Theology and source critical analysis

There is reason to think that a number of biblical texts—paradigmatically, the Pentateuch—were redacted from multiple sources that scholars have worked to tease apart and separately analyze. This is very interesting from a scholarly point of view. But I do not know that it is that interesting from the theological point of view.

Vatican II, in Dei Verbum, famously teaches:

since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation. … However, since God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of Sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.

Presumably many other Christian groups hold something similar.

Now, in the case of a text put together from multiple sources, the question is who the “sacred writers” are. I want to suggest that in the case of such a text, the relevant “sacred writers” are the editors who put the texts together, and especially the ones responsible for a final (though this is a somewhat difficult to apply concept) version, and the intentions relevant to figuring out “What God wanted to communicate to us” are the intentions of the final layer of editing. The books in question, such as Genesis, are not anthologies. In an anthology, an editor has some purposes in mind for the anthologized texts, but the texts belong, often in a more or less acknowledged fashion, to the individual authors. The editorial work in putting the Biblical works together from source material is much more creative—it is genuine form of authorship—which is obvious from how much back-and-forth movement there is. Like in an anthology, we should not take the editor’s intentions to align with the intentions of the source material authors, but unlike in an anthology, the final work comes with the editor’s authority, and counts as the assertion of the editor, with the editor’s intentions being the ones that determine the meaning of the work.

If this is right, then I think we can only be fully confident of dealing with inspired teaching in the case of what the editors intend to assert through the final works. Writers typically draw on a multiplicity of sources, and need not be asserting what these sources meant in their original context—think of the ways in which a writer often repurposes a quote from another. Think here of how Homer draws upon a rich variety of fictional and nonfictional source material, but when he adapts them for inclusion in his work, the intentions relevant to “What the Iliad and Odyssey say” are Homer’s intentions.

If what we want to be sure of is “what God wanted to communicate to us”, then we should focus on the redactors’ intentions. In particular, when there is a tension in text between two pieces of source material, exegetically we should focus on what the editor meant to communicate to us by the choice to include material from both sources. (In a text without divine inspiration, we might in the end attribute a tension to editorial carelessness, but in fact scholars rarely make use of “carelessness” as an explanation for phenomena in great works of secular literature.) I think we should be open even to the logical possibility that the editor misunderstood what the source material meant to communicate, but it is the editor’s understanding that is normative for the interpretation of what the text as a whole is saying.

From a scholarly point of view, earlier layers in the composition process are more interesting. But I think that from a theological point of view, it is what the editor wanted to communicate that matters.

I don’t want to be too dogmatic about this, for three reasons. First, it is possible that the source material is an inspired text in its own right. But, I think, we typically don’t know that it is (though in a Christian context, an obvious exception is where the New Testament quotes Jesus’ inspired teaching). Second, it is possible for a writer or editor who has a deep respect for a piece of source material to include the text with the intention that the text be understood in the sense in which the original authors intended it to be understood, in which case the intentions of the authors of the source material may well be relevant. Third, this is not my field—I could be really badly confused.

Authorless books

I've been imagining a strange scenario. I come across a text that I know for sure was generated by an entirely random process--say, the proverbial monkeys at the typewriter. I look at it. Mirabile dictu, it's coherent and reads just like a literary masterpiece--let's say it's just like something Tolstoy would have written had he written one more novel at the peak of his creative powers.

I think reading this random text could be a disquieting experience. I could read it shallowly, the way one reads some novels for mere entertainment. And in that context, it would work just as well as shallowly reading a real novel. But of course with a masterpiece, one wants to read it more deeply. In doing so, one draws connections between different parts of the texts ("Oh! So that's what that foreshadowed!" or "Ah, so that's why she did that!"), between the content and the mode of expression ("Look at all these short words describing the rapidity of the march"), between what is overtly the text and other texts, ideas, historical events and persons, etc. Drawing such connections, whether explicitly or just as a barely conscious sensation of something there--is a part of the enjoyment of reading a literary masterpiece, when done in moderation. But in our random text, all connections are merely coincidental. Nothing is there on purpose, not even unconsciously. When we read a literary giant like a Plato or a Tolstoy, when we see a compelling connection, we have good reason to think the author meant it to be there, and that sensing the connection is a part of a good reading of the text. But in the random text, there will be no such thing as a good reading or a misreading. And that would have to be disquieting. There is a sense in which we would be inventing all the connections. Reading would be more like creating than like discovering. I suppose death-of-author people think that's already the case with normal novels. But I don't think so. Real connections differ from chance ones.

At the same time, I think that in practice if I were reading this text which is just like a literary masterpiece, I'd end up suspending my disbelief about the author, and just delight in the connections and subtleties, even if they are merely apparent.

But maybe in a world with God there is no true randomness. So maybe the hypothesis of a book where nothing is intended is impossible?

Spinoza on truth and falsity

In Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds, I attribute to Spinoza the view that no belief is false (though I think i also emphasize that nothing rides on the accuracy of the historical claim).  Rather, there are more or less confused beliefs, and in the extreme case there are empty words--words that do not signify any proposition.

I was led to the attribution by a focus on passages, especially in Part II of the Ethics and in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, that insist that every idea has an ideatum, that of which it is the idea, and hence corresponds to something real.  The claim that every idea has an ideatum is central to Spinoza's work.  It is a consequence of the central 2 Prop. 7 (which is the most fecund claim outside Part I) which claims that the order and connection of ideas is the order and connection of things, and it is also a consequence of the correspondence of modes between attributes.

These passages stand in some tension, however, to other passages where Spinoza expressly talks of false ideas, which are basically ideas that are too confused to be adequate or to be knowledge (the details won't matter for this post).

I think it is easy to reconcile the two sets of passages when we recognize that Spinoza has an idiosyncratic sense of "true" and "false".  In Spinoza's sense, an idea is true if the individual having the idea is right to have it, and it is false if the individual having it is not right to have it (cf. Campbell's "action-based" view of truth, but of course Campbell will not go along with Spinoza's internalism), where the individual is right to have the idea provided that she knows the content, or knows it infallibly.  And Spinoza, rationalist that he is, has an internalist view of knowledge, where knowledge is a matter of clarity and distinctness and a grasp of the explaining cause of the known idea.

Hence, Spinoza uses the words "true" and "false" in an internalist sense.  But we do not.  "True" as used by us expresses a property for which correspondence to reality is sufficient, and "false" expresses a property incompatible with such correspondence.  Since every belief has an idea (in Spinoza's terminology) as its content, and according to Spinoza every idea corresponds to reality, namely to its ideatum, it follows that in our sense of the word, Spinoza holds that every belief is true and no belief is false.

The ordinary notion of truth includes ingredients such as that correspondence to reality is sufficient for truth and that truth is a good that our intellect aims at.  Spinoza insists on the second part of this notion, and finds it in tension with the first (cf. this argument).  But the first part is, in fact, the central one, which is why philosophers can agree on what truth is while disagreeing about whether belief is aimed at truth, knowledge, understanding or some other good.

So, we can say that in Spinoza's sense of "true", it is his view that some but not all beliefs are true.  And in our sense of "true", it is his view that all beliefs are true.  The sentence "Some beliefs are false" as used by Spinoza would express a proposition that Spinoza is committed to, while the sentence "Some beliefs are false" as used by us would express a proposition that Spinoza is committed to the denial of.

This move of distinguishing our sense of a seemingly ordinary word like "true" from that of a philosopher X is a risky exegetical move in general. Van Inwagen has argued libertarians should not hold that compatibilists have a different sense of the phrase "free will".  But I think there are times when the move is perfectly justified.  When the gap between how X uses some word and how we use it is too great, then we may simply have to concede that X uses the word in a different sense.  This is particularly appropriate in the case of Spinoza whose views are far from common sense, whose philosophical practice depends on giving definitions, and who expressly insists that many disagreements are merely apparent and are simply due to using the same words in diverse senses.  (Actually, I also wonder if van Inwagen's case of free will isn't also a case where the phrase is used in diverse senses.  Even if so, we should avoid making this move too often.)

Addendum: This reading is in some tension with 1 Axiom 6 which says that a true idea must agree with its ideatum. While strictly speaking, this sets out only a necessary condition for a true idea, and hence does not conflict with what I say above, it is not unusual for Spinoza to phrase biconditionals as mere conditionals. If we read 1 Axiom 6 as a biconditional, then maybe we should make a further distinction, that between the truth of an idea and truth of a believing. We take the truth of a believing to be the same as the truth of the idea (or proposition) that is the object of the believing. But Spinoza distinguishes, and takes more to be required for the truth of a believing. We then disambiguate various passages. The problem with this is that on Spinoza's view, the believing is identical with the idea. But nonetheless maybe we can distinguish between the idea qua believing and the idea qua idea?

Exegesis of Scripture

It is standard in interpreting Scripture to ask questions like: "What did the Paul hope to accomplish by this passage?" or "What motivated the prophet to write this verse?" or "What must the p been thinking given that he wrote this?" These questions are interesting to ask and the answers seem to illuminate our understanding of Scripture. We investigate secular texts in exactly the same way. It potentially illuminates our understanding of Aristotle's thought to ask why he waited until Met. H.6 to give a solution to the problems of Met. Z.

But there is a crucial difference between the secular case and Scripture: Scripture is authoritative. But, I think, what is authoritative is the text that the human author wrote, rather than the human author's motivations and thinking behind that text. The inferred motivations and thinking of the human author give us insight into what the text means (more strongly, I think that speaker-meaning is the relevant kind of meaning for Scripture, but the point remains even if one denies this), and hence help us know what is being taught. But the human author's motivations and thinking, in and of themselves, are quite fallible, while, in the words of the Vatican II ecumenical council, "everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit" (Dei Verbum 11, emphasis added) and hence is true.

Let me argue for the claim that the author's motivations and thinking are not in and of themselves authoritative, though I may need to qualify it. Suppose we infer from internal and external evidence that an author wrote the text to a particular audience with the confident belief that the text would convince the audience of some proposition. Can we conclude that it is authoritatively taught that the audience was in fact convinced of that proposition? Surely not. We gain an insight into the intentions of the author, and this helps us understand what the text means, but the author's motivating belief is not authoritative. Or for an even more obvious example, from the fact that a sacred author writes a sentence s we can typically infer that he thought s was orthographically and grammatically correct and stylistically good Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek. But this claim about grammar and spelling is not authoritative. Scripture is not to be taken as an authoritative examplar of style—that would be like the confusion of apostle and genius that Kierkegaard inveighs against (this is probably a point at which Christian attitudes to Scripture differ from Islamic ones).

It is sometimes possible to infer from the fact that the author wrote a sentence s that asserts the proposition p that there is some other proposition, q, which he also believed. For instance, suppose the author writes with great emphasis that anyone who does A will be doomed for eternity. We might be able infer from the emphasis that the author believes that some people do A, or at least that it is quite possible to do A. This belief, however, is not asserted by the author and need not be authoritative. However, the belief does help us with the interpretation of what the author meant. For instance, suppose we have two ways of interpreting "A": A₁ and A₂. Suppose, further, that internal and/or external evidence shows that the author probably would not have believed that anybody does A₁ but would have thought that some people do A₂. This now gives us strong evidence for the claim that the author meant A₂ by "A". Thus, probably, we are being authoritatively taught that those who do A₂ are doomed for eternity. But it does not follow from this that we are being authoritatively taught that anybody actually does A₂, even though our exegesis depended on attributing that belief to the author.

However, the above needs to be qualified. We must avoid the serious theological mistake of limiting the inspiration of Scripture to the inerrance of its assertions—the inerrance of assertions is a consequence of inspiration, but does not exhaust inspiration. There are large chunks of Scripture—much of the Psalms, for instance—where the illocutionary act is not assertion, but, say, prayer. Those parts are inspired as well, but the doctrine of the inerrance of Scriptural assertions says nothing about them. Similarly, even in the parts where assertion is the (primary?) illocutionary act, we should be open to the idea that something more is going on than inerrance. (Besides, inerrance is something basically negative—a preventing of error—while inspiration is a positive thing.) Thus, while what should be open to the idea that it does not exhaust the authority of an assertion of Scripture to say that we need to believe its content.

In particular, this raises the question of whether what is implicated by a text of Scripture is also authoritative. Here I will be entirely speculative. I think we need to distinguish between two kinds of implicatures. The first kind is where we can infer from some hypotheses about the text, such as that it tends to obeys Gricean maxims, that the author believed something, but the author does not intend for us to make that inference. The second is where the author intends for us to make some such inference. In the case where the author does not intend the inference, but we can make it nonetheless because we're clever, the inferred belief is not authoritative. In the case where the author intends for us to make the inference, we still need to distinguish between cases. The author may just want us to infer an autobiographical fact about him, that he happens to believe p. (For instance, maybe by a particular way of phrasing a question, the author wants to indicate to the reader which theological faction in Jerusalem he belongs to, and membership in the theological faction may be defined by believing p.) In that case, p need not be authoritatively taught. But the author may intend for us to learn that p from the text. In that case, p is authoritatively taught. Though maybe then p was in fact asserted?

In any case, in untangling these issues there is material for someone who is both interested in Biblical exegesis and philosophy of language for years of fruitful research. I am hoping that these reflections also show the necessity of a deep familiarity (greater than my passing acquaintance) with contemporary analytic philosophy of language to serious work on the theology of biblical inspiration.