We need some new metaphors. I think it is quite clear the two bucket theory is untenable, and the owners manual for life metaphor reduces the bible to a behavior manual. Both the theory and metaphor generate so many problems that it is time we start searching for an alternative approach to the text.
This is always how paradigm shifts occur. When a paradigm is initially adopted it answers a variety of questions very well. Those adopting the paradigm realize it doesn’t answer all questions and those unanswerables go on a shelf for further reflection and research. No paradigm is perfect, no model can answer all the questions.
Eventually the current paradigm, always historically and contextually rooted, answers fewer and fewer questions well and the shelf with the unanswerables becomes overloaded and near collapse. This is when a new paradigm begins to emerge. We are undoubtedly living in such a new paradigm time.
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Let’s say the author and editors of the Pentateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy) were living in a largely mythic culture, with a mythic view of God as well as a mythic reality and world around them. We might legitimately ask the question, does a skin legion, per the book of Leviticus, actually render you unclean to attend “church?’ I mean literally, does that mean you can’t worship God and he no longer connects to you? Does contact with a corpse disqualify you from being able to worship? All the laws of Leviticus, for instance, come “from God” yes, but within a very particular sort of mythic culture, meaning they are coming from a very particular view of God that THEY had. Does inspiration make this view of God, and these laws “correct” because it is canonized in the inspired text?
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What are the implications for the biblical text’s author being enmeshed within a particular culture vastly different than that of the readers?
For instance in Genesis 22 God in the inspired text says to Abraham go offer your son as a burnt offering on Mount Moriah. We could bypass the question of culture and time period, as most readers of the biblical text do, including most conservative scholars, seminarians and professors. If we do that we are left asking a couple honest questions.
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Let’s lay aside the old question that leads us to the two bucket approach. And instead of asking what is cultural and irrelevant and what is eternal and applicable how about if we acknowledge the entire text is cultural and that none of it is written to an audience in 2010 and in spite of what we are often told, inspiration doesn’t not make it universally applicable. The last number of posts has demonstrated that problem. So what about this as a new possibility…
How does an inspired text exert or exercise a shaping influence on the life of the reader(s)? The key word is “how?” In the past it was through extracting what we thought were timeless truths from a time bound text, sort of trying to figure out the eternal kernel in the culture bound husk. But what if we admit the obvious, it is all cultural and it can’t be otherwise.
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The two bucket theory has major problems we discovered last post. The first problem is stuff is jumping buckets. “Truths” formerly in the eternal and ever relevant bucket over time end up, due to societal evolution, in the cultural and no longer relevant bucket.
The second problem is this, who says we should read scripture this way? Why are we reading for eternal truth packaged in short, repeatable, memorizable propositions? Who convinced us this was the way to go?
The questions we ask always circumscribe the possible answers. Ask different questions, different answers become possible. Why do we read the bible looking for eternal truth that directly applies to my life? I have asked this question of over 1000 people (mostly pastors and staff), from publishing house executives (no houses will be named to protect the indicted) to bible school professors. The answer is almost verbatim the same. We read for eternal truth because the bible “is the inspired word of God!” (usually said with gusto and a fist pump of some sort.) And yes bible school profs have said this.
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So we have the bucket theory, which really sits as the backbone to the owner’s manual for life approach to scripture; something we already said we have to get rid of. The bucket theory has been asking this question for decades “what is in the eternal and relevant bucket and what is the in the cultural and irrelevant bucket?” While most people and/or pastors would never articulate this as their approach, a bit of probing reveals that for most this is hoe they figure out how to live, what to obey and what the rules of engagement are. This is how we end up using the text as “an owner’s manual for life. Two big problems, intractable, impossible-to-get-around problems arise with this question.
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