MetaCatholic

John Hobbins continues the debate about canon he initiated with a third update. This is a useful source of links to the discussion as various bloggers have been carrying it on, and is proving, unlike many discussions to shed more light than heat! First, I’d like to thank John for getting what I see as a really good debate going, secondly for being so informative, and thirdly for interacting so thoughtfully with the comments. If you haven’t caught up with this series, start here.

His latest comments cause me to ask one question I haven’t really thought about in relation to the gospels. One of the implications of the essays in The Gospels for All Christians¹ is spelt out by Michael Thompson’s chapter “The Holy Internet”.

I wonder whether congregations and authors would not want to produce their own version of the Gospel story once they knew that believers in another place had theirs. Some would do so to supplement or complement the traditions they received from their neighbors with additional sayings, stories and emphases, others might well write to correct or supplant.²

The latter point ties in to part of Mark Goodacre’s argument in e.g. The Case Against Q³ that a significant part of Luke’s motivation is to improve Matthew. (As I’ve heard Mark put it more colloquially, Luke didn’t really like what Matthew did to his well-known and beloved Mark, and set out to put things right – I don’t know if he would still stand by that way of putting it) Such motivation concurs, of course, with Luke’s preface.

That leaves me with this question, which I pose here in relation to the gospels, but could, of course, also apply somewhat differently to, say, Paul’s letters and James. What difference, if any, does it make to our understanding of canon, if the books selected to be interpreted together and concordantly, start their life in some form of discordance with one another?

It strikes me that that may also be relevant to the question John raises about the ways in which certain interpreters resist the concordance of the canon, to resolves things in favour of one or other viewpoint within it – such as Luther with James.

1. ed Richard Bauckham Eerdmans 1998 [↩]
2. p69 [↩]
3. Trinity Press International 2002 passim [↩]

Kevin Wilson addresses what he sees as the problem of Intelligent Design on his always interesting blog Blue Cord. Like him, I think there are problems with it, but I’m not sure that the problems he addresses are actually the right ones. He sees their views as a re-working of the teleological argument, augmented in some cases by the cosmological argument. In the process, I think he misses the heart of it.

Firstly, the specific form of the teleological argument that seems to be characteristic of ID-ers is an argument from what they call “irreducible complexity.”  The eye and the bacterial flagellum are among the most frequently adduced examples. Wikipedia provides a useful summary of this view, which, briefly, states that since the whole mechanism is what works, its parts could not have been selected for through the processes of evolution, because there was no advantage. Equally the whole could not have evolved without the development of the separate parts.

Use of the teleological argument depends first on establishing an “irreducible complexity” whose existence cannot be explained by the mechanisms of evolutionary biology. Unfortunately, various lines of work are suggesting ways in which the complexity of the eye or the flagellum could have evolved, thus taking away the first base on which a teleological argument might stand. I have found Francis Collins (the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and a committed Christian) to be a useful guide to this in his book: The Language of God.

As he points out there, ID actually manifests itself as another example of a “God of the gaps” theory. God is put in as an explanation of the things that science cannot explain. Unfortunately science has a pretty good track record of explaining things it couldn’t previously, and so this kind of “mechanistic God” finds itself with fewer and fewer places in which to gain a foothold in the universe, before more-or-less vanishing altogether. It is this confusing of theologically explanation with mechanistic explanation that is the fundamental category mistake of ID.

By contrast, in his post Wilson refers (though not by name) to the anthropic principle, the idea that the the universe seems incredibly finely tuned to the emergence of life, as part of the ID package. I don’t think it is, and there are numbers of respectable scientists and believers who refer to it, such as John Polkinghorne, making effectively a form of teleological argument for it.

What’s different about this argument? Firstly, it’s based on scientific discovery, not scientific ignorance; on what we know of the universe rather than what we don’t know. Secondly it’s used to demonstrate a congruity between the observable universe and faith in God. Thirdly, its used to demonstrate that there is a rationality to theistic explanations of the universe which do not simply depend on private (revealed) knowledge. This is quite different from what ID sets out to do, and nothing in this kind of careful use of the anthropic principle can be contradicted by further scientific discovery, though it can be refined.

The competition for theistic narratives explaining the anthropic principle come from narratives of some kind of “multiverse”. Either there is an unending process of universe “creation” and collapse / dissipation, or there is an infinite number of universes constantly slitting off from each other. In either case, we just happen to find ourselves, of necessity, in one of the few capable of generating life. These explanations can be no more rooted in science than theistic ones, since such hypothetical universes are neither observable, nor testable, and may theoretically in any case not obey the laws of physics as we know them.

This moves the question into a quite different arena from ID, and while I entirely sympathize with Kevin Wilson’s unease with ID which is both bad theology and bad science, I think he’s been misled by the ID-ers into confusing  two very different arguments.

AKMA bemoans the way people talk of “the real meaning”:

You know, when someone makes the claim to tell you what this or that really means. It functions as an authority claim (or a discussion-ender): “What this Greek word really means is. . . .” or “You said X, but you really mean Y.”

As far as I encounter this, it’s often an example of the etymological fallacy, and it’s far too prevalent in the pulpit, at least. Only the other day I heard, yet again, that “the real meaning” of proskuneo (to worship) is “I come towards to kiss” – and doesn’t that just give you a warm fuzzy about worship?

Except, of course, that’s not what it “really means.” When did you last hear a native English speaker say “Of course, the real meaning of “nice” is ignorant.” Never, except in irony. Yet the etymological process is the same, and “nice” derives, of course, from nescio - I do not know. As native speakers, however, we know what the word means, and it’s not “ignorant.”

While the bare-faced misappropriation of etymology rarely crops up in more serious discussion of, say, the biblical text, there are still overtones of it smuggled in via the agglutinating approach to meaning, excoriated by Barr, but still hovering out there. Just about every possible meaning of a word gets lumped together, and then this “Überwort” gets imported back into the sentence with every possible meaning intact, and turned into theology.

Words, however, do not work like that, which is precisely why the Sunday School teacher was horrified when one child praised Jesus thus: “Jesus, you’re  wicked, Lord.” Nice!