A prominent Christian scholar is criticizing some of his peers for their discussions of Jesus-era Jewish monotheism:
[these blokes work] with only two possibilities: monotheism could either have remained intact or been broken. Commendably, [one of the blokes] pictures developments stretching or even distending Jewish monotheism, but he too seems not to consider the possibility of significant reformulations and new adaptations of a religious commitment by adherents of a religious tradition. (emphases added)
What is “Jewish monotheism” here? If it is a tradition, way of life, or set of practices, I could see how it could be changed and adapted by folks, while still in some sense remaining the same tradition – not “broken” but rather “intact” and changed.
But if “Jewish monotheism” is a doctrine, then this is nonsense. Claims, assertions, propositions – the contents of beliefs – don’t change. They are what they are. Words may change their meanings, and sentences may be understood as expressing different propositions, but the propositions themselves just are what they are. If you say: there’s only one god – you presumably have something relatively precise in mind when you say it. That thing you express can’t be stretched, compressed, bent, warped, broken, chipped, boiled, or distended like a starving child’s belly.
Now I think by “Jewish monotheism” this author means a whole tradition. Maybe not coincidentally, he or she never makes clear what doctrine – precisely what claims about divinities are essentially included in this tradition, or in the new-and-improved Christian monotheist tradition that in his or her view rightly replaced it.
This person’s peers – the “blokes” mentioned in the quote, are thinking of monotheism as being or essentially including some precise doctrine about God. So yes – either this monotheistic claim is either true or false (assuming it is not vague). It’s nonsense to suppose it – that claim – being modified. In sum, this theologian, and not the people he or she is criticizing, is missing the point.
If people in centuries A, B, and C all said “X” and yet understood somewhat different things by the sentence “X”, then they did not share any one belief, but rather a sentence, a piece of a language such as English. To make an extreme example, in century A this group says “God loves us”, and by “God” they mean the God of the Jews. But people from that group in century B say those same words “God loves us” and by God they mean Nero. And in century “C”people from this group say that same words but by “God” they mean Conan O’Brien. In a scenario like this, there’s no “doctrinal development” – there’s rather development in what certain sentences in English mean relative to some community over time. About their beliefs, there has been change, or rather replacement, but not development.
This post isn’t the place to go into it, but these confusions are rife in discussions of the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and other theological matters.
The point is: traditions change, word usage changes, but claims – what is asserted using certain words – don’t change. People come to have them, and cease to have them, but it is only the people and their customs which change, not the claims themselves.
