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The primal, rigid nature of story structure. Joseph Campbell in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces puts great effort into showing that the concept of mythology (or “story” for our purposes) is at the heart of the human experience across all time. Story is the human means of making sense of our lived experience, and it can also act as a vehicle for handing down our own discoveries about life to subsequent generations. It’s a lot easier to communicate profound truths about our experience of the world through a once-upon-a-time narrative than through the philosophical categories of Plato or Kant.
For Campbell, the goal of myth is always transformation of the human spirit, and all of his work aims at showing the power of universal myths (the monomyth, as he calls it) to bring about that transformation in the people who encounter the story. Now, whether or not Campbell is entirely successful in proving his theory is debatable. But he does highlight the critical role that story has played and continues to play in human society. Campbell’s work does make it less surprising to us, then, that the story of the Bible is also aimed at transforming those who encounter it. What might have actually surprised Campbell, however, is that the transformation comes through experiencing the story as a story rather than as an exercise in intellectual discovery.
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The unity of the Bible’s narratives as opposed to disparate, self-contained vignettes. Even less confessional scholars such as Brevard Childs have acknowledged that there’s a unity to the canon of the Bible that transcends the individual books themselves, creating what I and others have called a “metanarrative,” or an overarching through-line that tells a cohesive story from book to book.
For Childs, that metanarrative grows out of the community of faith’s acceptance of the books as authoritative religious texts. They’re unified by their shared goal of shaping the lives of God’s people. As a result, they should be interpreted as a collective whole, rather than as individual writings gathered from across the ages. I appreciate Childs’s work from the literary perspective, too, in that it offers insight into the process of editors (or redactors) working in concert with the needs of their religious community.
My own commitments to the inspired nature of the Bible allow me to see God’s own hand at work in that unity. But it is comforting to see from a purely academic argument that the Bible’s cohesive narrative can and does stand on its own literary merit.
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Abandoning the notion that the Bible’s human characters offer us examples to follow or avoid. Constantly searching for a moral or a character quality to imitate makes it easy to “apply” any given passage to our lives directly. However, that impulse—however well-intentioned—will inevitably lead us far from what any given text is trying to actually do in context. In our race to find personal meaning from the Bible, we actually end up farther from the God the Bible is trying to show us.
I fully acknowledge that it’s concerning—or even terrifying—to abandon the tried-and-true methodology we’ve embraced for as long as some of us have. Throughout Of Deity and Dust, I come back to the idea that the Bible’s goal is to bring us face-to-face with God—not to give us a list of rules to follow, practices to employ in our daily lives, or character qualities to work on. Those things—while good in and of themselves—are neither the focus of the scriptures nor of God himself. Evangelical protestants are fond of calling Christianity a “relationship, not a religion.” That’s exactly what I’m arguing the Bible aims at—cultivating a relationship with a real person, not a ritualized means of everyday living.
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The power of storytelling as an intentional artifact of the Bible’s literature. Where I cannot say definitively that God chose to use narrative as his primary means of self-revelation because of its effects on the human brain, it exceeds the bounds of coincidence. I’m convinced that the connections between story and our brains underlies, at the very least, the effectiveness of the Bible as a story. I highly recommend Gotschall’s book as an easy-to-read introduction into the world of story and the brain science behind human storytelling. He offers an extensive list of additional resources that take a deeper dive into the neuroscience that’s worth perusing.
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The progressive revelation of God through the Bible’s narrative versus our philosophical-theological categories for him. Most of the pushback I receive on reading the Bible progressively centers around the issue of God’s immutable characteristics—especially those defined in the New Testament and Christian theology as transcending the bounds of time and space. If we approach the text with a rigid metaphysical definition of a transcendent God already fixed in our minds, we have to reimagine or explain away the many of the very words of the Bible.
Rarely would scholars lay it out so crassly, however. Instead, they’d typically appeal to the idea of condescension: that God was bound by the cultural idioms of the day and had to reveal himself in terms that the original audiences would have understood. Peter Enns is an excellent example of employing that technique in his critique of the Canaanite conquest in Joshua. Rather than accept the historicity of the conquest or even that the narrative laid out in Joshua was inspired in the sense of being faithfully accurate in its representation of God and his desires, Enns makes the argument that it was a condescension on God’s part to allow the biblical writers to frame him in terms consistent with an Ancient Near Eastern war god (Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of The Old Testament [Baker Academic, 2015]).
Enns’s approach isn’t the only one abandoning traditional views of inspiration and infallibility in favor of a reconciliatory reading of the text with modern theology. In my own educational process, I encountered several professors who were quick to chalk up the text’s presentation of God to divine condescension so that the ancient audience could learn something about God that we, as the enlightened, 21st-century readers, already know.
I alluded here to the moment where Yahweh relents from his rage against Israel over the golden calf, effectively changing his mind after Moses talks him off the ledge of his anger. The way the narrative presents God as a character is at odds with our metaphysical definitions for him, and something has to give. Fundamentally, our precommitments to theological categories pits those categories against the narrative, and narrative of scripture usually loses. I’m advocating for restraint in applying our metaphysics too swiftly and two broadly to the assumptions we make about the text. Instead, I’d prefer to allow the text to do what it’s designed to do at the literary level before moving on to other discussions about the truth it contains.
I’m increasingly convinced that we wrongly privilege Aristotelian (and, by extension, Thomist) metaphysics as the “actual” perception of God, his nature, and his essence over against the Bible’s own view of God. Doing so forces the text to bend in submission to our more “modern” and sensible philosophy. Throughout this book, I’ll avoid delving too deeply into that tension, but it’s a tension nonetheless that runs underneath the entire project.
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The insertion of the full formulation of the Trinity into the text where the text itself doesn’t call for it. The best example of that kind of insertion shows up within the first few paragraphs of scripture. Both scholars and lay Bible teachers will point to the first three verses in Genesis as evidence of the Trinity: there, God the Father creates by speaking, that “speaking” represents Jesus (since, in John 1:1, the apostle describes Jesus as the “Word” of God), and the Spirit of God hovers above the waters of the unformed planet. In the discipline of Systematic Theology, the Trinitarian-creation reading of Genesis ends up “proved” by reading New Testament passages from John 1 and Colossians 1 backwards into Genesis.
Where that argumentation may make certain sense as an exercise in systematic theology, it shows little regard for the function of Genesis 1 in the story itself. Doing so creates a problem that will become apparent throughout this book—rendering the “meaning” of a text inaccessible to the original audience or even original author. If the Trinity as a robust theological doctrine was intended in the first verses of the Bible, then they were meaningless to the original audience and the original author had no idea what he was writing. Such an approach to the text of the Bible asks the doctrine of inspiration to carry far more weight than it actually can or should, with most of that weight riding on very narrow readings of 2 Timothy 3:16–17 and 2 Peter 1:20–21.
What’s worse is that there’s no real value to be gained from “seeing” the Trinity in Genesis 1:1–3. On this particular problem of leveraging the doctrine of inspiration broadly to force awkward readings into the text, see John Poirier, The Invention of the Inspired Text: Philological Windows on the Theopneustia of Scripture, The Library of New Testament Studies, 640 (T&T Clark, 2022).
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My presuppositions about the inspiration of the various contributors to the Bible’s text. For the purposes of the doctrine of inspiration, I grant editors, redactors, and compilers the same level of “inspired” most often reserved for the original writers. That’s largely due to two issues: First, it’s clear that the text of the Bible has gone through layers of editing. Even simple statements such as editorial note on Moses’s humility in Numbers 12:3 or Paul’s use of an amanuensis in his letters show multiple hands at work in the composition of the final form of the text as we have it today. Even our use of a compiled Hebrew and Greek manuscript shows an implicit level of trust in the hands that have touched the Bible from its beginnings to now. (That’s not to discount the necessary and ever-present work of text criticism, but simply to point out that we would get very little done with the text of the Bible if our initial starting point was the unspoiled original.)
Secondly, I find the traditional appeal to the “original autographs” to be lacking both as a suitable explanation for the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility and also as a traceable starting point for an inspired text. The insistence upon an “original autograph” is a completely unfalsifiable premise. The “original autographs” by necessity no longer exist, and, as such, no assertion about their nature or contents can be proven or disproven. It’s a logical fallacy, and one that does little to help serious students of the Bible. It is far better to instead look at the contours of the Bible as it developed over time, appreciating the input that inspired editors had alongside the people responsible for the first pen strokes of any one given bit of the Bible.