The Case For Or Against "The Case For God"
November 26, 2014 9:33 AM Subscribe
Two points in the early chapters of Karen Armstrong's "The Case for God" are really bothering me, almost to the point of putting the book down in frustration; can the hivemind put my doubts to rest by answering two questions about religious history: First about the validity of Armstrong's "logos/mythos" distinction, and second, about the current thinking on the documentary hypothesis?
I've enjoyed Karen Armstrong's books for years now. But now, a chapter and a half into "The Case for God," I'm encountering two arguments that she has made before, that I find myself growing more and more skeptical about, the more often I hear them. When I flip to her footnotes, the majority of the work she references is decades old, and I can't help but think there must be new research on these arguments.
The first question regards her distinction between mythos and logos: Is this a valid distinction? Her point is that in our early history, religious stories were meant to be expressive and reflective, rather than historically accurate, as we would demand now. So, for example, the creation story is a way of contrasting God against Marduk, a reflection on our pride and ambition, etc., rather than an author really putting forward a belief about the history of creation. Back in my earlier years, I found this idea provocative, even revelatory...but now I wonder. The biblical authors have different genres available to them, and the genres read very differently; prophecy reads differently from wisdom literature, which in turn reads differently from the history books. And we could certainly see that the histories could be written with specific political slants and cultural prejudices in mind (or could just be factually wrong), the same as our histories work today. But it seems like a big jump from saying that a history book is politically motivated, to saying that it isn't meant to be read as history at all, but rather is a contemplative device operating on a symbolic rather than a more narrative-of-reality level. I'm willing to buy it for the creation story, but by the time we get to, say, the gospels, can we really say that there is no this-really-happened aspect to the stories? (Obviously there are different genres even within the gospels, but they typically do a good job marking off narrative from, say, parable.) Armstrong does not offer any real evidence for this assertion, at least at this point in the book (I should mention that right now she has not mentioned the gospels, so for all I know she covers them a few chapters from now, but I won't get that far if I can't get more comfortable with her argument, unfortunately!). So is this a valid distinction, and is there evidence that religious writing should be read primarily as contemplative in this way?
The second question regards the documentary hypothesis: Is this still considered a valid history of putting the Pentateuch together? As she is narrating the non-logos meanings and emphases behind the stories, she leans heavily on the idea of the four groups of authors, J, E, D and P. I'm familiar with the argument, and her description of what this does to the meaning of the history is absolutely beautiful, adding a great deal of depth and yearning. But it's also a really old argument, and surely in the past decades, new evidence has come to light to prove, disprove, or at least complicate the hypothesis? Or does it still mostly stand, with only some details changed (for instance, I've also read theories that we're not dealing with four author-groups, but only three and a later editor, etc.)?
I've enjoyed Karen Armstrong's books for years now. But now, a chapter and a half into "The Case for God," I'm encountering two arguments that she has made before, that I find myself growing more and more skeptical about, the more often I hear them. When I flip to her footnotes, the majority of the work she references is decades old, and I can't help but think there must be new research on these arguments.
The first question regards her distinction between mythos and logos: Is this a valid distinction? Her point is that in our early history, religious stories were meant to be expressive and reflective, rather than historically accurate, as we would demand now. So, for example, the creation story is a way of contrasting God against Marduk, a reflection on our pride and ambition, etc., rather than an author really putting forward a belief about the history of creation. Back in my earlier years, I found this idea provocative, even revelatory...but now I wonder. The biblical authors have different genres available to them, and the genres read very differently; prophecy reads differently from wisdom literature, which in turn reads differently from the history books. And we could certainly see that the histories could be written with specific political slants and cultural prejudices in mind (or could just be factually wrong), the same as our histories work today. But it seems like a big jump from saying that a history book is politically motivated, to saying that it isn't meant to be read as history at all, but rather is a contemplative device operating on a symbolic rather than a more narrative-of-reality level. I'm willing to buy it for the creation story, but by the time we get to, say, the gospels, can we really say that there is no this-really-happened aspect to the stories? (Obviously there are different genres even within the gospels, but they typically do a good job marking off narrative from, say, parable.) Armstrong does not offer any real evidence for this assertion, at least at this point in the book (I should mention that right now she has not mentioned the gospels, so for all I know she covers them a few chapters from now, but I won't get that far if I can't get more comfortable with her argument, unfortunately!). So is this a valid distinction, and is there evidence that religious writing should be read primarily as contemplative in this way?
The second question regards the documentary hypothesis: Is this still considered a valid history of putting the Pentateuch together? As she is narrating the non-logos meanings and emphases behind the stories, she leans heavily on the idea of the four groups of authors, J, E, D and P. I'm familiar with the argument, and her description of what this does to the meaning of the history is absolutely beautiful, adding a great deal of depth and yearning. But it's also a really old argument, and surely in the past decades, new evidence has come to light to prove, disprove, or at least complicate the hypothesis? Or does it still mostly stand, with only some details changed (for instance, I've also read theories that we're not dealing with four author-groups, but only three and a later editor, etc.)?
A) From discussions on similar topics with my hermeneutics roommate on Paul Tillich's similar arguments around ontologic and technical reasoning, my understanding is that until around the Renaissance, the idea of historicity was not understood the same way we do now, with the thought of an ever-progressing timeline, but rather that humanity was always roughly the same (generally after some fall, e.g. Homeric descriptions of a previous golden age of heroes). Because of that, the distinctions that she's drawing between mythos and logos would have been at best abstruse to most believers, and certainly most early Christian practitioners. The symbology was literal and seen as recent history, but history was not regarded as explicative the way we do now.
B) The documentary hypothesis is, to my understanding, still the dominant theory in the U.S., but has been widely critiqued as insufficiently supported by definitive evidence that would distinguish it from simpler theories like supplication or fragmentary collation. It's an area of active debate, and more than saying that the documentary hypothesis is a valid history of the Pentateuch, it's a dominant theory that most other theories react against and many significant challenges to it have yet to be resolved. Someone with a more concrete knowledge may have a deeper perspective on it, but that's what I've gleaned from talking to Scripture nerds.
For more on Armstrong, the Rationalist wiki has some good info.
posted by klangklangston at 10:43 AM on November 26, 2014 [3 favorites]
B) The documentary hypothesis is, to my understanding, still the dominant theory in the U.S., but has been widely critiqued as insufficiently supported by definitive evidence that would distinguish it from simpler theories like supplication or fragmentary collation. It's an area of active debate, and more than saying that the documentary hypothesis is a valid history of the Pentateuch, it's a dominant theory that most other theories react against and many significant challenges to it have yet to be resolved. Someone with a more concrete knowledge may have a deeper perspective on it, but that's what I've gleaned from talking to Scripture nerds.
For more on Armstrong, the Rationalist wiki has some good info.
posted by klangklangston at 10:43 AM on November 26, 2014 [3 favorites]
I don't have a copy of The Case for God with me, so I can't review her footnotes, but I'll try to make a short response. In regards to your first question, the primeval story in the Hebrew Bible fits more closely into an ancient Near Eastern myths of creation genre than it does into an ANE historical genre. You then move to the Gospels: what genre the four canonical Gospels fall into is a matter of debate. Probably the most widely-held opinion is that they resemble Greco-Roman biography; such accounts of great men were not intended to show them warts and all, as we might expect today [e.g., historically in the way we understand history today], but to show them as exemplars to be followed. Other scholars see the gospels as a unique genre, since Greco-Roman biographies were about the powerful and successful; each of the four canonical gospels has to wrestle with the theological crisis of a suffering and dying messiah. The Gospels are "good news," which is a specific theological reflection on perceived historical incidents. "What really happened" is a matter of debate among biblical scholars because it is hard to (retroactively, thousands of years later)separate out the perceived meaning of an event (if a given event can be postulated to be historical) from the actual event itself.
Regarding your second question: the Documentary Hypothesis is still a working model for understanding the sources that make up the Pentateuch, though it has been reframed, expanded, collapsed, etc., since it was proposed by Julius Wellhausen. The Re-Emergence of Source Criticism: The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis is a short article by Dr. Joel S. Baden that gives a good summary of the state of the question with regards to recent scholarship; a more fuller exploration can be found in his book, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis.
posted by apartment dweller at 11:17 AM on November 26, 2014 [3 favorites]
Regarding your second question: the Documentary Hypothesis is still a working model for understanding the sources that make up the Pentateuch, though it has been reframed, expanded, collapsed, etc., since it was proposed by Julius Wellhausen. The Re-Emergence of Source Criticism: The Neo-Documentary Hypothesis is a short article by Dr. Joel S. Baden that gives a good summary of the state of the question with regards to recent scholarship; a more fuller exploration can be found in his book, The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis.
posted by apartment dweller at 11:17 AM on November 26, 2014 [3 favorites]
I'm unfamiliar with Armstrong's work but I can say a little about the mythos/logos distinction. By the time of Plato and Aristotle mythoi had definitely come to mean stories told by poets which did not have the same standards of truth as logoi (see, for example, Plato's Timaeus 22c-d and throughout the Platonic corpus). Aristotle repeats this distinction himself, regarding mythoi as artefacts necessary to be decoded, that is, to have logos applied to them in order to determine what in them is true and false. So by 300 BCE or so, at least for the Greeks, a critical stance had developed toward the religious traditions (Homer, Theognis, etc.) which regarded the mythoi as not presenting matters of 'fact' but rather as, in some sense, fanciful (Strabo, for example, later than Aristotle but roughly contemporary with the Gospel writers, explicitly distinguishes myth from history). The Greeks, at any rate, had a well developed sense of history and even rudimentary notions of documentary evidence. Polybius is exemplary here for devoting a great deal of thought to methodological investigations of history and historical evidence. So, while I don't know much about the circumstances surrounding the writing of the New Testament, nonetheless the synoptic authors, and certainly Paul too, had access to a notion of history which regarded it as corresponding in some way to 'wie es eigentlich gewesen' (how it really happened). This would definitely seem to be the case when it comes to Acts (praxeis being the subject of history, traditionally speaking).
The question of when the notion of historicity first arises is in fact a really difficult one and it depends on what you mean by historicity. The sweeping narratives of mid-20th century Great Thinkers are all too often far too sweeping. If you're really interested in that sort of stuff, Anthony Grafton's What was History? is an excellent work, not to mention a quite enjoyable read.
posted by dis_integration at 11:24 AM on November 26, 2014 [5 favorites]
The question of when the notion of historicity first arises is in fact a really difficult one and it depends on what you mean by historicity. The sweeping narratives of mid-20th century Great Thinkers are all too often far too sweeping. If you're really interested in that sort of stuff, Anthony Grafton's What was History? is an excellent work, not to mention a quite enjoyable read.
posted by dis_integration at 11:24 AM on November 26, 2014 [5 favorites]
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Don't forget that great swaths of time exist between all of these distinct events:
* The conception of the religious stories in question
* The time they were finally written down
* The time a given story was selected and approved as being Canonincally Part Of The Bible
* Armstrong writing "The Case For God".
Armstrong is writing from the perspective of being able to look WAY back in time, armed with modern-day scholarship about what society was like in pre-history, and make the comparison between the moment when a given religious story was first thunk up, and the moment several HUNDRED years later when the bishops who were deciding which books were in the Bible and which were out selected that story and rejected others.
So it is indeed possible for a given story to have been initially conceived using a mythos mindset, but for it to have later relevance to those working from a logos mindset. For an example: in pre-history, there were probably a bunch of different stories circulating about the creation of the world, but many of them were different because they were more of an expressive, reflective kind of narrative. But later, when the bishops selecting the canon were meeting to discuss which stories would be included and which wouldn't, they were using more of a logos "what actually happened" mindset, and kept those stories which satisfied their desired interpretation and rejected the ones that didn't. And the ones that didn't fell out of favor and gradually vanished from the collective memory, until thousands of years later when archeologists discovered random scrolls that contained these alternate stories and everyone was all "what the hell is THIS now?"
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:41 AM on November 26, 2014 [3 favorites]