The Scripture Paradigm

I have some intuitions about the default paradigm Christians have with regard to Scripture, some of which I haven't fully been able to put into words. Last night in a grad class we spent a few minutes thinking about why, for example, it upset someone in a Bible study when the student told them that Paul's letters were written before the gospels.

Here are some of my intuitions:

1. Some people often link their faith to the version they grew up with.
So a 60 year old who has based his or her faith on the KJV finds it hard not to see modern translations as "cutting things out" of the Bible and thus angrily resisting them. Of course I don't have a problem with them continuing to use the "church's text," which the KJV reflects better than the other modern translations. But a minister should "add on" an understanding of how we got our Bible.

2. Some people have a "what you see is what you get" sense of the Bible. They don't like the suggestion that the "packaging" of the books might originally have been different than what it is. 2 Corinthians looks like a single book to me as it is packaged in my Bible. People get irritated at the suggestion that chapters 10-13 might come from a different letter.

Of course theories like this one are no priority to know whatsoever, even for a minister. But they're nothing to be afraid of either. I think I can preach 2 Corinthians better because I know a pretty good explanation for the sudden and suprising change of tone that takes place at chapter 10.

3. Some people see any approach to the Bible that views the books within a historical process as detracting from its "divinity," its inspiration. So to talk about situations that have affected the perspective, or talk of how Matthew might have edited Mark, or talk of the possibility that John or Revelation underwent stages of development makes it seem too human.

Does a person need to have a sense of historical process to hear God speak through the text? No, but I guarantee you that a good deal of the wild diversity of biblical interpretation comes from the countless ways that people try to create a singular meaning to these diverse texts by ignoring the likely historical processes underlying this text.

4. The Scripture paradigm which ultimately underlies what I'm trying to get out here is the default reading of the Bible as God's word to me--with little or no sense of what these texts originally meant.

So the authors are not authors but God's scribes. He told them what to write to me.

Last night I wandered off into a tangent and explored what this might look like with regard to Job. I suggested that, without thinking, it is probably natural for a person to assume that Job is the author. Job sits down and God tells him exactly what to write, in one sitting probably.

It's interesting how many of my NT survey students answer true to this question: T/F Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians from Thessalonica to us. The idea that it was written from Thessalonica doesn't raise any question because the Scripture paradigm is not wired to see 1 Thessalonians as a letter written to Thessalonica. It is written to us.

But of course we have no reason whatsoever to think that Job is the author of Job. I actually think Job is post-exilic in its current form, since it references the Satan, who appears in none of the clearly pre-exilic parts of the OT. What a book is about says nothing about when it was written. So the gospels were written in the last half of the first century, not at the time of Jesus.

And we have every reason to believe that, however inspiration works, it works through the mind of the human author to a significant degree. In fact, we even hear at a couple points that authors like Paul themselves used scribes, like Tertius in Romans 16 and, I think, Silas in 1 Peter. How else could we explain the conflicting use of words in different books. We can explain such things by recourse to differing styles of differing authors.

And I am not the immediate audience but, in terms of its original significance, someone listening in on an ancient conversation. And there is information I would have no way of knowing without education, like what the most likely meaning of Leviathan is. This requires a dip into Ugaritic literature. I can hear God speak to me through these words, but when I do I am usually not hearing the same meanings God spoke to them.

Many like Joel Green have been trying to work out what a second naivete might look like in which we hear God speak directly to us through these words. It remains clear to me also that the vast majority of Christians remain in a first naivete, which is not a problem until someone gets hurt.