The Evolution of Theological Commitments

My wife studies pagan mythology, among other pursuits, and she recently undertook some of the Norse background in a far deeper way than my own shallow assemblage of role-playing references, fictional mentions, and Marvel movies. She happened to mention the other day that Christian chroniclers like Snorri Sturluson likely adapted the pre-existing mythos in order to achieve a syncretic outcome. Loki was demonized to create a dualist conflict. Ragnarök may have been created out of whole, fresh cloth in order to extinguish the pantheon and make way for the new religion.

John McKinnell studies the narratives that the Norse proselytizers used to achieve the conversion of the pagans, as well as the influence and outcomes of those people. There is a theological problem for them in terms of explaining the existence of the pagan deities that is largely solved by simply describing them as devils or as personifications of natural phenomena. They transmogrify from real to a netherworld nestled somewhere between mythic, poetic, and literal evils.

I had nearly simultaneously joined the Bart Ehrman Blog because of a post that got repeated in one of his podcasts I happened to catch. The post is from a guest contributor who uses scholarship from Mark Smith and others to detail a model of the transformation into monotheism from earlier Canaanite pantheons. In this model, during the Second Temple Period, the success of the god Marduk’s people over Yahweh’s tribes requires a theological reinterpretation in order to explain Yahweh’s defeat. How can YHWH be the greatest god under such circumstances? The answer is easy, though. Marduk is just a puppet of YHWH and the literal military victory is a divine punishment. YHWH remains supreme. Job accepts.

What an incredible solution to the little chess match of theological requirements! It’s almost as if there was a theological structure that needed constant reordering in order to guarantee that the interpreters got the correct outcome. There seems to be a tension between specific mooring commitments in the epistemic framework and the use of mythic retellings and explanations to justify the commitments.

Often we see this in our modern political and economic commitments. Almost any particular policy framework has to have shaky foundational social science and historical justification. Do direct payments of social welfare programs result in improvements for the body politic as a whole? Is macroeconomics even usefully predictive? What is the correct level of taxation? Ideology in politics and economics is just a mooring to the epistemic pillars that allow for holding fast against the alternative (“…arrant nonsense…[that] saves us from intellectual nihilism” to loosely quote the Federal Reserve paper linked above). Think tanks exist to rebuild the theological framework as facts and circumstances change.

Even modern religious types take on this adjustment process as they encounter tensions in their belief systems. Here’s Paulogia on YouTube largely letting the Young Earth Creationists argue against one of the leading lights of Christian apologetics, William Lane Craig. Craig has decided that some Christians might be mistaken about the literal nature of the Old Testament and Genesis in particular. He will set them straight by declaring it mythic poetry that hints at evolutionary origins, in much the same way that he accepts Big Bang cosmology as a way to begin his justification of Kalam, one of the deductive shell-games that apologists take as extra-Biblical evidence.

Craig gives away the game, though, in having to repeatedly insist that these complex theological concepts like Inspiration and Christology face difficulties in resolution unless science is taken seriously and literalism about aspects of the Bible is discarded in favor of a vaguer form of appreciation: art not owner’s manual. The YECs are clearly trying diligently to figure out how to label Craig’s apostasy, though they are kind enough to say they are uncertain what his fate is regarding hell. Even there they continue the holy work of pressing out the dough of theological commitments.

I, of course, don’t believe any of this but also don’t think it terrifically dangerous. The contortions are interesting enough as a human phenomena, and the scholarship where it is good is revelatory. Between McKinnell’s linked paper, above, and additional reading on Yahwism in the Second Temple Period, it is illuminating to discover the real roots of shifting belief systems, their resolutions, and how culture spreads. It’s also interesting in terms of the mechanisms of its inventiveness. It doesn’t look all that different from scientific re-theorization excepting the commitment to experimental results that science requires. The supports are just moderately firmer than grand presumptions about divine perfection that are, themselves, theological.