 Alright, Skip from Columbus, Georgia has a personal question for you, Mike. How do you, as a Bible scholar, stay grounded in the Bible and the truthfulness it teaches on the Gospel of Christ and the whole nine yards of evangelical, reformed doctrine of the Bible, knowing what you know about the Bible's historicity, etc. Without going over the deep end and completely losing faith because of doubts about such things that cause many scholars, it seems to become so liberal in their thinking that they completely abandon faith in the God of the Bible and in the Bible itself. How do you keep the faith and maintain a balance of a scholastic deep knowledge of Scripture and that of a simple childlike saving belief in what you are reading? Well, the short answer to this, and this might sound a little bit harsh and possibly a little bit simplistic, but again, I've been a believer for 40 years and just trust me, this keeps popping. It keeps rearing its ugly head with great regularity. The short answer would be the problem with so many other scholars and just people who think in general is that they lack imagination and they are content with either or fallacious thinking. That just seems to be embedded, you know, kind of in the human condition. The longer answer I'll try to unpack that, what I mean by that statement is that many scholars can't seem to think about the phenomena of Scripture without using the vocabulary, the institutional structures and the approaches handed down to them in their past by whatever religious context they happen to grow up in. They just can't seem to escape it. They can't seem to frame the phenomena or the discussion in any other way than this caricature they have living in their head. I don't know why, but I just don't suffer from that problem. I'm not sure why, I'll confess. I don't know why that is, it just sort of is, but maybe examples will actually help here. Let's just take a topical example and I'll just relate some things about this in my own personal experience. Let's take the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Let's just jump in with a series of questions here just so that you know how some scholars, again, they can't escape from thinking about it in certain ways and then I'm going to suggest that that's not a good thing, that that's a lack of imagination and an embracing of either or fallacious thinking. Question, why does Moses have to have written all the Torah, all the Pentateuch? Why? Well, why does that have to be the case? If you're the fundamentalist, this is where you're going to land. Fundamentalists and others who sort of have inherited that tradition, whether they realize it or not, go through some really odd machinations to make that idea work without getting too granular here. When I was at the Missler conference in Coeur d'Alene several months ago, I saw an example of this again, where for some reason the speaker feels compelled to justify Mosaic authorship of every portion of the Pentateuch. He whipped out this colophon argument about how Moses would have been using cuneiform tablets and how the cuneiform tablets had evidence of colophons, which is a way of ordering material and Moses would have seen that. It's all speculation and frankly it's just unnecessary and there are actually some primary text problems with it too, both in the Torah itself with colophon language that doesn't work there and outside in the cuneiform world. But the point is, why do we feel compelled to go search high and low for what is really kind of a strange argument to justify this idea? Why? Why is the idea so important? Why must we say this? Second question, why couldn't Moses or why could Moses not have written any of it? Now this is the polar opposite of the fundamentalist. This is where your critical, quote-unquote liberal critical scholars are. Moses didn't write any of this stuff. Now catch what I'm saying here. This crowd is just as fundamentalist, but in the opposite direction. They cut themselves off from thinking critically and creatively about their own set of ideas. I'll give you a couple of examples here. When I was at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the things I did, Penn had two libraries that people in my field were supposed to use. One was in the museum. If you're kind of bent archaeologically, that's where you'd spend your time. The other one was the Semitic's reading room, which was in a different building. One night before class, I decided I'm going to go up to the Semitic's reading room and do a little thought experiment. I went up there and they've got thousands of books there. I had a couple of hours to kill. It was early in the semester, so I'm not burdened with assignments. I went up to the room and here's what I wanted to know. I had been at a seminar. I had two or three years of seminary under my belt. I was pretty well familiar with evangelical publishers, what outfits were evangelical publishers. The little game I played that evening was, I'm going to go through the stacks in the Semitic's reading room at the University of Pennsylvania in the Glorious Ivy League and see how many books published by evangelical publishers I can find. I found one, and I can tell you exactly what it was. It was R.K. Harrison's Old Testament introduction. What that taught me was that it generated some questions. Are you not aware that these other publishers exist? Surely the librarian must be aware. Who orders the books for these things? That would barely be the faculty. Is the faculty unaware that these other scholars that have evangelical commitment and published through these publishing houses, they're writing good books. After all, they've gotten their degrees from Harvard and Penn and all these other places. They can't be unaware of that, so are they afraid? Do they want to filter the knowledge? Do they want to limit exposure? Do they want to just eliminate ideas that they don't like? The answer to all those questions, the answer is somewhere in there. One of those is yes. It taught me very early on that there was a knowledge filter here. It just worked in the opposite direction. The fundamentalists don't want you to look at the stuff that the liberals say, and the liberals don't want you to look at the stuff the fundamentalists say. Again, those are using the two polar extreme terms here. The liberals, they want to come down on this, it's JEDP, it's Documentary Hypothesis, Moses didn't write a word of this. Maybe Moses didn't even exist. They're just all the way in the other direction. Then you have the other people that are just like, oh, Moses has to write every word. We're going to come up with some cock-a-may-me theory to get him to be the author of every word. My question is, why can't you have some of both? Why can't you have the use of sources? Why can't you have non-Mosaic authorship with Mosaic authorship? Why is it either or? That's a fallacy. That is fallacious thinking. That's why I have, again, I don't know where it comes from. It's just sort of in my head. But I have carried that everywhere and in every topic and with every question. I want coherence. I don't want either or fallacies handed to me. I don't have to accept the way you frame a topic or a question. Is there a cosmic rule that says the way you articulated the question is the only way it can be articulated? Is there some cosmic rule that says the way you answer the question is the only way it can be answered? No and no. So guess what? I don't need to play by those rules. And I have found, again, you have as much fear and knowledge filtering on both sides of basically any issue. And again, I don't know if it's like, is this my role in the universe here to just point this out? It's so obvious. But again, it happens for different reasons. So I look at these topics and say, well, why can't it be something to know? Why can't it be a little bit of both? Why can't we have some imagination here? Why? Why do we need mosaic authorship? Why is it a hill to dial? I mean, who said so? And in a lot of cases, you have so many will affirm obvious things, obvious points, you know, data points about the topic and then extrapolate to the completely unnecessary. You know, like, well, without mosaic authorship, the Bible's a crock. You know, I hate it now. My faith is in vain. Well, that's just kind of an extreme reaction. I mean, why is that a reasonable conclusion? Then on the other side, if Moses didn't write, you know, XYZ because we have sources, then he didn't write anything at any time and it's all made up. And maybe Moses wasn't even a real problem. I mean, it's just this total polar, you know, reaction. And I look at it and say, well, why can't we affirm the obvious? Hey, there's editing here. Hey, you know, Moses, if, you know, if we presume, you know, Moses was literate or was alive, you know, raised in Pharaoh's house like the Bible says he would have been literate. You know, what is there to prevent him from writing stuff down that would get edited later? The answer is nothing prohibits him from doing that. Nothing prohibits the Torah from being a little bit of both, you know, and is there something theologically wrong with all of the New Testament says that it refers to the Torah as the law of Moses. Yeah, it refers to the book of Daniel, you know, as Daniel. It refers to the books of Samuel and Samuel. Okay, what else would you call it? Because it's a book that is associated with the time period of Moses and the events of Moses' life and the law that began during the Mosaic period, and of course, last long, you know, thereafter, it's got these associations with it. So you wouldn't call it the book of Joshua or the law of Joshua. I mean, it's a normative expression. Law of, and I put this on my blog, you know, law of Moses, simple Hebrew construct phrase. The construct phrase has semantics. It could be the law that originated with Moses. It could be the law that was possessed by Moses. It could be the law that's associated with Moses. It could be the law that's about Moses. All of those things can be true, and none of them require that Moses wrote every word. These things just don't get thought about very well. And this is why I said in my short answer, we've got a lack of imagination and a willingness to embrace either or fallacious thinking. And I don't suffer from either. And a lot of people I know don't suffer from either. But too many people I know seem, they come across like they're trapped, either they want to be trapped or they're like, you know, trapped in a victimized way in one mode of thought. And I think on the critical side, I think they're just, again, I think it's something between an apathy and a disdain for the opinions of others. And they don't really see the need to even think about these things. I'll give you one more illustration. My doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin, we're sitting there in Pentateuch Seminar. And one of the criteria for the source hypothesis, JEDP, the Documentarian View, is that the documents, J, E, specifically J and E, and to some extent some of the others, depend on the vocabulary choice for the names of God. The names of God is one of the criteria. The J source uses Yahweh, the divine name. Jehovah is how the Germans would have said it. And the E source uses L words, L Elohim, L this, L that. And so when we see that the various names for God, then that indicates a separate hand and a separate source. Got the basics. So I actually asked in class, well, you know, we know that the Septuagint, which of course, you know, how the Hebrew base and the Hebrew bases was different than the Maseridic text in places. We know that the Septuagint didn't have the divine name. You know, it doesn't have the word Kurios, because that's where the Septuagint consistently translates the divine name, Kurios, Lord. We know that the Septuagint in 110, 115 places, it apparently had a different, you know, thing, a different name for God than the divine name in the Torah. Maybe it had an L name or something like that. I said, doesn't that kind of mess up the neatness of the sources for the Hebrew text of the Torah that you can just say when you encounter one, it's one author and you encounter the other, it's the other author? Because if we throw in 115 differences, doesn't that kind of muddy the waters there? Shouldn't that make a difference? Doesn't that make the argument weaker? And the answer I got from my professor in a doctoral program was, that's probably just a lazy translator, that the Septuagint translator was just sloppy. Again, you've heard me say this on the podcast before. That day was one of the reasons why I said later in the same class. It's a wonder I got out. I said later in the same class that I thought that every doctoral student in biblical studies should be required to take a course in logic. Because that was just not an adequate response. It just wasn't. That is not a coherent response. I'm sorry, but it's not. It's not a data-driven response. And critical scholarship is supposed to be about data. Well, that answer was not about data. That answer was, I'm too lazy to have looked. And even if I look, well, I like this approach so much, I don't care about the data. So again, I could throw in a few more of these, but back to the basics of my response to this. Again, it's nothing mystical. I just think that we need to be able to think about topics and questions and answers to questions and ways that don't violate clear thinking, clear logic that account for outliers that are not content to just dismiss parts of our arguments that don't work, that are not willing to accept either or fallacies. And to me, that makes it fun because then you have to engage the material. You have to think about it. And here's where the role of imagination and creativity, I think, helps. Imagination, not like you're just making stuff up, but you're trying to reimagine how, in this case, how we got the Torah. Well, how might this have worked in real time? Could Moses have had a role? Could other people have had roles? Could it have been done over long stretches of time? If you try to put it in real time and reimagine how this would have worked, are you able, if you do that, are you able to come up with a more comprehensive view that accounts for the data in all its disparity? That's what I'm looking for. So I just don't feel pigeon-holed. I don't feel like I've got to do one thing or the other. Again, there is no cosmic karmic, if I want to use that word, rule, that says there is a set of rules for how we must think or not think about Scripture. And I just know that. Again, I don't know why I really know it. It just seems sort of self-evident to me. But there it is. That lives in my head all the time. And again, if that's what's living in your head, let me just throw one other element. Since, again, I'm a theist. I believe in God. I'm a Christian. All these things, these basic ideas whose coherence has been defended quite capably for millennia. I'm not going to overturn any of those apple carts and neither is anybody else. People have tried for thousands of years. So given that assumption that we have God in the picture, thinking creatively and trying to think big picture about how these things might have happened in real time, that requires a providential role for God in all of it. It just requires it by definition. So then God becomes part of your thinking to answer the question, how might this have happened? How would this have looked in real time? How would God have pulled this off? Using people. Again, listeners here are going to know me well enough. I would assume at this point that I don't believe the Bible is a divine book. One adjective is not sufficient. I believe it is a divine human book. Both adjectives are necessary. And to strip the humanity out of scripture is to undermine the doctrine of inspiration. To strip the human out of it, to make the Bible vulnerable to all sorts of criticisms. One adjective is not enough. You need both. And if you can't find that view in a theology textbook, so what? Too bad. Get a better book. Think about it. There's no cosmic rule that the way this is articulated in the book that my pastor recommended, whatever. There's no cosmic rule that that's where the inquiry ends. So I think we just need to be a little more willing to think. Maybe it'll just appeal to you to have a little more fun with it. You know, don't get trapped. Just don't get trapped into fallacious thinking about scripture and about what scripture says. I think that would serve you a long way in it. Again, that rambled a little bit. I'm going to wrap it up here. That rambled a little bit. But I'm hoping the illustrations have a little bit of explanatory power to answer the question. Yeah, I've even been asked, Mike, how getting this deep into the Bible has affected my faith from friends of mine who are getting their MDev. And we've all heard stories of people going through seminary and stuff and kind of questioning everything. And I'm kind of like, you know, if you're studying the Bible and you start to lose your faith, well, you're doing something wrong. Yeah, the problem is in the Bible. I don't know. It just seems odd to me because, you know, the more you dive down, the more questions you have, right? So for me, it seems to strengthen it and not confuse it or lose it. So I don't know. Yeah, I'm always, again, I'm always left with a question. Well, again, how would this have worked? You know, like, like, you know, how did God influence the writer? What was the writer trying to do? Because the writer is under none of us live in a newsflash. None of us live lives of autonomy. Okay, we're all influenced by, you know, people, but, you know, again, if you're a theist, you're influenced by God, you know, all these things. And so the biblical writers are the same kind of people, and God has an interest in what they're doing, especially, you know, in something, you know, of this magnitude. You know, where is God in these set of circumstances? What did the data tell us about how this might have worked? And to try to, again, reimagine it. You know, imagination is not the enemy of biblical stories unless you're using imagination to just junk the truth, propositions of scripture and substitute your own. You know, when I talk about imagination, I mean, you know, creatively thinking about the data that you have in front of you. I think we need a little bit more of that. Yeah, I'm amazed because, you know, I believe the Bible is a living word. So you read it one day and it tells you something, you know, one day and another another day. But I get on some of these blogs or whatever and I see people have discussions. And if you're not in our Facebook group, you need to get in there. We almost have 2,000 people, Mike, in our Facebook Neck and Bible group talking about some of these great topics. But I'll go into some of these other groups or around the Internet looking at it. And I mean, talk about Christians reading the same thing and having the exact opposite viewpoint. You know, they can read something or study something and they come away with something completely different than another person. And it's crazy how us Christians can't agree on some of the most simplest things. And it's just we're all over the map. It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, some of that is, you know, they're, again, I don't, and this is not meant to sound critical, but you have a lot of sheep without a shepherd. And what I mean by that is they haven't, they may not have a lot of direction, but they haven't quit. And so I'm on their side, you know, I wish they had, you know, more direction, but at the very least they haven't quit. So that it's a positive thing in that respect, but negative in that, you know, they're just, they're just trying to do it on their own. You know, and that's why we do stuff like the podcast, to be honest. You know, just try to try to give a little help there. You know, but then you've got situations where people have sort of been, you know, funneled in one direction. And when their knowledge filter, the knowledge filter they were taught from very early on doesn't satisfy at some point, then they are tempted and some of them just, you know, go all the way opposite to just junk the whole thing and just say, well, none of this matters. None of this is going to help me and be any sort of guidance to me. I'm just going to wing it. You know, I mean, they're going to get rid of it or I'm going to wing it and whatever pops into my head, that's what scripture means or whatever the next person, you know, who maybe I like something they said, I'm going to just go with what that guys, you know, you have all these forces, you know, kind of operating. You don't have anything that, well, I shouldn't say anything, but you have a tremendous lack of discipline when it comes to method. You've got people who are charismatic and they make certain arguments and they get followings just because they're charismatic and the people who follow them, you know, want to follow them because they didn't like the last person they were following. They had no direction at all and, you know, it's kind of a mess, but at the end of the day, I'd still rather have that than people just quitting, you know, altogether.