Second naivete
Probably the most important element of C. S. Lewis’s conversion, at least in his telling of it, was that for a definite period of time between atheism and Christian faith he lived as a theist without any expectation of reward or afterlife. He knew from experience that one could believe in God, relate to God, obey the will of God just because; that is, just because God is God and one is not. Afterward, believing in the promises of Christ came with a certain sweetness but also a certain lightness or liberty: he did not feel compelled to believe, the way “God” and “pie in the sky” are conflated for so many people, but free to believe. The freedom lay in the gut-level knowledge that grace was grace, neither earned nor automatic.
I feel similarly about historical events reported in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. For a definite period of time it was not important to me whether this or that discrete happening in Scripture “really” occurred, or occurred in the precise way reported, or occurred at the time and place reported. Perhaps Job or Daniel or Esther were pious fictions; perhaps the Israelites came out of Egypt but in some far less magnificent manner; perhaps David’s many origin stories were folk tales “rightly” remembered and surely worth retelling but not exactly what we would today judge to be “historically accurate.”
My faith was not threatened by these possibilities; it still is not. I am not and never have been any kind of strict inerrantist. If it turns out that, like a nineteenth-century painting of a days-long battle, stories in Scripture are not historical in the way we use that term or measure reportage today, the sum total of my response remains a shrug of the shoulders. If you tell me that Acts and Galatians’ chronologies are finally irreconcilable, I will do well if I suppress my yawn.
As I said, though, for a period of time this was my default setting: “The following ‘historical’ passage I am about to read from the canon may or may not be ‘historical’ at all.” A giant if invisible question mark floated above the text whenever I read, heard, or taught the Bible. Let’s say this ran for about a decade, from 18 to 28 years old, roughly my undergraduate, Master’s, and beginning doctoral years.
Then a funny thing happened. The default setting slowly shifted, mostly without my knowing it. I saw firsthand how the historical-critical sausage is made. I digested a good deal of it for myself. And I came to see that the confidence with which its assured results were delivered was entirely unearned.
Lowered confidence—from dogmatic pronouncements to measured statements of relative probability based on the available evidence (often minimal to begin with)—does not mean biblical criticism should be ignored, much less that it’s all wrong. But what it does mean, or at least has meant for me, is that it need not be treated with submission, docility, deference, or fear. The study of Scripture, whether secular or spiritual, is a humanistic enterprise. It involves interpretation, wisdom, good judgment, good humor, humility, and dispassionate assessment. Very nearly every one of the questions it poses admits of numerous good-faith answers, just as very nearly every one of its considered conclusions admits of good-faith disputation. It is healthy when it tolerates and nurtures dissent, unhealthy when majority positions calcify into dogmas that define the well-policed borders of “serious” scholarship. The one thing to hang your hat on in this field is that something “everybody knows” today will be contested, qualified, replaced, or surpassed in the next generation.
With the following result: The question mark has, for me, dissolved into thin air. I now read the Pastorals as Saint Paul’s without a troubled scholarly conscience; I read Acts as penned in the early 60s by Saint Luke; I read Daniel and Esther and Ruth as historical characters; the same goes for the patriarchs and Moses and Aaron and Miriam and Joshua. It all happened, just as the text says it did. Not because I’m ignorant of research that suggests otherwise; not because I’m a fundamentalist who needs it to be so, lest my faith’s house of cards tumble to the ground. No, it’s because I know what it’s like to be a Christian who supposed otherwise, whose faith was as untroubled then as it is now. I’ve weighed the evidence and found it, for the most part, wanting. Wanting, that is, in terms of compelling my and all others’ uncritical obedience to purported academic consensus. (Reports of consensus being always greatly exaggerated in any case.) I could be wrong. But I’m not worried about it.
Most of all, I couldn’t care less what some expert in the field thinks about my so-called naivete. If he wags his finger at me and cites the latest peer-reviewed journal, I’ll just roll my eyes. This time I won’t be able to stifle the yawn his pronouncements so dearly deserve.
