In Chapter 3, Borg posits that a plurality of meaning exists for any given biblical text given its metaphorical nature.Here I will explore why I disagree with his approach.The reasons for multiplicity of meaning seem to be entirely founded on what associations a text brings forth for any given reader.Borg acknowledges to some degree the historical context for meaning, which implicitly acknowledges the author, but there is very little emphasis on this.
I think the starting point for thinking through this issue is that the author’s intention in some sense determines the meaning of a text (very few would disagree with this first point).Thus, in writing what he did, the author intended something by it.The reader, however, is a bystander to this intention to some degree or another, that is, he takes no creative role in the text in question.If that’s true, then there must be at least some distinction made between meaning as based on the author and meaning as based on the reader.It’s worth noting here that the word “meaning” has considerable semantic range.The author’s “meaning” has a will or intent behind it in creating the text – we talk about what the author meant, whereas the reader’s “meaning” comes from the text entering his world or horizon and his realm of experience interacts with the text, thus creating significance for the reader.The reader’s meaning can be similar to what one’s first car can mean, or a painting, or rainbows, or art deco.This links to some significant experience or reference point on some level for the reader.Of course, formally the text has significance for the author just that it’s restricted by the will or intent of the author at the time of creating it, and so it is significant in a different sense.
The reader, however, does not have that inherent restriction since he’s not the creator but the receiver of what’s been created.The text naturally “invokes” any number of significances to the reader based on the range of overlap between the text and its context and the experience or understanding of the reader.The reader has to will to control these invoked significances (associations) if he cares to understand the intent of the author in the text.The responsibility of the reader then is to restrict and/or bend the associations that are invoked within his whole experiential range to line up with the sector of the author’s world which informed his intent in the text.In short, the reader aligns his own understanding as best as he can with the context of the text.
What happens frequently, however, is that the reader has any number of blinders on.These can be natural ones like differences in the historical and cultural worlds of the reader and author.But oftentimes, especially with “sacred” texts – texts of significant import in our lives, the reader has an agenda.The reader can establish an important (to him/herself) connection/association between the text and experience/understanding apart from anything the author intended when there is no concern, will, or desire to keep the agenda in check.
Where we end up is the morality issue, stated in the last post, of whether or not the reader is concerned with what the author/creator of the text intended.(That, in turn, leads to requiring faith/trust in the God who ultimately created his Word when it comes to understanding his word.)Thus a moral hermeneutic is required to transcend part of the wall to understanding an author’s intent.
So, while it is true, as Borg states, that various parts of the bible have been read by Christians numerous ways at numerous times, the combination of historical cultural distance and lack of concern for the author’s intent is sufficient to explain the reason why.The intent of the author still stands whether we choose to ignore it or not.By not ignoring it, we can strive to merge our horizon of understanding with that of the author’s, and at least begin to understand and begin to understand sufficiently.
This does not mean there is no need to find what the text means for us since we understand that the bible is no less from God than man.But there is no reason to rely, as Borg does, on the reader to find the fullness of meaning in the bible.Is there then, a plurality of meaning to be found in any given passage?Only if intended by the author, whether God or man.
In Chapter 2, Borg rightly seeks to understand the nature of the bible in order to understand how to read it; certainly a critical aspect of this is understanding the historical origins of the bible.Rightly, Borg points out that the bible is a product of particular communities.Whatever the bible is, it is certainly not less than a product of particular human communities within cultural and sociological confines.Sadly, in evaluating its divine origins, Borg can’t seem to be able to maintain a both/and and opts for an either/or.It’s either human or divine, and it can’t be divine so it must be human.At least Borg anticipates an objection to his disjunctive thinking.
However, his argument falters on being limited to his own subjective experience.People who affirm that all of Scripture is both, in his experience, tend to separate Scripture out between the “human” parts and the “divine”.Quite naturally, those “divine” parts end up being those that simply affirm the doctrines of the community (so I take Borg to be saying).Well, I’ll certainly agree that this is a problem, and such practice is endemic to humanity beyond religious bounds, but perhaps Borg hasn’t experienced any who do comfortably, in theory and in practice, hold that the bible is 100% human and divine without seeing the tension as an obstacle for understanding.More charitably, Borg has probably read or experienced those who see it as both/and, yet made a judgment that their understanding was based simply on subjecting the “hard parts” to the “human” and what they agreed with to the “divine”.So then, does the fact that people have problems making it 100% both/and determine whether or not it’s true?This is an error in psychologizing.Maybe there’s merely a shortcoming in understanding how the human/divine go together or merely a lack of care in praxis while what they believe to be true really is true.
The issue is that the bible itself makes astonishing claims about itself that the words that it speaks (speech-acts) are no less divine than they are human.Of course, we don’t want to err on the side of divine dictation, where the bible merely consists of God, whether literally or metaphorically, speaking in someone’s ear and that person dictating or writing it out (though that may be true of some scripture).Rather, as a product within history, the bible claims, implicitly and explicitly, that Creator God himself has acted within history and has acted to have witness to his acts faithfully recorded.This recording claims to be so faithful as to be “inerrant” in conveying what God has said and done.I will not go into supporting the claims of the bible as this would take a whole other post, but note the standard 2 Timothy 3:16 and also 2 Peter 1:16-21.The authority with which the Scriptures (implicitly) demand such trust in its faithfulness is laced throughout.
But there’s a problem.What if such claims are simply a part of the “metaphor” of the community and simply intended to affirm faithfulness to itself?What if this way of putting things really is just the human community trying to exercise its own authority in the midst of historical trials/circumstances, etc.?Then it doesn’t simply do to say “the bible says it this way”, does it?As Borg lays out in Chapter 3, we shouldn’t ignore the historical context nor ignore the fact that the bible is not just simply historiography but paints a picture of how the people of that community see (for Borg, experience) God and thus themselves and the world they live in.
However, I think Borg draws categories which are too restrictive:
Concerning historical context, it is one thing to note that historical meaning is found in historical context, but some speech-acts point beyond the historical circumstance to declare a truth value intended to transcend the situation.Sometimes, saying that the historical meaning is found in its historical context ends up over-psychologizing the statement or not understanding the type of statement given.Take Exodus 34:5-7 for example:
“The LORD descended in a cloud and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the LORD.The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”
Over-psychologizing can look at the historical context and claim that the author who wrote this did so (merely) out of the fact that a marvelous feat had been accomplished when the Israelite people escaped Egypt.One might conclude that therefore the claims about God are ways of expressing the way the people experienced God in this instance and expressing consequences for not adhering to their way of seeing God.Thus, it is limited in its scope to this circumstance and not intended to be an absolute truth claim (or at least shouldn’t be taken as one).This is similar in many ways to Borg’s approach for Mark 13 in Chapter 8 of the book where we are to read it in light of the war-time mentality in the aftermath of the Romans destroying the temple.
Yet this is very slippery.Perhaps this is an instance where the reality really did point to some absolute truth, yet the approach of has determined a priori that it must be false as an absolute and so must be only true in relative terms.Perhaps even looking at it this way is a product of our own historical circumstances (to be consistent) and so we still haven’t gotten any closer in understanding.This is tied closely with simply not recognizing the type of statement.It is popular these days to see the bible as simply (or at least mostly) narrative and so we put on our “narrative” glasses and read it that way.Well, while that’s in many ways true, statements like the Exodus one above transcend narrative within the narrative.It makes an assertion or proposition about who Yahweh is.Thus it demands acceptance or rejection, not simply within the narrative but in and of itself.We can rationalize the circumstance that brought it about but that doesn’t reckon with what the author asserted in writing it.
This leads into considering Borg’s second strand of approaching the bible, the metaphorical approach.Borg wants us to recognize that ancient communities, like the ones that produced the bible, often metaphorized their history and often used this to invest their stories with meaning.This is no doubt accurate for many ancient communities and it is certainly very important to recognize that biblical narrative certainly is more than just history, but is used to make theological points.
But this is insufficient for a couple of reasons: First, it is recognized by some these days that many in Jesus’ and Paul’s day were very concerned with the factuality of the historicity of accounts, just as one criterion for canon for early church fathers was that it was in some way directly related to an eyewitness.So such a blanket statement would be recognized by some as considerably off.Secondly, and more fundamentally, there is a critical moral element in all this, a moral element to understanding and a moral element to “telling it like it is”.One can either proclaim one’s worldview with respect to a faithfully portrayed history, or one can proclaim one’s worldview with considerable disregard for the way it really happened.This directly ties in with the eyewitness concerns that are very prevalent in the bible (both implicitly and explicitly), especially in comparison to many other worldviews.
The crux of the whole thing is that one’s worldview is fundamental.Why would one be concerned with faithful historical accounting?If a people/community understood that God really has acted in history, that this has been fairly witnessed, that God really is the righteous Creator God who stands in judgment against our sin, and that as a result we will all be judged accordingly, then there would be high reason for faithful reporting of what God has said and done.Douglas Stuart says it well in discussing the historicity of Jonah,
“If the events described … actually happened, the audience’s existential identification with the characters and circumstances is invariably heightened.People act more surely upon what they believe to be true in fact, than merely what they consider likely in theory …. If this is the way God works in history … it is not simply a narrator’s desire, it is God’s enforceable revelation.”
This is directly related to Borg’s methodology of determining the metaphorical level of a given passage of scripture; in particular, “the limits of the spectacular”.He asks, “Are there some things that never happen anywhere?”But I’d ask, “How do you know they never happened?” To anticipate the present tense of his question, I’d also ask, “Does the fact that it doesn’t happen now mean it’s never happened?”First, this reminds me of a pithy Lord of the Rings quote.In reference to the history of the ring, the narrator towards the beginning of the first movie says, “History became legend, legend became myth … and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.”Along more biblical lines, how unreasonable is it to suppose that if God really has acted specifically in history that such wonders didn’t actually occur, especially in order to affirm that God really was acting.To assume they didn’t assumes that God hasn’t acted as the biblical authors proclaim.Moreover, this makes man the final arbiter of what has and hasn’t happened.Why should this be?
In the end, who’s to determine whether only parts of it are divine, or whether all or none of it is?Who’s to determine whether what the bible portrays really happened?What’s required for understanding is simply faith.That is, faith in what God has said and done.In an essay by D.A. Carson, a couple of thoughts say it well:
1)We cannot understand the bible without presupposing the God of the Bible, that is, of to some degree having the same view as the bible concerning God, human beings, sin, and what God has done and is doing to remedy the problem of sin.We cannot know God without God first disclosing himself to us.
2) We do not know independently.For God to structure his revelation to accommodate such a desire would be to foster the sin/idolatry in attempting to be like God, which the gospel frees us from.His self-disclosure is sufficiently clear to those who walk by faith.What is required is humility seeking godliness in order to grow in our understanding of God who says “This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2).
While Borg has some good points, I find myself in considerable disagreement in many places.
1) History of Inerrancy.Borg makes a sweeping claim in Chapter 1 backed by some fairly accurate but incomplete, and thus misleading, claims of the history of reading the bible.That the idea that the bible was actually infallible didn’t exist until after the Reformation is broadly mistaken.It may be true that infallibility as a doctrine wasn’t developed before then, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist as an idea for before then as it was hardly an issue.Doctrines develop out of pre-existing concepts.Given the pressures of many heresies in the second, third, and fourth centuries such as Gnosticism, there was certainly considerable emphasis in the Orthodox community on the faithfulness of the Scriptures to what it claimed to have been witness.And this certainly goes back to the New Testament itself (John , , 1 Timothy 1:3, Galatians 1:6-7, 2 Peter -21).No doubt Borg would disagree with my suppositions concerning orthodoxy in the early church and the scripture quotes, but this depends on a critical flaw I will get to later.Moreover, though it was the case for a long time that only a few could read the scriptures, it was not that way in the beginning.True, they didn’t always read per say but the letters were read and copied for reading considerably.Moreover, especially under the Christian Roman Empire, education and literacy were highly stressed for many Christians; and naturally the first thing to be read was the Holy Scriptures.
2) The development of the canon.Closely connected to the first point is Borg’s accounting of canonicity in Chapter 2.There is ample evidence, which I won’t put forward here, that there is a considerable distinction to be made between when/how something was determined to have canonical status and when/how the canon was determined to be closed.The evidence Borg (and many others) uses to determine when something was accorded a canonical status is quite precisely when the canon was determined to be closed and complete.This was due to various external pressures, like Gnosticism, which caused a need to reject other writings from a claimed canonical status.But there is considerable evidence, especially for the NT, that the biblical community accorded a canonical or authoritative status to many biblical works long before the canon was closed.One need only read Clement, Ignatius, or Justin Martyr, to name a few, and their use of NT documents to understand this point.Moreover, would a (significantly large, geographically vast, and diverse) community form a completed canon list without there being considerable precedence of the authoritative status of most of the works?To answer “Yes” would be a phenomenal claim.
3) The supremacy of world-views for governing ones reading of the bible.In chapter 1, Borg presents four cultural factors that require a replacement of the traditional way in which the bible is read.Yes, it is true that we have increased awareness of historical and cultural relativity (a subset being religious pluralism), and it’s true that we are in the throws of modernity and on the cusp of postmodernity, of which historical/cultural relativity is a subset.But why does one’s cultural stance become the standard of reading without criticizing any elements of that world view?Are all world views correct?In the very least we don’t know and it’s an amazing claim of knowledge to say that they’re all correct, even more than saying only your own is correct.Borg doesn’t quite claim that they’re all correct, but he does seem to indicate throughout the book that most every one is except the evangelical/fundamentalist one.(To be fair, there is some small critique of modernism.)The least one can do is critically evaluate any/all worldviews to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong with them (though, that would require a standard above ourselves … more on that later).
I feel a few points are required concerning his explanations of modernism and postmodernism.First, on my understanding, there are two major things missing from his characterizations of modernism.1) Modernity came into being when a shift occurred: where God or the gods used to be the “given”, now “man” is the “given”.Man becomes the center, and what is foundational to how one understands oneself and the surrounding world.God can still exist, but must be proven.2) What humans know becomes absolute (this follows naturally from the first point).That is, whatever humans know to be true, they know it exhaustively and without exception.To give an example, when Galileo made his discovery that the planets all rotate around the sun, the big deal was not simply that he proposed it, but that he claimed that it must be that way; instead of it merely being a possibility among many.If this is not sufficient example, just consider the way standard evolutionary theory is propounded as fact when in fact it is merely theory.
These shortcomings follow through in his understanding of postmodernity, the skeptical reaction to modernity.Again on my understanding, whereas modernism replaced the “given” of God/gods with man but left a god-like understanding, so postmodernism still has man at the center but man’s horizon of understanding shrinks to the size of man.Man is entirely his own limit of understanding (a natural consequence of modernism).What results is that whatever humans know to be true is really only true for them.This does not necessarily mean there is no absolute truth, only that humans can’t really know it.One’s horizon of understanding is so bound by one’s culture, language, historical circumstances, etc. – one’s community – that the truth that one sees is only true for one’s perspective.
All this means a few things with respect to Borg.1) Postmodernism according to these definitions means that Borg is a little off in saying that we are on the boundary of postmodernism.In fact in many ways the American culture is a mixture of modern and postmodern covering a wide spectrum.And the western world has been in postmodernism long enough to have parts of it already entering a post-postmodernism where we at minimum realize that society just can’t function without any understanding of absolute truth.We may not know absolutely but at least we know. 2) Given his strong emphasis throughout the book that we need a fresh reading of the bible based on the cultural world-views of our day, Borg is perhaps a bit more postmodern than “on the boundary” and comes across in this book as perhaps more postmodern than he admits.
I thought I’d take a break from the Borg series and insert some thoughts that developed while reading the book of Jonah, Chapter 2. Verses 2 through 9, per English bible versification (3 to 10 in Hebrew), are as follows:
2) I cried out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. 3) For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. 4) Then I said, “I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.” 5) The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head 6) at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit. O LORD my God. 7) When my life was fainting away, I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. 8) Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. 9) But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD! (ESV translation)
In Chapter 1 God calls Jonah to go to the pagan city of Nineveh, at that time a major city of the Assyrian Empire, and prophecy judgment on the city. Shockingly, to the narrative, Jonah actually flees from God, which no prophet did. This is the only recording in the OT canon of a prophet fleeing Yahweh. God, being God, pursues Jonah in wrath so that he is eventually thrown off the boat into a watery grave. Judgment is meted out to Jonah the rebel. But then, in God graciously sends a “large fish” to swallow Jonah thereby saving him from death. 2:2 to 2:9 is Jonah’s prayer to Yahweh.
In sharp contrast to Jonah the rebel are all the pagans in the book. To an unprecedented extent in narrative (that it is narrative is anomalous in the prophetic books) the pagans are portrayed as more righteous than (even) the Hebrew prophet. In 1:6 the pagan sailors prompt Jonah to call to his god, in they call out to Yahweh in their distress, and in they fear Yahweh and offer a sacrifice and vows to Yahweh. In 3:5-9 the wicked Ninevites immediately repent, from the least of them to the king, and call out to God in hopes of averting his wrath (already pre-displayed in dealings with Jonah).
In shocking display in , God actually “relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.” When, in Chapter 4, Jonah became exceedingly angry at this, God gives Jonah a living parable and the whole narrative abruptly ends with Yahweh explaining,
You pity the plant, for which you did not labor nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?
Now, I read Jonah 2 shortly after I had read the flood account in Genesis Chapters 6-8 in Hebrew. There is a word that caught my memory in Jonah 2:5 translated “the deep” or “the depth” in many translations, tehom, which shows up in Genesis 7:11 and 8:2 where “the deep” is the source of “the flood”, mabul. Mabul is a rarer word than tehom, appearing only 13 times in the Hebrew OT compared to 36 times for tehom. Moreover, 12 of the 13 appearances of mabul occur in Genesis 7 – 11 in direct reference to the flood of Noah. The only other occurrence is in Psalm 29:10, which possibly refers to the same thing. The mabul in Genesis is the instrument of God’s wrath and judgment on mankind (though, God provides a vessel of grace). Where mabul leaves off in Genesis, tehom picks up later on at times. I think an important link is made in Genesis where the tehom is opened thereby causing the mabul/flood of Noah.
The next occurrence of God’s destructive action by water is in Exodus 14 and 15. God has just led the Israelites out of Egypt. With the Egyptians in hot pursuit, God “pushes back” or “piles up” the tehom of the Red Sea in a major action of the total saving event by God. When the Egyptians pursue, God in judgment releases the tehom killing the Egyptians. Moses sings of this great redemptive act in Exodus 15. As tehom enjoys quite a spread across the OT, the word is picked up again and again in memory and celebration of God’s action with the tehom to save the Israelites and destroy the Egyptians – see Psalm 77:16, 106:9; Isaiah 51:10, 63:13. This theme of judgment plays out in evocative imagery elsewhere like Psalm 36:6 and a connected association with distress/anguish in Psalm 42.7, 107:24, 26; Ezekiel 31:15. Note especially Psalm 42:7 (and Psalm 88:6 -7) which is no doubt echoed in Jonah 2:3 in his distress and experience of God’s wrath/judgment. This matrix can be expanded if the Greek words used in the Septuagint translation are explored.
Thus, as those condemned during the days of Noah and during the Exodus experienced God’s wrath through waters of destruction, so Jonah in some significant sense experiences God’s wrath even, metaphorically, to the point of death (2:2, 5a, 6a). Yet, by God’s grace, Jonah experiences life out of death (2:6b). Jonah then goes on, despite his own will, to proclaim this same power of God’s judgment upon wicked pagans. Yet they are not destroyed, but repent and are spared God’s wrath and become an amazing display of God’s mercy ().
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Hundreds of years later, Jesus is prompted by some Jewish leaders for a sign (Matthew ), a sign to prove his authority (). Jesus replies:
An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. (Matthew 12:39-41)
The “sign of Jonah” is repeated in 16:4.
There is sufficient reason to understand the “sign of Jonah” in Matthew as referring to more than just the period of time Jesus will be dead. We first “meet” Jesus in chapter 3. John has been proclaiming the coming wrath and judgment of God and baptizing for repentance in light of such wrath. Jesus comes to be baptized with such a baptism but John protests, recognizing Jesus’ righteousness exceeds his own. Yet Jesus insists that it is necessary to fulfill all righteousness, that is, to fulfill God’s will (-15). In light of the end of the book, this is a subtle hint of his death to come. This theme is hit again in : “Whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” The immediate point is the extent to which loyalty to Jesus is required transcends our deepest and most cherished relationships. That’s all well and good, but those who haven’t read the end of Matthew yet ask, “Huh? Isn’t that a little much? Sure we’re supposed to follow him to whatever end and cost but why would the Messiah go to the cross, the place of God’s condemnation?” (See Deut. 21:23, Gal. 3:13.) This theme hits the ground running in right after the first time Jesus is explicitly acknowledged to be “the Christ, the Son of the living God.” is then repeated in . This culminates in chapter 27 when, in verse 43 Jesus the Christ really is on a cross and mocked, in stark irony for Matthew, “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him.” Soon after, the one who did trust in God from first to last cries out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” The ultimate curse; forsaken by God, his wrath poured out.
Yet on the third day, by Jewish reckoning, the Messiah finds life after death and one of the last things Matthew leaves us with, echoing with the end is “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” (28:18 – 19a) The authority given Jesus in life after death leads to a repentance of the Gentiles far surpassing anytime before. Two of the most major themes (if not the major) now merge as throughout the book Matthew has been preparing for this role of Jesus. Note the centurion in 8:5-13 with faith far surpassing any in Israel, the faith of a Canaanite woman in -28 and Jesus’ activity in Gentile country right afterwards in -39 (immediately followed by the second “sign of Jonah text”). Note the parable in -44 where the vineyard is taken from the Pharisees and given to a people (or “nation”, Greek: ethne, i.e. not the Jews). Lastly, note a passage right before the “sign of Jonah” text we started with (-41) where Matthew says:
This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom I am well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory; and in his name the Gentiles will hope. (12:17-21)
In Matthew’s narrative, this is followed by the authority of Jesus in setting up God’s kingdom; the reality and coming of a just judgment in which every word, whether good or bad, will be accounted for; and the “sign of Jonah” to a wicked generation as proof of his authority.
As Matthew says Jesus says, one “greater than Jonah is here.” As Jonah passed through “death” to life and brought grace and repentance to the Gentiles, so Jesus passed through death to life and didn’t just bring grace and repentance, but is the source of it by suffering God’s condemnation for many so that God could still be just while justifying the many (Rom. 3:26). In God’s story, Jonah points beyond to Jesus. Jesus is greater.
