OTT

27th November 21 - OTT

Dr dear Dr: Is it possible to question the Old Testament from a logical point of view when we know that parts of it are not literally or historically true? But tell me, tell me do, how do I know which parts of the Old Testament to take literally and which to interpret symbolically, since while reading through the genealogies in Matthew it occurred to me several times that logically the time sequences of the generations - 14 to Babylon and then 14 to Jesus did not square with the numbers of generations and the origins of mankind from a science point of view. So which is it?

Vladimir the Impaler - called that for his devastating responsories to questions from Americenne journalists - likes to analyse the assumptions of questions that come in to him at his various conferences around Sochi and Moscow and especially in the gorgeous golden palaces of St Petersburg, the like of which we simply do not see in Europe save maybe at the simple, elegant palaces of Paris, you can tell he belonged to the KGB, and I make no apology for saying this, that I follow their methods, but basically I like to do the same thing as Valdimir - analyse the assumptions of a question, and this before putting pen to paper to respond to the substantive querela of the question in detail, before responding to the merits of the case so to speak. Allow me to explain:

So anyway before we look at the genealogies, we should note something about westerners when they question the Old Testament on the basis of science. Fr Ratio was fond of telling people that the Bible is not a science text book  - keines wissenschaftliches Buch - and to use it that way is to abuse the angels that inspired it; rather it is about the Why of this moral world and not about the How of this physical universe. Yet we know from time to time along will come some prelate or some evangelical pastor from the Religious Right who will do precisely this, and within a generation of his time he will reduce everything to ash. Confusing the moral universe with the brute empirical physical universe or the savage universe as Steve Rose says of the Prospect magazine on the left. But there is more, the empirical question when served fresh on the moral world is rather like asking a goldfish to climb a tree - Just because the goldfish cannot climb a tree does not mean that it is not a very useful goldfish - context is everything, there are certain mediums which are not made for fish and one of them is the issue raised by the empirical question about literature that is spiritual and moral - it is the moral of the story moment that is being hinted at.

One prelate, a Northern Ireland bishop called Bp U, once thought that genealogies were to be interpreted literally, again abusing the books of the Bible and turning them into rationalist history, and he thought that if he worked back over the books of the Bible they would tell him pretty soon what the age of the planet was, so he reasoned and he reasoned and he read and read, and working back from the genealogies, he came up with the year of the creation of the world, this planet, as 4004 BC. Crazy lunacy we would all say nowadays, but he was thinking of liturgical creation - the moment when religious meaning of a revelation kind first dawned on the planet surface, with the dawn of the first religious man and his woman, Adam and Eve, primus homo - sapiens. But still he produced a thesis that was quickly outgunned in the universities who all took their empirical slide-rules to the discussion of an old bishop, keen on liturgical poetry and the like, and maybe rightly so. Misunderstandings on both sides. Such experiments reduce the faith as the questioner hints - and Aquinas always counselled his students when some were arguing for a beginning to the universe in time and a creation of the universe ex nihilo like an early medieval big bang theory that students should never say or do anything that would bring ridicule to the Faith - in philosophy only the instruments of human reason might be employed when speaking to other students of philosophy - creation was one of those no-no's that Aquinas liked to distance his more intelligent students from. Not to say on the other hand like so many Religious Right Radicals do that he was denying the Book of Genesis as a vehicle of a just meaning, merely that some issues had to be curtailed and avoided and postponed for a resolution simply because time had not passed sufficiently for the science to have developed toward an eventual solution. A salutary lesson for the students of the time, especially the zealots and franciscans and humiliati of the bible-bashing kind. Abusing good religious poetry.

Symbolically, most theologians say. Take the example raised by the girl above - 14 is a multiple of 7 which is the perfect OT number. So in this sense symbolically because the numbers are a symbolic quantum and they mean the end of perfect time in perfect fulfillment. Anything else is star-gazing. Or using Rubik Cubes to solve complex problems in space. The instrumentality of the question is a question to be posed of the question, and it is legitimate to pose that question as the asker, some girl from Cambridge, has done above. A nice question. There is no long and distant and comprehensive answer to the seeker above, since the question carries too much unspoken and unacknowledged and unanalysed philosophy baggage, save a question about questions themselves. When Galileo went to see Bellarmine to talk about his theories, Bellarmine simply said, "No problem, you propose your theories first and then we shall interpret scripture accordingly to follow your theory - truth is just as much raised by science as by religious men." Urban VIII agreed with Galileo, and it was Urban and not Galileo that came up with the famous phrase about the motion of the planet earth - eppure si muove - yes, it still nonetheless moves under out feet. So science first, when dealing with dates and times and places and the physical geography of the earth, and then scriptures can be brought to bear accordingly afterwards. So on the genealogies, we follow the theologians and not the historicists and not just because the historicists produce very rationalist histories at the moment doing so for the last 300 years up to Tim Jackson's book,  Post-Growth - After GDP Capitalism - there is added reason for following the theologians when a concept of history is so strait-jacketed by reductionism that it can hardly even be deployed in these obvious debates about genealogies when interpreting the bible - more goldfish climbing trees - so the Old Testament is largely to be interpreted symbolically for a good while yet. A good question that obviously afflicts some of the students at some colleges in these dark days of yet more variants.