Announcing Biblical Studies Carnival 41

James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix has promptly posted Biblical Studies Carnival 41. James has done a great job of rounding up the best posts from April for your reading pleasure, and not only that, but he's made it quite entertaining as a carnival should be.  Thanks, James.

Waltke & Enns on Inspiration

Peter Enns has posted links to a recent response to Inspiration and Incarnation by Bruce Waltke in the Westminster Theological Journal.  Waltke's review and Enns's response are available. The interaction highlights the challenge of distinguishing apologetics from exegesis as one is engaged in biblical scholarship. What struck me as I read Waltke's comments was how he repeatedly insists that his "apologetic" is based on "exegetical data and a posteriori reasoning, not on doctrine and a priori reasoning" (83-84). Methinks he doth protest too much. It seemed to me that his exegesis was colored by his a priori theological commitment to an orthodox position on inerrancy - a point Enns was quick to point out in his response.

Enns notes that there was also a surrejoinder by Waltke but implies it was outside the bounds of the type of exchange they'd originally agreed on. For that reason, he didn't link to it. Was that an unfair thing for the journal to allow the last word to come from the defender of the faith? Or is it common practice?

In passing, Waltke also had me scratching my head over his insistence that Proverbs is universally true, not situationally true. Anyone who's studied Wisdom Literature knows that proverbs are contextually-appropriate guidelines, not dogmatically true doctrines.  If such is Waltke's approach to Proverbs, it may not be worth the time to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

At any rate, I commend the exchange to all who are continually wrestling with the issue of inspiration and inerrancy.

Scripture is God-breathed

The discussion of inerrancy, Bible scholarship, and the impact of Bible scholarship on faith continued recently with some related (and sometimes interacting) posts by John, James, and Scott. Follow the discussion in the comments as well to get the full effect.

John offered a four-part critique and interaction with James's earlier question on the historicity of the Conquest account in Joshua. (Find my post on the subject here.) John had weighed in the day before with a quote from Paul Ricoeur that I suspect was subtly directed at the ongoing diablogue about the nature of our understanding of Scripture, but he didn't explicitly acknowledge it. (I suppose I should read this Ricoeur guy one of these days with my interest in the problem of evil.)

My contribution to the discussion is an observation about the relationship between a Scripture text and its interpretation related to the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy.  I say "doctrines" because I think they are separate theological issues, but they are often treated as one.

The Scripture: 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (ESV)

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

The Interpretation: Excerpts from "Inspiration, Summary" at 2 Tim 3:16 in the ESV Scofield III Study Bible

"Without impairing the intelligence, individuality, literary style, or personal feelings of the human authors, God supernaturally directed the writing of Scripture so that they recorded in perfect accuracy His comprehensive and infallible revelation to man. If God Himself had done the writing, the written Word would be no more accurate and authoritative than it is. . . . By means of divine inspiration the writers of Scripture spoke with authority concerning the unknown past, wrote by divine guidance the historical portions, revealed the law, penned the devotional literature of the Bible, recorded the contemporary prophetic message, and prophesied the future. . . . Because the Scriptures are inspired, they are authoritative and without error in their original words, and constitute the infallible revelation of God to man." (Emphasis added)

The Study Bible quite accurately sums up the essentials of what has been an evangelical/fundamentalist approach to the doctrine of Scripture - inspiration and inerrancy go hand in hand. My observation is that the logical connection between the two seems to be a non sequitur (that is, logically it does not follow). If we're discussing interpretations of Scripture, I think it's fair to ask "where is that in the text?" in response to an offered interpretation. I don't see how 2 Tim 3:16-17 supports the conclusion that the text is "perfect," "infallible," or even "accurate."  Inspired and authoritative is one thing; perfect and infallible is another.

To paraphrase, Scripture is inspired divine revelation, useful for equipping people of faith for serving God. My question for the inerrancy debate is are inerrantists attributing more to Scripture than it claims for itself? I'm not familiar with the history of interpretation for this doctrine, so maybe one of you can help me out (James? John?). When did the church start using words like perfect, infallible, and inerrant to describe Scripture? Aside from logic (God is perfect > Scripture reveals God > Scripture is perfect), what other Scriptures support the idea of a "perfect" Bible?

(Of course, one can always affirm inerrancy in the original autographs . . .)

Recently . . .

Like John, I'm preparing for preliminary exams (our version of comps - but I have until July 27). At the moment, I'm finishing up with William Dever's book Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? (2003). Dever apparently likes long questions for titles. The last book of his I had to read was What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? The book gives a broad overview of the theories on Israelite origins and especially develops Dever's own preferred version of an indigenous origins model. I think he may be right in many ways, but that's not why I'm writing.

Dever has a tendency to introduce quotations from secondary literature using the adverb "recently." For example, "Thomas Thompson has . . . stated recently that . . ." or "other biblical scholars have also weighed in recently . . . Diana Edelman . . . begins her chapter . . ." (pp. 191-192). These are just two representative examples from pages that I've read in the last few minutes. It caught my attention earlier in the book, too, and struck me as odd because most of the literature he's citing in these contexts is not what I would call recent.  I consider "recent" to refer mainly to the immediate past. In scholarship, a book that came out in the prior 2-3 years is passable enough as "recent."  Now the dictionary does give a technical meaning of "recent" from geology that pertains to the last 10,000 years, so in that sense, Dever's citing "recent" literature.

Thompson's book from which Dever quotes on p. 191 was from 1977. Edelman's book - 1996. And one earlier occurrence that I noticed was directed at a book from 1989. 

Granted, an adverb of time is often relative to the perception of the user, but 1977 was before I was born.  In 1996, I graduated from High School. In 1989, I started 6th grade.

So is the last 32 years of Bible scholarship that vivid and immediate to Dever that he feels it can all be accurately referred to as "recent" or is it just a stylistic tic that a good editor should have pointed out and corrected?

Thoughts? What qualifies as "recently"?

Israelite Origins and Biblical Inerrancy

James McGrath has had an interesting month, to say the least. He started the month debating at Triablogue about his views on inerrancy (in which he's a "standard-issue liberal" and quite probably an apostate). A few days later, he posted a quote on inerrancy from Eric Reitan. That post has 79 comments running still today 11 days after the original post. (Let's just say there's a lively discussion going on there that, incidentally, illustrates why I moderate comments.) That exchange apparently led to a commenter writing to James's pastor to inform him of his status as a liberal apostate heretic. And yet, he continues to post on inerrancy, without fear and trembling. The fact that he actually attempts to dialogue with some of his commenters is quite commendable (read the comments to see why).

Today's post raises questions about Israelite origins and the biblical accounts of the Exodus and Conquest. I normally avoid engaging controversial issues head-on. My series on Apologetics and Critical Bible Scholarship has been something of an exception, but even there, I only obliquely touch on the question of inerrancy as a theological commitment that governs how evidence will be interpreted. I think the firestorm of comments that James has set off shows how passionate people are about their beliefs and about how vehemently they will defend them lest their entire belief system fall apart. Despite the fact that the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy has only been around 31 years or so, it clearly reflects the only right way to understand biblical inspiration as it is based on careful exegesis of Scripture itself. It is an exegetical conclusion, not a theological commitment. (If you're unsure how to take the tone of those last 2 sentences, go here.)

Today, James asked:

Is there any single period of approximately a century during which we
find all the relevant cities mentioned in Joshua to have been destroyed
in something like the way the Book of Joshua indicates?

The answer is No. The Joshua narrative and the archaeological record for Canaan, Israel, and Transjordan for the appropriate time frames are difficult (dare I say, impossible?) to reconcile. The problem is that many biblical sites have been identified and excavated. One can appeal to our overall lack of knowledge and the inexact nature of the science, but such an appeal is usually only made in one direction. That is, it's used to explain why the evidence does not fit the Bible. The identification of many sites is quite certain and only challenged if the city that's found couldn't possibly be the city the Bible mentioned.

Gibeon is a great example of how the narrative and the archaeology don't line up. Joshua 9 is the well-known story of how the people of nearby Gibeon tricked Joshua into not destroying them (Josh 9:3-4). Regardless of whether we date the Exodus in 1446 BCE or 1290 BCE, it falls in the archaeological record during the Late Bronze Age (ended ca. 1200 BCE).

In William Dever's survey of the evidence for Israelite origins, he says that:

Gibeon was apparently not occupied in either the late 13th or the early 12th century B.C. The American excavator who dug there in the 1960s -- James Pritchard, a well-known archaeologist and Professor of Religious Though at the University of Pennsylvania -- found Iron Age remains, but nothing earlier than the 8th century B.C.
    Nor is the problem misidentification for here the identity of the site is certain. The Arabic name, el-Jib, is the exact equivalent of Hebrew "Gibeon," as the great American Semitist and topographer Edward Robinson pointed out as long ago as 1838. And Pritchard found 56 broken jar handles inscribed "Gibeon" in Hebrew in a deep water system of the 8th-7th century B.C. The fact that this water system is probably the same one that is mentioned in 2 Samuel 2:13 suggests that the book of Joshua belongs to the 8th-7th century B.C., when the Gibeon known to the biblical writers really did exist. (pp. 48-49)

Dever also raises the point that Joshua 12 and Judges 1 have different stories to tell about the success of the Conquest. One example: Ta'anach was defeated (Josh 12:21) or was it? (Judges 1:27) Those discrepancies were probably the earliest clues for me that the Bible was perhaps not telling me a historical story in the sense that I'd previously believed. I knew how to harmonize evidence from history that didn't fit with a literal reading of Scripture, but I didn't know how to accept as literal and historical two competing versions of the story from Scripture itself. Why do we impose modern ideas about science, history, authorship, and accuracy onto an ancient text? What if God didn't intend to give us an exact historical and scientific account of things?

Reference: William G. Dever. 2003. Who were the early Israelites and where did they come from? Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.