During my teaching days, my colleagues and I would occasionally run into a parent who would scan through our assigned texts, locate something they found offensive while neglecting the context and overall theme, and then demand that either the text not be taught or their child be offered an alternative, more acceptable text. We would be quite frustrated, if not exasperated, in our efforts to explain the legitimacy of our texts to those who decided based on a cursory flip-through that their child should not be exposed to such compromised material. Keeping in mind that it was typically the religiously conservative parents who offered these arguments, I found the situation ironic because the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, includes material far more disconcerting than anything ever presented in the texts we selected.
Be that as it may, of further irony to me is that those deemed liberal or purportedly more open among us would often approach the Bible in a similar fashion to these parents: locate the disconcerting portion, or just hear of it, regardless of context or broader theme, and decide the whole thing ought not be read. If that dismissive approach is not available, then simply excusing it as too old, or written too far after the events discussed could also suffice as reasons for keeping the Bible closed.
Regardless of belief, intellectual integrity requests a more thoughtful and thorough response than either of those options. As a text central to my most foundational beliefs, I do wish to approach the Bible with integrity and candor. In this post, I will discuss my reasons for finding the Old Testament credible. The next will focus on the New Testament. And in two short posts, not remotely as much will be said as could be.
First, as it regards the entire Bible, one vote for its credibility is its multiple and varied authors--approximately forty--spanning a few thousand years of history. Therefore, when someone says they do not believe the Bible, it’s a little like saying they don’t believe a portion of the library. It is more reasonable to find specific portions more questionable than other portions. This coverage of time and authorial variety suggest to me thematic credibility, a God who has been faithful through generations. A contrasting example: Consider the Quran, which God purportedly revealed through the angel Gabriel to the prophet Muhammed from 609-632. While I readily offer my esteem to any seekers of God, Muslim or otherwise, one author claiming divine inspiration for a span of 20 years does not really hold credibility against the Bible with its multiple witnesses and historical vastness.
While we’re on the topic of other texts, another vote of confidence in the Old Testament’s reliability is its contrast to other ancient texts. The ancients, at least the ancient Hebrews, had an appreciation of real time in contrast to storied time: the once upon a time notion. They believed they were recording actual history, where in contrast to the ancient Sumerian series of poems, Epic of Gilgamesh, while their authors and listeners may have believed the tale, it is certainly not presented with historical qualities of the early books of the Old Testament, complete with particular historical names of places, people, and the ubiquitous genealogies. While the Old Testament may contain some epic stories, it certainly is not crafted like an epic tale.
One thing the Sumerians had going for them that the early Israelites did not: they could write. This capacity would not arrive for the nomadic Israelites for some time. Therefore, they relied on oral tradition. The stories of the early Old Testament were shared orally for a time before they recorded. We moderns, who have evolved to be so dependent upon the written record, immediately question the validity of such traditions. However, that questioning only reveals our chronocentricity. It’s ridiculous to assume that orally-based cultures would not value credibility and reliability in their accounts. In fact, it’s reasonable to believe they may have been more attentive to facts, that those entrusted with those histories, felt the burden of accurate accounting. The eventual invention of the writing instrument and papyrus was a relief.
Of further contrast to other ancient cultures, Sumerian and Egyptian included, a transcendent, previously unknown God initiates a relationship with humans. This God transcends all the localized deities with which every people group populating the ancient world at the time were familiar. These gods had domain or held sway over households, small communities, and larger regions if one people’s god could defeat the neighboring people’s god through battle. However, God extends a call to one man, Abraham, and his family, requesting him to leave all that is familiar to him. Obviously, it takes multiple generations, continuing even now to adjust to the reality of this God from beyond us. Hence, the messy complexity that is the Old Testament.
Paul Copan in Is God a Moral Monster: Making Sense of the Old Testament God (2011) provides analogous situations in our country’s gradual adjustment from the racism embedded in slavery to the notion of equality and freedom for all (in some ways this struggle still continues) as well as in our efforts to export democracy to countries unfamiliar with such an idea. It will take generations for them to adjust to the possibility. He then invites us to the ancient Near East, a culture completely unrecognizable to the contemporary eye “with all its strange ways and assumptions” and social structures oppressive and frightening: the Sumerians, for all their capacities in writing and technology, were renowned for ritual rape of both boys and girls in their hopes for crop fertility. It is with people of this type of culture the transcendent God initiates relationship.
This both testifies to the truth and complexity of the Old Testament. It is decidedly unlikely individuals of this culture would have fabricated a God entirely transcendent above nature, who forbids them idol worship because of that fact, who strictly forbids human sacrifices--sexual or otherwise, and who gradually invites them to a system of law that has contributed to the sanity of the Western world we have inherited. As Thomas Cahill notes in The Gift of the Jews: “This God is the intiator: he encounters them; they do not encounter him. He begins the dialogue, and he will see it through. This God is profoundly different from them, not their projection or their pet, not the usual mythological creature whose intentions can be read in auguries or who can be controlled by human rituals.”
And yet, this difference provides the complexity and conflict that is the Old Testament. Copan continues: “Within this context, God raised up a covenant nation and gave the people laws to live by; he helped to create a culture for them. In doing so, he adapted his ideals to a people whose attitudes and actions were influenced by deeply flawed structures.” He is a “God who accommodates,” who is willing to have his own name muddied because he reaches out to muddy people. So the Old Testament saga begins through Israel’s actual history of gradually learning to adjust to this transcendent God, to the cries and songs of the Psalms, to the wit of the wisdom texts, to the cry of the prophets for justice, who call not only ancient Israel but all of us to the understanding that loving this God will always result in loving others.
Yet we never quite get it. Why? Because as the prophet Isaiah recounts the Lord, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (55:9). For those of us who believe, the journey of acclimating to this God of love never ends.
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