Euthyphro reads the Bible

[elfs]

Beck has another interesting article that touches on a subject that has been buzzing around in my head for some time. In a review of Christian Smith's book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, he writes:

[The main idea is that] the meaning of the bible is clear and transparent to open-minded readers. The implication of this idea is that when people sit down to read the bible a broad consensus can be reached about the will of God for any number of issues or topics.

Empirically speaking, the bible does not produce consensus. Empirically speaking, what we find, to use Smith's phrase, is "pervasive interpretive pluralism." Even among biblicists themselves consensus cannot be reached.

Smith's take is to tell people to get comfortable with ambiguity, to accept that the Bible is a mess, but just as you can't make out what one man in a crowd at a football stadium is screaming, you know that he and the crowd together are rooting for their team. Smith says that the Bible is "pointing to" God, and you'll just have to accept that the people who wrote the book made of hash of getting their story straight.

Beck doesn't have a take, except to say that Smith's is a recipe for madness and despair. But here's the one point that bothers me: if Smith is right, where is goodness in the Bible? How does one read it in order to "be a decent person," the take of Beck's other essays? Indeed, the entire question of Biblical interpretation is nothing more than Euthyphro's dilemma writ small: Can you take up the Bible and, from it, learn how to be a decent person? Or do you have to come to the Bible as a decent person first, and take from only those parts that edify and enlighten your quest for decency and dignity? If the latter, why need the Bible at all?

I have long suspected that the latter is the case. Smith seems to think so.

Comments

I'm not sure I've seen anyone else take the bible quite that way

[shunra.livejournal.com]

The whole "this is a user-manual for life" thing requires masses of pre-existing context.

I saw a really nice description of this phenomenon today, from a Muslim friend of mine in India: "The Quran is a telescope, it is not to look at, but to look through." I read that as extending beyond the Quran to any other religious text. In fact, that seems to be the way religious texts are used: not for the plain-language meaning but rather, for the evoked contexts. A meaning-zipping mechanism, among other things.

Within that viewpoint, people are not quite individuals with individual value (and values) but more of pawns in games at a higher level, pretty much in the way made most obvious in the Book of Job.
Bibles always come with interpreters thereof (in Mormonism this is quite literal!) and carry the weight of a whole system around them, not just the thin lines of text. Piles and piles of official and unofficial exegesis make the culture and context that define what a good person is and does, and enforces that goodness to a greater or lesser degree.