How to Baptize the Bible So That It’s Not a Dangerous Book, Part 2
God, Progressive Revelation, and the Nature of Scripture
Dear Students in BIB777,
Here is a summary of my first lecture of the term. I trust you will find these lecture summaries useful.
With gratitude, Dr. Neuticks/ Michelle and Barack Obama Professor of Biblical Interpretation and Theological Relevance/ The Divinity of the Americas/ San Juan, Puerto Rico
Lecture 1: God, Progressive Revelation, and the Nature of Scripture (Summary)
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Many Christians, and not all are enemies of thinker-seekers, refer to the Bible as the Word/word of God. The starting point of biblical interpretation for those who embrace scripture as part of their spirituality is God Godself. It is certainly possible and worthwhile to interpret the Bible as great literature and not have one’s faith involved at all.
To simplify or oversimplify, those who affirm the reality of God have a perspective on God that falls somewhere on a continuum like the one below The diagram shows the extremes. Most people who embrace an idea of God will fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes; though there are those at one of the furthest ends or the other.
Your concept of the way or ways in which God makes Godself known or not will have the most impact on how you perceive biblical inspiration and the possibilities for God communicating through biblical literature.
“Progressive revelation” is a way some theologians and biblical scholars have described the gradual processes by which human beings increasingly gained ground in their conceltualizations of God. Said another way, the earliest human efforts to comprehend God‘s identity and God‘s ways of interacting with the people of the world were expanded upon over time as the number of those seeking understanding grew as did locales in which humans were making these efforts.
As individuals pooled learning, the probability, or maybe possibility, increased of knowing more about God today than people did who first began to suspect that there was indeed a God. It is an important and insightful perspective though a better name for it is likely “progressive comprehension” since progressive revelation could imply that God is only allowing a limited amount of human understanding to occur at any given time slowly doling out details.
The reality is that God has always been revealing the totality of God‘s identity to all interested seekers and observers, but we humans have ostensibly learned across centuries how to improve upon our ability to “get” God. Those who come after us should learn more than we have learned, or should affirm more than we have been able to affirm. If one were to diagram how this progressive revelation or progressive comprehension has occurred the singular line on the graph would not move from a lower level on the far left side, gradually and steadily moving up with a straight line and ending at a much higher place on the righthand side of the page. Instead, the diagram would show a very crooked line—indeed, gradually moving upward, but indicating that there have been steps ahead and then steps backwards and then steps ahead and so forth.
Hopefully, at the conclusion of this course, your personal line graph delineating your progressive comprehension of God shows definite upward motion. If that is not the case, then either I have not done my job as well as I want to do, or your efforts have been too meager. You will get to let me know how I’ve done on the course evaluation, and I will get to let you know how you’re done by the grade I assign you. Just saying. And keep in mind that a course grade reflects academic effort and accomplishment, not your faith or your spiritual journey. Those are matters that God would grade if God gave grades. Also, I should say in the spirit of transparency, which has certainly been inspired by MAGAts and the Trump administration. The word has gone around for some time that it’s much easier to get an A from God than from me.
Now let us turn to the nature of scripture, which is our last topic for today’s lecture. To say that scripture is inspired and authoritative, which Christian traditionalists have wanted to affirm with zeal, means for them, though probably not for too many of the rest of us:
Every detail in every part of scripture is irrefutably factually correct. If on the outside chance a small detail isn’t exactly as correct as fundamentalists need for inspired scripture to be, then perhaps there was a hiccup in translation or transmission; those errors are not reflected in the original autographs—that is the original scroll copies of each of today’s Bible books.
Those writers of scripture were pretty much mindless tools of God who in a trans state let us assume penned exactly what God told him to pen. They were not mindless all the time, only when God took over their brains for the purpose of producing what is now scripture.
There is no need to worry with what type of literature a given passage a scripture falls into (psalm, wisdom teaching, parable, aetiological myth, epistle, apocalyptic vision, and so forth). All parts of the Bible are interpreted in exactly the same way.
Similarly, it’s pointless to worry about the cultural norms of the differing passages of scripture and how they differ culturally from other passages originating in completely different, cultural settings, and historical time frames.
If it appears that any part of the Bible contradicts any other part of the Bible, then the problem is with us as readers; not with the biblical literature.
We will not be making use of any of these perspectives in our work together this semester. We will take it as a given that all parts of scripture were produced by human beings, capable of being opinionated and misinformed. To say that scripture is inspired, actually means that the writers are inspired, and we would not deny that; we would not denounce that. But to see that someone who produces a great work of art whether it’s a literature or architecture or an oil, painting or sculpture was inspired doesn’t make the artist or the product she or he produced flawless. Inspiration might have as much to do with the motivation to create as with the finished product. And any kind of human error is not an indication that God was nowhere to be found in beginning or completing the project.was nowhere to be found in beginning or completing the project.
Dr. William Hull was a New Testament scholar and one-time Dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He once preached a sermon at the Crescent Hill Baptist Church very near the seminary campus titled, “Shall We Call the Bible Infallible?”
In the sermon Professor Hull made several compelling points. For our purposes today, I want to point you to one of those. He asked, what if the fundamentalists are correct and every part of the Bible is completely without error? His answer? That would still be a problem because all of us human beings trying to interpret such passages are not infallible.