I'm grateful to have been included in this session, and I appreciated all of the interactions. In the spirit of continuing the conversation, I'd like to engage with Beth Stovell's very nice questions. Here goes 
For Dan, “Exegesis eclipses semantic arguments about “inerrancy” and “inspiration.” (15). While I agree with where Dan is going with this, I wonder how Dan would construct a hermeneutical grid around this thinking. Did he not start with inerrancy and inspiration as grids for these questions? In a sense, isn’t it notions of inspiration that have caused Dan to describe God as main author and biblical authors as sub-authors? Does he see this vision of authorship as implicit in the biblical texts themselves? The answer seems to be: yes and no. Dan assumes inspiration is in a sense true, but doesn’t prove that it is true using biblical exegesis. So the answer is “no” and yet Dan’s concept of “sub-authorship” is based in part on his approach to Luke’s Gospel’s way of describing what authoring means.
This is a fair observation. I don't argue for a particular doctrine of inspiration or inerrancy in the paper. Instead, I adopt the VineyardUSA's stated position, uncritically, as a prior. My justification for this is, simply, that it is VineyardUSA's stated position, and I'm writing in service to the Vineyard, as a part of the Vineyard.
I suspect that this is a very un-Vineyard thing to do. In taking the SOF as seriously as the Bible, you might think that I've outed myself as a Catholic, treating mother church's pronouncements as divine. But that wouldn't be quite fair. Almost, but not quite. Instead, one of my main interests is in exploring whatever prior commitments people or institutions bring to a conversation, and finding surprising dimensions to these presuppositions. I think that we often critique and uphold priors, as if we are aware of the full possibility space that they define...but even seemingly narrow priors often have an astonishing degree of flexibility in them. So in that sense, I'm often more interested in evaluating priors in an a posteriori, rather than an a priori way. Or, less fancy, I usually like to eat pudding more than I like to parse the list of ingredients.
So I think Beth is absolutely right that I have assumed inerrancy and inspiration, and expanded on this notion by reflecting on God as an author. My hope is that this is actually a rather straightforward, simple and "obvious" expansion on the notion of inspiration...according to the rules of the game I'm playing, ideally it is little more than an articulation of part of the normal semantic range of "inspiration" or "being God-breathed." The idea is to say, "Wait a second...what does this actually mean?"
And I also think Beth is absolutely right, to suggest that I do not argue that a doctrine of Christian Biblical inspiration can be derived from the Bible itself. In fact, I think it is trivially obvious that Biblical inspiration can't be grounded in Scripture alone. After all, even if "all Scripture" is God-breathed, what is the body of Scripture that is being referred to? What constitutes the canon? Is it whatever Luther says, or whatever the Catholic Church says, or whatever the Ethiopian Orthodox Church says? Because none of these Bibles actually tell us. There is no inspired Index or Outline within the Bible. (Such a thing could, theoretically, exist for a holy book...but thats not the kind of holy book we have.) We should allow this to puzzle and trouble us. However, since I'm engaged in immanent critique here, my response is to say, "Even if sola scriptura is obviously self-defeating, I can quite happily ignore that, most of the time. Plenty of people do. What I'd like to know is this: what happens if I just go ahead and let all of these assertions float around together? After all, the moon and Earth are also 'incompatible' in the sense that both can't exist in the same place at the same time. But that doesn't stop them from floating around and mattering."
Yet, I would ask Dan whether the problem is not as much about author and sub-author, but about our modern need for an author to begin with. Why does so much rest on the notion of authorship, when this was a secondary concern in the ancient world? My suggestion is that ultimately this loops back to Dan’s assumptions about inspiration that ultimately are grounded in something besides exegesis itself. Thus, exegesis does not fully eclipse notions of inerrancy and inspiration, but our notions of these terms impact our exegesis and vice versa.
I appreciate where Beth is going here, and I do think it is worthwhile to interrogate notions of authorship. However, I also think it is worthwhile to interrogate all priors...and to search for new implicit priors to interrogate.
At the same time, I think it is also worthwhile to see where a prior might lead...taste the pudding. And I think that reflection on authorship and authorial intent (or imputed authorship and imputed authorial intent) makes some incredibly fine pudding. (Here, I'm thinking of the exploration of historical and grammatical contexts that have done so much to illuminate the possible meanings of Scripture for its original authors and audiences...and how wide the gap often is between their views of it, and our own.)
Turning back to my use of an "eclipse" metaphor, I think my previous answer helps clarify what I'm trying to say when I talk about an eclipse. I'm saying that if we allow "inerrancy," "inspiration" and the actual text of the Bible to float around together, the text of the Bible passes in front of many of our arguments about inerrancy and inspiration. In other words, the Bible itself covers whatever logical, exegetical and hermeneutical sins are to be found in that den of iniquity, the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy. The point here is that, viewed in the way articulated in my paper, one's position on inerrancy itself largely stops mattering. With a perfectly straight face, I can even affirm even Chicago Statement Inerrancy, and "main and plain" reading and read Joshua in a way that is clearly anti-genocide. After I'm done saying this with a straight face, you're certainly entitled to laugh. But I would argue that the logic is all perfectly sound, the exegetical judgments are perfectly defensible, and the Bible seems to cooperate with me a lot more easily than it cooperates with those who disagree with me. I hope that what I'm suggesting sounds funny, ludicrous, simple, obvious and true. That is just the way the best truth always sounds.
In future work, I would love to see Dan explain his notions of inspiration with God as ultimate author derive from exegesis itself. It seems to me that Dan’s approach is something akin to Pete Enn’s position of inspiration and incarnation, which sees both human and divine authorship as key to a well-founded description of inspiration. Perhaps Pete Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation and John Goldingay’s (in OT Theology Vol 1) examples of how Joshua’s concept of herem is repeatedly questioned and subverted elsewhere in Joshua itself and elsewhere in Scripture could provide helpful dialogue partners for Dan in future research.
Thanks! Much appreciated, and I would like to look into this. Here, my goal was to try to approach this in a way that doesn't appeal to many higher-order theological concepts...I wanted to stay close to the exegetical ground, and pursue a rather minimal kind of argument. However, I think that any earnest theological evaluation of my humble exegetical suggestion needs to engage with higher-order theological concepts. (For example: "In what ways is the Word like the Word?") I hope to go in this direction in the future, and turn the central argument of this paper into something more than a cute little observation about the surprising potentials of "main and plain" reading. Based on my engagement with Enns' work so far, I think my approach will critique and tweak some aspects of his theology...possibly going in a similar direction, but by very different routes. And our different routes might always lead us to very different places altogether.
