unarguably inserted by a redactor. There are so many different extant recensions of so many different biblical books, to claim that the existence of biblical redactors is just “speculative” is either utterly and tragically ignorant, or downright nuts. Or to put it in terms with which he is more comfortable, either the existence of biblical redactors is speculative, or Mike Warren is a moron.
Third, Warren expects us to provide a direct statement by a redactor that he doesn’t share our Enlightenment aesthetic? What silliness. The evidence that they did not is found in the fact of the multitudinous contradictions that exist, not only in the Bible, but in ancient literature in general, and ancient near eastern literature in particular. The evidence for this is manifold, and is quite patent to those who actually work in ancient texts. Until Warren is willing to engage actual redaction critics who discuss the literary aesthetics of ancient authors and redactors, his objections are without substance.
But note that he provides no argument against my extensive arguments (found more fully in my review of Copan) that ancient redactors had different M.O.s than do modern historians. He simply asserts that I am speculating (which is false). Note further that he only quotes a small portion of my blog post, in which I provide several explanations for the fact that ancient redactors weren’t as concerned with contradictions as we are. Anyway, claiming that I am merely speculating is not enough to justify his incessant and belligerent distortion of my position when he argues that I must think the ancient redactors were morons.
You’ll notice that the vast majority of Warren’s arguments against my position heretofore and hereafter amount to nothing more than this: either Stark’s reading is wrong and there are no real contradictions, or the authors and redactors of scripture were morons. This is the best that Warren has, but it doesn’t even touch on the actual picture. It is not a fault of my scholarship that Warren doesn’t have a background in redaction criticism.
The Bible itself contains evidence against the idea that contradictions didn’t bother ancient covenant Jews. Deuteronomy says that consistency with previous revelation is a test of canonicity (Deut. 13:1-4), as does the New Testament (Gal. 1:8-9).
Oh good grief, Warren knows how to twist scripture to serve his purposes. Here’s what Deut 13:1-4 actually says:
If prophets or those who divine by dreams appear among you and promise you omens or portents, and the omens or the portents declared by them take place, and they say, ‘Let us follow other gods’ (whom you have not known) ‘and let us serve them’, you must not heed the words of those prophets or those who divine by dreams; for Yahweh your God is testing you, to know whether you indeed love Yahweh your God with all your heart and soul. Yahweh your God you shall follow, him alone you shall fear, his commandments you shall keep, his voice you shall obey, him you shall serve, and to him you shall hold fast.
And here’s Gal 1:8-9:
But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed! As we have said before, so now I repeat, if anyone proclaims to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let that one be accursed!
Neither passage says what Warren wants it to say. One is talking about prophets proclaiming gods other than Yahweh, the other is talking about proclaimers of a gospel other than Paul’s. Neither is talking about historical discrepancies in prose narratives; neither is talking about written revelation; and neither is talking about any test of “canonicity.” Canonicity as a concept didn’t even exist at the time Deuteronomy 13 was written. Warren is grasping desperately at straws here.
(It’s not the only test; I have more to say on that below.) The Bible is presented as the word of God (cf. Jer. 1:9; Acts 4:24-25; 1 Thess. 2:13; 2 Peter 1:21), and the Bible says that God cannot lie (Num. 23:19,Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18), and his word is truth without error (Psalm 119:89, 96, 128, 144, 160; Prov. 30:5-6; Isa. 8:20; John 17:17). Then there is the ethical condemnation of lying found in numerous places in the Bible, beginning with the serpent in the garden (Gen. 3:1-5), later enshrined in the Decalogue (Exo. 20:16; Deut. 5:20), and with too many other places in the Old and New Testaments to mention. On the other hand, once something had been accepted by the covenant community as God’s word, the scribes were careful to accurately copy the original writing regardless of apparent difficulties in the text, since God said not to add or subtract from his word (Deut. 4:2, 12:32; Rev. 22:18).
All of this is a distraction. And while some passages say that God cannot lie, other passages depict God as lying. And Deut 4:2; 12:32 say nothing about adding or subtracting from biblical texts; they speak only of adding or subtracting from the commandments. And regardless of what they claim about adding or subtracting from the commandments, the various legal sources in the Bible show that’s just what occurred. Rev 22:18 says nothing about adding or subtracting from the Bible, but about adding or subtracting from the book of Revelation itself. Perhaps Warren assumes that because Revelation would later be included in the canon of scripture, 22:18 must refer to the whole canon. Whatever.
No one is disputing that many texts in the Bible present themselves or other texts as the word of God. Of course, so did other texts that didn’t make it into the canon, and so did religious and political texts of other nations. Moreover, not every book in the Bible presents itself in this way. I’ve already discussed this all in my book, and Warren hasn’t actually responded to me. The reality is that, especially with the historical narratives in the Hebrew Bible, these did not come to be seen as divine revelation until much later, after Judah lost political sovereignty and Jews became a people of the book. But at the time of their composition, the authors made no claim to divine revelation. The projection of this construct back onto these texts is thoroughly anachronistic.
Even if Mr. Stark’s defense is seen merely as a defence [sic] of the internal consistency of the liberal, higher critic perspective, it fails. While Mr. Stark presents the redactors as conservatives do the scribes of the Old Testament, as mere assemblers of a received text, that is not consistent with the heavy editing that they describe the redactors as responsible for.
This is a straw man. I don’t present redactors as “mere assemblers of a received text.” It’s clear that the position against which Warren is arguing is a position around which he hasn’t got his brain.
What Mr. Stark calls here “a few . . . scribal alterations of the text” is basic to the liberal view of the origin of the text. They claim, not that written accounts by others were merely added together to form one volume, but that stories were cut up and inserted into each other in all sorts of odd ways (alternating original sources every few sentences, and even making one sentence out of two sources). This would have left a lot of text on the cutting room floor (when an alleged original source is extracted from the Bible, it often doesn’t form a coherent narrative), and would have often changed the meaning of the text that was put in a new context.
Yes, they did this too, as did other redactors in other nations and cultures, as scholars of ancient texts are well aware.
Mr. Stark narrowly focuses on the apparent contradictions in the Bible, but that is not the only phenomenon of Scripture that is relevant to deducing the intentions of the redactors. Despite some apparent contradictions, a fairly solid observation is that the alleged redactors were successful in weaving together narratives that are, at the least, largely coherent. Most of the books, particularly those named after a single prophet, present themselves as being written by a single author, sometimes with a scribe adding some finishing details; whereas higher critics argue that they are the work of multiple authors with a redactor trying to make the multiple authors look like one author in a way so subtle that it was only discovered within the past two hundred years by some liberals applying a Hegelian/evolutionary interpretive scheme to the text. The appearance of unity seems to have been a higher priority for the redactors than preserving the source material.
Warren misunderstands my argument, and he also displays only a superficial familiarity with the state of scholarship on these issues. That redactors were sometimes concerned to preserve source material isn’t everything I’ve said on the matter. It’s true in some cases, not true in others. It depends upon the type of tradition in question, generally. And the fact that some redactors or later pseudonymous authors tried to create unity with previous sources doesn’t mean they were concerned with some contradictions in the way that Warren insists they must have been. The seams in these texts (and in texts from other cultures) are very plain. But these composite compositions would have more than sufficed for their purposes. The illiterate populace didn’t devote their lives to studying these texts critically (they couldn’t have done so). Nor did the literate scribes and theologians throughout the centuries, who read the Bible after the construct of divine revelation had been projected onto the canonical texts. They studied the texts, yes, but not critically and not comparatively. Modern scholars know what they know about the composition of these texts because of archaeology, comparative studies, and non-partisan critical scrutiny. A text reads very differently when one is reading it devotionally or as pure divine revelation than it does when one studies it as human literature. Of course, most of the so-called “higher critics” that Warren loathes were believers, and still saw the texts as divine revelation in addition to being human compositions that could be apprehended in the same ways as other human compositions.
And last, liberals usually claim that there was a political motivation behind it, as Mr. Stark mentions in the same blog post: “Their reasons for doing this were often political.” The alleged purpose of creating the stories and cutting and pasting them together was to persuade the populace to follow the ruling elite. But a story that contradicts itself loses credibility.
To a post-Enlightenment reader such as Warren, yes it does. To ancient near eastern tribal cultures? No, not really. Moreover, Warren’s argument requires that the populace had access to the whole books, when in fact they did not. They saw only what the ruling elites who composed these books wanted them to see. The authors of these books would not have foreseen that their compositions would later become canonized and distributed along with other books to be studied as divine revelation in local synagogues all across the Greco-Roman empire. Let’s come back down to earth.
I’ve already shown that contradictions counted against the credibility of the text for the Jews.
No, he hasn’t. He’s distorted scripture, and begged questions, but he hasn’t shown something that isn’t actually true.
In summary, liberals like Mr. Stark argue that the Bible was not received by prophets from God (with the aid of previous historical writings and their God-given natural faculties), but is the product of humans intentionally making it look like they received it from God as part of a political ruse.
Actually, my position is that while the latter did happen, the former may well have happened as well in other cases. It’s not an either/or.
Conservatives respond that, if the Bible was intentionally made up in an attempt to pull off an effective political ruse, then the human authors, if they had any sense, should have intentionally removed the contradictions that liberals claim to be in the Bible.
And conservatives argue this because they’re projecting later conditions anachronistically back onto the periods in which these texts were actually composed.
Since it’s unreasonable that the authors of the Bible and it’s intended audience were such morons as to not care about contradictions (1. contradictions count against canonicity
False.
and 2. the Scriptures repeatedly condemn lying),
Politicians who lie also condemn lying. So what?
the documentary hypothesis is an unreasonable explanation for the alleged contradictions in the Bible.
I think Warren should write this argument up in a good essay and submit it for peer review. It just might very well overturn the consensus!
Mr. Stark’s response is to minimize the intentionality of the redactors and present them as conservatives do the scribes of the Old Testament, as mere assemblers of a received text.
No, that’s a snippet of my position.
But that is not consistent with other claims that liberals allege about the origin of the text of the Bible: 1) the extensive editing by redactors, 2) a false appearance of unity as a deliberate deception by the redactors, and 3) the devious political motivation of the redactors to fabricate stories that would persuade the populace that the stories were true.
Actually, it is consistent with these other realities, because redactors had different purposes for different compositions. But point 2 (the false appearance of unity as a deliberate deception) is a point that is not settled among redaction critics. Warren is not aware of this, I assume, because he doesn’t do much reading in redaction criticism. A large number of redaction critics argue that the false appearance of unity wasn’t a major concern for many redactors. They weren’t bothered by the seams they left; they weren’t always trying to construct a perfectly seamless, coherent narrative; and they had different criteria of coherence than we moderns have. All Warren’s arguments have demonstrated is the paucity of his familiarity with the scholarly literature.
Jack Miles concludes that it is modern readers’ “inability to imagine an aesthetic of disorder, or of deliberately mingled order and disorder, that may separate them most sharply from the ancient writers and editors they study. As they acquire this ability, perhaps by relinquishing what in modern times has been their quasi-religious vocation, they may find that they have less taste for the harmony and smoothness that historical scholarship would impose on the text.”1
Robert Alter, in his seminal volume, The Art of Biblical Narrative, argues that often when redactors juxtaposed clearly contrasting historical accounts, theologies, or ideologies, the redactor’s intention was to confront the reader with a choice, to force the reader to take a position, one way or the other. Far from being “moronic,” or treating the audience as “moronic,” this understanding of the work of some redactors shows a very mature approach to the literature, and displays a profound respect for the moral and intellectual aptitude of the audience. On this understanding, some redactors did not wish to treat the audience as children, telling them how it was, but sought rather to confront them with a struggle the likes of which would produce moral and theological maturity. These redactors juxtaposed multiple sides of an argument, and left it to the audience to come to a conclusion.
Of course, it’s also true that sometimes redactors did seek to minimize the perspective of their sources, to overlay a contrasting paradigm upon them in order to transform one perspective into the perspective taken by the redactor. This clearly happened as well (as many conservatives in fact argue).
Both approaches to conflicting source material are found in the Bible. Both are valid. They are not mutually exclusive. It’s not the either/or that Warren, in his eagerness to sweep source criticism under the rug with a single syllogism, claims.
THOMAS – An acronym for “The Hermeneutic of Morons Authoring Scripture.”
The principle of biblical interpretation assumed by liberals.
This is, as we’ve seen, a lie, made worse by the inept attempt at humor.
Some Minor Disputes About Church History
In my original response, I wrote:
It is unfortunate that Mr. Warren begins his review by insulting the very people he hopes to persuade. Although I have no stake in defending pietism, Mr. Warren’s characterization of American pietism is so polemical and distorted that it tells us much more about Mr. Warren than it does about American pietism. Mr. Warren equates a flowery reading of the nice parts of the Bible and a neglect of the rest with pietism, and suggests that anyone persuaded by my book must not know the Bible very well. He claims that such Christians, in their ignorance, are easy targets for my book. To the contrary, I find that it is often those who are unfamiliar with the Bible who have such a difficult time accepting the arguments I put forward in my book; it is those who cherry pick the verses they like who blindly deny the reality of the conflict within the biblical texts.
Mr. Warren further insinuates that because of my association with the Stone Campbell tradition, I must not be very familiar with the Bible, an alleged fact which explains why I’ve adopted the positions I have. Mr. Warren on this point has alienated any Stone Campbell reader who may have looked to him for reasons to reject my arguments. To suggest that a strictly back-to-the-Bible Protestant tradition like the Stone-Campbell tradition is deficient due to a careless disregard for the Bible displays not the ignorance of Stone-Campbell Christians but of Mr. Warren. These sort of broad, sweeping generalizations and disdainful mischaracterizations of large swathes of American Christians don’t do Mr. Warren any favors, here at the outset of his review, but are unfortunately typical of what is to come throughout.
Warren responds:
Regardless of whether it offends, the truth is that those who belong to churches that teach that only a small set of Biblical doctrines are important will not have been given the resources to substantively respond to Mr. Stark’s arguments, which deal with issues that these pietistic churches rarely spend much time on. Churches in the Stone Campbell tradition belong to that category.
Hogwash.
It’s true that many such people will not even try to substantively respond to his arguments, but that does nothing to refute the previous point. Mr. Stark has obviously left the Stone Campbell tradition now, and his knowledge of the Bible is much greater, although of a distorted perspective.
Is Warren says so.
I wrote:
Of course, though he implies that my deficient views on scripture owe something to my connection to the Stone-Campbell tradition, Mr. Warren has not identified his own Christian tradition, but it is evident from certain remarks that he is likely a Reformed Calvinist. It is humorous to me that someone from a tradition committed to interpreting the Bible only through the filter of later traditions is willing to accuse strict biblicists who strive to come to the Bible on its own terms of flagrant unfamiliarity with the Bible.
I am Reformed Calvinist. Some aspects of this view may be arrived at later in church history, but maturity usually does take time. The Enlightenment was later in history than the Reformation, and since Mr. Stark is a follower of Enlightenment philosophy, he should agree with me on that.
Nope. Because what Warren refers to as “maturity,” I refer to as nonsense.
As for pietists coming to the Bible on its own terms, their strict biblicism is applied in a limited way. They have adopted unacknowledged assumptions from Enlightenment thought, such as an epistemology of Common Sense Realism, on top of just plain bad theology. But the proof of who is using an unbiblical filter is in the exegesis, so let’s get on with that.
“Bad theology” according to . . . a Reformed Calvinist.
Ezra’s Divorce Command
In my original response, I wrote:
Actually, Ezra forbids marriage with the following people groups: “the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites” (Ezra 9:1). This list is based on two passages in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 7 and 23. The former mentions all but the Moabites and the Egyptians. Deuteronomy 23 mentions the Moabites, excluding them from the assembly. Deuteronomy 23 also mentions the Egyptians, but in contradiction to Ezra: “You shall not abhor any of the Edomites, for they are your kin. You shall not abhor any of the Egyptians, because you were an alien residing in their land. The children of the third generation that are born to them may be admitted to the assembly of Yahweh.” In the law of Moses, the Israelites are expressly permitted to intermarry with Egyptians! Yet in Ezra, the Egyptians are excluded. Why? Because Ezra was a racial purist. As for the “abominations” mentioned in 9:14, they are not specified, nor is there any instance mentioned of an Israelite being led astray into the practice of non-Yahwistic rites. As I’ve argued extensively in chapter six, the claim that Israelites were not to intermarry with certain tribes because they might lead them astray to worship other gods is undermined by the fact that they are expressly permitted and often commanded to intermarry with certain other people from non-Yahwistic tribes! Clearly it was conceivable that bringing a wife in from a foreign culture was relatively safe, if the wife could be made to conform her worship to the Israelite norm. Yet there is no thought given to this in Ezra. The “abominations” practiced by the people of the land were just foreign religious rites—the same things Israelites did but to different deities. At any rate, see pp. 434-36 in John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, for a cogent discussion of the problem of intermarriage in Ezra and Nehemiah.
Warren responds:
Collins is no more enlightening than Mr. Stark’s own writing. He simply ignores the reason that Ezra gives for requiring divorce is based on moral behavior, not race. Ezra says that these foreign wives were committing the same violations of God’s law that God warned the Israelites about violating lest they should also be kicked out of the land like the Canaanites.
No, Ezra does not say this. Warren goes on to quote a passage in which he thinks Ezra makes this claim:
Since the Israelites had just returned to the land after being exiled for their sins, Ezra was understandably concerned that God would become so angry with them that he would simply wipe them off the face of the earth: “. . . [S]hall we break your commandments again and intermarry with the peoples who practice these abominations? Would you not be angry with us until you consumed us, so that there should be no remnant, nor any to escape?” (Ezra 9:14).
In verse 10, the abominations referenced are those of the Canaanites back in Joshua’s day. Ezra is referring to the people of the land in general as “those who practice these abominations.” But he makes no statement to the effect that the women who married the Jews continued these practices after coming under the household of a Yahweh worshiper. Note again (as I pointed out in my book) that just prior to Ezra’s arrival, the people from the north came down and asked to participate in the rebuilding of the temple. They wanted to worship Yahweh along with their Judean kin. But the Jews denounced them, because they had mixed their blood with foreigners. That’s the same attitude that Jesus condemns in his parable of the Good Samaritan. Warren would be better off admitting that Ezra and the Jewish leaders of his period were racist, but argue that the historical narrative is not meant to be taken as theologically normative.
Warren also ignores all the arguments I gave in the book that display what is really going on with Ezra. First, Ezra adds new people to the old list of supposedly abominable peoples, and the people he adds were, according to Moses, OK to intermarry with. Ezra’s ethnocentrism is narrower even than that of Moses. Furthermore, I’ve already pointed out the blatant contradiction present in this justification of religious purity. The Israelites were forbidden from intermarrying with anyone within the borders of the promised land; but they were allowed to intermarry with peoples outside the promised land. Does that mean that those outside the allotted borders were pure Yahweh worshipers who practiced none of the abominations of the verboten Canaanites? Of course not. In reality, they worshiped their own deities; they performed human sacrifices; they engaged in cultic sex. The real reason the people within the borders were off limits has to do with asserting political sovereignty over the region. Religious purity is just the excuse used. And by the time of Ezra, it had evolved into outright racism, as is amply clear from the attitude Jews had toward Samaritans, despite the fact that Samaritans were faithful Yahweh worshipers. The Samaritans sought reconciliation with the Judeans, but the Judeans rejected them because they had intermingled with people from outside their stock. This was of course not their choice. The Assyrian empire forced these intermarriages upon them. But that made no difference to people like Ezra.
And the foreign religious rites were not “the same things Israelites did but to different deities.” Religion back then was not practiced like it often is in modern Western culture, where it mainly concerns private devotion and is irrelevant to the rest of life.
I didn’t say it was. This is a straw man.
Religions were life-encompassing.
I never denied this, nor does my position entail such a denial.
Many of the sins that warranted exile of the nation were capital crimes: unlawful sexual relations, child sacrifice and necromancy (Lev. 18 and 20). (Ezra did not have to explicitly state which abomination would get them kicked out since the priests he was talking to should have known what Moses had written.) God’s judgment of vomiting people out of the land if these particular acts were practiced was ethnically neutral.
False. Everyone within the borders of the Promised Land was to be killed or forced out, not just those who practiced particular abominations. Moreover, again, those outside the borders who practiced the abominations were subject to no such judgment, and, in fact, the Israelites are expressly permitted to intermarry with them. Once again, the religious purity justification was bogus.
The judgment applied to the Israelites as much as to the native Canaanite nations: “Like the nations that the LORD makes to perish before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the LORD your God” (Deut. 8:20). Since this judgment applied even to God’s chosen people who were given this land for their perpetual inheritance, a fortiori any people of any ethnicity found practicing these deeds in the holy land had to be removed from the land to avert God’s harsher judgment of cleansing the holy land with an invading army.
This I don’t deny. If you want to live in Yahweh’s land, you have to worship Yahweh. But the ideology which says that intermarriage with those who practice abominations will inevitably lead to religious impurity within Israel is undermined by the fact that Yahweh is depicted as giving Israelites permission to intermarry with other groups outside of the borders of the Promised Land. It’s quite obvious to anyone who has eyes to see.
This ethnically neutral law is the basis for the law against marrying women from the Canaanite nations.
It’s clear why this is false, and why the law is not ethnically neutral. If it were ethically neutral, then the Israelites would have been forbidden from intermarrying with people outside the borders of the promised land, just as they were forbidden from intermarrying with people within the borders of the promised land. The prohibition applies only to the ethnic groups within Israel’s borders. And that is the way it goes with genocide. It’s not the enemy without that is seen as the problem, but the enemy within. It’s always the enemy within.
Those tribes practiced these abominations as an integral part of their culture. Moses had told the Hebrew men that they could marry foreign women, but if these foreign wives practiced the abominable acts of the Canaanites, then they would have had to be removed from the land (exiled or executed). If a Hebrew wife acted like a pagan Canaanite, she would have to be dealt with the same way. If men of any ethnicity acted like pagan Canaanites, they would face the same fate.
Yes, this is obvious, but it misses the point. The point is, the Canaanites weren’t given the option to stop practicing their abominations. Intermarriage was forbidden completely, and they were to be killed or expelled without possibility of making peace treaties with Israel or coming under Yahweh’s banner. The text of Joshua in fact states that Yahweh intervened to prevent the Canaanites from making such peace treaties. Obviously, anyone worshiping a god other than Yahweh was going to pay the price. But the point of killing all the Canaanites was supposedly that allowing them to live would ensure that foreign cults would creep into Israel’s midst. Why, then, does the same logic not apply to intermarriage with people outside Canaan’s borders? To reiterate, this is a classic example of a genocidal ideology focused on the perceived enemy within, even if those within were not really a threat. There’s no question, for Ezra, of whether individual women were or were not a religious threat to Israel. Because they are Canaanites, they are a threat. Let’s come back down to earth.
In Ezra’s day, the Egyptian women were practicing these abominable acts in the land of Israel, so they had to be cast out along with others who did the same. Mr. Stark says, “nor is there any instance mentioned of an Israelite being led astray into the practice of non-Yahwistic rites,” but that doesn’t matter. The wives and their children were practicing the abominations, so they had to be removed.
Warren is making this up. He has no evidence for this whatsoever, whether archaeological or textual. Ezra only says that “the peoples” were practicing the abominations. He does not state, or even inquire as to whether those women who had married Jews continued such practices. Warren has to rewrite the text in order to help Ezra save face, despite the fact that he knows full well that the inhabitants of Judea had this racist attitude toward the people of the land. The evidence for this is ample, long, long after human sacrifices and such ceased in this region.
We can gain further insight into the situation in the book of Ezra by looking at two other prophetic books of Ezra’s era: Nehemiah records that the children of these foreign wives were being educated in terms of their foreign, pagan cultures, rather than learning the Hebrew language (Neh. 13:23-27), so they were not learning God’s law taught in the Hebrew scriptures.
True and false. Nehemiah says the children were not being taught Hebrew, but the language of their mothers. He does not say that they were not being taught Yahweh’s laws. Warren added this to the text as it suited his purpose. Moreover, Nehemiah does not say that they were being raised to practice the religious rites of non-Jewish cultures. It makes no mention of any practice of Canaanite abominations, unless speaking a different language is now to be considered an abomination. This would not be surprising; I live in Texas, where Spanish is considered an abomination by some.
Malachi (possibly a title for Ezra) . . .
The identification of Ezra with Malachi was made by a single targum, much later, and few scholars give this identification any weight. There is no textual evidence for this, and in fact, most scholars argue that grammatical considerations lead to the conclusion that “Malachi” is a proper noun, not just a descriptive title (i.e., “my messenger”).
. . . records that the husbands of these foreign wives had divorced the Hebrew wives that they had married as young men. These good Jewish girls would have raised their children under God’s covenant (Mal. 2:14-16). But the men tossed them aside and married foreign women who raised their children as pagans.
Warren is making this last part up. There is no indication in Malachi that the women were raising their children “as pagans.” The only abomination mentioned in the text is the fact of the intermarriages themselves. In fact, the verse just prior to the portion cited by Warren makes clear that Israel was still offering sacrifices to Yahweh. He rejected them, it says, because of their intermarriages. There is no claim whatsoever that any pagan practices had actually crept into Israel’s camp, and certainly no claim that the children were being reared “as pagans.”
There is a special concern in Ezra about the priests who had married foreign wives. This special concern makes sense given that the priesthood was hereditary, so the next generation of priests would have included a large number of thoroughly pagan men, which obviously would have severely undermined the religion of Yahweh.
This again is false, based on the assumption that the children were being taught pagan practices. The concern rather is ethnic; they were not to mix with the Canaanite peoples—whether their wives were or were not actually practicing Canaanite cultic rites is not an issue relevant to the prohibition.
The issue is, again, ethical: whether or not the children would be raised to obey the law of Yahweh’s covenant. Collins’ claim to insight into the mind of Ezra, contrary to Ezra’s own stated reason for requiring the divorces, is that Egyptians are included in the list and they were not included in the Mosaic list. But that is actually a reason to say that the rationale was not racist. It shows that, in accordance with what Lev. 18 and 20 teach, any group who acted like the Canaanites had to be treated like Canaanites, regardless of their race.
Except, of course, for all the groups outside the borders of Canaan, with whom Israel was given permission to intermarry.
Mr. Stark’s examples of Scriptural approval of foreign women marrying Israelites all involve women that entered into covenant with Yahweh (e.g. Ruth), which does nothing to justify marriage to women who practiced detestable criminal lifestyles, and taught their children to do the same, as part of their rejection of Yahweh’s covenant.
This is false. Yes, Rahab, Ruth and (presumably) Moses’s Ethiopian wife made covenants with Yahweh, but those aren’t the only examples I provided. Contrary to Warren’s deceptive claim that the examples I provide “all involve women that entered into covenant with Yahweh,” I identified all of the peoples outside the borders of the promised land, with whom Israelites are given express permission to marry, and the 32,000 Midianite virgins who were forcibly integrated into Israel at Yahweh’s command. If these women could be integrated into Israel and be expected to adopt purely Yahwistic practices, why not the Canaanites within the borders of the promised land? The answer is because the distinction was delineated by ethnicity.
And one last point on this issue: Even if the worship of the Canannites was “the same things Israelites did but to different deities,” that would not negate the abominable nature of Canannite worship. The Bible teaches that the Israelite God, Yahweh, was the Creator of heaven and earth. The Canannite gods were demons or other types of created things being worshipped (Deut. 32:17; cf. Rom. 1:22-25). The creation does not deserve the worship of the Creator, the source of all morality, all facts, and all truth.
Here Warren is projecting an anachronistic understanding of the word translated as “demons” in Deut 32:17. I discuss the development of Israel’s cosmology at some length in my review of Paul Copan’s book. See footnote.2
Mr. Stark views Yahweh as just another finite god that was given birth by the universe.
Huh? I do? That’s news to me.
He fails to see the ontological distinction between Yahweh as Creator and the other gods as creatures, so he fails to see the abomination of the worship due to the Creator being given to creatures.
No, I don’t fail to see it. I just recognize that it’s a distinction that came late in Israel’s theology. Regardless, this is a red herring, because it was not the worship of other gods by other nations per se that is identified as abominable in the Deuteronomistic code. Rather, it is particular practices that are identified as abominable. If just the worship of other gods is abominable to Yahweh, then why is Israel given express permission by Yahweh to intermarry with Midianite women, and with any people who live outside the borders of Canaan? Note the contradiction here in Warren’s argumentation: one the one hand he says that Israelites were permitted to intermarry with Egyptians back in Moses’ day because the Egyptians weren’t committing the same abominations as the Canaanites, but that Ezra added them to his later list because by then they were (which itself is ridiculous); on the other hand Warren wants to argue that mere worship of another deity is an abomination sufficient to proscribe intermarriage. He can’t have it both ways. Anyway, obviously, the integrated women would be expected to adopt Yahwism, but then, why couldn’t this courtesy be extended to the Canaanite women? The answer: because it’s about the enemy within, i.e., ethnicity, just as with the Hutu/Tutsi and Arminian genocides, and the Holocaust.
Pesher vs. Historical-Grammatical Interpretation
In my original response, I wrote:
Mr. Warren is being deceptive here. First, he claims I am not aware of the article by Dennis Bratcher when in fact I cite this selfsame article in my book in support of my position. Second, the article by Dennis Bratcher does not say what Mr. Warren claims it says. Bratcher argues (quite rightly) that Matthew uses the Isaiah 7 prophecy analogously to draw out the theme of “God with us.” The reality is, as Bratcher is aware, this is still pesher interpretation and not historical-grammatical. Mr. Warren is grasping at straws here.
My explanation of Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7 follows Bratcher’s interpretation, but also goes beyond it:
In other words, Warren uses Bratcher’s scholarship to come to a conclusion to which Bratcher himself does not come.
Why is God with Israel to save a remnant through all the various judgments brought against her? Because of the Messianic promises made to the Patriarchs. Jesus’ birth was not just one more example of God being with Israel; it was the reason behind God being with Israel (or actually the holy seed from Adam onward – Gen. 3:15) all of those times in the Old Testament.
I have no objection to this understanding of Matthew’s theology.
Mr. Stark doesn’t cite the “selfsame” article but another article by Dennis Bratcher on the same website dealing with the more narrow topic of the word “virgin” (pp. 28, 243). But whether he was aware of Bratcher’s article that I reference or not, here’s the problem: He says of pesher interpretation, “An understanding of the prophetic message in its original historical context was entirely irrelevant to the community” (p. 26). But then, when I point to Bratcher’s interpretation, which could have been the same interpretation of someone who read Isaiah’s prophecy at the time it was written, he says that that’s pesher interpretation too.
First, the quote Warren pulls from my book is in reference to the Qumran community specifically, but in actual fact, while what I said is true, this does not mean that a pesher interpretation disregarded original meaning in every case. But my statement about Bratcher’s interpretation is correct; Warren just doesn’t understand my point. I’ll try to be more clear. According to Bratcher, Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7 emphasized not the virginity of the woman but the immanence of God’s presence. Just as the child born in Ahaz’s time was a sign that God was with Israel, Jesus represents the presence of God with Israel, now in the eschatological age. Bratcher’s understanding of Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7 is pesher, not historical-grammatical. The historical-grammatical reading of Isaiah 7 concerns the child born during Ahaz’s reign and that child only. But for Matthew, because he has an eschatological hermeneutic, the prophecy is really and ultimately about Jesus. In Bratcher’s own words, “The emphasis in Isaiah 7:14 is not on the virginity of the mother, but on the immanent birth of the child and the child’s name. It is this emphasis that Matthew uses to make his own theological point about the birth of Jesus” (emphasis mine).3 My original statement in my book was simply that Matthew is not doing historical-grammatical exegesis. He was doing pesher, the crux of which is that any text in scripture, regardless of historical context, is really about our time (the end time), our community, what is happening to us and among us. I would however disagree with Bratcher that Matthew’s emphasis was not also on the virginity of the mother.
Next, in my original response to Warren, I wrote:
Mr. Warren fails to take account of Paul’s language (“it was not written for oxen but for us”) and fails to do justice to the broader hermeneutical context of second temple Judaism that I outline in this section. See also the work of Richard Hays which I cite in my treatment of this text, which is the seminal work on Paul’s use of the Hebrew Bible. I simply used this as one example of Paul’s eschatological (rather than historical-grammatical) hermeneutic. There are myriad examples I could have used. See the relevant literature cited in my book.
Warren responds:
Actually I do take account of Paul’s language that “it was not written for oxen but for us.” I interpreted Paul’s statement as the observation that God did not have to be concerned that the owner of an ox would not feed his income-producing animal that has a high replacement cost because pure self-interest would take care of that. That’s an observation that a reader could have made at the time the law was delivered from Mt. Sinai. It’s not a hidden meaning needing special revelation to discern, so it’s not pesher interpretation. It’s a perfectly acceptable historical-grammatical interpretation.
Warren doesn’t seem to understand the point that pesher interpretation consists of reading texts as if they were written not for the original audience so much as for the eschatological community. Moreover, no, Warren does not take account of Paul’s language that “it was not written for oxen but for us.” Paul is saying that the text isn’t really about not muzzling oxen, but rather about paying ministers of the gospel; but historically-grammatically speaking, it patently is about oxen.
Now Warren is trying to read the command given in Deuteronomy 25:4 as it were intended as a proverb. Warren wants us to believe that it really wasn’t meant as an instruction to ox-owners not to muzzle there oxen, but rather as a general observation that a man should be paid for his labor. To reiterate, Warren writes, “I interpreted Paul’s statement as the observation that God did not have to be concerned that the owner of an ox would not feed his income-producing animal that has a high replacement cost because pure self-interest would take care of that.” This is very lame. An ox owner would feed his ox whether the muzzled it or not. The muzzling of oxen was meant to prevent them from eating too much of the grain. The command prohibits this. This is not a proverb; it is a formal legal command found in a formal legal document. Clearly, there was need to be concerned that some ox-owners might muzzle their oxen.
But Paul says that the verse isn’t really about oxen at all; rather, for Paul, it is “for us,” and not just “for us,” but, in Paul’s actual words, “entirely for us” (pantos di hemas). Note that: Paul says, “entirely for us.” In other words, Paul wants to read it eschatologically, and in doing so, denies that it was originally written on behalf of oxen. If Paul was just extrapolating the principle, that would be one thing. He could have said, “We can learn from the law: do not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain. This principle applies to ministers of the gospel a fortiori.” (Paul probably knew some Latin.) But Paul didn’t say that. What he said was, “Was it written for oxen? Or was it written entirely for us? Undoubtedly, for us!” It’s what Paul actually says that shows us that he is employing a standard first century eschatological hermeneutic (a.k.a. pesher), and not historical-grammatical exegesis. Warren may not like this (and I cannot fathom why), but if we pay attention to what Paul actually says, there’s no other conclusion to which we can come.
Hays tries to give Paul’s interpretation an eschatological emphasis because Paul says “for us” (di hemas) rather than “for humans” (di anthropous); in other words, Hays claims that Paul thinks that the law against muzzling the ox was specifically written for Paul’s ministry, not as an ethical principle for all humanity (p. 165). But the text does not support it. Hays is getting carried away with his interpretive scheme for understanding Paul’s writings.
The text does not support it? You mean, other than the fact that the actual language Paul used in the text supports it? Other than the fact that the context is only about supporting ministers of the gospel? Other than the fact that the first person plurals in the previous verses refer exclusive to Paul’s ministerial entourage, and not to “humanity” in general? Warren simply refuses to accept that Paul would adopt an eschatological hermeneutic in which scripture is really speaking about the eschatological community. Again, I cannot fathom why.
First, there is here no redemptive, christological interpretation of an Old Testament text, nor an argument about the members of the true Israel, which are the two main themes in which Paul makes use of typological interpretations of the Old Testament that find fulfillment in the “end of the ages” (1 Cor. 10:11). He’s just looking out for other full-time ministers so that they get treated fairly by being supported financially in their work.
So what?! Has Warren read the Dead Sea Scrolls pesher commentaries? Pesher interpretations are applied to the most mundane of situations with some regularity. Not everything that is pesher has to be about some central theme. But for Paul, I’d say that the ministry of the gospel in the end times is pretty central.
Second, Paul believes that there is an aspect of the Mosaic law that “the whole world” is obligated to keep (Rom. 3:19; cf. Rom. 13:4-10; 1 Tim. 1:8-11). We should be open to Paul teaching that this is one of those aspects of the Mosaic law.
I’m open to it! I’m just not sure where he teaches it, because that’s not what he’s doing here. I’ve no doubt Paul believed it was a general principle applicable in just about any situation. But that doesn’t mean that’s what he’s doing here. Pay attention to the actual words of the text, and less attention to what you want the text to say for non-exegetical reasons.
Third, Paul argues for the right of preachers to earn a living from their ministry by citing several other types of workers who expect to be supported from their labor: soldiers, vinedressers, and shepherds (1 Cor. 9:7). There is no eschatological significance to these trades. They are examples derived from mundane, universal experience. Paul tells us the reason that he cites the Mosaic law, and it’s not to prove that his ministry is the fulfillment of the end of the ages: It’s to prove that his analogical reasoning, from these mundane examples to the right of ministers of the gospel to expect material support from their ministry, is not the assertion of mere human authority but is backed by divine authority: “Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same?” (1 Cor. 9:8). Because the law only mentions an ox, he has to explain that it should apply to a human laborer. Then Paul illustrates the application of Deuteronomy 25:4 by citing two more mundane, universal examples of laborers: plowmen and threshers (v. 10).
This is all very confused. First, neither Hays nor I have argued that Paul’s citation of the Mosaic law was “to prove that his ministry is the fulfillment of the end of the ages.” Rather, Paul believes that his ministry is the fulfillment of the ages (indisputable), and that belief underwrites his pesher reading of the Mosaic law here. And the fact that Paul cites mundane occupations with no eschatological significance is not an argument against the position of Hays and myself. Yes, Paul is citing several examples, both from the mundane world, and from scripture, in support of his argument. But it’s his method of interpretation of scripture that tells us he is employing an eschatological hermeneutic.
The “for us” phrase is Paul saying that the general ethical principle taught by this Mosaic law applies directly to the current situation that Paul was addressing.
No doubt Paul believes this, but that is not what he says.
Last, Paul affirms that the same principle applied to the previous, Old Covenant dispensation: “Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get there food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? In the same way the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:13-14 – the last sentence referring to Jesus’ command to the 72 disciples: Luke 10:7; cf. 1 Tim. 5:18). It cannot be clearer that Paul is not teaching that this law applies only [sic] his ministry “at the end of the ages.”
Another straw man. Neither Hays nor I claimed that Paul said this principle applied “only [to] his ministry.”
According to Hays, Paul believes that the Spirit that enlightens him gives him interpretations that are foreign to the Old Testament text: “faithful readers, for whom the veil is removed, will be empowered by the Spirit to generate imaginative intertextual readings” (p. 178). But for Paul, God’s Spirit is a source of continuity between the original Hebrew scriptures and his own writings: The Spirit of God that delivered the Old Testament through God’s chosen prophets (2 Tim. 3:16) is that same Spirit that enlightens Paul’s mind to understand and authoritatively teach God’s people God’s word (1 Cor. 14:37). Paul teaches in 2 Cor. 3:12-18 that the “veil” that blinds the Jews who do not see Christ in the Old Testament is their sinful thinking (“their minds were hardened” – v.14) that prevent them from understanding what the Old Testament text had been saying the whole time, not their lack of “imaginative intertextual readings.” And Paul’s reference to the veil of Moses can be seen as simply an apt analogy rather than an attempt by Paul to find a hidden meaning in the OT text that applies peculiarly to Paul’s ministry.
Again Warren is confused. Obviously Paul didn’t see his interpretations as foreign to the Hebrew Bible texts. Obviously he believed that God’s Spirit is a source of continuity between the Hebrew scriptures and his own writings. That doesn’t mean he’s doing historical-grammatical exegesis. The Qumran community believed the same thing; they had the same conviction. They actually believed that their interpretations were really present in the texts.
Hays comes across as conservative in his assessment of Paul in relation to some of the skeptics that he interacts with in his book, but Hays does not seriously engage conservative, inerrantist theologians who provide interpretations of Paul that show how his references to the OT can be seen as accurately interpreting the OT text. Five hundred years ago, in his commentary on Romans, John Calvin addressed the very objections that Hays raises in respect to Rom. 2:24 and 10:18. Hays may disagree with Calvin’s reasoning, but at least he should interact with it.
So says Warren.
And since Mr. Stark’s book is directed against inerrantist views, he should appeal to the support of books that address the views of inerrantists rather than books like Hays’ that don’t venture outside the provincial world of liberalism. Hays’ book is written by a liberal for liberals.
That’d be news to Hays.
He begins his book with the assumption that Paul believes in “the legitimacy of innovative readings that disclose truth previously latent in Scripture” (p. 4). Later, Hays writes, “In cases such as these [1 Cor. 9:8-10 and Rom. 10:18], there is no indication that Paul has wrestled seriously with the texts from which the citations are drawn” (p. 175). He states this conclusion without any interaction, here or anywhere else in the book, with other commentators who have a contrary view.
Except for all the commentators Hays interacts with, who hold contrary views.
Hays assumes the liberal view that Paul mishandles the OT texts
This is false. Hays is not arguing that Paul is “mishandling” the texts; that would be an imposition of a historical-grammatical paradigm onto what Paul is actually doing. What Hays argues is simply that Paul is not doing historical-grammatical exegesis. To say that Paul “mishandled” the texts would be a value judgment that Hays does not make. In fact, Hays argues (if Warren will actually read the book) that we should treat scripture much the same way as Paul.
and while he finds that Paul’s handling of the text is sometimes more or less true to the original meaning (like echoes), he does not allow his negative assessments of Paul’s use of the OT to be challenged by competing voices. Where Hays attempts to prove his case that Paul was not true to the OT Scriptures, he fails.
Again, Hays doesn’t make “negative assessments” of Paul’s hermeneutics. Hays actually wants us to learn from the way Paul read scripture. And my aim in my book was not to make a negative assessment of Paul’s hermeneutic, but simply to show that the Chicago Statement’s commitment to a historical-grammatical hermeneutic puts them at odds with the Bible itself.
I happened upon this statement by C. John Collins that shows that Luke’s account of Paul’s ministry is contrary to the claim that Paul engaged in Pesher interpretation:
The early Christian missionaries went to synagogues to prove from the OT Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ (cf. Acts 17:1-3; 18:26-28). This implies that they relied on and used publicly accessible arguments from the text itself, rather than merely private insights—otherwise, they would be been unjust to hold anyone responsible for failing to see something that was not truly there. Luke praises the Berean Jews, who examined the OT to see whether what Paul and Silas told them was so (Acts 17:11). This implies that the NT invites critical interaction over its appeal to the OT, and is not solely dependent on the “insider’s” point of view. (C. John Collins, “How the NT Quotes the OT,” ESV Study Bible (Crossway Bibles, 2008), p. 2606)
This is a bad argument. Ancient Jews so inclined shared with Paul the eschatological hermeneutic that allowed them to find Jesus of Nazareth in the texts of the Hebrew Bible.
Finally, as I pointed out in my original response to Warren, Paul’s use of the oxen law is just one example of many of Paul’s employment of a pesher hermeneutic. Another example is Paul’s reading of the Abrahamic promise found in Gal 3:16, where Paul, taking his cues straight from the Qumran playbook, capitalizes on the fact that the word “seed” in the Abrahamic narrative is in the singular, and uses this to argue that the “seed” of Abraham was not Israel as a plurality, or even Isaac, but Jesus Christ. This is pesher exegesis par excellence—finding a hidden meaning in the scriptures that speaks directly to the eschatological community’s own convictions about what God is doing in their midst, with no real regard for a historical-grammatical reading of the text. I could spends dozens of pages adding example after example of Paul’s use of pesher.
Child Sacrifice Commanded by Yahweh?
In my original response to Warren, I wrote:
Mr. Warren attempts a critique of my treatment of Ezekiel 20:25-26, but fails to do justice both to my argument and to the various texts involved: . . . God wanted to defile them as punishment, and so he gave them a bad command, according to Ezekiel, but didn’t tell them it was a bad command. It’s not hard to grasp what Ezekiel is saying. Read my treatment of this text in chapter 5 to get the full picture. Mr. Warren is making a number of mistakes here. First he is conflating different sources (Exod 22 and Deut 28 weren’t written by the same source, and they were written hundreds of years apart). Second, I am not claiming that the authors of the legal material in Exod 22 believed that the command to sacrifice their firstborn was meant to devastate them. My argument is that this is a later interpretation by Ezekiel who is struggling and stretching to dispense with the longstanding tradition of child sacrifice in Israelite religion. Ezekiel is the only one who claims Exod 22:29 was a bad command, given as punishment, rather than given to make them prosper. Originally, the command there to sacrifice the firstborn children to Yahweh was intended to make Israel prosper, because at this stage in Israel’s history, they believed that Yahweh was satiated by human sacrifice.
Warren responds:
I didn’t have to quote Deuteronomy 28’s commentary on the laws given at Mr. Sinai as evidence that God intended the laws of Moses to give the Israelites abundant life. I could have quoted God’s words to Ezekiel in the very monologue in question: “So I led them out of the land of Egypt and brought them into the wilderness. I gave them my statutes and made known to them my rules, by which, if a person does them, he shall live” (Ezek. 20:10-11). These are the laws found in Exodus, given from Mt. Sinai. The life-giving intention of these laws are set in contrast to the bad commands that take their life: “Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life, and I defiled them through their very gifts in their offering up all their firstborn, that I might devastate them” (Ezek. 20:25-26). So it cannot be held that “Ezekiel is the only one who claims Exod 22:29 was a bad command.” Ezekiel says no such thing about any commands recorded in Exodus. He says the exact opposite – that those laws were to give them life. And when was the bad command given? The bad command is spoken in reference to what God tells the “children” in contrast to the laws delivered from Mt. Sinai to their “fathers.” So the bad command was given at a later date than the commands in Exodus. It would have been given no earlier than near the end of the 40-year wandering in the wilderness, after the “fathers” had died off. But I believe Ezekiel is probably saying that it was given later than that.
This whole argument is based upon Warren’s naïve assumptions about the composition of the legal code in Exodus. Mr. Warren believes that Exodus was written by Moses, that the legal code was transmitted at Sinai. In reality, it was composed over a long period, with some strata fairly early in the monarchical period, and some strata dating to the post-monarchical period.
Now, Warren speculates that the bad command referenced in Ezekiel 20:25-26 would not have been given until the late pre-exilic period. The text itself, of course, belies this. Verse 23 says, “I swore to them in the wilderness.” Yes, the “them” here is the children of the original wilderness generation. But it is the children in the wilderness that is the direct antecedent of the “them” found in verse 25, when Ezekiel says, “I gave them statutes that were not good.” Yes, it was not that generation who would be scattered among the nations. But the “them” is clearly the children in the wilderness.
Regardless of when we date the “bad command” of which Ezekiel speaks, here are the facts:
(1) The Israelites were practicing child sacrifice.
(2) Ezekiel states that Yahweh gave to the Israelites a “bad command” which was the command to sacrifice their firstborn. (Note, the command did not involve a mlch sacrifice, which is distinct from a firstborn sacrifice. A mlch sacrifice could be a sacrifice of any child at any age, but usually toddlers.) Now, Warren will later try to dispute that this is what Ezekiel says, but we’ll see why Warren fails below.
(3) Exod 22:29b issues a command to offer Israel’s firstborn as sacrifices, and it provides no provision for the redemption of the firstborn. It says, simply, “the firstborn of your sons you shall give me.” “Give to me” refers quite obviously to sacrifice, because the very next verse reads, “You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep: for seven days it shall remain with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me.” Clearly what is in view here is sacrifice.
Now, scholars have inferred that Ezekiel is referencing the law in Exod 22:29b. They have done so for several reasons. They argue that the Israelites who practiced this form of child sacrifice (the firstborn on the eighth day) found some support for this in the legal code. Ezekiel confirms that Yahweh did issue such a command, but spins it so that it was given as a punishment for their disobedience. Whether the law found in Exod 22:29b is exactly what Israelites were using in support of their practice, and/or exactly what Ezekiel had in mind is a hypothesis, a decent one, but is not of very great import either way. Nevertheless, Warren’s only argument against this is that in Ezekiel’s narration, the “bad command” came from Yahweh after the legislation at Sinai. The only way Warren is able to make this argument is to assume that the legal code found in Exodus was complete at the time of Ezekiel’s writing. This is not a realistic picture, and is not an argument against the actual consensus position. Ezekiel would not have had the book of Exodus sitting in front of him. He would have had knowledge of oral traditions, and perhaps some access to various different legal sources, yet to be compiled into the book of Exodus we now have. Of course, this is not a picture that Warren is willing to accept, since he is committed to the Mosaic authorship of the book of Exodus. So the situation here is one of ships passing in the night. Well, I’ve turned on the spotlight so it’s clear to the reader what’s really going on here. But regardless of what whether Ezek 20:25-26 refers to Exod 22:29b, we have in both cases references to a command of Yahweh to sacrifice the firstborn of Israel. That Exod 22:29b provides no provision for the redemption of the firstborn is one of the reasons (not the only reason) that scholars argue that this code dates to an earlier period.
God tells Ezekiel that “I withheld my hand” of judgment against the children of the Exodus (Ezek. 20:22). The “bad command” of verses 25-26 is called “bad” because it is a judgment.
Actually, Ezekiel never calls the “bad command” a “judgment.” The judgment, in Ezekiel’s mind, is the exile. The bad command precedes the exile, and therefore precedes the judgment. Even if we were to construe that effect of the command (i.e., the actual death of Israel’s firstborn) as a “judgment” (although Ezekiel never puts it that way), it would not be the command itself that is the judgment (as Warren claims) but the carrying it out.
Since God says that he withheld his judgment in the wilderness, this bad command would not have been given in the wilderness.
No. This is incorrect. What Ezekiel means by God withholding judgment in the wilderness is that God did not send them into exile in the wilderness. This is quite plain in the text.
Furthermore, immediately before Ezekiel mentions the bad command, he says, “Moreover, I swore to them in the wilderness that I would scatter them among the nations and disperse them through the countries, because they had not obeyed my rules.” (Ezek. 20:23-24) Did God scatter the children of the Exodus among the nations while they were in the wilderness? No. He warned them about this judgment in Deut. 28, but he did not carry it out until the Babylonian exile hundreds of years later. And unlike the exile judgment, Ezekiel does not even say, at least explicitly, that God warned Israel in the wilderness that God would bring judgment on them through this bad command. It’s simply listed as another judgment brought against them for their disobedience to the law of Moses.
No, this is not correct. It is not “listed as another judgment.” Warren’s argument is also confused. Why would Yahweh warn Israel that he was going to give them a bad command? If the point of the bad command was to judge Israel by bringing devastation on them, why would Yahweh warn them that that’s what the bad command was really intended to do? “I’m going to give you a bad command, so that when you obey it, you’ll be sorry you did.” That would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?
(Deut. 28:52-57 mentions the judgment of secretly eating their children because a foreign army besieges them and they are starving, but there is no command related to it.) I previously suggested the time of the bad command being given was during the years leading up to the Babylonian exile when the Bible says that Hebrew kings were sacrificing their children.
(Ezekiel assumes that Deuteronomy 28 was given to the Israelites at the end of the exodus, and therefore he assumes a Mosaic authorship. This is taught by every other writer in the Bible, and every ancient extra-biblical author who speaks on the issue.
This is quite humorous. First, we have no indication that Ezekiel had access to the book of Deuteronomy. Second, the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy is most certainly not taught by “every other writer in the Bible.” Yes, those who mention the authorship of Deuteronomy ascribe it to Moses, but that was the fiction concocted by Josiah and Hilkiah in the first place. Of course they thought it was Mosaic. That is entirely irrelevant. Third, I’m not sure, but is Warren suggesting that the prophecy in Deuteronomy 28 that Yahweh would make Israel eat her own children is supposed to be a parallel to the bad command to sacrifice their firstborn? I can’t imagine this is what Warren would be suggesting, but then again, if that’s not what he’s suggesting, I can’t figure out why he thinks the two issues are related? Eating your child because you’re being starved out by foreign armies has nothing to do with the institution of child sacrifice. Warren’s reference to Deuteronomy 28 is just a red herring.
There is no archeological support for anyone other than Moses being the author of Deuteronomy.
No, just textual support. Of course, there is no archaeological support for Moses being the author of Deuteronomy, and there is quite patent and obvious archaeological evidence indicating that this wouldn’t have been possible. The Hebrew script hadn’t been invented yet, and Israel didn’t develop the ability to write prose narratives in the Hebrew script until the ninth century at the earliest (over four hundred years after Moses). Maybe Warren wants to argue that Moses wrote the Pentateuch in Akkadian Cuneiform or something, while wandering through the desert day and night, and serving as chief judge, etc. etc. We’ll await the evidence in support of this argument.
The idea of a post-exilic date of Deuteronomy was unheard of until it was brought up by Enlightenment skeptics in the nineteenth century. It is simply a speculation based on interpretations of certain passages that can also be understood in ways compatible with Mosaic authorship.
Of course, scholars do not argue for a post-exilic date of Deuteronomy. They argue that it was composed about a century before the exile, with some minor redactions during the exilic period.
Many other aspects of Deuteronomy don’t make sense in terms of a post-exilic authorship, but that doesn’t bother the skeptics.
Which is why that’s not what they argue. Of course, Warren omits the hundreds of aspects of Deuteronomy that don’t make sense in terms of Mosaic authorship, such as mention of cities that didn’t exist until the eighth century BCE, etc.
They rely, of course, on the THOMAS assumption, rendering the text a confused, irrational product of inept political manipulation.)
False.
In my original response to Warren, I wrote:
Finally, Mr. Warren seems to be confused with his reference to the fact that Ezek 20:31 condemns children sacrifice. Of course he condemned it! As I argue, his whole interpretation of Exod 22:29 serves the purpose of his condemnation of child sacrifice. He wants to dispense with the institution, and his novel interpretation of Exod 22:29 is his means for doing so. (The fact, therefore, that Mr. Warren thinks v. 31 challenges my thesis shows that he did not understand my clear argument to begin with.) The redactors, who worked after Ezekiel, shared Ezekiel’s disdain for the institution of sacrifice. There would be no reason for them to change this text. Mr. Warren then continues, saying, “Of course, his interpretation also contradicts many other passages in which God condemns child sacrifice.” Yes, I am aware of this. That is in fact my argument. The Bible contradicts itself because it was written by different authors who disagreed with each other. He asks, “Isn’t there an interpretation with less problems? There certainly is: God gave them these evil statutes indirectly, by allowing evil rulers to institute these evil statutes (cf. Rom. 1:28).” The trouble is, that is not at all what Ezekiel 20:25-26 says. I understand this is what Mr. Warren wishes Ezekiel says, but the reality is that it is not what Ezekiel says. Ezekiel doesn’t say God gave them the bad command indirectly. He says that God gave them bad commands in the wilderness, because they had been disobedient and he wanted to punish them. Their disobedience preceded God’s giving them bad commands. Read my treatment of the text to see why Mr. Warren’s protestations are in vain.
I fully understand Mr. Stark’s argument. The point of my previous reply was that a plausible interpretation that allows various statements in Scripture to be consistent with one another is to be preferred over an interpretation that depicts God as contradicting himself, and in this case there is a plausible interpretation that avoids a contradiction.
First, there is nothing plausible about Warren’s interpretation. Second, why is a non-contradictory to be preferred, unless one assumes that the Bible has a single author? Here again is where Warren’s faith commitments interfere with sound exegetical practice.
Mr. Stark’s interpretation is extremely implausible. It is internally inconsistent.
Again, Warren thinks it is “internally inconsistent” because he posits a single divine author to the texts. But when we don’t come to the texts with that assumption, and let them stand on their own, the contradictions are plain, and there is no “internal inconsistency” whatsoever.
Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that the comment about the bad command meant that God was reversing his previous command in Exodus 22:29, then the statements later in the same chapter of Ezekiel are saying that the Israelites were doing an evil thing when they obeyed God’s command to sacrifice their children prior to God telling Ezekiel that he was reversing his previous command. In other words, God is telling Ezekiel that obedience to God’s explicit, positive legislation prior to God changing his mind about it (“defile yourselves after the manner of your fathers,” Ezek. 20:30) was evil.
See, here is a straw man. I’ve never argued that God “changed his mind” about it, nor is that what I argue Ezekiel is saying. In Ezekiel’s mind, God was always against child sacrifice; the reason God commanded Israel to perform child sacrifices is because God, in Ezekiel’s mind (or at least in his rhetoric), wanted Israel to discover for themselves that sacrificing their children was a bad thing.
“Defilement” is a deontic concept, not a problem of bad consequences like “devastation.” Even if obedience to God’s command would devastate the population, like I said before, “it doesn’t make sense that by obeying God’s command the Israelites could become ‘defiled’ (v. 26).” It doesn’t make sense for God to say “your fathers blasphemed me” (Ezek. 20:27) for obeying God’s command
That’s not what I argue Ezekiel says. Ezekiel says they blasphemed God by going after other gods, not by sacrificing their children to Yahweh. Yes, Ezekiel does say, “I defiled them through their very gifts,” after he says that Yahweh gave them a bad command to sacrifice their children to him. But the reason they are “defiled” by their gifts is because God is actually against child sacrifice, according to Ezekiel. God wanted to defile them, in order to bring them around to a knowledge of himself as Yahweh. That’s what the text clearly says. “I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am Yahweh.” I don’t understand why Warren can’t wrap his head around this. There is nothing difficult to understand here.
— to condemn actions committed before God changed his mind about it.
Straw man.
It’s in this sense that the condemnation of child sacrifice a few sentences after the mention of the bad command contradicts the idea that God gave the command to kill children in Exodus.
This is an unsuccessful argument. I’ll further explain why below.
Ezekiel says nothing about reinterpreting a command that God had lied about being good for them when it was actually a judgment to devastate them, however much Mr. Stark is attracted to the idea.
Why would Ezekiel state that he is reinterpreting the command? Even if he consciously did so (which I am not arguing), why would he state that’s what he’s doing? This is a silly point.
Ezekiel says nothing about God giving a command that he “didn’t tell them it was a bad command,” as Mr. Stark claims. The “he didn’t tell them” part is Mr. Stark’s conjecture in his attempt to understand how it was that God had given a bad command. Ezekiel affirms that the law given to the Exodus generation was for their good, for an abundant life. Ezekiel shows that he knows, and any other scribes handling the text after him would have known, the consistent testimony of Scripture: Obey everything that God had commanded Moses so that they would have a prosperous life (Josh. 1:7, 22:5, 23:6; Judg. 3:4; 1 Kings 2:3; 2 Kings 14:6, 18:6, 18:12, 21:8, 23:25; 1 Chron. 22:13; 2 Chron. 25:4, 33:8; Neh. 1:7-8, 8:1, 9:14,10:29; Dan. 9:11-13; Mal. 4:4).
I really don’t understand how Warren sees a contradiction between the laws being given “for Israel’s good,” and those laws including “a bad command.” There is no contradiction whatsoever. It’s not that difficult to wrap one’s head around. I am reminded of the time my father caught my brother smoking. His response was, “You want to smoke? Here, smoke.” He then gave my brother a full pack of cigarettes and told my brother to get in the closet and smoke it in its entirety. My father issues a “bad command” (i.e., something that was really harmful to my brother), but it was, quite consistently, also “for his good.”
Here I’ll quote Harvard scholars Jon D. Levenson who explains Ezek 20:25-26 in precisely these terms. Levenson writes that the “laws that were not good”
are YHWH’s retaliation for idolatry, but they are not in themselves idolatrous, only lethal, “rules by which they could not live.” . . . [T]he assertion in Ezekiel 20 is not that God left a wayward Israel to their own devices, or that he froze them in a posture of defiance like that in which he froze Pharaoh. Rather, the point is that because the people in their rebellion refused to obey YHWH’s life-promoting laws . . . he in turn saddled them with bad laws that would, nonetheless, ultimately serve his sovereign purpose.4
The ultimate, long-term intention of the bad command (as stated expressly by Ezekiel) was to bring Israel (through suffering) around to a proper knowledge of Yahweh. Even the bad command was for their good, according to Ezekiel’s logic.
As I pointed out above, Ezekiel affirms it immediately prior to the sentence in which Mr. Stark claims that Ezekiel is saying the opposite. Ezekiel and later scribes simply would have been morons to try to convince people that God had lied to Moses and the rest of God’s chosen nation when he delivered his holy law to his servant Moses and that now God wanted them to follow a different practice that contradicted the previous command, and that God had led all of his holy prophets up until (and actually including) Ezekiel to affirm the lie.
There is no evidence that the Jews had interpreted Exodus 22:29 as a command to kill their children as Mr. Stark claims, but even if some in Ezekiel’s time had, if Ezekiel wanted them to stop it, would it not have made more sense for him to explain that “sacrifice” in this verse did not mean “kill” but to dedicate to the special service of God?
The problem is, that’s not at all what it means, as I already pointed out. The very next verse uses the same language to refer to the sacrifice of animals. So the reason Ezekiel didn’t do that is probably because Ezekiel knew better than Warren what the command meant.
That understanding of “sacrifice” would have been consistent with other scriptures. Previously in the same book, God says, “Consecrate to me all the firstborn. Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine” (Exo. 13:1). Then a few sentences later God goes on to explain that human children are not to be killed but are to be ransomed (Exo. 13:11-15). When God says several chapters later at Exodus 22:29 that “The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me,” it only makes sense to assume that the method is still the same as stated earlier in chapter 13. There is no need for the details of how it’s to be done to be repeated later in the same book.
Here are Warren’s naïve assumptions about composition creeping in again. Just because Exod 22:29b comes later than Exod 13 in the text as we have it now, that does not mean that’s the order in which they were really composed. They come from different sources, and Exod 22:29 is earlier than Exod 13. But for Warren, Moses wrote it all, so there’s no point in even engaging in this argument on either side.
As even Mr. Stark notes (pp. 88-89), later in the same book God says that the first born are not to be killed but ransomed: “All your firstborn sons you shall ransom” (Exo. 34:20).
And as Warren should know, my position (as with the consensus) is that the redemption provisions are later than the stark, provisionless command in Exod 22:29. Warren can make this argument all he wants; it just won’t be useful in arguing against the consensus position.
God had told the Isrealites that the redemption of the first born children, rather than their actual death, was to be achieved through the dedication of the Levite tribe to the service of God (Num. 3:12-13).
No Warren is conflating yet another source. Again, ships passing in the night.
Exodus 22:29 has been understood in terms of redemption rather than killing by everyone except some of those dedicated to the THOMAS hermeneutic.
No. Rather by those who understand the difference between diachronic and synchronic readings of the text, as all actual critical scholars do. Scholars understand that individual texts have pre-histories, but that the texts often take new or altered meanings once they are spliced together with other sources. That’s not at all what Warren calls a “THOMAS hermeneutic.” No one is denying that after the final redaction of the Pentateuch, Exod 22:29b would have been read in light of Exod 13 and Exod 34, where provisions for the redemption of firstborn children are offered. We’re not stupid. But scholars are not merely interested in the synchronic reading of the text (as with Warren). Scholars also want to read the texts diachronically, because this helps us to understand the sources of Israel’s theology, and how Israel’s theology developed over time. Warren really should have no objection to a diachronic reading of these texts, since for him it’s only the synchronic that matters anyway. But whatever.
Since God tells the Isrealites in the book of Exodus both before and after 22:39 that firstborn sons are to be redeemed rather than killed, only a moronic interpreter would conclude that “give to me” in 22:39 implies that the firstborn sons should be killed.
Straw man. See previous comment.
Mr. Stark and his group grasp onto any superficial ambiguities and choose the interpretation that undermines the divine authorship of Scripture.
Right. That’s our motivation when choosing between interpretive options: Which option most undermines divine authorship? That’s obviously the same motivation scholars of ancient texts have when employing the same methods to other texts, such as Homer’s Iliad. Which interpretation most undermines the divine authorship of the Iliad? That’s the one we want.
God’s commandments in the Hebrew scriptures often condemn child sacrifice, with Jeremiah even saying that to command such a thing never entered God’s mind (Jer. 7:31, 19:5, and 32:35). Jeremiah began writing prior to Ezekiel, so on Mr. Stark’s view, Ezekiel’s claim that God had commanded child sacrifice in Exodus 22:29 contradicted what Jeremiah had already written, which would have raised the issue that one of them was a false prophet.
Either that or Ezekiel didn’t have access to the Jeremian scribal tradition. Or Ezekiel and Jeremiah were talking about two different issues, which in fact they were. Jeremiah was talking about mlch sacrifices; Ezekiel was talking about firstborn sacrifices. But once again, Warren’s argument here sums up thusly: “If Thom is right, then the Bible contradicts itself.” Well, yeah. It would follow that, if I am right when I argue that Ezekiel and Jeremiah had contradictory ways of dispensing with the institution of child sacrifice, then Ezekiel and Jeremiah had contradictory ways of dispending with the institution of child sacrifice.
Amazingly, Mr. Stark turns God’s condemnation of human sacrifice in Jeremiah, that commanding it never entered God’s mind, into an admission that God had once commanded it: “. . . why then would Yahweh need to point out that he never decreed the practice of sacrificing children to another god?” (p.96). An answer that should have easily come to Mr. Stark is that corrupt priests had convinced the people that adding worship of other gods, with all the customs that accompanied that, to the worship of Yahweh was okay.
This is humorous. Of course it occurred to me that “corrupt priests had convinced the people that adding worship of other gods . . . to the worship of Yahweh was okay.” But of course, Warren here, once again, entirely ignores the actual argument I made, and it’s again the argument representing the consensus of scholarship. The arguments isn’t simply that, because it would be strange that Yahweh would decree the practice of sacrificing children to another god, therefore the text is fishy. Warren presents a caricature of my argument in order to make it look like a non sequitur. But here’s what I actually argued in the book (from the same page that Warren cites rather selectively):
It is important to note that the divine name Baal originally was just a generic Semitic term for “lord.” It was frequently applied to Yahweh and only began to be equated in every case with a distinct Canaanite deity in the eighth century, with the ministry of Hosea. This is reflected in the names for Saul’s son and grandson. In the book of Chronicles their real names are preserved: Ishbaal and Meribaal. The first name simply means “man of Baal” and should just be understood as “the Lord’s man,” not as an indication that Saul’s son worshiped a deity other than Yahweh. But the Deuteronomistic Historian (the author of the book of Kings), who was not favorably disposed toward Saul’s dynasty, changed the names of these two sons of Saul to Ishboshet and Mephiboshet. Bōšet means “shame,” thus turning “the Lord’s man” into a “man of shame.”
Jeremiah, a contemporary of the Deuteronomistic Historian, shared Hosea’s predilection to associate “Baal worship” with idol worship. But it is clear that there is a long history in Israelite religion of identifying Baal with Yahweh. By the seventh century, when Jeremiah writes, the identification of Baal as a false deity was quite well established among the elites, though not necessarily in the popular or mainstream religion. This complexity is reflected in the text cited above; there are a number of semantic tensions. For instance, Jeremiah has Yahweh saying that he “did not command or decree” the practice of sacrificing children to Baal, that such a thing “never entered my mind.” But this strains against credulity. If Baal is not Yahweh, and all worship of gods other than Yahweh has always been condemned from the earliest times, even in polytheistic Israelite religion, why then would Yahweh need to point out that he never decreed the practice of sacrificing children to another god? This is a classic case of “methinks thou dost protest too much.” Taking into consideration what we have outlined above with regard to the original semantics of “Baal” as an honorific epithet for Yahweh, it seems that beneath the surface of the text we can discern a situation in which popular Israelite religion is sacrificing Israelite children to “Baal,” i.e., Yahweh, but the religious elites equate Baal with a foreign deity, a god other than Yahweh.
This seems to me the only way to make sense of the text. What Jeremiah’s language comes down to, then, is an early attempt to equate child sacrifice in general with idolatry. It is clear from the legends of the binding of Isaac and from the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter, as well as from the traditions represented in Exod 22:29 that child sacrifice was performed for Yahweh. Jeremiah’s strategy for condemning child sacrifice, then, is (following Hosea) to depict “Baal” as a foreign god, and thus to relocate the practice of child sacrifice under the theological category of idolatry. (Human Faces of God, pp. 96-97.)
Warren totally ignores the major argument I make and simply sums up my argument from this statement: “For instance, Jeremiah has Yahweh saying that he ‘did not command or decree’ the practice of sacrificing children to Baal, that such a thing ‘never entered my mind.’ But this strains against credulity. If Baal is not Yahweh, and all worship of gods other than Yahweh has always been condemned from the earliest times, even in polytheistic Israelite religion, why then would Yahweh need to point out that he never decreed the practice of sacrificing children to another god? This is a classic case of “methinks thou dost protest too much.” What Warren has done is very dishonest.
The fact is, there is more than ample evidence that this is what Jeremiah is doing here—he is recharacterizing legitimate Yahweh=Baal worship as the worship of a foreign deity. This is something that Jeremiah does throughout his oracles. Scholars refer to it, as I pointed out, as the polemicization of Baal worship. Jeremiah’s reference to Baal is polemical. Historically speaking, at this stage in Israel’s theology, Baal was another name for Yahweh in Judean tradition. That Jeremiah engages frequently in this kind of Baal polemic has been shown over and over again in the scholarship. See for instance the essay by Armin Lange, “‘They Burn Their Sons and Daughters—That Was No Command of Mine’ (Jer 7:31): Child Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible and in the Deuteronomistic Jeremiah Redaction” in Human Sacrifice in Jewish and Christian Tradition (ed. Finsterbusch, Lange, and Römheld; Brill, 2007), 109-132. Lange shows that in Jeremiah, the term “Baal” is a polemical term “often used to attack a religious practice that was part of Israel’s YHWH cult” (130). Lange shows multiple examples throughout Jeremiah where various figures are criticized as “Baal worshipers” when in fact they are Yahweh worshipers. Lange shows that Jer 7:31 “must be understood as attacking Israelites who actually sacrificed children to YHWH. In turn, in Jer 19:5 and 32:35, the claim that Israel sacrificed children to Baal is a polemic disqualification of a YHWHistic sacrifice as non-YHWHistic. The Dtr Jeremiah redaction discredits YHWHistic child sacrifices as sacrifices to Baal. This polemic agrees well with the approach to child sacrifices found elsewhere in Dtr literature” (130-31).
In short, Warren has concocted another straw man designed to make my argument appear absurd and unsubstantiated, while totally ignoring the actual content of the argument I made. This is a pattern in Warren’s apologetics.
Warren continues down the same road:
It was a similar situation when Jesus later condemned the Pharisees for adding commandments that God had never commanded and which actually violated God’s law: “So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. . . . In vain do you worship me, teaching as doctrine the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:6,9). Similarly, modern pietists strain credulity with their teaching that the Bible condemns all alcohol consumption. It’s not in the Bible, but they think it is. Numerous similar examples throughout church history could be given.
This is all built upon Warren’s straw man.
Sometimes Mr. Stark characterizes his position as a problem of “interpretation” of Exodus 22:29 by some Jews, in which case he should agree that there are other reasonable interpretations. But he also characterizes his position as that the original, intended meaning by God was that the Jews should engage in human sacrifice, which runs into the problems of internal consistency mentioned above.
This is a total mischaracterization of what I’ve said. I said that the tradition preserved in Exod 22:29b was being interpreted by many Israelites and Judeans (Warren keeps calling them “Jews,” which is anachronistic) as a command to sacrifice firstborn to Yahweh. (By the way, as Lange points out, the only form of child sacrifice ever condemned in the Bible is mlch sacrifice, never firstborn sacrifice.) Yes, there were other interpretations, but the question isn’t which is more “reasonable” so much as what does the evidence tell us would have been the most primitive meaning of the command. But nowhere did I ever argue, as Warren accuses me of arguing, that “the original, intended meaning by God was that the Jews [sic] should engage in human sacrifice.” I don’t believe God would earnestly contradict Godself or have a change of mind on something like this any more than Warren does. My position does not entail that the true God literally gave Israel the original command to sacrifice their firstborn. My position has always been that these are cultural traditions about deities, and that the true God at various times intervened to provide corrections, but not to the extent of producing a flawless, perfectly internally consistent collection of books. Warren’s mischaracterization of my position stems from his underdeveloped ability to think outside of his own Reformed Calvinistic box.
Warren continues:
Briefly regarding the account of Japhthah [sic] sacrificing his daughter in Judges 11, the account does not include a divine command. Whether God approved it is unstated.
I’ve shown repeatedly why this isn’t the case; Warren can ignore my arguments all he wants to. He continues:
Also, whether the “sacrifice” was a killing or a dedication of the daughter to service to God as a perpetual virgin is disputed by competent theologians. Mr. Stark fails to address these alternate interpretations in his book, leaving readers with the impression that there are no challengers to his interpretation.
The idea that Jephthah dedicated his daughter to lifelong service rather than sacrificing her is one taken up by an extreme minority of scholars, most of whom are conservatives. There is no credibility to this position whatsoever; it has been amply refuted by scores of scholars. And whether a scholar is generally competent doesn’t mean that scholar’s argument for a specific reading of a specific text doesn’t reflect a lapse in competence, a lapse adequately explained by embarrassment over the content of the text.
In Warren’s original review, he wrote that I admitted that “the Bible teaches Calvinism.” I responded:
Ha! I do no such thing as admit that “the Bible teaches Calvinism.” Mr. Warren is being deceptive again. Here is what I say about the Bible and Calvinism in my book: “Obviously one is going to find love in the text when one approaches the text with that expectation. In the same way, one would find violence in the text when one approached it expecting to find violence; one would find Arminianism when one sought Arminianism, and Calvinism when one sought Calvinism” (p. 37). I think we’re beginning to see a pattern in terms of the lengths Mr. Warren is willing to go to in order to refute my book (and the Bible itself).
Warren now responds:
In his discussion of the Calvinist views of Jonathan Edwards and John Piper on predestination, Mr. Stark forgets that he wrote: “Unfortunately for every Christian, the perspective of Edwards and Piper is not too far off from some perspectives inscribed in our own scriptures. For instance, in 1 Kings 22:19-23, Yahweh had determined to kill Ahab, the king of Israel, and accomplished this purpose by sending a ‘lying spirit’ to Ahab’s 400 prophets. . . . Even more significant is the claim made in Ezekiel 20.” (pp. 65, 66). So not only does Mr. Stark recognize that the Calvinist view is taught in Scripture (at least parts of it), and in way that can’t be avoided even if “one sought Arminianism,” he also directly relates it to the issue of the bad command in Ezekiel 20.
I’m sorry, Warren, but your claim that I said that “the Bible teaches Calvinism” is not supported the quote you’ve mined above. I said that 1 Kings 22 and Exodus 20 were “not too far off from” Edwards and Piper. That’s a far cry from saying that “the Bible teaches Calvinism.” Hell, not even Calvin taught Calvinism! Warren continues with more nonsense:
However, he fails to connect the two passages in terms of God’s methods, seeing that God could have given the bad command of Ezekiel 20 in the same way that, as Mr. Stark puts it, “Yahweh lied or commissioned a lie” (p.65) to Ahab – by permitting an evil spirit to influence their corrupt hearts.
I’m sorry, but how does this undermine my argument? Answer: not in the slightest. Obviously the same methodology is expressed in both 1 Kings 22 and Exodus 20. In both cases, Yahweh lies in order to punish disobedient people. That was my whole point. I’m not sure if Warren is suggesting that I failed to see the very point I was making, or if he is suggesting that by not expressly connecting 1 Kings 22 and Exodus 20 I was somehow trying to hide the fact that they both reflect the same methodology. Neither suggestion, of course, would be accurate. Warren continues:
In the case of the bad command in Ezekiel 20, the murderous spirit would have been sent to influence corrupt Hebrew rulers to institute child sacrifice. Like the corrupt Ahab and his corrupt prophets, those murderous rulers would have been responsible for their sinful acts, for the murderous spirit was only successful because the rulers with corrupt hearts allowed themselves to entertain such thoughts.
I certainly wouldn’t deny the human recipients of Yahwistic lies any moral responsibility for their hard hearts, but the mere fact of their hard hearts does not somehow magically erase the fact that Yahweh lied to them. And for the record, in principle I wouldn’t wish to argue that Yahweh is morally guilty for lying to unjust rulers. But of course in the specific case of Exodus 20, the bad command (allegedly) from Yahweh to sacrifice children is not a command I think can be excused in the manner in which Warren wishes to excuse it.
Now for Genesis 22. In my original response, I wrote:
Mr. Warren uses the word “scandalized” to make it seem as if I am unfamiliar with the long history of interpretation of Gen 22 and to make it seem as if my reading of the text is basically emotional. He is wrong on both counts. His subsequent interpretation of Gen 22 completely evades the points I make about the text in my book. He does not address my argument.
Warren now responds:
Mr. Stark’s argument is that the Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac supports “the logic of child sacrifice” (p. 89). The only kind of child sacrifice that it supports is in a situation comparable to Abraham’s – where God will resurrect the child, and that knowledge is received through God audibly speaking to you and performing awe-inspiring miracles as proof that it is God speaking.
Unbelievable. Warren wishes to import the midrashic commentary on Genesis 22 found in Hebrews 11:19, written two thousand years after Abraham was purported to have lived, as if it’s an element of the story in Genesis 22. This is inerrantist hermeneutics par excellence, and a rather flagrant example at that. Genesis 22 makes no mention of any such belief in resurrection on the part of Abraham. Nor does it make any reference to God performing “awe-inspiring miracles as proof” that God is speaking to Abraham about the possibility of a resurrection of Isaac. In fact, Hebrews 11 makes no mention of any such confirmation miracles either. Warren is just, apparently, making this up.
Obviously, more than seven hundred years after child sacrifice had been condemned in Israel, the author of Hebrews is going to have a different perspective on Abraham’s motivations than any tradition composed well prior to that condemnation of child sacrifice. The lengths to which Warren will go to apologize for the Bible never ceases to amaze me. The issue is not how Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac was understood 2000 years later than the story’s setting. The issue is what kind of traditions the much earlier story reflects about primitive Hebrew religion.
Nevertheless, Warren continues:
Since a ram was actually sacrificed, it can be said that Genesis 22 supports the logic of sacrifice. But what is the “logic of sacrifice”? That sacrifices “satiate God,” as Mr. Stark puts it? Not if that means that God needs blood for food.
I never suggested that’s what it means.
The Biblical logic of sacrifice to God is that death is the just penalty for sin. Whereas the logic of pagan human sacrifice was that killing a human would satisfy the wrath of the gods against the others in the community, sacrificing a sinful human does nothing to satisfy God’s judgment on other people for their individual sins (Deut. 24:16, Jer. 31:30, Ezek. 18:1-20).
Yes, let’s quote three late traditions which run counter to earlier traditions. And let’s ignore that a sacrifice for sin has nothing to do with the sacrifice of Isaac, or the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter, etc. Let’s ignore all the scapegoating executions too. The fact is, the biblical ideas about the purposes of sacrifice are various, and, contrary to Warren’s unsubstantiated (and unsubstantiatable) claim, sin is not the only reason the Bible gives for the necessity of sacrifice. Obviously, that’s a primary reason, but it’s hardly the only one.
Also, I should point out that Warren’s presentation of the logic of “pagan” human sacrifice is totally inadequate. Yes, some ANE cultures believed human sacrifices could satiate the deity’s wrath against the whole community, but there were numerous other reasons for sacrifice. Moreover, the fact is, sacrifice also served to satiate Yahweh’s wrath against Israel too. And in fact, that’s the whole point of Yom Kippur. The guilt of the people is transferred to the sacrificed animal. Same goes for the scapegoat.
Warren continues:
The only sense in which killing a sinful human removes God’s wrath from a community is when God commanded the community to execute a person for committing some egregious crime, and the community has not carried out the act that God commanded them to perform (e.g. Deut. 19:13). The death of the criminal does not pay for anyone else’s sins. The execution removes God’s wrath from the community because the community obeys what God commanded the community to do by not allowing a grave injustice from going unpunished. Christ’s death can pay for other people’s sins only because he didn’t have his own sins to pay for. Thus there is no contradiction between the passages that say each person shall die for his own sins, and the doctrine of Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice. The animals sacrificed in the Old Testament are symbolic substitutionary sacrifices for the sins of the people. The animal sacrifices do not satisfy the penalty in themselves, but they foreshadow the sacrifice of the Messiah to come.
Besides the fact that this is all a red herring, having nothing to do with my argument, Warren again displays his inability to read the texts historically; he’s only able to read them as a Christian inerrantist. He can only understand the Mosaic sacrifices in light of the book of Hebrews, and not on their own terms. Rather than presenting any sort of a challenge to the arguments that I actually make, Warren has simply exampled the selfsame problems with inerrantist hermeneutics that I critiqued in my second and third chapters.
Jesus’ Prediction of the Destruction of Jerusalem
Warren writes:
The Christians fled before the siege on Jerusalem began, so those Christians did not interpret Jesus’ words “when you see the abomination of desolation . . . flee to the mountains” to mean that they should flee when they saw the temple destroyed – that is, they did not equate seeing “the abomination of desolation” with seeing the temple destroyed. They would have been slaughtered and enslaved with the rest of the Jews in Jerusalem if they had waited that long. This is just one more piece of evidence against Mr. Stark’s claim that Jesus should be understood to say that his return is after the destruction of the temple. Rather, “the sign of the son of man in heaven” (Matt. 24:30) should be equated with the destruction of the temple. The destruction of the temple was Christ’s coming in judgment, a sign that he was ruling from heaven and destroying his enemies with a “rod of iron.”
This is an incredibly weak argument. The “abomination that causes desolation” was a codeword for a sacrilege on the temple. That’s the reference in Daniel. Simply because, historically, some Christians fled before the attack on the temple does not mean, as Warren wants it to mean, that Christians would have interpreted Jesus’ words to mean something other than an attack on the temple. All it means is that some Christians fled Jerusalem before the temple was attacked. So, no, this is not a piece of evidence against my reading. It is actually very clear in the text that the abomination that causes desolation refers to a siege of the temple. Matthew says, “So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains” (24:15-16). Here it is quite clear that Jesus refers to a sacrilege committed against the temple itself. Contrary to Warren’s wishes, in Matthew it is at this point that Jesus instructs them to flee to the mountains. Also, contrary to Warren’s misreading of the text, it is not the Christians or Jews in Jerusalem specifically Jesus tells to flee; it is “those in Judea,” a much broader geographic specification. If some had already left Jerusalem but remained in Judea, the time of the temple’s siege was the time to get out of Judea altogether.
The same is clear in Mark: “But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains” (13:14). Again, quite clearly the desolating sacrilege refers to a siege of the temple, and they are instructed to flee Judea after this has taken place.
Luke is slightly different from the other two: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then those in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those inside the city must leave it, and those out in the country must not enter it.” Warren obviously wishes to follow Luke in some ways, but not in others. Here the codeword “desolation” appears again, but in this case Jesus instructs them to flee before it occurs. But again, the desolation refers to the siege itself. So in Mark and Matthew, Jesus instructs them to flee after they have seen the desecrating sacrilege erected in the temple, while in Luke, Jesus instructs them to flee before this takes place. Regardless of which version(s) of this logion the Christians in Jerusalem had access to at the time, at least some fled before the fact. Warren wishes to make an argument about the meaning of Jesus’ words based upon how he thinks some Christians interpreted them in the face of impending doom. This is silliness.
As for Warren’s claim that the destruction of the temple was Christ’s coming in judgment, and not the abomination that causes desolation (desecrating sacrilege), none of the Synoptic Gospels agree with him. In Mark and Matthew, the desecrating sacrilege is performed by the Romans and it involves an erection (of the Roman ensigns) in the temple. In Luke, it refers to the Roman siege of Jerusalem as well. But in each and every case, the “coming of the Son of Man” occurs after the destruction of the temple, as I showed, while Warren has failed to show otherwise:
In Matthew, the coming of the Son of Man occurs “immediately after” the suffering of “those days,” i.e., the days which include the desecrating sacrilege at the temple. In Mark, again, the coming of the Son of Man occurs “after that suffering.” And in Luke, on the one hand, the people are instructed to flee when they see the desolation coming to Jerusalem. On the other hand, when they see the portents in heaven and the coming of the Son of Man, they are told the contrary: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” The former is described as “desolation coming near;” the latter is described as “redemption coming near.” The clearest reading is the one I offered: the Romans will come to destroy the temple, then the Son of Man will come to liberate God’s people and pour out God’s wrath on the nations. Warren has provided zero reasons to accept any other reading.
In my original response, I wrote:
First of all, it’s not clear what Mr. Warren is suggesting the “abomination that causes desolation” is. He says it is not the desolation itself. OK. The only hint he gives as to what it is is in his reference to Luke 21:20: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.” Is Mr. Warren suggesting that the abomination is the surrounding of Jerusalem by the Roman armies? It seems that’s what he is saying, but again he’s unclear so I could be wrong. What I think he’s suggesting is this: The abomination that causes desolation is the surrounding of Jerusalem by Roman armies in 68 CE, and the desolation itself is the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. If this is what he intends to say, this is frankly a rather silly interpretation. Note here also that Luke does not even use the term “abomination that causes desolation.” Only Matthew and Mark use the term. But Jesus’ use of the term was a reference back to its use in Daniel as a code for the desecration of the temple when Antiochus IV sacrificed a pig to Zeus on the temple altar. That was the “abomination that causes desolation” in Daniel. So when Jesus picks up that term and applies it to the Roman invasion, he means that Rome will desecrate the temple. I would not say that the “abomination that causes desolation” and the “desolation itself” are the same thing, even though Mr. Warren claims my whole case somehow rests on that alleged assumption. Obviously the desolation is subsequent to the abomination, but it is clear that the abomination refers to the desecration of the temple.
Warren responds:
As I explained above, a comparison of Matthew and Mark with Luke shows that Jerusalem being surrounded by armies occurs at the same time that the disciples are supposed to see the abomination of desolation, which means that Mr. Stark is wrong to say that Jesus taught that the temple would be destroyed before he came in judgment.
This is dead wrong. It’s a pity Warren doesn’t show us an actual comparison of the Synoptics on this point (as I just did above), because if he had, we’d see that his words are vacuous. Warren misreads Luke, and then wishes to harmonize Matthew and Mark with his misreading of Luke. Here’s his misreading of Luke: “Luke shows that Jerusalem being surrounded by armies occurs at the same time that the disciples are supposed to see the abomination of desolation.” No, this is incorrect. In Luke, the “desolation” is “near” when Jerusalem is surrounded by the armies; the desolation has not yet taken place. (One would think this would be quite obvious, but apparently not to a preterist.) Warren apparently just can’t acknowledge that Matthew/Mark disagree slightly with Luke. As we saw, in the former two, the people are instructed to flee after they see the erection of a sacrilege in the temple (the language is crystal clear). In Luke, they are instructed to flee before this takes place. There’s a real disagreement there, however minor. But one cannot harmonize them by changing the meaning of Matthew and Mark to comport with a meaning that Luke supposedly has, but actually doesn’t have. Warren is way off, and again, he has provided no legitimate evidence that my reading (that Jesus taught the temple would be destroyed before he came in judgment) is wrong.
Warren continues:
Wright equates Jesus’ coming with the destruction of the temple, and I agree with Wright on that. As to why they are coterminous, there are a number of possibilities. It could be that the occupation of Jerusalem by gentile soldiers is the abomination.
No. Again: “the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place” (Matthew); “when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be” (Mark). In both cases, the abomination that causes desolation refers to something being erected in the temple in both Matthew and Mark. (Luke doesn’t refer to an “abomination” at all; he just carries over the word “desolation” into his version, which makes sense because unlike Mark and Matthew, Luke doesn’t have a Jewish audience.)
Warren:
Because Jerusalem was “the holy city” (Dan. 9:24), many Jews held that an occupation by gentile soldiers was an abomination. When the Roman soldiers sacrificed to their ensigns in the temple before destroying it, that was a continuation and climax of the abomination that had begun with their occupation of the city.
Some fancy maneuvering here. Again, there’s no question that Matthew refers to a “desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place,” and that this refers to the erection of the ensigns of the Roman soldiers. There’s nothing in any of the texts about any sort of gradual abomination, as Warren rather humorously wishes to suggest. Yes, Jerusalem was referred to as “the holy city,” but not “the holy place.” “The holy place” referred to the temple. It is the official term for the outer holy area of the temple, surrounding the “most holy place,” where the ark was kept for a time.
Warren continues to skirt the facts:
Or if the “abomination of desolation” specifically refers to the temple, it could be that, when the gentile armies surrounded Jerusalem, they could see, in the sense of understand, that the abomination of desolation was immanent.
Yes, that is what Luke says, with the exception that Luke mentions no abomination whatsoever—he only refers to the desolation of Jerusalem. But at any rate, that is not what Matthew and Mark say.
More from Warren:
Another possibility is that Jerusalem is surrounded by armies around the same time that the abomination is committed. The abomination could refer to the slaughter of multitudes of innocent people in Jerusalem by the Zealots in A.D. 67, climaxed by the murder of Zacharias, the son of Baruch, in the middle of the temple after a mock trial.
Except that, again, Matthew and Mark both say very clearly what the abomination is: it’s the erection of a sacrilege in the temple. It’s not the execution of Zacharias in the temple. It’s the erection of a sacrilege in the temple.
The most ironic thing about all of this is that the two Gospels that do refer to the abomination (Matthew and Mark) both follow up their description of the abomination with the injunction, “Let the reader understand.” #facepalm
In my original response, I wrote:
At any rate, all of this is moot, and completely irrelevant to my argument, as well as to the text itself. Jesus clearly says that the temple will be destroyed and that the Son of Man will return to gather elect, all within one generation of Jesus’ lifetime. There’s no getting around that, as I’ve argued extensively in my eighth chapter, and Mr. Warren’s protestations certainly haven’t managed to get around it.
Warren responds:
Jesus only says that “angels” (messengers of either heavenly or earthly origin) are sent out when Jesus comes in judgment against the temple within one generation of his listeners. The actual gathering of the elect is a history-long process.
It’s quite clear from the context and from parallel passages that the angels here are celestial, not early messengers. But this claim that the “gathering of the elect is a history-long process” is just Warren imposing his post-millennialism onto the text. He wants to interpret this as evangelism. But it is described rather as a “gathering.” That is, a “bringing in.” The elect already exist, and the angels are sent to gather them in, not to go and make disciples. The Preterist reading strains against all credulity. Warren responds to my discussion of the parallel passages in my book:
In his book, Mr. Stark says that “There are two fatal problems with Wright’s interpretation here: (1) angels also accompany the Son of Man in Mark 8:34-9:1, but they are clearly not human evangelists here” (p. 189 n.33). Although Mr. Stark equates the angels sent out to gather the elect in Matthew 24:31 with the angels mentioned in such passages as Matthew 16:27 and Mark 8:34-9:1, the latter angels are sent in judgment, like the four horsemen of John’s apocalypse. But the angels in Matthew 24:31 have a different purpose – bringing salvation to all of the elect. I believe that the best view is that they are human messengers, but they could be seen as heavenly angels who aid humans in the proclamation of the gospel (cf. Acts 8:26, 10:3-7, 12:7-11, 20:23).
This is nonsense. Again, they are sent to gather in, not to evangelize. If you’ll recall, Christ’s messengers were already sent out to the four corners of the earth to evangelize some forty years past, at the Great Commission. What this describes is not a planting of seeds, but a reaping of the harvest from the seeds that have already been planted.
And while yes, the angels in Mark 8 are angels of judgment, my point stands: the event is the same in both passages (the coming of the Son of Man), and thus it stands to reason that the “angels” in both passages refer to celestial, not human, beings. Obviously some of the angels are tasked with judgment, while others are tasked with gathering in the elect. What is clear is that in no case is there any mention of evangelism in these Son of Man passages. As I pointed out, the evangelism to the world had already been commissioned a generation before this event.
Warren attempts a response to this:
Mr. Stark’s second objection to Wright on this point is that “Jesus said that the spread of the gospel throughout the whole world would already be accomplished prior to the coming of the Son of Man (Mark 13:10).” But this glosses over details and distinctions that a fuller study of Scripture reveals about the future course of God’s kingdom. There was a preaching of the gospel to all the known world prior to the first-century destruction of Jerusalem, but bringing in all the elect is a process that occurs for the remainder of history.
Warren doesn’t seem to understand what “bringing in” means. A “fuller study of Scripture” would make it clear to him that it refers to an end of diaspora—a return to Jerusalem—and not to the act of evangelism.
He continues:
Acts 2:5 says “Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.” So on the day of Pentecost less than two months after Christ’s ascension “every nation” had heard the gospel. Of course, this is speaking about the world of the Roman empire, not the entire earth. The parallel passage to Mark 13:10 is Matthew 24:14: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.” The word used here for “world” is “oikoumene,” which is the same word used in Luke 2:1: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered.” Other New Testament passages testify that the gospel was being preached throughout the Roman world (Rom. 1:8; Col. 1:6, 23). This would obviously be a short time period because it would be completed before the disciples had preached to every town in Israel (Matt. 10:23), and before the death of some of the disciples (Matt. 16:28; Mark 9:1; Luke 9:27).
But there is something further to be fulfilled in history than just preaching to the nations of the Roman world. The Old Testament predicts that one day all the nations on earth will worship Yahweh (Gen. 17:5-6, 22:18; cf. Gal. 3:8;Num. 14:21; Isa. 2:1-4, 11:9; see more here).
Note that in the very argument Warren makes, he undermines himself. He notes that Mark 13:10 and Matt 24:14 say that the gospel will be proclaimed “throughout the whole world,” and that then “the end will come.” He then makes my argument for me, showing that the word used for “whole world” was a term referring to the Roman realm. So, according to Warren, “the gospel will be proclaimed throughout the Roman realm, and then the end will come.”
The simple fact that Warren is unable to face up to is that the authors of the Gospels, and of the Hebrew Bible texts, didn’t know how big the world really was. So when they spoke of “all the nations of the earth,” they were just speaking about the nations they knew existed.
Warren continues:
Preaching to the nations of the known world (before there is time for every town in Israel to hear the gospel and before all the disciples die) is one thing; converting and discipling whole nations everywhere on earth to submit to the law of God so that wars cease is a much greater task (Matt. 28:19; Isa. 2:1-4).
Say what now? What does Matthew 28 say about making “whole nations” “submit to the law of God so that wars cease”? Uh, nothing. Matthew 28 speaks of making disciples from among the nations, not making “whole nations” into disciples. This is Warren’s postmillennial Christian dominionism imposing itself on the text again. Isaiah 2 is a utopian text and there is no basis whatsoever for his attempt to harmonize it with the Great Commission text. But on Jesus’ view, the world of Isaiah 2 would take place after “the end,” not before it. There’s a little thing called apocalypticism that emerged within Israel between the time that Isaiah was written and the time that Jesus preached.
Warren continues:
After the destruction of Jerusalem (“Babylon” Rev. 17:5-6, “the great city . . . where the Lord was crucified”Rev. 11:8),
Uh, no. Babylon refers to Rome. You can’t string two verses together from different chapters and just baldly claim they are talking about the same thing. Jerusalem is identified as Sodom and Egypt in Rev 11. But Babylon refers to Rome throughout Revelation. It is Rome in Revelation 14:8. It is Rome in Revelation 16:19-20 (Rome has islands; does Jerusalem have islands?). It is Rome in Revelation 17 (Rome sits on seven hills; does Jerusalem sit on seven hills?). And it is Rome in Revelation 18 (the cities of the earth grew rich on Rome’s excessive luxuries; did they grow rich on Jerusalem’s excessive luxuries?). This just goes to show how committed Warren is to his preterism, which includes a pre-70 CE dating of the book of Revelation. Obviously more committed than he is to the Bible. Nowhere does Revelation speak of the destruction of Jerusalem, not as a future event.
He continues:
there is the millennium where the saints reign with Christ (Rev. 20:4), having been spiritually resurrected and seated with Christ in heaven (Eph. 2:4-6). This “new heavens and new earth” does not come all at once. Christ is given all authority to disciple the nations (Matt. 28:18) and Satan is removed from authority to deceive the nations (Rev. 20:3) at Christ’s triumph at the cross, but the manifestation of Christ’s kingdom on earth must work out gradually over time: ” first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear” (Mark 4:28; cf. Matt. 13:31-33; Heb. 2:8). This view of eschatology that I contend that the Bible teaches is called Postmillennialism.
Yes, that is what it’s called. That’s all I’ll grant. Yes, the growing of the kingdom is gradual, according to Mark 4:28, but the gathering of the harvest is instantaneous, according to Mark 4:28. This is what Warren isn’t allowed to see because of his commitment to a silly eschatology. At the Great Commission, the disciples were sent out to plant the seeds. For a generation, they cultivated the seeds. But then it was harvest time, when the Son of Man came and the angels were sent out (not to cultivate) but to “gather” the elect. The harvest, according to Mark 4:28, is “at once,” i.e., quick. That’s what “gather the elect” means. It’s not difficult to understand, unless you have some commitment that would make it impossible for you to accept this, like, say, a commitment to the view that Jesus could not possibly have been wrong.
In my original response, I wrote:
No, “land” does not make more sense of the text, since in the very next verse it is clear again that the scope is worldwide, since the angels of the Son of Man are sent out to the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other, in order to gather the elect and (by implication) return them to Jerusalem. That makes it clear that the word in v. 30 should be read as “the whole earth” rather than just “the local land.” Moreover, why would all of the tribes of the land of Israel mourn at the sight of their liberator, at the very time of the restoration of Israel, when the tribes are being brought out of diaspora? It is not the tribes of Israel that are mourning, but the tribes of the earth, and this is quite clear in the text.
Warren responds:
The “implication” of returning the elect to Jerusalem is just Mr. Stark reading into the text.
No, that is Mr. Stark have a background in apocalyptic literature, and understanding that the gather of the elect always referred to the end of the diaspora, i.e., the return to Jerusalem. I’m not “reading into” the text. I’m reading the text against its literary background. Warren is “reading into” the text by ignoring its literary background.
The destruction of Jerusalem is the destruction of the Jerusalem in bondage, as opposed to the Jerusalem from above, which is the New Covenant church (Gal. 4:24-26).
Warren uses a prooftext for his allegorical understanding of Jerusalem but the prooftext isn’t speaking about judgment against Jerusalem.
The New Covenant church is the new, heavenly Zion (Heb. 12:18-29); the old, earthly Zion is no longer important once the temple and rest of the Old Covenant ritual structure finds its fulfillment in Christ (John 4:21). God’s presence and worship of God are no longer to be centered on the physical temple in physical Jerusalem, but on Christ himself (John 2:18-22), who now sits in heaven (Col. 3:1-2).
Mr. Warren is fond of citing Hebrew Bible passages about eschatology when he thinks they support his position, but he ignores all the ones that make it absolutely clear that a return to physical Jerusalem and an annual pilgrimage of the nations of the earth to physical Jerusalem is what’s prophesied (e.g., Zech 14). Once again, we see the hermeneutic of convenience at work. It may work on the biblically illiterate, but it doesn’t work on the rest of us.
Warren continues:
Mr. Stark simply ignores my quotation of Revelation 1:7, which equates the “tribes of the land” with “those who pierced him.” Although Revelation was written in Greek, it was written by a Jew, and the use of “the land” to be a specific reference to the land of Israel is quite common in the Hebrew language, just as “the city,” without any other qualifications, usually refers to Jerusalem in Hebrew.
If I ignored it it’s because it’s silly and I must have considered it not worth my time to respond to, given all the other silly arguments I was responding to. But I’ll respond now. Revelation 1:7 most emphatically does not “equate” the “tribes of the land” with “those who pierced him.” Here is what Revelation 1:7 says:
Behold, he comes with the clouds,
and every eye shall see him,
also those who pierced him,
and because of him all the tribes of the land/earth shall wail
There is no equation of the subjects of line three with the subjects of line four. The statement is that (1) every eye will see him, (2) including those who pierced him, (3) and all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him.
Note also that just two verses earlier, the same word for “earth” appears, but this time it is clear it does not refer to the land of Israel. It refers to the “kings of the earth,” over whom Jesus is ruler. So, in context, the word refers to the whole earth. And there is no textual indication whatsoever that “tribes of the earth” and “those who pierced him” are equated in v. 7. Warren again points to textual evidence that doesn’t exist, to serve an agenda that isn’t biblical.
Jack Miles, “Radical Editing: Redaktionsgeschichte and the Aesthetic of Willed Confusion,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature (ed. Richard Elliott Friedman; University of California Press, 1981). [↩]
Thom Stark, Is God a Moral Comrpomiser?, pp. 222-27. [↩]
