Anti-Climacus

LINK: I'm cheesed off enough by this Matt Yglesias post to feel the need to break my self-imposed 24-hour blogging break to respond.

1. Isn't it amazing how denying a premise of an argument makes the entire conclusion sound weak? Christians don't believe that the books of the Bible were written, and canonized, and translated by men; they were done by men in concert with the Holy Ghost--men do the writing, and the choosing, but it's not coincidental what they write or choose. But if you deny the premise, then it seems silly to assume that just because some men wrote it, it must be true.

2. "The Gospels, too, are telling different stories of the life of Christ." Shocking, isn't it? You know, I'd imagine that if you took any premise for a story (for example, 'man has difficult relationship with his mother'), and gave it to four different storytellers (say, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Steinbeck and Alfred Hitchcock), you'd end up with four entirely different works (Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Grapes of Wrath, Psycho). Even if you had them write about the exact same series of events, you'd still get different stories, because they'd all want to bring out different things in the source material. This shouldn't be surprising.

3. "As such, this morning on WAMU I heard a series of bluegrass songs, including one extolling the virtues of the Bible, noting that "every word is true"... it's not particularly clear what is supposed to be literally true in the Bibles folks read."

Matt also manages to elide the difference between literalism and fundamentalism. I'm not sure anyone is, strictly speaking, a literalist--that is, every word is true, without need for any interpretation whatsoever. Most Christians of the conservative stripe are, I believe, fundamentalists--that is, the Bible has to be read as a document written at different times, by different people, using different rhetorical devices and styles, and for different purposes. Corinthians 1 and Song of Solomon are in the same Bible, but you sure don't read them the same way. Augustine picks up on this point in his Epistle 92, when he notes that animal allegories for Jesus are quite frequent (Lion of Judah, Lamb of God, etc), but this doesn't mean anyone believes Jesus actually is any of those things. I hate to harp on this last part so much, but non-Christians sometimes have a hard time giving credit for sophisticated interpretation when it's going on.