In theologically conservative Christian traditions in the modern US, we've typically said that the claims we find in Scripture must be true and authoritative, no matter what we think about them. As evidence for this claim, we have tended to point to the historicity of the gospels, their testimony to Jesus' miracles, the resurrection, the miracles performed through the apostles, the apostles' commitment to their beliefs even unto death, etc. In other words, all the evidence for the moral and factual claims that we must accept in Scripture are external to the content of those claims, or how we feel about that content. The above view is what I'm going to call treating Scripture (or, from a Roman perspective, Scripture+Tradition) as an "epistemic norm" (EN).
Before we go further, some definitions and caveats for the purposes of this essay.
A proposition "X" can be moral, or factual, (i.e. it can be "you should do..." or it can be "such and such happened/will happen).
"is taught in Scripture" means by the best possible exegesis, which is to say, ignoring stuff that was "taught" by people who the text presents as wrong, or simple misreadings, etc.
Now then, with these definitions, we can say this. If we are treating scripture as an epistemic norm, then for any proposition X, if it is taught in Scripture then we must accept it as true regardless of what we think or feel about the content of X, since the evidence for its truth is completely external to itself (back in the miracles, historicity of the gospels, etc.).
With me so far? If this sounds crazy to you, then you can skip the rest and my question is not directed at you. But a lot of people seem to buy this view. In arguments they might say "This is what is taught in Scripture", as proof that it must be true, which assumes that Scripture is already proven to contain only true beliefs, their truth proven solely by their presence in Scripture.
So now to my question. Once more, if you agree with this view, what I have called the EN view of Scripture, then you agree with this:
"For any proposition X, if X is taught in Scripture, it must be true regardless of the content of X."
My question is this: if
1) X=the institution of Slavery in the US was *right* and should not have been abolished.
2) X was taught in Scripture
Would you accept X as true?
If you say yes, well I don't really have any gripe with you as far as consistency and coherency are concerned. I disagree, but our disagreement is outside the scope of this essay. Similarly, if you already rejected the EN view of Scripture or the Canon then I have no quarrel with you.
But if you bought that EN view of Scripture, and you answered my question above with a "No", then I would like to hear an explanation. It would appear that something is telling you that proposition X is wrong, and in this case, that something is so powerful as to override what you are willing to accept from Scripture. Something is guiding you in your reading of Scripture, such that you recognize that some things are out of bounds even if Scripture taught it, even if all that evidence for the truth of Scripture (miracles, resurrection, etc.) was still true. What is that something, and how do you square that with what you agreed to above?
It seems to me there is no possible way to hold the epistemic norm view without conceding that Scripture completely trumps your moral intuition to the extent that you would have to accept slavery, rape, genocide, or whatever, if Scripture taught those things. If, on the other hand, you would say that those things are wrong no matter what, and insist instead that Scripture would never teach those things, then you must agree that somehow your moral intuition plays a role in how you read Scripture.
At the very least, you would have to agree that somehow the content of the teachings of Scripture plays a role in why you accept it, i.e. the evidence for any given claim in Scripture is not entirely external to that claim. This implies that it is not enough to justify a moral or factual claim to simply appeal to whether or not it is taught in Scripture. Thus Scripture is not an epistemic norm, and we must justify our claims using Scripture, but also something else, such as moral intuition, reason, experience, church history, etc.
Note that there is still room for Scripture to be taken (by Christians) as evidence of a claim, and perhaps even prima facie reason to believe it (meaning that something taught in Scripture should roughly be taken to be true until there is significant reason to believe it false). But even so, if you are willing to reject outlandish claims even if they were taught in Scripture, you are admitting that presence in Scripture does not constitute proof.
Footnote 1: I am fairly certain that it is irrelevant to my argument whether or not Scripture does or does not teach that US Slavery was ok, since I insist that from the EN view what we think about the content has no bearing on its truth.
Footnote 2: Though I used only a moral example above, we note that we could make the same type of case with factual claims, e.g. what if Scripture taught that the Roman Empire still ruled Western Europe in 2005.
Footnote 3: It has been pointed out to me that the above argument is basically the most common argument against Divine Command Theory (the idea that if God commands something it is thereby made good). So I guess my argument is that if you don't accept Divine Command Theory, you also cannot logically accept an EN view of Scripture or the Canon.
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6 comments:
So now I can comment on your posts... :P
Nice Wesleyan Quadrilateral you've developed here...
(I would say that scriptural statements are true and authoritative insofar as they were meant to be true and authoritative.)
This seems to me a sort of false dichotomy and circular reasoning. Let me explain.
You say the EN theory is "Claims found in Scripture must be true and authoritative, no matter what we think about them." Then you cited evidence used to support this claim, which can be boiled down to establishing the general reliability of the scripture. So the theory REALLY is "Claims found in Scripture must be true and authoritative, no matter what we think about them...because Scripture has been demonstrated to be reliable." But this is kind of pointless, because there isn't much difference between "claims found in Scripture" and "Scripture." To me, it sounds like saying "Scripture is true...because Scripture is true."
I don't see any big problems with saying "Because Scripture is, in general, reliable, specific statements in Scripture are also reliable."
You say an EN proponent would accept blatant factual errors as true just because they were found in the Scripture. But don't EN proponents only accept Scripture because there are no blatant factual errors?
But I have strong reservations about your "moral error" argument.
First of all, I would say that there are many "outlandish" moral statements in the Bible. But this does not shake my faith at all, because we are not the arbiters of morality. As a Christian, I find the best definition of morality is "what God would want us to do." So if God wants us to do it...
If I found some troubling moral statement in the Bible, I would be much quicker to examine my heart than to reject Divine Command Theory.
Of course, it would be nonsensical for God to have created us with a conscience in direct opposition to his commandments, and he hasn't.
So for the example with slavery...
I would describe that as using God's moral law within us to trump God's law as found in Scripture. Either way, we are following what we believe is God's law.
It seems your problem is with implicit prima facie acceptance of Scripture as true and authoritative, regardless of what Scripture says. This, of course, is ridiculous. And the Bible would lose its authenticity and moral voice if it proscribed US-style slavery. But I do not at all recommend ignoring Scriptural commands because we don't like them.
I think you're missing a fundamental distinction I'm trying to make. For any given claim, the evidence of the reliability of the Bible as a while may indeed be external to the claim itself, and that is important. Yes it is true that some of the things I've cited as evidence of the Bible's reliability are in the Bible itself, but the EN view takes those things as proof of the rest of what is in Scripture.
Thus there are claims in Scripture whose proof is completely external to the claims themselves. It is these that they say we must accept regardless of what we think or how we feel about them. So I'm not convinced this is a false dichotomy at all. The distinction is that the proof is external to the claim itself. So it is not as simple as saying "It is true because it is true."
You then make an argument for general reliability of individual claims based on the reliability of the the whole. Sure, fine. But that's not proof, and that's my point. Being present in scripture may indeed be prima facie reason to believe a claim, but it is not proof.
And no, an EN proponent does not accept it "because there are no factual errors" in any given individual claim but rather due to evidence external to some individual claims.
I also want to push back on the morality thing. Again, it really doesn't matter whether there are any outlandish moral claims or not. The question is, if there was one, would you accept it? If God says to rape children, does that make it good to do so? Please note that it is irrelevant whether God does say such a thing or not.
If there exists any moral claim so horrendous that you could say no to it even if God said it, that is enough to show that you don't accept DCT. Sure, be cautious and say "I would really think about it and try to see how it could be good." But that's just delaying the inevitable.
As to what you say about the Bible and slavery, interestingly enough, I think it is true that the best exegesis of the day in the 19th century was not on the side of the abolitionists. What would you do in their shoes, ideally? If it seemed to you that the Bible taught that slavery shouldn't be abolished, would you believe it?
As an aside, my take on DCT is that God is the ground of all goodness, and that this goodness is something which can (fallibly) be recognized. I don't think God saying something makes it good, and I don't think good is a standard independent of God.
Are you saying there are statements in the Scripture which you don't accept as authoritative?
It seems to me that Scripture is either "true and authoritative" as a whole or just human and accidentally true or false.
I would accept it. (I know people who would kill me for saying that.) God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, didn't He?
I guess what I would say is that I accept the DCT insofar as God is a good God (which I believe He is).
I think there were times when biblical characters tried to reason with God when the disagreed, and sometimes He relented. Also, I consider our conscience (a flawed) part of God's moral command to us - but I would not say it supersedes Scripture.
It is true that the Bible never condemned slavery. I think it would be pretty impossible to justify the greed, racism, and depravity of US slavery, however. But even by abolishing, many Americans placed Enlightenment morality (one of earthly freedom and "natural rights") in front of God's morality (one in which we all love one another and give each other the dignity we deserve, but in which our earthly statuses do not really matter).
I am decidedly not saying there are commands I think are not authoritative. My argument is not really about the existence of any such commands, but more about the direction of proof/verification.
It is entirely possible to gather an accumulation of completely true statements that does not function as an epistemic norm. Basically, as long as you are evaluating the claims in some way, you are not treating it as an epistemic norm, but instead something to be evaluated epistemically.
You bring up interesting cases. We have to story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. What do we do with that? One thing I'm fairly certain we shouldn't do is to conclude that it would have been a good thing for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. But what to do with it is surely a difficult question, precisely because we know based on moral intuition that murdering children is bad.
The other case you bring up is when God appears to relent. I think those cases might well be enough to throw out DCT, and thus the EN view, but I'm not sure.
I tend to think, though, that like those characters, when we find something that offends conscience or reason, we do not do well to merely accept it. Instead, like them, we should bring our complaints and doubts to God, and ask him to explain himself.
In this way, it seems to me that Scripture is not meant to function as an epistemic norm. Instead it is an invitation to relationship. It is a sacrament (which is to say, something that is both divine and earthly). It is a place that God meets us, if we will meet him there.
Another way to put it would be that Scripture offers the (true) story of God and the people of God. We ask God to make this story our story, to make us a part of that people. But as characters in the story, we have just as much of a right to argue and complain and struggle with what came before, so long as we are actually honestly engaged with it.
This is to be contrasted with the EN view, which would suggest that rather than characters who are a part of the story, we are to almost passively accept it, concluding immediately than any objects we feel are merely our own deficiencies.
Thankfully, I do not think this what Scripture is, nor can it really function this way even if we wanted it to (as evidenced by different interpretations of what it is that is supposed to be communicated in Scripture).
I'm not sure I agree with you that a proper Christian morality would be completely unconcerned with earthly concerns, or draw such a sharp distinction. Of course the distinction does have roots in Scripture, but so does concern for the physical wellbeing of others, and indeed even of ourselves. While there are other concerns which are more important, these seem to be intrinsically good, rather than simply good because they help us get ourselves and others to heaven. But this is a tangential issue.
I think I get what you're saying a little better now. When you say "epistemic norm," you mean "self-evident truth"? Like the laws of logic?
Because obviously, that's not true. Paul, for one, didn't treat them that way; he defended them on external grounds.
It would not have been a good thing for Abraham to have sacrificed Isaac, but it WAS a good thing for him to listen to God and be willing to sacrifice Isaac. That was faith.
About the times when people "argued" with God... God never said they couldn't argue...but his will was still what mattered. So we should wrestle with Scripture, but we shouldn't ignore it out of disagreement.
I don't think they're enough to throw out the DCT, because God WANTED the dialogue (I refuse to spell it "dialog") in those situations.
I think asking God to explain Himself might be a little arrogant...
The "invitation to a relationship" explanation is an analogy, so it can be interpreted in a lot of ways. So I may or may not agree. But the point to me is that man's opinions do not trump Scripture.
We are not supposed to accept Scripture passively...but we ARE supposed to accept it.
No, EN doesn't mean self-evident. The basic idea is that if there is external evidence (some of which is within Scripture obviously, but this is a small enough subset of Scriptures that the point stands) which proves ALL of the rest of Scripture to be true, then the rest of Scripture can be taken as epistemically normative, which is to say, you must believe what is taught there.
As far as the Abraham story, I'm not ready to agree with you yet. I think it's very hard to read it because of the differences in cultural context. For example, a deity asking a servant to sacrifice a child wasn't the same type of morally shocking thing then as it would be now. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be just as *hard* in the emotional sense, but it does mean that perhaps Abraham's dilemma was what Paul said, which is to say, one of faith in whether God could still keep his promise, rather than an ethical dilemma.
Look at it this way. If I was going to kill you, but I knew God would bring you back to life, would that make it ethically ok to you? Of course not. The act itself is abhorrent, according to our (I think more correct) ethics. But for Abraham, according to Paul, the issue was simply one of God's faithfulness to his promises. So it seems though Abraham must have struggled mightily with being willing to give up Isaac, he might not have faced the same ethical objection we do.
But in either case, God appearing to one person to give them a specific command is much different than Scripture teaching something for all men. If we found Scripture teaching that for all men, it is a good thing to sacrifice a child to God, then I think we would (and should) reject it even given all the external evidence that apologists normally cite (like the Lord, Liar, or Lunatic thing, or the fact that the apostles attest reliably to the resurrection).
Asking God to explain himself might be a little arrogant, but it also might be a little honest. And look at what it occasions. All throughout the OT in the Psalms, in Job, and in the prophets (notably Habakkuk), it is the fact that men insist on an explanation that occasions God's response. I think this is a good thing, even if at times (such as in Job) the reply involves an element of rebuke. This is better than simply assuming that our moral intuition or reason is simply trumped.
But I'm not sure how the fact that God wants dialogue makes DCT any better off. I think the fact that God wants dialogue shows that he doesn't want us to operate with a simple DCT theory. He wants our honest response.
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