The Interpretive Animal

Aristotle famously said of Homo Sapiens that its definition is this: it is animal by genus, rational by specific difference. We are, he said, the rational animals.

I suggest another definition. It is that we are the interpretive animals. We are the animals that interpret.

This is nowhere more evident than in Christianity. The Christian has a text, and a tradition, and each new generation takes and interprets them in a way characteristic of its time.

But curiously Homo sapiens often denies that it interprets. Rather it often speaks as if its mind is a perfect mirror of God's will as expressed in revelation. It speaks as if it merely reflects that divine will and so knows it perfectly, without possibility of error.

It holds that revelation is crystaline in its clarity and that a mind unfettered by prejudice can perceive precisely, without error and without omission, what is there.

But this cannot be. The human mind, at least in its present state, cannot have any such perfect access to the divine will. For consider each of those sects that proclaims the inerrancy of the Bible. Do they all speak with a single voice about God's will? Of course not. Some hold that the laws of the Old Testament, unless explicitly rescinded in the New, are still in force. Others reject this. Some hold that the power to work miracles ended with the disciples died. Others reject this. Some hold that signs now visible point to the fulfillment of divine prophecy of the end-times. Others reject this and say that we can never know when the end-times will come. Examples could be multiplied.

So, then, we have many versions of the Bible, each produced by a group that declares the inerracy of the Bible. Of course if one is within one of these groups and has given one's loyality to it, it might seem quite clear that one's own verison is true. (Indeed one is likely to deny that it is a version of the Bible. One is likely to say that it just is the Bible.) But how will it seem to one who is not within any such group? It will seem that all are unjustified and that their differences as it were nullify one another. They cancel each other out and leave is unable to determine just where the truth lies on matters of dispute.

One cannot, it seems, reject the version of one or another of these groups because its adherents lack critical acumen, are morally corrupt, etc. Each group has its own scholars, extraordinarily learned, morally upright and with the requisite knowledge to have the right to render a judgment about what is meant by Scripture. Thus if they differ about what Scripture says, it must be that we humans cannot be certain about what it says. To say otherwise and insist on the truth of one's own version thus seems hubristic, for it is to insist that one is somehow elevated over others who are no less intelligent than you, and no less and serious in their adherence to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.

The situation is the same within science. When do we, scientific non-specialists, take a certain scientific result as proven? When the scientific community reaches concensus. But when we apply this same standard to the question of what is meant by Scripture, we must conclude that we do not know that this or that version is the true one.

What if one were to say at this point that, though one cannot perhaps know where the truth lies when the community of Biblical scholars who hew to the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy disagree, one can know the truth when they agree? Perhaps this standard is right, but its likely to be little consolation to my opponents here. For they wish to say that no part of Scripture is in shadow. It is all clear, they wish to say.

My diagnosis of the situation is this. When we have before us a text as difficult and as complex as the Bible, a text that deals with matters moral and spiritual, it is quite inevitable that those who make a serious study of it will disagree about what is means. For when one interprets, one fills in. But when the question arises of how best to fill in, one must always rely upon background beliefs about what is plausible and what is implausible. But always and everywhere people will not share the same background beliefs. Thus they will fill in differently.

Thus it seems to me that when someone produces an intepretation of Scripture and insists that it is complete and without possibility of error (and many do this) they have in effect said that they are incapable of error, for much of them is in that interpretation. Claim that the Bible is inerrant if you like. (Perhaps in some sense it is.) But do not write a book in which you give your interpretation and then demand that I believe it because the Bible is inerrant. I will dismiss the claim out of hand. Indeed I will take it as a prideful claim. I will take it as the insistence that one cannot be guilty of error.

If, on the other hand, you recommend the book for consideration, I will quite happily do so.