My friend Rob published two blog posts about something I’ve been interested in for a while, Progressive revelation. In Henry Virkler’s Herrmeneutics he discusses a theological model of bibliccal interpretation called the epigenetic (or organic) model. This model views the development of scripture as something akin to a tree, which is always complete and yet still growing. I think the approach that Rob has taken to interpreting and understanding scripture (though I don’t know that he would call it that anymore) in which culture is considered to be a vehicle for divine inspiration.
I’m sure that to some people this makes things impossible. Emphasizing, or even bringing up, the influence of human involvement is bad news for inerrancy. The input of fallible human culture completely undercuts the possibility of a perfectly factual scripture. In which case we have to go back to the drawing board and reexamine the things that we think because they just can’t be. I had to do that when I read William G Dever’s book about early Israel. In it he points out that the archaeological evidence throughout Israel points to a proto-Israel that emerged from the indigenous population of Canaan. This means that the facts of history do not comport with the narrative of scripture.
Before this point I was already interested in progressive revelation, and afterward I found it much easier to view the development of scripture as an organic process. It seems to me that the development of scripture over time was a glacially slow process that involved several different cults bringing their disparate theological views into the biblical cannon until eventually we end up with what we have today.
It is important to avoid ethnocentric understandings of scripture. This is especially the case when we deal with taking our interpretations and developing some product of theological significance. Rob refers to “nostalgia” being a roadblock to our properly understanding a divinely inspired and historically shaped document. I think this happens because when nostalgia replaces actually attempts to read scripture as an historical document that was produced over a period of time throughout several functioning cultures it serves as a kind of shell game in which the culture in which the nostalgic person lives forces out the culture that ought to be the subject. So the fundamentalist who thinks they’re staying true to the people who wrote the Bible is actually supplanting that culture for his or her own.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
Anglopressy 