Through a Glass Darkly

I removed and reinstalled the blog, and I think I’m back in business now. 

For our Project Timothy Q&A this month, we had to respond in one page to the following: “In Joshua, how would you explain the violent invasion of a settled population that resulted in total war.” Here’s my very imperfect effort:

1. Exegesis and Analysis

It is difficult to identify this text’s “original readers.” The traditional view is that Joshua himself wrote the text. Joshua would have written after the conquest when the tribes of Israel settled in the Promised Land. The original readers or hearers likely would have understood the text as a recitation of how God kept His promise to deliver the land to Israel. (See Josh 11:23).

The critical view generally attributes the text to several sources who wrote during or after the Babylonian captivity. This view seems more consistent in some respects with the archeological record, which does not appear to reveal either a “settled population” in Canaan or temporally consistent destruction layers in key cities such as Jericho and Ai. In this view, the original readers would have understood the narrative at least to some extent as a polemic against Babylon.

2. Hermeneutics and Application

Under the traditional view of Joshua’s authorship, there are three main options for contextualizing the violence depicted in the narrative: progressive revelation; accommodation to cultural norms; or just judgment / purification. Progressive revelation is the notion that God only gradually revealed the peace-making ethic reflected in the New Testament. This is tied to the concept of accommodation to cultural norms, by which God executes His perfect sovereign plans through the imperfect cultural norms of the day. Just judgment / purification is the view that God hardened the hearts of the Canaanites because of their continual wickedness and purified the land of influences that would corrupt Israel as God’s chosen people.

If one takes the critical view of authorship, the narrative does not depict actual genocide directed by God, but represents an idealized view of God’s faithfulness, which ultimately becomes tied to the messianic hope of final deliverance from oppression.

It is difficult to make a definitive choice from among these views. However, they all view the narrative through a Christological / ecclesiological / eschatological lens. Seen through this lens, a primary theme for today is that, while the gulf between sin and righteousness inevitably produces violence, God’s righteousness ultimately produces peace. The atoning death of Christ absorbed the violence of sin so that the community of the Church can now participate in the telos of creation, which is “rest from war” (cf. Josh. 11:23; Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross).

If this teleological view is correct, the text can be used to justify neither “holy war” nor so-called “just” war. The Church’s task today is not to wage war with human weapons or to provide spiritual justification for temporal political conflicts. Rather, the Church is called to transform culture sacrificially, in the love of the Father, participating in the sacrificial death of the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This is from a conversation I’ve been having with an acquaintance, who is a well known theology professor, about the Jeff Schloss review of Expelled:

Yes, I know a bit about the ISU situation as well, and I agree that Schloss is too soft on ISU, and that he misses some important nuances about the first amendment and academic freedom. Even among my friends in the American Scientific Affiliation, I’ve always argued that the Gonzalez case was an injustice and that his “ID” book is something most Christians can appreciate, whatever their view of “hardcore” ID or creationism.

But this is what troubles me, about this film and many other things: I’m not sure the evangelical movement in the U.S. ever really climbed out of fundamentalism in many ways. Carl Henry’s “Uneasy Conscience” and Francis Schaeffer’s work got evangelicals to engage culture, but in large part the engagement has been a hostile culture war. I think Mark Noll is right and that this posture led to a “scandal of the evangelical mind” in many fields, including two fields in which I have an overlapping scholarly interest: law and the sciences. I’m glad that in recent years there has been more much productive and transformative engagement by evangelicals in many fields, including law and policy (I think of the “For the Good of the Nation” document produced by the National Association of Evangelicals, for example). However, I think the sciences remain an area of high hostility.

The Expelled movied tries to make the case that this hostility is due to enforcement of “Darwinist” orthodoxy. As Jeff Schloss points out in his review, that is true in many quarters, but on the other hand there is a log in our own eye as well. At the end of the day, denying the evidence for common descent is akin to denying that the earth travels around the sun — as even Mike Behe recognizes. I really passionately believe that to become transformers of culture, we evangelicals need to become more creative theologically and apologetically around the reality of common descent. The political ID movement behind Expelled reinforces the “wall” mentality that disallows any constructive engagement between evangelical faith and created reality, IMHO. Talk about “expelled” — I’ve been demonized by some brothers in Christ for even suggesting that we look at the evidence for common descent objectively and try to address it constructively. Somehow this perpetual posture of defensiveness has to change, I think.

An Evangelical Manifesto signed by a number of prominent evangelical leaders was released today. I think it’s an outstanding document.

Here is a long review of the film Expelled by Westmont College biologist Jeff Schloss. I haven’t seen the film yet, so I can’t offer too much personal comment. However, I’m deeply disturbed by the “Nazi” trope in the film. It’s unfortunate, I think, that the biggest impact of this film likely will be to (further) stifle speech and exploration of the relationship between faith and science in the evangelical community.

On Jesus Creed, guest blogger RJS is exploring the relationship between faith and reason. Here are the categories she proposes:

(1) Faith requires the renunciation of intelligence. Any elaboration here would detract from my principle point – so I will forbear.

(2) Intellectual integrity requires the renunciation of faith. This is a growing view in our world today. Secular humanism and atheism may not be in ascendancy (Alister McGrath, NT Wright, Tim Keller, and Brian McLaren all make this point in various ways) – but the view has become the de facto operating principle for many; the point of departure. More importantly, the accepted alternatives to atheism or materialism do not usually include orthodox Christian faith.

(3) By the skin of one’s teeth one can hold to both faith and integrity. But within this position there is a constant tension. We bracket off the questions and continue to function – barely. Many stories – both of those who “lost faith” and those who “retained faith” include this approach in the mix.

(4) Intellectual integrity demands faith. A modernistic “evidence that demands a verdict” approach. (Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Hugh Ross, …)

I would add a fifth response to this taxonomy:

(5) Intellectual integrity is fully compatible with faith but requires honest interaction. There is no proof – some ambiguity remains. Of course honest grappling with all the questions and issues is somewhat unnerving to many. It seems inevitable that some views will be refined or even abandoned in the process and this prospect causes concern. Perhaps it is not true that everything is clear cut. Nonetheless there is a way forward. Exploring the issues does not lead inevitably to deism or liberalism or apostasy.

I grew up with category 4. I’ve moved towards 5, and at times I’ve thought I’ve been there, only to get beaten back to 3. Here’s my question: can you get to 5 with an orthodox Christian faith, or does 5 require that the big challenges between faith and intellectual integrity must be resolved by moving away from orthodoxy?

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.