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.

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.

Inspiration and inerrance

Some people prefer to talk of divine inspiration of Scripture instead of Scriptural inerrance, because they think this way they can avoid affirming inerrance and hence being subject to the apparent counterexamples to inerrance. However, I think the right concept of divine inspiration will make God a full author of the text (so is the human author, of course; I am not here addressing the interaction of the two authorships). Sometimes it happens to an author that the text asserts something that the author did not assert. I doubt this can happen in the case of an omniscient and omnipotent author. If it cannot, then anything that the text asserts is asserted by God. Moreover, it seems central to Christianity and Judaism that God does not lie. Hence, the text only asserts propositions that God believes to be true. But the only propositions that God believes to be true are propositions that in fact are true. Hence, anything the Biblical text asserts is true. If we add some plausible counterfactual robustness to this story (a hard question exactly how to do this—cf. this post), we get inerrance. So inspiration, understood the way I want to understand it, entails inerrance.

I don't mean for the above argument that inspiration entails inerrance (which is basically an expansion of the enthymematic argument for inerrance in Vatican II's Dei Verbum, section 11) to convince those who don't believe inerrance. Rather, I am here interested in a different point. Even if we believe in inerrance, as indeed the Christian Tradition does, nonetheless we have at least two good reasons to focus on inspiration as the basic concept.

First, if we can argue from inspiration to inerrance, but not from inerrance to inspiration, then inspiration is likely to be the more basic concept. If something like the strategy in the first paragraph of this post goes through, we can argue from inspiration to inerrance. But we cannot argue in the opposite direction. Inerrance is a negative doctrine, namely that a text does not contain any false assertions, plus a bit of counterfactual robustness. Such a doctrine could be made true by all kinds of positive realities, of which inspiration is only one. For instance, an uninspired text would be inerrant if, say, God resolves to paralyze the person at the first sign of writing a false. For a more extreme case, God could make a text be inerrant simply by resolving to preventing the human author of the text from setting down any assertions (thus, the text might contain questions, commands, nonsensical rhymes, etc.)

Second, inspiration is a doctrine about all of Scripture. Inerrance is only a doctrine about the truth of assertions in Scripture. An assertion can be true, and intentionally both deeply misleading and spiritually harmful. And there are important portions of Scripture, of varying length, where the main business is is not the making of assertions—but the offering of prayers (especially in the Psalms), the making of commands, the giving of advice ("Go to the ant, O sluggard, and consider her ways, and learn wisdom" is not an assertion), and so on. Inerrance says nothing about those portions. Inspiration does.

Presumably, there is some analogue to inerrance in the case of those portions of Scripture (perhaps, the analogue to inerrance in the giving of proverbial advice is that the advice is helpful when appropriately applied by a phronimos). But these are analogues to inerrance, not inerrance itself, and it is to the doctrine of inspiration that we turn to find out what these analogues would be.