Month: March 2008

Westminster Seminary has announced the supension of Peter Enns due to the controversy over his book Inspiration and Incarnation. What a shame.

Pete’s book was and is very important to me personally, and I believe the questions he raised are vital to the future of evangelical faith. We cannot ignore the humanity of the Bible. People need meat, not just milk. We have learned to integrate the emotional aspects of spirituality into our practice through praise music and small support groups, and that is a good thing. But educated, urban people also need food for the mind.

The shamanistic recitation of magical dogmatic phrases such as “inerrancy” is not meat. Meat is actually digging in to the Bible God gave us, in all of its maddening situatedness, strangeness, and diversity. Meat is recognizing that what it means for God not to “err” in communicating to human beings might not be exactly what we would expect. Meat is working to understand the authority of scripture in the context of the whole of God’s revelation, including what He reveals to us through the natural and social sciences, literature, the arts, and philosophy.

If we evangelicals can’t move on to the meat, we’ll starve. If we can’t learn to eat the meat, how will we be different than the thousands of other fundamalist sects of the world’s religions that lack contact with reality? If we can’t learn to eat the meat, how can we expect our young people to hold onto their faith? If we can’t develop a more robust and well-rounded consensus on the nature, authority, and interpretation of scripture, a consensus that isn’t just rigidly formulaic, evangelicalism will become an irrelevant emotionalist backwater. At least that’s my two cents as a moderately educated lay person.

On the Brian Lehrer show yesterday, Doug Rushkoff suggested that the U.S. Constitution and the Talmud are open source projects. This strikes me as, well, overstated.

In the context of open source biotechnology, I’ve written about the “hacker culture” required to support open source norms. This sort of culture, I think, is very different than a contractual community established by a constitutional document or an interpretive community surrounding a set of canonical sacred scriptures.

It’s true, as Rushkoff noted on Lehrer’s show, that constitutions usually provide procedures for amendment, and of course the U.S. Constitution has been amended numerous times. Those procedures, however, typically reflect the agreement of the community governed by the constitutional document that amendements should be difficult and rare. Article V of the U.S. Constitution, for example, requires a two-thirds vote of Congress or an application by the legislatures of two-thirds of the states, followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states. If this is “open source,” then “open source” simply means “possible, though exceptionally difficult, to change.”

The Talmud presents a more interesting example, because there is significant diversity in the various Talmudic traditions, although the Orthodox tradition resists the notion of historical editorial change in the oral law reflected in the Talmud. However, the Talmud expounds and interprets the written law, the Torah. The Talmud therefore reflects the activity of interpretive communities connected to a “closed source” written law. I think most of the writers of the Talmud would have been horrified to have been portrayed as “hacking” the Torah. If the Talmud was an “open source” project, then we can apply the term “open source” anachronistically to every interpretive community that ever existed — which might include everyone who has ever read a text.