Notes on “The Story of the Bible” Class No. 13

• class date: Tuesday, May 1, 2018
• presenter: Toby Hodes, email: tkhodes@comcast.net
• notes provided by Jesse Heines, email: jesse@jesseheines.com
• this document is available with live links at: https://jesseheines.com/lira
• updated May 1, 2018

Links to Other Classes

Previous Class: No. 12   —   Index

Preliminaries

Luke Timothy Johnson, Emory University, lecturer

• Candler School of Theology
• web profile: http://candelabrums/faculty/emeriti-profiles/johnson-luke-timothy.html
• email: luke.johnson@emory.edu

Lecture 23: Contemporary Christians and Their Bibles

Official outline from The Teaching Company

The big struggle for Jews is to find a place in the post-Enlightenment and post-Holocaust world

Among Christians, the Bible remains central to theology, but there are a number of controversies

(1)  Christians today are deeply divided over the authority of the Bible and the perspective from which to read it

• modernists: we do not yet know everything about God
  • standard in most seminaries since 1920
• fundamentalists: taken literally
  • five fundamentals (1895)
    1. verbal “inerrancy” of Scripture
    2. divinity of Jesus Christ
    3. the virgin birth
    4. the substitutionary theory of atonement
    5. the physical resurrection and bodily return of Christ
  • fundamentalism is an interpretive framework that has its own ideological position
• Scofield Bible (1909 and 1917)
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible
  • chains of cross-references
  • provided historical dates for all important events
  • reads as a great historical work
  • dispensationalism = God has acted in the world leading to the final dispensation, the Apocalypse
    • involvement of Russia in Ezekial chapter 38
• chief battlegrounds in modernists vs. fundamentalists debate are the academy and seminaries
  • academic/political/theological battles
  • both equally reduce Scripture to historical
    • fundamentalists say that it’s historically accurate, modernists say that it is not
• however, there’s much more in the Bible than its historical content
• represents deep divisions between people

(2)  What is meant by cannon? What is the “true Bible” and how does it measure “true Christianity”?

• the modern debate mirrors that in the 2nd century
• factors: archaeological discoveries
  • finding of Christian writings not included in the Bible
• new gnosticism
  • prefer spirituality to religion
  • new feminist view that it’s at least patriarchal
  • gnosticism is more egalitarian
• revisionist movement seeks to reform hierarchical, oppressive, patriarchal compositions
  • this battle is being carried out through publishing in teaching
  • this battle tends to be more deconstructive than constructive
  • he feels that the new gnosticism doesn’t offer any positive suggestions for including new writings

(3)  Conflicts carry internal conflicts over into competitive translations of the Bible

• for fundamentalists, piety is tied to literal interpretation
  • based on original Greek and Hebrew
• the Scofield Bible uses the King James version
• New Revised Standard Version (1978)
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Revised_Standard_Version
  • sought to improve the King James version
  • tried to eliminate gender-specific language in passages that would allow it
    • e.g., “brothers” -> “brothers and sisters”
• New American Bible (Catholic translation) also tried to be gender-inclusive
  • Bible de Jérusalem (French) as well
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traduction_%C5%93cum%C3%A9nique_de_la_Bible
• scholars have also devised new ways to think about translations
  • literal vs. equivalency translations
  • New English Bible is an equivalency translation
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_English_Bible
  • New International Version is a literal translation
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_International_Version_Inclusive_Language_Edition
  • e.g., “pistis Christou”
    • “faith directed to Christ” vs. “Christ’s faith in God”
    • both are legitimate, but lead to different interpretations
    • https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/faith-in-christ-or-faithfulness-of-christ
  • new versions try to extend gender-neutrality to God
  • “mother/father God” (in the Lord’s prayer)
    

(4)  Christians use the Bible in missionary work and engage in the effort to translate the Bible into every human language

• United Bible Society (1804-present)
  • https://www.unitedbiblesocieties.org
  • now active in 141 countries
  • dedicated to Biblical diffusion through translation
  • goal: to bring the Bible to every human being in every language
    • 1804: 67 languages
    • 2005: 2043 of the world’s 5600 languages
  • they’ve distributed over 372 million Bibles
• controversy: what is evangelism?
  • distributing the Bible vs. living the life
• challenge = communicating the Bible’s message to cultures very different from our own
  • the United Bible Society’s work is admirable, but very difficult
  • e.g., Bible favors right hand over left, some cultures find this very offensive

Lecture 24: The Bible’s Story Continues

Official outline from The Teaching Company

The story of the Bible extends from antiquity to the modern day

• he admits that the story is personal and that others would have emphasized other points

(1)  Amazing longevity

• the Bible was born, not all at once, but through centuries of human experience and the struggle to interpret reality in light of extraordinary claims
• the Bible has never been completely stable or totally without critics, even in periods when it has been most prized
• the Bible in the last four centuries has sustained more direct attacks on its truthfulness and worth than any other literature

There are amazing claims, but also profoundly human

Many struggles, yet it survived

(2)  In its long history, it has never been completely stable

• existed in many forms
• never been total agreement on the cannon of Scripture, i.e., what makes up the Bible
• dramatically different interpretations

(3)  In the last four centuries, has sustained more direct attacks on its truth than any other publication

1. it’s simply not true about the world, e.g., the life of Jesus
2. it’s not true history
3. providing negative rather than positive images of humanity
   • superstition and intolerance
   • holy war
   • xenophobia = racism and anti-women and minorities

It has not only survived, but continues to influence people

• still the world’s best-selling book
• read every week in churches and synagogues
  • about 224 million Christians in the US in 488,000 churches
  • about 4.4 million Jews in the US in 2,000 synagogues
  • assume that only 30% of those go to church or synagogue regularly
  • thus, one can conservatively estimate that 80 million attend church or synagogue each week and here the Bible’s stories
• in addition, many people meet voluntarily to study the Bible outside of formal services
  • entire bookstores are devoted to providing material to assist in this study
  • the same is true on college campuses, e.g., the Hillel Foundation

It is impossible to measure the behavioral effect of all this, but anecdotally they can be significant

• now exists in a variety of electronic formats
  • a multitude of interpretive tools, as well
• any college freshman has more access than the greatest of scholars a century ago

Likewise, it is impossible to know the effect of electronic, digital access

• however, many young people regard their real church to be chat rooms, not formal churches and synagogues

Academic study of the Bible is also flourishing

• PhDs in Biblical and New Testament Studies are offered by top universities
• depth, breadth, and rigor are extensive, including requiring knowledge of 4-5 or even more languages
• the Society of Biblical Literature has tens of thousands of members
• the study is also interdisciplinary, including social scientific fields
• this flourishing co-exists despite the increasing secularization, even anti-religious, culture of universities and criticisms by many groups

Anything concerning the Bible can command instant attention

• especially movies
  • Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ
  • Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ
  • The Da Vinci Code
• sensational TV documentaries
  • the Dead Sea Scrolls
  • the Nag Hammadi writings
  • the Judas Codex
• the media pays excessive attention to all things related to the Bible
• in schools: rebirth of desire to teach the Bible
  • rationale: to be ignorant of the Bible is to be ignorant of a large part of American culture

Thus, the Bible has not only survived, it thrives

• it’s not due only to cultural inertia
• only The Book of Morman and The Koran are the only comparable books
• it is impossible to know science and believe Genesis
• it’s continuing power comes from its religious nature
• God creates, saves, and sanctifies humans
• Bible is not to describe the world, but to define a world and try to create it
• Utopian poetics
• e.g., according to Genesis, humans are created in the image of God
  • invites readers to imagine that they are crated in the image of God
  • if they do this, they cannot act poorly toward other human beings

Final summation of his interpretation of what the Bible is and can be

I would argue that the Bible’s continuing power comes from its character as
a religious text.  Its success in witnessing to and interpreting a way of life as
deriving from and directed toward a God who creates, sustains, saves, and
sanctifies humans.  Its ability not to describe the world, but to imagine a
world that provides an alternative to those imagined by science and history,
and that invites humans to make that world empirical by the manner in
which they live their lives.  It is, if you will, a Utopian poetics that can be
enacted by individuals and communities without the sacrifice of their
intellect: Let me give you an example of what I am thinking about.

According to the creation account in Genesis, humans are created in the
image of God.  Now, this is a revelation about humans, because it’s
impossible to derive that conviction from empirical investigation.  In fact,
the more closely that one looks at human behavior, the least likely it is that
one would conclude that humans are created in the image of God, unless
that God was a malignant entity.  As G.K. Chesterton remarked, the only
Christian theological teaching that is actually empirically verifiable is
original sin.  Usually human behavior doesn’t give rise to the conviction that
humans represent all that is good and beautiful and true in the universe.

So, the Bible, by imagining that humans are created in the image of God,
invites readers to imagine that same thing.  And what happens?  If, in fact,
humans believe or imagine that other humans are created in the image of
God, their behavior toward themselves and toward those other human
beings is profoundly changed.  Other humans cannot be manipulated, cannot
be oppressed, cannot be enslaved, cannot be wiped out in service of my
pleasure or need for power, but they are regarded as ends in themselves, as
Kant would say; as infinitely worthwhile because they, like me, reflect the
image of God.  So, if I actually live by that Utopian poetics, if we live that
way, then we can, in effect, make the biblical word and empirical world-it
is, actually the way we live.

So, whatever the vicissitudes of popular culture, the future of the Bible’s
story is certainly most bound up with its role within communities of faith.
In Judaism, despite centuries of Christian repression and the shock of the
Holocaust, Torah still speaks convincingly and powerfully about the way
humans can honor God through the practices of justice and mercy.

In Christianity, the Bible witnesses to God’s work in Jesus and the meaning
of a life shaped by his ministry, death, and resurrection; through
transformation, to the pattern of obedience and love that he revealed.  The
Bible, I think, will continue to flourish precisely as religious literature that
gives meaning to, and itself draws meaning from, the continuing experience
of God in human lives.