A Thought Experiment by Hermione Granger and Harry Potter
St. Paul in Acts 17, by quoting a Greek poet, essentially claims that the Christian gospel takes up and fulfills (though at the same time corrects) a theme in ancient Greek religion, which religion both St. Paul and we would consider to be historically fictitious. Is it possible that God could have given Israel a mythology which is similarly taken up and fulfilled by Christ, a set of stories which, while not historically referential, nevertheless provided a framework in terms of which His person and work would make sense? Let’s say that excepting Adam (or a first historically real human being qua imago Dei representing the race and through which sin entered the race), Abraham, and Moses, many of the other early OT figures are not historically referential.[1] That is, what if figures like Job or Jonah are fictitious characters? Would something like that necessarily be outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy? The claim would be something like Genesis and Exodus are historically referential, but we must be sure that we are not importing an extra-biblical and distinctively modern idea of what historicity means, as this term is not univocal over time and culture. Part of what we have to do, then, is to be sensitive to the ways in which the Bible may be doing history on a model other than the modern model, on a model, in fact, that would have been more at home in the Ancient Near East (a novel idea-I recall this suggestion being “that-which-none-of-the-critics-of-he-who-should-not-be-named-seem-to-grasp”[2]). God has the right and ability (enter the infamous Incarnational Analogy here) to accommodate Himself to such models if He so chooses. After all, many liberals and conservatives tend to assume a modern historiography and then either deny historicity (some liberals) or stretch the text embarassingly out of joint to make it fit (some conservatives).
Here what “he-who-should-not-be-named” may have in mind would go something like this: Genesis and Exodus are history, but we can’t know the extent to which they would translate directly into a modern historical model. Or, to put it in other words, the text is historical, but Ancient Near Eastern history does not share the modern concern for point by point movie-camera-like reconstruction of the past. Or again, some of our modern historical questions go beyond what the text is trying to tell us, and so we have to be careful of beating an answer out of them.
If this is the case, then it would be wrong to suggest that “he-who-should-not-be-named” has subjected Scripture to the canons of archaeology.[3] Rather, he is precisely trying to divorce Scripture from those canons so as to suggest that discrepancies with historical and archaeological findings need not make us shy away from calling Scripture historical.
Notes
[1] In case any death eaters are wondering, Hermione and Harry are very committed to the doctrine of original sin, and historical referentiality of Adam, Abraham and Moses. Why? Because it is our conviction that the ineradicable premising of Christ’s work on the OT persons named (Adam, Abraham, Moses), as well as certain events of the OT, make it extremely troubling to think of the OT tout court as a non-referential myth. Thus, for example, that God entered into covenant with (a real historical) Abraham and gave the Law through (a real historical) Moses are convictions that Hermione (and Harry) are not willing to depart with given their importance in the redemptive historical narrative.
[2] The only problem with this demonination in the context of present essay is that the “he-who-should-not-be-named” of this story is not a villain, but is instead the object of the death eaters’ quest to promote pure-bloodism and eradicate those who don’t fit the pure-blood ideal (the pure-blood model varies of course depending upon who is in power). To make the analogy more accurate in relation to the Harry Potter series, the Voldemort figure would have to be the leader of the death eaters.
[3] I’ve read elsewhere that a certain Professor Quirrell and his cohort, Barty Crouch Jr., have brought this charge against “he-who-should-not-be-named” in an attempt to show that “he-who-should-not-be-named’s” approach to Scripture cannot harmonize with the self-attesting nature of Scripture. However, it seems to me that Prof. Quirrell and Mr. Crouch are confusing extra-biblical evidence which functions as a ground versus that which functions as an occasion for re-thinking the nature of Scripture. As one of my friends pointed out, it is not clear at all why Scripture’s self-attestation cannot harmonize with re-thinking Scripture on an Incarnational model. After all, Hans Urs von Balthasar has a version of the self-attesting nature of Scripture, yet HUvB would have no problem with the IA-see Vatican II document, Dei Verbum. As I understand “he-who-should-not-be-named’s” position, he is not using extra-biblical evidence to serve as the ground, but rather than the occasion for re-thinking Scripture, and this is exactly where the incarnational analogy comes in. That is, it seems to me that “he-who-should-not-be-named” is holding up internal evidence, i.e., the Incarnation, as the guiding principle and is saying, “you see all this external evidence that is so difficult to make sense of on the older model of understanding Scripture, well, if we use the incarnational analogy as a way to understand the nature of Scripture, we have not only a better way to make sense of the external evidence but we also gain a richer understanding of Scripture, history, and of course of God himself.”