Time to close some browser tabs by writing about what's in them:

Ehrman not out to destroy Christianity

Bart Ehrman has a new book out. Jesus, Interrupted aims to make stuff about the Bible that Christian ministers are taught in seminaries available to the public. Ehrman was interviewed at Salon. Despite Ehrman's adoption by the neo-atheist fundamentalist secularists, he seems pretty mild-mannered about religion. In the Washington Post, Ehrman says he's not out to destroy Christianity, although he hopes that his book will show up the problems with an evangelical approach to the Bible.

Why is God hidden?

There's a good post from Jeffrey at Failing the Insider Test on the problem of why God is hidden if he wants people to know him. In previous discussions here, apologists say there's no evidence that God being more obvious would make people come into a loving relationship with him. They say the Bible contains examples of people who saw miracles and didn't believe, and as the Epistle of James says, even the demons believe (and tremble). Yet even granted the premise that the Bible's account is accurate (which seems to be generalising from fictional evidence), Jeffrey points out that the Bible itself contains examples of people who believe on evidence from God. Jesus complains that if Sodom had seen his miracles, it would have repented, unlike the towns he's been visiting. While compelling evidence doesn't reliably produce the relationship Christians say God wants, it can hardly make it less likely.

Morality again

John W Loftus mentioned a debate between William Lane Craig and Shelly Kagan of Yale. You can listen here. Kagan does well against Craig, thus proving that it is possible to beat him.

As I've mentioned previously, the moral argument for the existence of God is pretty unclear to me: some people just seem to feel that if there's no God, there can't be "real" morality. Kagan talks about what rational agents would do and the idea of a veil of ignorance. Craig doesn't see how being moral matters if the universe will die a Heat Death. Kagan says that there is significance even if this significance is not eternal, and that eternal significance is not needed for morality.

I'm being oppressed

Slacktivist talks about that awful video which the National Organization for Marriage made, and the tendency of American evangelicals to believe both that they are, and should be, in a Chrisitan nation and that Christians are horribly persecuted.

I suspect that American evangelicals' persecution complex is an inevitable side effect of sectarian hegemony. Once you believe that your faith requires cultural dominance, and that it deserves it, then any threat to that dominance -- even just the unwelcome reminder of the existence of alternative points of view -- is perceived as a threat, as a kind of persecution.

The NOM video has spawned many parodies, of which A Gaythering Storm is perhaps the best. NOM were even advertising here on LJ until LJ's staff booted them. Well done, LJ.

Even the atheists agree: William Craig thrashed Christopher Hitchens in their recent debate. In The West Wing, we see Bartlet preparing for a debate as real politicians do, by practising against someone playing his opposition, presumably having studied the other guy first. Craig is formidable, but his arguments don't change, so it's odd that his opponents apparently don't take advantage of knowing what he's going to say. Transcripts and audio of his previous debates are available, and his arguments are also in his book, Reasonable Faith. Chris Hallquist responded convincingly to the arguments in Reasonable Faith: a review like that should be a starting point for anyone debating with Craig.

Anyhoo, Hallquist's review of Craig's book brought back some memories of my time in evangelicalism, specifically about how I was taught to do evangelism. (Reminder: Evangelicalism is a particular subset of Christianity, emphasising the inerrancy of the Bible and the need for personal repentance and faith; people who believe in evangelicalism are evangelicals. Evangelism is the process of making converts; people who try to make converts are evangelists. Clear? Then off we go.)

When I tap on the dashboard, I want you to recite "Two Ways to Live" as quickly and as safely as possible

Sometimes non-Christians are disturbed to learn that evangelicals commonly receive training in evangelism, as if such training were somehow cheating. But there's nothing inherently sinister about wanting to be better at evangelism, especially if you value the sort of propositional consistency I've mentioned previously: evangelicals who evangelise are anticipating-as-if there's a Hell, rather than merely speaking-as-if they believe it (I've previously mentioned an evangelical evangelist who definitely anticipates-as-if there's a Hell).

The training provided to a typical church-goer doesn't cover spanking ill-prepared atheists in formal debates, but rather the every-day evangelism which is the responsibility of every Christian. It might start off with overcoming the British reticence about religion to get Christians to casually mention to friends and colleagues what they do on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. The church itself would put on fun events (film screenings, dinner parties, Ceroc nights) to which you could bring non-Christian friends, and there'd be a "short talk about Jesus" in the middle. Once people know you're a Christian, you might get to talk to them about it, so the training goes on to having conversations about Christianity with non-Christians, maybe learning some sort of salvation schema like Two Ways to Live and some answers to common questions.

What kicked off memories of this was Hallquist's review of Chapter 1 of Craig's book. I remember being told to try to move the conversation away from issues like theodicy or the reliability of the Bible, to personal issues of sin and repentance. If you watch the BBC documentary on Deborah Drapper, you'll see her doing this several times, using Ray Comfort's Are you a good person? script. If you'd like to see Christopher Hitchens win for a change, you can also listen to an unfortunate Christian trying the script on him.

Bad faith

The advice to move the argument to personal issues reflects the common evangelical belief that philosophical debates and requests for evidence are a smokescreen: the non-Christian knows there's a God really but just doesn't want to worship him. One Biblical source for this belief is this passage in the Apostle Paul's letter to the church in Rome, where Paul says that God's nature is clear from creation, so that people who don't worship him have no excuse (verse 20).

Hallquist quotes Craig:

[W]hen a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God. -- William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, my hyperlink

Craig advises Christians to ask objectors "If I answered that objection, would you then really be ready to become a Christian?" This is something like the rationalist technique of getting to the core of disagreements by asking "Is that your true rejection?" (see also The Least Convenient Possible World). However, Craig departs from the rationalist use of this technique in that he seems to argue it cannot legitimately be applied in reverse ("If I substantiated that objection, would you be ready to leave Christianity?"). He also takes the stance that non-Christians are culpably arguing in bad faith.

Hallquist's review does a better job of arguing against Craig than I can, so you should read that if you come across assertions that Christianity is evidenced by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, or indeed, if you should happen to get into a debate with William Lane Craig. Rather, as is traditional, let's end by drawing out some practical applications, and then go in peace.

Evangelism training

• One of the less memorable new phrases invented by Neal Stephenson in Anathem is Hypotrochian Transquaestiation, which means "to change the subject in such a way as to assert, implicitly, that a controversial point has already been settled one way or the other". Watch out for this, for example, in the switch from discussion of the existence of God to whether you are a good person.
• Cognitive biases exist, and seeking a person's true rejection is a useful technique if the debate seems to be going nowhere. However, it cuts both ways, so...
• Beware of your conversational role. If you've accepted a passive role as potential buyer and the evangelist's active role as sales-person, there are thoughts which won't occur to you (like the seeking the evangelist's true rejection).
• If you're aiming for dialogue rather than the buyer role, it's probably not worth discussing things with someone who sees every argument you raise as evidence of your culpable self-deception. Craig's position on an atheist's motivations together with his experience of the witness of the Holy Spirit serve as a fully general counterargument to anything the atheist says (but note that knowing Craig is in possession of this argument doesn't itself invalidate his specific arguments). If you find yourself in conversation with an evangelical evangelist, it is worth asking whether they agree with Craig.
  • One exception where it would be worth arguing is if there are people watching, as in a public debate, online, or if you found yourself at one of those evangelistic dinner parties.

Richard Carrier recently debated with William Lane Craig. That's them in the picture, you see (I'll leave it to you to decide which one's which). The topic was the Resurrection of Jesus. You can listen here, though the audio is a bit crappy, or watch the debate on Youtube.

Carrier doesn't think he did very well. He correctly says that he was a lot less organised than Craig and couldn't keep up with all the things he'd need to rebut. As I've previously noted, Craig has a lot of arguments and a very polished delivery.

( Summary of the arguments )

So much for Craig, what about Carrier? In Are You a Solar Deity?, Yvain cautions against theories which can be applied to anything (the specific example Yvain uses is related to religious myths, in fact). Some of Carrier's examples of myth seem a bit of a stretch. He needs to do more work to show that the gospels are generally unreliable, more than he has time for in a debate, it seems. He's written a book outlining his theories, but I don't think he's carried out a Spot the Fakes test. I'm not convinced the gospels are mostly myth.

On the other hand, the gospels do contain mythologised history based on Old Testament passages. Christians without a prior commitment to Biblical inerrancy recognise this, as do other readers. For example, scribb1e noticed when she read through the Old Testament. (If you're an inerrantist, you can accommodate this evidence into your web of belief in other ways, for example by saying that the OT passages were foreshadowing). Craig concedes this for the sake of argument, but says we still extract history from unreliable sources. True, but historians don't extract belief in miracles from other sources either, do they? The apologist is right to argue that the gospels should not be treated more strictly than other historical documents, but historians don't believe that Vespasian cured the blind, either. Without the presumption that the source is totally reliable, they're going to treat miracles as the unreliable part.

That steers things back into the territory of the Ehrman vs Craig debate I've mentioned previously. When you've watched enough of these debates, you realise there are standard openings, like in chess. If you're an evangelist and someone says to you that historians don't accept your religion's miracle, you counter by accusing the historians of metaphysical naturalism and hence of begging the question. Your sensible sceptic will say that this has nothing to do with grand philosophical statements about how everything supervenes on the physical, and more about the way everyone, even Christians, agrees that miracles are pretty uncommon. You need a lot of evidence to back up a miraculous claim, and in the case of the Resurrection, if you really start with a low prior probability, there just isn't enough evidence.

Notice that Craig never puts numbers into his equation when he's beating Ehrman with it (not that this would have helped Ehrman, because he's an arts graduate, poor soul). Craig doesn't seem very sure what his prior would be. Barefoot Bum and I argued about this, because I'd not noticed Craig talks about it in two places in the Ehrman debate: at one point he says it's "terribly low" but then, as the Bum notes, he later says "That Jesus rose naturally from the dead is fantastically improbable. But I see no reason whatsoever to think that it is improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead." Craig's argument seems to be that there's sufficient evidence to believe in the Resurrection if you already believe that God is the sort of God who'd do something like raise Jesus from the dead. That seems fair enough, but as an evangelist, shouldn't Craig be concerned with how people come to believe in that sort of God? Not by examining the evidence for the Resurrection, it seems.

Still, Craig duffed Carrier up. Let's not lose heart: over at Evangelical Agnosticism they talk about the rare atheists who don't get duffed up by Craig. Paul Draper did well, and is well worth a listen. Also, Craig's debating with Christopher Hitchens on 4th April, which will be entertaining, if nothing else.

In other news:

• I've brought out this old icon in honour of disgraced pastor Ted Haggard, who was all ready to make a comeback (as it were) until fresh revelations emerged recently. I've mentioned him before, but somehow neglected to mention that Ted Haggard is Completely Heterosexual (Roy Zimmerman = Tom Lehrer for the Naughties).
  
  
• I've been contributing to some threads over at Unreasonable Faith, the blog of Daniel Florien, an ex-Christian. Daniel asks other ex-Christians whether believing was a complete waste of time (you can see my answer). He's also posted about the Ehrman/Williams discussion on Premier Christian Radio, which I've mentioned previously, so I stuck my oar in. There are a few Christians with a strong inner conviction that the Bible is inerrant on there, so I responded to one of them.
  
  
• There's a meme doing the rounds on LJ where you get very angry about something called "cultural appropriation", or get very angry about people getting angry about it. The threads I've seen have largely involved the sort of people who use the word triggering to mean "a bit upsetting" (see also Monstrous Vegiment), so I've stayed out of it. However, livredor linked to an interesting post by nextian about the Jewish attitude to Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible, which reminded me a bit of Karen Armstrong's take on it in The Bible: the biography. livredor also has some discussion on her LJ.
  
  
• scribb1e and I watched Maverick last night. I somehow managed to miss it in 1994. It was funny, in a gentle sort of way.
  

Bart Ehrman recently turned up on Premier Christian Radio's Unbelievable programme, talking to Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House. You can listen to the programme on Premier's site.

The subject of the programme was Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus (which, confusingly, is also available in the UK as Whose Word Is It?), a book which we've discussed here before. Williams has written about the book over at Bethinking.org (scroll to the bottom for more, including Williams interviewing Ehrman).

Ehrman the evangelical

What's perhaps surprising is how much Williams and Ehrman agree on matters of fact, but disagree on interpretation. Williams describes himself as a "glass half full" person when it comes to the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts. His most convincing argument is that an Ehrman-approved NT translation would differ very little from the ones used by most Christians, and, says Williams, would still be sufficient for God's purposes. Ehrman himself says on the programme that, while some variants do alter the meaning of passages, he wouldn't expect a theologian to change their mind as a result of those variants.

When robhu mentioned Ehrman a while back, we ended up concluding that Ehrman's knowledge of the manuscript evidence is not so very different from that of evangelical scholars (see Article X and section E of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, for example). But Ehrman couldn't carry on being an evangelical knowing what he did. So what's going on here?

Obligatory dig at CICCU

At least part of it it seems to be bad communication from the evangelical scholars to evangelical flocks, as Williams says on his blog. Perhaps one of the evangelical churches or colleges Ehrman attended was unwise enough to ask him to assent to doctrinal statement which asserted "the divine inspiration and infallibility of Holy Scripture as originally given", for example. Perhaps they were even silly enough to speak of verbal, plenary, inspiration, rather than of Williams's ideas of the "immaterial text" which is encoded in the manuscripts as genes are in DNA (clearly one can't say the word "meme" on a religious blog).

Making inerrancy pay rent

Ehrman questions just what Christians are claiming is inerrant, and how it got that way. He expected assertions of inerrancy to mean something definite about the Bible he was actually reading, both in terms of how it got into his hands and what it says. Manuscript errors and internal contradictions bothered him because they seem to cast doubt on the text in his hand, but the Section III, C of the Chicago Statement makes it clear that errors aren't errors if they're not things God meant to get right anyway, and any contradictions aren't. Well, I'm convinced.

OK, so I'm taking the mickey, but there are some interesting bits of psychology in something like the Chicago Statement. According to this interesting article on the philosophy of science as it pertains to inerrancy (no, really), there's a logical way to maintain any belief whatever evidence comes in. Simply calling inerrantists illogical or deluded won't cut it, however tempting it may be. So, let's say that Ehrman's commitment was to a version of inerrancy which couldn't fit in his web of belief alongside the problems he knew about. Williams's version can fit, but is far less clear. Williams's version pays less rent, that is, it's closer to, if not the same as, saying nothing more than "The Bible has an attribute called 'inerrancy'" (like saying "Wulky Wilkinsen is actually a 'post-utopian'" in Eliezer's example)

Evil

Next week on the programme, Ehrman is talking to Richard Swinburne about the Problem of Evil. I hope he's learned something about Bayes Theorem by now, after the unfortunate events of his debate with William Lane Craig.

Metafilter had a posting on the ideas behind His Dark Materials a while back. It contains links to the video of a documentary where Melvyn Bragg interviews Pullman, as well as to articles discussing his literary influences, from Blake and Milton to Arthur Ransome.

The Plot

This set me to reading the books again. I enjoyed them. Pullman's a craftsman, and the books show off both his skill in writing and his imagination. I still found the ending, the final separation of Lyra and Will, rather forced. Nick Lowe wrote The Well Tempered Plot Device, which partly deals with authorial insertions, not of a character who stands for the author, but of an object which stands for the Plot, so that, for example, we can say that "Darth Vader has turned to the Dark Side of the Plot" (this is also the essay which introduced "Clench Racing", a sport for as many players as you have Stephen Donaldson books). scribb1e riffed on this, explaining that at the end of His Dark Materials "there can only be one hole in the Plot", the one which leads out of the land of the dead.

Pullman's stories are satisfying because they borrow from the greats: the Bible, Milton, Book of Common Prayer (where else does anyone learn the word "oblation"?) and the the English hymnal ("frail children of dust"). I doubt the Bible's or the BCP's authors would approve of His Dark Materials, but, as lisekit says, great art is characterised by its ability to sustain more than one interpretation.

The authors

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that God doesn't exist, and that evangelicalism is like fandom (the latter wasn't entirely an original idea of mine: livredor defines midrash as Biblical fan fiction). All these people who claim to be in a relationship with God obviously aren't, so what are they doing? I think they're not writing fan fiction but living it, creating their own stories in a world they see as belonging to the divine Author, stories which occur after their canon has ended.

In fandom, inserting yourself into the world you're writing fan fiction about is seen as passé by the experts. There's a disparaging term for characters who are obviously authorial self-insertions, Mary Sue. In religion, it's not quite the same. You can and should insert yourself into the story, but you'd better not get too far above yourself if you do, unless you're very convincing (this isn't that dissimilar to fandom, since the real objection to Mary Sues is that they're too perfect). C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that Christians do not know whether they will be given bit parts or starring roles, but their job is to play them as best they can.

The disagreements within religions which are based on the same book are similar to the disagreements within Harry Potter fandom before the final book came out, about whether Ginny or Hermione should end up with Harry. The bitterest disagreements are always about sex, as illustrated by the perpetually imminent division (Rilstone wrote that in 2004) of Anglicanism into the ones who believe God hates shrimp and the ones who don't believe in God.

Unlike Potter fandom, in Bible fandom there's no-one who can produce the universally recognised Word of God, settling the matter with a final book (if you want to remain within the canons of your religion, that is: the Mormons and the Baha'i have taken the approach of adding a new book, as Christianity itself did to Judaism), so people end up grouping themselves into communities which more-or-less share a view on the One True Pairing, and the ideas of each community become fanon to those within it. The Bible is rich soil for this sort of thing because it is great art and so admits multiple interpretations.

The Story

What's the point of living this way? To be in a story with meaning. lumpley speaks of the fun of roleplaying games as coming from three possible sources: one, wish-fulfilment; two, strategy and tactics; and three, "the fun of facing challenging moral, ethical, or socially informative situations". He splits up games into two approaches:

Approach one: "made up journalism." The conceit is, the characters and events of the game are real. The lives of the characters don't have meaning, the same way that our real lives don't have meaning. Approach two: fiction. Fiction, unlike life, is all meaning all the time. I prefer approach two. In particular, it's very difficult to take approach one and yet get fun type three.

What does he mean by "our real lives don't have meaning"? That shit (notably death) just happens. Wash's I'm a leaf on the wind/I'm a leaf on a rake death scene in Serenity is shocking, and Anyone Can Die is a rare trope in fiction (except if you're watching something by Joss Whedon), because we expect fiction to give us meanings for significant events.

So then, God is the Plot, in Lowe's sense of the word, and if you believe, the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse. If you die, it's what the Plot wanted. Your community knows they're reading the canon the right way, that Harry really loves Hermione, that God disapproves of gay sex, or whatever, and everyone else has misunderstood the Plot. Of course, it's not just about reading the book: you have the spirit of a dragonGod in you, however odd that sounds.

The reason Lowe can mock the Plot is that bad fiction leans on it so hard that it becomes ridiculous. The reader becomes too aware that they're reading fiction and loses their suspension of disbelief. Why lose it? Because all readers know deep down that reality doesn't come invested with meaning in that way.

I mentioned Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus in my response to nlj21's complaint that Karen Armstrong does not provide a source for her claim that the Apostle Paul didn't write the Pastoral Epistles.

I re-read the book while we were on holiday recently. I'd recommend it, despite the rather sensationalist cover advertising ("OMG the King James Version's text is bollox, sorry, 'corrupted and inferior'": we all knew that, right?), as a lucid introduction to New Testament textual criticism. Luckily, if you're too cheap to buy it, there's a video of a lecture covering the book's key points, available from Google. Ehrman's an engaging speaker. His responses to questions at the end are particularly good (especially the one from the bloke who's clearly read Elvis Shot Kennedy: Freemasonry's Hidden Agenda and therefore "knows" that Jesus spent a lot of time travelling round India before marrying Mary Magdalene).

Ehrman's another ex-evangelical, who now describes himself as an agnostic. The Washington Post article on him attributes his loss of faith to textual problems (Erhman started out as an inerrantist, a position he found untenable as he studied the NT texts) and the problem of suffering.

On suffering, if, like me, you're a fan of Bishop Tom (N.T.) Wright and of Ehrman, you'll probably enjoy their blog debate on the Problem of Evil.

On the Biblical text, people can and do dispute Ehrman's claims. This review on Ben Witherington's blog has some good comments from both sides of the debate (if anyone does speak Greek, I'd be interested in whether the grammar of Matthew 28:19 does imply that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one person as Ben says). Some of the Bible's defenders are at pains to point out that one can still believe even knowing that the Bible is a very human document which records religious experiences (some of them wouldn't say that, of course, and defend something like inerrancy). But Dan Barker's comment evokes the sort of feeling I can imagine Ehrman having as his inerrantist beliefs collapsed, that is, the feeling that he'd been lied to by his evangelical teachers.

There are other good reasons for thinking evangelicalism is probably incorrect, namely that it's an extra-biblical tradition despite claiming not to be and that it commits you to interpretations which do violence to the Biblical text in an attempt to maintain its inerrancy. Ehrman's reason seems to strike at the heart of the thing, though: study the history of the text enough and it becomes impossible to take the attitude to it that evangelicals do.

Things that caught my eye on the web recently:

• marnanel supplies the ultimate version of all those "which local dialect do you speak?" questionnaires that people have been doing lately.
  
  
• Zarf, otherwise known as Andrew Plotkin, gives us LOLGRUES. Makes a change from cats, I suppose.
  
  
• scribb1e thought I'd like The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus. Some of them are good, some of them are typical "the church is the people, not the building" Christian greeting-card verse (but as cartoons!) The artist shows some signs of creationism, but as I'm no longer a Christian, I don't have to do my "please get off my side, you're making it look stupid" bit.
  
  Inevitably, the cartoon with the most comments is the one about gay marriage. Inamongst the usual godhatesfags stuff (or rather, God hates the faggotry but loves the fags, naturally) there were a couple of links to interesting interviews with N.T. Wright (no relation), the Bishop of Durham. There was also an interesting comment from Tyler on just what Paul did mean by arsenokoites (the word translated by the NIV as homosexual offenders, about which there's considerable debate as it's a novel coinage as far as we know). Tyler points out that the Septuagint puts the two words that Paul has used in his portmanteau word right next to each other in everyone's favourite bit of Leviticus (scroll down a bit for the Greek). So it looks like you practising gays (or even those of you who aren't practising because you've got very good at it) are pretty much out as far as Christianity goes. Have you considered atheism?
  
  
• If your internet connection comes from BT, Virgin Media or Carphone Warehouse's Talktalk service, you should be aware of the evil that is Phorm, a cunning plan to intercept all your web browsing and use the knowledge of what you're interested in (from your web searches) to display targetted advertising on collaborating websites. Richard Clayton has spoken to Phorm and has technical details of how the system works. It's a horrible hack, in all senses of the word.
  
  Talktalk aren't all bad though: they just told the British recording industry to get stuffed in a highly entertaining way. The BPI are now threatening to sue.
  

Karen Armstrong's book is a potted history of the Bible and its interpretation, starting around the time of the Babylonian exile and continuing up to the present day. Armstrong's writing is succinct: the book is short (229 pages in the main text of my copy) and easy to read.

Armstrong sees both the Christian Gospel writers and the Judaism of the first and second centuries CE as profoundly influenced by the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Their conflicting ideas on the future of Judaism can be seen in the attitude of the Gospel writers to the Pharisees as it became clear that the future of Judaism did not lie in a belief in Jesus as the Messiah, but in a revitalised Judaism which the party of the Pharisees would lead.

The parts of the book which deal with interpretation were most interesting to me. Armstrong interweaves chapters on Christian and Jewish interpretation. Later texts start out as reactions to earlier texts, drawing on them to find something useful in the writers' times. The later texts may eventually come to be seen as scriptures themselves. Armstrong applies this idea to the Christian New Testament and to the Jewish Mishnah, as well as to modern commentaries like the Scofield Reference Bible, the source of much of fundamentalist Christian theology on the End Times.

Armstrong discussion how later commentators draw out meanings which they believe are hidden within the text, a process which she describes as pesher, referring to the commentaries produced by the Essenes. The methods of interpretation are often quite strange to modern readers, but reflect the belief that scripture was infinite, containing a variety of meanings. Sometimes passages are re-interpreted in the light of the Golden Rule, as in the case of Rabbinic punning on scripture to show God's compassion, or Augustine's statement:

"Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine scriptures or any part of them so that it does not build the double love of God and of our neighbour does not understand it at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived."

Some Christians, such as Origen, viewed the Old Testament as a commentary on the New, rather than vice versa, and produced detailed allegorical interpretations of OT events, which were taken to refer to Christ or the church (a tradition they could claim was started by the apostle Paul, in letters like Galatians).

The book contains some uncomfortable facts for someone in the modern evangelical wing of Christianity (as I once was). If evangelicals insist their approach is the only correct one, they must conclude that the church has been doing it wrong for most of its history. Worse yet, for evangelicals who claim to use only scripture to interpret scripture, is realisation that the New Testament writers would be seen as terrible exegetes by modern evangelical standards.

As I said, these are not comforting thoughts for evangelicals. While I was writing this, I found an interesting review of Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Peter Enns. Enns has written a book which, if the review is anything to go by, talks about these exegetical problems and tries to address them, still remaining within a reformed Christian theology. Enns does this by drawing an analogy between the humanity of Jesus and that of the Bible. For this, he is well on the way to being drummed out of the seminary where he holds a professorship.

Back to Armstrong. As her story moves closer to the present day, she writes about modern scriptural interpretation with dissatisfaction, albeit tempered with some sympathy for fundamentalists who feel threatened by, well, practically everything that's happened since about 1800. In the book's epilogue, she calls for a return to Augustine's principle of charity as the means of interpretation, arguing that "hurling texts around polemically is a sterile pursuit", and that rather, the entire Bible should be interpreted as a commentary on the Golden Rule. She rejects criticism of the Bible by "secular fundamentalists", presumably in the knowledge that in the past both Christians and Jews have seen the violent or otherwise "difficult" passages as an invitation to look deeper rather than as an invitation to imitate God or Israel's bad behaviour.

I'm a little sceptical, because I think the horse has bolted, at least as far as Christianity is concerned (I'd be interested to hear what Jewish people think). Since Luther, the authority of the church to interpret the Bible has diminished. Everyone is their own pope, vigorously defending their interpretation and eager to anathematise the people closest to them (as Enns's case illustrates), even more so as believers feel threatened by modern developments and batten down the hatches. I'd like it if Armstrong's vision became reality, but I'm not sure how she intends to bring it about. More people reading her book might help. I recommend it.

These days, it seems the youth in the UK and in America are increasingly sceptical about the Lord's word. A new Bible translation promises to remedy this by speaking to the young people in a language they can understand. I must thank drdoug for bringing it to my attention. A few sample passages will illustrate its freshness and relevance:

Matthew 5: Ceiling Cat liek kittehz wiv no cash. Tehy can has Ceiling Catz pad.
Ceiling Cat liek sad kittehz. Tehy can has petting.
Ceiling Cat liek kittehz taht no pwn otehr kittehz. Tehy can has earth wen otehr kittehz is ded.
Ceiling Cat liek kittehz taht is liek "can i has good?". Tehy can has cheezburger.
Ceiling Cat liek kittehz taht no pwn otehr kittehz even if tehy can. Ceiling Cat no pwn tehm.
Ceiling Cat liek kittehz taht has bath inside. Tehy can see Ceiling Cat.
Ceiling Cat liek cheezmakers. Ceiling Cat is liek "u mi kittenz"

John 1:5 - Teh lite iz pwns teh darks, but teh darks iz liek "Wtf."

Ecclesiastes 3:3-6 - sup. there has is a sison 4 everthing, and a tiems 4every purpos under teh ceiling, lol. a tiemz 2 get kittehs, an a tiems 2 get ded. tiemz 2 mades cookies, an also tiems 2 cheezburgers. teimz 2 hugs, and loltims 4 buttsecks.

John 20:26-28 - Ltr, teh dscpls iz in teh hous wif Thomas. Teh doorz iz lockded, but Jesus waz liek "Oh hai!" And Jesus sayed "My wounz--let me show u them. Srsly, stfu." And Thomas sayed "OMG, OMG!"

Revelation 22:6 - Then ayngel sayz "this all true. Srsly."

This translation will turn the tide.

The Bible has much more to say on divorce and remarriage than it does on homosexuality. Ignoring the vexed question about what exactly the Bible does say about homosexuality (and the assumption implicit in the idea of "what the Bible says", namely that the Bible is a unitary document which is to be read in the way evangelicals do), the New Testament statements on divorce are clearly and directly against both divorce and marrying a divorcee. Jesus describes the latter as adultery in all of the synoptic gospels. St Paul explicitly states that divorcees must not remarry.

There are a couple of exceptions to the rule: sexual malpractice of some kind (the Greek word which the New International Version translates as "marital unfaithfulness" here, and "sexual immorality" elsewhere, usually rendered "fornication" in the King James Version) and the case where a Christian has an unbelieving spouse and that spouse deserts the believer.

Nevertheless, my impression is that evangelical churches are more willing to re-marry divorcees (whether or not they would be subject to the exceptions mentioned above) than, say, Catholics are, while at the same time being steadfastly against gay marriage. I've been asking an evangelical about this on uk.religion.christian, after he made a statement which seemed to confirm my impression. He's said some good things about repentance and forgiveness in regard to divorce, but hasn't yet addressed the point that the second marriage itself is described as sinful by the Bible, so it's hard to see how one can repent of a sin while one is doing it.

I think these churches are doing the right thing in letting compassion overrule "what the Bible says", of course, but once you've done that, why not do it for the gays too? The reason why they don't do that is, I cynically suspect, because they know what their members want: there are a lot more straight divorcees than there are gay people wanting to get married. As St Jack of Lewis pointed out, it's very easy to condemn a sin to which you feel no particular temptation.

Premier Christian Radio have put up the audio of the Unbelievable discussion programme I was on. You can go to the programme's page and play the stream, or if you can't do Windows Media, you can download the mp3 from Rob's site.

Here's my director's commentary track (except I wasn't a director, but you get the idea).

The first phone-in question from Steven Carr is a hard one for Christians. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus talks of God being like a shepherd who seeks each lost sheep. Steven said "a good shepherd is not one who says 'I have given the lost sheep enough evidence to find its way home'", provoking laughter in the studio because we all realised how Steven had struck home, I think. Some people (St Paul, for example) seem to get dramatic experiences, whereas some don't. This is inconsistent with a God who we're told seeks out everyone. The usual Christian defence is to say that God cannot over-ride our free-will and make us believe (C.S. Lewis says "he cannot rape; he must woo"). But God wasn't so concerned with St Paul's free-will and autonomy that he could not knock him off his horse on the way to Damascus, yet St Paul's sort of experience is rare.

Marvin's call was interesting, and all of us in the studio regretted that we didn't get the chance to discuss all his points. His first point was that to accept the existence of evil one has to accept the existence of God who creates good and evil. I didn't really follow that argument. The existence of evil seems to be merely a matter of people doing stuff I consider bad, and I don't need to suppose that God made them do it. It's possible he was arguing that without God we have no moral basis to call something evil, something which I've touched on before.

Marvin mentioned Anselm's Ontological Argument, but Paul Clarke agreed that he'd concede that one.

Marvin's second point was that we accept the truth of other classical writings, so why not the Bible? This argument fails because we're not asked to live according to the teaching of those other classical writings. Something which we're told to base our lives on should be held to a higher standard. But there are already many excellent arguments against Biblical inerrancy, so I'm not going to rehearse them all again here, but I will talk about the specific example I mentioned.

I don't think that Paul Clarke's response to my killer argument against inerrancy holds up. To say that the "we" of St Paul's "we who are still alive" in 1 Thess 4 could encompass later Christians presupposes that St Paul knew he was writing to such people. My understanding of inerrancy was always that it did not and should not require such an assumption. At the Square Church they taught that the beginning of biblical interpretation was to work out what a passage meant to those who originally heard it (in this case, the people in Thessalonica, as is clear from 1 Thess 5:27). The method of interpretation where you read something like an epistle as if it's personally addressed to you was right out, in fact.

Secondly, Paul Clarke's defence of the inerrancy of 1 Corinthians 7 relies on some ambiguity about what the "present crisis" (verse 26) is. Paul Clarke suggested its a some local trouble affecting the Corinthian Christians. But St Paul himself spells this out in verses 29-31, ending with "for this world in its present form is passing away". Something more than local trouble is being spoken of.

As I said to triphicus, it's perfectly acceptable to concede the point (as she sort of does) but then look for what a Christian might take from that passage anyway (in this case, that the glories of this world are fleeting, and that Jesus could be back at any time so Christians should look busy). But to maintain that this sort of interpretation is what Paul actually meant to say in the first place, as Paul Clarke seemed to, seems like making work for yourself. It's only the extra-Biblical assumption of inerrancy that requires evangelicals to go through these contortions when faced with texts like these. Removing that assumption cuts the knot. I'm reminded of the Washington Post's description of Bart Erhman's tortured paper defending some passage in Mark, and of the revelation Ehrman had when his tutor wrote a note in the margin saying "Maybe Mark just made a mistake".

I stumbled a bit when I mentioned Occam's Razor because Paul Clarke rightly jumped on the fact that in some sense God's miraculous healing of someone's fibroids is a simpler explanation than them getting better naturally by some unknown mechanism. scribb1e points out that this doesn't address those people who pray and don't get better. She also says that unexpected stuff does happen in medicine but it's not proof of anything very much more than the ignorance of doctors. If a Christian gets ill they will almost certainly pray about it, and some of the people who pray will get better (along with some of those who don't). You can't say it wasn't God's doing, but you have to wonder about his inconsistency. Edited to add: scribb1e elaborates in this comment.

nlj21 kindly batted off a question to both the Paul's in the studio. Paul Clarke was right in saying that the fact that some people leave Christianity doesn't prove it's wrong, but it does make you wonder about CICCU and similar organisations, doesn't it? cathedral_life's comments on this discussion (where she signs herself as "AR") seem apposite.

I hope I gave a reasonable answer to nlj21's question to me, although I'm sure he'll be along to disagree.

I loved the question about "a god that suits your lifestyle", because lifestyle is a Christian code-word for "having sex in a way we don't like".

I was expecting someone to try the No True Scotsman argument about me leaving Christianity ("no True Christian leaves Christianity") so Narna came up trumps and I delivered my prepared answer. Go me.

I found Paul Clarke's summing up quite affecting, because it was clear that he genuinely was concerned about my welfare. In the end, though, as I said, you can only follow the truth as best you can.