Episode 290: Pete Enns & Jared Byas - Biblical Criticism & the Modern Mindset
We’re back for Season 9 of The Bible for Normal People and we’re still asking ourselves, “What is the Bible, and what do we do with it?” In this episode, Pete Enns and Jared Byas examine how biblical criticism raises questions about traditional understandings of Scripture. They explore the historical evolution of biblical interpretation, from the medieval period to the Enlightenment and then modernism, highlighting the influence of major intellectual and religious movements on the practice of Christianity as we recognize (or don’t recognize) it today. Join them as they explore the following questions:
How has historical criticism shaped modern understandings of the Bible?
What do we mean by the “modern mindset”?
Why is the authorship of the Pentateuch questioned by biblical scholars?
What did medieval scholars like Abraham Ibn Ezra observe about the Bible that challenged traditional views?
How did Baruch Spinoza contribute to the historical-critical approach to the Bible?
What role did the Protestant Reformation play in shaping modern biblical interpretation?
How did Enlightenment thinking influence how people read and understand scripture?
Why did biblical authorship become a bigger issue in the modern period compared to earlier times?
What contradictions exist within the Pentateuch that suggest multiple sources?
How did early biblical scholars identify different voices and traditions within the text?
What was the impact of historical criticism on faith communities and their understanding of scripture?
How does recognizing the Bible’s historical development change the way people engage with it today?
Quotables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
“What's the role of tradition and interpretation and how is that authoritative throughout these periods? We have Ibn Ezra in the 1100s, so we're firmly in the medieval period, if we're looking at a timeline here. We could go back further and talk about all the [discrepancies] that the rabbis noticed in these texts [and they] didn't seem to be bothered by it. It didn't seem to need to be defended against in any significant way. Then we get to the 16th, 17th centuries, and now all of a sudden this is problematic. So what happened in those 500 years? Why all of a sudden [is it] now so problematic?” — Jared Byas
“The Bible came to be elevated in the sense [that] “This is the book and it has one meaning and we can't diverge from that.” And it becomes this sole rule of faith. History is much more complicated than that…but we did move away from the sense that, for example, there are multiple [levels] to Scripture, and they're legitimate.” — Pete Enns
“I think we have to question even how we frame this because for a lot of us, it's so inherited. We've inherited the idea that Moses writing [the Pentateuch] is important because we think that an eyewitness gives us closer factual truth than a non-eyewitness, and that we need the Bible to be accurate historically because of the place that it holds in our epistemological framework—which is a fancy way of saying how we know things.” — Jared Byas
“I think it's fair to say once you start looking at the Bible with historical consciousness, you've left the medieval period, you’ve left the ancient period, you've left the New Testament period. You’ve left the Old Testament period in my opinion.” — Pete Enns
“An inerrantist reading is not a reading that flows from the text itself.” — Pete Enns
“I think that this is analogous to scientific investigations and the belief in God, for example. Like evolution. “You can't have evolution because then God's not real.” Well, that has nothing to do with whether God is real or not. It just has to do with whether the Bible is an explanation of human origins. It's a very different kind of thing.” — Pete Enns
“If what we mean by God is—the one who provided us a text that is inerrant and perfect, a perfect prism through which, if we just trusted it, would give us all the facts about the world that we need both from a historical and a scientific aspect, and also a moral and spiritual aspect—then that God doesn't exist if we accept historical development. — Jared Byas
“A common comment I get on social media is “If you lose any part of the Bible, you lose all of it, because it's God's Word.” And my response is—but read it, look at its behavior, look at how it acts. If we have a theory of the Bible that doesn't take into account things like there's no way Moses could have said this, then we're participating in the perpetuation of a kind of myth…something that's not true, but that gives us meaning. And ironically that, to me, shows a certain lack of faith in God that it has to be a certain way or none of it can be true.” — Pete Enns
“If we don't have a God that understands that we're just trying to understand, then all this is nonsense anyway.” — Pete Enns
“We see fingerprints of humanity all over [the Bible].” — Jared Byas
“One reason the Bible never gets old for me is because it's all over the place, and I can't wrap my arms around it. I'm fine with that. And to me, that is a picture of faith that [knows] we are stepping into something that exceeds our limitations.” — Pete Enns
“When I see the Bible with different voices speaking, and having different opinions on something, I'm seeing a dialogue. That very same dialogue [goes] back through the millennia. And to me, that's the beauty of the Bible. It's not that it gives you all the answers. It's that, if you take it seriously, it forces you to live with some discomfort at times.” — Pete Enns
“There's nothing [in the Bible] that we can see that people haven't seen in the past. There's no new data. The question is, what do you do with it? For me, it's simply a matter of being willing to take the risk, which I think is required in faith, to explore and to be curious and to try to understand as best as we can.” — Pete Enns
“The Bible is about as impossible to wrap up into a modernist mindset as anything. Because it's ancient, it's weird, it's diverse, it's all over the place, it's internally contradictory. You just can't make a system out of it. But it can be a means of grace, too, for the life of faith.” — Pete Enns
“I get excited when we have these conversations because this idea of reimagining the Bible requires our participation. I think that's scary for some, but if we can move beyond that, it's very exciting. We get to participate in this faith tradition, in its survival, its expansion, its shifts, its evolution.” — Jared Byas
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: February Class “Blood and Belief” happening February 17th taught by Caroline Blyth and Emily Colgan
Books: Violence & the Bible…for Normal People by Caroline Blyth releases February 11th
Join: The Society of Normal People online community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete: You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
[Intro music plays]
Jared: Well, well, well.
Pete: Well, well.
Jared: Here we are again.
Pete: Here we are again.
Jared: Welcome to season nine.
Pete: You tired of us yet, folks? Too bad.
Jared: Season nine.
Pete: Season nine. I have never, I haven't done very much in my life for nine years solid.
Jared: I know.
Pete: Except my t shirts and my underwear. I have those for more than nine years, but that's about it.
Jared: That's really—
Pete: And baseball.
Jared: That's really gross.
Pete: Oh, and family. Well, frankly, there are a lot of things, but not, not as many as you would think that I have done for nine years in a row. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I mean, I don't know, when we started this, what were we really thinking this will go on forever?
I don't know, we were just, let's do this, and we didn't have a time frame in mind, but nine years, that's almost a decade.
Jared: I know. It's a long time. I didn't know if you'd still be alive.
Pete: I barely am, frankly, I had two doctor's appointments today. Anyway.
Jared: [Laughing] So today we're going to talk about uh, well, it's just us.
Pete: It's me and you yeah.
Jared: And we're going to talk about uh, I don't know. I forget what we said. What we're going to talk about.
Pete: I'll take it from here, Jared, talk about getting old. Um about the bible and the modern mindset.
Jared: And biblical criticism.
Pete: Yeah, well, fine. Biblical criticism and the modern mindset, which is the gift that keeps on giving. And this is the kind of thing we could talk about at various angles, literally for hours upon hours upon hours. There's so much going on here. So we're just, we're going to touch on some of that stuff here.
Jared: Yep! All right, let's get into the episode.
[Music plays over teaser clip]
Pete: “I think the Bible is about as impossible to wrap up into a modernist mindset as anything. Because it's ancient, it's weird, it's diverse, it's all over the place. It's internally contradictory. You just can't make the system out of it. But it can be a means of grace too, for the life of faith.”
[Ad break]
Jared: We're going to talk today about, uh, biblical scholarship and the modern mindset. So we're going to be talking about two things and how they came together in biblical criticism.
Pete: Right.
Jared: And it's a little bit of a genealogy, where did it come from? Why did it come?
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: What were they doing and how did that evolve over time?
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: So let's start where genealogies usually begin, in the beginning.
Pete: Well, yeah. And, and I think, you know, it is a meshing of, you know, the Bible and the modern mindset and there are data points in terms of like, here's what biblical people were saying fairly early on in the modern period in terms of the Bible, but also just more philosophically what's, what's behind that.
So. Um,
Jared: And maybe I'll just say this as a, as a way to set up what we're, where this is all going. And that is in the modern period, the times we're going to be talking about, we start getting this, uh, mixture, this admixture of a couple of things that really come to a head in the 20th century. In America, at least, that become problematic for Christian expression.
Pete: Right.
Jared: So, uh, or at least in certain traditions, but I think that's what we're going to talk about.
Pete: Yeah. And I think in terms of, you know, in the modern period, this all began with Genesis and the Pentateuch. That was really the focus. People weren't talking as much early on about, you know, Isaiah. That came later on, but it was really the Torah.And, uh, people had noticed for a very, very long time, there were some problems in the Pentateuch for saying Moses wrote it. And that's really the issue. That's, that's what began all this. And around 1100, there was a, um, a rabbi, Abraham ibn Ezra, who noticed, you know, orthodox rabbi, but he noticed there were things in Torah that just don't make sense for traditional views of authorship.
And his, one of his examples is, uh, Genesis, uh, 12, six, where, um, God is taking Abraham on a tour of the Holy land, the promised land rather. And um, you know, there's almost a parenthetical aside in verse six says, “Now at that time the Canaanites were in the land” and Abraham Ibn Ezra—Ibn means son of, um—but Abraham Ibn Ezra said this has a meaning, and the one who understands it will keep quiet. Because it seems to imply that whoever's writing this is living at a time when the Canaanites weren't in the land any longer. So we're talking, you know, after the conquest period. So he's saying that, yeah, this is a clue that this is written significantly after the time of of, uh, of Moses.
Now, the thing is that, um, yeah, that, that's great, and people had noticed these things. He wasn't the first, he wasn't the only one, but Jews could read. You know, these rabbis could read, and they were not, they weren't particularly bothered by it, but they noticed it, but they didn't make much out of it. The modern period, and, you know, whenever we want to start that—I, I'm, I'm thinking of the 17th century, and I'm thinking of, um, Benedict or Baruch Spinoza, the philosopher.
What happened then was a more systematic, rigorous, academic account for why Torah looks the way that it does. And, uh, Spinoza wrote, which I've only poked in, it's, it's, you know, it's a philosophical, uh, tractate, but the theological-political tractate, where he is briefly, uh, I think undermining the Church and state mess that has pretty much ordered people's lives and the way to undercut the state is to undercut the religion and the way to undercut the religion is to say, you know, the Bible, it's, it's, it's not all that. It's got some problems in it and you need to read it with the normal light of reason and to sort of get into it.
And he says, you know, one of the chapters in his theological political tractate is entitled, It is clearer than the sun, this is the title of the chapter, “It is clearer than the sun at noon day that Moses did not write the books ascribed to him.” And he goes on to show that, you know, pretty convincingly.
Jared: Right. It's interesting, a couple of things that you said. One, that the Mosaic authorship is a, is such a big deal when we're talking about the Bible, that's really more of a tradition around the Bible than the Bible itself. Right? I mean, the Bible doesn't say Moses wrote the Pentateuch.
Pete: It doesn't say that anywhere. I mean, it became part of a Jewish tradition, which then gets into Jesus, in John's gospel chapter 5 mentioned something very similar. So it's part of the tradition.
Jared: So yeah, we got to a place where to undercut a tradition is to undercut the biblical witness.
Pete: Right.
Jared: Which is, I think is important here when we're talking about what we're, what we're talking about. Because we're talking about what's the role of tradition and interpretation and, you know, how is that authoritative throughout these periods? But we have, uh, Ibn Ezra in the 1100s, right? So we're firmly in the medieval period, right? Kind of if we're looking at a timeline here. These things are noticed. I mean, we could go back further and talk about all the things that the rabbis noticed in these texts that didn't seem to be bothered by it. Right? Um, all the discrepancies—
Pete: It was more of a challenge to sort of, well, how can we work through how this stuff?
Jared: How do we figure this out? And how, but it was, it wasn't. Uh, it didn't seem to need to be defended against in any significant way, right? Then we get to, you know, the 17th century, 16th, 17th centuries. And now all of a sudden this is problematic. So what happened? This is where that mindset shift comes in. What happens in those 500 years? Why all of a sudden now it's so problematic? What do you, do you have any thoughts on that?
Pete: Well, I mean, I only have from my perspective and I don't want to blame the Protestant reformation on everything, but, um, the Bible came to be elevated in the sense, like this is the book and it has one meaning. And we can't diverge from that, and it becomes this, this sole rule of faith. That's a bit of a caricature, because history is much more complicated than that. I don't want to give people the impression that Protestants were stupid or something, or Calvin or Luther, things like that. But we did move away from the sense that, for example, there are multiple senses to Scripture. There are various levels, and they're legitimate.
And the literal meaning is the most boring one, quite frankly, you know, the the an allegorical meaning is much more important. Calvin felt that allegory was a satanic device to get people away from the literal meaning as he had very little very little—
Jared: Calvin, he's always just so diplomatic. well, the thing is, I mean I get it in a sense, you know given his his time period, his era, and you know, the rise of, of scientific thinking and there's, you know, there is one explanation for why the planets move the way they move and there's one thing about the Bible and there's one meaning to it, you can’t have multiple meanings. That's part of that modern mindset, I think. And, um, so, you know, that, that, that gets embedded, I think, in, in, in the, it's baked into the Christian experience in Europe.
That caught on and you have Spinoza coming along a little bit after that saying, yeah, let's take this to the next level.
Jared: Yeah, I think what I'd maybe say to that is maybe to answer my own question just after hearing you say that is I wonder sometimes I think we don't want to, I would say my opinion. I don't know if we want to blame the Reformation. I think the Reformation was an effect of something that had been happening for a couple of hundred years, and so for me—
Pete: Well, talk about that.
Jared: Yeah, because I think for me, Calvin—Calvin is trying to figure out a new foundation for authority within Christianity, it's not like he's, he's coming in and wrecking things. He's actually coming into a political and social situation that has been wrecked and saying, what do we do now? And so, you know, we when we talk about the modern mindset, um, and I talk about this a little bit in my class on the making of the modern mindset. If we think of these influences, you know, it's funny.
You talk about the 12th century with Ibn Ezra, right around that same time we have the rise of the republics for the first time. So, you know, historically in the medieval period, God is sort of that foundation and that will actually continue. We can talk about that. But I think in the modern period, God is still the foundation. God just now gives us reason. That becomes the tool that we can trust, but how can we trust reason? Like Descartes basically comes back to like, well, we can only trust it because God sort of gives us, you know, he wouldn't do that to us. So we can trust our reason. But God's still at the foundation of that in the modern period for most of the modern period.
And so there's still God, but then in the medieval period, it's the church and state. It's the hierarchy of the tradition baked into these two institutions. And so whenever you have in the 12th century, Florence and the rise of these republics, we start losing that hierarchy on the state side. And then you have Petrarch and the return to like, classic literature and the return to biblical sources. They start finding manuscripts of Greek and Hebrew, and they start scratching their head and saying, yeah, Ad Fontes, back to the sources. They start scratching their head and saying, like, huh, maybe we should, and that's what leads to then Erasmus, and then Luther, I think, you know, uh, maybe is, gives him too much credit.
I don't think he even wanted the credit of this thing that's been happening for a couple hundred years. So we have these, these two, the twin towers of church and state who, that are radically shifting during this time. We have Florence and the republics, which eventuate in these, you know, monarchs getting their heads chopped off in the 18th century. And now we have a whole new way of doing things, but that was how we got information from God to the people in a way that we could trust it.
Pete: Right.
Jared: The church and the state.
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: And we have these revolutions on both sides and Calvin's like, Okay, well, maybe this. Right. Maybe this.
Pete: So, so you're, you're saying that it's, it's this historical consciousness? Going back to the beginning, the way things were. Let's look at the earliest, let's not. It's not just, you know, the Bibles that we have, that we've inherited, let's go back and look at these early manuscripts, right?
Jared: And we'd been trusting these traditions for centuries, and now we have many, so there's a conflict in itself of like, oh, what happens when the sources contradict the tradition—like mosaic authorship, which is not biblical. It's a tradition and then we get Spinoza and so on. That's like really starting to ramp this up.
Pete: Well, and which people didn't really, I mean, I think it's fair to say people in the medieval period weren't running around trying to defend Mosaic authorship.
Jared: No.
Pete: Because it just wasn't an issue.
Jared: Exactly.
Pete: Right. But it became an issue, right? Because we're starting to dig into the manuscripts themselves and things become a little more complicated.
Jared: Well and again, I would say, because also we didn't need to question it because we, we, we got an inherited tradition through these, through these hierarchical institutions. And so what there was no consciousness around why would we question that, but when that starts to fall apart and we need to start building up a new authority and reason becomes it, then we can't help but start asking those questions because we develop processes by which we question things.
Pete: And so Calvin and others were saying, What's our foundation?
Jared: I think Calvin was questioning the traditions and saying well, let's just go to the Bible. And then biblical criticism starts turning it on that—
Pete: That’s exactly right.
Jared: And saying oh, well, let's not just go to the traditions. The Catholic Church maybe isn't the only thing that has all these challenges or problems with it, maybe the text itself does. So I think Calvin was willing to go with the tradition criticism, and then sort of let's put our trust in the text.
And I think, as we move along in the modern period, criticism develops these processes and methodologies that start saying, well, we're not just going to go there, we're going to actually look at the text, and we see problems there too.
Pete: Right. And, and, you know, people have sort of blamed Luther for these things as well. I mean, I, it's, it's easy, it's easy to blame people for things, but that it's, don't trust the church. And then people like Spinoza came along and said, why trust anything that people tell you. Look into, it's the natural light of reason that God has given you that you can be skeptical about and you probably should be skeptical. And that's a shift, I think, from that, from the medieval period and it was hundreds of years in the making. It didn't just happen overnight.
Jared: Yeah. And I think that's, you know, before we move on to kind of that next phase post-Spinoza, I think that's a big takeaway. And I think it's something we do at the Bible for Normal People is like, recognizing that there's a context to all of this. So we can say Luther, we can say, uh, you know, Petrarch or Erasmus or Calvin, but they were all swimming in a water. If it wasn't Luther, it would have been someone else. If it wasn't Calvin, it's the time where human consciousness is moving. Is it progress? I don't know, but it's definitely shifting in this time period. And so then what we do with the Bible is also getting swept up in this time period.
[Ad break]
Jared: So where do we go from there?
Pete: Well, that's where people started. I mean, scholars started systematically looking at like, why do we believe anything that we believe? And who wrote this stuff anyway? Who wrote Torah? Who wrote the Pentateuch? Just sort of obvious things were talked about. Like, You know, it's sort of written in the third person. It's about Adam. It's about Noah. It's about Abraham. It's about Moses. So, so he's a third person figure and you have that passage in Numbers, uh, what is it? Chapter 11 or so. Uh, about, now Moses was more humble than any man on the face of the earth.
Jared: Right, I always loved that one.
Pete: And that's sort of a, a, a, you know, a jab to the idea that Moses wrote it. Well, okay, but Moses wrote most of it, but some editor put that in, well, but there's no really difference in terms of the style, linguistics between that verse and everything else around it. So. It begins to call into question whether Moses could have written about himself in the third person, calling himself humble, right?
And those are the things that sort of just came to light and looked at more systematically. And then you have things like, you know, the diversity in the Bible, you know, and how you have laws that contradict each other within Torah that are all given by God, but yet they're different. And the big one I always talk about with my students is the slave laws concerning the keeping of Hebrew slaves.
In Exodus, um, chapter 20, it's you can, you can, you can keep Hebrew slaves and, but a male slave can go free after seven years should he wish to. If he came in married, uh, he can leave with his wife, but if he came in single and married somebody, only he can go free, the woman can’t. But it's very clear women don't have that right.
In Deuteronomy, they do. And it's, you know, and it's, it's not, it's, it's not like reading between the lines. It's twice in that chapter 15 in Deuteronomy. It's men and women can go free after, they can declare their freedom after seven years. And that's a shift, that's a change. And how can you have the law given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, the same God, the same Moses, saying two different things in Exodus and Deuteronomy.
And then just throw Leviticus in there, uh, chapter 24, 25 around there. It's like, what are you talking about having Hebrew slaves? Don't you know you were slaves in Egypt yourselves? You can't have, you can't enslave your own people. You can enslave others. I mean, some apologists use this as an example of like, you know, you're not supposed to have slaves, but not Hebrew indentured servants is really what they were.
But you can certainly enslave anybody else, but it's just the rules about whether to what it means to be a Hebrew and to be a slave of your own people, that clearly shifted. And so you've got different voices there talking to us and, and you know, Ben Sommer, we had him on the first season. I think he was. He wrote a beautiful book on, on, on, on this problem and you should go back and listen to that episode.
But yeah, he addresses that as like, it's, it's the voice of God that has to be interpreted in different settings, in different times. But that's just it. It's the voice of God being interpreted by different communities at different times in different places, and coming up with different answers to this. And that sort of doesn't help the idea that Moses wrote all this essentially in one sitting. And just many, and that's what people would take systematic views of the Bible just in Deuteronomy I mean, we're not gonna go through all the reasons why people say that but just one of my favorite ones is the book of Deuteronomy, which is the longest first-person narrative where Moses is doing the speaking.
And it's also the least Mosaic, if you really look at it carefully. You have the editor at the beginning saying, uh, these are the words Moses spoke on the other side of the Jordan. Well, Moses died on the eastern side of the Jordan. He never came over. So whoever's saying this is saying, Yeah, we're reminiscing here about Moses and what he said.
And so Moses does a lot of talking and, um, you get to chapter 4, verse 37, where, I mean, I really encourage people to read chapter 4, verses 37 and 38. Uh, Moses is giving, um, sort of a review of where we've been.
Jared: Hmm.
Pete: Actually, I wonder, can I read this? I have it right here.
Jared: Yeah.
Pete: The Ten Commandments are going to be in Chapter 5, but he's giving this review of their history, and he says that he, God, brought you out of Egypt with his own presence.
That's a reference, reference to something in the past. And he keeps going, uh, by his great power, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than yourselves to bring you in, giving you their land for a possession as it is still today. So, this is a reference to not only the exodus from Egypt in the past, but giving you the land driving out these nations.
This is the conquest of Canaan, right? As it is still to this day. Well, what day is that? Right? \
Jared: It's like double down. It is in the past. And then it says, as it is still today.
Pete: So, what is that day? And the thing is that, you know, it's not that the writer of Deuteronomy is an idiot, he, I think the writer knows what he's doing, and he's not trying to pass this off as something that Moses necessarily said, but this is a piece of theology.
But the point, rather, is that, I don't think Moses wrote that, you know, he didn't write about his own death at the end of the book, and it's not like an I gotcha moment for anti Christians to point that out, that's, it's very, very clear, you know?
Jared: Well, and again, even the way we're framing this conversation right now that you're framing it. I'm still, it it's telling that it matters. Why does it matter whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch or not? Even to ask the question is because we need this text to be authoritative. And we have made the argument that if Moses wrote it, it's more authoritative than if Moses didn't write it.
Pete: Cause you have an eyewitness now to all the events. That's really the thing. Very modern way of thinking.
Jared: And that goes back to the way we, we needed this to be. I don't know how to say it a different way, but I think we have to question even how we frame this because I think for a lot of us, it's so inherited. We don't even think to question it. Like we, we've inherited the idea that Moses writing it is important because we think that an eyewitness gives us closer factual truth than a non-eyewitness, and that we need the Bible to be accurate historically because of the place that it holds in our epistemological framework, which is a fancy way of saying how we know things.
Pete: And how can we be sure we're right about those things, too.
Jared: It is the tool we have used to unlock certainty about how the world really is. And that, all of that is an inherited tradition, that is not a given.
Pete: Part of the modern mindset.
Jared: Part of the modern mindset, which is a tradition that we've inherited from our modern forefathers and mothers is this way of thinking.
Pete: Even preceding the modern period, is what you're saying.
Jared: Right, I mean, it started in the late medieval period because this is, nothing is black and white.
Pete: And once you left open the Pandora's box, it's like wait a minute.
Jared: Yeah.
Pete: Once, I mean, I think it's it's fair to say once you start looking at the Bible with the historical consciousness, you've left the medieval period, largely left the medieval period, you’ve left the ancient period, you've left the New Testament period, right? You’ve left the Old Testament period in my opinion, right?
It's now different and you're, you're gonna see how the sausage is made, at least theories about how the sausage is made. And, and one of the, the, the true pillars of the modern period concerning the Torah is like, there is no way this was written in the second millennium BC by one person. There are too many voices here, and there, there are too many passages and sections that are screaming to you saying, this is probably exilic or even post-exilic.
Right? And that's what the historical dimension of the study of Scripture has done, which is a child of the rise of modernity.
Jared: Well, and maybe, can you, can you, let's dig in a little bit more specifically. When you say history or historical consciousness, when we look at the Pentateuch and say, this couldn't have been written here and we couldn't—What are the tools you're using to, what are the tools that biblical scholars and biblical criticism has used to get to that?
Because when we talk about history and how we figure out what's historical, we're talking about a, a tools, we're talking about tools and a set of processes. And that's, that's kind of what we mean by that. Right? So what is happening? Because I could just see people saying, well, I guess I would just say there's like an inerrantist version of history. So we have to be more specific.
Pete: Right. Well, I, I would, I, I think the tools come around in order to help us understand what we're reading and I think that, you know, an inerrantist reading is not a reading that flows from the text itself. That's my opinion. So I think, you know, Moses writing about his own humility or about his own death in the past tense and for Moses to say, no one knows to this day where his body is. This is how Deuteronomy ends. It's, he dies, he's buried, and we don't know where his grave is, and no prophet has come along like Moses. You know, to try to make arguments, which some people have done historically, to say that, well, Moses could have written that by inspiration. Okay, that's fine, but we're not in a, in a historical conversation at that point.
Jared: Well, I think that's important. What you, if someone says that, then they have, they have extracted themselves out of the process.
Pete: Out of the contemporary process, the way we think about things over the last few hundred years.
Jared: I think one thing I'm, I'm picking up on, right, is what you're saying is, We have, uh, collectively decided what's reasonable. And what would we, we've decided that based on a set, a certain set of processes. Which have, is undergirded by the scientific method. Right? Of hypotheses and tests and thousands and thousands of iterations of that. Within a particular field of experts. And then, and I, I, I'm trying to think of how to articulate this.
So I think sometimes what inerrantists can do is use reason when it suits them. Use that process. And then when it doesn't suit them, they have a trump card that sort of extracts them out of that process. And then they want to give and take. And then I think what can be frustrating for me is the same process that's undergirding biblical criticism also undergirds medicine and technology. And we're fine with those processes. The challenge becomes when reason comes in conflict, right? That, that the scientific process and how we become experts in things, when it comes into conflict with the thing that we think actually gives us certainty, which is an inerrant Bible,
Pete: Which is a tradition.
Jared: We have to sort of take the inerrantist Bible position for that. And then we're going to just put ourselves right back into this thing. And I think that for me, is one of the most challenging parts of an inerrantist position is we, you want to be reasonable. You want to say reason is at the ground of things. Um, and then you say, well, the Bible is reasonable in the same way. And then when it comes into conflict, we have to sort of figure out these—
Pete: That is apologetics.
Jared: That is the, that for me, that is the invention of apologetics. That's why it exists as a machine.
Pete: And I think that this is analogous to scientific investigations and the belief in God, for example. Like evolution. Well, I mean, you can't have evolution because then God's not real.
And people can come along, like myself, and say, well, that has nothing to do with whether God is real or not. It just has to do with whether the Bible is an explanation of human origins. It's a very different kind of thing.
Jared: Right. Yes. Yeah.
Pete: So, I would say the same thing about, um, you know, uh, exposing is the wrong word. Uh, just observing, I think, that it's really hard to come to the conclusion that Moses wrote the Pentateuch that doesn't, to me, undermine the existence of God, the nature of God. Those, to me, are very different kinds of discussions. This is just a historical snapshot of how people processed this in the past and we're coming to understand that process a little bit by certain tools that, you know, I mean, I, again, I don't know if source criticism is a tool as much as it is a, an observation of different voices that then comes up with theories to say, here's how I explain the different voices.
They come in a chronological order historically, or maybe they don't, or maybe there's one big writer and people added to it. But the point is that the Torah has a historical development. That is as—in biblical scholarship that is as strong a statement as there's a fossil record in evolutionary theory. People say that's not true, but it is. So, you know, that's, those are those are observations that people have made not because they have anti Christian biases or anti supernatural biases, but because the biblical data themselves push us in a certain direction as they did Abraham Ibn Ezra, who was not a modern person, but on the cusp of that, perhaps, you know, the Renaissance and humanism and all those kinds of things.
So, uh, they were thinking along those terms, but they weren't modern in our sense. And I think we have to be open to the fact that we have perspectives as well. And I definitely acknowledge that. For more, I said, I don't know what else to say. It's like saying the sun is up.
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Jared: I don't want to get too abstract or philosophical, but when you say that recognizing the historical development of the Pentateuch, therefore Moses didn't write the Pentateuch, doesn't mean God doesn't exist. The only thing I would challenge with that is I think it does mean a certain version of God doesn't exist.
Pete: Absolutely, yeah.
Jared: And I think that's important to name because that's really the argument.
Pete: You may need to rethink your understanding of the tie between the reality of God and this book.
Jared: Because if God, if what we mean by God is the one who provided us a text that is inerrant and perfect, a perfect prism through which if we just trusted it, it would give us all the facts about the world that we need both from a historical and a scientific aspect, but also a moral and spiritual aspect, then that God doesn't exist if we accept the historical development.
Pete: So therefore God can't be real.
Jared: Right?
Pete: And that is…
Jared: But that's within that. That's within uh, uh, I would say a modernist understanding of Christianity, which for me, the irony is I think evangelicalism is the pinnacle of modernist Christianity, even though it is the chief enemy in its own mind of modernist Christianity.
Pete: It's, it's, it's a, uh, many have said this, it's a thoroughly modernist experiment in terms of the articulation of Christianity, which, you know, departed from earlier ways of, I mean, most of the church has not thought this way, right? And some people were saying, and it's starting not to think that way anymore.
I mean, people are moving, call it postmodernism, whatever. But that's why postmodernism is an attempt, I think, one way of putting it, to reclaim, um, a view of reality that's not limited by modernism, which has done many beautiful and wonderful and fantastic things. But it's, it's, it is a myth in a sense, too, that it's not giving us, um, It's it's it's a structure. It's a structure by which we explain things.
Jared: Yeah. Well, and we can't conflate—Reason and the scientific method is not modernism. That continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. That's very helpful. When I think of post modernism more and more I have to own, what I mean by that is more in the 20th Century when this came to a head in, in America, right?
We have biblical criticism that has been working its way through seminaries and churches for a couple of hundred years. And we kind of come to a crisis of faith in the early 20th century in this, uh, fundamentalist modernist debate. Scopes monkey trials, um, all of these kinds of things where it's sort of liberal conservative split within Christianity.
For me, one way—I'm sure it's very complex and there's a lot of ways to look at it—but one way to look at that, is that's when the, this crisis of what, what is the relationship of the Bible and Christian expression to modernist categories and the modern project? And I feel like evangelicalism actually doubled down on the modern experiment to find the certainty of our knowledge. And the modern sort of the breakaway of more progressive quote liberal churches was to actually follow the path of what science did which is to say we're just gonna give up on that project. It doesn't mean we can't know things. It just means maybe it was a fool's errand to try that undoubtable, unshakable foundational truth that we can then build a pyramid of knowledge on top of. Maybe we should abandon that, seems like we found the process by which we can come to knowledge that helps with the medicine and technology and moralism and all of that.
Let's just go with that. And so for me, when I say postmodern, I just mean we kind of gave up on that project. And I think that could explain part of where this came to.
Pete: Well, postmodernism is the acknowledgement of the limitations of the modernist agenda. And, um, and I think, yeah, I think that's really important. It's not, um, I mean, you know, the liberal church, for example, 19th century, 20th century, they dried up, people aren't going anymore. And you know, that's, that's probably true, you know, but there's also a post liberalism, which is saying, okay, now, constructively, what, what does the Bible mean to our community? To me, that's the question. What, what, how can we, you know, I've used in, in how the Bible actually works, I use the word reimagine a lot, I like that word. How do we reimagine God? How do we reimagine scripture, the nature of scripture, what it does, how it works for us, and um, even what it is? What is the Bible? And what do we do with it? Right? I think we talk about that a lot. Those, those, we're driven to those questions.
And I'm, I've become more aware of how infrequently people are willing to ask that question of themselves. How uneasy they might be, and I understand why, because they're, they're, they're in that mindset, right? They're in that mindset, like, it's one or the other. I mean, I, I, a common comment I get on social media is, almost doesn't matter what I say, if you lose any part of the Bible, you lose all of it, because it's God's Word. And, um, my response is Yeah, but read it, you know, and look at, look at its behavior, look at how it acts.
And if, if we have a theory of the Bible that doesn't take into account things like, there's no way Moses could have said this. You know, we're, we're participating in the perpetuation of, I think, um, a, a, a kind of myth, right? And, and, and, and, um, the negative sense of the word, I mean, just something that's not true, but that gives us meaning.
And ironically that, to me, that shows, um, a certain lack of faith in God that, you know, it has to be a certain way or it can't, and none of it can be true.
Jared: Well, and I think the frustrating thing for me is when we don't recognize the way that you're insisting it has to be hasn't been how it always was, right?
You, you, you're doubling down on a particular way of thinking in the West over 500 years.
Pete: “The Church has always believed this.”
Jared: Yeah. And you're doubling down on that and saying that is now the essence of Christianity, right? Which for me is just short sighted and untrue. And it's just, I think I'm sad about it because it's like, well, you're going to, what it, what it comes down to is it actually is going to, I think, lead to a lot of people abandoning the faith. Because the more and more people move past the modern mindset into a more process oriented, quantum understanding of the universe and God and how all this has to work together. We're evolving. The tradition's evolving just as it always had.
And there's always people who are refusing to get off the Titanic as it sinks because they're on the real Titanic and I'm going to go down with it, even though there's like another boat that's perfectly fine that will just carry the tradition on and it's like, I just want to be like, and I get frustrated with apologists who are trying to keep people in the fold of modernist inerrantist Christianity saying, you have to choose. It is either or.
And so they just are choosing to be atheist or choosing to be like, I'm going to be a spiritual nun because I've had to, I've been forced to choose. And for me, it's sort of like, well, you're the one forcing people to choose. Christianity isn't.
Pete: So, well, I mean this is it's been baked into the culture of the past I mean, I think especially probably since the 19th century maybe even before but especially since then, it's it's baked in I mean, I've heard the rhetoric, you've heard it too. Our—I mean metaphorically speaking—our forefathers spilled blood over this issue. And you're just gonna abandon it?
And yeah, I'm so, so there's, there's a lot at stake emotionally in maintaining the faith because you've been warned. If you go in this direction, X, Y, and Z is going to happen to you. But I mean, don't get me started. I just, I just think it is what it is, and studying the Bible and studying the philosophical, uh, context within which we're reading the Bible. To me, that's fascinating stuff.
And I, uh, I truly, truly believe that if, if we don't have a God that we think understands that we're just trying to understand, then all this is nonsense anyway.
Jared: So as we kind of wrap this up, what are ways that we can see these things? Moses didn't write the Pentateuch. We see different sources in these texts. We see historical development. We see, we see fingerprints of humanity all over this thing. What, how does that mesh with, uh, a faith beyond a modern mindset for you?
Pete: I think what it does is it, um, I want to use the word you hate.
Jared: I knew it was coming. I know it's coming. It’s mystery.
Pete: But, but that's not, it's not just that, but it's, one reason the Bible never gets old for me is because it's like, it's all over the place, you know, and I can't wrap my arms around it. I'm fine with that. And to me, that's, that is a picture of faith that it's, we're stepping into something that is, that exceeds our limitations. And I think when I see the Bible with different voices speaking and having different opinions on something, I'm, I'm seeing a dialogue. That very same dialogue going back through the millennia.
And to me, that's, that's the beauty of the Bible. It's not that it gives you all the answers. It's that, if you take it seriously, it, it forces you to be, to live with some discomfort at times. And realizing, this is an adult book. And, and it's, there's a tradition that goes way back. And people have, there's nothing that we can see that people haven't seen in the past.
There's, there's no new data. It's a question is what do you do with it? And, you know, for me, it's simply a matter of being willing to take the risk, um, which I think is required in faith to, to explore and to be curious and to try to understand as best as we can.
And, and to me, um, the whole issue of like, what do you think God is like is wrapped up in all that stuff? Because I've, I've come to be over the years, very comfortable, not just comfortable, but very grateful for a notion of God, where I'm just like a little kid trying to figure out how to use the crayon, you know, and it's like, I'm just, I'm limited myself. But I'm, I'm doing it honestly, I'm trying to do it honestly, I'm not trying to defend a particular view because without it I'll freak out. Where, where's the faith in that? That, that to me, so I think, I think the Bible is about as impossible to wrap up into a modernist mindset as anything. Cause it's ancient, it's weird, it's diverse, it's all over the place, it's internally contradictory. You just can't make the system out of it. But it can be a means of grace, too, for the life of faith.
Jared: That's well put. Yeah. And I think the only, the only, uh, thing I would add for me is I get excited when we have these conversations because this idea of reimagining the Bible requires our participation. And I think that's scary for some, but I think if we can move beyond that, it actually gets very, it's very exciting.
Um, we get to participate in this faith tradition, in its survival, its expansion, its shifts, it's, we're, it's evolution, it's evolution, baby. Yeah.
Pete: Anyway, it's just, there's a lot to think about and that's why theology and, and, and biblical studies in almost any discipline that's related to philosophy. It's, it's not ending, and that's okay, because we're limited people, we're trying to make sense of things. And that's what we're doing here.
Jared: And we want to make ten more seasons of this podcast.
Pete: Of course.
Jared: So we need it to not end. I mean, it's a little bit self serving.
Pete: Yeah. So there you go, folks. Okay? That's the capitalist mindset right there.
Jared: That's the real agenda.
Jared: All right. Well, thanks everybody for participating in this conversation with us. We hope that it's helpful, because I think it really does come back to those two questions of what is the Bible and what do we do with it? Which is in itself, you say this a lot, it, that asking those questions in community and talking about it is the process of theologizing and is the process of expressing our Christian faith.
Pete: And over season nine, we'll be doing more and more of that.
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Jared: Well thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.
Pete: And if you want to support us and want an all access pass to our classes, ad free livestream of the podcasts, and a thoughtful community of people asking tough questions about the Bible and faith, you can become a member of our online community, the Society of Normal People at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join.
Jared: And lastly, it goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review, and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com.
Outro: You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People. Don't forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Joel Limbauan, Savannah Locke, Melissa Yandow, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Lauren O'Connell, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
