Divine Inspiration, Revelation, or even being handed directly from God to man… regardless of the stance you take… the reality is that man is in the middle of it and had to become the instrument for its inscription, and its proliferation.
I’d be lying if I said at some points I haven’t (knowing how humans are, or can be) felt the impact of that thought, and had to wrestle with its implication. But as I’ve grown and matured, I’ve begun to see human involvement not as a proof against the Bible’s reliability… but rather FOR it’s reliability.
The fact that it is written by man is actually proof itself that there is truth in it, if not THE truth.
Why? Because man is quite, consistently… errant. In fact, humans are quite incapable of coming up with “truth” by him/herself. What man IS more likely to do is to “find” existing truths. Some of which are sought, and some of which are stumbled upon.
I can find atoms not because I made them up, but because they are there. I can find wavelengths and geodes and slimy bugs, not because I made them true, but because they already exist in truth, and are just waiting to be found.
Of course, it is possible that any given learning found may be false or not what it seems at first (See *superceded theories such as dinosaurs not being feathered, Leeches not being great for headaches, and stress causing ulcers…). But when existing truths are found, again and again, and confirmed and validated again and again, and tested and validated and grow in truth… those truths are honed and strengthened and fortified, so that later, the truest parts of those truths become inherently known and be more readily viewed and trusted. This is the truth of the Bible that man has uncovered over these thousands of years (and continue to uncover today…)
But let’s not stop there… let’s take a step back…
<< 80’s rewind sound plays <<<
What exactly is “revelation?”
A revealing of truth.
A revealing of truth through a process of exploration and discovery.
“Revelation” or “Divine inspiration” don’t have to mean that God planted the thought or paragraphs in your head… rather that through consistency of outcome or consistency in a feedback loop, that some “truth” or some “reality of nature” is revealed, uncovered, gleaned, made visible to the observer.
I want to start by saying, God has always been described as being beyond our understanding (or his full nature anyway). And it’s that thought that starts this off.
If God is too big, too complex, too abstract, too multi-faceted for us to understand… and yet the Bible is written by men. (Who I know from experience are too small to understand that)… There is a question written between the lines that must be asked… What does knowing that fact reveal about Bible? And what does that reveal about understanding of God?
The fact is, if you deconstruct all that you know about society and civilization and modern humanity itself, and return to a place of naive existence… the world was (nothing) but a mystery.
Like children with no parents, humans had to learn that fire is hot, some things aren’t edible, people feel bad when they are punched in the throat. But they also later learned that crop growth, health problems, riches and peace are out of their control, and they began to throw Hail Mary’s (no pun intended) to see what might influence the forces at play.
And that’s where they began to learn about the nature of God. But, just like in today’s science there are false positives, false negatives, uncontrolled variables and they can lead to misguided conclusions. Hence the reason the Bible doesn’t make any attempt to hide (or misname) the belief in other gods… because, to the extent that ancient cultures were concerned, they did believe and had their own reasons for doing so.
The idea is not to say that there are other gods, or that it’s worth giving them credence… only that what they may have been experiencing was just a “facet” of the true God, and they were misunderstanding or mislabeling it.
All this is Genesis BTW
So, how can we get from “some Gods” to THE God. Well, the plague story in Exodus begins to show the transition. (Note: the first commandment on Mt. Sinai after Egypt isn’t don’t believe in other gods, but put no others gods BEFORE me) and as humans get more sophisticated, more collectively oriented and more centered on wisdom sharing and extrapolation by multiple minds (e.g. Levites, later Pharisees and Sanhedrin) the thinking gets more calculated, more scientific, more deep… and the God we know in the OT begins to take shape. In both experience, in lists, in laws, in stories, in literature. They continued to learn about and shape their view of God based on their experiences, both positive and negative.
Here’s where I say the scary thing… does that mean that those writers got it wrong? And the answer is “maybe in parts, they misconstrued some finer details…”
But the beauty is that as time has gone on, those details can and have been refined by future experiences, (more data so to speak), and we, as finite, flawed humans… have had a chance to learn more, hone our view and understanding of God, and reconfigure it.
Case in point? Jesus.
Jesus came, as God, to teach what we’d skewed. In the OT we see a God who wants us to destroy villages and bless us for it… in the NT we see a God who wants nothing of the sort. Is that easier to explain by saying “Different God” or by saying “men wanted/needed to fight… they won and attributed it to God’s favor?”
The answer there is oddly self-evident.
It simply means that mankind, as we were, does not relate to God in the same way as humankind of the humankind of the NT. As they continued to see, feel, and experience, God… they’re understanding grew and evolved. (Note: His nature never changed, but their understanding of it did.) Plus, Jesus came in no uncertain terms to clarify their lack of understanding (e.g. “You have heard it said, but I say…” Matthew 5)
But that leads to the final question/point…
Are we still called to continue to evolving our understanding of God? And I think the answer is an unequivocal… yes.
If that was not the case, why would most of Jesus’s answers to questions be answered in parables and allegory? Jesus would do so by opening up ambiguous situations and asking his questioner to glean the meaning. He didn’t do so because he couldn’t answer their questions, but because he knew that direct, explicit rules don’t work to create individuals and societies with clear direction… (don’t forget, they already had 613 rules… and that had already proven to not work) He knew that only through focused thought, questions, and earned wisdom could people have the tools to continue to do so as the future would unfold.
So, here we are 2000 years later, not with a final, set-in-stone (pun intended) set of inflexible rules to live by, but a wisdom book that challenges the mind, challenges the hearts and challenges the character to rise to its standards in order to get closer to being Christ-like, so we can be more like the one we still seek to find.
It’s a messy thing, being human. We tend to doubt our doubts, yet double down on our beliefs, because certainty and clarity are more valued than having to work it out day by day. But the older I get, the more I treasure the value that a few failures can provide, and the amount of wisdom it can provide. I’m under no illusion that our forefathers were any better, but I do think (collectively anyway) they knew that we’d get here all along.