The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It). By Thom Stark. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011, xx + 248 pp., $29.00 paper.
It is no secret that some of the most fervid theological liberals tend to be former evangelicals. Evangelical-turned-agnostic Bart Ehrman has vindicated that truism with books like Mis-quoting Jesus and Jesus Interrupted, both of which seek to discredit biblical inerrancy by popularizing critical studies of Scripture. Thom Stark describes himself as a former fundamentalist, and his book The Human Faces of God belongs to the Ehrman-genre, though with at least one significant difference. Despite the Bible’s many deficiencies, Stark wants to retain the Bible’s privileged place as Christian Scripture. Even though Stark views the Bible as shot through with error and contradiction, he nevertheless thinks that it is an important book. “This Holy Bible is also my book because I continue to choose it. For everything I loathe about it, there is at least one thing I love about it: it has the power to show me who I am. When we look into the looking-glass we see the aspirations, desires, insecurities, and utter obliviousness of humanity” (242). For Stark, the errors and foibles of the Bible are a reflection of the fallen human condition, and that rings true with him. Stark makes no claim to be breaking new ground in The Human Faces of God. He does not aim “to advance knowledge within academic circles”; rather, he intends to reach a “wide audience” through the popularization of well-worn arguments (xvii). From the start, Stark has The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (CSBI) from 1978 in his crosshairs: “This book is an argument against that doctrine, particularly as articulated by the Chicago Statement, and it is an argument in favor of a different, more ancient way of reading the books that comprise the Bible” (xvi). Stark hopes his book will speak to Christians who struggle with biblical inerrancy and who have not found answers to their questions about the Bible. Stark wants them to know an “alternative way of being Christian”—a way that vehemently rejects the Bible as inerrant (xviii). Through ten chapters, Stark makes his case. Chapter one contends that the Bible is “an argument against itself” and is hopelessly self-contradictory (1). Chapter two asserts that “inerrantists do not exist” in reality because of their inconsistent use of an historical-grammatical hermeneutic (which is required by the Chicago Statement). Chapter three adduces examples of biblical texts that would undermine “basic tenets of fundamentalist theology” if those texts were interpreted properly. Chapter four argues that the “theological unity” of Scripture founders on the observation that many Old Testament authors were polytheists (85). Chapter five attempts to demonstrate the moral inferiority of the Bible by showing that the authors believed in the “nobility and efficacy of human sacrifice” (99). Chapter six highlights “Yahweh’s Genocides” in the Old Testament and concludes that God never commanded such things as the conquest of Canaan. Chapter seven argues that the story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 is a fictitious “hero-worshiping legend” that appears in Scripture as a kind of “government propaganda” aimed at buttressing the Davidic dynasty (159). Chapter eight takes aim at Jesus himself and says that if the Gospels are right then Jesus was “ignorant” and “wrong” about the timing of the final judgment (160). Chapter nine dismisses three hermeneutical approaches that have the effect of glossing over Scripture’s theological and moral deficiencies: allegorical readings, canonical readings, and subversive readings. Finally, chapter ten consists of Stark’s constructive proposal for reading the Bible in a way that allows Christians to retain the Bible as their Scripture. It is in this final chapter that the futility of Stark’s quest comes into full view. After nine chapters of attacking the historical, theological, and moral authority of the Bible, he thinks he can offer a way of reading the Bible that will preserve it as Christian Scripture for the church. Since the biblical text taken on its own terms has an “evil,” “devilish nature” that reveals God to be a “genocidal dictator” (218, 219), Stark argues that the only way to read the Bible faithfully is to read it as “condemned texts.” It will be useful to read Stark’s prescribed hermeneutic in his own words: “[The Bible] must be read as scripture, precisely as condemned texts. Their status as condemned is exactly their scriptural value. That they are condemned is what they reveal to us about God. The texts themselves depict God as a genocidal dictator, as a craver of blood. But we must condemn them in our engagement with them” (218). Stark anticipates an objection: If the texts deserve censure, then why pay attention to them at all, much less give them some kind of authoritative, canonical status? He answers: To do so is to hide from ourselves a potent reminder of the worst part of ourselves. Scripture is a mirror. It mirrors humanity, because it is as much the product of human beings as it is the product of the divine…. It mirrors our best and worst possible selves. It shows us who we can be, both good and evil, and everything in between. To cut the condemned texts out of the canon would be to shatter that mirror. It would be to hide from ourselves our very own capacity to become what we most loathe. It would be to lie to ourselves about what we are capable of. It would be to doom ourselves to repeat history (218-19). So Stark says that the church must appropriate Scripture’s regulative authority in two ways: one, it must face head-on the Bible’s moral and theological deficiencies, and two, reject for its own life the negative examples in the Bible. In other words, the church should learn to shun the evil ways of the God of Scripture. Stark gives several illustrations of how his hermeneutic works out in practice. Since Scripture reveals that both polytheism and monotheism underwrite ideologies of slavery, war, genocide, and racism, the church must reject both polytheism and monotheism. Instead, Christians should embrace a new “conception of the divine nature”—one that recognizes its non-trinitarian “plurality” (221). Since Scripture affirms the nobility of human sacrifice, Christians should recognize their own evil propensity for human sacrifice. Once again in Stark’s own words, Yet we continue to offer our own children on the altar of homeland security, sending them off to die in ambiguous wars, based on the irrational belief that by being violent we can protect ourselves from violence. We refer to our children’s deaths as “sacrifices” which are necessary for the preservation of democracy and free trade. The market is our temple and must be protected at all costs. Thus, like King Mesha, we make “sacrifices” in order to ensure the victory of capitalism over socialism, the victory of consumerism over terrorism (222). Stark goes on from here to apply his hermeneutic to biblical texts about genocide, Jesus’ failed prophecies, etc. This is a learned book that is well acquainted with critical biblical scholarship. Nevertheless, for a number of reasons, The Human Faces of God does not deliver on what it promises. Stark attempts to offer both a convincing case against inerrancy and a viable, alternative way of reading the Bible as Christian Scripture. He fails at both aims. None of the arguments that he offers against inerrancy are new (as he himself acknowledges on page xvii), yet he treats his interpretation of the material as if it were the settled scholarly consensus. He promises to pay inerrantists the “deep respect of extensively engaging their arguments” (xvii) and then neglects to interact with leading scholars who have defended inerrancy over the last thirty to forty years. For example, Stark lodges extensive complaints against New Testament authors’ use of the Old Testament (19-20, 29), yet he has not one word of interaction with the work of Greg Beale or other inerrantists who have done extensive work in typology. Stark dismisses out of hand the notion that inerrancy is the
established position of the church (17, 32), yet he has not one scintilla of interaction with John Woodbridge’s work (nor does he cite the Rogers and McKim proposal). I daresay that there is not a single objection to inerrancy that he raises that has not already been ably answered in the relevant literature. Yet Stark goes right on as if his case is the only one to be made. I could multiply examples in which Stark trots out old objections that have already been answered, but I will limit myself to just one. In an attempt to show that inerrantists do not really accept the Bible’s literal sense, he appeals to 1 Timothy 2:12-14 and the fact that many inerrantists allegedly reject Paul’s teaching that women are “inherently more susceptible to deception” (16- 17). Stark says that “the most common strategy to explain away this blatant misogyny” is to impose a distinction between the cultural and the universal (41). For Stark, this is prima facie evidence that inerrantists cannot accept what the Bible really teaches and that they do not practice the hermeneutic that the Chicago Statement preaches. Yet anyone familiar with the literature knows that this is not the “most common strategy” used by inerrantists in dealing with this text. Stark appears oblivious to the work of Doug Moo, Tom Schreiner, and many others who argue on exegetical grounds that the prohibition on female teachers has to do with the order of creation, not with the relative gullibility of women. Not only does Stark fail to produce a convincing argument against inerrancy, he also fails to offer a viable alternative. His proposal to read the Bible as a “condemned” text is clever but transparently bogus. It is a little bit like asking an abused wife to admire her abusive husband because of the “mirror” he provides into her own corruption. It is patently absurd, and I doubt that very many actual churchgoers will be compelled to respect the Bible as “scripture” based on the mountain of deficiencies that Stark alleges. If anything, Stark has given readers more reasons to give up on the Bible altogether. In the end—even though he does not say so in so many words—Stark himself has given up on the Bible. He confesses that he rejects monotheism and the substitutionary atonement of Christ and that he is not in any sense an orthodox Christian (242). We have to conclude that Stark’s approach is less a reading of Scripture than it is a raging against it. Stark loathes the God of the Bible and filters out any depiction of God in Scripture that does not fit into the Stark moral universe. Stark stands over Scripture as its judge. Indeed, his hermeneutic requires it. And he wants readers to join him in his cynical scrutiny of the Bible. The shortcomings of The Human Faces of God, however, are extensive and serious, and there are more than enough reasons for readers not to follow Stark down the dead-end trail that he is walking. —Denny Burk Associate Professor of Biblical Studies Boyce College
(HT: Credo Blog)
