Category Archives: Hermeneutics

The problem of the interpretability of sacred texts

Standard

[I apologise for the long silence. My "little" fall seems to have taken more out of me than just my broken rib and its attendant discomfort, and I have been feeling, as a consequence, a general sense of "unwellness". However, here is a post I had almost finished before I decided to "take it easy," which you may find interesting in the mean time. I do not expect to be back "full time" for a little while yet. Thanks for your patience.]

It has been said that a translation of the Qur’an is not the Qur’an, but an interpretation of the Qur’an. So Pickthall’s “translation” of the Qur’an is called The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation. For that, after all, is all that it can ever be. The Qur’an is in Arabic, which is, in some sense, though Rahman denies it, the language of God. Evangelical Christians often say that the Bible is inerrant in its original text. Both Muslims and Christians, although they acknowledge the existence of both translation and interpretation, deny that it applies to the sacred text in (at least) its sacred meaning, as though text and sacred meaning are somehow miraculously conveyed merely by reading the text in a certain frame of mind.

Some Christians have got themselves into a bind by supposing that the true meaning of scripture is hidden from those who are unworthy. But how is worthiness to be characterised, so that we know who indeed has grasped the true meaning of scripture, the original meaning intended by God, whatever, presumably, its human “authors” thought? This is what I call the “hermeneutic auction,” and it is a defeater for any sense of sacred truth. Why those who believe that God speaks through texts, do not recognise the problem, is itself a problem, for there are clearly dynamics at work that tend to send interpretation spiraling out of control.

Take, for example, issues of ethics in the Roman Catholic Church concerning the end and the beginning of life. Similar things might be said, as well, about Islam and Judaism, since Christians, Jews and Muslims (inclusive) tend to hold that abortion is forbidden, and that suicide is a grave moral error. It is occasionally acknowledged that people who kill themselves sometimes do so because they are mentally disturbed, and so allowance is sometimes made for this possibility. But abortion, which is a conscious choice by someone, is apparently never justified under any circumstances, if the practice of the Roman Catholic Church is anything to go by. Protestants, on the other hand, sometimes provide some latitude for choice in the matter of abortion as well as in the matter of self-deliverance, though it is not quite clear how these exceptions get through the fine mesh of the Protestant moral conscience. Latitude is sometimes allowed as a matter of “compassion,” but it is hard to see how compassion can make a difference. If abortion is contrary to the will of a god, then presumably there is an ultimate, indefeasible prescription which it would be wrong to ignore. Compassion could cover a multitude of sins, and if obedience to a god is the issue, that is obedience to a being than which nothing greater can be thought, whose writ is universal and absolute, where is the room necessary for raising doubts about this or that individual case?

Continue reading →

About these ads

Evidence, Interpretation and Scientism

Standard

This post is a continuation of themes addressed in my last two posts about interpretation. There are two reasons for adding to them. First, there seems to be a widespread misunderstanding of scientism; and second, there is a deep sense of confusion about what constitutes knowledge, and how knowledge is grounded. First, as to scientism. In a couple of essays, already referred to, the philosophers Philip Kitcher and Massimo Pigliucci have suggested that there is a worrying narrowing of focus in the new atheism, a growing sense that science, and science alone, provides the foundations for rational understanding of the world, and that reason, in its most robust sense, must be sought and can only be found in the more determinate techniques and findings of the natural sciences.

Thus, when Richard Dawkins, in an enchanting book, tells us that there is something quite magical about the things that scientists know about the world, and that what they know, and the techniques by which they discover this knowledge, is how real knowledge is acquired, the implicit suggestion is that there is no other means of discovering the truth about the world except the methods of natural science. This has been discussed ad libitum in the atheist blogosphere, and it usually takes the form of disputing that there are other “ways of knowing.” At the very least, amongst the ways of knowing, religion is not to be found; but usually the point is made in a quite general way in the claim that the only way of knowing is scientific and empirical, and whatever else people think they know must be accepted as only a simulacrum of knowledge; and I have noticed that critics are almost as quick as the early Christian fathers to charge with heresy anyone who should have the temerity to suggest otherwise, as I have done.

Continue reading →

Is Dawkins really hoisted by his own petard?

Standard
‘Krudt’ is ‘gunpowder’ in Danish, ‘Lunte’ a fuse

Well, William E. Carroll believes that he is. In an article in The Catholic Thing — Catholics have so many journals and newspapers, organisations and institutions, that they seem to be running out of names for them! — called “The Dawkins Challenge“, Carroll thinks he has caught Dawkins out in a contradiction — ‘hoist by his own petar’,’ as Hamlet says of his uncle Claudius, the king, whose letters to the King of England, borne by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (R & G), are supposed to compass Hamlet’s destruction. But Hamlet alters the letters, so that R & G become the victims, and Claudius is “hoist by his own petar’,” while Hamlet — delving “a yard below their mines, … blow[s] them at the moon.” A petard is a small bomb or mine (in contemporary French, a firecracker), leaned against or attached to a gate or barrier to weaken or destroy it. Has Dawkins blown himself up with his own bomb?

Here’s Carroll’s argument:

Dawkins, in recent statements, has said that Catholics should be held to account for their nutty belief in transubstantiation. According to Catholic dogma the bread and the wine of the Eucharist really become — that is, metaphysically change their substance — from bread and wine to “body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ.” According to Catholic doctrine, while the substance changes, the accidents do not. As Carroll says:

The rationale behind the doctrine, which is known as transubstantiation, employs categories of substance and accident, which have their origin in the philosophy of Aristotle. According to the Church, the underlying substances of bread and wine are replaced by the body and blood of Christ while the external appearances of bread and wine remain. A scientific analysis of the consecrated host and wine would only detect these external appearances.

Now, this is an amazingly nutty thing to believe, as Dawkins says, and the Church should be ridiculed for teaching it as revealed doctrine. There is nothing — absolutely nothing — in the supposed revelation of God to Christians, that either suggests or implies this doctrine. When the gospel Jesus says, at the Last Supper, “This is my body” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for you” (Luke 22.19), or when Paul says “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10.16), there is simply no reasonable understanding of these words, as then spoken (that is, supposing that the gospel records are accurate reports of what a man called Jesus, who was shortly to be crucified, actually spoke on that occasion), that implies either that Jesus is speaking other than figuratively, or that Paul is interpreting the words in terms of a strictly literal meaning.

Continue reading →

The fatal ambiguity of Religion

Standard

The most salient difference between science and religion is that science comes to (relatively) unambiguous conclusions, whereas religion is left swimming around in a slough of imprecise and fatally ambiguous promissory notes as to what its devotees are to believe and hold to be true. We have recently been blessed with a signal example of this in the person of one of the commentators here on choiceindying,com — one David Roemer, whose blog, New Evangelist, is something of a paradigm case of religion’s failure to make sense. For example, Roemer writes this (on the linked page):

Richard Dawkins in his latest book said evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because of the sun. He must have gotten this idea from a peer-reviewed article published in the American Journal of Physics. Catholic Truth in England just published my explanation of why the article is absurd.

The trouble with people like Roemer is that he imagines that things that he has read are also determinative for the positions of others. The article in the American Journal of Physics to which he refers was published recently (2009), and one may be assured that Dawkins was saying that evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics long before this. Indeed, the second law only applies to closed systems, which the earth patently is not, so even if you don’t understand the math of the article, it is plain that, if evolution defies the second law, it must be because there is another energy source which militates against increased entropy here on earth (in select instances), and that that source provides the energy needed to defeat the suggestion that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics.

Continue reading →

Did Jesus Exist?

Standard

The existence or non-existence of Jesus is not an issue with me, and I still find it hard to understand why it should be an issue with anyone else. I spent years talking about the Jesus of the gospels, his teachings, his life and death, and, believe it or not, his resurrection — which was the hardest part of all — and for a while Robert Funk and his Jesus Seminar interested me strangely, and I attempted to understand the basis upon which the Fellows of the Seminar distinguished between the actual words of Jesus from words put in his mouth by later myth-making and tradition. Of course, the latter exercise has to presuppose Jesus’ real existence as an historical person who not only said things of interest and importance, but whose actual words can be distinguished from sayings that are not reliably attested and cannot be ascribed to the apocalyptic preacher from Galilee.

But still this didn’t lead me to wonder whether Bart Ehrman’s HuffPo article “Did Jesus Exist?” had anything of importance to say. If there is no god, and it makes no sense to speak of god in the absence of its existence — contrary to people like Don Cupitt and Jack Spong — then Jesus, whether as an historical or a mythical figure, must lose traction in the mind of anyone who has said farewell to god. So, when Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne (here and here) and Richard Carrier showed such keen interest I was mystified, and, I suppose, I still am. After all, if there is no god, then, whatever can be said about Jesus, there could not have been a Jesus who was more than an apocalyptic prophet who carried on a ministry of some kind in Palestine, and who anchored a number of mythological beliefs which are not directly related to anything that he said and did. Anything else, besides the sheer humanity of the man, and his wit and wisdom, if any, must be a mythological construction — must be, because there can be no sons of god if there are no gods. The most that the gospels can be is special pleading either for a mythological figure at the centre of a new religious movement, or the myth-making writings of people whose real human leader either died by crucifixion as a pretended messiah figure or even royal pretender, about whom stories were composed that supposedly reflected not only his wisdom, but his wonder-working powers and divine transcendence.

Continue reading →

Can Christians interpret the Bible without ending up with nonsense?

Standard

Over at Why Evolution is True, guest author Sigmund addresses himself to a Biologos guest voice trying to sort out the details of biblical interpretation. The problem, often pointed out, is: How do you know when to interpret the Bible figuratively, and when to interpret the Bible literally? The problem, of course, is obvious. If there is no basis, other than simple expediency, for reading the Bible one way or the other, then the obvious conclusion is that biblical interpretation, rather than producing a view that can reasonably be thought to be based on the Bible itself, is merely the product of individual imaginative responses to the text, guided by what is now believed to be the truth about the world or about history.

So, when we come to something like the first couple, Adam and Even, and their fall from grace, is this to be interpreted as a real historical event, something that happened in history, or is it an interpretation of human nature, based upon later understandings of Jesus as the one who redeems us from Adam’s sin? And if there was no first couple, and no fall from grace, then what on earth is Jesus all about? What, in particular, is the supposed sacrifice of Jesus on the cross all about? For if there was no first sin, so that, as Paul says rather dramatically, everyone has sinned in Adam — however the connexion with Adam and later human beings is understood — then there is nothing that we need to be redeemed from. And if there is nothing that we need to be redeemed from, then the whole drama of redemption, in the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection, is unnecessary. It addresses a problem that does not exist.

Continue reading →

Did the Bible get it Wrong? The Hermeneutic Auction

Standard

The Christian response to the Bible is so diverse it’s really quite hard to say how Christians, in general, receive the writings that compose their holy book, whether they think of it as inspired, and in what way, or whether they acknowledge it as a human work, providing a glimpse of how people in a particular tradition gradually developed their own perception of god and god’s doings. Of course, it makes an enormous difference to the way others should regard believers. If, like some fundamentalists, you take it that the Bible is not only inspired, but is inspired in a plenary way, so that every last word in it is suffused with divine significance, no matter how peripheral it seems to what might be thought of as its central message, then the Bible imposes immense challenges to rational thought about Christian belief. However, if, on the other hand, you take the Bible to be the work of inspired authors, who, while conveying something of their god’s message for believers, who did not in any way subvert their humanity in the course of inspiring them to write as they did, you will have a completely different understanding of how the Bible conveys god’s word. Indeed, you might fairly think the problem insoluble, since, in order to dig down to the sedimented thoughts of god expressed in human words, you will have to play fast and loose with some parts of the Bible while you take other parts of the Bible with intense and even reverent seriousness.

This question arose in a fairly general way in the discussion between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams in the Sheldonian Theatre the other day, so looking at what the archbishop had to say on the subject is as good a way into the subject as any. The question arose as to why the writers of sacred scripture, being inspired by god to write as they did, should have got the whole business of the origins of the universe and human life so completely wrong, if, indeed, it was god who inspired them. After all, if god did inspire them, and if, in fact, it would have been possible for god to reveal the secrets of the origin of the universe and life to the sacred writers, why did the writings inspired by god not achieve something that more nearly approximated to what we know from science about the origins of the universe and human beings?  Here is the archbishop’s response:

Error
This video doesn’t exist

Now, this sounds to me particularly unsatisfactory as an answer. The sacred writers, we are to suppose, didn’t get it wrong; they told us what god wanted us to know — and at this point the archbishop gets all theological and speaks about the free creation, human beings and their dominion (although he doesn’t say this), and how human beings got it wrong. The point about dominion is this: If in fact the origin stories constitute a summary of what god wanted us to know, then one of the vital things that we needed to know was how it came about that human beings became responsible for sinfulness. The archbishop cleverly avoids the issue of sin and the fall, but this is basically what is at the heart of the story as he expresses it — the way human beings have made such a mess of things.

Continue reading →

Adam Lusher and the Resurrection of Jesus

Standard

Anyone reading the title of this post will doubtless be perplexed. What could it possibly mean? After all, what does a marginal journalist have to do with the resurrection of Jesus? The answer of course is: nothing at all. But that is precisely the reason for juxtaposing them here. You see, Christianity, just like any religion, has a serious problem with credibility, and this is problem that Christians themselves have increasingly had to face. I thought of this just after making a comment over at Why Evolution is True on the post “More “sophisticated” theology: John Polkinghorne proves that the Resurrection happened.” The link takes you to the post. I’ll come to my comment in a moment.

Now, clearly, this is one of Christianity’s chief sticking points: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Did it happen? And, if it didn’t, does Christianity have a gospel? St. Paul was the first to recognise the problem. As he said to the Christians in Corith:

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain. … If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. [1 Corinthians 15: 13-14, 17]

This is why John Polkinghorne takes the resurrection very seriously, and tries to find a way to justify the claim that Jesus was really and truly, as a matter of historical fact, raised from the dead. Now, let me swipe a block of text from Jerry Coyne’s post. First, we have a quotation from Polkinghorne’s book Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (2011, Yale), then a short comment from Jerry, and then a continuation of the quote:

At first sight it might seem that we are faced with a bewildering confusion, consisting of a variety of stories, some set in Jerusalem and some in Galilee. Could this variety not simply reflect the fact that we are presented with a bunch of made-up tales, originating in the pious imaginations of a number of different communities? (p. 122).

Well, given that Biblical scholarship has shown us that the Bible is a farrago of made-up tales, perhaps the parsimonious answer here is “yes.”  But Polkinghorne dissents (my emphasis in the following):

I do not think so, for there is a recurrent theme, hardly likely to have arisen with such consistency from a gaggle of independent sources, namely that it was initially difficult to recognize the risen Christ. For example, Mary Magdalene took him to be the gardener (John 20:15), the couple on the road to Emmaus only recognised at the end of the journey who their companion had been (Luke 24:31); Matthew even tells us that it was on a Galilean hillside ‘some doubted’ who it was (28:17). It seems to me that this unexpected feature is more likely to be a historical reminiscence of the character of actual encounters, rather than a fortuitous coincidence in a set of independent confabulations. (pp. 122-123).

Of course, as Jerry points out, the assumption that Polkinghorne makes that the texts of the gospels are independent sources is nowhere made good. It can’t be, since we do not know enough about the sources to be able to say this. Of course, Jerry’s point is also an overstatement, since it has not been demonstrated that the Bible is (only) a farrago of made up tales, though it has been shown that much of the text of the gospels and other texts, even supposing them to have some historical content, have been airbrushed by imagination.

Continue reading →

Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: VIII: The “New” Testament Exceeds the Evil of the “Old” One

Standard

I want to begin this post with a remark about biblical criticism. One of the things contributing the the freedom that we in the West still enjoy — though for how long seems to be in some doubt — is the rational criticism of sacred texts. The point of departure for this trend was Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, a work which, for the first time, takes the Bible as the work of human authors to be analysed and interpreted and criticised as any other human work should be.

I determined [he writes in the Preface to that book] to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly therein set down. With these precautions I constructed a method of Scriptural interpretation, and thus equipped proceeded to inquire — What is prophecy? in what sense did God reveal Himself to the prophets, and why were these particular men chosen by Him? Was it on account of the sublimity of their thoughts about the Deity and nature, or was it solely on account of their piety? These questions being answered, I was easily able to conclude, that the authority of the prophets has weight only n matters of morality, and that their speculative doctrines affect us little. [8, Dover Edition]

The reason for bringing up Spinoza and biblical criticism is this. Despite the fact that many people consider religion and science compatible with one another, there is a widespread resistance amongst Christians and Jews to accept the conclusions of biblical and textual criticism. If science and religion are compatible, then textual and other types of rational criticism of the Bible should hold no terrors for them, but they do. David Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu brought an end to Strauss’ academic career, and as Hector Avalos points out in his book, The End of Biblical Studies, the resistance to the acceptance of the findings of biblical criticism is still very strong, and ways of working around biblical criticism are highly developed.

Continue reading →

Hitchens’ “god is not Great”: An Assessment: VII: Revelation: The Nightmare of the “Old” Testament

Standard

The next chapter in god is not Great begins a series of three chapters on sacred scripture — the scriptures in question being the Jewish Tanach, called by Christians the “Old” Testament (which is the reason for Hitchens’ scare quotes in the title of the chapter), the Christian New Testament, and the Muslim Koran. (Though I usually spell the word ‘Koran’ as ’Qu’ran’, I will retain ‘Koran’ throughout, since this is Hitchens’ preferred spelling of the word. With good reason, I might add, since this was, until recently, the normative English spelling of the word. There is no obvious reason why we should Arabise the word, as I had begun to do.)

One of the things that is worth saying, straight away, is that, if anything shows religion to be a man-made affair, the books that people call holy prove the point. The suggestion any text can be the communication of a god, or can, in any sense, be called holy, as soon as you recognise that every text is open to interpretation, is clearly absurd. Holiness suggests set-apartness, uniqueness, but no text can be, as such, unique, since every text is open to multiple interpretations, and anything capable of mulitple and conflicting interpretation cannot be unique, cannot offer a word from a god, nor can it have absolute or final significance — as, presumably, a word from a god would be. Sometimes Christians speak of the Bible as the word of God in the words of men — or, in human words, though the masculine is strictly correct in this context, most known scriptures (and I do not know any exception) being obviously written by men and for men. But this — “the Word of God in the words of men” – is an expedient used only by those who recognise the inescapably human character of scriptures. Islam has the audacity to claim that their scriptures — cribbed from Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian sources, and plainly not the revelation of an angel to anyone — represent God’s final revelation to humankind. But this silliness is contemptible, and anyone with an ounce of sense or humanity should be able to see how truly contemptible it really is, the Koran being, of all the scriptures, undoubtedly the most violent, intolerant and oppressive.

Continue reading →