Natalie's Narrative

Did Neandertals have the image of God?

A few months ago I shared why I can't believe that Adam and Eve literally existed.  One of the pre-modern-human species I mentioned were Neandertals, who are thought to be an evolutionary dead end.  Pinpointing a literal Adam and Eve after the Neandertals, or leaving their species out of those who would have the image of God, is problematic to me because Neandertals left flowers at burial sites.  They had some understanding of the meaning of death, so to consider them soulless is troublesome.

I recently discovered a great blog by Jim, a self-described "Christian, librarian, palaeoanthropologist, and evolutionary biologist with an all-consuming interest in apologetics and controversies in science and religion."  At Science and Religion: A View from an Evolutionary Creationist, Jim linked to an intriguing new finding on the Neandertals.  Researchers found that this species lived in house-like structures.  The report says: 

Researchers from the Museum National d'Histories Naturelle in Paris said it suggests the early human ancestors settled in areas where they built structures to live for extended periods of time.

The circular house was made up of 116 large bones, including mammoth skulls, jaws, 14 tusks and leg bones.

And inside at least 25 hearths filled with ash were also found, suggesting it had been used for some time, the Mail said.

Jim adds that the Neandertals "were every bit as intelligent as we are, just very environmentally-challenged."  This discovery complicates the notion that two individuals were suddenly infused with God's image.  That a group of not-quite-human beings had the capacity to build homes, albeit crude, makes a bright-line rule with regard to who has a soul seem arbitrary.  

 

Problems with the theory of inspiration

The next section in Chapter 7 of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible criticizes the deductive theory of inspiration.  Deductive reasoning starts with a theory, and then moves on to the observed object, which is the Bible in this case.  

Smith argues that evangelicals get into trouble when starting with the theory of inspiration, and describes the common logic:

(1) all scripture is in the biblical canon because it is inspired by God (per 2 Tim. 3:16–17);

(2) “inspiration” definitely means “plenary verbal” inspiration (every word and grammatical form is divinely inspired);

(3) since God does not err, tell falsehoods, or say useless things, everything in the Bible is not only inerrant but also meant to communicate divine truth, which readers must learn; and, therefore,

(4) in every statement the Bible, most often read in its “plainest” sense, communicates binding theological and moral truth.

Nowhere in Scripture is this model used to describe Scripture itself; inspiration is an external theory biblicists impose on the text.  And the point of 2 Timothy 3:16-17 was to describe Scripture's pastoral usefulness, not its factual correctness.

Similar to Timothy Beal's argument in The Rise and Fall of the Bible, which I discussed here, simply looking at the early church's concept of "the Bible" causes the doctrine of inspiration to collapse.  Early Christians had no concept of a closed canon, and passed around different versions of the authoritative version of Scripture until the final canon was determined in the late fourth century.

While most of what ended up in the New Testament canon had been written by the end of the first century, few communities had copies of all of these texts.  And, some texts many Christians considered scriptural weren't even included in the later official canon, while some texts considered non-scriptural ended up in the final canon.  Smith points out:

This means that the early Christian church lived without “the Bible” as we know it canonically for nearly four hundred years, even if many churches possessed copies of many of the documents that eventually went into the New Testament. That has big implications for the role of the church, the Holy Spirit, and the “rule of faith” in the function of scriptural authority for Christians.

Noting how the church has interpreted the Bible for the past 2,000 years is another aspect that pokes holes in the theory of inspiration.  Evangelicals have a tendency to be anti-traditionalist and to not lend as much credence to those who are not American (or, I would add, Western European).  Smith calls this tendency "foolish and arrogant."  We miss out on the benefit and insight of our predecessors.  

We have no reason to pretend to be "biblically or ecclesially self-sufficient" or feel superior to our predecessors and to non-Western believers.  Smith writes:

American evangelicals should pay much greater attention to how Christian believers read and interpret scripture in other parts of the world, across space, particularly perhaps in the Global South. “The church today must be open to listening to how other Christians from other cultures read Scripture and live it out in their daily lives” [quoting Peter Enns]. American evangelicals have already learned and can still learn a great deal from Christian believers outside their subculture and normal social networks.

Non-present-day and non-American interpretations won't always necessarily be better, but at least bucking this anti-traditionalist and ethnocentric trend will "reveal blind spots, challenge parochial views, offer insightful perspectives...and suggest helpful ways to resolve differences of understanding within the American evangelical world."

Not surprisingly, this is one of my favorite points of the book, because I believe the theory of inspiration aggrandizes the perspective of those who have the loudest voices when interpreting Scripture within North American evangelicalism.  When the Bible is read in its “plainest” sense, and thus communicates binding theological and moral truth, this truth often ends up reflecting the viewpoint of the most influential and loud interpreters, who are usually middle- to upper-class, white, straight males.  And a purportedly "plain" reading of Scripture disregards the cultures in which both the text and the reader are rooted.  

My intent is not to marginalize middle- to upper-class, white, straight males, but rather to recognize that the logic that undergirds the theory of inspiration may keep helpful alternative views from informing how we look at Scripture.  

When defending the Bible is a defense of collapsed modernism

The final chapter in Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible offers quite a lot to digest, so I plan on discussing it in more than one installment.  Titled "Rethinking Human Knowledge, Authority, and Understanding," this chapter provides more suggestions for moving toward a postbiblicist, yet still evangelical, reading of Scripture.

Smith first argues evangelicals must break from modernism's epistemology (how we know what we know).  That today's evangelicals equate the most correct reading of Scripture with modernist knowledge is ironic given that evangelicalism grew out of opposition to modernism, especially naturalism, liberalism, and relativism.  Evangelicals "have drunk deeply from some of the wells of modernity and the Enlightenment, yet in ways they often seem to fail to notice."

One such "well" is epistemological foundationalism, the belief that rational people can identify a common foundation from which we build a body of reliable knowledge.  The foundation on which this knowledge rests must withstand all challenges and be universally accessible to all rational beings, producing reliable knowledge without fail.  All those who think rationally, then, can access truth that is certain and universally binding.  

This epistemology has collapsed, but evangelicals still hold to it by making the Bible the foundation for certain knowledge.  "Without realizing it, evangelicals embraced a view of scripture that was more driven by [...] generally modern preoccupations with epistemic certainty than by scripture itself."  So, rather than using the Word to critique modernism, evangelicals fully ingested some aspects of modernist thinking and equated its epistemology with the Word itself.

But Smith points out that, as a corrective, evangelicals shouldn't fully embrace postmodernism.  Just because modernism's attempt to frame truth as certain, rational, and completely accesible has failed doesn't automatically mean that all truth claims are simply exercises of power.  

Smith claims there are alternatives, and one such alternative is called critical realism.  This view abandons foundationalist illusions,

acknowledges the conceptually mediated and fallible nature of all human knowledge, accounts for the influence of historical and cultural context, and [unlike much of biblicism] recognizes the inescapably hermeneutical, cultural-historical, and interpretive character of all knowledge[.]

Smith argues that critical realism "breaks the stalemate and enables both sides [modernists and postmodernists] to move forward," especially because the modernist-postmodernist debate often reinforces the binary between objective-subjective truth.  

Smith doesn't actually go into much more detail about critical realism, but conveniently enough, he recommends another of his books as a starting point: What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up.  Although I found the next part of this chapter helpful (a discussion of inspiration, authority, and the dynamic, always-developing nature of the Gospel), I'm sort of disappointed Smith didn't flesh out critical realism a little more.  That said, he emphasized earlier that the book's purpose wasn't necessarily to provide a comprehensive solution to biblicism's problems.

Has anyone read up on critical realism or have any other books that would be a good starting point?