The Bible and modernity

…already by the end of the 19C it was widely understood that the earth was "the product of a historical process that could no longer be described in the terms and by the data available from Scripture, I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017), 404.

That's misleading. On the one hand the Bible is not an encyclopedia, so it doesn't go into scientific detail. That's different from the charge that Genesis is inconsistent with earth sciences. 

[Aubrey Moore 1848-1890] We are as little prepared to consult Genesis on the order of the paleontological series as to ask the high priests of modern science to solve for us the difficulties of our moral and spiritual life, I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017), 407.

Although Moore was a Victorian Anglo-Catholic priest and theistic evolutionist, this is still a popular strategy for avant-garde Christians of the BioLogos stripe. But it suffers from internal tensions. It posits a dualism between the physical side of things and man's moral and spiritual life. But if you grant the autonomy of science, then science will erode that dualism by defining human origins, nature, and destiny. Secular science will say that the difficulties of our so-called spiritual life aren't spiritual at all, but reducible to hormones and brain chemistry. At bottom it's all biological and physiological. Likewise, what we call morality are the residual instincts of the predatory social animals from which we descend. And that's a problem when you take man out of the jungle or savannah and give him a desk job.  

This brings us, second, to the question of the limitations under which the author of Gen 1-11 is operating…Inevitably they must include limitations of knowledge; it is not at all likely that he knew about black holes, red dwarves, or quantum mechanics…our biblical authors might inevitably have had to embed their radical propositions about reality in a narrative that truly reflects the time and culture of its origin and truly speaks the language of its day… I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017), 431.

i) It's true that the target audience's level of understanding can impose limitations on what an author is able to communicate. 

ii) The Bible is written for earthlings. And it has a practical aim. You don't need to be an electrician to use a light switch. So even if the Genesis narrator had advanced knowledge of physics and astronomy, there's no reason why any of that would figure in a creation account. The account is naturally geared to things human beings experience. Things at an observable scale. Things they have some control over. Things that have a discernible impact on their lives. The creation account is not inaccurate because it fails to delve into irrelevant scientific details about many things outside the range of reader's empirical awareness or control.

iii) If evolution is true, it's quite possible to write an evolutionary narrative in popular language, imagery, and metaphors. So the fact that Gen 1-2 narrate divine creation in terms of fiat creation and special creation can't be chalked up to the inevitable limitations under which they labored. 

Literal and typological interpretation

This is a reality to which modern biblical scholarship has sometimes been blind, insisting on an atomistic style of reading that frequently proceeds as if the parts of any particular biblical book had little to do with the whole, and as if whole biblical books had little to do with others in the same canonical collection…This language emphasizes not just that there are "resemblances" in various prats of the Great Story, but that the Story itself moves ever onward…The literal and the typological (figurative) are best understood not as two different ways of reading, but as two aspects of the same way of reading. The latter comes into its own not so much at the level of a sentence or a paragraph, but at the same level of larger entities like whole books and even collections of books…We are not dealing in OT narrative with isolated texts, or even with isolated books. We are dealing with texts and books transmitted together by people who were already reflecting upon them together, as sections of a larger, unfolding Story–one reality, described in individual segments. I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017), 94,99-101.

i) That's a very insightful explanation of typology. It breaks new ground, demonstrating the essential continuity–indeed, identity–between "literal" interpretation and typological interpretation. They aren't different in kind but degree. Typology operates with the same principle, but extends it to large blocs of material. 

ii) That said, it would be easy for secularized Bible scholars to accommodate typology in the sense of claiming that the narrative books of Scripture were redacted and combined to generate a sense of thematic or messianic diachronic progression, but that's editorial legerdemain. It's just manipulating stories or texts. To take a supernatural view of typology requires a higher view of inspiration and providence than Provan's own position.

Ecclesiastical arbitration

The question of "arbitration," then, lies at the heart of the matter–its necessity, and also its nature–and the theologians of the magisterial Reformation found themselves having to defend their position on two fronts. On the one side, notable Roman Catholic scholars questioned "both the reliability of the received biblical text when compared to the Vulgate and also its perspicuity, arguing that without the church hierarchy's guidance the unbridled interpretation of these texts would only lead to heresy." The Church could provide this guidance not least because it possessed alongside Scripture (according  to the Council of Trent) oral traditions "concerning both faith and conduct, as either directly spoken by Christ or dictated by the Holy Spirit, which have been preserved in unbroken sequence in the Catholic church" I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017), 285.

What's striking about this historical description is how subsequent reversals in Catholic theology have rendered obsolete these planks of the Counter-Reformation polemic:

i) It's been a long time since Rome made the Vulgate the gold standard of comparison for the biblical text. Catholicism came around to our side on that issue. 

ii) While debates over perspicuity still rage in popular Catholic/Protestant apologetics, the Tridentine solution has been mothballed. The historical fiction of "oral traditions either directly spoken by Christ or dictated by the Holy Spirit, which have been preserved in unbroken sequence in the Catholic church" was abruptly replaced by Newman's theory of development. 

iii) It's true that in the wrong hands, sola scriptura can lead to heresy. However, it begs the question to make Catholicism the standard of orthodoxy. And sola scriptura can also correct the errors and heresies of Rome. So it cuts in several directions. 

On the other side, supporters of the Radical Reformation…argued strongly for a different arbiter, namely the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believing Christian…The Spirit-filled reader is the proper judge in the exegesis of Scripture. Ibid. 286. 

It's my impression that this has tricked down into the folk theology of many lay fundamentalists. It is used as an intellectual shortcut to sidestep scholarly exegesis. But a basic problem is that it fails to explain the diversity of interpretations. 

Jesus, Paul, and perspicuity

As to Scripture, Jesus himself constantly appeals to the OT as the measure of what is true and right, and he evidently does so "not only with the expectation that this testimony will be accepted by faithful Jewish men and women, but that it will be intelligible to them. What use would there be in quoting texts no-one was able to understand?" When he quotes Hos 10:8 in Lk 23:28, for example, he appears to believe that "the images of this OT text would be both recognizable and intelligible" to his hearers. 

The apostles appeal to the OT Scriptures in the same way as Jesus, and what is initially striking here is that "the appeal is not reserved for Jewish audiences where some familiarity with the Scriptures…might be fairly assumed." It is also made in respect to Gentiles audiences. Paul, for example, displays "general confidence in the accessible meaning of the OT" so far as the church of Rome is concerned, I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017), 308-9.

Given that they were writing in Greek to an audience in which knowledge of Greek was widespread (see below), the apostles unsurprisingly used the LXX as a major source in citing the OT Scriptures. There is no e evidence that, like Philo, they believed the LXX to be inspired in itself. Paul, for example, appears to translate directly from the Hebrew on at least six occasions where the LXX does not agree with it; on at least twenty-eight occasions his citations reflect neither the MT nor the LXX. He and the other apostles were not bound to the LXX, I. Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017). 234.

Church, scripture, canon

I'm going to quote some excerpts from a book by a noted evangelical OT scholar. The quotes are clearly germane to a Catholic apologetic trope against the Protestant canon. Provan supplies detailed supporting material to document his claims. I won't be quoting the copious documentation, but just his summary conclusions. 

Does Scripture precede the Church, and provide the "rule" against which the teaching of the Church is to be measured, or does the Church precede Scripture, and provide the only context in which Scripture may rightly be understood?

[Craig] Allert is critical of the way in which most evangelical Protestants (his target audience) "have…a 'dropped out of the sky' understanding of the Bible…"

At the heart of Alert's argument, first of all, lies an important confusion with respect to notions of "Scripture" and "canon." No biblical canon, he informs us, in the sense of "a delimited list of authoritative writings"–neither in an OT nor a NT canon–existed in the early Christian centuries. Therefore, "One cannot properly speak of a Bible in the first several centuries of the church's existence." The Bible, he claims, comes into being as a result of the teaching and practice of the Church, as expressed in the rule of faith and later creeds; therefore, there is a problem with Christians appealing to it over agains the teaching and the practice of the Church. The Bible itself cannot be regarded as the rule of faith, Allert proposes, because early Christians like Tertullian "did not know of a closed canon."

All of this begs the question, however, as to whether it is possible to have a recognized Scripture that is functioning canonically (that is, authoritatively in respect to religious practice and/or doctrine), without yet possessing a finally "delimited list of authoritative writings" in a closed canon.

The question is not whether everyone agreed in earlier times about exactly which text were canonical Scripture and which were not. The question is whether the idea of Scripture itself implies the idea of a limitation–of canon–even if people do not yet conceive that the limits have been reached…"the margins of the emerging canon are less significant than the character and function of the canon  (or 'core canon') itself."

In reality, however, one doesn't need to have a closed canon in order to have an authoritatively functioning Scripture that is a "measuring stick" (the meaning of the Greek word kanon), against which belief and practice may be assessed. One only needs to have a "mere" canon: a collection of texts, albeit not yet necessarily regarded as complete, that serves a normative function within the community–"a sort of core of central and agreed tradition, a body of writings already recognized and revered, which…functioned…in the same general way in which the canon of scripture functioned for later generations. 

It is clear from everything described thus far, then, that the "Rule of Faith against which everything was measured in the 2C," and also in succeeding centuries, was God-breathed (God-inspired) Scripture, even if the ultimate and precise boundaries of this Scripture (at least with respect to the NT writings) had yet to be defined. 

"The Christian church was born with a Bible in its hands," as Stephen Dempster put it, and it always had one thereafter, looking for its guidance on faith and life to the prophets, and then to the apostles, on whose foundational teaching the Church had been built. 

We have established in chapter 2 that, even if the OT canon was not yet already closed in the earliest period of the life of the emerging Christian Church, the Church certainly possessed from the beginning an authoritatively functioning set of canonical Scriptures, shared with Judaism, that formed the "measure" of its belief and practice. But was the OT canon, after all, closed? 

Who decided which books were canonical, and on what grounds? In the first instance, with respect to the OT, no Christian "decided". The point was to receive the OT scriptures, as from God in Christ…The point was not to "decide." The point was to receive new Scripture from the apostles who had been appointed by Christ, and to represent a new and authoritative prophetic "stream" in history, in continuity with the OT prophets. Iain Provan, The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture (Baylor 2017).

The humble are the heroes

Vegetarians or carnivores?

Young earth creationists (YECs) typically argue there was no animal death either before the Fall or before the Flood. Moreover YECs typically argue animals were vegetarians either before the Fall or before the Flood, but became carnivorous either in the postlapsarian or postdiluvian period. The basis for their arguments is exegetical.

By contrast, OT scholar Iain Provan offers a different exegetical argument about animal death and animal feeding behavior in Seriously Dangerous Religion (pp 226-234).