Religion 09 Feb 2006 03:59 pm
Sacred text
I love, I mean love, getting my mind blown in seminary. This week is the week I get my mind blown in two different directions by approaches to sacred texts. I once wrote a ministry blog post on the bible (I promise, really, to do a ministry blog post in the next week, it’s taken me a while to get back up to speed.) That post was about my own perspective on the text, and what good I think it is.
What’s fascinating me now, is the amazingly complicated and convoluted process that happened over extraordinary periods of time to accomplish the book (and it’s various versions) that I carry with me to class. I’ve pretty much always understood that it wasn’t really a reasonable suggestion that the bible was inerrant. It’s just now that I’m realizing how ridiculously unreasonable that suggestion is. I’m not even going to try and collapse 6 hours of classroom time about this subject into a blog post, but anyone who has, in any even half-serious way studied the bible, and any parts of the process of going from original manuscripts (which we do not have) to modern books, has to admit that it’s just not possible for this to be so. Besides contradictions, blatant additions, subtractions and changes that have been systematically found to be missing in older manuscripts, the number of variants of text (providing the need for verse by verse analysis of the extant manuscripts,) translation issues (translation is by nature interpretation,) it is, in my view, extremely disingenuous to even suggest that the bible is inerrant. And it is unconscionable that people who went to seminary, and must have learned at least bits and pieces of this story get up in the pulpit, and point to the book, and say "God says…" There are a ton of fascinating and completely blatant examples (like the verse in I John that has a trinitarian declaration in the King James Version, that does not exist in early greek manuscripts.)
So the second direction of mind-blowing today is from my Jewish mysticism class, where I’m learning that for the most part, for Jews, as the Torah is the direct revelation from God to Moses, that it can’t possibly mean just what it says - that there has to be more to it. Plus, engaging with the text in a questioning, even argumentative way, is a good thing. And, that anything anyone writes in terms of commentary on the Torah, etc., was within that revealed to Moses by God. (I am totally not doing this justice - perhaps in a few weeks I can do better.)
So you have two points of view: On one hand, the Christian (I think Protestant, actually, I think Catholics have a different approach) view, which starts with inerrancy (the text means what it says and says what it means, and you can’t question it), and then moves inevitably (and rightly so) in the direction of critiquing that absurd view. In my opinion, this starting point and subsequent critical process reduces the richness, depth and meaning of the text, and it’s abilities to speak to us about God. On the other hand, there is the Jewish view, which, in my opinion enhances the richness, depth and meaning of the text, and makes it more approachable, and increases its ability to speak to us about God. So which would I pick? I think it’s obvious. It’s not that I can accept, fully, the fundamental idea behind the Jewish notion of Torah as the direct revelation to Moses, but the overall approach is one that I think makes so much more sense. Unfortunately, we don’t get to start again from scratch, but it’s something to keep in mind.
technorati tags: bible, scripture, sacred, inerrancy, christians, jews, judaism, christianity