The Problem of Scripture

One can only wonder why there are some, Christian theologians perhaps being the foremost examples, who still care to defend the Christian scriptures on an intellectual level. In a time when Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” became an international bestseller and theology has been marginalized in the academy, and the Church marginalized in Western societies, why do we still care? Or, better, why do we still believe at all? The answer to that question always, to some degree, begins or at least falls back on those texts that were delivered to us; texts from ancient times, thousands of years old: texts written in a very different culture, from very different lands and cities than where, for the most part, people think and discuss and write about these texts in our time.

On the grassroots level, these texts are highly revered by enormously diverse groups of peoples, literally all over the planet. Mostly, all these groups also read the same texts differently, but for certain relatively stable notions. Where does this undying reverence and trust in these texts come from, so goes a common question of today’s society co-inhabitants. And the question is understandable; even more so, it is a question that most believers ask themselves as well, often on a regular basis. The question also often seems, unfortunately, unanswerable. The common answers do not satisfy—at least, they do not satisfy most people.

Is it not, to start out with, an immense problem that the foundations of our faith are often seen to stand or fall upon words written on paper, as opposed to a foundation outside of the written word, however difficult to imagine? This would mean that as soon as certain parts of these texts could be reasonably attacked and made to look implausible, these foundations would start crumbling, as indeed they have. What remains, if not the text? If the text crumbles, are we left with nothing? But then again, surely God is not found in the text itself? (although writers such as Brueggemann suggest just this. Brueggemann refuses to speak of a God outside of the text. See Theology of the Old Testament. Perhaps, in Brueggemann’s case, it is foremostly a way of doing theology well. See his Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, p84. It cannot be denied that his approach takes the biblical texts extremely serious). The texts themselves presuppose, from beginning to end, that God acts in the reality outside of the text. Put irreverently, the texts are merely the after-effects of the writing down of what God did in Israel’s and mankind’s history.

If God stays inside the text, we are faced with a dead entity. Over-simply put, He’d consist of letters slapped on paper. It is true that such ways of speaking are tributes to postmodern philosophy and literary theory, but true theology need not pay tribute to anyone but God. In that sense, we can agree with Dawkins who sees the existence of God as a scientific hypothesis, outside of any holy text—if God does not exist in that way, then surely not in any other way (for example) as pertaining exclusively to a written, holy text. The problem, or if you will, opportunity, is that we, Christians, see a direct relation between the existence of this God and the written, biblical scriptures. Without these texts we’d have what Dawkins tries to disprove: a supernatural, transcendent entity about whom we know nothing. With these texts, we have the entrance into a revelation about this entity, who is presented to us as being personal and, to a degree, approachable. We tread on a thin line, between having nothing and, possibly, a lot. All of that is caught in what I here have called the problem of scripture.