The End of Christianity (18 page)

Subsequent religious tradition has by and large encouraged us to take the Bible seriously rather than enjoy it, but the paradoxical truth of the matter may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.
⁶⁴

Literary criticism of the Bible is suffering from a crisis that is besetting all of literature. On the one hand, the old rationales for studying literature no longer seem self-evident. For example, it is not clear that literature enhances “mental discipline,” a rationale used in the famous Yale Report, which desperately sought to justify requiring the study of the classics in a modern university.
⁶⁵

The question of the canon has become much more polarized, with other voices clamoring to be part of the canon.
⁶⁶
Nonetheless, justifying literary studies of the Bible still poses a special set of problems. First, biblical scholars have failed to provide a coherent rationale for why biblical literature is better than that of many other cultures. When asked what differentiated the Bible from Shakespeare, Phyllis Trible, a feminist apologist for the Bible, and the president of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1994, could only reply, “I ask myself that question, and if I had a clear answer, I would give it to you.”
⁶⁷

Second, the Bible has been studied far longer than any other text. So why invest any more time in this text when there are so many others that have yet to be studied? If the Bible is kept because of its supposed moral lessons, then why not allow that the many ancient texts that are still unknown to the modern world might also have worthy lessons? Likewise, aesthetic worth can be found in many ancient texts, and so the Bible cannot be privileged on those grounds either.

Third, the question of relevance is particularly acute for ancient texts such as the Bible. How does knowing anything about biblical characters or biblical poetic structures help us to become better people or to solve any practical problems in the modern world? That is why the notion that the Bible must be studied for its “intrinsic value” also fails as yet another meaningless and indefinable feature meant only to maintain the privilege of that text.
⁶⁸

But let us say that literature is a beneficial part of our human experience, which should be celebrated along with the humanities.
⁶⁹
The problem is that such a rationale overlooks how the Bible also has been detrimental to human beings. For every page of
Hamlet
that we might enjoy innocently, there is a passage of the Bible that prompted someone to kill another human being. One can't say that about
Hamlet.
The differential in detrimental effect is also a main argument for ending a privileged status for the Bible in any modern canon.

Suffice it to say that literary beauty is subjective; one could argue that many biblical texts are actually ugly; the Bible fails to satisfy the standards of beauty set by scholars themselves; other texts could also satisfy or surpass the Bible when the same criteria of beauty are applied; ethics can be invoked to judge some biblical texts as aesthetically defective. In sum, the current emphasis on literary analysis and aesthetics becomes simply another apologetic device to maintain the value of the Bible in modern society.
⁷⁰

BIBLICAL THEOLOGY

Like other disciplines within biblical studies, biblical theology has a complex and contested history.
⁷¹
Krister Stendahl, the former dean of the Harvard Divinity School, in a much-cited article in
The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible
, argued that scholars should distinguish “what it meant and what it means.”
⁷²
The background of such a claim was Stendahl's realization that the Bible is so alien to our culture that only reinterpretation could keep it alive.

Jon Levenson also champions the legitimacy of “recontextualization” and “reappropriation,” which claims that a text can and should mean whatever a faith community needs it to mean to keep the community alive. For Levenson, recontextualization is legitimate even when it might contradict what an author originally meant. And both Levenson and Stendahl argue that since faith communities do apply other meanings to the Bible, it is legitimate for them to do so. This rationale may be expressed more schematically as “People do X = People ought to be allowed to do X.”

But upon closer inspection, Levenson's own reappropriation program carries the seeds of the destruction of biblical studies. When considering the meaning of a biblical text for faith communities, two positions can be identified for those who believe there is even such a thing as authorial intent:

A: Authorial intent is the only one that matters

B: Authorial intent is not the only one that matters

If one chooses A, then biblical studies has been highly unsuccessful. We often do not possess enough information to determine what an author meant, even if we believe that authorial intent matters and should be the primary goal of interpretation. If one chooses B, then the only result is chaos and relativism that renders scholarly biblical studies moot and superfluous. Faith communities do not need academic biblical scholars to inform them about any original context in order to keep the Bible alive for themselves. So what is the purpose of academic biblical studies in such a case? The answer is that there is no purpose, except perhaps to preserve the employment and status of biblical scholars.

However, it is not usually the case that a modern faith community acknowledges that Text A has original meaning B, but that meaning B will be disregarded or contradicted so that Text A can take on modern meaning C. Rather, most members of faith communities assert that Text A means C,
but not because it is recontextualized.
For them, B = C. Academic scholars might call that “recontextualization” because they have concluded on empirico-rationalist grounds that the meaning attributed to a text by faith communities today is not original, even when faith communities might be claiming
not a reinterpretation
but rather
a continuity in interpretation.

But once an equation is made between a modern sense and an original sense, it is not a case of scholars allowing “another sense” but rather a case where simple empirico-rationalism comes into play. As such, a secular biblical scholar is perfectly right in concluding that a modern community is falsely claiming that “the modern sense = the original author's sense.” Followers of the historical-critical method would be no more monopolistic or fundamentalistic in this case than if they were correcting someone who claimed that 1 = 3.

Even if we suppose that all authorial intention is irrelevant or indeterminate, Levenson's position would also lead to the argument that biblical studies should end.
⁷³
The consequences of Levenson's position differs not in the least from ejecting that ancient text from modern life altogether. If Text A can mean both B and Not-B, then how is Not-B any different from regarding meaning B as irrelevant in modern life? And how does regarding meaning B as irrelevant in modern life differ from simply ejecting Text A and its meaning B from modern life altogether? More importantly, why are we expending any energy in determining the history or original meaning of a text in the first place?

John J. Collins, the president of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2002, once remarked: “The Bible was written long ago and in another culture, vastly different from our own.”
⁷⁴
In the end, Levenson's pleas for the legitimacy of recontextualization only expose the fact that the Bible is so foreign to modern life that it can survive only if people pretend that it is something other than it is. The fact that people reappropriate scripture is not an argument that they should do so. Levenson never answers the question of why we should bother to reappropriate such texts at all, given that there are many other texts whose voices are still silent and silenced by scholars who could resurrect them just as well.

Despite the claims of academic rigor and increasing self-criticism, all biblical theologies have one thing in common: bibliolatry. They may not agree on what the central concept of the Bible is or how many concepts there are, but they all agree that the Bible is valuable enough to have its concepts receive exhaustive analysis for the purpose of helping readers. Never is there an Old Testament or biblical theology centered on completely deprivileging the biblical text and on helping move human beings beyond its antiquated, opprobrious sections. Instead, biblical theologians endeavor to rescue the Bible from itself, while providing the illusion that biblical theology should matter. If this is the best biblical theology has to offer, then it deserves to come to a most ignominious end.
⁷⁵

CONCLUSION

Biblical studies as we know them should end. Biblical scholars all agree the Bible is a product of another age and culture, whose norms, practices, and conception of the world were very different from ours. Yet these very same scholars paradoxically keep the general public under the illusion that the Bible does matter or should matter. We have argued that whether they intend it or not, their validation of the Bible as a text for the modern world serves to validate their own employment and relevance in the modern world.

We have seen how translations, rather than exposing the alien and more opprobrious concepts of biblical authors, instead conceal them. We have seen how textual critics, even after knowing that the original text is probably irrecoverable, do not announce to most churches that their Bibles are at best constructs that cannot be traced earlier than the second century for the New Testament and the third century BCE for the Hebrew Bible. In our look at biblical history and archaeology, we learned that “biblical history” has not so much been erased as it has been exposed as not being there in the first place. The supposed superior artistic merit of the Bible has also been unmasked for what it is—another bibliolatrous apologetic device.

Why do we need an ancient book that endorses everything from genocide to slavery to be a prime authority on our public or private morality? Why do we need any ancient text at all, regardless of what morality it espouses? “The Bible” is mostly a construct of the last two thousand years of human history. Modern human beings have existed for tens of thousands of years without the Bible, and they don't seem to have been the worse for it. There are modern secularized societies in Europe that seem to get along just fine without the Bible.

From my perspective, there are really only three alternatives for what is now called biblical studies.

1. Eliminate biblical studies completely from the modern world.

2. Retain biblical studies as is, but admit that it is a religionist enterprise.

3. Retain biblical studies, but redefine its purpose so that it is tasked with eliminating completely the influence of the Bible in the modern world.

I do not advocate the first option, at least for the moment, because I do believe that the Bible should be studied, if only as a lesson in why human beings should not privilege such books again. My objection has been to the religionist and bibliolatrous purpose for which it is studied. The second option is actually what is found in most seminaries, but we must advertise that scholars in all of academia are doing the same thing, though they are not being very open and honest about it.

I prefer the third option. The sole purpose of biblical studies, under this option, would be to help people move toward a postscriptural society. It may be paternalistic to “help people,” but no more so than when translators hide the truth or when scholars don't aggressively disclose the truth for fear of upsetting believers. All of education is to some extent paternalistic, since an elite professoriate is there to provide information that uneducated people lack. The third option is also the most logical position, given the discovery of the Bible's alien character.

Mine would also be the less self-interested option because it would not have my own employment as an ultimate goal, and it would allow thousands of other texts that have not yet been given a voice to also speak about the possible wisdom, beauty, and lessons they might contain. Indeed, thousands of Mesopotamian texts continue to lie untranslated. So even those who believe that literature does matter should be advocating that we bring to light more of the as-yet unread ancient texts.

What I seek is liberation from the very idea that
any
sacred text should be an authority for modern human existence. Abolishing human reliance on sacred texts is imperative when those sacred texts imperil the existence of human civilization as it is currently configured. Thus, total abolition of biblical authority becomes a moral obligation and a key to this world's survival. The letter can kill. That is why the only mission of biblical studies should be to end biblical studies as we know them.

by Dr. Jaco Gericke
¹

In former times, one sought to prove that there is no God—today one indicates how the belief that there is a God arose and how this belief acquired its weight and importance: a counter-proof that there is no God thereby becomes superfluous.…When in former times one had refuted the “proofs of the existence of God” put forward, there always remained the doubt whether better proofs might not be adduced than those just refuted: in those days atheists did not know how to make a clean sweep.
          —
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
, DAYBREAK
²

INTRODUCTION

T
o this day, many atheist philosophers of religion still tend to try to disprove the alleged reality of the Christian God by pointing out the logical problems in divine attributes or by trying to argue via science or philosophy why “God” as first cause or cosmic designer or benevolent providence does not or cannot exist. This is all fine and well, but what is often overlooked is the fact that there will be no end to apologists’ reinterpretations of the concept of “God,” no end to their error theories to account for why they seem irrational and others remain skeptical, and no end to their labors to make their pseudoscientific speculations and ad hoc hypotheses appear intellectually respectable. This means that any disproof merits only a relative efficiency value at best when it tackles the god of the philosophers.

In my view, there is a far more devastating way of showing why what most people call “God” does not and cannot exist. It involves philosophers of religion instead focusing on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and actually taking the Bible seriously (more seriously than the fundamentalists do). It involves exposing the fact that the clothes have no emperor in the Christian philosophy of religion by looking at the emperor with no clothes in the repressed history of Israelite religion from which it originated. Then one lets common sense do the rest—most people can add two and two without needing the answer spelled out for them. Eating from the tree of knowledge will always make one aware of one's nakedness and is a guaranteed one-way ticket out of the fool's paradise.

WHO IS “GOD”?

What the Western world means when it refers fuzzily to “God” is not some untouchable, ineffable ultimate reality beyond the grasp of human rational faculties that will one day catch up with unbelievers, making them realize their cognitive blindness. Rather, the entity most readers refer to when they speak of “God” is actually an upgraded, mysteriously anonymous version of what actually used to be a relatively young, quite particular, and oddly hybrid Middle Eastern tribal deity called Yahweh. The trick was done when “God” got lost in translation—in the Bible the word “God” can, in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, be both a personal name and a generic term. A nice illusion of conceptual dignity is created in English Bible translations where the Hebrew word “god” in the generic sense is capitalized, even when it does not function as a personal name but as the name of a species or natural kind (i.e., a god). Of course, translators only do this when it's used of the “god of Israel,” who promptly becomes the “God of Israel.”

In philosophical monotheism since Thomas Aquinas, God is considered as not belonging to a genus, despite the biblical assumption to the contrary, assuring us that we are dealing with a particular kind of god among others. Often other gods are also lost in translation when rendering the Hebrew plural term for divinity as “mighty ones,” “angels,” or “heavenly beings,” and so on. Many people don't know that the expression “sons of God/the gods” in Genesis 6:1–4 just means “male gods” (as the expression “daughters of man” just means “female humans”). References to a “divine council” like those in 1 Kings 22:19–22, Psalm 82, and Isaiah 6:14 also presuppose the reality of other “gods.” Only later in the history of Israelite religion are these “gods” turned into semidivine “messengers.” Yet even the word “angel” is misleading since these beings were nothing like what Christians today popularly associate with them. In the Hebrew Bible they are fierce humanoid male demigods or animal-type functionaries (cherubs/seraphs). They are also to be distinguished from the divine beings in Yahweh's divine council (and just for the record, there are no kind women or cute baby cupid angels in the Old Testament, except for the one reference to women in a late passage in Zechariah).

To be sure, many texts in the Old Testament do not assume polytheism. However, many others assume monolatrism rather than monotheism—that is, the belief that one god should be
worshipped
, not that only one god exists. People who read the English Bibles seldom notice this, but one need not know Hebrew to recognize monolatrist assumptions. Take the Ten Commandments, for example. If there were no other gods assumed, readers never bother to ask why Yahweh was called a god (and not something else) in the first place, or of whom he was supposed to be jealous as the first command assumes. How is one—a god no less—jealous of something that does not exist?

I am not denying monotheistic beliefs in the Old Testament, but the beliefs of one biblical author on this matter often contradicted those of another. The translations obscure this, and I offer a literal rendering of the Hebrew:

“On all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am Yahweh” (Exod. 12:12).

“When Elyon gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of El. But Yahweh's portion is his people; Jacob his measured out inheritance” (Deut. 32:8–9, about which see Hector Avalos's preceding chapter).

“Will you not possess what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? And all that Yahweh our god has dispossessed before us, we will possess” (Judg. 11:24).

“God stands up in the council of the gods, he judges in the midst of the gods; I have said myself, you are all gods, and you are sons of the most high (god)” (Ps. 82:6).

“For who is like Yahweh among the sons of the gods” (Ps. 89:7).

“For Yahweh is a great god and a great king over all the gods” (Ps. 95:3).

“All the gods bow down before him” (Ps. 97:7).

“Then he will act, with the aid of a foreign god” (Dan. 11:39).

These texts make sense only on the assumption that they (in contrast to other texts) assume there are other gods. It is no credit to Yahweh if he is fighting against, king of, jealous of, judging, or greater than entities that do not exist. Of course, many reinterpretations of these passages are available in apologetic literature, but these are motivated by dogma more than the need to accept the Bible on its own terms.

In the Old Testament taken as a whole, not only Yahweh but other national gods are called gods. Also, spirits of the dead, heavenly messengers or counselors, kings, and even demons can be called a “god” (see 1 Sam. 28; Deut. 32; Ps. 45; etc.). Add to the capitalization of the generic term the fact that the highly specific Hebrew(!) personal name for this god—“Yahweh”—is recast with the generic term “Lord” (following the Jewish tradition), and you avoid the scandal of peculiarity altogether. “The Lord your God” sounds somewhat more respectable and intimidating than “Yahweh your god.” So what is often overlooked in debating the existence of “God,” if by “God” is understood anything with any relation to biblical theism, is the fact that the entity as known today is in fact the product of a complex conceptual evolution from the variable conceptions of the god Yahweh to “God,” a panel-beaten hybrid that can be made into what can seem like philosophically respectable proportions.

So what? Well, this little bit of information is more atheologically potent and philosophically significant than it seems at first sight. For it means that, in trying to prove “God” does not exist, so long as “God” is in any way related to the entity worshipped in modern (or postmodern) biblically derived forms of theism (no matter how sophisticated), the only thing needed is to show that representations of Yahweh in ancient Israelite religion do not refer to any ultimate reality outside the text. It's not unlike trying to prove there is no Zeus. Not even Christians can do it, but you can demonstrate belief in Zeus to be absurd by pointing out the ridiculously superstitious nature of the representations of the entity in question (i.e., his human appearance, his less than scientifically informed mind, and his nonexistent divine world), thus exposing his artificial origins. Well, the same can be done with “God,” aka Yahweh.

TAKING THE NATURE OF THE BIBLE SERIOUSLY

The Bible is a text, a literary artefact. The question is the relation between Yahweh as depicted therein and the world outside the text in which we live. On this matter, many biblical scholars are still theists of sorts.

First, there are still some fundamentalists (naive realists). This is your average committed conservative (often “evangelical”) Christian scholar who thinks one is warranted to believe in a correspondence between representations of Yahweh in the biblical text and an alleged extratextual reality to which they supposedly refer. The text and language are assumed to function like a
window
through which you see reality as it really is. The Bible is literally the Word of God.

Second, the majority of mainstream biblical scholars are theists but critical realists. They believe the Old Testament contains Israel's fallible human perspectives on God in their beliefs about Yahweh, who is assumed, nevertheless, as really existing. According to this view, the biblical text is like a
painting
, an attempted semirealist representation of the reality it seeks to describe. The text is God's Word in human speech or human words about God.

Third, there are those of us who realize that what we have in the text is the character Yahweh who, as depicted, can for various reasons not possibly exist outside the stories in which he acts. Yahweh is like Donald Duck, who is real in some fictionalist sense. He does not exist outside the cartoons about his character (except people in costumes, I suppose). We are the nonrealists who believe that the text is neither a window to some divine reality nor a painting of it. It is simply a house of concave and convex mirrors which in a warped manner reflects to us only human ideals, beliefs, desires, fears, and values. For us the text is just human words, period. As Robert Carroll noted, “The biblical God is a character in Hebrew narrative and therefore is, in a very real sense, a figure of fiction.”
³

The same idea was reiterated by David Clines, ex-president of the Society of Biblical Literature, who realized that a biblical scholar needs to believe as little in Yahweh as a classical scholar in Zeus or an Egyptologist in Ra. In his view, when it comes to the representation of God in the Pentateuch, “God in the Pentateuch is a character in a novel. God in the Pentateuch is not a ‘person’; he is a character in a book. And there are no people in books, no real people, only fictions; for books are made, not procreated.…”
⁴

Moreover, even a populist crypto-fundamentalist like the postliberal Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann had no problem admitting this when he wrote in the fashion of what William Harwood rightly implied is nothing but “faculty-of-mythology doubletalk”: “even with reference to God, the imaginative generative power of rhetoric offers to the hearer of this text a God who is not otherwise known or available or even—dare one say—not otherwise ‘there.’”
⁵

In general, these Old Testament scholars are reluctant to engage in philosophy of religion. As a result, they have not attempted to spell out why they believe that Yahweh as represented in the biblical texts does not really exist. But the Bible itself offers a mandate for challenging any claim to divinity. Thus we find that the God of the Old Testament could at times rant and rave and even challenge the reality of foreign gods, claiming them to be human-made idols; for example, Isaiah 41:21–24 (NRSV):

Set forth your case, says the LORD; bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob. Let them bring them, and tell us what is to happen. Tell us the former things, what they are, so that we may consider them, and that we may know their outcome; or declare to us the things to come. Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be afraid and terrified. You, indeed, are nothing and your work is nothing at all; whoever chooses you is an abomination.

One would like to put the same request to Yahweh, if only to be fair. If only the writers of this text applied the same criteria to themselves. But let us not tempt this god—we shall let his alleged divine revelation speak for itself. For of all the arguments that show why a claim to divinity is false, none seems as devastating as the argument from the projection of all-too-human qualities onto an alleged superhuman entity. What is ironic is that taking the Old Testament seriously will reveal that using the same line of reasoning against representations of Yahweh in that text has devastating consequences.

Before we begin, it should be noted that we are not trying to be difficult or blasphemous—there is no pleasure in destroying the beliefs of others. We just want to make known the truth about the Bible, to show why the Bible (which is just a book) is itself the most subtle of idolatrous agents. Our critical approach is demanded by the polemics of many a biblical prophet himself and certainly seems prudent. After all, no god appeared to us to tell us that this book is true. No god will appear to you as you read this chapter to inform you that it is wrong. But humans calling themselves Christians will just keep quoting from the Bible or referring to their religious experience or some philosophical position to convince you it is. But even the character Yahweh himself taught us that one should not trust in humans—if there is a god, let him fend for himself (see Judg. 6 on Baal). And we need to be critical, since biblical religion makes too important claims about reality not to have it scrutinized as though one's life depended on it. The fact is that many of those writing in this book were committed “biblical” Christians ourselves. So was the author of this chapter. Yet in trying to be even more biblical, we all discovered what the Bible actually says and as a result lost our faith.