Walter Moberly on Human Construction and the Mind of God

In a helpful article in the Richard Hays F/S, Walter Moberly concludes his analysis of the construction of the Flood narrative with some comments about how the awareness of the fundamentally human dimensions of the text relate to the ongoing claim that the text mediates the divine will and word.  He makes 3 points that I find especially helpful, and often forgotten in debates about how we interpret the Bible:

'Although sometimes people speak as if the discovery of the complexities of human processes involved in the formation of the Bible somehow disqualifies the Bible from being regarded any longer as the word of God, those who are more theologically literate will rightly insist that one should conceive the human and the divine as complementary rather than competitive.' (65)

Moberly then goes on to nuance the scope of these 'human processes':

'there is sometimes a tendency to suppose that writers singly composing narratives of historical factuality are acceptable [as human work] in a way that editors and scribes reworking legends preserved by a community are not.  Yet surely any significant mode of human communication should in principle be acceptable as a vehicle for the divine word' (65)

This leads to a model of biblical engagement that:

'should represent a trusting commitment to work in a self-opening way with the wider moral and theological tradition - both biblical and postbiblical - of which the story forms a part.  Such a commitment would be intrinsically indebted to the past and present fruitfulness of that tradition in its various Christian (and/or Jewish) forms.  Within this context, searching and critical questions are put to text and tradition as a corollary of allowing text and tradition, received as mediators of divine reality, to put searching and critical questions to us.' (66)

Moberly, Walter, 'On Interpreting the Mind of God: The Theological Significance of the Flood Narrative (Genesis 6-9)', in J. Ross Wagner, C. Kavin Rowe, and A. Katherine Grieb (eds.), The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays (Grand Rapids / Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2008), 44-66.

Comments

[Baptist Bookworm]

Hi Sean - you're right, these are great quotes, and he's making a really important point.

The problem, though, for many of those in our churches, was summed up by Mike Parsons at a recent colloquium (!) where he commented that in Baptist circles the debate is all too often not about interpretation at all, but infallibility.

So it's not the difference between 'writers singly composing' and 'editors and scribes reworking' that defines the popular debate, but that between 'narratives of historical factuality' and 'legends preserved by a community'. And yet as biblical scholars we keep coming in to the ring on an interpretation ticket, only to find that we've already lost the bout on an infallibility technicality.

[Glen]

How come someone how looks like William Hague talks so much sense?