Supplemental 10/13/09: What is Theological Truth?

David Hearne left a comment on the First Creation Story that I thought was excellent. It goes to the heart, to the nub of our human dilemma, and it caused me to do some extended and deep reflection. To do justice to the topic, I decided to post my extended comment as a supplemental post – to which I welcome your input. I am “thinking out loud” and would value your insights as I do so.

Agreement & Difference.       I agree with David that truth is elusive. And I think people (at least, people influenced by the Enlightenment) largely agree, these days, that ‘absolute truth’ is not available to us – even in science. We are always approaching, but never discovering the rock bottom layer of “how things work” or “what things are.”

Never the less, it might be a bit too much to say we haven’t an inkling of truth. We are not wholly ignorant, and we have come a long way from splitting wood for heat to splitting atoms for heat; from applying leeches to heal swellings to CAT scans. Those advancements have required some improved understanding of “how things work” and “what things are.” At least in the physical world we can state some facts and see them confirmed in outcome.

I suppose I would not want to ever say, in any realm, that we have achieved “truth.” I am more inclined to agree with David that we accomplish something analogous to truth. We arrive at provisional truths, always subject to revision when we know more.

Primary Theological Approaches to Truth.       In Christian theology, the two primary ways of approaching truth are to treat the Bible as either literally true or as metaphorical truth. Adherence to literal truthfulness requires asserting that the Bible tells the whole history of the world and humanity from creation to Jesus. In turn, that requires ignoring certain indications in the Bible that suggest it isn’t literally and unequivocally true. The first wives of Cain and Seth, for example, came from where, if Cain, deceased Abel, and Seth were the first children of the first couple? If we posit there were other children, daughters, born of Adam and Eve who became wives to the sons, we have an immediate instance of the Bible not recording everything about the human family. If we posit women who were part of other family groups, we have the same evidence that the Bible does not tell us everything about the human family. Either way, literalness is compromised from the very beginning.

There are many problems with the literal truth argument for the Bible. Under the lens of literary-critical analysis it becomes very evident that the Bible is a compendium and conflation of multiple strands of writing, and a variety of literary categories, including stories that are, by their very nature as works of fiction, not histories. But that doesn’t make all of the Bible fiction – which is the worry of literalists. The Word of God is composed of many words of human beings with a variety of interests and perspectives.

The metaphorical truth argument has the problem opposite to that of the literalists: the tendency to downplay historically accurate aspects of the Bible. At a minimum, the metaphorical approach posits that whatever actual history is contained in the biblical accounts is not the important thing. The entire Bible, the more historical and the less historical, is a metaphor for spiritual reality. We talk about physical events in order to point to spiritual events, since we cannot directly apprehend or describe the spiritual realm.

The problem with the metaphorical approach is that historical-critical studies indicate there really were an Abram, a Moses and a Jacob, a Sarai and a Rebekah. These historical figures have been pressed beyond their historical stature to express Hebrew conceptions of who they are as a people, but those conceptions are anchored in actual historical people and events; they are not mere metaphor for qualities the Hebrews would like to think are real. Similarly, Jesus really did walk on the earth, and to the extent we Christians believe he was the incarnation of God’s Word to us, it really does matter that he really suffered and really died on a real cross. As ugly as that is, if God was in some sense incarnate in Jesus – that is, present in the flesh of Jesus – if God actually partook of human life and the earthly realm in Jesus, then God really does know what we experience as human beings; God really does know how we struggle and suffer. That God is very different from a God who remains aloof and distant, perhaps all-knowing, but not all-knowledgeable about our struggles and mortal existence. Who God is is fundamentally transformed by God’s real experience of real human life. Metaphorical readings of the Bible deny that God, and might want to deny any “real” God altogether, preferring to understand the term “God” as a metaphor for a deeper, largely-inexpressible human reality or world reality (what Paul Tillich would call “the ground of all being”). But there is a real physical world, and we do have real sense impressions, and we do act upon the world and experience the world acting upon us. This real world has a real origination, and that origin is in some fashion tied to an Originator, God. It is that God that I want to know something about, because that God made me and I want to know why.

Another Approach to Theological Truth.       Another way to read the Bible, one not talked about very much in churches, is as an analogy. This gets to David’s sense of truth, and is where I was headed. The analogous approach to Scripture argues that we cannot know the truth, but we can approximate it. We can get closer to the contours of the truth even though we can never exactly match truth’s features.

My theology instructor used this image. He said it’s like traveling along the coast of North America. You can sail down the coast at a 100-mile distance, and you’ll cut pretty straight lines from north to south, periodically swinging further east or west to maintain the distance from shore, but all along straight vectors. It’s fairly efficient, but you won’t know very much about the coastline. Or, you can cut in to a 1-mile distance, which will require that you engage in a lot more maneuvering. At that distance you will travel a route that is far less efficient, but over time provides a pretty good sense of what the coastline looks like in its general contours, even though you still won’t see the details. Or, if you were able to do so, you could go ashore and walk the waterline. That would show you every detail of the coast, but it would be highly inefficient, and you’d only ever know a small portion of the whole seaboard.

Those who approach the Bible as an analogy interpret it as being something like a one- or five-mile-out sailing venture. In the Bible we do not see the spiritual realm, but we see its general contours. As we apply our various critical analysis tools we can get closer in and see more detail, but in the end we are not able to set foot on the farther shore. All we ever get is analogue, but that analogue does say something true about the contours of spiritual life, the spiritual realm, and God.

Of course, different sailors, making different decisions about when to sail across a bay, or when to tack closer to shore, will come away with different notions of what the coastline looks like in a particular area. And that is why we compare notes along the journey. We learn from one another’s travels; and we learn to depend more on some notes than others, as we get a sense of how industrious or lazy, how careful or careless, how interested in the shoreline or focused on the distant horizon a particular sailor is.

It’s all fraught with potential error. But it’s also richly seeded with actual truths – seen at a distance. What we discover of that shoreline depends upon our interest and diligence in uncovering its contours, using the historical record and the best tools at our disposal at our point in history.

Avoiding Anachronistic Expectations.       The promise of Scripture is that, however darkly we see, we can see enough to know the truth of God and God’s passion for us in Jesus Christ. I would add that that’s the promise of modern “scientific” methods of both biblical analysis and inquiry into the mechanics of the world. I have not yet found a conflict between science and faith when the Bible’s questions are asked – indeed, I hold science to be a kind of faith, in origin anchored in the Christian mindset.

It is possible to ask the Bible’s questions of the Bible and of the world known to modern science. That’s because the biblical writers’ worldview is represented in the Bible, and subsumed in our subsequent development of human knowledge.

However, it is not always possible to ask our modern science-oriented questions of the Bible, because the biblical writers did not apprehend the world the way we do, and so could not anticipate our questions and interests.

That might seem convenient, but it’s a fact of history. Example: we have people today who are arguing that the United States’ foundational documents are contemptible because our founders had slaves, and everybody knows slavery is evil. Therefore, the reasoning goes, inhumanity is built into our foundations. But any rigorous scholar knows that that’s anachronistic thinking. You cannot project backwards to another time and wonder why people then did not behave as do people now. We stand on their shoulders; they do not stand on ours. What we know and believe today is the result of what they knew and believed. To expect our parents and grandparents to have the same sensibilities as we do today is simply naive. If they did, we would not have progressed. If they and we believed the same thing, there would be no movement of time and wisdom; we would still have slaves; or, our future would be condemned to be just as we are today. No improvements, no advances in our sense of how to be humane and human.

Staring into the Mirror of History & Theology.       However, as heirs of our founders, we can still be asked the questions they asked. Do we still believe that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”? The answer to that question should not be an unthinking “yes, of course.” Rather, we need to gain some appreciation for what they meant by those terms – life, liberty, pursuit of happiness – before attempting to answer. Happiness, for example, did not mean ‘ability to smile,’ or ‘frequency of laughter.’ For our founders, a person’s “happiness” was his or her material comfort. The right to pursue happiness was the right to pursue whatever makes you comfortable and content in the world, and our founders recognized that for some people worldly comfort would come predominantly from spiritual or mental pursuits, while for others worldly comfort would be related to their holdings or credit worthiness, or even the number of silver place settings they could afford. Do we still believe a person should be allowed the freedom to accumulate as much as makes him or her “happy”? Do we believe what our founders believed about our essential God-given nature, and the rights that follow? Or were they wrong? And why?

The answers to those questions may not get us to a “truth” about life or living, or being human, but as we pursue the answers to such questions we will begin to see the contours of the “truths” we individually hold and the contours of the “truth” we advocate today, as a people. Holding a mirror up to our souls allows us to see the truth about ourselves, in relation to the world, our progenitors, and God.

The Bible is interested in our seeing the truth about our spiritual selves, more than interested in expounding general truths of the world. Reading and reflection on the “truths” of the Bible is primarily an exercise in examining our own souls. What do we believe, and why? How does that make us “good” people, and by what standard of “the good” do we live?

What Does God Care About?       In reading the Bible, I have come to understand that God is not interested in general propositions or philosophies; God is not even really interested in what that other person or people over there believe. God is interested in what I believe. Jesus once asked Peter what people were saying about him, and Peter responded, some say you are the Messiah, some say something else. And Jesus nodded and asked, but what do you say, Peter? That’s the position we are each in. We are not called to worry about the faith of others, but about our own beliefs. That’s primary to the Bible. It is a mirror I hold up to my own soul.

But being the primary concern does not make it God’s exclusive concern. The Bible is also interested in portraying a certain perspective on the world and the people in it. The Bible is not interested in telling us how the world was created – that’s a modern question – but it is interested in whether we apprehend that it was God who did the creating, and did so for a reason. God’s reason is articulated throughout the biblical record and in the Hebrew understanding of the unfolding of their history; it is found again in the biblical recounting of the earliest Christian history. As we pursue the biblical record, we discover contours of God’s character, residence, and reasons for creating our world and us. It is a mirror we hold up to ourselves and our culture, by which we can see how well we are doing at living into God’s intention for us. We may only see contours, but that’s at least pointing us in the right direction. If we deny the landmass to our starboard by stubbornly persisting in looking at the empty sea on the portside, we will never really know ourselves – nor know the hope that comes from knowing that one day we will stand on the shores of heaven.

A Working Definition of Theological Truth.       So, perhaps we could say that theological truth is not a matter of fact vs. fiction, but the content of our relationship to God and the world when we take seriously, and are informed by, our understanding of and reflection on our sacred texts and persons. For Christians, that means taking seriously the task of understanding and reflecting on the Bible and the people of the Bible, primarily Jesus Christ, upon whose life and views we strive to pattern ours, believing him to be uniquely approved of by God.