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In this episode, Trent shares how Pope Benedict XVI provides a way of avoiding Christian “fundamentalist” approaches to the Bible that can lead to “fundamentalist atheism.”
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion once said, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction, jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously, malevolent bully.”
Well, in today’s episode, I want to talk about how Pope Benedict XVI would respond to harsh reviews of the Bible, like those from Richard Dawkins. But before I do that though, could you please leave a review of this episode in the comment below? Hopefully not a harsh one, but a comment would be nice. And of course, subscribing is a great way to keep up with our content that comes out every Monday and Wednesday. And of course, we always appreciate support at trenthornpodcast.com.
So there’s a fair number of tough passages in the Old Testament. I’m not going to go through all of them in today’s episode. I do plan to do future in-depth episodes on some of them though. Today what I want to focus on is a general attitude towards the Bible that can lead to the rhetoric that comes from Richard Dawkins and other new atheists. This often happens when people hold a fundamentalist, overly literal reading of the Bible and just go from thinking what they’re reading is true to what they’re reading is false, and hold onto the fundamentalism.
Here’s what I mean. Here’s a graphic from atheist John Loftus’ blog back in 2014. It shows three choices from a Gallup Poll regarding what someone thinks about the Bible, and it shows what people said in 1984, 2004 and 2014. Here are the choices. First, the Bible is the actual Word of God and should be taken literally word for word. Second, the Bible is the inspired Word of God, but not everything should be taken literally word for word. And finally, the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.
Now, none of these are great options, but if I had to pick one, I go with option two. Option three denies the Bible’s divine inspiration, or at least it doesn’t mention it, it certainly seems to deny it. But option one denies the Bible’s human composition. It implies that the Bible just is God’s direct words that should all be taken literally, and the Bible’s authors are just kind of secretaries who blindly wrote down whatever God told them. But that’s not what the church teaches, and it’s not what even most modern non-Catholic Christians believe. Here’s what the church taught at the Second Vatican Council about scripture. It writes, “In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him, they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they as true authors consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.”
The Old Testament is the Word of God, but its human authors weren’t just blindly transcribing God’s voice, they were true authors. And that means God allowed their personalities and their ancient worldviews to be present in what they wrote. This means in their writings, we see a worldview that is less advanced, not just scientifically, but also theologically. That’s why the Second Vatican Council notes that the books of the Old Testament, “also contain some things which are incomplete and temporary, nevertheless show us true divine pedagogy.” To give a concrete example, the earliest parts of the Old Testament affirm henotheism, the belief that there are many gods but only one God should be worshiped, Yahweh. We see this in passages like Psalm 97:9, “Thou art exalted far above all gods.” Or in the fact that Israel was tempted to worship other gods. Pope Benedict XVI when he was a cardinal said, “Ancient Israel no more denied the existence of Sheol, a gloomy underworld in the afterlife, then at first it denied the existence of other gods than Yahweh.”
Pope Benedict recognized that the Bible is not just a sterile collection of God’s explicit commands and instructions. It’s a story of human redemption told over centuries. Pope Benedict wrote the following in his 2010 apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini, “It must be remembered first and foremost, that biblical revelation is deeply rooted in history. God’s plan is manifested progressively, and it is accomplished slowly in successive stages and despite human resistance. God chose a people and patiently worked to guide and educate them.”
Since the ancient Israelites were often tempted to worship false pagan gods, Yahweh did not explicitly reveal to them He was a trinity. Doing so early in Israel’s history, might’ve confused them and led to the false worship of a triad of separate divine beings, instead of true knowledge of the one God who is a trinity. So God first taught that He was the God to be worshiped above all other gods without explicitly saying the other gods don’t exist. That’s why the first commandment only says to have no other gods before the true God. But later in Israel’s history, God revealed He’s the only God that exists. Like when He said to the prophet Isaiah, “I am God, and there is no other. I am God, and there is none like Me.” Once God’s people were sufficiently free from the temptation of idolatry, God became man and He revealed the mystery of the Godhead.
So when we read difficult passages in scripture, we have to remember that God allowed the ancient authors to retain their own worldviews, which in many cases were theologically undeveloped or incomplete. So we have to be careful when we’re reading a biblical text, since we may think that just because the text says something, that means God is saying that to us today.
That’s why the Second Vatican Council taught that quote, “Since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”
Now, the key phrase in this passage is asserted by the inspired authors. The fact that something is said in scripture does not mean that it is being asserted or that it’s without error. The sacred author could be uttering something that’s not literally true, like when the psalmist says, “We take refuge under God’s wings.” The Bible is the inherent Word of God, but it comes to us through human words in a variety of literary genres. Some are historical, but some are also poetic or non-literal. Like when the Bible describes God, the Father, having physical body parts like a strong right arm. An overly literal approach to scripture produces many more difficulties that would make an atheist say the Bible isn’t divinely inspired.
Let’s go back to the Gallup Poll and notice the change over 30 years. So this atheist, John Loftus, he thinks this poll shows Christian fundamentalists are losing. And in one sense they are, but in another sense, they’re just, as my friend, the Protestant theologian, Randall Rauser says, “They’re just switching sides.” The percentage of those who see the Bible as the literal but not actual Word of God has actually increased in recent years. When Gallup asked this question in 2022, here were the results. So the Bible is the actual Word of God and should be taken literally word for word, 20% of people. The Bible is the inspired Word of God, but not everything should be taken literally word for word, 49%. The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man, 29%. Once again, the middle ground position actually picked up points. But more people are ditching one extreme view of the Bible, that it’s all God and has no truly human elements, in favor of another extreme view, the Bible is all human and it has no truly divine elements.
Here’s what I think is driving the switch from one extreme view to another. It happens when a person pits what the Bible says against the facts of science, history, and ethical reasoning. That person might think that only one of them can be right. So if the Bible is right, science, history and philosophical approaches to ethics, just have to be wrong. But if they end up accepting modern views of science, history and ethics, then they think the Bible has to be wrong. They switch sides. They don’t step back and say, “Well, maybe it’s not the Bible that’s wrong, maybe it’s my overly literal reading of the Bible.” This is especially the case when we read the Dark Passages of the Bible. Pope Benedict called them this because as he said, “The violence and immorality they occasionally contain, prove obscure and difficult.”
Here’s more from Verbum Domini on that, “Revelation is suited to the cultural and moral level of distant times and thus describes facts and customs such as cheating and trickery and acts of violence and massacre without explicitly denouncing the immorality of such things. This can be explained by the historical context, yet it can cause the modern reader to be taken aback, especially if he or she fails to take account of the many dark deeds carried out down the centuries and also in our own day. In the Old Testament, the preaching of the prophets vigorously challenged every kind of injustice and violence, whether collective or individual, and thus became God’s way of training His people in preparation for the gospel. So it would be a mistake to neglect those passages of scripture that strike us as problematic. Rather, we should be aware that the correct interpretation of these passages requires a degree of expertise, acquired through a training that interprets the text and their historical literary context and within the Christian perspective, which has as its ultimate hermeneutical key, the Gospel and the New Commandment of Jesus Christ brought about in the Paschal Mystery.”
For example, it’s easy for someone to read the atrocities in the Book of Judges and come to the conclusion that the Bible is just a book of fables written by cruel human beings, this is not the actual Word of God. I talked about this in a previous episode where I said that Judges is not an instruction book on how to live our lives. The Book of Judges is a warning about what happens when God’s authority is rejected. It’s more of an anti instruction book of what not to do. Pope Pius XI put it well, he said, “As should be expected in historical and didactic books, the Old Testament books reflect in many particulars, the imperfection, the weakness, and sinfulness of man.”
Remember, the ancient authors used anthropomorphic language to describe God that was not literally true. Like God, the Father, having physical body parts. The authors also use phenomenological language to describe the natural world, and that language wasn’t literally true either, like descriptions of how the sun moves. We still use this today. We’re saying a man thought in his heart. That wasn’t poetry, people didn’t discover we thought in our brains until the modern era. But the biblical authors were not asserting scientific truths and the Holy Spirit wasn’t asserting scientific truths to them. They’re asserting theological truths. Likewise, there are certain moral truths in scripture that are said, but they’re not necessarily asserted for us today.
But a good example of this would be Psalm 1:37, which says, “Oh, daughter of Babylon, you devastator, happy shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us. Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock.” Now, this passage is in the poetic genre because it’s found in the Book of Psalms, but also falls under a special category of psalmic literature called the Imprecatory Psalms. These are Psalms that have the author asking God to curse or harm his enemies. So in this psalm, the author describes how he and his fellow Jews have been taken into captivity in Babylon. So keep in mind that when cities in the ancient world were conquered, the inhabitants were rarely shown mercy, regardless of how young they were. When the psalmist talks about babies being dashed against a rock, he probably thought of his fellow Jews or even his own family who had been brutally murdered. Remember, the Bible is fully divine in its inspiration, but it’s also fully human in its composition.
Psalm 1:37 is not just a divine command in a seemingly endless divine instruction book. It’s a brutally human cry to God, to justly punish the Babylonians. The Psalm takes the form of a warning, telling the Babylonians, they gleefully devastated Jerusalem, but there will come a day when another empire, the Persians, will gleefully carry out the same atrocities against them. So when we’re reading this, we have to separate the spiritual lesson God is teaching from the literal desire of the author of the Psalm. The psalmists’ worldview, it was limited. He didn’t know about Christ’s future victory over evil or Christ’s future command to love our enemies. He may not have even had a clear idea of eternal punishment in the afterlife for the wicked. So as a result, the best response he hoped for in the face of horrible injustice that he and even his family suffered, was just some kind of retributive justice or punishment against the evildoers of his time.
But God was able to use this author’s words to convey a literal truth about war and a deeper spiritual truth for us today. One example of this is found in St. Augustine who said of this passage, “What are the little ones of Babylon? Evil desires at their birth. By no means let it gain the strength of evil habit. When it is little dash it, but you fear less though dashed it die not, dash it against the rock, and that rock is Christ.” Of course, that’s one spiritual sense of the text and there can be others. What’s just important is that we don’t want to universally and rigidly apply the literal sense of the text and miss the different layers to it.
Now, does questioning the literal nature of these accounts and their meaning, does that end up denying divine inspiration? Pope Benedict XVI talked about this with a journalist named Peter Seewald. Benedict was asked about the supposed contradiction between God giving the fifth commandment, “Thou shall not kill,” in Exodus 20:13, and then just a few chapters later, He ordered the Israelites to kill 3,000 of their brethren as a punishment for idolatry.
Here’s a part of Pope Benedict’s reply. “The story that follows does sound terribly bloodthirsty. And for us it is scarcely comprehensible. There too we have to look forward toward Christ. He does the opposite. He takes death upon Himself and does not kill others. But in this moment of the Sinai story, Moses, as it were, puts into effect what is already present. The other people have perverted their own lives. How far we should take this story literally is another question. The people of Israel stay in existence. What happens expresses the truth that anyone who turns from God not only departs from the covenant, but from the sphere of life. They ruin their own life and in doing so, enter into the realm of death.”
Notice that even Pope Benedict XVI recognize the possibility that some of these disturbing stories in scripture are not literal historical accounts. In my book, Hard Sayings, A Catholic Approach to Bible Difficulties, I defend the possibility that passages would seem to describe God ordering the killing of all the Canaanites, including the women and children, are not literal events. Because the Book of Judges shows the Canaanites weren’t all wiped out. Instead, these passages are example of exaggerated warfare rhetoric the ancient author used to emphasize that Israel should have nothing to do with their pagan neighbors.
Now, the question of the killing of the Canaanites is a huge topic that deserves its own episode. So I’m not going to get into all of that right here. My main point in today’s episode is just that when we’re carefully studying scripture, we have to parse the incomplete human elements of the Old Testament from what God is asserting to us today. And this is not just some trick of liberal biblical scholars to undermine God’s words. Even someone as conservative as Pope Benedict XVI recognize that scripture is not always clear in what it means, especially in these Dark Passages. Pope Pius XII made a similar point when he talked about interpreting scripture in his 1943 encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu.
He wrote, “What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wish to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context. The interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East, and with the aid of history, archeology, ethnology and other sciences accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact, did use. For the ancient peoples of the East in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today, but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East.”
All right, well thank you guys so much for watching today. I hope this was helpful. I’m sorry I couldn’t get into more biblical difficulties. This is kind of the tip of the iceberg. If there is particular Dark Passages or themes in scripture you’d like me to address in a future episode, definitely leave a comment below. But my main point was just that we want to avoid overly literal fundamentalist readings of the biblical text. Because it’s easy for someone to start with a Christian fundamentalist reading of scripture and then in the face of what seemed like insurmountable difficulties for that view, to simply hold to that fundamentalist reading of the text, but deny its divine inspiration and then become a kind of have a militant atheistic reading of the text instead of parsing through the language to understand that the Bible is fully divine in its inspiration, but also fully human in its composition, and it’s not always easy to determine what the Holy Spirit is asserting through the meaning of the text.
So that’s why there’s a lot of great resources I would recommend. The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible is one set that I would recommend. I have my own book, Hard Sayings, A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. And also another book I would recommend is Dark Passages of the Bible, Engaging Scripture with Benedict XVI and St. Thomas Aquinas by the Catholic Scholar, Matthew J. Ramage. So a really great book and one that shows that the approach that I’m putting forward today is not something from modernists or liberal biblical scholars. That by understanding the texts and studying it this way in the face of difficulties, flows within a wonderful biblical tradition that we see in Pope Benedict XVI, St. Thomas Aquinas and other thoughtful, faithful exegies of scripture. So thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very beautiful and blessed day.
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