Danger

This year, many well-wishing people have taken the liberty to warn me about the theological dangers that they see at HDS. Don't worry, I already know, but to be honest, I sincerely doubt that HDS can teach me anything more about the struggle between faith and history than I have already picked up here at Princeton. I will attempt to briefly outline the heart of the matter of why I struggle so much in this area, and why it is, for me, a question of history and faith.

History is trap. It entombs meaning into a certain time and place, and does not leave us in the modern time with the tools of reviving the meaning of a that certain time and place. To illustrate this on a small scale, consider the book of Revelation. The fantastic imagery is directly lifted from Daniel, and thus in that way, it at least changes the meaning of the original Daniel context. Now, let's focus on the number 666, which in some other documents is actually 616. Both of these numbers have been convincingly shown to refer to Nero. If it refers to Nero, then, who else can it refer to? No one. Not to the President, Joel Osteen, or anyone else. It refers to Nero and always refers to Nero. That is the nature of History.

Now, expand this little idea into the entire book of Revelation. Revelation was compiled from different letters and a running story. There is great urgency in the book, one which shows that the authors of the community believed that the things in Revelation were happening then and there (circa 100 CE). This is again confirmed by the reference to 666/616 referring to Nero. This book belongs to the first century, and, it only belongs to the first century from where it came. It cannot go further into history. Therefore, since this book was written in response to severe persecution of the Christians by Nero, it can only remain in that context. The locus of authority is in the moment this book was authored. (This is not altogether true, but I will elaborate).

Now, expand the entire Bible into the historical framework. The reason why so much of it seems to incredibly alien is because it is alien to our time-period. It does not belong as a genetic descendant to our time-period. It is an ancient text, made by human hands, transmitted fallibly, and its creation also entombed it in cementing the meaning of the text. Its creation was historically and culturally mediated, that is, in both an Ancient Near Eastern context and also a Roman ruled Palestinian context. That is where it ought to stay, and cannot go further. To illustrate this point, let's look at the book of Hebrews, where Paul argues that Jesus is the mediator of a better covenant by doing some questionable interpretation of a very mysterious, but altogether unimportant figure of Melchizedek. Would his reasoning of how Jesus is the better mediator convince the rational person today? Absolutely not. We would look at him and say, you're crazy. However, it was a convincing way of arguing about Jesus in second-Temple Palestine, and it can only be convincing in that time period. We as Christians only accept it out of our reverence for Scripture. Also, look at the book of Jude and its blatant allusions to apocryphal material. Would we think that it is convincing now? No. Why not? Because we don't hold those apocryphal material to be authoritative. Well, obviously the author of Jude did, and he could because it was meant to be only in that time and place.

The only thing that allows Christians to look at Scripture and say that it can possibly speak to us is faith. Faith is impossible if you stick to the historical framework, it is the step that you cannot take within the bounds of human reason. The historian would say, "The Johannine community believed in the divinity of Jesus." The Christian would say, "I believe in the divinity of Jesus."

How do you make the jump? You can't, reason can't build up to faith.

Now when I said that the inception of the text is its death, I was wrong. The interpretation of that text called the OT or the Hebrew Bible is the great hallmark of Christian theology and of Jewish commentary. However, what you see throughout history is that the interpretations change, sometimes drastically. Also, the methods of legitimate interpretations change, very drastically. Even our standard way of reading the text, as a plain-reading exercise, was relatively late, perhaps as late as 900 CE ish, with the flowering of Karaite Judaism and Peshat reading. So, all interpretation and method of interpretation is relative. Each period believed that they had THE way of understanding scripture. This type of interpretation will continue, because, that is the very nature of interpreting any text.

However, from an academic perspective, this is fine. I can survey the interpretational topos spread out in time and space. However, it is one thing to do that, but it is another thing to believe in that interpretational schema, as a Christian MUST do. 1) Which time period would I choose to interpret? 2) Why do I privilege this interpretational method over another? If you are honest with yourself, I do not think that you will be able to find a suitable answer to this question, because, we are deeply deeply engrained in our cultural-historical ways of thinking.

So, we have the two-fold process of 1) History entombs meaning, and 2) All subsequent meaning about these texts are derived from relative interpretational methods and conclusions.

Now, add on top of this, the problem of the historicity and the historiography of the texts. Tonight, I had a conversation with a few people that said this. "I believe that the Old Testament is true because Jesus thought it was true." Well, okay. This is a terrible reason, because it inflates the divinity of Christ over his humanity, and also the fact that Jesus was limited in his knowledge.

(I will finish this post later. It's late.)