John Cobb on Biblical Inspiration and Interpretation
Dec. 1, 2019
reposted from Process and Faith, Ask Dr. Cobb
originally posted in March 1999
How can the Bible be interpreted? *
The Bible is a thoroughly human document written, edited, and compiled over many centuries by numerous people. From the perspective of process thought, to say that it is thoroughly human does not exclude God from involvement in its authorship. God is present and active in every moment of human experience, and in some moments that activity, the Holy Spirit, is more effective than in others. In extreme cases we may properly speak of someone as inspired. There are many inspired passages in the Jewish and Christian scriptures.
But inspiration does not by any means entail inerrancy. An inspired author may rely on inaccurate historical information and prescientific notions of the natural world. Inspiration does not guarantee that a writer fully transcend the cultural values of one's time and write for all the ages. Hence to press even the most inspired words in the Bible for accurate information or definitive judgments will often lead to absurdities. Christians are fortunate that the Bible does not make the claim to be inerrant or even consistently inspired. There are a few places where individuals do make strong claims for what they have to say. For example, a prophet may assert that the Word of the Lord came to him, and "Thus says the Lord". We should take these claims to extraordinary inspiration seriously. But we should also note that what follows are typically statements directed to particular people at particular times and places. It remains for us to discern their relevance today. Despite this lack of claim to divine inspiration in most of Scripture, many Christians want to claim inerrancy and infallibility for every passage in it. This witnesses to the human tendency to idolatry -- treating the earthen vessels as if they were God. We are now heirs of two centuries of Biblical scholarship based on assumptions of the sort I have sketched. Some of it is iconoclastic and largely negative. It has an important role in clearing away idolatrous attitudes toward the Bible. Most of it is extremely helpful in giving us access to the astonishing richness of insight and deep wisdom of the ancient Jews. This insight and wisdom had to do especially with the relationship of God and the world, and no other literature, ancient or modern, supersedes this in illuminating these most important of all questions. The Bible remains our basic source for reflecting on these matters. For this purpose the diversity within the scriptures is very valuable. One cannot simply agree with everything one finds there. There are contradictions, and there are depictions of God in some of the earlier writings that a Christian simply cannot accept. But for the most part the diversity of experiences of God reflected in scripture enable the Bible to speak to us now in many and varied conditions and situations. Passages that one generation ignores often become crucially important to a later generation. Several of the issues posed by the questioner * deal with the Genesis account of creation. These stories contain internal contradictions as well as prescientific ideas about how the world came into being. But when we recognize this and move to the deeper theological level, they are immensely important for good and ill. For many generations they were read as authorizing human exploitation of the natural world. In the past few decades we have realized that this exploitation is threatening to render the Earth uninhabitable. This has brought us to repentance. It has also brought us to study the creation stories afresh. We have recognized that, although human beings are given a central place in them, all creatures are affirmed as of value, and the human role for which the stories call is not so much that of exploiter as of steward. The theological importance of these alternative ways of understanding the relation of God, humanity, and the other creatures is not affected by recognition that the stories are told by fallible human beings and cannot be relied on for factual accuracy. Of equal importance is what the stories say about the relation of males and females. Of the two creation stories, one sees male and female as together constituting the human that is created by God. The other definitely subordinates woman to man. It is this subordination that has dominated the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Today we must expose this account for the patriarchal prejudice that it expresses and establishes. On what grounds can we pick and choose among Biblical passages and themes? This is the heart of the theological question today. For Christians, the answer is that we read all of the Bible from the perspective given us in Christ. But that is only the beginning of an answer. We must go on to clarify what we mean by Christ and how Christ is related to the historical Jesus. Are the words of Jesus our final authority? No, not if that means that they are treated literally and legalistically. But we do find in Jesus a purity of the way in which he points to God's love of us and our calling to love God and fellow creatures that guides all our critical reflection about other ideas and themes in the scriptures. It is sad, indeed, that for so many people being a Christian is associated with an idolatrous understanding of the Bible. The writings that should liberate us to think critically and creatively in ever new situations have been turned into bonds that tie us to ancient and outdated notions. We become absorbed in petty and even silly questions that have nothing to do with faith in Christ. Paul's distressed question to the Galatians applies to the contemporary church as well: "Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh?" (3:3) |
Is the Bible inspired?
Like so many questions asked of process theology, the answer is that it all depends on what the questioner means. If the question comes from one who thinks in very conservative categories, the answer must be an emphatic "No!" The words of the text were not dictated by God. Certainly the hand of the writer was not controlled by God. And even in the more modest sense proposed by some proponents of divine inspiration of Scripture, that God protected the authors from error, the emphatic "No!" remains. The Bible is full of errors of fact, of moral judgment, and of theological teaching.
But if the word "inspired" is being used as in ordinary language outside the conservative theological tradition, then the situation is quite different. We say that someone's performance in a concert or in a play was inspired. We speak of poets as inspired. Even a preacher may be inspired. That is, people may be moved by the Spirit in extraordinary ways. They may be so totally caught up in what they are doing that they are not consciously controlling their actions. What results exceeds the best product of their ordinary voluntary acts. A writer may find that sometimes the words "just flow." A composer may feel that the music "comes to her." Inspiration in this sense is rare enough to be greatly prized, but it is common enough that many of us experience it to some extent. Indeed, it is not altogether discontinuous from quite ordinary experience. Process thought affirms that at a very basic level all life is inspired. That is, there is no life at all except as God's Spirit participates in constituting us. It is that participation of the Spirit that leads to our being, in each moment, something more than the deterministic outcome of the forces from the past that also play so large a role in shaping us. The times when we think of ourselves as inspired are those when this creative novelty contributed by God's Spirit plays a particularly strong and effective role and is less inhibited than usual by the other causal factors in our lives. So process theology affirms not only that the common use of the language of inspiration is meaningful but that the inspiration is truly the work of God. When we think in this way, there is no reason to be skeptical of claims that many passages in the Bible are inspired. Indeed, it would be artificial to think that ancient Hebrew poets and prophets experienced inspiration less often than our contemporaries. The contrary is a reasonable guess. Our contemporaries are on the whole less intentionally open to God that were the Hebrews, and it is at least plausible to suggest that openness to God's inspiration is conducive to it. Also the results that come down to us show many indications of inspiration. The high ration of inspired passages in the Bible is partly due to the process of selection. No doubt there was much very ordinary writing in ancient Israel. What we now have was selected by the community through the centuries. That a community selects on the whole the more inspired parts of what is available is to be expected. What follows from the judgment that much of the Biblical writing is inspired in this sense? Certainly not that it is free from cultural influence or class bias or patriarchal perspective! The writings are thoroughly human, and that means just as conditioned as any writings by the contexts in which they arose. But to be conditioned is not to be wholly determined. It is the element of transcendence over that determination where we find the work of the Spirit. And there is much of that creative transcendence in the Bible. What follows from this judgment is that we do find God's truth transmitted to us in very earthen vessels. The texts we encounter deserve our deepest respect. Of course they should be studied by all critical methods, but when the assumptions of the critic are reductionistic, then we must be open to more than the critic finds. But is this to be said only of the Bible? Certainly not. There is inspiration in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Hindus and Chinese as well. There is inspiration also in the writings of Shakespeare and Goethe and of contemporary poets and dramatists as well. All this deserves our respect and listening. Hence the question of the uniqueness of the Bible cannot be answered by the category of inspiration. It must be answered in terms of the importance for us of the history of Israel. That history consists of events and their interpretations inextricably connected. Without inspired interpretations the events would not be important to us today. But without unusual events the inspired writers would not be more important than the inspired writers of other communities. For us, as Christians, the most important events are those that surrounded the person of Jesus. If it had not been for these events the history that has shaped us would have been a very different one. These events would not have been possible apart from inspired interpretations of previous events. We cannot appropriate them today apart from interpretations, and if these are not inspired, our tradition will die. Thus inspiration is involved at every point. So my answer, as a process theologian, is that "Yes, the Bible contains much inspired material." The healthy continuance of our Christian tradition depends on our intense appreciation of that material and continual recurrence to it. It depends, equally, on our distinguishing inspiration from any notion of inerrancy. And finally it depends on our inspired interpretations of that inspired material through relating it to all the wisdom we can gain from other sources. Today, we may be inspired to reject some of the ideas that are found even in the most inspired passages of scripture. We have been inspired to see through patriarchy, for example, a patriarchy that pervades the Bible. In this and other respects, we must preach against the Bible. But if this negation is to be healthy, it must be qualified in two respects. First, we should continue also to listen to the truth even in those passages that we feel have done most harm and continue to be most dangerous. And second, we should recognize that, at least for many of us, the call to attack Biblical ideas is grounded in just that tradition we attack. For example, when we attack particular ideas of the prophets, our doing so continues the prophetic tradition. We may be taking the inspiration of the Bible most seriously when we are most free to critique its specific teachings. |
* Question to which John Cobb is responding:
If people can become demon possessed, why didn't God warn Moses about this when He warned him about sin (10 commandments)? Why wasn't Adam deceived? Wasn't Adam with Eve when the serpent deceived her, Adam ate also, after Eve. Why did God sentence man to death and hell but woman through childbirth is saved? (OT) If we have dominion over animals, why can they eat us? God is an image of light, was Adam created in His image, or mans? Seth was like Adam, was he different? If Noah was the 8th person, does that make Adam and Seth different? Is the garden of Eden in heaven? Why does Jesus say if you cast out devils in his name he will tell you to depart you that work iniquity? Didn't demons and devils originate in Babylon? Why did the Jews adopt the Babylonian Talmud? Have you seen the tabernacles on Mount Carmel that Daniel spoke of?
If people can become demon possessed, why didn't God warn Moses about this when He warned him about sin (10 commandments)? Why wasn't Adam deceived? Wasn't Adam with Eve when the serpent deceived her, Adam ate also, after Eve. Why did God sentence man to death and hell but woman through childbirth is saved? (OT) If we have dominion over animals, why can they eat us? God is an image of light, was Adam created in His image, or mans? Seth was like Adam, was he different? If Noah was the 8th person, does that make Adam and Seth different? Is the garden of Eden in heaven? Why does Jesus say if you cast out devils in his name he will tell you to depart you that work iniquity? Didn't demons and devils originate in Babylon? Why did the Jews adopt the Babylonian Talmud? Have you seen the tabernacles on Mount Carmel that Daniel spoke of?