Spiritual Hiccups - The Truth of the Bible

One of the curses of living in the modern, scientific age is is the constriction of our notion of truth.  Truth has become synonymous with facts and figures.  Myth, by contrast, has become synonymous with falsehood.  Yet the writers of Scripture did not understand truth in our manner and did not recognize our distinction between truth and myth.

My Presbyterian tradition speaks of the Bible as a "unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ," but in our modern notion of truth, the validity of a witness is based on whether or not she gets her facts straight.  And so some who want to "preserve" the truth of the Bible insist that it is factually, historically, and scientifically correct.  But in what strikes me as a very strange twist, these protectors of Scripture (who often view science as the enemy of religion) have adopted science's definition of truth. 

Of course the problem with preserving the truth of the Bible in such a manner is that it creates insurmountable hurdles for anyone who pays much attention to what the Bible actually says.  Today's Genesis reading is a good case in point.  If we are to apply modern, scientific notions of truth to today's reading, we immediately must deal with God creating in quite a different order from what we read in chapter one of Genesis.  On top of that, we must take as historical, scientific fact that God created earthworms, blue jays, and alligators, thinking they might make a suitable partner for the man. 

We Presbyterians have tended to be less threatened by science than some other Christian groups, and we have tended to steer clear of the obvious problems with biblical literalism.  But we too have  found ourselves captive to a modern, scientific worldview.  And so at times we have used all the scholarly tools at our disposal to get to the truth behind the text.  We have searched for the "historical Jesus" and tried to understand the historical forces that caused biblical writers to say what they did.  But in the process, we sometimes acted as though the truth could not be found in the text itself.

Fortunately, much of biblical scholarship has recognized this and turned more of its focus back to the text itself.  Yet among rank and file Christians, I worry that there is a difficulty speaking of the "truth" of the Bible in other than modern, scientific, historical terms. 

I would never argue that the Bible is "fiction," but I do think we could learn something from great works of fiction that speak the "truth" to us.  Indeed art can sometimes speak to us at a much deeper level.  No one reads an encyclopedia in order to be touched or moved deeply.  No encyclopedia will every launch a movement.  And any good painter knows that his purpose is not to create something that looks exactly like a photograph.  A great painting shows you something that you likely would not have seen had you looked at the painter's subject.  It reveals a deeper truth, a truth that has a spiritual dimension to it.

If one amassed all the world's knowledge, she could still be far from the truth.  Strange that religious people would not know this well.  I sometimes wonder if the fascination with spirituality in our day isn't a longing for a deeper truth than can be found in either a literalist fundamentalism or a progressive, scholarly attempt to explain what the Bible means.  Perhaps it is a longing for a truth that cannot be known from any amount of correct information.

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