The Bible and the Tyger
I go beyond Karl Giberson’s disapproval of the inerrancy doctrine: I can’t even understand how the argument can exist, if we are to see the Bible as a divine gift and a divine creation. Granted, however, my perspective is unusual.
I see the Bible from the direction of a literary translator, so for me the text in the original languages is an object of desire. I hope that doesn’t sound trendy or irreverent, because that’s not how I mean it; I mean that I don’t see the form and the meaning as separate things—all my work in ancient literature says they aren’t. I long for the sounds and structures as a means of insight into what the original authors intended and what they can teach me; but of course I have to accept the limits of what I can know.
It all reminds me of William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.” This creature is “burning bright” and possesses a “fearful symmetry”—and (Blake doesn’t need to add this) it hunts down terrified, innocent prey, tears them to pieces, and eats them raw, not even sharing with its own kin during hard times. The speaker feels fear and wonder, but intellectually is left with mainly the question “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
A tiger is (like ourselves) a mysterious and marvelous creation, so the complexities and paradoxes of its existence can do little more than add to our awe concerning its provenance and purpose, and should reduce certain preoccupations to laughter. Is the natural world here to prove something to our triumph and to our intellectual rivals’ discomfiture? Is the story of the tiger a story about God only if we can understand it in easy human terms such as “seven” and “days”? Because the tiger is part of divine creation, should we think like him, or should he think like us?
I’m in the early stages of a book called The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible. I’ve realized that, to avoid losing three quarters of my prospective readers at the Table of Contents, I have to include a long preface on the Bible’s historical origins; most young people, and a great many people my age, don’t know what kind of a document the Bible is, as in the geographical areas it comes from and the era during which it emerged in a form we would more or less recognize. I knew little about the history myself and had to read up, cringing the whole time, because I really didn’t want to know about the Bible as a product of pragmatic forces.
But things quickly began to look rather unpragmatic. Jewish scripture is, in context, less nationalistic, less paternalistic, less materialistic, less superstitious than simply bewildered. An edited compilation attesting to—for the ancient world—unique monotheism and a uniquely punctilious set of laws seemed to me to grow mostly from questions of why. “Why didn’t the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Persians crush us? Why did the Persians actually send us back our elite and help rebuild our Temple? But if we’re so special, why does the trouble keep coming? What are we doing here?” It was under the demand for convincing answers that the various priestly and scholarly schools contested what was truly important and how it should be expressed—again, not two separate categories—and what should be set aside and what kept.
And imagine the early followers of Jesus, as they faced the task of formulating what had happened and for what reason. It was about a crucified criminal who had shown a particular interest in outcasts, and any ordinary political or religious program that might have been claimed for him dissolved in the catastrophic end of the Jewish Wars, just forty years after his death. But the idea of God’s Son suffering and dying for degraded humanity had an irresistible life of its own: it just had to be systematized, explained—somehow.
Here is my draft for the passage that sums up my preface:
“For these reasons, I see absolutely no conflict between acknowledging that the production of scripture is a fallible (if not pathetic) human process, and believing that, over time, scripture reveals God’s ineffable will. Abraham Lincoln held that God works slowly through history, no matter how tragic, and I believe also that God works slowly through speaking, listening, reading and writing, no matter how faulty. I have a special esteem for the Bible in part because God has had the longest time to work on it: to allow various documents and collections to come and go, to funnel the survivors to populous conferences for final vetting, and—in the great fullness of time—to release the texts to a common readership, which stubbornly loves what it loves—certain passages, but not others—and interprets as it feels compelled.”
An important change in interpretation happening now concerns hell as a lake of fire. Paul, the earliest extant writer about the new religion, shows no sign of having heard of such punishment—a fact more and more modern believers notice as they contemplate misuses, past and present, of the threat of hell.
I think Martin Luther’ s attitude at the Diet of Worms is important. He likely didn’t say, “Here I stand; I can’t do otherwise.” which would not have been characteristic of him. He probably did say, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God,” meaning that his deep involvement with the Bible, not any independent notions of right and wrong, had brought him to where he was. If this is the case, his “God help me” isn’t so much a personal plea for protection as a grim hope of being right, given what being wrong would do to the Bible and to other people depending on its guidance. The man and the Book were in a frighteningly dynamic relationship with each other. The relationship—like all earthy things—produced good and evil; Luther’s Bible-bolstered anti-Semitism can’t be called anything but the latter. But time belongs to God; it discards evil.
The Bible is, like the natural world as a testament to God’s power and goodness, still only a created thing—or, as I prefer, a thing still in the process of creation.
What a wonderful post, intelligent, whimsical, thought-provoking. Thank you so much!
What a wonderful post, intelligent, whimsical, thought-provoking. Thank you so much!
What a wonderful post, intelligent, whimsical, thought-provoking. Thank you so much!
It seems like you are saying you only lost your fear of coming to "know about the Bible as a product of pragmatic forces" by instead coming to see it as a series of the biblical writers' explanation-seeking responses to bewildering, inexplicable, unusual, and unlikely (largely political-military) events apart from the question central to most Evangelicals — whether the events actually happened. Apart from that, I don't see the implied distinction. Can't events and our responses to them be both pragmatic and a matter of fumbling in the dark? Isn't that *normally* how things go?
As far as the Evangelical world goes, aren't historical and critical approaches to biblical interpretation and history welcome only as long as they ratify or do not disturb what are fundamentally nationalistic and anti-scientific views embedded in a conservative civil religion? You are fine as long as your history starts with the creation of Adam and Eve from non-biological processes. You are fine if your history shows how the will of God continues to be revealed *progressively* in the lives and deaths of nations and peoples, principally Israel and the United States, Jews and Christians. If you do disturb those ideas or suggest a regress is possible, or that evil might increase and get the upper hand for a time, you are likely to be accused of process theology, liberalism, etc.
It seems like you are saying you only lost your fear of coming to "know about the Bible as a product of pragmatic forces" by instead coming to see it as a series of the biblical writers' explanation-seeking responses to bewildering, inexplicable, unusual, and unlikely (largely political-military) events apart from the question central to most Evangelicals — whether the events actually happened. Apart from that, I don't see the implied distinction. Can't events and our responses to them be both pragmatic and a matter of fumbling in the dark? Isn't that *normally* how things go?
As far as the Evangelical world goes, aren't historical and critical approaches to biblical interpretation and history welcome only as long as they ratify or do not disturb what are fundamentally nationalistic and anti-scientific views embedded in a conservative civil religion? You are fine as long as your history starts with the creation of Adam and Eve from non-biological processes. You are fine if your history shows how the will of God continues to be revealed *progressively* in the lives and deaths of nations and peoples, principally Israel and the United States, Jews and Christians. If you do disturb those ideas or suggest a regress is possible, or that evil might increase and get the upper hand for a time, you are likely to be accused of process theology, liberalism, etc.
It seems like you are saying you only lost your fear of coming to "know about the Bible as a product of pragmatic forces" by instead coming to see it as a series of the biblical writers' explanation-seeking responses to bewildering, inexplicable, unusual, and unlikely (largely political-military) events apart from the question central to most Evangelicals — whether the events actually happened. Apart from that, I don't see the implied distinction. Can't events and our responses to them be both pragmatic and a matter of fumbling in the dark? Isn't that *normally* how things go?
As far as the Evangelical world goes, aren't historical and critical approaches to biblical interpretation and history welcome only as long as they ratify or do not disturb what are fundamentally nationalistic and anti-scientific views embedded in a conservative civil religion? You are fine as long as your history starts with the creation of Adam and Eve from non-biological processes. You are fine if your history shows how the will of God continues to be revealed *progressively* in the lives and deaths of nations and peoples, principally Israel and the United States, Jews and Christians. If you do disturb those ideas or suggest a regress is possible, or that evil might increase and get the upper hand for a time, you are likely to be accused of process theology, liberalism, etc.