(Please note:
These are rough notes for a lecture, and should not be reproduced or
otherwise used verbatim.)
The idea that God’s will can be directly revealed through
scripture is an extremely dangerous one. It is an idea that has lead to the
deaths of countless people, not just within the Christian religion, but also
through Judaism and Islam.
Many religious fanatics, in carrying out acts of terror,
justify their actions on the basis of scripture, quoting verses from the Bible,
the Jewish Scriptures or the Qur’an. (On the basis of biblical claims, the
ancient land of Palestine has become a battlefield many times, and is still a
running sore of hate and resentment. Websites show Muslim terrorists reciting
verses from the Qur’an before beheading their hostages. On the relative
authority of Church and Scripture, Europe has been torn apart by wars of
religion, that have lead to the deaths of thousands. On the authority of
scripture, witches and others have been tortured and burned to death. On the
basis of scripture, crusades have been launched.)
In the argument between religious and secular thinkers, the
authority of the scriptures is a key issue, for if scripture provides a direct
revelation of God’s will, it will take priority – for the religious person –
over human reason.
This has ethical implications. A religious person, acting on
the basis of the authority of scripture, may do something that would be deemed
wrong on the basis of a secular ethical argument – e.g. utilitarianism or virtue
ethics. But the religious conviction is such that, in the name of God, or
Allah, things can be done that would be impossible to justify if done on purely
human authority. We need to examine this…
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What does it mean to claim that God
is revealed through scriptures?
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Can that claim be justified
rationally?
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What is it that makes scriptures so
important for believers?
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What is ‘revelation’ anyway? How
does it relate to religious experience?
Let me take an extreme example. The book of Deuteronomy
claims to set out the laws that God gave, via Moses, to the Children of Israel
at the point at which they are to come into the Promised Land. He makes a
careful distinction between the treatment of cities that are distant and those
that are part of the land that they are to live in. Let’s consider the distant
ones first… (Deuteronomy 20: v 10 onwards)
‘When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer
of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be
subject to forced labour and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace
and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God
delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the
women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take
these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God
gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that
are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is
giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.
Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites,
Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you.’
Here we have Divine authority for both ethnic cleansing, the
mass killing of men and the systematic enslavement of women and children, and –
of those whose cities were to be taken over – genocide. And the reason –
because the people of the cities followed the wrong religion, and contact with
them might corrupt the Children of Israel.
Rabbinic tradition sanitised the text, by suggesting that the
commands should not be taken literally, or military force used against those of
other faiths. Similarly, most Christians and Muslims – would argue that one
should not take everything in their scriptures literally.
The fundamental problem, however, is this:
IF you believe that the scriptures are revelation - the words
of God – then it is difficult to know how you should decide which bits to take
literally and which not. IF it is all equally valid as revelation, then
Deuteronomy gives you a mandate for genocide.
BUT, IF you want to avoid that, you have to find some meaning
of ‘Revelation’ that is compatible with human reason and ethics, and which is
able to embrace all scripture as somehow relevant to what people take to be the
key features of their religion.
And the danger is that different people interpret scriptures
differently – and yet (through the idea of Revelation) claim Divine authority
for what they do. Hence my statement at the beginning that this is one of the
most dangerous and important issues in the world today. For there are many
fanatics who might seek to justify what they do through scriptures and the idea
of Revelation.
What authority does scripture have?
Suppose something is revealed, what then?
The following is from Thomas Paine (1737-1809) – best known
for his political work ‘The Rights of Man’. He believed in God, but was very
suspicious of revelation:
‘Every national Church or religion has established itself by
pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals.
The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and
saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every
man alike.
‘Each of those Churches show certain books which they call
revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say that their word of God was given by
God to Moses face to face; the Christians say that their word of God came be
divine inspiration; and the Turks say that their word of God (the Koran) was
brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those Churches accuses the other of
unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
‘As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will,
before I proceed further into the subject, offer some observations on the word
revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something
communicated immediately from God to man.
‘No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to
make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case,
that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any
other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second
person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a
revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and
hearsay to every other; and consequently they are not obliged to believe
it.’
(from The Age of Reason, Part I)
In other words, whatever might have been the case for the
person who originally received it, if anything is revelation, it does not
preclude us from examining any accounts of it with the same seriousness and
critical eye that we should apply to any other document. And – following the
philosopher Hume – we should proportion our belief to the evidence we have for
it. The more unlikely the event that comes to us as a revelation through
scripture, the more likely we are to assume that the account was wrong, and has
either been exaggerated, or misreported, or misunderstood, or whatever.
[To fall in love is one thing, to read and believe accounts
of falling in love is quite another – as any frustrated romantic can testify.]
But revelation ends up as scripture, so let us look at the
nature of religious language.
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The Logical Positivists argued that
language was only meaningful if it could be justified with reference to
evidence, taking scientific language as the model. On this basis, scripture
cannot be revelatory, because there can be no direct evidence of God. (God
is a word that appears in scripture, and which gives authority to scripture
– but that authority is internal to the text, unless you can give some
evidence for God independent of the text. It’s rather like a notice ‘No
tipping of rubbish’ by order of the Council. You are entitled to ask What
Council? And unless you can point to the local borough council and its
officers, who have responsibility for keeping an area clean, the ‘by order’
makes no sense, and carries no authority. ‘By order of God’ only makes
sense in the context of belief in God – and (said the logical positivists)
that is something for which we have no evidence.)
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The later work of Wittgenstein
showed that language gains its meaning through its use (language being like
the rules of a game that people play). On this basis, the authority of
language is the authority of the community of people who use it. The
authority of scripture cannot therefore go beyond the authority of its
writers and the religious experience and community they represent. On that
basis, it is revelation because the religious community that preserve those
scriptures have decided that, for them, it is revelation. Again, to break
out of that closed loop, you need some sort of external guarantee of the
existence of God.
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Once you move into the realm of
analogy, symbol and myth as a way of explaining religious language, you have
then to ask what it means to say that something is revelation and also myth
– does this image, this story, claim to point towards the nature of God?
Someone may be convinced that it does, but where does that conviction come
from? Clearly, it cannot come from the story itself – ‘I believe in it
because it tells me I should believe in it’ makes little sense. The
conviction that a symbol, myth, or analogy works and ‘reveals’ something of
God, can only make sense if the person claiming it has his or her own
personal understanding or experience of what he or she means by God. If you
don’t know anything about God, how can you claim that something is a symbol
or an analogy?
What authority can such religious experience have?
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For the person who is convinced
that he or she has had a direct or indirect experience of God, the authority
is absolute. If it were not, that person would not believe that it
was God they had encountered.
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For a person reading or hearing an
account of that religious experience, its authority depends on two things:
the trustworthiness of the person concerned; the degree to which what is
‘revealed’ in that experience agrees with a person’s own convictions and
understanding of the world.
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Religion has generally invoked both
of these. It has argued that the religious authorities should be obeyed, and
has punished those who challenged them. It has also presented rational
arguments to justify its beliefs.
What can be ‘revealed’ in a religious experience?
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Schleiermacher described the
consciousness of a religious person as ‘sense and taste for the infinite.’
It is seeing the whole in and through the particular; seing the eternal in
and through the changing moment.
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Otto highlighted the weird feelings
when confronted with something that horrifies or threatens us. Religious
experience is an encounter with the ‘numinous.’
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Buber pointed to the personal nature
of religious encounter. It is as if we are encountering a universal ‘thou’,
not some impersonal element.
How can these experiences – of the infinite, the terrifying
and the personal – translate into words?
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Literal language is inadequate to
describe God.
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Analogy gets closer to what is
needed, since the literal term (e.g. wise) which normally applies to limited
things, is modified (e.g. infinite) when applied to God.
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Symbols are self-transcending: they
point beyond themselves, and mediate the power of that to which they point
(Paul Tillich)
The process of writing scripture
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Some believe that every word of
scripture is directly given by God. That is a belief that is used to
interpret scripture; it is not a conclusion from the study of scripture.
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Muslims believe that the words of
the Qur’an were given directly to Muhammad to recite, and are therefore free
from error and from literary criticism.
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In the case of the Jewish and
Christian scriptures, Biblical study shows the way in which a variety of
texts, often from different periods, have been put together (Source
Criticism), and that the original context in which a piece of text was used
(in worship, in teaching) shaped the way in was written down (Form
Criticism). The finished result is far from simple, and needs careful study
to appreciate how it came to its final form.
So, from the standpoint of academic study, we need to
recognise that it is not enough, looking at scripture, to consider particular
words, as though they appeared out of nowhere. They have a history – their
meaning and context are important; we would be unwise to take them literally,
and out of context. That context – including the general views and attitudes of
people at that time – needs to be taken into account.
IF you want to argue that scripture reveals God’s will, then
you have to decise whether that overrules the human elements in the way that the
scripture was put together. If you believe in God, you need to ask yourself – Is
the God I believe in one who works in and through human beings, or is he (or
she) known through things done independently of human action? If through human
beings, then why not accept that the falibility of those human beings influences
what is known of God? If not, then you have the problem of defining what you
mean by God and by his or her actions. For if these cannot be things in which
humans are involved, or for which a natural explanation can be given, then much
of what presently passes for God’s action (as presented by the world’s
monotheistic religions) can be discounted. You are left with what is known as
‘the god of the gaps’ – namely a God that only appears to do what nobody else is
doing, or to give an explanation for what has no other explanation. And that
view is unpopular with religious believers, who want to see God’s actions
everywhere.
So you have a fundamental problem with the idea of revelation
through scripture, which does not take into account the human elements in
putting that scripture together.
But there is a final problem that the idea of revelation has
to face…
If God is eternal, infinite etc, he cannot be accurately
presented in a form of words. The attempt to take words themselves and treat
them with absolute authority is therefore a form of idolatry, exactly as
it would be idolatry to take a religious image and to worship it as if it were
God himself.
We therefore need to distinguish between the literal words
used, and the insight that those words try to convey. The former may lead to
idolatry; the latter may be sensitive to religious experience. Many would argue
that God cannot be described literally, and the scriptures cannot therefore be
revelatory if taken literally.
But sadly, as religious fanatics throughout the centuries and
even today prove, it is the ability to take scripture literally that enables it
to justify their actions.
Revelation through scriptures is therefore not a safe and
rather introverted topic at A- level, of interest mainly to the most
traditionally religious, it is key to some of the most wonderful and horrific
acts that people have ever engaged in.
Scripture has inspired acts of selfless devotion and heroism.
Scripture has also been used to justify the darkest horrors. Where you stand on
this issue is crucial.
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