Although I have had a long association with Roger Hutchinson through letters, internet and e-mail exchanges, and his articles that have been published in TSR, when I read material from him like the foregoing article, I have to wonder if he is a real person or at least a prankster, who sends me his articles and then laughs when I take them seriously enough to publish and respond to. He has been receiving TSR for several years, but he must not be reading the articles or he would know by now why the principle of hermeneutics that says scripture should be allowed to interpret scripture is fundamentally unsound.
He claimed that "(i)nterpreting Scripture with Scripture is a method no different from defining a word in a sentence by the context in which it is used." If this were all that was involved in the principle, it would, of course, be a sound one, but biblicists carry it far beyond this. They insist on making the entire Bible the "context" of a disputed statement and straining the principle to the point of letting passages that were written centuries apart "interpret" each other. In the May/June 1996 issue, we saw Wilhelm Schmitt use this hermeneutic principle to try to remove the chronological discrepancy between the four-generation genealogy of Aaron in Exodus 6 and the claim in Exodus 12:40 that the Israelites had sojourned in Egypt 430 years. Schmitt argued that a statement by the apostle Paul in Galatians 3:17 should be allowed to shed light on the "not so clear" passages in Exodus. In this text, Paul said that 430 years had passed from the covenant that God made with Abraham until the giving of the law, so Schmitt argued that the discrepancy was solved. Paul's statement was clearer than the other one, and so the Exodus writer couldn't have meant what he appeared to be saying. The only problem was that Schmitt was arguing from an unproven assumption of total biblical inerrancy and was unwilling to give any consideration at all to the possibility that Paul, who lived centuries after the Exodus writer, simply had a different opinion on the duration of the Egyptian bondage.
In my response to Schmitt, I pointed out that biblicists would not consider this an appropriate critical method to apply to any other book. If volume two of Encyclopedia Americana should contain a statement that conflicts with a statement on the same subject in volume ten, no one would argue that the statement in volume ten is clearer than the one in volume two, and so it should be allowed to "interpret" the earlier statement and remove the contradiction. Reasonable people would understand that a multivolume encyclopedia, like the books in the Bible, was not written by the same person and that different writers often can and do have opposing views, so therefore inconsistency in such a work is not only possible but probable.
This highly touted hermeneutic principle is as if a literature teacher should tell his/her class that all of the literary selections in the textbook are inerrant, and so if a story by Ernest Hemingway should appear to contain a discrepancy, the students should consult the writings of John Steinbeck, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, et al to find "clearer" statements on the same subject and use them to remove the discrepancy in Hemingway's work. It is equally absurd to apply this principle to the biblical anthology. The prophet Isaiah and the apostle Paul were two different men, who lived centuries apart, and so it is just as likely that they would have conflicting religious views as any other two people. To say that the apostle Paul should be allowed to interpret Isaiah, or vice versa, is no more hermeneutically sound than arguing that Martin Luther should be allowed to interpret Ezekiel.
Hutchinson cited the usage of the Hebrew word yom (day) as an example of how the entire context of the Old Testament should be allowed to define words. He said that "with one or two exceptions that do not affect our conclusion," the word yom was always used "outside Genesis 1 to mean a 24-hour day." Boy, did Hutchinson put his foot in his mouth on this one! I happen to agree that the Genesis writer meant for his readers to understand that God created the heavens and the earth in six 24-hour days, but the word yom was used many times-- not just once or twice--in the Old Testament to mean "eras" or periods of time longer than 24 hours. One has to go no further than the Genesis account of creation to find an example: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day (yom) that Yahweh made earth and heaven" (Gen. 2:4) Since chapter one states that God created heaven and earth in six days and rested on the seventh, the word yom in "the day that Yahweh made earth and heaven" has to mean more than just a 24-hour period. It obviously conveyed the sense of a period of time rather than just 24 hours. Genesis 19:37 stated that Moab, the son of Lot's firstborn daughter, was "the father of the Moabites until this day (yom)." Surely, Hutchinson won't claim that the Genesis writer meant that Moab was the father of the Moabites only up until the very 24-hour day that this statement was written, but afterwards the statement didn't apply and Moab somehow ceased to be the father of the Moabites. That would put an absurd meaning on the word yom (day), which was obviously being used in this verse to mean the time period in which the Genesis writer lived and wrote. Other examples are too numerous to note, but anyone can use a concordance to find many places where yom was used to mean a longer period of time than just 24 hours. Job 18:20, Psalm 20:1, Ecclesiastes 7:14, Isaiah 17:4, Jeremiah 4:9, and Ezekiel 30:3 are just a few of many examples I could cite, so I suggest to Hutchinson that if he is going to use an example in support of his position, he should at least use one that is tenable. This one fizzled on him.
After taking us through his yom excursion, Hutchinson concluded that his methodology "is not fallacious hermeneutics." He said, "Till's reasoning in this instance is fallacious and not good hermeneutics." Well, my reasoning is that different people could and did have divergent views on religious issues and that the more widely separated they were in time, the more likely they were to be in disagreement. Let Hutchinson explain to us what is "fallacious" about that reasoning. What is the fallacy in assuming that writers who lived centuries apart could very well have disagreed on some subjects that they wrote about?
Good Hermeneutics? Hutchinson needs to explain why the scripture-should-interpret scripture is "good" hermeneutics. What is his rationale for assuming that the author of Amos or Mark or Daniel could not have written anything that conflicted with something the author of Genesis wrote? The only possible answer he can give to this question is that he assumes that all books that were selected for inclusion in the biblical canon were inerrant, so he must explain to us why it is reasonable to believe this. We just want simple, verifiable reasons why one should believe that the Bible-- but no other collection of writings-- should be accorded such a privileged status. I suspect we will wait a long time to get those simple, verifiable reasons.
Hutchinson claimed that he "compared Scripture with Scripture to show that the Bible consistently teaches that children are not to be punished for the sins of their fathers," but he did no such thing. He compared scripture with scripture in order to claim that if King Amaziah did not kill the children of his father's murderers because it was written in the law of Moses that the children should not be put to death for the sins of their fathers (2 Kings 14:1- 6), then it must be true that David's son was not killed for a sin that David had committed. That "comparison" in no way demonstrated that the Bible "consistently teaches that children are not to be punished for the sins of their fathers." It demonstrated only that the Bible in some places does indeed teach that children should not be punished for the sins of their fathers, and it demonstrated that some biblical characters, as in the case of Amaziah, honored this law; however, if other biblical passages, such as the story about the death of David's son, indicate that children were sometimes punished for the sins of their fathers, then we have a point of contradiction in the Bible. Hutchinson cannot make that contradiction go away by arguing that if passage X clearly states that children should not be punished for the sins of their fathers, then if passage Y states that a child was punished for the sin of his father, passage Y must not have meant what it says. Such reasoning as this attempts to prove biblical inerrancy by assuming biblical inerrancy and completely ignores the probability that biblical writers simply had divergent opinions on this subject.
A resort to equivocation: Hutchinson asked if we should believe that the "death of the child born to Bathsheba was not somehow related to the adulterous affair between David and Bathsheba." In answering his own question, he said, "Of course not," because "(t)here is a definite relationship." From there, he went on to say that the issue is "whether we can use the term consequence to describe" the relationship between the parents' act of adultery and the death of the child. He argued that if David and Bathsheba had not sinned, then no child would have been born, and so the act of adultery had "laid the foundation for a series of events that included the conception, birth, and death of that child." In that sense, Hutchinson concluded, the death of the child can properly be considered a "consequence" of adultery.
We see, then, that Hutchinson has had to resort to equivocation to defend his claim that the death of David's son was a consequence of and not a punishment for David's sin. In his original article on the issue, Hutchinson had compared the death of David's son to the death of an innocent party in an accident that resulted from two men drag racing on a public highway. When one of the drivers lost control, his car crashed into another one and killed an innocent third party. In this case, the death of the innocent person was a direct consequence of the reckless conduct of the drag racers. Here the word consequence was being used to denote an effect that resulted directly from a wrongful act without the intervention of any other agent, who was not involved in that act, to bring about additional effects, but now Hutchinson is trying to extend the meaning of consequence to include the intervention of a third-party causative agent. It may be true that no child would have been born for Yahweh to kill had David and Bathsheba not committed adultery, but it remains embarrassingly true that had Yahweh not afflicted him by direct intervention, the child would not have died. This act (if it happened) was fundamentally different from the death of an innocent party caused by the reckless conduct of drag racers. To make the difference clear enough for even Hutchinson to see, let's give names to the parties involved in the drag racing incident. We will call the drag racers Joe and Bill, and the person killed in the accident will be Jim. Surely, Hutchinson can see that Joe's and Bill's actions killed Jim. No third party intervened. However, in the case of David's son, nothing that either David or Bathsheba did killed the child. Yahweh, a third party, intervened and "struck" the child, who then died. To have a parallel to this, we would have to imagine that Joe and Bill recklessly engaged in drag racing during which Joe's car careered out of control and killed Jim, after which the police went to Joe's house and killed his son. Not even Hutchinson would claim that killing Joe's son in this scenario was justifiable, but his beloved Yahweh can do no wrong. Therefore, if the Bible says that Yahweh killed a baby, Hutchinson must rationalize some justification for it.
In so doing, he did an about face and wound up flatly contradicting himself. As just noted, he first argued that the death of the child must be considered a "consequence" of David's and Bathsheba's act of adultery, for if the adulterous act had not occurred, no child would have been born, and so "(t)he sin of the parents laid the foundation for a series of events that included the conception, birth, and death of that child" (p. 4). In other words, if no adultery, then no child, and if no child, then no death of the child; therefore, the death of the child was a "consequence" of the adultery. As he was ending his article, however, he argued that Yahweh could not allow the child to live because "by this deed thou [David] hast given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme" (2 Sam. 12:14). At this point, Hutchinson switched horses in midstream and said, "The Scriptures tell us that the death of the child was not tied to the adulterous act but to the `occasion to blaspheme'" (p. 5). So now which was it? Was the death of the child a "consequence" of the adulterous act, or was the death of the child "not tied to the adulterous act"? When one must contradict himself as flagrantly as this to defend a position, that's a good reason to believe that the position is weak.
We see too that there is apparently no end to the number of hairs that Hutchinson is willing to split to avoid admitting that there are discrepancies in the Bible. To say that this child was killed not because of David's adultery but because of the great occasion that the "deed" had given the enemies of Yahweh to blaspheme is about as flagrant a case of inerrantist hair splitting as I have seen. Whether the child was killed to punish David for the sin of adultery or whether he was killed because of the "great occasion" the "deed" had given the enemies of Yahweh to blaspheme is a quibble that may give Hutchinson some consolation, but the fact will still remain that the story clearly indicates that it was because of the "deed" that Yahweh killed the child. Since the child had nothing to do with the performance of the "deed," it would still remain true that the Bible claims that Yahweh killed a baby for a deed that his parents had done.
Let's return to the hypothetical drag racers to help Hutchinson see the obvious. If the police should kill Joe's son after the crash in which Joe had killed Jim, would Hutchinson think that killing Joe's son was justifiable if the police should argue that Joe's reckless conduct had given the enemies of the police "great occasion" to complain about the enforcement of traffic laws? I doubt it. Furthermore, even if David's and Bathsheba's "deed" had given the enemies of Yahweh "great occasion to blaspheme," killing David's son would not have undone the "deed." Once it had happened, it had happened, and nothing could ever change that. The people who had known that David had consorted with another man's wife would still have known it after the child was dead. If they had had occasion to blaspheme before the child's death, they would still have had occasion to do so after the child was dead. The writer who concocted this as an excuse for Yahweh's conduct in this matter wasn't thinking too clearly, but that's not at all unusual for biblical writers, just as it isn't unusual for biblical inerrantists to quibble as Hutchinson is doing.
Beginning on page 2 of this issue, another article discusses
biblical examples of people whom Yahweh killed or ordered killed for
offenses committed by others. If Hutchinson reads it, perhaps he will
see that even if he could show that David's son was not killed for a
sin committed by his parents, the Bible would still teach that Yahweh
on many occasions killed the innocent for "sins" that others had
committed.
