I’m currently reading my review copy of N.T. Wright’s new book, Surprised by Scripture. In the book, he takes up exploring how the Bible can be applied to some of the most pressing contemporary issues facing us. In the coming week or so, I’ll post up a fuller book review. However, I wanted to briefly look at an issue brought up in his chapter How the Bible Reads the Modern World.

In this specific chapter, Wright sheds light on how a modernist, Enlightenment paradigm has directed the way the Bible is read in much of the western world today. But, surprisingly, what many might not know is that the modernist template was actually adopted by most Christians in the western hemisphere as well.

How so?

Let me first start by quoting some of Wright’s thoughts:

He goes on:

You see, here’s the problem I’ve come to discover. Following what many believed as the triumphant victory of the Enlightenment, we embraced the position that all that is true is only that which can be proven. And the way such truth was proven was through gathering together empirical data, observable evidence, all summed up in something like the scientific method.

Now, let me say from the get-go that I am not anti-science. I am no scientist of any sorts, though I have great friends who have PhD’s in varying fields of science while also being pastors and/or involved in some kind of specific ministry. But I personally can see the positives of what science has to offer, including studies in evolutionary biology.

But science – or let’s say “a commitment to truth only being discovered through observable and empirical evidence” – does not satisfy all questions. As Wright goes on to offer in Surprised by Scripture: “science takes things apart to see how they work, but religion puts things together to see what they mean” (p142).

And that’s just it, science cannot answer the deeper philosophical, nor theological, questions of meaning. Why are we here? What are we here for? It lacks the ability to address the why’s of life.

But let’s go back to how Christians accepted the modernist, Enlightenment paradigm, or how we were hoodwinked by this reductionist view of knowing truth. In an effort, a noble effort, mind you, to combat early 20th century liberalism and secular modernism, the church in the west took up every effort to prove the veracity of the faith, including its claims on Scripture. Thus, the Bible was approached almost as a set of propositional statements or journalistic history that could be empirically proven in one way or the other. And if something couldn’t be proven, we’d remark: “Right now we don’t have enough info (data) to support the truth proposition we offer, but if we keep searching and studying, we’re liable to get there at some point.” Something of this sort.

And so in our apologetic and polemical efforts of defending the faith, a particular commitment to setting Scripture within modernist, scientific study (don’t think “science” as in biology, but more the method of how science is approached to “prove” something), we actually lost the battle.

Without realizing it, we were duped into believing we lived in this sort of split-level world. Truth was only boxed up as fact. Narrative, or historical narrative, could not have elements of story, but rather was only to be seen as journalistic, factual reporting. Truth could not be in poetic or pithy statements and could not well embrace story (or “myth,” which is simply storied form to communicate truth).

Consequently, we lost the battle because Scripture was not given to us within that paradigm of the Enlightenment, scientific approach. It was given in a much different framework of the ancient world. They worked under much different auspice and conviction about communicating the truth, or God’s revelation.

And here’s the thing: The word truth and fact are not synonyms. Truth is the umbrella term, fact is only one branch of truth. This is why a poem (think the Psalms), which is not journalistic history or empirical data, is true at its core, even at the expense of using metaphor, imagery and other literary devices. This is why parables are true at their core – because they teach truth, even if the good Samaritan was not necessarily a guy named John Smith who lived in the early part of first century Palestine. This is why borrowing old Egyptian wisdom sayings and planting them within Solomon’s own proverbial sayings still gives us truth (or God’s revelation). This is why storied narrative is true, even as elements are shaped in a way within the story that wouldn’t be seen as acceptable for Dateline or reporting in the Washington Post.

Now hear me!

I’m not even negating apologetics as a whole. But even apologetics has it’s limits (just as science does, believe me!). When we engage in the realm of apologetics, or defending the faith (or the Bible), we are dealing in the realm of reasonable proofs. Let’s say on the matter of Jesus one can reasonably conclude that Jesus was an historical person, who was historically crucified, and even historically rose from the dead. Now, what you do with that information is another whole issue.

But let’s look at Jesus and those 3 “propositions” of him being an actual living person in history, his crucifixion and his resurrection. The first two are more “provable,” though again, not wholly empirically observable (you can’t test his life and death over and over in the way science tests hypotheses over and over). But, it’s pretty dang reasonable he lived and was crucified. Even the Bart Erhman’s of today recognize this.

Yet, for the resurrection, things are a little less empirically observable and proven (from that modernist ploy of the scientific method). But they are not wholly unreasonable. Of course, science doesn’t speak to resurrection. Maybe resuscitation, but not resurrection – a man was truly dead from a late Friday afternoon to a Sunday morning, but he walked out the grave alive.

This is even what N.T. Wright spends time looking at in his book, Surprised by Hope, which lays out the tale that a pivotal change took place on that resurrection Sunday when God turned all things around towards new creation as Jesus walked out of the grave. He adds some discourse in on the reasonable reality that Jesus was raised by the power of God.

So all of this is good and helpful. But I’m not sure it gives us THE final answer, mainly because our empirical investigation into matters does not yield 100% provable answers. It leaves reasonable answers, reasonable evidence. But not always tangible, observable data for our case. I can reasonably prove my wife loves me, even pointing to some tangible evidence. But I’m not going to be able to offer empirically measured data. Sorry! But I am assured, certain of (!!), her love for me.

And, you know, science is in the same boat. To believe otherwise would be pretty silly.

Therefore, as Wright surmises in the book, we as the church have gone along for the ride. Again, out of noble intent. But many of us have trapped ourselves into arguing out of modernist, scientism, rather than out of a more holistic approach to truth. We’ve pushed the wide scope of literary genres in Scripture into only things like fact, proposition and literal history. Of course it contains such. But not on every page. And to claim such, I believe, is to reduce the Scripture that God gave us.

As someone once remarked: “I want to love the Bible we’ve been given, not the one we wish we had.”

This is why I came to appreciate the writings of Jamie Smith, especially his tempered appreciation of some aspects of postmodernism, as espoused in his book Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? The book was instrumentally helpful for me moving away from a strongly committed modernist approach to Scripture to a more balanced approach, embracing the wider measurements of truth, even as it’s expressed in Scripture. And this includes fact and history, but not only such, even within those sections of Scripture we identify as “history”.

I don’t want to see the church duped into some of the extreme lies of modernist, Enlightenment though, just as I don’t want us deceived by some of the extreme measures of postmodernism. But truth is big in the eyes of God. He’s the God of all truth, within Scripture and without, within particular literary elements and within others. And God has never been committed to expressing his truth only in factual or propositional statements. He, like us, is relational at his core. And relational beings embrace the expression of truth much wider than we might have first imagined. Just remember, your relationship with your spouse can always leave you a good example.