Eyre Lines

In my last post, I expressed some frustration with concepts of inspiration in scripture from the point of view of whether human language and concept structures could actually do justice to the content of the inspiration, and I want to develop that a little further.

Language is essentially a communication. There is a speaker or author and there is a listener or reader. What the recipient receives is not necessarily what the utterer has in mind (assuming, for a moment, that the utterer has anything remotely clear in mind, which is dubious taking the tack of my last post). In spoken English, trivial examples might be the joke exchange between two old ladies on a train:- “Is this Wembley?” No, it’s Thursday.” “So am I, let’s have a cup of tea”, or the apocryphal communication from the Western Front “Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance” becoming after many stages of passing via multiple mouths, brains and ears, “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance”.

Monty Python satirises this in terms of the recording of the spoken word in the gospels in the “blessed are the cheesemakers” heard at the back of the crowd. This can be used to demonstrate one feature of hearing (or reading), that you tend to hear or read what you expect. “Blessed are the peacemakers” is not something you’d expect a Jewish resistance leader to say, so it becomes something else, if you think of Jesus as a Jewish resistance leader. In any case where you hear or read something very similar to something you already know, it tends to become what you already know (something I need to watch extremely carefully when proofreading) – take the widespread “Paris in the the spring” written in a triangle so the two “the”s are on different lines.

On the other hand, something which does actually strike home and is remembered particularly forcefully is when you do hear and register something which is novel and out of character. That, I think, is why we have the Sermon on the Mount rather than “blessed are the cheesemakers”.

I had to contend with this phenomenon a lot as a lawyer, dealing with eyewitness evidence. Eyewitness evidence of any reasonably complex situation was never straightforward; one person was adamant they had seen one thing, another had seen something completely different – and years of experience unpicking the stories led me to conclude that in general no-one was lying, they were faithfully recounting their memories. There was no getting behind the fact that that was how they had experienced what quite often was clearly not the case (from hard evidence such as CCTV or tire tracks). I made something of a speciality of weaving together the set of disparate stories and coming up with a plausible reason why each person had experienced what their testimony related, despite the fact being as I proposed, not as they proposed.

There is a clear application of these principles in the “quest for the historical Jesus”, although far more along the lines of the current “social memory” theorists than the formal rules of the Jesus Seminar.

Of course, in the case of people steeped in scripture (certainly in the cases of the gospel writers and, I think, Paul, the Septuagint Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures), there is a set of templates of expectation into which you can fit experience. Matthew, for instance, sees the story of Jesus overwhelmingly through the eyes of previous scripture, but all of the NT writers do to some extent – and they use different scriptures and different interpretations, making the task of a systematic theologian extremely difficult. Just as one example, I have been in the process of working through a set of scriptural supports for various atonement theories; I find that Paul’s use of the word “atonement” uses the template of the Maccabean martyrs in 4 Macc. 17:12-22. The writer of Hebrews, on the other hand, wishes to see Jesus’ death both as a replacement for the Levitical sin offering sacrifices and as the scapegoat of Leviticus 8; 1 Peter 2:24 picks up the second meaning. Those two concepts are somewhat inconsistent, as the sin offerings are slaughtered and burned (in part eaten), the scapegoat is driven out. They are fine as ways of looking at something, less fine if you try to extract from them a single deep meaning – at least, a single deep meaning which preserves more than a bare outline of what the originals actually are.

This fitting of experience into templates of expectation seems to me particularly strong when I look to compare my own mystical experience with the spiritual experience of, for instance, friends in the church whose trajectory has been via the template of evangelical conversion. I think that this is cognate experience, at least, if not necessarily identical – but it is very difficult to be sure. They know in advance the terms which are applicable, such as “filled with the Holy Spirit” and “slain in the Spirit”, and it has proved nearly impossible to get them to describe what their experience has been without that terminology, in non-religiously charged and non-specialist language. I can sympathise; it was extremely difficult for me to develop a description which actually conveyed something of the experience without using words and concepts previously laid down for me by others, and if I do describe it that way, it seems at the same time pedestrian and self-contradictory (how, for instance, can the sense of self at the same time expand towards the universal and be reduced to near-nonexistence?).

What we experience, in other words, tends to be what we expect to experience, or at least what we have language and concept structures for. I wouldn’t go quite as far as saying that our language and concept structures create our experiences, but they definitely modify them and constrain them. Where we have an experience which really doesn’t fit with our existing concept structures and language, we will tend to torture those concept structures and language until they are a better fit (as, I would argue, the New Testament writers were doing, and it may be that this fuels the torturing of language which I find typical of modern philosophers – that is to say most philosophers later than the 18th century).

Even then, I think it isn’t necessarily a good “fit”.

However, what would I expect if a God as reasonably commonly conceived looked to communicate directly with a human being, which is the basis of the concept of inspiration – at least, the scriptural form of it? I fancy I would expect two snippets from scripture to have “got is right”: Isaiah 55:8 ““For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD” and 1 Cor. 13:12 “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

I would expect some recipients to go mad, or babble incoherently (speaking in tongues?). I would expect some to keep to themselves what, in any attempt to express it, seemed totally inadequate. I would expect some to try to coin new language to express what they had experienced (which we see to an extent in, for instance, Paul coming up with neologisms). I would expect some to launch into a paradoxical and extremely allegorical rehashing of motifs in existing scripture (which I think we see in Revelation). I would expect some to twist meanings in existing scripture to produce new forms (which I think we see all over the Bible, not restricted to the NT, and in a lot of Rabbinic midrash, and which finds meanings in existing wordings which the original authors would not have dreamed existed). I would expect those with poetic gifts to speak or write metaphor, allegory and myth. Finally, I would expect some to write or speak in a way wholly incomprehensible to those around them (which might not be the same thing as babbling incoherently).

I would not expect anyone to come up with insights which were far removed from anything for which they had existing language or concept structures; their minds would just not contain the building blocks to construct these – though the poets would be likely to do best at this, talking around the insight rather than attempting to tackle it directly. Moreover, if anyone actually did overcome their internal constraints in a radical and sustained way, I would not expect their words to be remembered, or if written copied and circulated; you need readers and listeners who understand at least something of the contents as well as writers and speakers in order for communication to happen.

Some years ago, an internet acquaintance suggested to me that I took too pessimistic a view of God’s ability to communicate exactly what he wanted to communicate; I did not think God was sufficiently powerful to do this. This is not the case – what I think is that he took far too optimistic a view of man’s ability to understand what God communicates.

It may well be that God has been communicating everything we may ever need to know about life, the universe and everything, and that we have not yet got to the stage of being able to understand it. We may never get there, but we can, I think, build steadily on the shoulders of those who have had a stab at it previously.

In fact, central to peak mystical experiences (including mine) is the feeling that, for a moment, you do understand everything – and as soon as the moment passes, you don’t. Maybe that’s a correct feeling?