When I was writing The Generations of Heaven and Earth I made extensive use of John H. Sailhamer’s The Meaning of the Pentateuch. It was somewhere in that large tome, if memory serves, that he wrote something to the effect that theology should not be concerned with historical events, as such, but with the Bible’s record of historical events.
I found that shocking, until I came to understand it better. Was he really saying that the study of archaeology to corroborate the Bible is useless? Or that studying the natural sciences should be spurned in favour of contemplating Genesis 1 alone? Or that artistic representations, such as Passion Plays or paintings of biblical events, should be avoided?
Worse still, should we interpret him to mean that what biblical authors wrote about an event matters more than the event itself? That the Passion, or the Passover, only matter because they are written down in Scripture? That sounds dangerously close to saying, like the Victorian liberals, that history doesn’t matter to salvation, but only faith: if Jesus never actually existed, it wouldn’t matter because it’s the thought that counts. Surely historical faith is grounded on facts like the actual deliverance of a nation from Egypt, and supremely from the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son of God in history?
Sailhamer was not, of course, implying any of that. I was put in mind of it by a conversation with a sister recently, who waxed enthusiastic about the film series The Chosen. She said how brilliantly it brings to life the gospel accounts. But in contrast, this week, a member of my Bible Study group independently mentioned The Chosen, saying that she’d investigated it and found some dubious links to the Church of Latter Day Saints, with consequently dodgy on-screen dialogue. That led to a fruitful discussion on the benefits and dangers of exposure to arts with potentially deceptive ideologies, but that’s another story.
I believe The Chosen is on Dizley Channel, or Flick-knife, or another of those networks I can’t access, and so I can’t comment on its credentials. But the episode does demonstrate that we can only “bring history alive” through the endeavours of humans who have their own agendas. And even were we to have been present at major biblical events, our own human agendas would in all probability have masked their spiritual significance.
A case in point is Mark’s Passion account, which was the theme of my last post. To the disciples-on-the-ground the events of Jesus’s arrest, mock-trial and crucifixion signified the end of their supposed Messiah, and likely death for themselves. That was compounded by the fact that no one disciple witnessed every stage of the catastrophe. How much more would the Jerusalem crowds have perceived only the come-uppance of a false prophet, whether deserved or not? But the Holy Spirit, inspiring Mark to write his gospel (whatever mental journey that actually involved), revealed that the apparent defeat was actually nothing less than an Imperial cosmic Triumph.
To return to Sailhamer’s territory of the Pentateuch, those of us old enough to have seen Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments in our childhood may, like me, remember the Passover only by the memorably spooky depiction of the Angel of Death passing over the land as a green claw.
It is very scary (when you’re six), and very cinematographic – but it is not what Yehovah tells Israel, in their torah, to recall every year when they commemorate the Passover in their families. The judgement on the firstborn is briefly described, and the angel mentioned (but not a skeletal green claw), but the focus of the ongoing remembrance is on driving home to Israel that their fathers’ deliverance is their own deliverance. History is brought to life annually as spiritual meaning through the biblically prescribed form of remembrance.
Sailhamer’s overall thesis is that the meaning of the torah is to be understood from the way the books, as they have been transmitted to us in their canonical form, present the events God brought about. In particular, he draws attention to the role of poetic passages placed at what he calls the “compositional seams” of the work. That leads us to read behind the superficial history of how Moses led Israel into Canaan to a deeper theme of the inevitable failure of the Mosaic covenant and the prophetic hope of the Messiah.
A similar point could be made about what we call “the historical books” of the Old Testament. Archaeology has been remarkable in corroborating, and even clarifying, the history of Israel during the time of the judges, then the kings, during the Exile, and after the return under Zerubbabel and Joshua the priest. To see the seal impressions of biblical figures from the City of David, or the excavated remains of Shiloh, is both revealing to the mind and encouraging to faith.
But it is significant that the Jews did not classify the biblical accounts of these things as “history”, but as “the former prophets.” We know the name of some of them – Samuel the seer, Nathan the prophet and Gad the seer (1 Chronicles 29:29), and other notable prophets like Elijah and Elisha, and Isaiah almost certainly were involved in compiling the later stages. They in turn sometimes refer us to sources like the royal chronicles for “the facts,” whereas their interest is the meaning. This especially concerns the progressive failure of Israel’s kings to be the fulfilment of the Messianic Covenant made with King David, and hence the need to live in hope for Messiah’s future coming.
The problem with historical biblical reconstructions, whether academic or popular, is that they can teach us to focus on vicariously experiencing the facts, whilst they may fail to highlight, or worse still actively distort, the meaning that God teaches us through his written word. That would be an especially grave danger to the spiritually immature if the purveyors of that history were false teachers.
And so when, a couple of years ago, I saw a cartoon version of the Lord’s ascension intended for children, for all the presumably good intentions, I saw nothing of the event’s spiritual significance, translated into a form children might understand. Instead the figures were comical rather than significant (imagine Hamlet or Macbeth done by South Park, but wearing tea-towels). Worst was the depiction of Jesus, who was shown with large, unexplained, holes in his hands and feet (through which the background could bizarrely be seen), and who finally disappeared into thin air as if by magic, rather than ascending to the holy realm of the Creator. How could that ever move a child towards true repentance and faith?
The key, I think, is to escape from the Liberal (and Progressive Evangelical) lie that the Bible was written by fallible men struggling to make sense of the acts of God in the world. Rather, Genesis and John’s gospel teach us that the Father who created the universe by speaking his Word by his breath, the Holy Spirit, created Scripture in the same way. Because Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16), it conveys the eternal thought of the Father because what God, in the Person of his Spirit (Hebrew ruach) breathes out is his Word (Hebrew dabar, Greek λογος), also a Person, who was with God “in the beginning” (John 1:2). How else could the word of God be “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12)?
There is the small matter that a mind indwelt by the Spirit is necessary to appreciate the meaning the natural man cannot see in Scripture (1 Corinthians 2:14). But I hope you can see that, however good The Chosen is, or the scientific findings of a Kenneth Kitchen or a Turin Shroud investigation team, they were not breathed out by God’s own Spirit or embodying his living Word, Jesus. That is what makes the Bible more than just a sacred text.
Postscript: Although I’ve not yet read it (owing to the price!), Steven M. Bryan’s The Visible Word of the Unseen God: Reading John Among Rivals Old and New appears to present some similar ideas, based on a reading of John’s gospel that sees it mainly as an apologetic to sceptical Jewish readers about the possibility of divine incarnation. John, he says, argues that God’s Word became visibly present at Mount Sinai in the torah, so that there is nothing inherently strange, to Jewish beliefs, in the Word later becoming incarnate in human flesh (and there is a solid reason for forbidding “graven images”). As in my post, only in greater theological depth, the book’s Amazon blurb argues: “As John renders the world, God is not absent from his creation but neither is his presence diffuse within it. Rather, the Creator is and always has been present in his Word. Through the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, the Word has become the sanctuary that human beings co-inhabit with God and share in the life he lives and speaks.”
