Below is a conversation that began on 12/30/2025 in the Nerds Only Forum at BSA where the participants discussed the bible and how it can be read and used.
What remains of scriptural authority after infallibility and univocality collapse
OP – Schaun Wheeler – Faith without doubt is just pretext
I grew up in and still belong to a religious tradition that largely treats the Bible (plus some other books of scripture) as authoritative. My own experience plus my understanding of critical scholarship doesn’t so much allow me to maintain that particular strain of my faith tradition in my own thinking today, but I do devote a lot of thought to the question of whether and to what extent any text can, in any sense, be considered to have normative [prescribing a norm or standard] weight. Although I’ve largely abandoned the dogma that scripture is some direct download of God’s will onto paper, the intuition and inclination is still in me to see the Bible as having a divine origin, in some sense of that term.
The proposition that the Bible or any other sacred text is nothing more than an artifact is a perfectly justifiable conclusion given the absence of all evidence pointing to an alternative, but I’m enough of a scientist to know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and that the longer any given institution survives, the higher the chances that it survived because it serves some important function for the people who adhere to it, even if that function is different from the qualities to which adherents themselves attribute the institution’s success. In other words, would very much prefer to believe that scripture is not only interesting but also useful, but I refuse to believe that if I can’t find a good reason to do so.
So I guess I’m trying to find ways to glean whatever goodness I can from scripture while still maintaining my intellectual honesty. It seems intellectually suspect, if not outright dishonest, to pick and choose moral teachings from the Bible that I happen to already agree with, while at the same time denying that the text has any standing to challenge, correct, or place demands on my moral judgments. Not that affirmation isn’t useful. I just don’t find it useful if that’s all there is – in that posture, the Bible functions only as a mirror for prior commitments rather than as a source of moral insight. I’d be affirming myself more than anything represented by the text, which would reduce scripture to a convenient rhetorical tool. If scripture lacks any basis for forcing me to confront things that I would normally ignore or avoid, I don’t’ see what value it has except as an artifact and curiosity.
To complicate matters: I’m skeptical of any approach that assumes that deity has abdicated any amount of its authority to a collection of words on a page. I’m not a fan of sola scriptura. So I seem to be looking for a view of scripture where the text can be in some sense authoritative, without positing that the text is the seat of that authority. It’s been a challenge.
I think I’m stumbling toward a view that might work [for] me, which I discovered in Benjamin Sommer’s book Revelation and Authority: Sinai in Jewish Scripture and Tradition. It’s part of the Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library. Sommer, Professor of Bible at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, explicitly sets out to see if he can justify a view of the Bible that preserves a notion of divine origin even while fully accepting the findings of critical scholarship. So he spends part of the book deconstructing the Sinai accounts(s), showing their very human origin and evolution, and then spends the rest of the book none of that requires a change in the extent to which laws derived from those accounts can be considered divine and therefore authoritative.
To quote Sommer:
The belief that there is a significant human element in prophecy…or significant human participation in revelation…appears among both Jewish and Christian thinkers in the modern era…. In the stenographic theory [of prophecy], God employed language of the sort normally used by humans to speak specific words to prophets; the prophets then repeated these words verbatim to the audience. In the theory of prophecy as poetry, the divine element of prophecy involves the creation of persons with strong imaginative, rational, and moral faculties, and God does not have particular moments of contact with a prophet. In between lies our participatory theory of prophecy as translation…. According to this approach…the prophet is not merely a vehicle God uses to convey a message but also a participant who helps to shape it…. [S]cripture results from the interaction of God and a human being; God communicates the divine will to the prophet, and the prophet shapes that communication for presentation to a larger community.
Sommer combs through so much rabbinical commentary while fleshing out this argument that at times it felt like I was just reading the notes straight through on Sefaria.org. It was instructive, but dense. I found it easier to digest when he focused on more modern thinkers like Franz Rosenzweig (here in a letter to Martin Buber):
The primary content of revelation is revelation itself. “He came down” — this already concludes the revelation; “He spoke” is the beginning of interpretation.
He also draws heavily on Abraham Heschel:
Indicative words…stand in a fluid relation to ineffable meanings and, instead of describing, merely intimate something which we intuit but cannot fully comprehend…. The source of authority is not the word as given in the text but Israel’s understanding of the text…. [Proper understanding of the Bible] requires austere discipline and can only be achieved in attachment and dedication, in retaining and reliving the original understanding as expressed by the prophets and the ancient sages.”
He cites Edward Greenstein to explain how this constant interpretation of experience gets layered into the text itself:
Throughout the course of its history, Israel developed forms of religious observance that were additional to the laws already existing or that differed in their interpretation or understanding from the laws of earlier periods…. The traditions of the Torah, then, encompass the records of revelation experiences from many periods of Israel’s growth. But the biblical tradition “telescoped” the accumulated revelations of Israel into one great revelation, beginning at Sinai and continuing through the career of our greatest teacher-leader, Moses. “Telescoping” is a common technique used in passing on traditions. Many events occurring over a long period of time are viewed as occurring at one, prime moment, usually the first great moment in the tradition…. Israel’s responses to God’s presence in later generations were telescoped into the Mosaic age as though…they had existed from the first meeting of God and Israel at Sinai.
Sommer concludes:
The divine presence in the biblical text consists not of its words but in the qol [the non-linguistic ‘voice’ or sound that precedes semantic speech] that is not yet a word, in the aleph [the silent letter, without propositional content] of God’s presence that hovers beneath the biblical text and invites it into being. The words in that text are signposts pointing toward a transcendence that cannot be apprehended, but they are not synonymous with or written by that transcendence. Such a view explains why the all-too-human documents we know as the Pentateuch are indeed sacred even as it attenuates claims that they are ontologically distinct from all other texts. Further, this view removes the distinction between the Pentateuch and the rest of Jewish literature. The Pentateuch, like Midrash Sifre and Rashi’s commentary, like Rosenzweig’s essays and a worshipper’s questions made during a synagogue’s Torah discussion, is one of many human interpretations — in fact, a collection of several such interpretations.
And later:
People brought up on the stenographic theory of revelation typically suffer a wrenching loss when they become convinced that the Pentateuch includes, or consists entirely of, human words. The divine words that anchor their life, their beliefs, and their practices turn out to be human formulations, and the disappearance of the firm foundation a divine text provided can be devastating. But the participatory theology in fact posits a very similar relationship between revelation on the one hand and Israel’s beliefs and practices on the other. Even for adherents of the stenographic theory, the actual laws one observes as a religious Jew are human formulations; they were debated in the Talmuds and are laid out in the medieval and modern law codes. The adherent of the stenographic theory might object: “Yes, the law as we observe it involves human formulations — but these human formulations are based on and derived from a heavenly text; they are rooted in God’s own words.” To this I respond: the participatory theory entails essentially the same structure of thought, and it merely pushes the heavenly origin back by a single step. Instead of an earthly talmudic law based on a heavenly Pentateuch, the participatory theory yields an earthly talmudic law based on an earthly Pentateuch that is in turn based on a heavenly, albeit nonverbal command. In both theories, Jewish law as we practice it ultimately but imperfectly reflects a divine revelation. The loss involved in recognizing the earthly nature of the Pentateuch is less momentous than one initially assumes. But the gains that follow from frankly acknowledging the human and thus at times flawed nature of the Pentateuch are considerable.
What Sommer seems to give me is not so much a defense of scripture, as much as a relocation of where normativity lives. I’m not Jewish, but it turns out my Christianity needed a hefty dose of Jewish theology. Sommer’s participatory account addresses the tension between stenographic textual authority and uncritical textual self-affirmation, but only once I saw what problem he is actually solving. He’s not, it seems to me, trying to rescue the Bible from critical scholarship; he is trying to explain how normativity can survive once revelation is no longer equated with dictation. The key move is to stop identifying revelation with textual content at all. Revelation is encounter. Using his later metaphor: it’s a nonverbal command that precedes and generates interpretation without being exhausted by it.
If revelation were identical with the words, then rejecting parts of the text would be rejecting revelation itself. But if revelation is prior to the words, then engagement with the text is always already and necessarily interpretive, and selective. I don’t actually avoid the risk of using scripture as a mirror by pretending the text is fixed, and the interpretation therefore anchored to some sort of original intended meaning. I avoid it by treating interpretation as a disciplined response to something that resists me. The text embodies prior attempts to respond faithfully to an encounter that neither I nor the text nor anyone else controls. I’m not submitting to the authority of ancient sentences; I’m entering into a chain of responses to a reality that exceeds any one response, including my own. Correction comes not from obeying propositions but from submitting my moral imagination to a tradition of interpretation that neither I nor anyone else can fully domesticate. The text confronts me precisely because it does not speak with one voice, and cannot be reduced to a single moral stance.
If the divine presence resides not in the words but in the pre-verbal summons that generates them, then authority is real but indirect. The text has normative weight not because it settles questions, but because it reliably reopens them. It presses me toward something you cannot fully articulate, by pressing me towards other people’s imperfect attempts at their own articulation. Authority resides neither in the text nor in private judgement, but in the ongoing encounter with the divine that is forced by my repeated interactions with historically-situated human responses to encounters with the divine. Scripture matters because it is a privileged archive of some but of course not all of those responses, not because it provides One Response To Rule Them All.
In the end, Sommer’s work didn’t give you permission to believe that scripture is “useful”. It gave me a framework in which usefulness is the wrong criterion. Scripture’s value lies in its capacity to place me under obligation. It does not tell me what to think; it insists that I think in conversation with voices, failures, and insights that are not my own, all of which (including my own contributions) are themselves responses to a reality that none of us can fully grasp. Normativity can survive the collapse of textual infallibility by relocating revelation in encounter rather than inscription. It’s authority without the idolatry of words.
Anyway, that was a long way of saying “this book is really good!” But…it really is a very good book.
Norm Erlendson – Schaun, thanks for sharing your encounter with what does seem to be a “really good book.” Your summation of the author’s thesis that divine revelation precedes the words of scripture is an invaluable insight that opens our minds to new light and life. Rather than the words of scripture themselves being God’s revelation, revelation happens when we enter into conversations about the text with others. Revelation doesn’t end conversation, it invites it. Revelation brings scripture into the present, making ancient words living and active. Therefore, Scripture doesn’t have one, permanent meaning. I enjoyed the way you put it, scripture is not a download of God’s will onto paper. This dynamic of revelation as honest encounter is on display in this community and, perhaps to a growing number of churches not permanently chained to dogmas of an earlier era.
Tony Harshbarger – I will need to read this soon, thanks for the suggestion. You might enjoy Peter Enns “How the Bible Actually Works,” if you haven’t read it already.
Schaun Wheeler – Tony Harshbarger yes, I’m a big fan of Enns’ work! How the Bible Actually Works is one of my favorites.
Schaun Wheeler – Tony Harshbarger I’ve been thinking more about what Enns’s book didn’t quite do for me that Sommer’s book did. Enns helped me a lot in coming to terms with the Bible as multivocal, historically situated, and honestly human, and that mattered. What I still felt missing, though, was an account of how scripture can obligate rather than just accompany me once all of that is granted. Enns made it easier to stay in relationship with the Bible without pretending it was inerrant, but he largely left open why I should ever let it correct me rather than just resonate with me. Sommer goes straight at that problem. He spends most of his energy on authority, law, and covenant, and on how a community can treat a deeply human text as binding without claiming that God dictated its words. That difference matters – at least, it apparently matters a lot to me.
Enns, along with many others, helped me articulate at a basic level a view of scripture that could stand as a viable alternative to the view I’d grown up with and grown out of. Sommer helped me see how that new view could still ground real obligation, not just personal resonance. How it could confront me, not just reassure me. Enns helped me articulate ways my relationship with scripture could be more free than it had been. Sommer is helping see how that freed relationship can still justifiably demand interpretation, discipline, and restraint.
Tony Harshbarger – Schaun Wheeler do you think the obligation comes from a personal resonance?
Charles Bledsoe – Although I’ve largely abandoned the dogma that scripture is some direct download of God’s will onto paper, the intuition and inclination is still in me to see the Bible as having a divine origin, in some sense of that term.
I share this “intuition and inclination”, while also of course facing facts (such as errors, contradictions, borrowings, ex eventu prophecies, evidence of editorial activity driven by human motives and agendas, et al.) that run contrary to reverence for the Bible as a product of plenary inspiration. The way that I make sense of a Bible whose humanity and fallibility, and frequently objectionable theology, is in tension with what I take to be theological insights and divine guidance, a Bible that also has a divine character and origin, is a process-theological version of the concept of concursus divinus, the idea, worked out by Scholastic thinkers such as Aquinas, that the Bible could be simultaneously a divine revelation and a work of human creativity because God cooperated with human creativity in producing it.
In my panentheistic process-theological version of concursive inspiration, human beings have an internal felt relation to God, they feel divine “lures”, urgings to realize ideal possibilities. But, being instances of self-creative freedom, we often form and follow our own subjective aims rather than the initiatives supplied by God. In the case of the authors of the Bible, some of what they wrote is a result of theological and ethical insight that they owed to their internal relation to God, and receptiveness to divine urgings. But, rather than being in control of it, God essentially acted as a muse for their creativity. When they weren’t listening to their divine muse sometimes they still turned out brilliant stuff, but sometimes what they produced was flawed, context-bound, and theologically dreadful. And of course the divinely inspired content, the brilliant human contributions, and the harmful and toxic human contributions are all interwoven, making it necessary to read the Bible critically. In short, through this mechanism of internal influence God had a hand in the production of the Bible, but this influence wasn’t always operative or regnant. The Bible is predominantly human in origin.
At any rate, this is how I understand how the Bible can be a mixed bag of rubbish and revelation, of material that should be rejected and material that should be normative. This is how I “see the Bible as having a divine origin”, and at the same time being “human, all too human” (to steal a line from Nietzsche). And this is how I understand revelation being prior to, not identical to the words of the Bible; and “the divine presence” residing “not in the words but in the pre-verbal summons that generates them”, and the Bible’s resulting “indirect” but “real” “authority”.
It seems intellectually suspect, if not outright dishonest, to pick and choose moral teachings from the Bible that I happen to already agree with, while at the same time denying that the text has any standing to challenge, correct, or place demands on my moral judgments.
The same process-theological theology of inspiration that constructs God’s role in the production of the Bible as a muse-like influence on human agency can also supply legitimacy to your pickings and choosings among biblical teachings and texts that have a ring of truth to you, by constructing that ring of truth as sometimes divinely inspired, a result of a felt appropriation of a divine urging, rather than always merely a matter of your fallible subjectivity and bias. It also affirms the role of your own creative subjectivity in interpreting, negotiating, and deciding on the normativity of, biblical texts, and evaluating their claim to make demands on your moral judgments.
