Diary 1928-1957, entry of 6 October 1941:
The story of the manna gathered and set aside by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps that means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed — by prayer and by works — ends by causing a sort of rotting inside us. You die with a head full of fine sayings and a perfectly empty heart.
The consumption of a comestible is its physiological appropriation. To appropriate is to make one’s own. Green is referring to spiritual appropriation, the making one’s own of spiritual sayings by prayer and practice.
Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?
Hi, Bill. I’m glad to see that you are up and running on the new site!
>>Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?<<
Here's an interesting coincidence. (Or is it a coincidence?)
I attended a religious service yesterday. The sermon was about the story of Esther. The pastor claimed that the narrative is historical fact, though he provided no evidence. A mere assertion! I don't believe there is any independent evidence for the historicity of that story. My understanding is that the majority of relevant scholars hold the story to be a work of historical fiction.
In any case, when the pastor claimed that the story is historical fact, I had the same thought: "Is it? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament story in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?"
In other words, the story has moral and spiritual lessons even if it is an allegory. Why go beyond the evidence and assert the story as historical fact?
Hi Elliot. Glad you found your way over here. I just now discovered your comment.
This is a vexing question we are both wrestling with. It ties in with the question of Biblical inerrancy. Our mutual Calvinist friend Brian takes a hard line: the Bible is inerrant in every particular. But then the Bible would have to be factually correct in each of its historical claims — which is unbelievable.
I think one could hold that the Christian Bible is (one form of) divine revelation and thus in a sense the Word of God without holding that every word/sentence in the Bible is God’s word. For one thing, the canonical text comes about through human choices of some texts over others. Does that not show that the Bible is not identical to the Word of God? God is one, Bibles are many. How could the Word of God (the Logos), which is infinite and transcendent be finitized and immanentized by being identified with some text in a human language?
It was also a human decision that the original text could be translated into other human languages. So even if there was no selection of texts to come up with the canonical text, the translations of the Urtext would finitize and immanentize the infinite and transcendent Word (Logos).
This also touches on the problem of superstition and how it differs from genuine religion.
>>Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?<<
Bultmann and Paul Tillich were subtle thinkers, but generally did not seem to think the literal truth was important to Christianity, even unto whether it was essential that Jesus actually walked the earth, said what he said, and did what he did. But the Biblical text certainly considers it important that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt literally happened and the events recounted were critical revelations of God and his relationship to his people, so I take the report of manna from heaven as a literal miracle, try to understand what that means about God in the context of the history, and see no need to argue the point.
NT Wright says somewhere about miracles (as best I can remember it) that once you believe in Jesus' resurrection from the dead, then any other miracle is easier to accept – because the context is not as some sort of apologetic proof of God or Jesus Divinity, but of the actual victory of God over sin and death. Believe God will intervene in the natural order like that, and anything else he might do is small potatoes – even if those potatoes happen to be bread from heaven.
Bill, yes, these are challenging questions.
According to Craig, the Doctrine of Inerrancy is that the Bible is true in all that it teaches. See 3-minute summary by Craig here: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/other-videos/what-is-your-view-of-inerrancy
This view of inerrancy is consistent with saying that it is not the case that every sentence in the Bible is true. Some sentences are not propositions. They have no truth value. And there are propositions in the Bible that are false. Plus, there are passages that are not meant literally. For example, Isaiah 55:12 speaks of singing mountains and hand-clapping trees.
Regarding the OT stories about manna, Esther, the Garden of Eden, Noah and the ark, etc. we might ask: were these stories meant to teach history? If not, then the DoI does not require affirming these stories to be true as historiographical texts, even though they contain moral and spiritual truths.
An example of a sentence that occurs in the Bible that is presumably not true is, “There is no God” which occurs in oratio obliqua . “The fool hath said . . . .”
Craig’s distinction between what the Bible teaches and what the Bible says is an appealing one. But it doesn’t help us with the question whether the story about manna is a teaching about an historical occurrence. I take that to be your point, Elliot. How would you respond to Tom T who is maintaining that it is a miraculous historical occurrence?
But here’s a question: Does the Bible teach anything? Or is rather the case that God teaches through the Bible? It is the latter, I would say. But if so, one cannot identify the Word of God ( the 2nd person of the Trinity) with the divinely inspired sentences of a book written in a human language such as Hebrew.
Bill,
Right, the distinction is helpful but doesn’t settle the question of whether or not the story about manna is a teaching about an historical occurrence. There are so many stories in the OT that are similar in the sense that one can reasonably ask if they were meant as teachings about literal historical occurrences.
“Does the Bible teach anything? Or is rather the case that God teaches through the Bible? It is the latter, I would say.”
I agree that it is the latter. I suppose that to say that the Bible teaches something is an informal or shorthand way of saying that God teaches through the Bible. Although I do sometimes wonder whether or not some folks confuse the Bible with God.
I wonder about that too. There is THE WORD and there are the words of a human document which exists in many translations, and in each of these translations, in many versions. The Word is One, since God is One, but the words are many across all the different translations and versions. The translations are many, and the versions of each translation are many. On the immanent plane — which is where we reside — there is a multiplicity of manifolds. It ought to be blindingly evident that the Word cannot be identical to any human document or the whole lot of them taken together.
There are several other arguments one could give for the non-identity of Word and words. For example, the WORD is a necessary being, but both the divine revealing process and the book in which this revelation can be read are contingent.
So God, the Impeccable Transmitter, communicates a message to multiply-flawed human receivers who encode the message in their human-all-too-human languages, a message, moreoever, that is filtered through and mediated by their shallow pates.
So how could anyone think that the pure signal is being received with no admixture of noise?
Could there be an Immaculate Transmission whose signal-to-noise ratio is 100% pure signal? No. So what should we say? That the Bible “in the originals” is verbatim the inerrant Word of God by some sort of miracle? Is there Immaculate Transmission that is as miraculous as the alleged Immaculate Conception?
Bill, you wrote: “This also touches on the problem of superstition and how it differs from genuine religion.”
Yes, this is a significant problem. Book Four of Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone is helpful. There, Kant discusses genuine religion and deals with forms of “pseudo-service” such as superstition, religious fanaticism, religious lip-service, fetishism, priestcraft, etc.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), P. 72:
Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.
Glaube (faith) and Aberglaube (superstition) are, says Wittgenstein, entirely different. I agree. It follows that religion cannot be a species of superstition. It is not as if the genus superstition divides into religious and nonreligious species. And as Aberglaube suggests, superstition is a degenerate form of faith.
But is it true that superstition arises from fear while religious faith does not arise from fear but is a kind of trust? I don’t think so. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10) A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith. So arising out of fear cannot be what distinguishes religious faith from superstition. It is worth noting that Wittgenstein himself believed and feared that he would be judged by God. He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs. In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,
God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them.” (CV, p. 87)
Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.
I agree that “arising out of fear cannot be what distinguishes religious faith from superstition.”
I think Kant is on the right track. At least part of what distinguishes religious faith from superstition is a matter of one’s motives. Religious faith involves a genuine commitment to and practice of living a morally good life. Superstition involves trying to use non-moral means (petitionary prayers, churchgoing, hymn-singing, ritual behaviors) to inveigle God’s favor without making any moral commitment.
What Kant seems to have in mind is sometimes called the “vending machine” approach to religious faith. The confused devotee puts his tokens (religious rituals such as religious or doctrinal chatter, church attendance, singing, baptism, pilgrimage, scripture reading) into the vending machine (God) which automatically spits out what he wants, such as a candy bar (God’s favor for, say, a new car or a ticket to heaven after death).
Kant (pp. 94-97):
“I take the following proposition to be a principle requiring no proof: Anything other than good life-conduct that a man supposes that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious illusion and pseudo-service of God…
“If a man departs at all from the above maxim, there are no limits to how much further the pseudo-service of God (superstition) may take him … He offers everything to God, from lip-service, which costs him the least, to the donation of earthly goods that might better be used for the advantage of mankind, and even to the offering up of his own person, becoming lost to the world (as a hermit, fakir, or monk) — everything except his moral disposition; and when he says that he also gives his ‘heart’ to God he is talking not about the disposition to live in a manner well-pleasing to God but the heartfelt wish that those offerings may be accepted in place of that disposition. . . . they are all deviations from the one and only intellectual principle of genuine respect for God. Whether the devotee goes regularly to church, or undertakes a pilgrimage to the sanctuaries in Loreto or in Palestine; whether he brings his formulas of prayer to the court of Heaven with his lips, or by means of a prayer-wheel as the Tibetans do, it is all one, all equal in value, all a worthless substitute for the moral service of God…
“The illusion of being able to move towards justifying ourselves before God through religious acts of worship is religious superstition… It is a superstitious illusion to try to become well-pleasing to God through actions that anyone can perform without being a good man.”
(Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Ch. 4)
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1793.pdf
“Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting.”
It’s not easy to see what Wittgenstein had in mind, since the passage is aphoristic and doesn’t include any elaboration. Maybe he’s not far from Kant. Perhaps the difference between religious faith and superstition comes down to one’s motives. The fearful superstitious person is motivated by fear. Hence, he engages in non-moral rituals to please God for the sake of avoiding fear (or avoiding the intentional object of his fear). The person of religious faith, though he might experience fear, also makes a genuine commitment to the moral life and does not attempt to use God as a means of avoiding fear.
I wonder about that too. There is THE WORD and there are the words of a human document which exists in many translations, and in each of these translations, in many versions. The Word is One, since God is One, but the words are many across all the different translations and versions. The translations are many, and the versions of each translation are many. On the immanent plane — which is where we reside — there is a multiplicity of manifolds. It ought to be blindingly evident that the Word cannot be identical to any human document or the whole lot of them taken together.
There are several other arguments one could give for the non-identity of Word and words. For example, the WORD is a necessary being, but both the divine revealing process and the book in which this revelation can be read are contingent.
So God, the Impeccable Transmitter, communicates a message to multiply-flawed human receivers who encode the message in their human-all-too-human languages, a message, moreoever, that is filtered through and mediated by their shallow pates.
So how could anyone think that the pure signal is being received with no admixture of noise?
Could there be an Immaculate Transmission whose signal-to-noise ratio is 100% pure signal? No. So what should we say? That the Bible “in the originals” is verbatim the inerrant Word of God by some sort of miracle? Is there Immaculate Transmission that is as miraculous as the alleged Immaculate Conception?