Ratzach and Worked Examples

Are we ready to try applying all this? Let's have a go at the “No Murdering” Commandment

To state the obvious, the original Ten Commandments were not written in English. So our first task is to reduce translation error.

For a full discussion Google or Wikipedia will give you possibly more information than you want. The short-short version is as follows.

The Hebrew word used is רצח

(Ratzach ).There is no single English word which has precisely the same range of meaning. The King James Version of the Bible translated it as “Thou shalt not kill”. However “kill” includes a number of actions which Ratzach does not. This has led to miss-quotation of this command in discussion of killing by capital punishment and warfare, neither of which comes within the meaning of Ratzach. Modern translations translate Ratzach as “murder”. This is much nearer the mark, but is now slightly too restrictive. That is to say there are some things an ancient Hebrew would have called Ratzach which in modern English usage would not be called “murder”.

To avoid even more confusion I will follow the modern translations and use “murder”, but just keep at the back of our minds that it is a little broader – more like “culpable homicide” and that we will have to look throughout the Bible to find out what is and is not 'murder'.

Start with the “worked examples”

In one of my engineering subjects at university, for many different scenarios we our lecturer painstakingly went through the calculation method for each scenario with a worked example in class. When we came to the exam, there were all the problems we had already encountered in class, just with the numbers changed. Doing the rest was easy!

In the Bible right after the Ten Commandments are set out in Exodus 20, there are a large number of what look to me like worked examples illustrating the Commandments applied to different scenarios. I don't think it is meant to be an exhaustive list. That would not help us in the 21^st century. I don't think too many people are troubled by coveting their neighbours ox or ass, however coveting their car or boat might be a real temptation! So I think these worked examples illustrate the general principles of applying the Commandments using scenarios which may have been common at the time and still allow us to understand and apply the Commandments to situations that a 13^th century BC Hebrew couldn't have begun to imagine!

So what can we find in the way of worked examples for “No Murdering”?

Exodus 21: 12 “Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death. 13 However, if it is not done intentionally, but God lets it happen, they are to flee to a place I will designate. 14 But if anyone schemes and kills someone deliberately, that person is to be taken from my altar and put to death.

Things to notice: “schemes and kills someone deliberately” is a paradigm case of “murder”. Killing someone accidentally is in a different class. Capital punishment is commanded for murder. I am not claiming capital punishment is mandatory for murderers now, but one can definitely say it is not for bidden as “murder”.

Exodus 21: 20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, 21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.

Things to notice: Even in a social milieux where a slave was the master's “property” killing them was a punishable offence – even if not attracting the death penalty. That has a modern parallel. “Its my body” is used to excuse abortion. If there is really a parallel between the sentiments “the slave is my property” in 13th century BC and “the foetus is my body” in the 21st century AD, then killing the foetus would still be an offence. Food for thought!

Exodus 21: 22 “If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely[e] but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Things to note: This is used as a proof text by “right to life” advocates, however I think that may be an instance of trying to use the Bible for support rather than illumination. It seems to me to be singling out pregnant women for protection. Ordinarily if a bystander was injured or even accidentally killed during a melee it would (see v.12) not be “murder”. But if the bystander in question is a pregnant woman then the penalties are much more severe, with her death being punished as “murder”. I think in our time it is more relevant to considering war crimes, so called “collateral damage” and domestic violence than abortion.

Exodus 21: 28 “If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. 29 If, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner also is to be put to death. 30 However, if payment is demanded, the owner may redeem his life by the payment of whatever is demanded. 31 This law also applies if the bull gores a son or daughter. 32 If the bull gores a male or female slave, the owner must pay thirty shekels[f] of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull is to be stoned to death.

Few points to note: In each of the above scenarios: the bull that kills a human is killed. The culpability of the owner is beautifully set out: Generally the owner not responsible. But the owner who had been warned the animal was especially dangerous and did not take sensible precautions was punished – possibly even by death. 

 In Australia at the moment there is debate over people keeping especially dangerous breeds of dog. Several people have been attacked in the street by 'Pit Bull Terriers” and some have been killed by these dogs. One can see a parallel with the case of the owner of the bull here. 

I have been watching a televised series “Air Crash Investigations” which examines real life airline crashes. In several instances the manufacturer or airline operator had been warned of a dangerous fault but had done nothing to remedy it. Then the fault had caused a crash in which many people were killed. This text might give some guidance on to what extent the managers who failed to act on the warnings are culpable.

NEXT POST … More worked examples from Exodus

Church Hunting - My Adventures with God Ch.2

                                         Church Hunting.

After failing baptism classes twice I got the message! I also had this sort of inner compulsion to take a serious look at other churches.

First up was the local Anglican church. A very pretty sandstone neo-gothic building just a few hundred yards from where I lived. The Adventist church I had attended was always full of peiople. I used to get there ten minutes early so that I could get a front seat. The Anglican church up the road was not like that. I did arrive ten minutes early and found no trouble getting a front seat, I was the only one there. Eventually maybe a dozen elderly people drifted in and sat right up the back.

The service was 'Morning Prayer” from the 1662 Prayer Book. Anglican readers may not see any problem with this. That, even a generation ago, was part of their problem! They did not see how foreign it was to anyone not brought up to it!

Certainly in the Adventist services we used books. One took one's own Bible and Hymn book, and there were spares for any who did not have their own. In the Anglican Church there were hymn books, so far so good, but there was also the Prayer Book. Definitely not, in modern parlance “user friendly”.

I did manage to find “Morning Prayer” - perhaps the page number was on the hymn board.

However the service is not contiguous in the Prayer Book. The collect for the day – is in a totally different part of the Prayer Book. Then there are the canticles. For instance after the first reading there is the heading TE DEUM LAUDAMUS … and the Te Deum canticle follows. After the Te Deum if you had time to read the minuscule print rubrics it says “or this canticle” and the Benedicite, Omnia Opera is printed. So old chums know that if the minister leads into the Te Deum then you read that and then flick over a couple of pages past the Benedicite. Or if he starts saying “All ye works of the Lord …” then you flick past the Te Deum to the Benedicite.

After the second reading the process is repeated with saying either the Benedictus or the Jubilate Deo.

Simple if you know it. Totally bewildering if this is your first time in an Anglican church! And if you are 15 years old: embarrassment unlimited!

But wait there's more! There was an incessant cycle of standing, sitting and kneeling. If you are brought up to that liturgy it is doubtless obvious when you should be doing what. If you are new to it, and worse right up the front where you have to continually turn around to see which of the three positions everyone else is adopting now it is 'embarrassment unlimited' squared!

At one point the minister came down and gave me a prayer book open at the right place. A kind thought, but it didn’t help!

Needless to say I did not go back !

However this inner push to search for a church was still there. I decided on a cunning plan. I would catch the train into the city and go to any of the large city churches where I could be safely anonymous. Oh, and I would sit right up the back!

I started doing this. Systematically I went round different denominations. St. Andrew’s (Anglican) cathedral, Central Methodist mission, Congregational, Presbyterian. I think I tried a more local Baptist church. They all seemed much the same. Well the trimmings were different, but underneath they seemed the same.

All this time I had a nagging inner push to try a particular local church. I held out resolutely against this intuition. I knew where the church was. it was at Turramurra (next station up the railway line) in the street that had the Masonic hall on the corner. I didn’t know what denomination it was, and I didn’t look. I just held out and kept going into the city where no-one knew me. This went on, I think, for about eighteen months.

Eventually I gave in to my nagging compulsion and went to this local church. It turned out to be a Methodist church. When I went in it was full. Oldies, parents, young children (the “youth” were absent only because they went to the evening service). I felt it at once: I was home.

From the surprised look on the minister’s face when I shook hands at the door after the service and said “I want to join your church” I may have been unusually forthright. After a pause he stammered that they would probably be having confirmation classes in the fall. A matron behind me was quicker and hurried to explain that I really should try the evening service since all the people my age went to it. In general, top marks to her, but in this case I wasn’t looking for young people, I was looking for a spiritual family. I had just found it.

I was baptised and confirmed in that church on 23^rd April 1967. I can fix that date because I have got out the certificate and had a look! I had just turned 18, and my sister Louise, who at that stage had chucked religion completely, came to the service. My parents and older brother were overseas (separately) stationed in Malaysia with the Air Force.

It may seem as though I was finally safely on the spiritual path. That is generally about the time young Christians get tripped up. If you have not read C. S. Lewis' quirky book about the trials of a new Christian “the Screwtape Letters” do read it!

Spiritual trials, pitfalls and disaster were just around the corner for me too.

Morals : Discussion on using the Bible cont.

Continuing my list of 7 things I believe are true and important qualifications when using the Bible as a moral compass.

4. God is super smart, so all the important things will be said so often in so many different ways so that even us dummies can get the message. There is some controversy over the second part of this. Probably academics express the topic as “the perspicuity of Scripture” Some will say one needs experts – say priests or TV evangelists or the Church hierarchy to explain what it really means. For an amusing exposé of this and other foibles of human religion I recommend Terry Pratchett's novel “small gods”. The other side of the academic argument takes the view that the Bible is written so that anyone can safely use it as a guide even though the greatest scholars can spend all their lives studying it and still not fully plumb its depths.

I say that the perspicuity of scripture follows from the character of God. If God wants humans to understand certain things, then given he possesses absolute intelligence and absolute knowledge, he will know how to get his message across!

Yes, before you accuse me of being simplistic: I do know about the 'deconstruction' school of thought. I just believe they are wrong!

Think about it: they even refute themselves. Deconstruction is largely derived from Jacques Derrida's 1967 work “Of Grammatology”. If I de-construct say his book and say that it has no intrinsic meaning and proceed to say that to me it means something else entirely, deconstructionists will doubtless get very annoyed, giving away that in practice they do believe that words have an intrinsic meaning.

The plain fact is that we use language to convey information. The whole point of being able to “speak XYZ language” is that we can understand what a speaker of that language is trying to convey and conversely speak in such a way that we can convey our meaning to our auditors or readers. Human society and cooperative endeavour would cease if that were not the case!

So I stick with this: words mean something, and mean more or less the same something to all people who use the dialect in question!

So I say:

a) it is just a given that God can get his message across to the average human using human language.

b) Given God's character of being beneficent and truthful he will do so – at least to the extent that people want to hear his message. For us modern English speakers, there are a number of reputable Bible translations in our language, so it follows that it is possible for us to safely use the Bible as a guide to the things God intended to convey by it.

5. God is a master of language, so he might use poetry, hyperbole, sarcasm and the whole range of linguistic tools that even ordinary humans use. Thus 'literal' interpretations are obstinate folly.

If I sound a bit harsh her it is because I have been driven to it by Christians who act as though God is not as smart as the average human being!

Even people of below the average intelligence manage to use figures of speech. It is part of language!

They may use hyperbole: “Everyone is catching the 'flu this winter”. They are not claiming that literally everyone is catching it. Their audience do not think for a moment that they are. Even if they do not know what the word hyperbole means, they still use it and understand it!

They may use sarcasm: “Well that was a clever thing to do” in response to someone doing something silly. Their hearers understand perfectly that they are actually saying that it was emphatically not a clever thing to do!

And so forth … the point is that God is smart enough to use figures of speech for added impact. Don't be crassly literal in reading the Bible!

Again humans don't always write in prose. Down through the ages poets have managed to use words to reach through to their hearers emotions. They have often brought about significant social change by so doing. It should then be no surprise that again God can do what humans can do with language. The Bible has bits that are poetry. Don't treat it as you would prose, you'll just miss the point.

Stories: yes even us humans – well admittedly the more talented ones! - use stories for didactic purposes. For a thousand years the epic poems of Homer sung by wandering bards around the Aegean fixed in the minds of each generation what it meant to be a Greek Citizen.

In recent history the effect of books, drama and films is too obvious for there to be any dissent from the proposition that stories can be a powerful tool. So don't be surprised that a lot of the bible is stories. Mostly it uses true stories, but Jesus made up brilliant yarns of which we only have the bare outlines in the “parables”.

But how do you interpret a story. Be it a parable, or a slice of historical narrative. I think myself that what we find in the Old Testament are very select scenes from history (edited by humans, yet under the providence of God, the selection God chose for us) which we are meant to learn from. we have to ask “what do we learn from this story?” not try to pull it apart to find proof texts.

What about the prophets? Was it them or God? Well the prophets frequently prefaced their words with “Thus says Yahovah” of course the false, cult prophets said the same. So we read of God denouncing the false prophets in terms like: “I did not speak to you”, “If you had really stood in my counsels you would have said XYZ instead” and frequently “you made it all up out of your imagination”. So the canonical prophets believed and claimed that the message they proclaimed was God's and not theirs and sooner or later their claim was recognised as being true. False prophets made similar claims but history proved them wrong!

Once again people (or more particularly Biblical scholars of a “liberal” persuasion) seem to think that God is not as smart as the average human! We use the saying “horses for courses” to indicate that one needs to pick the person suited to the needs of a particular task. What if God also knew this! At different times in history there were different situations each receiving a prophetic message tailored to that situation. What if God was smart enough to pick a prophet who was suited to that particular task. Then yes the message would be flavoured by things like the prophet's temperament, background, even family experiences. But far from making their message “human” these things merely fitted the prophet to respond all the better to God's leadings and deliver a message that was “from the heart” and simultaneously precisely what God wished to be conveyed.

For an example look at Hosea: His broken marriage and his continued love for his unfaithful wife enabled him to empathise with God's continued love for unfaithful Israel and then accurately proclaim God's appeal to Israel.

The point is this: we can rely on the prophets' messages as being from God. Discovering how it applies to our situation is the hard part and what we need to concentrate our efforts on.

6. Humans are at best fallible and at the worst lying, conniving, self deceiving, self-centred and nasty. So even the best people will sometimes misinterpret the Bible and the worst will use and abuse it to gain personal advantage. And there will be all stages in between.

No one is infallible. However in our everyday life that does not prevent us from relying on people.

We fly in aeroplanes, trusting the design and maintenance engineers and pilots (to name a few) for our safety. From time to time people in all these categories make mistakes that result in hundreds of people dying. We don't stop flying on that account but we do try to learn from these mistakes so that flying is safer in the future.

We should apply this model to using the Bible. Even good people will sometimes “get it wrong”. Jesus was continually pointing out how religious leaders in his day had misinterpreted the Bible. Our best response is not to throw the Bible away, but to learn from these and other human errors to interpret the Bible better.

Someone once said to me “True, figures can't lie: but liars can figure!” There are bad people in the world. Some of them twist the Bible to their own ends. Even Jeremiah back in the 7^th century B.C. voiced God's complaint: “How can you say, 'We understand his laws,' when your teachers have twisted them up to mean a thing I never said?” (Jeremiah 8:8 TLV translation). The danger is real. But again the wise course is not to give up on the Bible, but to observe due diligence.

7. Humans find being bad much easier and more attractive than being good, so our inner nature will be antagonistic to Bible teaching that tries to correct our faults.

The problem here is one of “intent”.

In some law cases, the intent of the accused person is important. Intent is a hard thing to prove or disprove, but in these cases the prosecuting and defence lawyers still try to do so. Often other words or actions by the person are examined for any evidence they might yield as to the persons inner disposition to the matter or person in question.

In understanding the Bible the intent of the reader or expositor is of great importance.

Because our human nature is frequently in opposition to godliness, even the best of us have a lurking desire to find in the Bible confirmation of what our human nature wants. This will make us blind to the Bible's condemnation of those things. The we assuage our conscience by seeing even stronger condemnation than really exists regarding other people's behaviour.

This human foible is one of the culprits in making the Bible seem unreliable to people who have seen or suffered from such hypocrisy. It's not the Bible: it's us! (that is at fault).

Yet again my solution is not to throw the Bible away. Rather when judging other people's interpretations of, or arguments from the Bible: examine their intent.

Even more importantly: we must check our own intent. If we go to the Bible for any reason other than to develop our relationship with God by learning who God is and how we ourselves can become more godly (and only second to that to instruct others) we have the wrong intent and that will lead us to misinterpret the Bible.

Morals: Rules of Evidence

Law courts (at least in the English tradition) have found it necessary to develop rules of procedure and of evidence over the generations to help ensure a 'fair trial'. So we should expect to need some rules for using the Bible to help ensure accuracy in developing morals from the Bible

Lets see if we can state some basics for understanding the Bible.

I want to start with seven propositions. I will then explain why I think they are both correct and necessary for sound interpretation of the Bible :

1. God, not “the church” or any other human system gave us the Bible.

2. God is beneficent, so the Bible is intended for our good not our harm.

3. God is transcendent, so there are lots of things we could not find out about God unless he revealed them to us and the Bible is his 'authorised' record of this self-revelation.

4. God is super smart, so all the important things will be said so often in so many different ways so that even us dummies can get the message.

5. God is a master of language, so he might use poetry, hyperbole, sarcasm and the whole range of linguistic tools that even ordinary humans use. Thus 'literal' interpretations are obstinate folly.

6. Humans are at best fallible and at the worst lying, conniving, self deceiving, self-centred and nasty. So even the best people will sometimes misinterpret the Bible and the worst will use and abuse it to gain personal advantage. And there will be all stages in between.

7. Humans find being bad much easier and more attractive than being good, so our inner nature will be antagonistic to Bible teaching that tries to correct our faults.

1. God, not “the church” or any other human system gave us the Bible. My fellow believers of a Catholic persuasion will disagree strongly, but hear me out. This doctrine may have sprung up as a reaction to the protestant reformation with its stress on the authority of the Bible, and its use of the Bible to pass judgement on certain practices of the Western Medieval Church. But the book of Hebrews begins:  “In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways,  but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” If the Bible records what God spoke, whether by prophets or by his Son, then it comes with his authority and his imprimatur. Whatever role “the Church” played in recognising real from counterfeit claimants for inclusion in the canon of Scripture and preserving and transmitting the scriptures it cannot alter or supplant the divine origin of the Bible.

This proposition is also a necessary one. If the Bible were the product of mere humans, even ones who claim to be “the church” then it could not command universal respect. It certainly could not claim to give us access to the ultimate standard of morals. It is only so far as the Bible is the gift of God to the human race that we can say it gives us access to the ultimate standard – God's own moral character.

2. God is beneficent, so the Bible is intended for our good not our harm. Jesus said  “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10) The theme of God's beneficence and redemptive purposed for humankind are so prominent in the Bible that I don't think I need to present a case for it! But despite this biblical evidence, people indeed often religious people like the ancient Pharisees have made God out to be a kill-joy. Consequently people commonly think of the Bible as a book of burdensome rules. This is the opposite of the true position! Since God desires us to “have life and have it to the full”; his gift of the Bible to the human race is to help us have that life.

3. God is transcendent, so there are lots of things we could not find out about God unless he revealed them to us and the Bible is his 'authorised' record of this self-revelation. I hope it is self evident that there is a great deal about God that humans would have no way of knowing if God did not take the initiative and make himself known.

Is the Bible God's authorized record of him making his nature and purposes known to humans?

Look at it from the other end. If God cared enough about humans to want to relate to them, he would want them to know what he was like. Rather than “re-invent the wheel” so to speak by starting afresh with every generation and every individual, it would make a lot of sense to get something written down (once there was writing!) to serve all people generation after generation. So coming back to looking from our end, it would make sense to look for some writings that at least claim to be a record of God's revelation to mankind. The Bible does indeed make this claim repeatedly and consistently from beginning to end.

In this line of argument, the question is not “can one prove that the Bible is God's word”, but merely “is its claim to be God's self revelation better than any other body of literature that makes the same claim”. The Bible wins hands down!

More next post

My Adventures with God.: Ch.1

Why?

Why am I writing this? (Apart from: “It seemed like a good idea at the time”) .

I found at many stages of my Christian growth that hearing hearing other people’s experiences was a great help. True many of these were famous, but some were ordinary, nevertheless God had done something in their lives and reading or hearing about it helped my own relationship with God. I found the same thing in prayer groups and churches. Where people shared their experiences (well when they were honest about them) it was a stimulus to Christian growth.

I might be ordinary but God has done things in my life that I think are pretty special. I have had some adventures doing things for and with God that I think are tales worth telling and hearing and I've made some mistakes others could profit by hearing and avoiding. So here goes with the story of my adventures with God.

How It all began.

I can't think of any way to avoid starting at the beginning; it sets the scene for things that follow. But I will try to cover the mundane bits briefly.

A resume might include: David Lindsay Greentree born 4^th April 1949 to Isabel Florence Greentree (nee Cornwell) “home duties” and Ashton Edward Greentree “pharmacist” at the Sydney Adventist Hospital Wahroonga. Grew up in the Sydney suburb of Pymble attended Warrawee State Primary school and Asquith Boys High School.

A spiritual resume should add: Ashton and Isabel were second generation Seventh Day Adventists. Devout Christians but of a more ecumenical outlook than many in that denomination. Ashton served in the Air Force, then as a pharmacist at the Sydney Adventist Hospital but left this to return to the Air Force where he served until he retired. Ashton and Isabel were 'dis-fellowshipped' by the Adventists about the time Ashton returned to the Air Force. They then did not attend church but Ashton was very active in the Officers' Christian Union, and they retained a strong private faith.

How I failed baptism class … twice

How can anyone 'fail' baptism class? Well I'll tell you.

I was brought up on the 'King James' version of the Bible. Even for someone raised on it, the thee's, and thou's and generally archaic language makes it heavy reading. I was about twelve when a new translation into modern English appeared – at that stage only the New Testament but I got one and suddenly found that here was something I could read easily and understand. So I read it.

Although my parents had left the church, I got on my push-bike most Saturday mornings and went to church. Adventists are one of those denominations that do not believe in infant baptism so about the age of thirteen children are sent off to baptism classes. As a keen young believer I joined a class at about that age.

Adventists have some practices that they hold dear. Two of these are strict Sabbath observance – on Saturday not Sunday - and health food. The health food practice generally included vegetarian diet. My family and I suspect many others were not vegetarian in private, but most conformed in public. Adventists also took the Old Testament dietary laws seriously so pork was strictly forbidden. They also had strong views on the interpretation of the books of Daniel and The Revelation, but at that age I did not understand those so they do not feature in this story.

I had been reading the New Testament in modern English. I had seen how time and again Jesus was in conflict with the strict Sabbath-keeping of the religious people of his day. I also noticed that he was against their strict dietary laws, indeed in one speech he declared all foods ritually clean. I think these views must have become apparent in class. Perhaps I asked the wrong kind of questions.

The day for the class to be baptised in church I expected to be among them. Somehow I found myself culled from the group and sitting in church watching the baptism instead of being in it.

Not to be deterred I signed up again the next year for baptism classes. During these classes I got invited back to the Youth Pastor's for Sabbath lunch one time, and then to the Senior Pastor's. The big day for the group baptism arrived. Once again I expected to be in the group but instead found myself in the congregation just watching.

Now another strongly held doctrine of the Adventists was that they were one one true church. The Pope featured in far too many sermons for my liking as the Antichrist, but when I had questioned the senior pastor about Roman Catholics who believed in Christ He just answered with a quote from Revelation: “Come out of her my people”. I think from memory that they were not as hard on the protestant denominations – but they were still the “apostate Churches”. So where was there for a young teenager who believed fervently in Jesus but was rejected by the “true” church?

That was a problem! But my father had found fellowship with many sincere and devout Christians in the Air Force, and my brother was about to marry an Anglican girl, who seemed to me to be a Christian. Also about this time I was active in the Inter School Christian Fellowship and there was no doubting the faith of the students and teachers involved in it. So I went church hunting.

ANNOUNCING ....

A NEW SERIES

The blog series on spiritual advice for new Christians has finished, and has now re-edited and made available as an E-book on Amazon under the title "Colostrum : spirituals antibodies for new Christians".

I am now starting a new series for helping believers grow in their faith.

I found personal testimony of what God had done in people' s lives helped me. So now it is my turn to tell some of the things God has done in my life.

Coming soon: "My Adventures With God"

Ah, but just whose interpretation of the Bible do we believe?

(PS I have just returned from holidays. Although I said I would look at the Ten Commandments next, while I was away I worked out that there are a few more preliminaries I need to work through first!  So here goes...)

This is a serious problem. To re-phrase an old joke: “ask two Biblical scholars what a text means and you will have three opinions!” Matters get even worse with platform speakers and church leaders whose main claim to fame is having strong opinions. Even ordinary people generally have a pre-formed notion of what they would like the Bible to say. All these can and regularly do make the Bible out to say just about whatever they want!

Making the facts say anything we want is not confined to Bible study. For those who entered debating competitions at school you will remember that after the subject was given one often tossed a coin to decide which team would have to try to prove the statement true. The other team then had to prove the statement wrong. It is surprising how many convincing arguments you can invent in favour of a proposition even when you actually believe it is wrong.

All this has led many people to throw their hands up in despair and in effect say “It is simply impossible to be certain about anything”. Of recent decades it has seemed to me that churches have been swamped by clergy who at least in their preaching have said that there are no certainties, even about God. (Of course it is often these same people who have the greatest degree of certainty that their own group's views – from theology to politics – are right.)

On the other hand I have up to this point been making a case that God is our ultimate moral reference, and the Bible his official exposition of his character and purposes. So although I can see the problems I am not advocating that we should give up attempting to use the Bible.

To put it another way: on one hand I am against the idea that every moral problem can be answered and all argument settled by simply quoting a few Bible verses. On the other hand I am against the opposite notion that nothing can be settled from the Bible.

Let me give an example of a possible way forward by looking at how we humans have dealt with a similar conundrum.

Take the criminal law courts. Their role is to convict (and subsequently punish) the guilty and to acquit the innocent. Successfully carrying out this role is close to essential for their society to function. But courts face two problems in reaching a verdict. Getting at the “Truth”; and the effects of making a mistake.

The Truth is out there. Suppose Joe Blow is accused of killing Fred Nerks, either he did kill him or he did not. That is history, it happened how it happened. But this Truth is not generally accessible – the court can't go back in a time machine and watch everything that really happened. They have to weigh the evidence that the two opposing counsel have presented and make their decision.

The other problem the court faces is effects of making a mistake in what they think that truth is.

Punishing wrongdoers is, among other things, a practical necessary in order to maintain any human society, but the society will survive if occasionally wrongdoers escape. However punishing an innocent person is a thing evil in itself so it aught always to be avoided.

How do courts deal with these problems

If courts took the view: “the prosecutor says he did it, the defence says he didn't. We can't go back in time and see for ourselves so we can't decide” our criminal justice system would collapse, and society with it.

The social necessity for punishing wrongdoers is so pressing that we do not throw up our hands and say “It is simply impossible to be certain about anything”. We aim for the best 'certainty' that is in practical terms possible, and work with that. We formulate rules of such things as procedural fairness and of evidence because these have been found to reduce the incidence of wrong verdicts. We allow for the possibility of error by such things as allowing appeals and by giving the accused person “the benefit of the doubt”.

There are several points of similarity between the courts and moral philosophy where the courts point the way forward.

A justice system is essential to human society, so courts make ways to function despite all difficulties. Moral rules just are a fact in any human society. So we need to find ways to make good ones, despite all difficuties.

For moralists there is a truth out there: God's moral character is what it is and in relation to a moral question it does provide the standard by which to judge. But like the courts, deciding what that truth is in relation to a particular question may be hotly contested. We need to accept the idea of having to evaluate the evidence, possibly from several opposing or at least conflicting sources and make our best decision. Like the courts: we do may not have certainty, we just have “beyond reasonable doubt”.

In criminal justice, false positive results are more damaging than false negatives. This may apply t moralists. There is a famous dictum by one Judge Blackwell “I would rather acquit ten guilty murderers than hang one innocent person”. History has many tragic examples of religious zealots causing suffering by their rules. Biblical moralists need to consider that they may err, and make sure that if so, they err on the least deleterious side!

Courts have found it necessary to introduce rules as to how they operate. For instance gossip and rumours are frequently inaccurate, so there is a rule against hearsay evidence being admitted. One side of an argument often sounds right until the other side is heard: so accused persons have to be given a chance to answer the allegations against them. Biblical moralists will also need rules of interpretation to reduce the likelihood of making mistakes. I the next post I hope to say something about this.