"Faith" Obscuring Understanding

"Israel conceived even Jahweh himself as having human form. But the way of putting it which we use runs in precisely the wrong direction according to Old Testament ideas, for, according to the ideas of Jahwism, it cannot be said that Israel regarded God anthropomorphically, but the reverse, that she considered man as theomorphic." G. von Rad, OTtheo, 1:145

This statement of Gerhard von Rad's nicely summarizes an emphasis James Kugel has often made.  Traditionally theology has tended to view the human-like attributes of God as distractions which need to be explained (away). This has the paradoxical results of a) decontextualizing and dehumanzing the biblical texts, that is, making it easier to understand them as divinely inspired, and b) of imposing on them, unwittingly of course, our (human) will to domesticate or exult them (depending on your perspective). If we take the lead of texts like Gen 1:26-27 we should be much less struck by the humanness of YHWH than by the divine quality of humanity. With the psalmist we might exclaim, "You have made him a little less than elohim!" (Ps 8:6).

A similar impulse to subject the text to a hermeneutical straight-jacket of symbolism is to divest the Gen 1 account of scientific implications, insisting, as Evangelical interpreters are want to do, that the text only communicates theological, not scientific knowledge. As von Rad notes, this too is a mistake: "This account of Creation is, of course, completely bound to the cosmological knowledge of its time" (ibid., 1:148). The Fundamentalist tries to take the high road by holding its scientific and theological implications together, but, because (s)he cannot allow that the text could be wrong, can only do so by badly misreading either or both the text and contemporary science.

I think that the only way to proceed is to admit that the text ties theological claims to defunct science, and then to ask whether the theology remains compatible or adaptable to our contemporary state of knowledge about the world. The answer to that may be yes or no: the fact that Gen 1 ties the two together does not mean that its theological claims are automatically false. (We shouldn't take from this that theology can ignore science; to the contrary, like the text of Gen 1, it must run the risk of engaging scientific knowledge dialogically.)

In complete contrast to the dictum that one must share the faith of the biblical texts in order to understand them, it is often the case that those who claim to possess such faith in fact misread the text, forcing it to conform to rather than challenge their convictions. This is faith obscuring understanding.