Reading the Bible in Translation

Above: Elihu just can't hold it in anymore.

Quick: which of these Job 32:18 translations is not like the others?

1. For I am full of words; the spirit within me constrains me.
2. For I am full of words, and the spirit within me compels me.
3. For I am full of pent-up words, and the spirit within me urges me on.
4. For I am full of words, the wind in my belly constrains me.
5. For I am full of matter, the spirit within me constraineth me.

If you answered #5 because it's clearly less contemporary than the others, you're right, but that's not what I was going for! The correct answer is #4. Take another look. 

The key thing that #4 has and the others are lacking is the word "wind." All the others translate the same term as "spirit."* Both are valid translations of the Hebrew word רוח (ruach), but the translation in #4 has a leg up on the others, and I'll tell you why: it's the best translation for helping the reader understand what this verse really is—a joke!

(Background info on Job if you need it: the book of Job is a theological debate, framed before and after by a folk story about the characters doing the debating. The main character is Job, a fundamentally good man who loses all he has, including his health. His friends come to visit and, in a series of poetic speeches, tell him that he is suffering because he sinned. Job, also in poetic speeches, insists he is guiltless and demands that God explain why he, Job, has been punished when he's done nothing wrong. Surprisingly, God shows up in the end and tells Job that he has no right to ask the master and creator of the universe such questions, and then God gives Job all his stuff back. It would be a way less satisfying ending if the speeches God gives weren't such dang fine poetry!)

Job chapters 32 through 38 are the last speeches by any of Job's friends. Up to this point, the author has stacked the deck subtly in Job's favor by giving Job all the best, most creative, insightful, and beautiful poetry, while his friends are mostly stuck with rather bland platitudes and hoary cliches. The speeches in 32-38 come from the young man Elihu, and they're probably the worst of the bunch.

Verse 18 of chapter 32 is a joke at Elihu's expense by the author of the story. Elihu is trying to say that he's gotten so tired of waiting to speak that he's filled to the breaking point with things to say, but he accidentally calls himself a windbag in the process! (Check out also the next verse, which has another comparison to a bag full to bursting. Note that this joke may also be about farting.) In having Elihu say this thing that ironically discredits him as a know-nothing blowhard, the author clues us in to the fact that we're not really supposed to take Elihu's ideas very seriously. And translation #4 is the only one among these that lets the English-speaking reader in on the joke!

Translation #4 is by a literary scholar and Bible translator named Robert Alter. For the last two decades, Alter has been working on a translation of the Hebrew Bible that's really, really worth checking out if you don't already know about it.

The translation (with commentary) so far: Pentateuch, Psalms, Wisdom Books, and Deuteronomistic History

In introducing his translation, Alter points out that we live in an age of many, many Bible translations, founded by and large on detailed scholarship and very advanced understanding of Hebrew based on current archaeology and other fields of study. When asked, "why add another?" he claims that, "[b]roadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew" (The Five Books of Moses, pg. xvi).

Alter accuses his fellow Bible translators of falling into what he calls the "heresy of explanation."** Bible translators, he claims, seem to feel afraid to translate much of the idiomatic, metaphorical language of the Hebrew into its most literal English equivalents, perhaps out of fear that readers will get confused. Instead, they tend to create translations that explain what the metaphors probably mean. Trouble is, many of the Hebrew Bible's important literary qualities—allusion, motifs, and as we've already seen, humor and irony—are bound quite tightly to these idioms and metaphors. Heck, Alter explains it better than I do—here's one of his examples:

The Hebrew noun [זרע] zera‘ has the general meaning of “seed,” which can be applied either in the agricultural sense or to human beings, as the term for semen. By metaphorical extension, semen becomes the established designation for what it produces, progeny. Modern translators, evidently unwilling to trust the ability of adult readers to understand that “seed”—as regularly in the King James Version—may mean progeny, repeatedly render it as offspring, descendants, heirs, progeny, posterity. But I think there is convincing evidence in the texts themselves that the biblical writers never entirely forgot that their term for offspring also meant semen and had a precise equivalent in the vegetable world. To cite a distinctly physical example, when Onan “knew that the seed would not be his,” that is, the progeny of his brother’s widow should he impregnate her, “he would waste his seed on the ground, so to give no seed to his brother” (Genesis 38:9). Modern translators, despite their discomfort with body terms, can scarcely avoid the wasted “seed” here because without it the representation of spilling semen on the ground in coitus interrupts becomes unintelligible. E. A. Speiser substitutes “offspring” for “seed” at the end of the verse, however, and the Revised English Bible goes him one better by putting “offspring” at the beginning as well (“Onan knew that the offspring would not count as his”) and introducing “seed” in the middle as object of the verb “to spill” and scuttling back to the decorousness of “offspring” at the end—a prime instance of explanation under the guise of translation. But the biblical writer is referring to “seed” as much at the end of the verse as at the beginning. Onan adopts the stratagem of coitus interruptus in order not to “give seed”—that is, semen—to Tamar, and, as a necessary consequence of this contraceptive act, he avoids providing her with offspring. The thematic point of this moment, anchored in sexual practice, law, and human interaction, is blunted by not preserving “seed” throughout.

Even in contexts not directly related to sexuality the concreteness of this term often amplifies the meaning of the utterance. When, for example, at the end of the story of the binding of Isaac, God reiterates His promise to Abraham, the multiplication of seed is strongly linked with cosmic imagery—harking back to the Creation story—of heaven and earth: “I will greatly bless you and will greatly multiply your seed, as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore of the sea” (Genesis 22:17). If “seed” here is rendered as “offspring” or “descendants,” what we get are two essentially mathematical similes of numerical increase. That is, in fact, the primary burden of the language God addresses to Abraham, but as figurative language it also imposes itself visually on the retina of the imagination, and so underlying the idea of a single late-born son whose progeny will be countless millions is an image of human seed (perhaps reinforced by the shared white color of semen and stars) scattered across the vast expanses of the starry skies and through the innumerable particles of sand on the shore of the sea. To substitute “offspring” for “seed” here may not fundamentally alter the meaning but it diminishes the vividness of the statement, making it just a little harder for readers to sense why these ancient texts have been so compelling down through the ages. (The Five Books of Moses, pgs. xx-xxi, emphasis added)

If you skipped all that quoted text, know this: Alter's main point is that current translations of the Bible are ugly and clunky. I think he's pretty much right, but I actually want to take the argument a step further, and suggest that English translations of the Bible are, by themselves, completely inadequate when it comes to the needs of Christian interpreters.†

Think about it: if our usual translations of the Bible are missing something as cool, interesting, yet simple as a joke about Elihu being a windbag (golly, even his name sounds kind of like someone talking about nothing), how much other more important stuff isn't coming through in translation? How much important stuff is just impossible to effectively translate into English?

Christians read the Bible, by itself, in translation all the time, and while that's fine on occasion, it's not a really effective way to discover the meanings in the text, and it can lead to misinterpretation and simple misunderstanding far too easily. I wrote about this in a little more detail last week, but reading the Bible without someone or something to inform you about the historical and literary context seems foolish to me, and frankly, expecting to be able to interpret it without help amounts to magical thinking.

Put it another way: if we read the Bible in translation with no outside help, and expect to understand it, we are like the man in that old story: he's up on his roof, trying to get away from the rising water during a flood. He prays to God, "Save me!" Another man in a boat passes by and invites him in, but the man on the roof says, "No thanks, God will save me!" The man on the roof drowns; in heaven he confronts God, "Why didn't you save me?" God says, "I sent the boat, what more did you want?" If we read the Bible without all the help God has sent us—in the form of commentators, knowledgeable pastors, Biblical archaeology, and so forth—are we not the same as the drowned man who refused the help that he prayed for?

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*The other translations are: 1. NRSV, 2. NIV, 3. NLT, and 5. KJV. Note that The Message has an interesting, if slightly bonkers, take on this material that includes neither "wind" nor "spirit" but that does include "volcano," if that's what you're into.
**"Heresy" is of course a loaded term in Christian circles. Given that the technical definition of heresy, at least in Western Christianity, is "contradicting something declared in one of the ecumenical councils of the early church," I don't think this can be considered actual Christian heresy. Someone with extensive knowledge of the ecumenical councils: feel free to correct me!
†Which is not to say that you shouldn't buy Alter's translations. In fact, in no way did I mean to imply that; I'm clearly a huge fan of dude's work, and if you're interested in dipping a toe in to see how you like it, I recommend starting with his translation of Genesis, or better yet, 1 & 2 Samuel.

Photo sources:
1. http://www.gci.org/files/images/b6/index
2. Me! Them is my books. The second from the bottom was my birthday present from my parents this year. Thanks, guys!

What Does it Mean to Quote the Bible Out of Context?

The New Testament book of Hebrews says, "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword." Growing up in the American evangelical culture, I heard this verse used a great deal to describe the Bible. The point was to demonstrate that the Bible is not some dusty, irrelevant ancient tome that cannot speak to modern experience, but a book that remains vital to the faith and experience of Christians to this very day. In its most extreme form, quoting this verse can amount to a promise that merely reading the Bible is enough to change your life, because God will use it to speak directly to your heart and change you.

The trouble is, that when you read that verse in context, it's clear that it means nothing of the kind:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. (Hebrews 4:12-13, NRSV)

In Hebrews, the verse is referring not to the liveliness and potency of the Bible, but to God's personal ability to speak to and judge the human heart. The paragraphs that immediately precede this one make this more plain, as the "word of God" that is discussed in them is not a book but God's voice, speaking to David, Joshua, and others. There are places where Bible does speak directly about scripture (most notably, 2 Timothy 3:16), but this verse is not one of them.

Christians are almost equally fond of (1) quoting Bible verses while ignoring their context and (2) accusing others of quoting Bible verses while ignoring their context. One of the big reasons for this is that Christians—especially Protestants—see the Bible as the absolute best (and often only) source of proof that God agrees with them; when Christians get into arguments with each other, they resort to quoting the Bible as a prooftext to back up their claims.

A larger issue than this, however, is ignorance of and disagreement about what actually constitutes the context when it comes to a given Bible verse. Here are some examples of things that can count as "context," using American evangelicals' all-time favorite, John 3:16 as a case in point: 


Immediate Literary Context:

One of the more frequent meanings of "you took that out of context" when Christians hurl it at each other is the words right next to the quoted text in the Bible. The immediate literary context of John 3:16 is the story of the meeting of Jesus and Nicodemus in which it is embedded (John 3:1-21, NRSV). Placing the verse back into this context has the effect of changing how the hearer perceives it. The verse is transformed from a pat description of God's sending Jesus to earth (supposedly a sort of summary of the Gospel in a single sentence) into a small piece of a larger story and explanation of the nature of God, Jesus, and his mission. Instead of a rote phrase, we get a more lively bit of revelation, Jesus speaking about himself and his purpose to a confused and questioning stranger.

In some cases, putting a quote back into its immediate literary context can radically alter the perceived meaning of the verse, depending on whether the usual interpretation is contradicted by the words right next to the verse in the Bible. My earlier example, Hebrews 4:12, shows how the meaning can be altered substantially by placing a verse back in its immediate literary context.


Book-Level Context:

The next level of context is the level of the whole book that the quoted verse is a part of. We can look at a verse and think about its relation to the narrative, the messages, and the themes of the book it's embedded in. How does it fit in the narrative? Which messages does it support? What themes does it relate to? John 3:16 seems to relate to John's theme of Jesus' pre-existent divinity, and it's in keeping with John's picture of a self-confident Jesus who speaks in highly developed and often mysterious theological language.

If a verse seems to contradict one of the main messages or themes of the book it's in, or if it's out of sync with the narrative logic of the book, that may be grounds for examining it with greater scrutiny—is the verse sarcastic? Is it from a different literary source from the other content in the book? What does it mean if it is?


Testament-Level Context:

We can continue to telescope out the context of a verse by talking about its relationship with the major sections of the Bible it's in—how does it relate to other ideas in the Old/New Testament? With John 3:16, we can notice and ponder the fact that Jesus does not say anything particularly similar about himself in the other gospels, or we can compare it to the way Paul writes about Jesus' identity and mission in his letters.


Bible-Level Context:

Finally, we can zoom all the way out and ask how the verse relates to the whole book it's embedded in. If it's in the Old Testament, how does it complement or conflict with ideas in the New Testament? Does it point to an event or an idea that comes to fruition in the New Testament? If it's in the New Testament, how does it draw on or relate to ideas from the Old Testament? John 3:16, for example, draws on the Old Testament language of God's son, which would originally have referred to the king of Israel, and repurposes it to mean something more than simple kingship.


Cultural Context:

What we know about the cultures of the people who originally wrote and read the books of the Bible can radically alter how we read an individual verse.

John 3:16 speaks about people who believe in Jesus receiving "eternal life." Evangelicals have a tendency to equate this with life in Heaven with God after death, but in the first century CE, when Jesus spoke, the notion that after you die, your soul can go to Heaven, was not current. The closest concept to an afterlife at the time was the resurrection, in which people would be raised, body and soul, (or, have their souls given new resurrection bodies), to live again on Earth in God's new kingdom. Jesus could have said, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish forever but may be resurrected," but he didn't, which leaves us to wonder just what exactly he might have been talking about. Here's one interesting interpretation.

A more immediate example of the cultural context reversing our understanding of something is Matthew 5:45, when Jesus speaks about God who "sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." American Christians might be tempted to quote this to mean, "bad things happen to everybody," but if we remember that Israel is a hot, dry climate, where rain is very desirable, we can realize it means something more like "good things happen to everybody." (The immediate literary context also helps clarify this.)*



Documentary Criticism:

One way in which laypeople are especially prone to take the Bible out of its context is to ignore the fact that many of the Bible's books are composed from multiple sources. (John is probably not such a book, but there are people who think that it is.)

Scholars have spent a great deal of effort attempting to pick apart the seams of the Bible and discern where the different parts come from.** Especially if the narrative that you're reading seems to contradict itself, paying attention to the details of the story in this way can be crucial to a full understanding of the text.


Church History: 

Finally, the historical teaching of the church is an important context. How the church has read the verse you're looking at down through the centuries can be key to fitting it into one's faith. (For example, even if the original meaning of John 3:16 might not have referred to the afterlife as we conceive of it, the fact that many Christians have long treated it as if it does bears.) Not only that, but it's important to read the Bible in the light of the basic creeds of the church, without which it can sometimes be easy to end up believing some heterodox things; the Arians knew their Bible just as well as orthodox Christians of their day, after all.

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These contexts are all worthy of attention when speaking of a passage in the Bible. Note, however, that paying attention to different contexts may lead to contradictory or more complicated interpretations: the interpretation from immediate context may be muddled by something in the Bible-level context,† and the context of the verse in church history may be very different from its context when seen from a documentary-critical perspective. In fact, it's almost always possible to accuse someone of taking a verse out of context, because there are so many contexts one can pay attention to, and interpreters are rarely able to incorporate them all in their interpretations.

Even so, if we aren't mindful of context when reading the Bible, we take some very significant risks: the risk of accidentally reading our own culture into the text, or worse, we risk setting aside real interpretation for mere prooftexting, a mindless search for verses to prop up our pre-formed ideas about the world. But keeping all of these contexts straight—literary, historical, or what have you—is next to impossible without help.

There's a notion abroad in American evangelicalism that the Bible by itself is sufficient for God's purposes. It's what people mean when they say "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword;" they think they can just open up the Bible and it will speak to them, to their specific needs, right then, the things they need to hear. While I hesitate to suggest that God is incapable of reaching people in any fashion that God chooses, to expect that the Bible will operate this way is essentially magical thinking. When we read the Bible as if it's somehow written just for us, like there's a code there that just needs interpreting, we treat it more like a tool of divination—like a pack of tarot cards or tea leaves at the bottom of a cup—than a scripture.

The Bible deserves more respect than that. If it is to be, as it's described in 2 Timothy, "useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness," then Christians who read it must make every effort to examine what it means, and how that meaning fits into the larger picture of our faith. In practical terms, this should mean that when Christians study the Bible, they should do it with a study Bible, or a commentary, or a Bible history reference, or something to inform them of what is going on at a cultural, textual, or historical level around the text. To do anything less is to risk too much.

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*I could add some related categories here, like Genre and Authorial Intent, but this list is already getting very long. Suffice it to say that we can also take the Bible out of context by ignoring what literary genre we're reading—e.g., forget that Revelation is a piece of apocalyptic literature, which makes considerable use of certain kinds of metaphor and hyperbole, at your peril. And we ignore the context of authorial intent when we forget to combine our knowledge of genre, cultural context, and other factors to make educated guesses about what the author meant when they wrote the book. Here's a great example of this kind of investigation into the authorial intent behind Romans 1:26-27, which is often used as clear biblical proof that homosexuality is a sin, but which is more complicated than that.
**A while back, my dad put together this neat demonstration, picking apart the two Noah stories that are woven together into one big story in our Bibles today.
† For example, Paul's assertion in Romans that Christians are justified by faith alone is complicated by the letter of James, which points out that faith without works is dead.

Photo source
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/lmlienau/121073591/

Camel Bones, Confirmation Bias, and American Evangelical Biblicism

by James Davisson

"When I see things like this I like to think about how the Hittites were said to have been a creation of the Bible authors, until they found them. David didn't really exist, until they found proof that he did. Pilate wasn't a real person, except that he was. Coelacanth, Wolemi pine, et al were extinct millions of years ago, until they were discovered alive and well. Countless attempts have been made to show the Bible as inaccurate and it tends to be vindicated in time, so I'm not worried about it."

If you're unfamiliar with the idea of confirmation bias, the quote above is a pretty great example. Confirmation bias is an incredibly common way of processing information among people of all walks of life; most importantly, it's one of the main reasons it's next to impossible to change peoples' minds about subjects they already have strong opinions on. To quote the Wikipedia entry: confirmation bias is "the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs." This "tendency" is so common that I'd call it nearly universal. If you have strong opinions about guns, gay marriage, abortion, the environment, or, as in today's case, the Bible, you will tend to believe without question anything you hear that confirms your opinion, and you will tend to heavily scrutinize (or outright reject) anything that contradicts your opinion—unless you train yourself and force yourself to do otherwise. And not just you, dear reader—I regularly delude myself with confirmation bias, too.

We've posted a couple times recently about frustrations and struggles with many Christians' inability to accept the theory of evolution—last week, an anonymous guest described his experience with a fundamentalist Christian colleague at a secular university, and before that, I talked about my own confusion and metamorphosing opinion on the subject as I grew up—and I'd like to build on this problem to discuss a deeper and more intractable problem for American evangelicals: their view of scripture.

Let's back up slightly, first. If you didn't click the link in the quote (here it is again), it's referring to evidence that one small detail among many in the Hebrew Bible is probably wrong: while the stories of the patriarch Abraham in the book of Genesis are usually dated to roughly the 20th century BCE, there is no evidence of camels in the region he lived in until nearly a thousand years later. (Specifically: if camels were a part of human life in the region, we would expect to find their bones in the trash heaps of settlements dated to the 20th century BCE. Bones of other livestock known to have been raised in this period are present and widely attested, so the absence of camels is pretty glaring.) Given that Abraham is depicted as owning camels, this information poses a problem for some folks, like our commenter in the quote above. Fortunately for them, confirmation bias can take care of things like this pretty easily: after all, a lack of evidence isn't the same as proof that there weren't camels in Palestine in the ~2000s BCE, right? Why even scrutinize this further—if it contradicts your worldview, it's easy enough to reject.

Fortunately for us, though, this quote reveals a major issue within American Christianity that's worth talking about. A detail this small (is what kind of livestock Abraham owned really all that important to...anything?) bothers this person enough for them to draw comparisons, not only to other claims about Biblical historicity, but also to coelacanths, in order to help them ignore this data, which means that something bigger and more interesting than camel bones is at stake here.

Coelacanths rule, BTW. Did you know a mature coelacanth is the size of a person?

What's at the root of all this is a way of reading the Bible that I'll refer to as biblicism. In his book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicicsm Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, the evangelical sociologist and thinker Christian Smith defines biblicism as a set of widely held beliefs about the Bible in American evangelical Christianity that includes a range of interlocking ideas. The relevant ones for our purposes are the following (though see a full, and very interesting, list of them here):

• Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God's very own words written in human language.
• Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text. 
• Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.
• Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear "biblical" truths that it teaches. 
• Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, politics, and romance. (The Bible Made Impossible, pgs. 4-5)

If you look carefully, you can see how the earlier items in the list logically seem to lead to the later ones: if the Bible is God's direct, inerrant, written word to people (divine writing), it should be easily understood by anyone who wants to know what God has to say (democratic perspicuity); if something is to be easily understood, it should have only one, plain, surface meaning (commonsense hermeneutics); if God's inerrant word is easily understandable and to be taken at face value, then it can serve as a source of clear, consistent, truths—not just in faith, but in all elements of life (inductive method and handbook model).

If any detail in the Bible were proved, without any doubt, to be wrong, this schema unravels; the Bible can't be God's very own words if parts of it are wrong (because God does not lie), and if any details of the words are wrong, they are all suspect and cannot therefore form the basis of Christian faith and life. This is why even the issue of camel bones can make someone resort to the questionably relevant coelacanths for support; it's too important to risk leaving out awesome ancient fish if that will help bolster the argument!

Buying into biblicism is really great; it allows believers a sense of incredible security and certainty in their faith. Also, it allows them access to a whole world of books and teaching on an incredibly wide range of subjects, all backed up with direct quotes from scripture and all completely "biblical." Take a look at Smith's list of titles:

This is one of several pages in the list.

Biblicism was definitely part of my church culture growing up. I read and was profoundly impacted by books like The Purpose-Driven Life and I Kissed Dating Goodbye, self-help books based heavily on key Bible verses. I wore a shirt as a teenager that said "Lost? Need Directions? Read the Map" above a picture of an open Bible—God's map/handbook for human existence. I saw and heard evidence of these ideas everywhere in my experience of Christianity, from the Christian book store to church camp and beyond.

There are quite a number of problems with these ideas; we've talked elsewhere on the blog about changing our minds on the specific issue of inerrancy (or "divine writing" in Christian Smith's terms above), but I'd like to point out a big problem with the larger, interlocking schema of biblicism as a whole. It's a problem Christian Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism," but which might better be labeled "Christians can't agree on anything."

If it's true that (1) the Bible is God's direct, inerrant word, (2) that it's accessible to anyone of reasonable intelligence, and (3) it means exactly what its "plain sense" says it means, then logically it follows that all reasonably intelligent Christians can read and agree on the meaning of the Bible. And anyone who has met more than one Christian will know that this is, like, laughably the opposite of true. Christians can't agree on issues as diverse as free will/predestination, gender equality, wealth and poverty, charismatic gifts, and atonement and justification. Heck, we can't even agree on which issues are the central issues of the faith:

It will not suffice to respond simply by reciting the mantra: "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity," because many of these matters that sustain multiple "biblical" views that cause division are essentials—particularly as viewed by many biblicists. There simply is not unity on many essentials. Furthermore, this response assumes more fundamentally that evangelicals at least agree on what the essentials are, which they do not. For certain kinds of Reformed believers, the sovereignty of God understood in a certain way and double predestination are clearly essentials of the faith—while for others they are not. For Bible-centered Anabaptist Christians, biblical pacifism and nonviolence are central to the gospel—while others serve in the US military with clean consciences. For some biblicists, the penal satisfaction theory of atonement expresses the pure essence of salvation—but for others it is an unbiblical and misguided doctrine. So not only are Christians divided about essential matters of doctrine and faithful practice; they are also sometimes divided on what even counts as essential. (pgs. 24-25, bolded emphasis and links added)

Smith's proposal for a better, "more evangelical" reading of scripture is an elegant and worthy one, neither liberal nor conservative, but simply Christian: read the Bible as, above all else, a book about Jesus. Smith challenges biblicists, and all Christians, to remember that Christ is the "real purpose, center, and interpretive key" to the Bible. If we read the Bible this way, our focus is not on what a Bible verse can tell about us "biblical" dieting or romance or the origins of the universe, but instead on how it relates to our understanding of Jesus Christ. In Smith's words, "We do not then read scripture devotionally to try to find tidbits there that are 'meaningful to' or that 'speak to' us, wherever we are in our personal subjective spiritual experiences. We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ."

In the middle of that quote is a sentence that strikes me at least as hard as it does any biblicist; too often I can be a "detached historian" when reading scripture, allowing myself to revel in the literary details of the text without thinking even for a moment how it enriches the picture of Christ, points to an idea about Christ, or relates in any way to Christ and Christian faith. I am as guilty as anyone of misreading the Bible for my own ends, of bending it so that it says what I want it to say rather than coming to it and asking what it says, and particularly what it says about the fact that God came to earth as Jesus, and in the process, taught us, led us, and saved us for God's own better, fuller purposes.

If you are a Christian, and this is not how you have been reading scripture, I challenge you: why not? In the face of evidence that the Bible is not for communicating dating advice or exact knowledge about ancient Palestinian ungulates, would you not rather believe that it is God's written word, sent to tell us about and remind us of God's lived Word in the world, Jesus Christ? It's something to consider, friends.

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Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/manojvasanth/4119668254
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marjorie_Courtenay-Latimer_and_Coelacanth.jpg
3. The Bible Made Impossible, pg. 9

Religion in the Workplace: A Story

by an Anonymous Guest Poster¹

I want to introduce myself before I begin, as I’ve never written here before. I’m a graduate student in the physics department at a large research university. James Davisson is a friend of mine from college. I am not a particularly religious person, but some events that happened a couple years ago got me thinking about combining religion with professional life. James invited me to write about it here.

The following stories feature a former colleague and classmate of mine, who I will call Quentin. Quentin is an Evangelical Christian whose personal faith came up against the secular world of academic research. His very public enthusiasm for Christianity led to him becoming isolated from the rest of his colleagues, who largely did not understand his views or how to react to his behavior. At the same time, Quentin’s inability to separate his personal religious life from his work life seemed to indicate a misunderstanding of how one should behave at work. Eventually, he decided that Christianity was more important to him than physics, and left the department to pursue a stint of missionary work in Africa.

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I first encountered Quentin over the Internet: before myself and my cohort of graduate students arrived in the Fall, he started a Facebook group to help all of us get to know one another. About a week into our first semester, he posted a note to all members of the group. Being physicists, he knew that we would all appreciate the challenge of an order of magnitude problem. Instead of asking us to estimate the number of piano tuners in New York City, his note used scripture and a great deal of jargon to argue that Jesus is Lord with probability 1.

Quentin’s argument began:

The basis of this argument is the idea that information cannot travel backwards in time, which is a fundamental principle of general relativity. In other words, one cannot accurately predict the future. I hold that the Old Testament scriptures contain enough accurate prophesy [sic] that they seemingly demonstrate a violation of this Physics “law.” Further I hold that there are no other religious documents that foretell the future as accurately, specifically, and abundantly enough to rule out statistical chance. A violation of this Physical “law” is really a way that God demonstrates his sovereignty, not a violation of physics itself.

Upon seeing this, a lot of us were perplexed to say the least. Wasn’t the Facebook group intended for a secular, academic group? If Quentin really believed that the acts of God superseded physical laws, what was he doing studying physics in graduate school? There was also a great deal of derision that followed – people found it very easy to dismiss the post as evidence of craziness or stupidity.

Over the next few months, the other graduate students learned more and more about Quentin’s beliefs and religious practice. He thought evolution was a lie. He had very negative things to say about homosexuals and same-sex marriage. Outside of his office, he posted a large, friendly sign proclaiming that the Kingdom of Christ lived within him, and offered laying on of hands and prayer to whomever wanted it (I emphasize: this was at work, at a secular university). At one time, he claimed that he could raise the dead. His beliefs were baffling and offensive to many in the department. Quentin’s colleagues began to talk about him behind his back. He became a topic of conversation at parties, a focal point of derisive curiosity. Most of the mockery took place from afar (although there were a number of passive-aggressive flame wars that took place over Facebook). Needless to say, my colleagues’ (and perhaps my own) reaction to Quentin was not kind.

A lot of us scientists are vexed by the counterfactual beliefs maintained by many Americans. Creationism, for example, doesn’t make any sense to us, and to hear about how so many people cling to the notion that evolution must be wrong² (a hyperbolic example here), is deeply frustrating. At best, it reveals poor education. At worst, it is an attack on our modern, secular way of understanding the world. I believe that to some of his colleagues Quentin became the perfect picture of mindless, backwards ignorance. It is no wonder that so many people reacted with frustration and anger at Quentin’s presence in the department.

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During our second year Quentin offered to give a presentation at the Physics Graduate Student Organization-sponsored lunch seminars. At the time, I was part of the PGSO (our department’s student organization), and organized some informal talks where students were invited to present and discuss their research interests or other ideas. A week before his presentation, Quentin emailed me his title and abstract:

Authority Theory
Have you ever wondered what exactly it is that makes right things “right” or wrong things “wrong?” In this seminar I will unveil a brand new philosophical argument about the nature of authority using very simple ideas from graph theory mathematics to help answer such questions. We start with some definitions, use some logic, and demonstrate some interesting and important philosophical implications that impact our society at every level. Lastly, I will show the proof of the following theorem: God exists if and only if a finite number of beings with authority exist. This discovery has many interesting implications which we can hopefully discuss.

I replied to Quentin that his talk did not seem to be within the purview of physics. I suggested to him that he focus on the graph theory and mathematics, rather than proving that God exists. I also requested that mentions of God be removed from his abstract. Quentin agreed, on the condition that I substitute “exactly one being with ultimate and final authority” for God. I made the changes and notified my fellow graduate students of the upcoming talk. Within minutes I had received several complaints that the talk was obviously religious in nature, and that our academic student organization should not be sponsoring a Christian polemic. I wanted to keep Quentin’s talk on the schedule if possible. I didn’t want him to feel separated from or censored by the department because of his interest in religion. But at the same time, the students who complained were right that a religious talk would not be appropriate in that academic setting.

Kicking myself for not talking to Quentin about this before making the announcement, I talked to him about whether or not his talk did contain academic content. I told him that several people had complained because of what seemed like a religious agenda. Was there any way for him to remove the religious emphasis and focus instead on his mathematical or philosophical interests? Quentin told me that he had been confused: His talk had no physics in it, but I had never explicitly told him that the talk needed to be related to physics or research. (To be fair, he was right in that regard.) There was no way for me to allay the suspicions of the grad students who had complained, so I canceled his talk. I told Quentin that the PGSO’s lunch talks were not the appropriate venue for him to publicly discuss his interests, but encouraged him to find a different venue. At the time, I felt bad that I had to reject Quentin’s talk (and embarrassed that it had been made public before), but was relieved that his talk would not be associated with the PGSO.

What followed was this: several weeks later, Quentin scheduled the use of a classroom himself and gave his presentation publicly. Almost fifty people showed up. A few of them were interested in learning about Authority Theory, and how one could use graph theory in the context of theology and philosophy. Many others, by contrast, were there to nitpick Quentin’s arguments. They interrupted him while he spoke. They peppered him with questions and made it hard for him to work through the talk. They wanted to see him fail. Frankly, they were very rude to him, in the loud, smug way that arguments are made anonymously in Internet forums. At one point, Quentin’s former office mate spoke up and told everyone to be quiet and let him finish.

As for the content of the talk itself, it would be an exaggeration to say that Quentin had thought everything through clearly or argued convincingly. His talk borrowed concepts from graph theory as a way to justify the belief in a single God.³ It was clear that he had begun at the conclusion and worked backwards, as the assumptions were nonsensical, and the argument itself didn’t actually prove his thesis in the end. A friend of mine said to me later, “If this is what he spent a year thinking about, and then presented it as a completed project, then something is wrong.” Quentin’s talk certainly didn’t deserve the scorn that it received from some people, but it was very, very flawed. It seemed to confirm what many people already believed about him: that he was so distracted by his creed that he was incapable of reasoning.

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I want to be clear: I’m not writing about this because I want to reveal the hypocrisy of non-religious liberals. It would be easy to interpret these events that way, after all, since this does seem like an example of how self-professed free-thinking academic types turned on one of their colleagues for being a Christian. This story is more complex than that. Yes, Quentin was a Christian, and yes, my colleagues (and, I admit, myself at times) were rude to Quentin and marginalized him because his beliefs seemed foolish. But, as time has passed, I have come to think of Quentin’s presence in the department not as a reaction to Evangelical Christianity, but how any average social group will react to an outsider who does not know how to behave.

There are plenty of religious people in my department. I have friends who go to Church and shul regularly. A couple of my coworkers wear kippahs, and a collaborator in my research group wears Sikh religious articles. A Christian colleague I know would wear a cross but cannot do so at work for laboratory safety reasons. So these colleagues of mine are openly religious, and in conversation they will occasionally bring up their religious practices. The community doesn’t react badly to this kind of casual behavior at all. Personally, I’m quite comfortable living in a work environment that accommodates people who follow different religions.

Quentin, as anyone, was entitled to his personal religious beliefs and practice. That being said, Quentin decided to bring his religion to work with him and advertise it loudly and up front. I have no idea why he thought this was a good idea, although I speculate that part of his faith included active pursuit of disseminating his religious ideas to others.

The first impression Quentin made with his Facebook message, his public display of evangelism in his office, his attempt to deliver a theological talk at a venue for discussing scientific research, and other events all seemed to indicate that Quentin was confused about what was appropriate for work and what needed to stay at home. Quentin’s colleagues turned against him not because he was a religious conservative, but because he that he was aggressive about advertising his enthusiasm for Christianity in a professional context where nobody else talked about religion in the same way. His behavior was far enough outside the established norm that he made the people around him uncomfortable. I don’t know whether any of his mentors in the department, his academic or research advisors, ever confronted him about mixing work and religion, but it certainly seems that conversation might have helped Quentin fit in a little better.

Overall, Quentin seemed to lack a degree of what is often called common sense, meaning an understanding of tacitly agreed-upon rules of social engagement. In this case, his lack of common sense manifested itself in such a way as to present to his colleagues the image of a ludicrous religious fundamentalist. He did not deserve the mockery that was directed at him, but I find myself wondering whether there was a way for him to keep his personal beliefs private so as not to confuse or annoy others in the workplace.

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Quentin left the department after two years, completing a Master’s but not a PhD. He worked as a missionary in Africa for six months, and has moved on to work as a programmer for a large software company. I wish Quentin well for the future. I hope he figures out what he wants from his career, and that he finds a work environment that’s a little more accepting of him than we were. I hope he figures out how to balance his professional and private life.

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1. Editor's Note: Today's guest poster wishes to remain anonymous for reasons that will probably be clear from reading the post. If you're offended, confused, or delighted about this, email us about it at theologyinprogress@gmail.com. The title picture are not related to the author of the post; we just thought it looked nice.
2. Editor's Note: Evolution and creationism is actually a subject which we've tackled on the blog before from a Christian perspective; read about it here.
3. Quentin tried to model the relationships between all beings as master-slave, where the upper tiers commanded the lower tiers, allowing him to "model" everyone as belonging to a directed graph.  Quentin then tried to argue that the "authority structure" meant that those graphs must be treelike (having no loops).  He disregarded (or at least, had no convincing argument against) the possibility of having two "ultimate authority" nodes in the same graph, as well as the possibility of having two disjointed graphs.  In other words, even if you did buy his argument that there was an ultimate authority figure, there could have been more than one of them.  So, for all we know, there is an equally powerful God on Neptune who has never been to Earth

Photo source: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/1198523560/