The Bible and Truth

I am rewriting a section of a chapter in the philosophy textbook I'm working on. I posted a draft of this section back in winter, but I am unhappy with it. The purpose of this section is 1) to discuss the Bible as a source of truth while 2) giving a brief introduction to the philosophy of language.
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Up until the early 1900's, a theory of language prevailed that we might call the "picture" theory of language. Take the following comment on words by St. Augustine in the early 400's.

"No one uses words except as signs of something else; and hence may be understood what I call signs: those things, to wit, which are used to indicate something else. Accordingly, every sign is also a thing; for what is not a thing is nothing at all" (On Christian Doctrine 2.2).

Here Augustine reflects the simplistic view that a word is a "sign" or cue in your mind the remembrance of some "thing." I see the word cat which cues in my mind the thing, a cat. The appeal of this view of language is that it seems to work on a very basic level. It evokes images of childhood and of learning a new language.

If we apply this view of language to the Bible, it leads to a sense that each word of the Bible points to a meaning. Understanding the Bible--indeed understanding any words--is simply a matter of knowing the right meaning behind each word, behind each sign in turn. With this view of language, it is easy to think that the meaning of the Bible is something anyone could easily understand, especially if you are using a good Bible translation with English words whose meanings you know.

However, a little reflection makes it clear that this view of language is inadequate. More than anyone else, the early twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) came to this recognition. Wittgenstein pointed out that the meaning of words is primarily a matter of how they are used, not of some fixed thing to which they point.

What Wittgenstein recognized is that we cannot know the meaning of a word like fire unless we know what language game a person is playing with it, what a person is "doing" with the word.

"Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a ruler, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screw.---The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects" (Philosophical Investigations 11).

These games connect to particular forms of life, the distinct contexts in which various words are used. For example, if we are talking about a firing squad, then the rules of the game tell a person to pull a trigger at someone in that particular context. The meaning of the word fire here does not correspond to some "thing." If we do not know the "game" an author was playing with certain words in his or her original form of life, then we cannot know the intended meaning.

It was following this general train of thought that Wittgenstein suggested, "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him" (PI 229*). The reason is that we do not know the language games of a lion's form of life. We might be able to give approximate definitions for every word the lion said and still have no clue what he was trying to say.

We think of the answer General Anthony McAuliffe gave to the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge, "Nuts!" The Germans knew what a nut was, but they could not make sense of McAuliffe's response because they did not know a particular slang American language game.

The implication for understanding the Bible is incredible. First, we recognize that most Bible readers approach it from within what we might call a pre-modern paradigm. A pre-modern paradigm, as it relates to texts, is one that reads texts from the standpoint of the reader's own language games and forms of life without realizing that the meaning of these texts was originally a function of differing ones. The text in question is not read in context but on the reader's terms.

A modernist paradigm for approaching the Bible thus attempts to read the biblical texts on their own terms. These were not originally one book from God to me, but at least 66 books written in three different languages over perhaps a 1000 year period. On the assumption that God meant their first audiences to understand them--a reasonable assumption--they must have been written in the language games of these ancient contexts.

Do human "forms of life" and accompanying "language games" exist that are common to all humanity? Probably. But they are far less common than most people likely realize. Some of the most exciting recent developments in biblical studies have to do with the social world of the Bible. These studies suggest a host of basic categories, such as what a person is, in which a modern Westerner could hardly read even a simple word like "I" with the same meaning as any of the biblical audiences.

We titled this section "The Bible and Truth" because the Bible is a major source of truth for Christians. But it is clear from this discussion that the topic is far more complex than most Christians imagine. The person who simply reads the Bible and does what it says, unless their thoughts are guided by the Holy Spirit, is more likely reading the Bible and doing what they think it says, given who they are. They are far less likely to be reading the text for what it really meant to Isaiah or Paul.

Scholars who believe God inspired the books of the Bible have spent a good deal of energy unfolding a method by which we might connect the worlds of the Bible with our world. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 5:26, Paul encourages the ancient Christians at Thessalonica to "Greet all the brothers with a holy kiss."* The meaning of this act in the form of life of the ancient Thessalonians was quite different from the meaning it would have in the Western world today.

We might consider fellow Christians family. We might give them a hearty handshake. But we would not be following this admonition if we literally did what it admonishes. The significance for us is simply not the same.

More recent days have seen attempts to move beyond a purely modernist approach to the Bible to one that returns to the possibility of hearing a more direct voice in the Bible's words. Because these attempts come after the era of the modernist approach, we might fittingly call them postmodernist paradigms. They are much like the pre-modern paradigm in that they are not primarily concerned with the original meaning of the biblical texts but with what these texts might mean for us today. The difference is that the post-modernist knowingly chooses this focus, while the pre-modernist is largely unaware of the distinction on a deep level.

Some postmodernist approaches to the biblical text do not leave it with any real voice at all. Purely reader-response approaches ignore any original meaning the words might have had and replace it with the way the words strike some particular interest group, such as certain feminist, liberation, or African-American readings of the text. These approaches often give the reader complete control over the Bible’s meaning. We will also discuss briefly the deconstructionist approach to language in chapter 17. It denies that words have any stable meaning at all—not even that of a particular reader.

However, other developments in recent years are more promising. The two horizons approach draws largely on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who pictured the process of understanding as a "fusing" of the "horizon" of the reader with the "horizon" of the text. In this scheme, Gadamer was largely unconcerned with the historical author behind a text.<1> A person might take into account historical features of a text, but the main goal is not to get behind the text to its history but to fuse your world with the text's world.<2>

Gadamer's approach to texts stands on the edge of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. On the one hand, he pictures understanding as a genuine engagement with the text as something other than yourself. On the other hand, he did not believe we could come to the text objectively. We have no choice but come to texts with all the traditions of understanding we bring with us.

In that sense, Gadamer's account of understanding finds it inevitable that a Christian will come to the biblical text with many Christian understandings in tow. Some who have pursued Gadamer's approach further have found this element in his equation very attractive. Is it in fact a good thing for Christians to come to the biblical text with certain Christian understandings in place? If Scripture itself can be ambiguous at points, is it helpful that Christians come to it with many beliefs and practices in common, things that presumably God has helped the church throughout the ages unfold?

For example, the belief that Jesus is fully God is a common Christian belief. However, it is not nearly as frequent or explicit a teaching in the New Testament texts themselves as we as Christians now see it to be as we read the biblical text through the eyes of Christian history.<3> In far more ways than we usually realize, our Christian glasses rightly influence the way we read the Bible.

Different Christian traditions will no doubt continue to combine these elements of the equation differently. But when we ask in what way the Bible might be a source of truth, our discussion points to three basic ways. First, the Holy Spirit can no doubt speak to us collectively and individually through the biblical texts. Some would put significant limits in how much freedom the Spirit has to vary from the original meaning.<4> But we can all surely agree that if we could be certain that the Spirit was speaking, that message would indeed be a valid source of truth.

Most Christians would also agree that the original meanings of the Bible witness to the ongoing speaking of God throughout biblical history. Each book in some way represents God speaking to each audience. It is difficult not to see a flow and progress of understanding when we look at the Bible in this way. The Old Testament books in general do not have as complete an understanding as the New Testament books. But we can see in each book a source of truth, many Christians would say an inerrant or infallible one, as it related to God's purposes for each original audience.

Finally, we recognize in the church throughout the ages a potentially rich, perhaps even essential, set of lenses through which to read the Bible. If the books of the Bible themselves have played into the hands of numerous competing versions of God's story, perhaps the version that Christians hold most in common is the version that sets the story straight.

<1> Talk Ricoeur here as well.

<2> Thiselton

<3> Take a statement like John 10:30, "I and the Father are one." We as Christian readers are prone to hear in this verse an affirmation of Christ's divinity like the Father. However, in context, Jesus is surely speaking of the agreement between him and his Father on this topic.

<4>Vanhoozer