I’ll run this past some other people, but this is very interesting:
Dave,
I don’t know if I am going to post on the board, but you are very right. In fact, it is the most ancient and correct view to look at those stories as allegory. I now ask a different question: what evidence does antone have in support of a literal interpretation? The burden of proof is on the Fundamentalists to show why their newfangled literalism is superior to the Ancient Eastern approach to our sacred mythology.
I was getting more and more disillusioned with all of the modern church for a while there. I almost gave up on it all. Not my belief in God, but just the whole corporate thing. I felt like the only way to view scripture in a way that made sense was “liberally.” I may be pretty liberal in my politics, but I prefer to think of myself as a purist when it comes to religion. It was C.S. Lewis who helped me out as always. I was reading “Miracles,” and at one point he mentioned in a footnote that he wasn’t even going to enter in to a discussion of Old Testament miracles since so much of the Old Testament is myth. He saw that the earliest stories were told to convey meaning, not history. So, knowing that Lewis was a pretty straight member of the Church of England, it became apparent that such a view isn’t at all “liberal.”
At that point, I really started getting into the CoE. I even started going to St. Andrew’s Episcopal on Chapman. (A really great congregation by the way.) But over the past year, I have learned so much about the history of the Church and the origins of Western christianity that I have come to find the Orthodox Church to be my home. They have never stepped outside of the Eastern mindset in which the scriptures were written. The East has no problem speaking of Adam and Eve as real people, but at the same time saying that they probably never existed in “real” history. I am not saying that the Eastern mind is superior, but an understanding of it is essential for real Biblical scholarship. That’s just Anthro 102 basic understanding.
To look at the grand arch of Christian history, I think, supports the conclusion that Orthodoxy is the best preserved Worship handed down from the Early Church. The Roman patriarchate (autonomous church) broke away from the other four Orthodox patriarchates (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem) in 1054 AD. The Roman Church made some significant breaks from Apostolic teachings even before that, but it only compounded after that. (Filioque, transubstantiation, immaculate conception of Mary, etc)
By medieval times the Roman Catholic church was a huge monster of a political machine, and the first generation Reformers, had some good points. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, etc. never wanted to break away from the Chuch, though; they wanted to reform it. The second generation reformers were way more radical. They de-emphasized the Eucharist, calling it a mere symbol. They totally dishonored Mary. They threw out all the Creeds that were written to protect the correct understandings of Apostolic teachings. I think Calvin and Luther were both unpleasant individuals, but their successors made them look like gentle doves. So despite the corruption of the Medieval Roman Church, the Reformers did not reestablish a correct worship; they ended up even farther from their Apostolic origins. Threw out the baby with the baptismal font, as it were. (This is going somewhere – bear with me.)
When the Church Fathers of the fourth century decided to assemble the best writings in circulation in the Church into an approved Cannon, I doubt they would have envisioned what we use it for in the modern West. The Church decided, centuries into its existence, what books would be contained in this cannon. Therefore, as a work of the Church, the Bible was seen as deriving its authority from the Church. Now, thats no small thing, as the Church is Christ on earth – His Body. The Bible was therefore conssidered to be an infallible source of knowledge about God. It was the measure against which all consequent teachings were compared because it was seen as accurately attesting to the long-held teachings of the Church.
Coming back to the Reformation: The second generation had quite a problem. The Roman Church was challenging them. “We are the Church. Our authority comes from Apostolic Succession. You have broken from that, so from whence come your authority.” The answer of the Radical Reformers was likely never to have been thought of by those who asked. “Our authority comes from the Bible.” The had subjugated their church to something which the Church Herself had produced. They turned the relationship upside down.
This upside down relationship has had some severe consequences. Now, admittedly, the Roman Church used its authority to a detriment, but this was no solution. They put the Bible in the place of Christ as the head of the Body. This necessitated the belief that the Bible itself was infallible, outside of any knowledge about the languages, cultures, historic context, author’s positions, and intended audiences. Calvin said that since all (male) Christians were of infinite worth to God, and also since all (male) Christians were individually responsible for their actions (this latter being totally unbiblical) then they were all equally entitled to individual revelation. This later came to mean individual interpretation. Scottish Common Sense doctrines then added to it by saying that any two sane men would come to the same conclusion based on the same information, so individual interpretation was no problem (ha!).
It was only in the nineteenth century that two Princeton theologians came up with the doctrine of the Verbal Inerrancy of scripture. They reasoned that if the Bible was the ultimate source of authority on all matters (not just about our realtionship to God), then it must be absolutely free of any sort of error in all its original writings. This was never believed by any of the Church before this point.
So, nowadays we have a bunch of people running around with their “right” to individual interpretation of their “verbally inerrant” Bible, with absolutely no accountability to the original teachings of the Church to which the Bible was supposed to be witnessing. Essentially, any person with modest rhetorical skills can make a text say damn near anything they please, including taking some of the most meaningful mythology in the Bible, stripping it of its allegorical context (and therefore its meaning) and recasting it as history. This is what the Fundamentalists have done. It is a recent phenomenon, and I consider it not only naive, but one of the most destructive forces against Faith in existence today.
So Dave, I turn it back on them: From whence do they derive the authority to change some of the most ancient and meaningful texts into a transparently pseudoscientific sociopolitical platform.
Sorry for the length, but I feel as though I was conservative in the amount that I included. I would love to talk to you more about this too. I mean, to hear your views. I think we have always been of a similar mind on this…
