In Pursuit of Truth
One of the common characteristics of people across all races, colors and continents is the drive to make sense of the world around us. It is this hunger to understand the whole truth about our world that made Aristotle not only a significant philosopher, but also the world’s first botanist (as well as a ground-breaking cosmologist!).[1] It brought Copernicus to an understanding of earth’s true place in the solar system, and it led Einstein to develop his theories of general and special relativity, by which we all know the equation E = mc2.
But as the stories behind these examples would readily illustrate, discovering truth – the real and true nature of things – in the scientific realm is no easy task. Over the centuries settled scientific truths have had to be discarded as new discoveries have been made.[2] We have gone from believing that everything in the world is made of four elements (fire, water, air and dirt – Aristotle again), to embracing Mendeleyev’s marvelous Periodic Table of the Elements, to understanding that all matter is made up of elementary particles like quarks, leptons and bosons, according to the Standard Model of particle physics.[3]
But if discovering scientific truth can be elusive, discerning the real and true nature of things in other realms of life, particularly religion, can feel downright evasive. As humanity has grappled over the millennia with the fundamental questions of origin, purpose and whether there is life after death, there have been countless explanations proposed. Some of these have paraded through time in the garb of philosophers, while others have proudly worn the vestments of religious belief. More often than not, however, these truth contenders have proven stubbornly resistant to analysis and verification attempts.
And yet, what more important questions do we face but ones of purpose and existence? Is all that we see all there is? Is there any meaning to my life? Do I matter? These questions lead us to what is for many the ultimate question: Is there a God? (Or gods?)
In beginning our journey to answer these all-important questions, however, we must identify our epistemological starting point: How can we truly know things? How do we know what is true? Here, we must avoid the opposite temptations of, on the one hand, being convinced we can know everything, and, on the other, despairing that we can find anything true at all.[4] Rather, with humble confidence we can proceed in the middle, beginning with the very same epistemological tool with which we carry out knowledge-gathering in nearly every sphere of life. When we do so, not only do we make headway in answering these questions of meaning, but also discover a little more about the character of the God we are seeking.
A Trustworthy Epistemological Tool
Certainly, there are many ways to discover truth (some more valid than others), but it makes sense to begin with one that we employ everyday resulting in dependable, productive outcomes: reason.[5] To reason is to have the capacity to think rationally and logically and, from those thoughts, to be able to draw inferences which are themselves reasonable.[6] If there is a God (and that God created us), then He must have made us to be able to understand life through this ability to reason, because we are overwhelmed with daily evidence of reason’s correspondence to reality. In short, reason works, sometimes so well we take it for granted.[7] This strongly implies that God Himself is reasonable and that He acts logically. Therefore, we can expect any religion that worships the true God to be one that corresponds with logical analysis and reasoning.[8] When religious experiences corroborate a reasonable belief system, we may consider it personal evidence of a deeper truth. But if religious experiences contradict reason, doubt is cast on the validity of those experiences.[9]
However, the assumption so far has been that reason allows us to observe and accumulate knowledge about God like we might about any other subject. To a certain extent, if God has made us rational creatures, this assumption is true. However, God is not like other passive subjects only capable of being observed; He is a Being, a Person. As theologian Lesslie Newbigin points out, “If…the Idea of the Good has actually entered the room and spoken, we have to stop our former discussion and listen. Instead of asking all the questions, we must answer the questions put by the Other.” [10] We do not only ask questions of God, but God also asks questions of us.
We have now ventured into the realm of personal knowledge,[11] in which truth about someone must be discovered not only through observation, but also through relationship, through mutual initiative. Just as there are things you cannot know about a person without them revealing them to you, so also with God. And what is God’s initiative to us?
The Nature of Revelation
In the Christian tradition, God’s initiative to humankind is articulated in the doctrine of revelation, which describes God revealing Himself and His attributes to us. This revelation is classically divided into two broad categories: general revelation and special revelation.[12]
General revelation is God’s creation, the universe itself, which is the testimony God has left for all humanity to see. As Leon Morris notes, “A reverent contemplation of the physical universe with its order and design and beauty tells us not only that God is but also that God is a certain kind of God.”[13] The reasonableness of God’s creation avails itself to our discovery and increased knowledge of its wonders, as well as reveals to us the character of its Creator: rational, ordered, imaginative, even playful.
On the other hand, special revelation is more akin to “personal knowledge,” God’s direct communication with us. Christianity holds that God has chosen to do that in three different ways. First, there is His spoken word, which we see in various instances in scripture when God speaks to someone directly. In Exodus 33:11, for example, God speaks to Moses “face to face.”
The second type of special revelation is the written word, the Bible, the inspired or “God-breathed” word of God. The final form is the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. This occasion of special revelation, where God reveals Himself most fully to us by becoming one of us, is the centerpiece and core of the Christian faith.
Why do we need this special revelation? General revelation gives us hints about the nature and character of God, but special revelation is what tells us about God and His redemption story. Telling this story is the goal of the Bible. From beginning to end, the biblical narrative unfolds the story of God’s dealings with humanity and establishes the story arc of salvation and redemption. Its fulcrum and centerpiece is the death and resurrection of the incarnate Son of God, such that the special revelation of the Bible pivots around the more complete special revelation of Jesus. Carl Henry states, “Special revelation is redemptive revelation. It publishes the good tidings that the holy and merciful God promises salvation as a divine gift to man who cannot save himself (OT) and that he has now fulfilled that promise in the gift of his Son in whom all men are called to believe (NT). The gospel is news that the incarnate Logos has borne the sins of doomed men, has died in their stead, and has risen for their justification. This is the fixed center of special redemptive revelation.”[14]
The Bible as Special Revelation
God’s gift of special revelation, specifically that of the Bible, fits well within the framework of reason introduced above. In order to function, reason requires something to be reasoned about. Or, in more technical terms, it requires a set of data to be analyzed. If God is a reasonable God who made reasonable creatures, it makes sense that he would provide them with reasonable means to understand who He is (if indeed He wants to be known).
Most religions that make a claim to truth, consequently, offer a sacred book (or set of writings) as their analyzable set of data. This book, a presentation of the faith’s beliefs and worldview – its theology, can be assessed for internal coherence and correspondence to the reality of human nature and the world around us. In short, it provides an opportunity for the religion to be evaluated and verified as true.
Unlike many sacred writings, the Bible directly avails itself to the process of reason and allows itself to be falsified because it is rooted in history and makes definitive claims about the way the world is. According to Old Testament scholar Kyle Greenwood, “Without an objective fixture on which to ground our pursuit of truth, we are open to all sorts of whims and fancies. Scripture provides that fixture. It [makes] objective [claims], not simply because it self-referentially says so, but because it is rooted in historical reality—in facts and data against which it can be verified or falsified.”[15] It is this historical nature of the biblical story that is central to our faith. We believe the Bible as the authentic source of divine revelation because it is verifiably true. It is verified through its historical accuracy, its own internal consistency and by the historicity of the Resurrection.[16] But because God has created us as creatures of reason, He welcomes us to accept this after careful study, not as an a priori assumption.[17]
Believing Christians, then, understand the Bible as providing the “data” needed in order to know God. Out of this revelation then comes a framework for making sense of the entirety of creation. In this way, the Bible serves as the undergirding of one’s whole understanding of life, the bedrock to which one can refer and consult to understand truth. While Christians believe it is the Spirit of God who guides us into truth (John 16:13), it is that self-same Spirit who guided the writers of the Bible as they each authored their portion of the scriptures (2 Timothy 3:16). Because of this, new “words” or impressions from the Spirit should not contradict that which is already given in the Bible.
Confidence in Scriptural Revelation
How do we know that the Bible is God’s special revelation to us? As the Bible is an incarnate document, both divine and human, we can approach this from two directions.
As a human manuscript, the Bible is rooted in historically specific times, places and cultures. We can then ask (taking into account the genre and context of the different biblical books), Do the texts stand up to the historical and archaeological record? In fact, we find that they do. In examining relevant fields of study – Ancient Near Eastern history and culture, archaeology, Roman and Hellenistic texts, etc. – we find significant levels of corroboration with the biblical account. Archeologist William Albright states, “There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of the Old Testament tradition.”[18] Similarly, biblical scholar Craig Blomberg, speaking for the New Testament, strongly affirms that “the gospels must be subjected to the same type of historical scrutiny given to other writings,” adding, “[we find that] they can stand up to such scrutiny admirably.”[19]
However, the Bible also claims to be a divine manuscript. Accordingly, we should expect that within it there would be evidence of things only God could do, such as miracles and fulfilled prophecies. And we see copious evidence of this, from God’s working wonders in the Old Testament to Jesus’ many miracles in the New to the many prophecies fulfilled in Jesus’ life, which bind the two testaments together. Of course, the most significant miracle the Bible claims is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
Clearly, such supernatural events cannot be verified in the same manner as historical claims, although the texts provide reasonable levels of corroborating evidence.[20] However, when we take the measure of the Bible as a whole, we discover a surprisingly substantial body of evidence in favor of its supernatural claims. For example, if we are willing to consider that the Resurrection is probable, that lends much greater weight to all that Jesus did and said (1 Corinthians 15:1-20), including his regard of the Old Testament as the word of God.
Our Responsibility with God’s Revelation
Since John Wycliffe (14th c. AD) forward, reformers and evangelists of the Church have striven to get the Bible into the languages and hands of as many people as possible so that they can hear and read for themselves what God has said. Through having the word in their vernacular, God’s people have been enabled to lead lives of greater devotion and obedience to Christ.
The presence of a Bible in our hands, however, creates a responsibility for us to read it properly.
On the one hand, the Bible is an easy book to read. If we take it like any other book and follow the narrative, there are many wonderful and readily accessible lessons for us today. In it, we discover the character of the sovereign God of the universe, that He is a covenant-keeping God and that He came to earth as the sacrifice to atone for our sins. As a result, the Bible teaches that we may have an abundant life in Christ and walk in fellowship with the Spirit. Moreover, we understand that the Church is tasked to continue the same calling that God gave Abraham, Isaac and Jacob: to be a light to the nations.
These over-arching truths are both wonderful and without dispute. However, if we are to dive deeper into the Bible, we soon discover that understanding what it says on some issues can be very difficult to discern (Acts 8:31; 2 Peter 3:16). Moreover, just a quick survey of the diversity of opinion held on significant biblical positions within the Evangelical church, not to mention the Protestant church, or the Christian church at large, suggests that sincere, Bible-believing Christians often come to very different conclusions on what they understand from the text. Therefore, to be competent students of the Bible, we need to be aware of several important points:
- The Bible was inspired by God but it was written over many centuries by different people in different cultural and historical settings. If we do not understand the background in which a book was written, we risk misunderstanding what was communicated.
- When we read the Bible, we are reading a story written for us, but presented to a different audience. We need to understand the situation of the original readers of each book of the Bible in order to understand what the text meant to them. Only then may we discern correctly how what they were told applies to us today.
- The Bible is a self-referential book. No verse can be understood in isolation from the entire corpus. We need to allow the entirety of the Bible to inform our understanding of each verse.
Therefore, we are called to be diligent in our study of the Bible and to seek out the historical, linguistic and exegetical resources we need to gain a proper understanding of it. Without doing such applied work, students of the Bible lack the data necessary to effectively reason with it and come to a correct understanding of its meaning. Yes, the Bible is God’s special revelation to us, but He has also created us as rational creatures with critical minds. There must be no false opposition between heart and mind when seeking to understand God through his word, for he commands that we love Him with both (Luke 10:27).
Without the willingness to diligently study the Bible, we run the risk of doing harm to ourselves and others by acting in ways that are actually contrary to God’s intent. Let’s take, for example, the issue of slavery. In the United States before the Civil War, many churches in the southern states held to a theology that slavery was ordained by God.[21]
The problem with this understanding of slavery is that it completely ignores the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12).[22] To quote Abraham Lincoln, “[F]or although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.”[23]
So we see here how believing – and often very sincere – Christians, were taught that something as profoundly evil as slavery was not merely biblical, but approved of heartily by God. Certainly, some had their doubts, but a great body of Christians in the southern United States were convinced that truth was on their side. As Lincoln noted in his Second Inaugural Address: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”[24] This example of an incredible misreading of the Bible should give us pause. Are we doing the same thing now and just don’t know it? What errors do I believe that I think the Bible supports?
This is the reason why the study of the Bible is so important. Such study does not consist solely of reading Bible verses in context – which is incredibly important, maybe most important – but it also includes much more, including:
- Understanding the literary nature of the passage
- Determining the historical and cultural elements that influenced the writing and therefore affect its meaning
- Finding out any linguistic issues which impact the text
- Discovering allusions to other passages in the Bible. This is frequently seen in the writings of the New Testament authors when they are influenced by the Old Testament.
- Seeing how what is written fits into the story arc of the Bible as a whole.[25]
Finally, it is critical that we engage in this study not as individuals, but among the company of others. By ourselves, we are easily susceptible to a flattened view impeded by our blindspots, biases and cultural-temporal positions, but opening ourselves up to different voices expands our view to be three-dimensional. We could well consider the three axes of this new view to include the church vertically (throughout history) and horizontally (as it exists today in all its ethnic and theological diversity) as well as the academic voices of biblical and theological scholars.
When we are good students of the Bible and are able to understand it well, one result will be a deeper and more satisfying relationship with God. Having known Him in His word, it becomes easier to know Him by His Spirit. In this way the Bible contributes to our spiritual maturity and becomes a means for a deeper walk with God.[26]
Being a student of the Bible also helps our spiritual lives is by keeping us from error. Since God does not change, we can fully expect that what He communicates to us personally will always comport with scripture. Therefore, the Bible is able to act as a plumbline for us, helping us assess whether our devotional life is on track or is perhaps being influenced by our own personal emotions, hurts, whims or fancies. This role of the Bible as a consistent and faithful judge of our spiritual life gives us great confidence as we pursue a deeper relationship with God.
Conclusion
The task of understanding scripture in light of all the influences on it is called hermeneutics, from the Greek word hermēneuō, which means to translate or interpret. It is this task of thinking critically and applying our ability to reason to the biblical texts that allows us to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15, KJV) and be workers who are not ashamed.
The Bible is not a simple book to read. It was not written to us directly, but over thousands of years to people in different cultures and circumstances and societies. And as each one of these factors influenced the writing, they demand of us the effort to understand them in order to understand the passages they affect. If we fail to apply our reason to diligent study, we run the risk of finding ourselves in the end having followed not God, but our own misunderstandings.
Yet because we believe in a rational God, we can be confident that His word will reveal truths about Himself, His love for us and our purpose in Him. After all, the generosity of his revelation – in creation, in the Bible and foremost in his Son – demonstrate lavishly how He longs for us to know Him.
Please click on the following link to download this article:
Notes
[1] Aristotle is renowned for being one of a few in his day who posited a round earth around which the planets moved. This truth was lost over time only to be rediscovered by Copernicus about 1,800 years later.
[2] Although I (Kevin Grenier) use “discarded” here, the change from one fervently held scientific theory to another often takes years, even centuries. So while we may say a theory was discarded, those at the time would have more often seen a series of refinements.
[3] Democritus should perhaps be included in this list as well, having been the first to posit the existence of atoms decades before Aristotle declared his four elements.
[4] Such a claim opens the door to a much larger philosophical discussion, but that is not the focus of the present article. Suffice it to say, living life honestly will quickly disabuse most people of both illusions.
[5] Many ideologies may claim that discovering the truth in religious or supernatural realms must naturally have its own unique way of knowing, but this can be difficult or impossible to substantiate outside of the believing community and so takes the burden of proof upon itself.
[6] One resource as a good introduction to this subject is Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous, by W. Jay Wood, 1998. It is part of the Contours of Christian Philosophy series.
[7] Of course, we must admit that the role of reason can also be overstated.
[8] As the reader may notice, I (Kevin Grenier) am clearly siding with Boethius, although I do believe that there are areas of faith which reason is incapable of exploring.
[9] Some key questions to assess the reasonableness of a religion include:
- Is it logical?
- Is it consistent within itself?
- Does it explain the human condition in a way that reflects reality?
- Is it historically accurate and factually true? Or are there good reasons why it isn’t?
- Does it give the simplest answers to questions or does it become needlessly complex and complicated? (Occam’s razor)
- Does it explain the way the natural world functions without having to add in too much new material?
[10] Newbigin, Leslie. Proper Confidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 11.
[11] Explicated in more depth by philosopher and polymath Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, 1958.
[12] In this section, we are indebted to Rick Wade for his May 27, 2003 blog post on probe.org for his clear explanation of revelation. Another very good resource on general revelation is found on the Bible.org website at https://bible.org/article/bible-only-revelation-god.
[13] Leon Morris, I Believe in Revelation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), p. 33.
[14] Walter, A. Elwell, ed. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), s.v. “Revelation, Special,” by Carl F. H. Henry.
[15] From personal correspondence with the author.
[16] See the paragraph below starting with “How do we know the Bible is God’s special revelation…” for a fuller discussion of this subject.
[17] Modeled admirably by the Bereans in Acts 17:11, who did not accept Paul’s message without first searching out its veracity.
[18] William F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1956), p. 176. A short summary of some of the evidence for this statement (and the source of the quote) is Why the Bible is Historically Reliable by Gerhard Pfandl at the website revivalandreformation.org.
[19] Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1987), p. 255.
[20] For example, considering the Resurrection: the eyewitness accounts of the apostles and an additional group of 500, the boldness of the apostles following the death of their leader, the weakness of competing arguments and women listed as the first eyewitnesses when their word was not accepted in court.
[21] There are many very good books on the subject of the biblical justification of slavery in America. One such is Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old South, ed. by Eric McKitrick (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963).
[22] This theology of slavery also ignores numerous Old Testament passages and key concepts.
[23] This quote is from one of Lincoln’s speeches during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Accessed at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lincoln-speech-slavery-and-american-dream-1858
[24] Accessed at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln%27s_second_inaugural_address#Inaugural_speech
[25] This list is not exhaustive, nor entirely helpful on its own. In further articles in this series, the authors will dive into the task of biblical interpretation more heavily and unpack recommended tools and procedures to enable us to do it well.
[26] There are, of course, other means as well, such as prayer, worship, contemplation, fasting and other spiritual disciplines.
