Idolatry and eisegesis: how we should avoid them but will do them anyhow.
The second of the ten commandments (see Ex. 20:4-6 , Lev. 26:1 and Deut. 5:8-10) prohibits idols: ““You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them…” from Exodus. Now, Christianity doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the succeeding passages of Exodus (Ex. 21-31) or the linked provisions of Lev. 11-26:2, but we seem to have retained “the ten”. At least in theory.
Because, actually, most flavours of Christianity do make images; of Jesus, rather less of God the Father and very occasionally the odd dove. We run a huge risk of directing our worship towards these pictures or statues, both of which I think qualify as “graven images”, rather than towards what lies behind them. In that context, the Eastern Orthodox church attitude to icons unsettles me, as does the Catholic attitude to statues of saints and Mary mother of God.
However, what are we doing when we form concepts of what God actually is? I suggest that we’re making a kind of internal “graven image”, particularly if we think in pictures. Peter Rollins in How (Not) to Speak of God says “[N]aming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.”
Now there are several passages in the Bible which suggest extremely strongly that any concept of God we have is inadequate. I can think of Isa. 55:8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, says the Lord”, the celebrated 1 Cor. 13:12 “For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face” and John 1:8 “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (Incidentally, I do not read this passage as contradicting either Isaiah or Paul, but best read in the light of both).
I’m reminded of the humorous comment “God made man in his image, and ever since that man has been returning the compliment” (I can’t find an attribution). This is mainly considered to target anthropomorphising God, of which examples are thinking of God as a guy with a long white beard sitting on a cloud dispensing judgment on people (the picture I tended to glean from my early Sunday School experience) or as a sort of superhero writ large, with POWERS, dashing around and righting wrongs in response to prayer. I have even more difficulty with a concept of God which can be reduced to a guy who wears his knickers outside his tights than I do with the old bearded chap. Rom. 1:22-23 deals with this “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles”.
But it can be any image of God. Any concept of God. It’s a form of idolatry. The Catholic Encyclopaedia has this to say:- “Now, the human mind, when sufficiently ripe to receive the notion of God, is already stocked with natural imagery in which it clothes the new idea. That the limited mind of man cannot adequately represent, picture, or conceive the infinite perfection of God, is self-evident. If left to his own resources, man will slowly and imperfectly develop the obscure notion of a superior or supreme power on which his well-being depends and whom he can conciliate or offend.” The vast set of quotations at “A Puritan’s Mind” come to the same conclusion – and if Catholicism and Puritanism can agree on something , I may not have to work harder! (I don’t, incidentally, agree with other conclusions in either article; I have a different template of interpretation than theirs).
But then, how can our human minds relate to God at all unless we have some mental concept of Him? I certainly can’t; I acknowledge that most of the time I work with a panentheist concept of God, which is the only concept I can get my head round which reasonably fits my personal, spiritual, emotional experience of God.
I go further. For us to formulate a concept of God, we must limit Him; we must say “he is like this” or “in this situation he will do this” or “his character is this and therefore…”. I think that is a part of what idolatry is pointing at, it is an attempt to set ourselves above God, to be able to control Him (“if we do this then God must do that”). I have to acknowledge that all ( or almost all) of us want certainty – though Rational Chris is able to do without certainty, Emotional Chris can’t be persuaded to let go of it, and the totality of Chris would not be human were this not the case. It seems to me an inbuilt human interest to seek control, and a wish for certainty has to be part of this (having suffered from chronic anxiety for a significant number of years and lived through a period, also of some years, during which virtually no aspect of my future was predictable in any sensible way, I can particularly relate to this).
This should not in any way be taken to indicate that the individual most referred to quality of God in the whole of the Bible, namely God’s love for humanity, both individually and collectively, is in any way limited. The Torah attests to God’s love, particularly for a chosen people. The prophets attest to God’s love for Israel in particular and humanity in general, Ezekiel to his love for humanity individually. The Psalms attest to all three of these frequently. Jesus attests to God’s love, particularly for the individual, in the sayings from the gospels which are undisputedly his (even by the Jesus Seminar), the remaining contents of the gospels which represent the developing experience of the post-resurrection Christ among several communities of Jesus’ followers and Paul attest to God’s love, particularly for the individual and for the body of Jesus’ followers. The strongest individual experience of God consistently throughout has been his love for us. Rob Bell delivers a passionate account and invitation from the heart (not from systematic theology) in “Love Wins”. I would prefer to hear this spoken, acted by him rather than read it, as I’m sure it was conceived, but I have that in my mind’s eye while writing this.
Reconciling that experience with the existence of pain, suffering and evil in the world is a question of Theodicy (why bad things happen in the simplest terms), and I’ll address it elsewhere. Whole books have been written on it, whole libraries worth of books.
Eisegesis
I didn’t just have the word “idolatry” in the title, but also “eisegesis”. This is the practice of interpreting scripture with presuppositions, i.e. expecting it to show you something. It is contrasted with “exegesis”, which to me in the broader sense means allowing scripture to speak to me without expecting any particular thing from it. If you follow that link, I think that “Revealed Exegesis” is poor exegesis, as it presupposes that the text is throughout divinely inspired such as to convey a divine revelation, not just in the individual passages but in the Bible as a whole.
I link this with idolatry because both involve imposing our concepts on something which we need to accept for what it actually is and experience as such without our interference.
In order to be an “equal opportunity offender” I also think some aspects of the work of historical-critical scholars can be criticised in exactly the same way. Taking the work of the Jesus Seminar (notorious among mainline-to-conservative Christians), as an example, these kinds of methods have been severely criticised by many people. It is quite hard to find a readily available unbiased account of their methodology, and perhaps the best advice is to read Robert M. Price’s and N.T. Wright’s articles, both of which are critical of the Jesus Seminar’s assumptions for entirely valid reasons, at least to themselves. Robert Price is very much the closest of these to what I would regard as a true historical-critical perspective (if you wish to adopt such a technique) and you can see what conclusion he arrives at; Tom Wright is absolutely correct in his comments on the voting procedure and method of translating it into an aggregate colour (Red, pink, grey or black depending on the decreasing degree of certainty with which sayings or actions are assumed to be those of Jesus). The system was irredeemably flawed, as he says. The Wikipedia entry (which I consider reasonably fair and unbiased but extremely incomplete) seems to me to give a reasonably fair account.
Just one point I need to mention. In Tom Wright’s critique, I think he is absolutely correct in saying that in a story-telling culture, which I accept was the case in rural Palestine at the time (though not in towns and cities), stories rather than just aphorisms are transmitted readily. What he doesn’t advert to (and I don’t think he adverts to enough in his other writings) is the fact that those stories get amended seriously in order to give extra flavour, to convey the story-teller’s point of view and to suit a particular audience. He isn’t going to get all that much closer to “authentic Jesus” by taking this into account. But definitely closer.
I have to concede that the eventual 74 scholars who stayed with the project to the end do not include a lot of heavyweight biblical scholars who might have been there, though as Tom Wright admits, the list of members includes some of the most respected biblical scholars in the world. However, reference to Westar’s criteria for membership seems to indicate that anyone with a PhD or equivalent in religious studies or a related field could have been involved, the membership of the seminar started at 150 and there have been some 200 actually involved. Although it has to be said that this would have opened the way for conservative scholars to “pack” the Seminar, the criteria of the Seminar (see the Wikipedia link) could not have been honestly accepted by any significantly conservative scholar. It is therefore not surprising that so many “black” entries appear.
That would not necessarily matter if the criteria were entirely without prejudgment, but Tom Wright is in general correct in criticising those (I don’t agree with a fair number of his points, though). As can be seen from Robert Price’s comments, however, they can also be attacked for prejudgment from the other extreme of interpretation (and Price is far closer to what I would expect from an historian with no religious or non-religious leaning, if anyone fitting that description can be found).
That is the real historical-critical method.
The base problem with that is that it excludes any possibility of there being any supernatural force or occurrence absolutely, including miracles, prophecy and supernatural entities other than God (in which I include angels and demons), which is a presupposition, and as Tom Wright states, tilts the scales of objectivity.
After all, this technique is used widely in studying ancient literature of other cultures, in which that possibility is always excluded. Without the presupposition that the Bible is special, if you accept the supernatural in the Bible, you also have to accept the supernatural in a very large amount of other ancient literature. The result would be fantastically different from the picture of the ancient world which historians have built up. It is frankly not worth making the effort to do this; the result would be so ludicrous as to convince most people very rapidly that the method was, in fact, faulty in taking these things into account.
I am not necessarily saying that we need to abandon this principle. However, if you eliminate accounts which have some supernatural event completely, you ignore the fact that all the evidence is that the people of the time did not think along the same lines that we do, and felt it entirely natural and indeed right to invent stories showing the importance of famous people; these showed their “real character”, you might say. Thus, an account including supernatural elements might (even if there is not in fact some non-supernatural explanation for it having happened which would be interpreted by the people of the time rationally) actually be eyewitness and have substantial truth to it – it just wouldn’t evidence a miracle.
I am also not absolutely ready to abandon the possibility that some supernatural events do occur, purely on the basis that although the overwhelming preponderance of accounts of such events have proved to me personally and to a lot of debunkers of the supernatural to have a naturalistic explanation (sadly, many of the modern ones involving deliberate fraud), there are things which have happened to me and to people whose accounts I really trust for which, to say the least, a naturalistic explanation even if present is very unsatisfactory.
Now, I hope that I’ve shown from the above that I myself try to be as untainted by presuppositions as I possibly can; only that way can I allow the text to speak to me rather than first putting on a set of distorting glasses and then reading. I started this process having a nearly completely scientific-rationalist and historical-critical stance and at a point where all my instincts were to use an atheist presupposition but I had one piece of personal experience which told me that presumption was wrong.
It may come as a surprise to readers, but the vast bulk of my conclusions were then reached from an only very slightly modified (as above) historical-critical stance and through reading the Bible itself in multiple translations, and applying the forensic techniques learned by any lawyer who has spent a reasonable amount of time in court to seek the nearest approach to the truth as possible. I quote other writers extensively when I can, but I tend to do this after having used my own reading technique to arrive at a working hypothesis as to the way in which the text has actually arrived at the wording it has, in order to give my conclusions some scholarly authority and in order, to some extent, to allow me not to worry at the problem further. I admit, I keep coming back to texts now having already a good working hypothesis which has already been confirmed after reading some new interpretation which seems particularly reasonable and “checking my working” as a mathematician would say.
To explain my comments about legal forensic techniques, I used to be good at taking the agreed evidence in a case and seeing how it could be explained such that my client was less guilty than might otherwise have appeared, i.e. a plea in mitigation, or even not guilty at all. I was, of course, doing this with a presupposition, namely that my client actually was in some way innocent, unlikely as it might have seen. In a defended case rather than a plea, I would sequentially argue as an exercise in my mind or with a colleague first for a guilty verdict and then for innocent, so I could do it both ways.
I make the most possible use of that technique that I can when viewing any scripture the meaning of which is debatable, and try to arrive at the result which a reasonable jury would reach given capable presentation of both sides.
I also try to learn as much as can be reasonably known about the ways of life, ways of thinking, philosophies and social structures of the milieu in which scripture was written as I can, though, so I use historical scholarship a lot more than I do scriptural scholarship before actually tackling a passage. The context is very important. Likewise, at some point I may find that my decision making may turn on the interpretation of a word, and so I go to scholars in the language used and seek a variety of possibilities.
So I’m an absolute paragon of virtue, sitting on my pedestal criticising such heavyweight scholars as Tom Wright or (for example) Robert Funk, who is close to Mr. Price’s stance and a heavyweight in Tom Wright’s class, and sneering at their faulty techniques from my total lack of formal qualification in any subject which would get me into Westar as a Fellow, am I?
Bull droppings! I’m just as guilty as they are in the absolute sense. I wouldn’t have started the exercise of reading scripture seriously like this had I not had a presupposition; this was drawn from my own experience and F.C. Happold’s “Mysticism, a study and an anthology”. The quotations he gives from St. Paul, St. John and the Oxyrhyncus papers spoke directly to my own experience and gave me emotional certainty that all three were basically speaking of the same experience as mine, though expressed in radically different ways. I thus expected to recognise in scripture some instances of mystical experience and, where I did, to be able to say “Whatever else he may have been, the writer (in the case of Paul and John) or the one making the statements (in the case of Oxyrhyncus) has experienced this thing which I’m provisionally calling God and therefore their other statements may well be inspired as well and I should look at them very carefully”.
I also took the attitude which I used to use when cross-examining eyewitnesses (who in my experience are notoriously unreliable but almost always think they are telling the truth), and assume that all the voices seen in scripture were giving a faithful account of their understanding of things (not, of course, the same as the truth) unless I found reason to the contrary. And, as with eyewitnesses, differences in their stories were probably explained by different perspectives, different assumptions, different vocabularies and different thought processes.
I never liked conspiracy theories anyhow. I tend to assume that where there’s a choice of cockup or conspiracy, cockup is massively most likely.
And I used a kind of Lectio Divina almost from the start. As it’s not quite that described by Fr. Luke Dysinger O.S.B or, in fact, the slightly different one taught to me about ten years ago, I’ll explain it.
Taking a passage, I read through it fairly quickly to get the sense of it. I then read it aloud, putting as much “performance” into that as I can manage (if you do this, do it where others won’t be annoyed). I then read it through really slowly, taking time over each word to see if it gives me any feeling about meaning, whether positive, negative or “pardon?”.
In proper Lectio, which I still do occasionally, at that point I should meditate on it longer, pray and contemplate (which for me aren’t really a trinity, more an unity). However, in fact I tend to go and look at other resources. Is it illuminated by surrounding passages? Are there any other scriptural uses of the word which might help me? Is there any commentary on this in the Bible I’m reading (or one of the others I keep around for this reason)? Do any of these give me a new insight? If not, I meditate on it a bit longer and possibly write a note to come back to it later, and then move on to repeat the exercise on the next word which produces some feedback in me. And so on…
This can be an extremely time consuming way of doing things. I find it brings a lot of insight.
And, for me, it makes up somewhat for the fact that I’m not really a scholar in any of the applicable fields (except in the sense of having definitely spent over 10,000 hours working in this way, not that I expect this to impress anyone much), I’m not a working pastor or indeed anything beyond a largely solitary contemplative.
Oh, and I do find that when I later read Marcus Borg’s take on something, I almost always seem to have come up with the same answers, though often for slightly different reasons. My working hypothesis is that he has exactly the same kind of experiences as I do.
So, do you have any presuppositions? Guess what I expect the answer to be. Do you maybe think that you might get a fresh and interesting view of scripture if you didn’t?
Well, that’s very very difficult. I can’t do it. As far as I can see Tom Wright can’t do it either, though he clearly tries. The best I can suggest is to examine how you read scripture and ask yourself very seriously what the process you use is and what you expect to find there. At least then you might be able to pause a moment and say “How much did I prejudge this? and see if you can then get a slightly different perspective.
Alternatively (and a lot easier), make sure you read several views from different stances and try to accept all of them as being as faithful as they can be.