That is the question posed by Richard Dawkins in his recent debate with Rowan Williams in Oxford. As far as Dawkins can see, there is no point in reading a text whose 'explanations' have been superseded by superior modern discoveries. You can see the whole debate here and it's well worth a look. It's a much more irenic exchange than most of those involving Prof Dawkins and is genuinely inquiring about the question of the origin of consciousness (much more interesting than the fixation Dawkins has with 'design' and he's far less clear cut in his response). I don't really understand his point about the Bible. For most of us, and for most of history, Christians have not understood the Bible as a literal source of 'scientific' knowledge but as a text through which we come to know God. You don't read Darwin to learn how to cook and you don't read the Bible to understand evolution.
But there's a more interesting mistake that Dawkins makes about how Christians use the Bible. [As an aside, please forgive me for referring to Richard Dawkins yet again. I do so because he seems to me to be an interesting barometer for how people in this part of the world at this point in history misunderstand religion. And I include many religious people in that.] In his recent survey of the 'beliefs' of people who self-define as Christian, he asked how often they read the Bible on their own, as if this was a more reliable indicator of religiosity than hearing it in church. Again, a bit of history will go a long way here. It is only in the recent past that the majority of people began to read the Bible on their own and, for many Christians, it is far more important that the Bible is read in communion and in continuity with the community within which it arose and within which it has been read and reread - the Church.
As I have suggested many times before, we always read texts like the Bible with a considerable history of interpretation behind us. We are reading the multiple interpretations as much as we are reading the text itself. let me give an example. I'm preparing a sermon for Sunday focusing on the strange and awful text of Genesis 22 which describes the 'binding of Isaac'. To make sense of this story, I have referred to modern writings about the place of Mt Moriah in the imagination of Jews and Muslims, to Kierkegaard's famous thought experiment on the story (Fear and Trembling), to the depictions on canvas of the moment of almost-sacrifice by Caravaggio and Rembrandt, to a modern reflection on these paintings, to a 20th Century Jewish commentary on the text, to the original Hebrew of the story, to a modern work on the place of mountains in human imagination and to my pastoral practice in a cancer hospital. On top of that, I have read the story alongside the Gospel narrative with which it is paired - Mark's account of the Transfiguration - and the representation of that story in Eastern iconography. Of course, not all of this will find its way into a sermon of little over 1000 words, but whether we acknowledge it or not, this history of interpretation by real communities of people struggling to make sense of life makes our reading infinitely rich and fecund.
Karen Armstrong makes the case strongly in The Case for God that we cannot think of religious texts and religious insights separately from the lived experience of communities of practice. We read these texts together within the context of worship, ritual and compassionate practice. They don't sit on our shelves like reference books. We make judgements about the relative prominence given to the texts based on that history of reflection while never being dismissive of the possibility that our judgements often need to be adjusted in the light of experience. Alongside the Bible, a wonderful example of this is the Rule of St Benedict, which still guides the life of nuns and monks across the world after 14 centuries of lived experience. It would be foolish to suppose that this little piece of Wisdom literature is read and practised in exactly the same way now as it was at the time of its writing, but it would be equally foolish to ignore the real continuities of practice and insight.
We bother with the Bible because others have done so before us, because others do so with us and because this collective bothering has yeilded hard-won insights into the mysteries of human life.
I'd like to offer a reflection from another Richard, Ricjhard Rohr, the radical American Franciscan. I think he says all of this much better than I can:
How can we look at the Biblical text in a manner that will convert us or change us? I am going to define the Bible in a new way for some of you.The Bible is an honest conversation with humanity about where power really is. All spiritual texts, including the Bible, are books whose primary focus lies outside of themselves, in the Holy Mystery. The Bible is to illuminate your human experience through struggling with it. It is not a substitute for human experience. It is an invitation into the struggle itself—you are supposed to be bothered by some of the texts. Human beings come to consciousness by struggle, and most especially struggle with God and sacred texts. We largely remain unconscious if we avoid all conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes, inconsistencies, or contradictions.
The Bible is a book filled with conflicts and paradoxes and historical inaccuracies. It is filled with contradictions and it is precisely in learning to struggle with these seeming paradoxes that we grow up—not by avoiding them with a glib one-sentence answer that a 16-year-old can memorize. If I had settled for the mostly one-line answers to everything from my Fr. McGuire’s Baltimore Catechism, my spiritual journey would have been over in the third grade. And for many people, otherwise educated in other fields, that is exactly what happened. We created people with quick answers instead of humble searchers for God and truth, which never just falls into your lap, but is only given as a gift to those who really want it and desire it.
I was sent by a buddy who told me I would be thinking about reading this article. She was correct. This is truly great original material with which I agree.
Posted by: acne | 05/05/2013 at 06:53 AM