Jefferson seems to have been a unitarian from his personal writings. OTOH he also sometimes attended church (anglican) when at home, riding there on his own on horseback, and took part in the services - prayers and congregational responses. In his writings on slavery, he wrote that he feared divine judgment on the nation on account of it. He said that individuals could be punished for their sins after death, but nations, not having immortal souls had to be punished in this world. So the idea the God he believed in was a non-involved hands-off Deist God is wrong. HHis God was more of the judgmental Biblical type.
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Re. the cultural value of Biblical knowledge (have had thinking about an opportunity to post this for several days):
The Folly of Biblical Ignorance Since the Bible Is a Great Book
John Mark Reynolds
Culture
08.15.2007
Weird Anger
Whenever I quote the Bible in a large group, there is sure to be at least one dismissive and angry person. In fact, it isn’t just that they they don’t take the Bible seriously, but they hate anything in the Bible just because it is in the Bible. I use the word “hate” carefully, because there is no other way to describe the weirdly passionate reaction.
There is evidently something about the Bible that irritates a few Americans the way the sight of a stake disturbs a vampire.
I don’t generally get the same reaction when I quote Darwin (even favorably) to conservative Christians, Dante to Protestants, or Calvin to Wesleyan churchmen. They might not agree with the totality of the writer’s work, but they can learn from it and admire what is admirable in it.
Since is uncharitable to assume that these angry Americans are just too boorish to recognize a great book, I have tried to understand what causes this reaction to the Bible. I usually get some combination of four responses and over time have learned why I get them.
Four Reasons for Weird Anger
Problem 1. The “Science-Guy”
There is always the “science-guy” (it is almost always a guy) who thinks nobody should waste their time reading any old book since only science contains knowledge. Give them a list of great books and they will complain that the latest technical journal article in their sub-field of physics is not there. The Bible makes them the most angry, because defenders of it (some ill advised) have been the least eager to leave all knowledge to the white jacket priesthood in the laboratories.
These are the people who think Richard Dawkins has a clue about philosophy of science.
They don’t get mad about Shakespeare or Plato, they are merely dismissive.
Amazingly, there is a discernible class of Americans that think one can be well educated and read nothing outside of one’s own technical field.
(Obviously this not true of all scientists or even philosophic naturalists. I am describing a sub-class of both groups that I sometimes encounter, especially on line.)
While it is hard to take such cultural illiterates seriously, their education is really more to blame than they are. They have been taught the glories and importance of science. That is good, but they also have been taught an epistemology (theory of knowledge) which only counts “science” as knowledge as if the truth of this philosophically contentious claim was self-evident.
They are actually stunned that anyone still reads old books and takes them seriously. (I actually had one say, “But Aristotle did not have the space shuttle!” as we were discussing the Ethics.)
Their souls are dead to the importance of the human things (literature and art) as they have been taught to reduce humans to computers made out meat.
This is the kind of person who thinks any reference to the soul is “magical” thinking or that the goal of an educated man is to become a great fact-grinding machine.
They are the products of a simplistic epistemology which owes more to 1950’s comics and science fiction than to any deep reading of philosophy.
Whatever the merits of philosophical naturalism (and it has merits), anybody who cannot learn from Bach, Spencer, or Shakespeare what it means to be human has confused a good thing (science) for the only good thing.
Real life is the best way for this poor soul to realize that a highly technical education might make one good at a task, but bad at living. One does not have to be religious to recognize that religious books might contain great human wisdom.
Problem 2. Understandable Reaction to an Error By Some Christians
The second common reaction is the fault of some Christians. Since a few Christians use the Bible in conversation with non-Christians in a way that assumes non-Christians should simply fall down and repent on hearing the Bible, non-Christians are turned off by any mention of the Bible.
Use of the Bible in public discourse should not be a conversation stopper, but a wise place to begin. Who wants to stop a dialog anyway? Certainly not a traditional Christian! We love dialog.
Hopefully non-Christians can forgive us our misuse of the text.
Problem 3. Some People Cannot Read the Bible Well
The next problem I encounter is often the result of not having been taught how to read the Bible as literature.
There a few sad souls that take hard passages in the Bible and allow them to so consume their understanding of this highly complex book that they can no longer get anything else out of it.
I have known people so hung up on the interesting question of how Genesis relates to Darwin that they cannot get beyond that or ever give the topic a rest to learn other things from the book.
Joseph and his brothers? They cannot stop talking about days in Genesis.
Even more absurd, given the expansiveness of the text, is the person so worried about working out the chronology of the kings of Judah that they cannot pause to hear the central message in the Book about the King of Kings.
There is another kind of chronic misreading that leads to ignorant disrespect for the Bible.
Some people believe the Bible says things it doesn’t or read it woodenly. They forget the Bible is a collection of books and has to be approached that way. They don’t check context or try to understand what the author might be doing.
My favorite example of this is the confused person who worries notices that “back to back” verses in Proverbs say to answer a fool and to not answer a fool in his folly.
Isn’t that a contradiction? The writer of Proverbs must have been really foolish not to have noticed that he contradicted himself in two parallel lines!
Of course that could be true, but isn’t it more likely that the editor of Proverbs is making a point about there being no way to safely deal with a fool? I wonder sometimes if such readers are capable of catching written irony or humor.
Problem 4. Isn’t quoting any old book as an authority a bad argument?
Finally, there are a few people who don’t understand the difference between the legitimate use of authority and the logical fallacy of the “false appeal to authority.” They think any helpful quotation from any book (but especially the Bible) must be fallacious.
It is not bad to quote experts or people who put complex ideas in pithy ways!
Nobody can be an expert in everything and most of us (despite the tone blogging induces!) don’t know much about most thing first hand.
We trust (as we should) to authorities. Our knowledge, such as it is, is derived from them. These recognized authorities give us “operating assumptions.” When we want to challenge the authorities (as we sometimes should), they still the background where we begin to do our Socratic work.
Cultures work like people in this respect. There are certain formative ideas that are at the bottom of societies that certainly can be challenged, but usually are not. Most of us are not equipped to sensibly challenge those assumptions most of the time and have to live as if they are true.
We have to trust our best poets, religious leaders, philosophers, and scientists to tell us what is so in their areas of their expertise.
Authority is good and useful in normal life (though it can be dangerous). The trick is in finding good, culturally accepted, general authorities.
The “false appeal to authority” is (generally) an inappropriate reliance on an authority or an appeal to a questionable authority. The problem is determining when an authority is being relied on “inappropriately” or is “questionable.”
There is an easy example of the false appeal to authority in the tendency to think any authority outside of “science” lacks weight. Many of us wait for “science” (really certain scientists) to pronounce on an ethical topic, when science is perfectly incompetent (on all but the most extreme view of science) to show us how we SHOULD live.
Science might tell us how we DO live. Science might tell us what actions will lead to certain outcomes, but science alone can never tell us which outcomes humankind should prefer.
Unless scientism is shown to be true, a scientist cannot use his authority (as a scientist) to make pronouncements on ethics.
There must be left to the wise men and women of all ages. This has major implications for the study of the Bible in our age.
If one lives in a civilization with (in part) Christian roots, then it is sensible to take the wisdom from those roots seriously.
It is very dangerous, when we simply assume that the wisdom that produced a culture can (without great care) be discarded by most of us, simply because it is old, difficult, or unfashionable.
If the Bible is foundational to Western civilization, which is difficult to dispute, then it seems a perfectly useful authority to cite in describing what Western persons should do.
“Look,” a woman might say to her friend,”you are a man of the West. Stop seeking revenge. As the Bible says vengeance is the Lord’s.”
Now the man has the right to argue with the woman and the Bible, but if he has accepted the basic legal code of the West which assumes that private revenge is bad at least in part (historically) for Biblical reasons, he should pause. Does he really have the sophistication to refute the Biblical assumption?
Is he wiser than the Bible? The Bible’s assumption has proven useful for a very long time. It has been tested and shown plausibly sound.
While the Biblical authority does not clinch the case (or end discussion), if the Bible is book full of wisdom (an authority in the area of human behavior), it should give the man concerns about his position.
Given the failure of normal excuses for dismissing the Bible, there is a very good reason to take it seriously.
You Can Believe the Bible Is Not the Word of God and Still See It Is Great.
Now of course I personally believe more than this about the Bible. I accept, based on reason and experience, that the Bible is the written Word of God.
If this is true, it would simply be stupid of me to ignore God’s opinion. I don’t need any other argument to take the Bible seriously. (Of course, coming to that conclusion took time and was much more difficult for me.)
The divine status of the Bible is a reasonable working hypothesis given any close reading of the text.
Of course it is only reasonable if one is using literary skills more advanced than the wooden “I-wouldn’t-know-poetry-from-history” school of Internet infidels, but my assumption is that very few people actually have the kind of unsophisticated reading skills of that group. Atheists and secularists are all over the Internet, but one meets very few of them in real life outside a few select professions and geographic areas . . . rather like Ron Paul supporters in politics.
However, just because I believe more about the Bible does mean that lesser things are not also true about it.
The Bible may be God’s word, but that does not mean it is not also merely interesting, beautifully written, and useful.
I shall not argue for or assume divine inspiration here, but obviously if you agree with scholars like Thomas Aquinas, poets like Dante, and contemporary philosophers like Alvin Plantinga that the Bible is God’s word, then nothing else needs to be said to convince you it should be taken seriously.
But this post is for everyone else (a large minority in the U.S.) that vaguely cares about the Bible, is not sure it is inspired, but needs to know why it is a decent moral and cultural authority for Western men and women.
Like Shakespeare it is (at least) a good short cut to what civilized men and women should think and can be appropriately used in casual conversation that way.
I am arguing for less than I think I can prove, because that is a good first step for most of us.
In other words, the Bible is a (generally) useful authority that can be a good place for Western people to start a discussion about how we should live. (For Christians it will frame that continuing discussion inside the Church, since we have come, through discussion, to stronger conclusions about it.)
Five Non-Religious Reasons for Thinking the Bible is a Very Great Book
Let me give five reasons (not related to divine inspiration) for thinking the Bible is a great book, even if it is not God’s Written Word.
First, the Bible has shaped and continues to shape foundational social assumptions in the United States.
One example is marriage. Most of us have not studied the issue, but simply assume that on the whole marriage is a good thing. There is a reason the homosexual community desires marriage after all. There acceptance of marriage as a desirable institution is actually a positive acknowledgement of the power of the Bible’s view of reality.
This attitude about marriage may change, but it is derived (at least in great part) from Christianity (at least in the United States).
Most American citizens have historically encouraged heterosexual, non-polygamous marriage and disliked divorce, because of our roots in Christian culture. Now these deep ideas were developed over time for many reasons (divine Revelation, natural law, utility), but they came from the Christian Church and the reasoning and revelation is often summarized in the Bible.
Other areas where Bible ideas are often below the surface include much of the assumptions behind our art, literature, philosophy architecture, science, our common law, and our political system.
The Bible is a shorthand and shortcut to many deep cultural assumptions.
Second, the Bible tells a compelling story (at least in places) that rings true to human experience. Especially in the context of the life of Jesus, this story can make complex issues and propositions “three dimensional” for us.
Ideas are hard to apply to life and having an example (like Socrates or Jesus) helps most of us do it better. The frame of the story helps us fit the facts of our lives into a meaningful whole.
Why choose the Bible story as a “frame?”
First, Jesus Christ as found in the Gospels is an attractive and compelling figure.
There is a reason that one billion people (or so) worship Him and most of the rest of the world’s population admire Him. He said some hard things, but His message summarizes much of the great wisdom of the ages.
Even if He were not God, He would be one of the most important people who ever lived. His story is a good one.
Second, our culture is so steeped in Christian images that it is impossible to ignore them without missing a big chunk of the context of what is happening.
You cannot read Harry Potter (for heaven’s sake!) intelligently and remain ignorant of the deep reliance in the English speaking world on those stories.
Non-Christians like to point out that many themes in the Christian stories are common to many cultures. This is so and a good mark of their general usefulness, but to pretend that all “dying god” stories have had equal impact on the West is simply absurd.
Baldar and Jesus have not had equal cultural penetration . . . as even our profanity testifies.
Christian versions of stories supplanted any pagan roots for so long and with such great artistry that the pagan roots (if and when they exist) are essentially irrelevant to all but the specialist.
The Christian version will always be the one against which the “new and improved” version reacts.
It may be that the Arthur story and the Grail were really all about some (fairly unknown) Celtic myths, but that is not how the Matter of Britain came to impact the West. Whatever it once was mythically, the Grail now simply is the Cup of Christ.
Modern attempts to re-tell the myth in pagan or secular form come and go, but it is the Christian Malory and Spenser who will endure to generate more retellings.
Third, the Bible is very likely to endure globally.
Christianity, unlike almost any other great tradition, has millions of followers in every region of the world. Today the Bible will be read and studied by believers and unbelievers. Its “way of expressing” even common wisdom will studied and admired by skeptics, Christians, and many other religious traditions.
There is no indication that the Bible is going away and every indication that it will be more important (and not less) to the future of humankind than it has been.
We are frequently told that ignorance of the Third World or developing nations will hinder the West’s ability to survive in a “global economy.” I am very sympathetic to that argument.
Since the Bible will be part of the intellectual framework of much of that world (Christian or Islamic) ignorance of how to use it properly in an intellectual argument or of what it says (read charitably) will be to cut oneself off from the Third World conversation.
Fourth, the Bible (whether uniquely or not) contains many wise sayings and teachings.
The command to “love our enemy” is not obvious to most of us, but we would be better off as persons if as a culture if we heeded it. The command not to love money more than God (or moral goodness) may not be popular, but it is good advice for those who want to be happy and not just rich. The command to obey Caesar, but not to give him the sovereignty that belongs to God alone is an excellent check to authoritarian regimes. Our culture would do well to remember the ideal of married love found in the Bible and instead of settling for the goal of personal satisfaction. This side of Paradise we are never likely to fully realize our ideals, but noble failures are better than base and selfish ones.
Finally, the Bible is a sublimely beautiful work of art.
Some of this is easy to recognize as in Psalm 23, Paul on love, or Jesus’ story of the bad son and the forgiving father. In other places, the beauty requires some work, but I have never found my work was in vain.
Leaving aside any question of divine inspiration, I have never found a section of Scripture that has not been of sublime merit as a work of intellect and art when carefully studies. Once I used Obadiah as a test case for this claim, because it seemed dated and dull to my uneducated mind. After putting time and study into it, I found that it was a work of deep meaning and beauty. Try this yourself.
Read The Bible!
Recently, I was reading a Harry Potter fan site where a commenter said that he enjoyed Potter much more than the Bible. This is not difficult to believe. Safe to say that the wonders (such as they are) of Potter are easier for our culture to access and enjoy.
Nothing wrong with that, since the Bible is not primarily written for our enjoyment. The great value of Rowling in fact is that she takes common Biblical themes and makes them work for modern people just looking for a fun read. But even as a non-Christian I would know that the Bible could be a companion for years of intellectual and spiritual growth that Rowling for all her merits could not sustain.
There are other works that are similar in this regard (Plato, Shakespeare, Dante come to mind), but none nearly so universal or influential.
The Bible is sublime. The Bible is read on every continent by every people group. The Bible is also influential, both historically and equally today.
Not many books could claim one of those characteristics. I know of none that could claim all of them other than the Bible.
Without any argument for its inherent superiority to the other “greats,” the Bible is of much practical importance as source for citation in cultural discussion for the reasons I have given.
Ignorance of the Bible or undue resistance to its obvious importance as (at least) a highly influential book is too often bigotry, ignorance, and anti-intellectualism tricked out as skepticism.
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