The Plain Sense of the Text

Many objections to TE by young-earthers involve the claim that an evolutionary model of creation violates the “plain sense” of the Genesis accounts. But that is hardly demonstrable, as any look at Dispensationalist hermeneutics will indicate. Dispensationalism looks at the book of Revelation and interprets the swarm of locusts as a squadron of Apache helicopters because that is the “plain sense” of the text. What is plain to one man or to one group or one generation may be the furthest, most remote possibility to another. Young-earthers are constantly doing word-studies and surveys of Jewish scholars to establish the lexical meaning of words in the Genesis account such as “day” or “create.” Having established that the word “day” literally means one 24 hour period (a point to which nobody objects), they fancy they have resolved the matter. The “plain sense” of the text has spoken.

In reality, they have wasted precious time. I do not read Robert Frost and argue that in his poem he was talking about a literal road located in a wood because, according to all lexical definitions of the word “road,” a road is a road is a road. I do not argue that the plain sense of the text is determinative of its meaning. I would not even be quick to say that a literal road is the “plain sense” of the text to all readers. Other poets or avid poetry enthusiasts may read the road and immediately imagine difficult life choices they’ve made in the past, or choices they know are ahead of them, long before they see a picture in their head of an actual road. That is the power of poetry for those that know how to read it. Or alternatively, a Robert Frost biographer, knowing the background of the poem, does not conjure an image of a road but immediately thinks of the historical contingencies in Frost’s life that inspired the poem. He reads “road” and to him the “plain sense” is some definitive historical moment in Frost’s life in which Frost chose a certain life over another. The biographer knows the moment, and the actual meaning of the “road,” the historical referent of the metaphor, is to the one “in the know” the “plain sense” of the text. Arguing that Frost was actually talking about a real road in a real wood because a road is a road is a road and a wood is a wood is a wood is not only unfaithful to the poem, it is a little neurotic. Something is wrong either with the reading habits or with the reader him or herself.

Problems of “plain sense” extend far beyond poetry. Even historical texts can have unstated subtexts that in the right contexts constitute a “plain sense.” In other contexts, such subtext is usually entirely invisible. In short, appeals to word studies or the “plain sense” of the text resolve nothing. They do not address the issue of whether or not the account(s) of Genesis 1 & 2 are meant to be taken literally. If the basic claim of Moses was that the actual creation of the cosmos was ordered and guided by a single divinity, over against the claims of other cults in his day that the world was created as a result of conflicts between multiple gods, then the authority of his account does not lie in the account’s actual, literal correspondence to the actual processes of creation. In such a case, we would not accuse Moses of deception any more than we would accuse Robert Frost of deception for not ever having actually made a life-altering decision to take a certain road in a certain wood.

The fact that the word “Sabbath” does not occur in the Bible until after the exodus from Egypt is an indication of the kind of thing we are talking about here. The layout of the creation account, the six days of work and the seventh day as a day of rest, reflects Moses’ context in his struggle against the slave labor imposed by Egypt over his people. The creation account underwrites, among other things, a liberation ethic. The text was authoritative because it spoke the truth about the nature of God’s cosmos over against the tyrannies of the powerful and their corresponding creation accounts. It did not need to be literal in order to be true, and it certainly did not need to be literal in order to be rightly formative for the people of Israel. People back then simply did not share our post-Enlightenment ontology of meaning and our Baconian reading of authoritative literature. If proponents of TE do not share such assumptions either (many do, many do not), that puts them in good company with the ancients. The attempt of young-earthers to defeat TE by recreating TE in its own image (rationalism, Baconianism) and subjecting it to criteria external to TE theory itself is a gross misstep and a sensational adventure in missing the point.

So far so good, on the fourth way.

Intro, Way 1, Way 2, Way 3, Way 4, Way 5, Way 6, Sabbath

Labels: Creation, Evolution, Science