According to Roger Olson:
This pops up every time a Calvinist points the finger at me and cries “Where’s your exegesis?” as if exegesis is the solution to everything. If only it were. And I agree it is the solution to some things. In other words, there are cases where people are simply practicing bad exegesis and hermeneutics and arriving at blatantly wrong interpretations of scripture. But I suspect many of our disagreements about scripture have more to do with blik than objective exegesis. I know that no exegesis could convince me that God is a monster. If I thought it possible that God is a monster there would be no point in doing exegesis because a monster cannot be trusted.
i) Olson is conflating two distinct issues:
a) What does the text assert to be the case?
b) Does that textual assertion correspond to reality?
If (arguendo) Scripture teaches the existence of a monstrous God, and Olson doesn’t believe in the existence of a monstrous God, that would at most mean the Biblical passage is false, not that the exegesis is false.
ii) Olson is alluding to the Cartesian demon. But if the Cartesian demon did exist, he might get his kicks out of inspiring a Bible that teaches Arminian theology, even though the real God is monstrous. The Cartesian demon might get his jollies out of dictating those Wesleyan hymns about God’s universal love, or Christ’s universal atonement, to beguile the credulous into believing that’s what awaits them–only to lower the boom when they die.
It seems to me that SOME Christians view the Bible as divine. That is, they regard it so highly that they put it on the same level with God himself in terms of authority. This is what Brunner meant when he accused fundamentalists and evangelicals of treating the Bible as a “paper pope.” But I would go further and say that some Christians treat it as if it were God himself or somehow participated in the divine essence. This appears when people say they would believe whatever the Bible said EVEN IF it said God is a monster.
Of course, Olson is imputing to them his twisted interpretation of what that would mean if Scripture taught Calvinism.
Then I know they are investing too much faith in scripture and not enough in the God who inspired scripture.
But that’s clearly a false dichotomy.
In my opinion, they are flirting with bibliolatry. From my perspective, anyway, scripture is the divinely inspired, infallible witness to God; it identifies God for us. But I only believe that because through it I “hear my Master’s voice” (to use another metaphor from Brunner).
It’s revealing that Olson has so little confidence in Arminian exegesis. If the true God is Arminian; if the Arminian God inspired the Bible, why does Olson need this ace in the hole?
After all, there are quite a few competent Arminian Bible scholars, viz. Ben Witherington, John Hartley, John Oswalt, C. K. Barrett, I. H. Marshall, Joel Green, Grant Osborne, Scot McKnight, Brian Abasciano. If the Bible teaches Arminianism, then don’t they enjoy an insurmountable advantage over Reformed exegetes? They were dealt a winning hand.
It’s a backdoor admission on Olson’s part that he has so little faith in the witness of Scripture to Arminian theology. Otherwise, why prepare this escape route?
My experience of WHO GOD IS is not limited to scripture; I have unmediated experience of God as good that convinces me that scripture is God’s Word–the oracle of God.
But if God really were monstrous, if the Cartesian demon actually exists then wouldn’t the Cartesian demon take sadistic delight in snookering Olson by giving him a delusive spiritual experience? Olson wouldn’t know what hit him until it was too late.
When I look at scripture I see it “as” the testimony to the God who I experience also outside of it. The experience I have of God outside of scripture does not communicate doctrines, but it does “speak” to me of God through my personal relationship with Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit within me. But that experience always points me back TO scripture as God’s written self-communication for understanding him more fully. Nothing in my experience of God contradicts scripture; that’s not even possible. But neither is God the prisoner of scripture.
But in this life, we know Christ by description, not experience. We're not the twelve disciples.
So what is the blik difference I’m talking about here? Some evangelicals seem to see experience of God as always mediated through scripture which, from my perspective, seems to incline them toward bibliolatry. This is why they say they would believe God is a monster (or the author of evil or whatever) IF scripture said so. Other evangelicals (like I) seem to see experience of God as BOTH mediated by scripture AND as unmediated with the latter as primary in terms of knowing God’s character as good.
i) I don’t even know what Olson means by an “unmediated” experience of God. To say we can experience God outside of Scripture doesn’t mean our extrascriptural experience of God is immediate. Rather, it would simply be mediated by something else.
If God subsists outside of time and space, then we can never experience God directly, as he is in himself. Rather, we can only experience God as he discloses himself through various spatial and temporal media. Even inspired visions and dreams convey the experience of God through a temporal process, with interior dialogue or simulated imagery. It’s adapted to a creaturely mode of subsistence.
ii) Speaking for myself, I experience God’s providence in my life through the lens of Scripture. I use his word to interpret his work.
Certainly I can experience God outside of Scripture. Ordinary providence is one way we experience God–everyday and every hour. But providence alone is often ambiguous.
When I got saved I was not converted to the Bible; I was converted to the God of Jesus Christ. THEN I found more about God through the Bible and believed in it BECAUSE it told me about the God of Jesus Christ I encountered in conversion and in my pesonal relationship with him. My experience of God is both unmediated and mediated and the two are inseparable.
i) How does he experience Jesus outside of Scripture? Does Jesus appear to him in visions? Does Jesus speak to him in dreams and apparitions? What is Olson talking about, exactly?
ii) Moreover, we need a benchmark to judge the veridicality or inveridicality of religious experience. If the Bible is not our benchmark, what is?
But when I open the Bible to read and study it I NEVER do so as a tabula rasa–prepared to believe whatever it might say EVEN IF it says (in some passage I had henceforth never noticed) that God is a monster who might hate me and want the worst for me or who loves his own glory more than he loves me (and all of us). If I am tempted to believe that, I go to God and rediscover him in unmediated experience of him through Jesus Christ or at least remember those times when my heart was strangely warmed and I KNEW without any ability to doubt that God loves me and wants the best for me and does not hate me or love his glory at the expense of my (or anyone else’s) well being in its most profound sense (wholeness).
Unless the Cartesian demon is the nefarious source of his strangely heart-warming experience.
This is my perspective on experiencing God. People experienced God before there was a Bible and have experiences of God apart from the Bible. But the Bible fills experience of God with cognitive content. But it cannot contradict the God I know as good through my unmediated experience of Jesus Christ because the only reason I believe the Bible is because it is THAT GOD’s WORD. In and through it I hear my Master’s voice in a unique way–as communicating himself to me in a cognitive way, filling my unmediated experience of God with information. But that information cannot contradict the very pre-cognitive experience of God as unqualifiedly good that I had in my conversion and have in my post-conversion relationship with Jesus Christ.
This statement is incoherent. If his extrascriptural experience lacks cognitive content, then, indeed, the Bible can’t contradict his noncognitive experience inasmuch as there is nothing to contradict. A noncognitive experience is consistent with any proposition.
It seems to me that this is a fundamental watershed between evangelicals. Those of us in the Pietist tradition claim unmediated experience of God that authenticates scripture to us but makes it impossible to see scripture as proving that God is evil or the author of sin and evil or loves his own glory more than he loves people created in his own image and likeness. Those evangelicals in the Protestant scholastic tradition at least claim to experience God only through scripture and at least say they would believe the Bible even if it said God is a monster, the author of sin and evil, who loves his own glory to the extent that it causes him to hate some of the creatures created in his own image and likeness.
Don’t cult leaders also appeal to their unmediated experience of God? Doesn’t that supply the prism through which they interpret the Bible? Take Swedenborg, Helen Schucman, or the Münsterites.
No amount of arguing or crying “exegesis!” is going to solve this blik dilemma, this continental divide among evangelicals. To be perfectly blunt, I shudder when I encounter people who seem to me to be worshiping scripture to that extent–that there is no unmediated experience of God outside of scripture. I shake my head and wonder about their spirituality even as I continue to embrace them as fellow evangelicals (even if they reject me as one to them).
Reminds of what Peter Hitchens says about his brother’s inner promptings:
Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. "I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong."
At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.
It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he "simply knew" who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.
It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and "innate" knowledge of this kind...
"Speaking for myself, I became a Christian before I became a Calvinist."
ReplyDeleteMe two.
Thanks Steve,
ReplyDeleteI was going to write a response to Olson for a friend, but now I can just link them to someone who has done a much better job than I ever could have.
It's clear that Olson has no foundation for a consistent biblical hermeneutic. It's also clear that he doesn't believe sola scriptura.
ReplyDeleteSo he thinks that we all should base our faith on unmediated experience of God, but when someone else's unmediated experience disagrees with his... then what?
He has no sound Christian epistemology.
It's ironic that Olson prides himself on his intelligence, his ability to see both sides of the issue, but when it comes to seeing God from the Calvinist perspective he can only vehemently repeat his own position that the "Calvinist God" is a monster.
ReplyDeleteCalvinists see a morally perfect God worthy of all glory.
Olson sees a monster.
Blik.