15. ST. CLEMENT’S CITATIONS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT (2)

We observed last time that St. Clement likes to refer to speakers when he cites the Bible.

Paul J. Achtemeier explains an important aspect of this fact when he says in a slightly different context that “the New Testament must be understood as speech,”¹ not as printed matter. As anyone who has ever examined facsimiles of ancient Greek or Latin knows, nothing in the texts provides the enormous number of clues which modern typography does; all organizational cues are aural.² 

Therefore, we must grasp that the Old Testament did not mean to St. Clement what the it means to us.  For us, Scripture is above all a book.   For St. Clement, the Old Testament, though a book in Greek already available for centuries, was primarily God’s vital message.  It was heard by most people and read by a very small number; its value ultimately came from God or the men whom he appointed to speak for him.      

Returning to the New Testament, we notice that it took centuries before the New Testament would be established as the canonical collection which we have today.  Why did it take so long for that to happen?  Why did the Fathers of the church disagree about the canon of the New Testament so peacefully for so long?  Part of the reason has to be (as Ernst Robert Curtis puts it) that while “Christianity became the religion of a book, . . . it did not begin as such.”³  

This explains why St. Clement could be so excited about the Septuagint and at the same time did not bother himself about the exact wording of any Septuagint text.  This is also why the innumerable and tiny inconsistencies of the gospels were so unimportant to the early Christians that no one bothered to harmonize them.⁴  Who cares about details when the substance is all that matters?  Why focus on the feather, the stylus, the papyrus, the pixel, the screen, when the only thing that matters is the message?   

As Achtemeier said, the Scriptures were primarily an aural experience.  What he does not emphasize is that this aural experience occurred in a liturgical setting.  The aural experience connects the audience not to the documents but to the authors or the speakers.  From the point of view of the early Christians, the later interest in gathering and comparing manuscripts in order to establish the best readings would likely be seen as signs of cultural rot or dementia, as an inexplicable victory of petty details over dynamic message. 

The indifference of the early church to the Bible as a book is therefore due to the mind of the believers:  their faith was a response to a message of incredibly good news.  While the core New Testament documents were generally agreed upon from a pretty early era, there was no felt need for codification.  Who needs to codify living ideals?  Living ideals drive men to do crazy things to serve them; only dead ideals need to be codified and defended. 

St. Clement needed no authorized canon; indeed, Chrysostom says that if we lived in a truly Christian manner, we would need no Bible.⁵  Only in our bookish age can anyone conceive of reducing the faith to a codified text; only in our times can we be advised that just as Christ was God’s Word in the flesh, so the Bible is God’s Word in print.⁶ 

In conclusion, St. Clement’s habit of referring to speakers provides us with evidence that what really matters is the message, not the medium.  This habit seems to support Vellas’ view that it is the person who is inspired, not the document.

ENDNOTES FOR THE CURIOUS

1.  Paul J. Achtemeir, “Omne Verbum Sonat:  The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 109 (1990), p. 19.

2.  Idem, p. 17.

3.  European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (Bollingen/Princeton, 1953), p. 257f.  It was a happy day when I found this brilliant book in the small library of the University of Maryland at Munich.  To further recommend Curtis to the reader, I note his observation that “Church law . . . fixes canonical ages for ecclesiastical offices.  Only in the case of a priest’s female cook is there no definite stipulation.”  Make of that what you will.

4.  Except of course for the heretic Tatian.  Tatian was shunned, but after Christianity became a religion of a book, his Gospel harmony was translated into a huge number of languages from England to Central Asia.

5.  Homily 1 on Matthew.

6.  As an Evangelical Christian charmingly put it to me.  To understand such a bizarre claim, see Alvin Kernan’s account of the 18^th century transition from an oral/scribal culture to a print culture in Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (Princeton, 1987).  The press might have been introduced to the West from China in the 15^th century, but according to Kernan it was not until the 18^th century that English culture made the transition to a print-based culture.  So Achtemeier’s article on the oral environment of the New Testament is concerned only with one period in the larger oral/scribal culture which persisted until a few centuries ago.

14. ST. CLEMENT’S CITATIONS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

In my last post, I discussed divine inspiration, revelation and Biblical errancy.  Now I propose a somewhat odd simile.  Think of divine inspiration as the crucial information which various witnesses have been given.  Revelation is the testimony the witnesses give at the trial.  The stenographer corresponds in this simile to the scribe taking dictation from a Biblical author.  

The value of this simile is that it makes it clear that everything depends on the testimony; nobody in his right mind would imagine that the stenographer can have anything but one role to play:  to get things straight.  He does not add his own remarks to the testimony.  His only value lies in staying out of the way.   Any value his transcript has is due exclusively to its fidelity to the court proceedings. 

Is there any corroboration for this unusual comparison?

St. Clement’s epistle to the Corinthians might do.¹  We note that this epistle, which was written towards the end of the 1^st century, contains numerous citations of the Old Testament. 

St. Clement uses several expressions to quote the Old Testament:  “it is written,” “that which was written,” “it says” etc.  Most of his citations use these kinds of standard expressions.  He also says “the Scripture bears witness” (XXIII.5) and “Scripture says” (XXXIV.6 and XLII.5), expressions which seem to support the court-room simile proposed above.

Other times he introduces quotes in a very different way.  E.g., he introduces a quote from Gen. 2.23 (“This is now bone of my bone etc.”) in VI.3 as “the saying of our father Adam”.  He also introduces a quote from Ez. (33.11-27) by saying that “the Master of all things spoke.” 

St. Clement often introduces a quote with “God says” (VIII.4, X.2, XIV.5, XVIII.1 etc.; cf. XXXII.2, XXXIII.5). In XIII.1, of Jer. 9.23-24, St. Clement says, “the Holy Spirit says.”  In XXII.1, he introduces an Old Testament citation of Ps. 33:12 (LXX) by saying that “Christ . . . himself through his Holy Spirit calls us thus.”  Introducing a quote of Ps. 2.7-8, he says, “But of his Son the Master said thus:  ‘Thou art my son etc.’”(XXXVI.4).

To wrap it up:  in addition to standard ways of citing Scripture, St. Clement also likes to refer to speakers, not just documents.

Next time we will draw a few inferences from this fact.

ENDNOTES FOR THE CURIOUS

1.  The Apostolic Fathers is what we call the earliest fathers after the apostles.  The proper term is sub-apostolic, where sub- means immediately adjacent (The Concise Oxford Dictionary).  The earliest were contemporaries of St. John the Theologian.  There are several collections of their writings of the Apostolic Fathers in print and online.  The online versions tend to be done in archaic English; the best version online may be J. B. Lightfoot’s. 

13. IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED?

In our last post, I pointed out some inconsistences in Caleb’s Hebron.  These inconsistencies create trouble for the Inerrancy Warrant (If the Bible is inspired, then it must be free from errors).  Now I wish to propose new warrants that will cover divine inspiration and inconsistencies. 

Let’s first explore some ideas advanced by Basil Vellas.¹ 

According to Vellas, since there is no way for man to grasp what God  reveals to him, he must receive “internal illumination” which will help him to understand and record what has been revealed.  This process of inspiration “does not exclude free will, thought or conscience, because it does not bring a Scriptural writer into a state of ecstasy.”²

Vellas goes on to cite the Blessed Theophylact as saying that “the Spirit spoke to each of the prophets and they transmitted what was said by the Spirit in the way they could.”  Just as salvation is a question of cooperation between God and man, so too in the case of inspiration do we find that the prophets and apostles are allowed to participate in revelation. 

This view of revelation, says Vellas, “prevented the Ortho­dox church     . . .  from accepting the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture, which denies the author's personality.”  This permits Vellas to conclude that divine inspiration does not affect “historical and scientific questions and knowledge of everyday life which could easily be obtained by the authors through their own mental powers.”  Rather, “revelation and the divine inspiration which is conne­cted with it can be applied only to dogmatic and moral truths.”  He adds that “consequently there is a distinction in Holy Scripture between the vital and the non-essential, the per­manent and the transient, the divine and the human element.”

We capture Vellas’ insights in three warrants.  The first is a Revelation Warrant:  Inspired men contribute to the revelation they proclaim.  A Biblical Errancy Warrant naturally follows:  If there are errors in the Bible, they reflect the human contributions made to the records of divine revelation.  The third is a new Biblical Inerrancy Warrant:  Dogmatic and moral truths in the Bible are inerrant.  Let’s apply these warrants to the case of Hebron.

We first ask whether the history of Hebron is something which a divinely inspired author could have provided from his own resources.  Certainly; this agrees with the Revelation Warrant.  Then, whether the muddled history of Hebron suggests errors.  It certainly seems like it, so the Biblical Errancy Warrant applies.  Finally, we ask whether Hebron’s history has a bearing on dogmatic or moral truths.  Of course not; if we wish to suggest that the history of Hebron cannot be accepted at face value as factually true, our new Biblical Inerrancy Warrant clears us to do so.    

By the application of these three warrants, we see that we do not have to treat Hebron as a divinely inspired history whose contradictions must be vigorously whisked away with the broom of piety, nor do we have to concede that the Bible is not inspired.  Rather, we candidly admit that Hebron poses an interesting problem of history and manuscript transmission, without having any bearing on divine inspiration or revelation.

All this goes to show the value of identifying and proposing warrants for our evidence. 

If we retain a warrant to the effect that Biblical inerrancy requires the Bible to have no errors, any evidence of inconsistency—really, the tiniest disagreements among the manuscripts—becomes grounds for dismissing the divine inspiration of the authors and the revelation they proclaimed. 

If we retain a warrant to the effect that Biblical inerrancy does not entail zero-tolerance for errors in the Bible, evidence of inconsistency does not even touch divine inspiration or revelation, let alone dismiss them. 

 

ENDNOTES

1.  All quotes in this essay are from Basil Vellas, “The Authority of the Bible according to the Eastern Orthodox Church,” in Ευχαριστήριον, τιμητικός Τόμος Αμίλκα Αλιβιζάτου (Athens: 1958), 490-503 (http://www.apostoliki-diakonia.gr/ index.html [accessed July 9, 2018]).  I hope in the future to have the hard copy of this book and provide more specific references.

2.  Here Vellas alludes to the kind of prophesy that involves what we would call ecstatic experiences.  Saul himself, when he was bent on killing David, was permitted by God to succumb to this when “he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that night.  Wherefore they say, Is Saul also among the prophets?” (1 Sam. 19.24). 

 

12. OBJECTIONS TO BIBLICAL INERRANCY

The Inerrancy Warrant (If the Bible is inspired, then it must be free from error) can be objected to on several grounds.  I had not meant to explore this issue, but it seems promising.  Here are my objections in no particular order. 

Please note that Biblical inspiration and inerrancy are two entirely different concepts. 

Biblical inspiration is first of all an unsupported claim is a matter of faith.  In logic, we would say that Biblical inspiration is a given or an axiom which one does not prove.  Biblical inspiration only requires that Scripture not be exclusively human in origin.  Biblical inerrancy goes a lot further in ascribing total freedom from errors to the Bible.

So, then, here are my objections for readers to ponder if they wish, but which won’t figure (at this point) in any future posts.

1.  How do we know that divine inspiration frees the Bible from human errors?  There is no verse in the Bible which states the that the Bible is inerrant.

2.   Suppose that the Bible does provide us with some kind of Inerrancy Warrant.  Then its testimony could not be accepted, since it would be circular reasoning.

3.  How do we know that divine inspiration frees the Bible from human errors?  If a human source says that it does, then we must assess that claim on its own merits.  If our hapless opponent claims that it is free from error because it is divinely inspired, then he is assuming just what he is supposed to prove. 

4.  Even if the Bible’s claim to its own testimony were not circular, according to Dt. 19:15, we must have two or three witnesses for resolving any matter.  This verse is cited several times in the New Testament, of which John 8:17 is most relevant, where it is a question of testimony and not allegation.  What second or third witnesses could be brought forward to corroborate the Bible’s claim to be free from error?  Does the Bible have such peers?

5.  Why should the Bible be free of human frailties like errors?  When the Son of God was incarnate, he took on human frailties.  Why should the Bible be free of something which Christ gladly bore? 

11. THE BAFFLING HISTORY OF HEBRON

Let’s apply the notion of warrant to a common religious doubt, the inspiration of Scripture.

We read in Genesis that Hebron and Kiriath Arba are two names for the same place (35.27).  Kiriath Arba was named after Arba “the greatest man of the Anakim” (Jo 14:15).  Arba was “the father of Anak” (Jo 15:13, 21:11).  Anak’s three sons—Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai—feature prominently in the intelligence briefing which the spies gave Moses and the Israelites (Jo 13:22); the spies identified them as “the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim)” (Nu 13:23). 

However, when the narrator recounts the attempt of the five Amorite kings to attack the Gibeonites, who were allies of the invading Israelites, Hoham is identified as the king of Hebron (Jo 10:3).  Hoham is not said to be a descendant of Arba, nor are any of the Nephilim said to have been in the ranks of his army. 

After the execution of Hoham, we are told that Joshua sacked Hebron and “left none remaining” (Jo 10:37); then he wiped out all the Anakim, except in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod (11:20-21).

Nevertheless, after Joshua allotted Hebron to Caleb (14:13), Caleb still had to drive out the “three sons of Anak” (Jo 15:14). 

Later on we learn that Hebron is made a city of refuge and given to the Levites (Jo 21:13). 

To sum it up, Hebron, a city of the Anakim, ruled by the three sons of Arba, is paradoxically said to have an Amorite king named Hoham; it was sacked utterly.  When, however, Caleb selected Hebron as his portion, he had to drive out the Anakim violently, even though we had just been told that it had been sacked by Joshua.  Then Hebron was given to the Levites, even though we had been told that Hebron was Caleb’s.

On the face of it, not all the details in this summary can be true according to the Law of Contradiction (a statement and its contradiction cannot both be true).  For example, either Hebron was ruled by the three sons of Anak or by Hoham; either Hebron was a city of the Nephilim or of the Amorites; either Joshua utterly sacked Hebron or Caleb did; either Joshua wiped out all the Anakim except in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod or not; either Hebron was Caleb’s city or it was a Levite city. 

Here is what people normally often say when they are confronted with Scriptural inconsistencies:  “How can the Bible be true, if it is inconsistent with itself?  If it is not true, how can it be inspired?”  Here the implicit warrant may be supplied as, If the Bible is inspired, then it must be free from error.  Let’s call this the Inerrancy Warrant.  The exact wording of this warrant will vary with the exact shade of opinion different believers have, but you will see why the exact wording does not matter.  Naturally, once human errors are found in the Bible—whether they are disagreements as noted above or manuscript variants—either the errors have to be explained away by some incredible arguments or the deal is off.   

Next time we will provide an alternative to the Inspiration Warrant which will free us from these difficulties.

10. ORIGINS OF CERTAINTY (2)

Now that we know why evidence imparts certainty to a claim, we need to know how evidence matters to a claim. 

What makes evidence matter, as Stephen Toulmin tells us, is its warrant.¹  Let’s define warrant as a rule which dictates what is allowed as evidence and how compelling it is.

Let’s look at a few examples of warrants.

Suppose that the Mr. Slaughter claims he could not have murdered Mr.  Corpus in London because Mr. Slaughter was in Gravesend at the time.  Here the accused appeals to the warrant that no man can be in two places at once.  This warrant makes Mr. Slaughter’s presence in Gravesend compelling evidence of his innocence.

If Mr. Fraile says he is sick, why does it matter if his temperature is 99 degrees?  It matters because of the rule that if someone’s temperature is above 98.6 degrees, he is sick.  If Mr. Fraile says he cannot go to work today, his fever is likely to persuade his boss.

Reverting to the Dover Restaurants problem, my warrant could be that if the owner of a restaurant cannot be bothered to maintain his building properly, he likely cannot be bothered to serve good food, either.  As warrants go, this warrant does not seem to be as persuasive as Mr. Slaughter’s warrant or the feverish warrant, but that is okay.  In a pinch, it could give me some quick way to make up my mind.

In all three examples, the warrant states or implies what sort of evidence must be introduced in order to confirm the claim.                 

How does warrant relate to certainty? 

I do not have a complete answer to this question, nor is it likely available, but we may make a start here by distinguishing important types of warrants which confer different degrees of certainty.²

If we return to the case of Mr. Slaughter, we see that his warrant confers necessity upon his innocence, since his warrant cannot conceivably be violated.  This kind of warrant is called a metaphysical warrant.  Similar warrants are A statement may not be false and true at the same time in the same sense; killing for no reason is morally right; whatever is, is; and so forth.  It is characteristic of metaphysical warrants that violating them drives us to either incoherence or madness.    

In Mr. Fraile’s case, the feverish warrant is a kind of physical necessity.  Physical necessities “are ultimate facts, which we take on the evidence of experience, without being able to give their final account.”³  Natural necessities are squishier than metaphysical warrants.  For instance, water may boil at 212º F for most people, but the inhabitants of the Mile High City know that a full statement of the facts must include air pressure to explain for when water boils.  Warrants involving natural necessities are not as conclusive as metaphysical warrants, but they are still sturdy.

Finally, we have moral warrants.  A moral warrant relies upon the moral character of the person involved.  This kind of warrant demonstrates in range of certitude exactly that range occupied by moral character.  

At one end of the range, Rickaby observes that “it is a sheer impossibility that historians should be deceiving us, when they narrate certain substantial events in the lives of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Charlemagne.”⁴  He can say this for a number of compelling reasons—the sheer abundance of evidence from the earliest times on, the consensus of the learned, the stigma (once) attached to mendacity among historians and so forth.

At the other end of the range, I would not ask a used car salesman to tell me the value of a car on his lot and pay that price with the conscience of a man who has done all he could to secure a fair deal; the salesman has too many reasons to inflate the price. 

In the Dover Restaurants problem, my warrant is a moral warrant.  The kind of person who keeps his restaurant looking spic and span is in my experience more likely to offer a decently and hygienically prepared meal, but I could not swear by it.  This illustrates why the moral warrant is tricky to apply.

In conclusion, if evidence is what leads us to the truth, warrant is what confirms the viability and weight of the evidence.  Warrants are not equally authoritative, so we have to pay attention to the type of warrant being used when we evaluate an argument.

ENDNOTES

1.  I rely throughout on the Toulmin Model Argument, as the perceptive reader will note.  For details, see Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rieke, Allan Janik, An Introduction to Reasoning, 2^nd ed. (NY:  MacMillan Publishers, 1984).

2.  The astute reader will note that I am using Rickaby’s discussion of the three kinds of certitude (The First Principles of Knowledge, 4^th ed. [London:  Longmans, Green & Co., 1901], 44) to provide a classification for Toulmin’s otherwise unwieldy concept of warrants.

3.  Rickaby, 57.

4.  Ibid., 58.

9. THE ORIGINS OF CERTAINTY (1)

Now that we have examined the degrees of certitude, we will turn to the origins of certitude.  After all, it won’t do us any good to discuss doubts if we have no way of settling them. 

So, we last mentioned how ignorance gives way to doubt, doubt to suspicion and so forth.  What allows us to upgrade, say, doubt to suspicion?

Many years ago, I was passing through Dover, England, where, I was told by the tour guide, the only good places to eat at were two Chinese restaurants.  Let’s call them Chang’s Chow Fon and Eng’s Chow Fon.   Suppose I can put off eating for a bit, but not too long.  Short of eating in each restaurant in turn to decide where I should eat, how do I decide?

As a first approximation, I decide to judge them by appearances.  Suppose that I discover that Chang’s restaurant is obviously badly kept—the grass is knee-high, a window in front is broken, paint is peeling in giant flakes—and Eng’s has a neatly kept lawn, shining windows and an otherwise immaculate appearance.  For me, this decides where dinner will be. 

What’s happening in this story? 

I started off the evening in positive doubt, since the tour guide implicitly gave the two restaurants equally strong recommendations.  Figuratively speaking, the scales of judgment were level.  By finding out which one was more decently kept, I found something by which to tip the scales.  This something is evidence. 

Before we discuss the nature of evidence, we need to define the word claim:  a claim is any statement whose truth is in doubt.  If I say, “I should eat at the nicely kept Chinese restaurant,” that is a claim.  I can’t know which one offers better food until I have tried both, but the price of certainty—eating, say, the same dish at both restaurants—is too high a price for me to pay in terms of time, health and money. 

Many claims can be justified by experience and so become accepted as facts.  If I am ironing clothes, listening to music and using a fan, and suddenly everything goes dark, I claim that I tripped the circuit breaker.  When I go to the garage and find the relevant circuit breaker in the off position, my claim becomes a fact.

Other claims have a harder time becoming facts.  For instance, even if I ate at both restaurants, I might find that their dishes are equally good, so that I hesitate to regard either claim as fact.  Or I might find out that both restaurants have more than one cook, and the quality of your meal depends on which cook is on duty.  Or one chef is double-timing, and the quality of your meal depends only on the mood the chef is in and has nothing to do with the restaurant.  At any rate, the question When do I eat at both restaurants? becomes more useful than Which restaurant is better?

We may now turn back to evidence:  We define evidence as anything that confirms a claim.  If I make the claim to my poker pals that I cannot play poker anymore, I can corroborate that claim by showing them a bank statement which shows there is nothing in the vault.  I have verified that my claim is a fact.  This example shows how (as Rickaby says) evidence is the test of truth.¹   

We may now say that evidence is what we use to upgrade any level of certitude to a higher (or for that matter a lower) level.

The importance of the notion of evidence requires us to discuss it a little more next time.

ENDNOTES

1.  See John Rickaby, The First Principles of Knowledge, 4^th ed. (London:  Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), p. 222.