Libolt at Calvin (Jan. 1983 Issue)

Editor, The Outlook, For someone apparently so concerned with factuality as the editor of The Outlook, he has remarkably little compunction about representing correctly what I said on the occasion of a speech at Calvin College. I will advert to a single but characteristic example of the distortion found in DeJong’s review of my speech. At the beginning of the speech, I said that although all my life I had been a right-fielder (a baseball schlemiel for you nonLittle Leaguers) people were now trying to put me out in left-field— a weak joke, admittedly. In DeJong’s report, this comes out as an observation that I “had been moving from ‘right’ to ‘left field’ on [my] way to candidacy.” De Jong uses that small but clever distortion to suggest that I have been moving to the theological left. A little joke about my Little League days becomes, in DeJong’s deft hands, a political statement. The distortion is representative of what De Jong does to the rest of the speech. I hope the readers of The Outlook will be wise enough to realize that you can’t believe everything on a printed page, even if it is printed in pretty blue ink.

Clay Libolt River Terrace Church East Lansing, MI 48823

Editor’s Response:

The means are readily available to determine whether Dr. Libolt’s criticism of the article is warranted or not. For $2 the reader can obtain a tape of his lecture from Calvin Seminary. Unfortunately the tape does not include the opening remarks. If Dr. Libolt’s joking illustration of moving from right to left field in playing baseball is so inappropriate that my using that figure of speech amounts to a distortion, why did he use it to introduce this lecture on his changing views of reading the Bible?

Comparing the tape with the article I could not find misrepresentation of what he said–in fact, the report, prepared from notes, turned out to be at a number of points a word for word transcript, containing more exact quotations than I had realized. If Dr. Libolt found misrepresentations he should say what they are rather than dismiss the report as unreliable.

Notice a few excerpts from the tape regarding some key points:

Regarding Schoenberg’s portrayal in his opera of a despairing Moses admitting regarding the Ten Commandments, “I have fashioned an image too, false as an image must be,” Libolt concludes, “Is this a good interpretation? Are those images really saying that? Is that the way to read Exodus 32? And the answer, if you abandon the primitive (?) assumptions that we always bring to the text, is, ‘Yes.’”

“If Exodus 32 and Exodus 33 are so full of thematic juxtapositions and images, if they are so literary, can they also be history? Did it happen the way the narrative says it happened? It’s our preference or our style, if you will, in the modern world to distinguish as much as possible between fiction and history. The ancient world showed no similar preference, or rather, the ancient world treated fiction as if it were history.”

“Finally, in the world of Biblical scholarship it is generally agreed that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are not history at all but cosmogeny.”

“There is no conflict, per se, between history and the resurrection, but there is between history and the story of the tower of Babel. Now I suspect that our reading of the tower of Babel story as history is not an article of faith but precisely a prejudgment, a prejudice.”

“Now obviously, it is extremely important in any interpretation . . . that we understand what the knowledge and recognition of good and evil is all about. The phrase apparently refers to the sort of self-knowledge which is achieved by people when you become adults. The story with its heavy sexual overtones in the eating of the fruit is somehow related to the experience of the human transition between childhood and adulthood. Like Adam and Eve we discover our sexuality, our alienation from each other, our morality, at the same time when we reach young adulthood. The text which seems so distant from us is talking about us. The man and the woman become you and me. We walk in the garden of our childhood together. We discover our morality and alienation at the same time we discover our nakedness and individuality. And the debate about the historicity of Genesis therefore becomes barren and useless because it robs us of the thing that is most valuable . . . the text itself.”

“He wants to know if I believe that Adam and Eve were flesh and blood, and so forth. I was asked that question virtually on the floor of synod and I answered it by saying, Now I don’t think that that story is historical. Now I don’t mean that there wasn’t a first person. That would be absurd. What I am saying is that this story does not describe in a historical fashion creation and fall. It doesn’t describe the way things happened sequentially. This is what I was asked before synod. I was asked, ‘Is it a real woman and a real snake and a real garden?’ And my reply was, ‘No.’”

Where was the distortion?

P.D.J.