The Flow of Revelation 1

It is on my bucket list to write a book on biblical theology, starting with the notes from when I taught it as a graduate class. However, the church could probably use a popular version of my notes. I've thought about writing on it on Fridays. Here's a possible start.

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Introduction
It is natural for Christians to read the Bible as a single book from God to them. It is the word of God. It is good news for everyone in the world. The Holy Spirit speaks daily to believers as they read these words.

In the pages that follow I want to take you on a journey in your reading of the Bible. The goal is not to interfere with those direct words from God to you every day as you read the word. I call it God "zapping" us. I am reading the biblical text and, bam, God makes some passage come alive. In older language, he "quickens" it. 

Keep chewing on the text daily. If you know what lectio divina is, keep doing it -- reading small portions of text over and over again asking God to speak to you. Keep hearing that overarching story of salvation from creation to fall to redeption to final consummation in the text.

Yet, I want to sharpen your hearing of another story in the Bible. This is the story of God walking with humanity toward a more and more precise understanding of him. The pages of Scripture give witness to this journey. The New Testament has a fuller understanding of God than the Old Testament because of the fuller understanding of Christ, who is the key to unlock everything. Yes, we and the New Testament authors see Jesus in the Old Testament, but it is the Spirit and the New Testament that has opened our eyes. 

You don't have to take my word for it. We are about to see this developing understanding, this "flow of revelation," in the pages of the Bible itself. We will look at passages you may not have noticed. We will learn how to read the books of the Bible in context -- how those who first received it might have understood it. The goal is not to take away your direct zappings but to add what the biblical texts might have meant when God first revealed them.

The result will be a transformation of your reading of the Bible from a flat, two-dimensional story to a deep, three-dimensional chorus. We hope to hear how God spoke to a host of different individuals on different occasions in different times and places. I welcome you to treat me as a hostile witness if you want. Feel free to suspend your judgment on what is being said until you are fully convinced. If I am wrong, I don't want you to believe me.

I expect to learn on this journey as well. Who knows, maybe the text will talk me out of what I think this book is going to say. But it is the biblical text itself I want us to listen to. Some say that, but I wonder if they truly mean it. In practice, is it more the case that they listen to the Bible until it hits an electric fence their tradition has put up? In other words, I wonder if they listen to the text as long as it doesn't break their "rules."

We'll see what you think. We're going to start with what the Bible has to say about God. Then we'll follow a fairly conventional path. What does the Bible say about creation? About a Fall? What is the arc of Israel in the biblical texts? What about Christ and salvation? What about ethics? What about the return of Christ?

What I think you will find is that the earliest texts of the Old Testament have a very broad understanding of these things. I think you will find that the flow of revelation gets more and more precise as we go along. The details get filled in. The earlier revelation is more anthropomorphic in relation to God (portraying God using human illustrations we can relate to), the later texts more theologically detailed.

We will argue that Jesus is the "final Word" of Scripture. I want to be careful not to put a rule on the Bible that it doesn't want -- after all, that is what I am saying others do. But our working hypothesis will be that the flow of revelation after Christ is an unpacking of Christ's significance rather than "extra" revelation. One rule we will try to maintain is that the New Testament is the definitive unpacking of Christ's significance.

Yet, if we are honest, the unpacking of Christ did not end there. I write this introduction during the months of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in AD325. The Nicene Creed that would eventually develop out of that meeting is a much more precise presentation of the Trinity than anything found in the Bible. Indeed, the contours of the Bible itself -- called the "canon" or measuring rod -- are not found in the Bible. The Bible never says, "Here are the books of the Bible." That was a decision that bubbled up hundreds of years later in the church.

So, Jesus was the "last Word" and the New Testament is the authoritative presentation of God's Word. But the unpacking of that revelation continued in fundamental ways for several hundred years. And there are issues like predestination that we continue to wrestle with today. 

We want things to be crystal clear, and Christians often act as if the Bible serves that purpose. Yet, over 20,000 Protestant church groups later, it is simply not the case that the Bible has removed all ambiguity on questions of theology. It is quite curious to make such a claim in the light of history. Words by their very nature can typically be read in multiple ways. For good or ill, the community of faith almost always ends up playing a role in our understanding of Scripture. [1]

You can decide for yourself. Let's set sail on the river of revelation in Scripture. Orthodoxy will be our guiding star on the voyage -- the commonly held beliefs of Christians over the centuries. Yet we will also keep in mind that it is a "rule." Hopefully, the rivers of Scripture lead us there, but we also want to be honest if at some point we have to get out of the river of Scripture and finish the journey by land.

We'll see. Let's get in the boat and start sailing in Genesis. 

Key Concepts

lectio divina -- "divine reading." It's a practice of reading Scripture is small bites. Mulling it over. Meditating on it. Praying over it. Chewing on it.

anthropomorphism -- portraying something that isn't human in human terms

canon -- the collection of authoritative books found in the Bible, the "measuring rod" for our belief and practice

orthodoxy -- "right belief"

hermeneutics -- the study of how we interpret things, especially the Bible

[1] Several years ago, I tried to set out a "hermeneutic" -- an approach to reading the Bible -- that takes all these factors into account. The ebook of Who Decides What the Bible Means? is here, and the paperback on Amazon.

7.3 The Ordering of Impressions (part 3)

continued from here
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The Ordering of Impressions
8. So, our experiences of the world give us impressions. More accurately, our experiences of the world either conform to or do not conform to our mind's predictions of what we expect. And of course we have fake impressions as well, pseudo-impressions. How does our mind process these impressions?

Let's go back to Kant. As we mentioned, Kant believed that God had built our minds to have certain built-in or "innate" categories to accurately process our impressions. [18] The first of such categories he discussed were space and time. We perceive the items outside ourselves to have dimension. We perceive our experiences to string together in a sequence.

He would add to space and time other innate categories like cause and effect. Although not innate, he added logic and mathematics to the list of things that were not known by experience but could be known to be true through reason.

In short, there are a number of things that seem true about reality that go beyond our mere experiences. They seem to be intrinsic to reality itself. Can we go even further?

9. How about gravity? If I am on the roof of a tall building, I best not treat the question of jumping off as a matter of opinion. "You have your opinion; I have mine. You think I'll go splat but I don't." We can both debate whether we are going to go splat on the way down, but the ground doesn't care which position you take. There is a right and wrong answer. 

[As a quick aside, few people are truly relativists when it comes to matters of truth. [19] It's easy to be a relativist on matters of religion or the meaning of life, but you would be hard to find many people who think that the consequences of jumping out of an airplane without a parachute is a matter of opinion.]

Back to Hume. In his consummate skepticism, he suggested that we had no real reason to prefer going out of a building from the first floor rather than out a second floor window. [20] We have not experienced the future, so we cannot empirically say one is better than the other. Kant disagreed, and I hope you will too.

Roy Bhaskar, who coined the phrase critical realism, considered Hume and philosophers like him to be "unserious" when they ventured into suggestions like these. [21] Hume never actually climbed out a second floor window. Bhaskar suggests that there is an underlying structure to reality that, while our perceptions of it may vary, it is worthy of being called real. Our language about it, our pictures of it, our paradigms about it may vary, but we are getting at something that is actually true and there.

Bhaskar suggested that there were three dimensions to reality. [22] First, there is the actual -- the events that happen in the world. They are independent of us. They happen whether we are present or not. If a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound.

But, yes, there is the empirical. This is my experience of the world. Yes, these perceptions are filtered by my mind. I do not experience the actual as it is but as it appears to me.

But he added a third category, the "real." There are structures and mechanisms that connect my perceptions with the actual. They are more than useful constructs of my mind. There's more to them than that. Gravity was one of them, as an example.

10. If I might tweak Bhaskar and Kant a bit, here is a similarly three-fold analysis of our knowledge of the world. First, the world outside of me is real. This is certainly a very pragmatic belief. If you find yourself in the middle of the road with a truck coming toward you, please step out of the way. It is best to treat the world outside yourself as real. We can hallucinate things about the world. We can be dreaming about the world rather than awake. But the existence of a world that is different from us is consummately reasonable.

It is reasonable to believe that the world would continue to exist even if I did not. If the earth did not exist, the universe would be just fine. No one has ever woken up to find that the world outside him or herself was not there.

Second, my perception of the world is thoroughly affected by my mind. In 1910, Ralph Barton Perry coined the phrase "the egocentric predicament." [23] I like to say that we are stuck inside our heads. We have no choice but to see the world from "in here." More on the paradigms and constructions with which we come to the world in a moment. As Kant put it, we do not see the world as it is. We see the world as it appears to us.

However, Bhaskar is also surely correct. There are underlying realities that are the basis for both the world and my understanding of it. We can surely go beyond pragmatic realism. Faith in certain structures of reality is more than merely useful. It is reasonable to believe that space and time, cause and effect, logic and math, and certain rules of nature are actually real beyond mere perceptions. The way any one person or group expresses that reality may differ, but the reality we are trying to express is real apart from our perception.

To summarize critical realism as I use the term, the world exists independently of me. It is real apart from my perception. However, my perception and understanding of the world will always be finite and shaped by my interpretive frameworks and fallen reason. Nevertheless, there are real truths about the world that we can grasp even if our knowledge of them is always mediated by human paradigms and frameworks of understanding.

Human Paradigms
11. What critical realism gives us is a hope that the constructs of our minds -- the way we organize our thinking about the world -- are more than merely arbitrary inventions of our minds. It gives us hope that some interpretations of the world are actually more accurate than others. We briefly mentioned Thomas Kuhn and the idea of paradigm shifts earlier in the chapter. In the first edition of his 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his work was interpreted by some to say that one scientific paradigm was no more valid than another. [24] A critical realist view justifies us in thinking that some paradigms are more correct than others and that we might actually approximate truths about the world.

Nevertheless, we should recognize the significant degree to which we construct our understanding of the world. If our perception of the world involves a host of different impressions, we are rarely aware of all of the data points, and some of them will be mirages of our imagination. Remember that our minds come to the world looking to confirm our pre-existing expectations. Our default mode is to see them.

You may have heard of a concept known as confirmation bias. This is our tendency to see what we expect to see. In chapter 3, I mentioned Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of a rider on an elephant. [25] The rider is like our reason and the elephant our deep intuitions and urges. Our elephant largely goes where it wants to go, and our "riders" find reasons to justify it.

As we have argued thus far on the journey, this is often true of the most idea-oriented among us. It is true especially of those who do not use their reason to find the most probable interpretation of the data but rather use their intellects to find possible ways to make the evidence fit what they already believe and what they want or need it to fit.

12. Paradigms are interpretive frameworks. They are meaning-harvesting mechanisms. They affect what we see of the data and what we don't see. They are like a word cloud -- they make some aspects of reality seem bigger and other aspects seem smaller. They direct what data we select as significant and what data we ignore.

When I was growing up, jewelry of almost any kind was considered wrong for a woman to wear (e.g., 1 Pet. 3:3). In the paradigm of my church background, it was very significant. It was something someone in my group would notice immediately on a woman. It was part of our holiness paradigm. It was large in our "word cloud."

My paradigm came into conflict with the paradigms of others at college. Modest jewelry wasn't a no-no for the women at my college. It was only after a break-up in college that it came home to me how insignificant an earring was for most Christian women. In my paradigm, it meant pride. It meant "look at me, look at me" in a bad way. But it crashed in on me that most women put on earrings like I would wear a tie to church back then.

When I got married, I wore a wedding ring. For the first few years of marriage I think I twisted and twisted that thing endlessly. It was uncomfortable and a foreign object on my finger. Yet its meaning was one of commitment to my wife. It says, "I am committed to someone and am not looking for a relationship with anyone else." I assure you, no self-centered pride is involved with it.

Yet, given the holiness paradigm of my youth, someone asked if they could see it not long after I was married. I foolishly took it off and gave it to them to see. They then commenced to parade around, "Ooo, look at me," flaunting the ring in an over-the-top way. To be frank, the person looked ridiculous.

In the "word cloud" of their paradigm, it seemed impossible that a ring would not be some huge statement, some huge psychological indicator. For this person, it meant PRIDE with capital letters. Most of you reading these words will no doubt think this story was very weird.

And yet this is the way paradigms work. Certain datapoints seem very significant. Yet someone with a different paradigm may not find them very significant at all.

13. The idea of paradigms arose in science as Kuhn used them to explain, for example, the Copernican revolution of the 1500s and 1600s when people went from seeing the sun as rotating around the earth to the earth rotating around the sun. In the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics similarly transformed the way we look at the physics of the very big and the very small.

We often think of changes like these as a matter of progress or people getting smarter, but Kuhn points out that the math of the geocentric (earth at the center) thinkers was at one point better than that of the new heliocentric (sun at the center) ones. But the geocentric view had become very complicated to try to account for data that didn't fit simply into the existing paradigm. 

Copernicus' (1473-1543) model was much more straightforward. And when Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) later suggested that the planets moved around the sun in ellipses, then the new model was both simpler and more accurate in its math. Kuhn's point is simply that what the prevailing view of science is at the moment ("normal science") is not simply a matter of objectivity. There are social and paradigmatic elements as well.

Paradigms are the scaffolding that stand alongside whatever it is we are interpreting. They affect what we do with the data. They direct what kinds of pictures we draw with the dots, so to speak. 

As we mentioned earlier, you can draw an almost infinite number of pictures with a set of dots. In ancient times, they didn't have a lot of dots. This significantly affects what picture you draw. The fewer the dots you have, the less likely it is that your picture either represents underlying reality or that it is highly useful.

Myths were expressions of mysteries using the dots they had. We shouldn't think of myths as bad science -- that's to misapply our modern paradigm to a different world. Ancient myths were as much expressions of things as explanations.

Take the Norse myth that expresses why the seasons change. Jostein Gaarder uses this story as an illustration in his novelized history of Western philosophy. [26] The god Thor gets his hammer stolen and the season goes to winter. He gets it back, and we have spring. It's the Norse version of the Greek story of Demester and Persephone.

The thing is, in the story, Thor kills the guy who stole his hammer. If you are thinking that myths are about explanations, this is a really bad one. The story only works for one year because then the guy is dead. In fact, Thor dresses up like a woman and marries the guy before killing him. He's not going to be fooled next year.

I was always amazed that Gaarder didn't see that his paradigm of what a myth is was inadequate. This story is a really bad explanation for why the seasons change. However, it is a fun expression of the mystery that is the changing of the seasons...

[18] "Innate" comes from words meaning "in born." In other words, we are born with these categories.

[19] I might also point out that relativism on questions of truth is different from relativism on matters of ethics. On matters of truth, a relativist would claim that all truth is relative to the individual or group. As often pointed out, this is an absolute claim which deconstructs the very claim of relativism itself.

Relativism in ethics is a distinct question. It holds that there are no universal moral norms. It sees right and wrong as relative to the individual or group. We have already discussed relativism in chapter 2.

[20] In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). 

[21] Roy Bhaskar, The Order of Natural Necessity: A Kind of Introduction to Critical Realism (Independently Published, 2017), 8.

[22] Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Knowledge (Leeds, 1975).

[23] In his article of the same name, "The Ego-Centric Predicament," Journal of Philosophy (1910). 

[24] He denied that this was the case in the Postscript to his second 1970 edition.

[25] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013).

[26] Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux1991).

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Previously,
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes 
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)
7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)

 

A Brief Thought on Wesleyans and Baptism Debates

Someone asked me, given the recent article in Wesleyan Life, how the son of a Wesleyan minister might never have been baptized. Many Wesleyans do not know that the Pilgrim Holiness Church was not strong on baptism.

For example, my grandfather was a Quaker minister before he switched when the Pilgrim church was officially formed in the early 20s. Asked to perform a baptism in his 50s, he decided he should be baptized too first. My mother was not baptized until she was in her 40s (and our family was good friends in Florida with the Coates, with a similar background). [1]

If you find this incomprehensible, there is a key factor in play. Few of us realize that we wear glasses when we read the Bible. This was true of the Quakers, but it's also true now of us as Wesleyans. America is Baptist country. It suits our culture like hand in glove. Quakers and Salvation Army folk are wearing a different set of glasses and don't generally baptize at all.

I believe in baptism as a norm. I love that you can still be baptized as an infant in the Wesleyan Church, following our Wesley roots. I love that we don't specify immersion, pouring, or sprinkling.

Wesleyan Church Wesleyans generally borrow their thinking from others. The more academic side says, "But we're Wesleyans; it needs to be more sacramental." The more populist side feels the forces of baptistification and says, "Acts, Acts, Acts."

And I feel like we Wesleyans have been doing just fine with our big tent position on baptism. Paul looks on at our current debates and says, "Were you baptized in the name of believer's immersion? I thank God I didn't baptize any of you (to your horror). Ok, maybe I did baptize a handful." We all think we're just reading the Bible and doing what it says. And so do the other 20,000 denominations.

Here was my attempt to capture what I perceive to be the Wesleyan Church position on baptism (now in this). Here is another piece I wrote before that, "The Skinny on Wesleyans and Baptism."

[1] As an artifact of her upbringing, I remember my mother noting in Mark 16:16 that while baptism is mentioned as part of being saved, the second part only says that those who do not believe will be condemned. In other words, it does not say that those who are not baptized stand under condemnation.

1.2 Science and Scripture: Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth

It's Tuesday, so my Science and Scripture writing continues from last week...
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Experience vs. Reason 
Believe it or not, philosophers have debated extensively these last two hundred years about what science actually does and what its goals truly are. We will mention a few of the details near the end of the chapter. For the moment, here is a practical, common sense approach that will hopefully allow us to move forward. We will mention more specific controversies as they seem relevant.

When the scientific method was first detailed by Francis Bacon in the 1600s (more below and in the chapter that follows), it fed directly into a stream of thought called empiricism. In empiricism, the path to truth is through our senses -- "seeing is believing." Our eyes, our ears, our touch, taste, and smell all "write" on the whiteboard of our minds. As the ancient Greek Aristotle once said, "There is nothing the intellect that was not first in the senses." [10]

However, David Hume (1711-76) -- who took empiricism to its logical extreme -- realized that many aspects of common human understanding do not come from our senses. For example, you can hit a pool ball with a cue stick and experience every moment along the way. It's getting closer. It's getting closer. It is barely touching. The ball is moving. The ball is moving. What you can't experience is the rule of cause and effect that says, "The cue caused the ball to move." You can experience individual moments, but it is your mind that "glues" those moments together. 

The same is true of time. We experience moment after moment, but we do not experience time as the glue our minds assign to those moments. The same is true of the relationship between events and the "values" we assign those events. If someone hits me, I experience pain, but I do not experience the "value" that says it is wrong for you to hit me. Hume extended empiricism to what seemed a ridiculous conclusion -- that cause and effect, time, and values might be illusions.

Hume remained an empiricist despite what seemed a non-sensical implication. [11] However, he awoke another philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) from what he called his "dogmatic slumber." Kant suggested a simple way of looking at our knowing that created a cosmic shift in philosophy. He suggested that the content of our minds comes from our senses, yes, but that it is inevitably organized according to certain "built-in" or innate categories that God had given us. These categories included concepts like cause and effect, space and time, and right and wrong. [12]

I like to use the analogy of a Google Doc or some similar processing software. The user inputs text into the Google Doc. I am typing into a text "box" as I write this chapter. My typing is like our senses -- our senses "type" stuff into our minds.

But there are rules. Google Docs won't make you breakfast (yet). It won't take out your trash. I can't doodle outside the box (yet). What I am getting at is that there are rules to how the content is entered.

So it is with our minds, Kant argued. Our senses don't input the things of the world into our minds as they are. Our minds "glue" the inputs together in certain predictable ways that come pre-loaded onto our "hard drives," so to speak. In the end, we do not see the world as it actually is. We see the world as our minds process our experiences. We see the world as it appears to us.

With this simple framework, Kant set the stage for the debates of the last two hundred years over knowledge. These debates have spilled over into the philosophy of science, as we will explore in slightly more detail near the end of this chapter. Despite Kant's dethroning of any concept of pure empiricism, the first part of the 1900s was dominated by a group called the "positivists" who apparently did not get the memo. 

On the other hand, there are other philosophers who have almost suggested that science is nothing more than different social groups who believe different things. [13] Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) did see some paradigms as more effective than others but went a long way toward suggesting that scientific paradigms were less about progress in understanding as new groups simply organizing data in a different way. [14] A "constructivist" view of science sees it far less as the study of what is true about the world as scientists imposing their own frameworks on the world.

Both extremes seem a little less than satisfying, especially given all the developments in technology that improved understandings of science have made possible. Surely there are other perspectives on science that have managed to hold these two sources of truth in better tension. Such an approach would not abandon the central role of our senses nor ignore the dominating factor of our paradigms. Arguably, there is such an approach.

Critical Realism
The notion of "critical realism" has appeared in several contexts over the last fifty years. [15] In general, the goal is to find a middle way between a naive realism -- which doesn't recognize the role our minds play in our perception of the world -- and some pure constructivism that suggests we are simply making up our sense of the world as individuals or society. [16] Roy Bhaskar, the originator of the phrase, proposed three categories of reality: 1) the actual, the events that happen in the world (apart from our senses or existence), 2) the empirical, that which we observe, and 3) the "real," the deep structures and mechanisms that make things happen.

Without committing to his precise formulation, we can discern in his three elements a way of looking at science and the world that checks all the boxes, as it were. First, there is the world as it is. This relates to what Bhaskar called the "actual." It is reality happening. If the earth did not exist, the universe would go on just fine. Christians have historically believed that God is the only truly necessary Being, That is to say, if the universe were not here, God's existence would not be affected. [17] God and the world are real. They are not simply constructs of our minds. This is an incredibly reasonable claim.

However, second, we do not have unfiltered access to the world as it truly is. We only know the world as our minds organize and process it. (By the way, this is true of the Bible as well.) This is what Bhaskar calls the "empirical." Our understanding of the world is finite and it is flawed. From a theological perspective, part of human fallenness is our inability to be fully objective. We are stuck in our heads, and our sense of the world is inevitably skewed.

Yet, third, surely there is something more. Here is where various critical realists might differ a little in their formulations. There are ways of thinking that work incredibly well. Consider logic. The rules of logic were explored 2300 years ago by Aristotle and have been taught repeatedly to this day. There are no known exceptions to these rules. There is a structure to logic that always seems to work without exception. If one's premises are true, and one's logic is valid, the conclusion must follow. 

There is a close relationship between logic and math. Math parallels the world so well that some concepts first explored by mathematicians were later found to have actual correlates in the world. Take the square root of negative one, known as i. A smart middle school student might think, "Who came up with this idea? You can't find the square root of a negative number!" 

Yet quantum physics regularly uses imaginary numbers. Those numbers help physicists explain the way particles function on the subatomic level. Some of the predictions of cosmology -- the study of the universe -- were first proposed because of equations. The existence of antimatter is an example of one such discovery.

What we find is that there is a correspondence between math and the real world that seems to belie an underlying structure to the world that the human mind can grasp very adequately. Call it what you will. The world exists, and though our perception of that world is heavily constructed by our own minds and culture, the quest for truth about the world does not seem completely in vain.

One key to critical realism is the fact that some constructs of reality work better than others. For example, if a construct helps us correctly predict what will happen next, that is a more successful one than if we are always predicting the wrong thing to happen next. The idea of cause and effect, for example, is consistently reliable as a predictor of what comes next. Bhaskar would say that in such cases we have hit on something that goes beyond our mere perception to something that is real. We are knocking on the door of structures and underlying mechanisms of the universe. 

In this sense, we can go beyond what another school of realism -- pragmatic realism -- asserts. Pragmatic realism bascially asserts that we should only think in terms of what works, not in terms of actual truths about the world. [18] Leave the reality of the world as a black box we cannot look into and think only in terms of constructs that help us function in the world.

However, the existence of logic, math, and consistently dependable concepts like cause and effect may suggest we can say more than what the pragmatic realist does. Even if our way of talking about the world is subject to our language and paradigms, it would seem that our language is sufficient to express and predict some things with absolute accuracy (1 + 1 will equal 2 when the symbols refer to reality in their normal way).

The language and symbols we use to express the underlying reality of the world may vary. Nevertheless, in certain well known instances, it seems to be a fully accurate representation of what takes place as we experience it. The pragmatic realist brackets all consideration of the world as it actually is. The critical realist thinks more is possible.

Three Tests for Truth 
The previous section has paved the way for what may seem common sense to most of us. It is conventional to speak of three tests for truth. The third is our ultimate fall back: the pragmatic test. We often consider something true if it works, if it helps us predict what will come next, if it helps us make our way through the world. It is our ultimate fall back because, even if the pragmatic realist approach should turn out to work better than the critical realists', we would still be able to have the conversation that is in this book.

A second classic test for truth is the coherence test. Does a proposed explanation contradict itself, or is it logically consistent. You might argue that it is an extension, by faith, that the same logic that works consistently in deductive thinking also applies to the external world. It is an act of faith, for we cannot see the external world as it is. But it is a "reasonable" hypothesis.

One of our goals in this book is to explore whether a coherent integration between science and Scripture is possible. This goal assumes that truths about external reality are fundamentally coherent, and logic works both deductively and inductively. [19] We will assess how well this hypothesis holds up as we examine various topics.

Even in science, there are instances where coherency remains a goal rather than a worked-out conclusion. A well-known example is the ongoing challenge of reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics. While each framework works extraordinarily well within its own domain, they resist integration into a single, coherent theory that explains all physical phenomena -- especially when it comes to extreme situations like black holes.

Do these incoherencies on the smallest level of reality indicate that, in the end, the universe is not coherent? Are matters of Scripture ultimately a matter of "blind faith," as Søren Kierkegaard generally believed? [20] Or is faith reasonable?

The third classic test for truth is the correspondence test. This test stands at the heart of why critical realism provides an important bridge from our perception to reality. If there is a real structure to truths about the world, then we should expect that our hypotheses and theories correspond to the data of the world. The more useful they are, the better they presumably will correspond.

Then there is the question of "elegance" in the correspondence. A complicated theory may account for the data, as the Ptolemaic model of the solar system did. In a complicated way, it mathematically expressed how the sun might actually go around the earth. But the Copernican approach -- whose math was initially less precise -- was more economical in its explanation. More on it in the chapter that follows.

These three -- the correspondence test, the coherence test, and the pragmatic test -- will be our friends in the pages that follow. We will not simply assume them uncritically. We will question them when it seems appropriate. However, they have stood the test of time as useful criteria for truthfulness. Hopefully, our confidence in them will only grow as we proceed.

[10] Aristotle, De anima III.

[11] He once remarked, for example, that empiricism left you with no reason to go out the first floor door rather than a second floor window. After all, you've never experienced what will happen in the future either way. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion I.

[12] The primary work in which he suggests this approach was Critique of Pure Reason.

[13] E.g., Paul Feyerabend (1924-94) basically reduced science to sociology. In Against Method (New Left, 1975).

[14] Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1962).

[15] The phrase was coined by Roy Bhaskar in 1975: A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds, 1975). In theology circles, the general concept was promoted by Ben Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament (Princeton Theological Monograph, 1989) and N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992). Before Bhaskar, similar lines of thinking were found in the work of Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago, 1958).

[16] We might align this perspective with postmodernism.

[17] The relevant theological term is God's "aseity." He does not require anything outside Godself. By contrast, the existence of our universe is "contingent." There is no need for it to exist.

[18] Richard Rorty would be the key figure in pragmatic realism. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University, 1979).

[19] Deductive reasoning begins with certain assumptions or "premises" and then uses the rules of logic to proceed to a valid conclusion. Inductive reasoning, as we will see, stands at the heart of the scientific method. In inductive reasoning, we begin with the observations of data in the external world and then infer various hypotheses to account for that data, patterns, inferences. Deductive thinking has been likened to an upside down V, starting with assumptions and broadening out to conclusions. Inductive thinking is like a right side up V, starting with data and inferring hypotheses from there.

[20] Kierkegaard did not use this exact phrase, but it captures his sense of the absurdity (and yet validity) of religious belief in Fear and Trembling (1843).

10. Adventures in the King James Version

Back in January, I started once again to try to capture my hermeneutical journey. Reviewing what I wrote so far, I feel like it's turned out pretty well. I think I might now continue plugging through this journey on Mondays.

Thus far:

1. The Memory Verse Approach

2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry

3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law
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1. As I've mentioned, I grew up reading the King James Version. It didn't seem too hard to understand, although in retrospect I'm sure I would have understood a great deal more if I had been reading something like the New Living Translation (NLT) or The Message. Of course they didn't exist at the time. 

The main alternatives in my youngest years were the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the Good News Bible New Testament (GNB). In the late 70s, the full New International Version (NIV) came out. 

The RSV was in a different social plane from mine -- Methodists and higher church folk. I wasn't exposed to it until seminary. It was the version used at Asbury Seminary when I went there in 1984. My grandfather Schenck so despised th GNB that he used it to even out his bed, I heard.

When the NIV came out, a friend of my family pitched it to the morning Bible study (it might have been a special afternoon meeting) at Frankfort Camp Meeting. Paul Sebree had gone to Frankfort with my mother. My dad returned from the session a bit disgruntled. In typical fashion, Sebree had suggested parents were putting their children's souls in danger to have them read the King James when something so much more understandable was available.

I believe my parents gave me my Thompson Chain Reference KJV as a high school graduation present in 1984. I took it to college and tried to read a chapter a day. It was fairly easy going until I would get to Exodus 21. Then what was obscure legislation commenced, cubits and all. The prophets were also tough sleding for me since I didn't know much about the context. I would read until I got to a verse quoted in the New Testament and then, suddenly, Jesus was there in a verse. Then it returned to the incomprehensible.

When I got to Exodus 21, I would often lapse in my daily reading for some time until I managed to push through Leviticus. I do believe I was attention deficit, although I was never diagnosed. It was excruciatingly difficult to hold my attention. I didn't discover the focusing effect of coffee until England, unfortunately. 

In retrospect, Dr. Sebree probably had a point about the NIV, although he presented his case abrasively, as was his style, as I recall.

2. I remained a KJV advocate in college. My mother began to feed me resources, as she increasingly came under the spell of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale and its radio station. (Those were also the days of the rise of the Christian bookstore.) One was Edward F. Hills' The King James Version Defended. I also had a copy of Ted Letis' compilation on the Majority Text when it came out in 87.

This was the first of an unfortunate pattern where my mother would feed me fundamentalist literature that I was eager to receive but that eventually I came to conclude was not correct. She thought I was rebelling, but that was not the case. I remained uncertain for some time about many of these things. But eventually, you have to make up your mind.

I also didn't have a guide into this literature. I have often wished that I could go back in time and explain what I was trying to read to myself. I was recently complimented for having a gift at taking difficult concepts and being able to break them down so that they are more understandable to the uninitiated. I will take that compliment for it is born of the difficulty of trying to grasp so many hard things myself.

In my final year at Central Wesleyan College, Dr. Bob Black came. I think he was hands down the best professor I had at CWC, although I loved them all. I had him for the whole year for church history. In the fall of 1986, I wrote my final paper arguing for the corruption of the manuscripts (the handwritten copies) behind modern versions of the Bible.

3. I probably should take a moment to explain. We do not have any of the original copies of the Bible. All we have are copies of copies of copies. The oldest copies of New Testament books go back to the 100s and there aren't many of them, and none of them are the whole New Testament. The oldest copies of the Old Testament go back to the 100s BC.

This is nothing to worry about, in my opinion. Everything we know suggests that the manuscripts we have are pretty reliable. There are variations among these manuscripts -- handwritten copies, but they leave us with a relatively small degree of uncertainty. No doctrine is in danger (although the KJV of 1 John 5:8 would help a lot with the Trinity if it were original).

The majority of manuscripts date to the Middle Ages, AD900 and later. These all tend to read similarly and support the Greek behind the KJV. The Greek text behind the KJV is sometimes called the "textus receptus" or the "received text." Sometimes this tradition is also called the Majority Text because most manuscripts read this way. [1]

Case closed? Probably not.

The reason is that the oldest manuscripts tend to read a little differently than these medieval manuscripts. The reason modern versions of the Bible tend to agree against the KJV text is because most of them follow the older manuscripts. There's a famous rule of "textual criticism," which is the science of trying to determine what the original text said. The rule goes like this: "Manuscripts must be weighed, not counted." More on all this in a moment. 

4. My thesis in Dr. Black's class was creative. The pro-KJV crowd likes to blame modern versions on two manuscripts from the 300s, "Codex Sinaiticus" and "Codex Vaticanus." [2] To be fair, Bishop B. F. Westcott and Fenton Hort in the late 1800s had effected a revolution in the text of the New Testament using these two manuscripts at the center of their arguments. I had read somewhere that these two manuscripts might have been part of an initiative by Eusebius under Constantine's charge to have 50 copies of the Bible made.

Here comes the creativity. Eusebius and Constantine argued for a compromise position on the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea in AD325. (By the way, this month and year is the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea) They suggested that perhaps Christ was of a similar substance (homoiousios) to God the Father, while the orthodox position would end up being that he is of the same substance (homoousios).

So, argued I, these "heretics" were behind Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Therefore, they were bad manuscripts. Therefore, modern versions of the Bible are bad. Brilliant!

I received an ever so kind note from Dr. Black on my paper. The problem with my argument is that the overwhelming majority of the variants in the manuscripts have nothing to do with theology (and absolutely nothing to do with the homoousios/homoiousios debate). The vast majority of variations are actually pretty mundane, like spelling errors or omissions because of eye skips. I had made a clever argument. Just not a good one...

[1] There is technically a difference between the Majority Text and the Textus Receptus. The story of the Greek text of the Textus Receptus is a fun one involving some clever entrepreneurship. This is specifically the text that was used in 1611 to create the KJV New Testament. 

Although they are very similar in content, the concept of the Majority Text distances the debate from the historical particularities of the KJV story. More or less, the idea is that the majority of manuscripts have always been right. All we need do is count them, and we will know the text of the Bible that God chose to preserve. This sounds compelling at first, although I'll argue that, in the end, it just doesn't seem to be the same as the original text.

[2] A codex is a book form. Prior to this point in history, books tended to be on scrolls. However, it can be argued that the desire to have all the books of the Bible together caused a movement toward the book format.

Through the Bible -- Mark 4:35-5:43

Previous chapters of Mark at bottom.
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1. The end of Mark 4 and Mark 5 happen around the Sea of Galilee. After the Parable of the Sower, which also happens by the sea, Jesus and his disciples set out on the lake in a boat. Archaeological remains suggest this would have been a relatively small boat of about 27 feet length, 7.5 feet width, and a little more than 4 feet high.

The "Sea" of Galilee itself is only about 8 miles wide at its widest point in the center. Most of the places Jesus would have traveled would have been more like 5-6 miles wide, and the traditional location of the scene at the beginning of Mark 5 (Kursi) was about 5-6 miles across the lake. It would have been about an hour and a half to two hour journey depending on the winds.

At the end of Mark 4, the disciples find themselves in a wind storm on the sea. If you look at the picture to the right, you can imagine how terrifying it would be for the seas to get rough in a storm in such a boat. The sides were only a little more than 4 feet high and water was coming in.

Jesus sleeps. He was fully human. No doubt his ministry was physically exhausting even though he was perhaps only 30 years old. The disciples think he is crazy to sleep through the storm. They awaken him. "Don't you care that we are going to die?!"

Nonchalantly, Jesus rebukes the storm. The wind stops. The lake becomes calm. He rebukes them for their lack of faith, fitting with the "dullness of the disciples" theme in Mark.

Meanwhile, they are shocked. Jesus can not only heal. He cannot only cast out demons. But Jesus has authority over physics as well. Of course, they would not have divided the world up the way we do. We might put miracles relating to the laws of nature in a completely different category than exorcism. But we note that the Gospels point to such abilities on Jesus' part.

2. The story in Mark 5:1-20 is one of the more bizarre in the Gospels. They reach shore in the land of the Gerasenes, perhaps about halfway down the east side of the lake. [1] As they disembark, they are greeted by a man who turns out to have not just one but a legion of unclean spirits.

He stays near tombs. He has extraordinary strength, as is often reported of those who are possessed. He is often crying out, often hurting himself. He is outside of human society. He abides in a liminal zone that is outside the boundaries of human existence.

The demons recognize Jesus. They know him as the Son of the Most High God (5:7), and the possessed man bows before Jesus as before his king. [2] Jesus commands the demons to come out, and they beg Jesus not to torture them. 

Jesus asks their name -- possibly a reflection of the fact that Jesus did not function with his omniscience while he was on earth. After all, Jesus will say in Mark 13:32 that he does not know the hour of his return. In short, the Gospel of Mark does not present Jesus as omniscient on earth. [3]

The demons' name is "Legion" because they are many. In a military context, a legion consisted of as many as 5000 men. The text indicates 2000 pigs received the demons (5:13). The demons beg Jesus to go into the pigs, a request that he grants. The pigs then rush down into the sea and drown.

The fact that there are pigs there indicates that they are not in Israel. The Jewish Law of course prohibited the consumption of pigs. The loss of such pig life might not have been of great concern for a Jew. But of course for the pig owners, this represented a huge financial loss, and they beg Jesus to leave their country. They are understandably afraid as well (5:15).

However, it is a fantastic development for the possessed man. Previously naked, now he is wearing clothes. He is now in his right mind. He wants to go with Jesus. But Jesus bids him to stay and be a witness to Yahweh to his people. As a result, he spreads the word about Jesus throughout his land. In a sense, he is the first Gentile (non-Jewish) missionary in the New Testament.

3. The final scene of Mark 5 is what we might call a "sandwich" construction, more technically called an intercalation. The "bread" of the sandwich is the story of the healing of the daughter of a synagogue ruler named Jairus. These verses (5:21-43) begin and end with the story of Jairus.

In the middle is the story of the woman with a blood flow. It is the "meat" or the "peanut butter and jelly" in the sandwhich. This intercalation structure brings two stories together in a way that they inform each other. We will see the structure later with the story of the fig tree (the bread) and Jesus' action in the temple (the meat). So the story of Jairus begins. Then "we interrupt this story for the story of a woman with a hemorrhage." Then "we resume the story of Jairus still in progress."

The story of Jairus is the first time that Jesus raises someone from the dead. Jairus leaves his dying daughter at home to find Jesus. He has faith that Jesus can heal his daughter. Jesus is his last hope. He finds Jesus and falls at his feet, begging him to come heal her.

The story is of course interrupted by the story of the woman with a blood flow. Doctors had been of no use to her for years. They had only brought her torment with their treatments.

Like Jairus, she also has faith in Jesus. She thinks that she will be healed if she can only touch him. She manages to touch his clothing. She is immediately healed.

Again, Jesus did not seem to be aware of her presence until she touches him. He feels a power go out from him. Interestingly, it only took her faith for her to be healed. Jesus does not have to say or think anything for it to happen. Her faith is sufficient. Yet, at the same time, we are told that a power goes out from him.

He asks who touched him. His disciples think he's crazy. He's being mobbed, after all. But the woman identifies herself, and Jesus indicates that it is her faith that has made her whole once again.

4. Then the story returns to Jairus. A healing to a woman is about to take place here as well. They were on their way to Jairus' house when some from his house meet them. They inform Jairus that his daughter has died. They suggest he need no longer bother the rabbi Jesus.

But Jesus tells Jairus to have faith and not to fear. The quelling of fear, by the way, has been a continual theme throughout these verses today. When they arrive, Jesus tells the wailing group that the girl is only sleeping. Wailing was presumably part of the mourning ritual, although no doubt they were sad. They mock him for saying she was only sleeping. 

Jesus enters her room with only the parents and his core disciples Peter, James, and John. In Aramaic, he tells the girl, "Talitha cumi" or "Girl, arise." The twelve year old girl immediately arises. Jesus tells them to give her something to eat.

Jesus tells them not to tell anyone what has just happened -- part of the messianic secret theme in Mark. Although often the people he tells this do not listen, in this case, we have no reason in the text to think that they disobeyed him. Presumably the story was told by Peter and the others later.

Although it is not a primary argument, the fact that Mark has more Aramaic in it than the other Gospels is often seen as a supporting argument for it being the earliest Gospels. It also supports the majority view that Aramaic was Jesus' primary if not exclusively language spoken during his earthly ministry. 

 [1] The traditional site is a place called Kursi today. The oldest and best manuscripts read "Gerasenes" in Mark and Luke but "Gadarenes" in Matthew. Both Gerasa and Gadara were too far inland to be the precise location of the event, but both accurately depict the same region. "Gergesa" would have been more precise, and some later manuscripts have it, but it is not the most likely reading of the original of any of the Gospels.

[2] Although it is a point of debate, to "proskyneo" before someone could refer to a range of activities. In the hindsight of Christian theology, we immediately jump to the concept of worship. But you also proskyneo-ed before a king, and the expression "Son of God" was a royal title. I suspect that in Mark's audience's mind, bowing before a king comes closer to the original connotation here.

[3] To harmonize our theology with the biblical texts, I have suggested that Jesus did not access his omniscience while he was on earth. It would be mildly heretical to suggest he emptied himself of his omniscience, since orthodox theology holds that the divine attributes of the Trinity are immutable. So, I have suggested a willful bracketing of divine prerogatives like omniscience. You might say that he kept his omniscience in a divine subconscious while he was on earth. 

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Mark 1:1-13
Mark 1:14-15 
Mark 1:16-45
Mark 2
Mark 3
Mark 4:1-34

Mark 11:1-11 (Palm Sunday)
Mark 11:12-25 (Temple Monday)
Mark 11:26-12:44 (Debate Tuesday)
Mark 13 (Temple Prediction)
Mark 14:1-52 (Last Supper)
Mark 14:53-15:47 (Good Friday)

Mark 16 (The Resurrection) 

7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)

Epistemology cont.
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For Locke, we are born with a blank slate, a "tabula rasa." [4] Our lives are basically the constant input of source material into our minds. Experience writes on the whiteboard of our minds, and we know stuff.

In the 1600s and 1700s, the rationalists and the empiricists vied with each other for prominence. On the rationalist team, you had Descartes, Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). On the empiricist team, you had Locke, George Berkeley (1685-1753), and David Hume (1711-76).

David Hume would prompt the next step in the debate. Hume was the empiricist to end all empiricists. He noted that Locke and others were sneaking in some patterns that weren't actually part of experience. [5] For example, I can experience the moment when a fist starts coming toward me. I can experience all the individual moments as the fist comes toward my face. I can experience the fist hitting my face and the pain that accompanies it.

However, Hume argued that I cannot experience the law of cause and effect that, in my mind, connects that fist with my head lurching backward. (I am making up the fist example. His example was a billiard ball.) In fact, he would argue that I cannot experience time itself -- I only experience an individual succession of moments. 

He was also known for what we call the fact-value problem. I can experience the fact of pain because you hit me. But I can't experience that it is wrong for you to hit me. There is a distinction between the fact that murder or someone stealing something from you or your spouse cheating on you is painful, on the one hand, and the claim that those actions are wrong. Hume argued that you cannot experience the value. You can only experience the fact.

The Kantian Synthesis
5. Enter the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He would say that Hume woke him from his "dogmatic slumber." [6] Before he engaged Hume's thoughts on causation, he leaned to the rationalist side of the debate. But Hume would spark perhaps the biggest paradigm shift in philosophical history.

Kant proposed a synthesis of empiricism and rationalism. My mind clearly organizes the inputs of my senses. I experience individual moments; my mind stitches them together into a sequence in time or into a cause-effect relationship. I only experience the moments. My mind shapes them into an order.

Similarly, I only experience someone taking my stuff. It is my mind that puts the valuation on the event as "wrong." My mind connects "facts" with "values."

I like to think of what Kant was saying as something like typing into a laptop. Right now, I am entering content into a computer. There is a box on the screen. I cannot enter letters outside the box. There are rules to the box. For example, the box won't make me coffee or breakfast. The software organizes the inputs I am making in certain predictable ways.

Similarly, our senses input experiences into our minds, but there are rules to the ways our minds organize that content. Our minds organize our experience into frameworks like cause and effect, space and time, and right and wrong. Kant believed in God, and he believed in the reliability of that organization. So he was not proposing uncertainty. He trusted that God had created reliable "software."

The bottom line is that Kant suggested that the content of our minds comes through our senses, but the organization of that content came through our minds because of certain "a priori" categories God had put in our minds. A priori means "from before." It means that the categories were already there before we began. The categories are "innate" or "inborn."

One consequence of this approach is that, ultimately, it means we do not experience the world as it is. We only experience it as our minds organize it. This shift to our minds as the organizers of reality was the seismic shift in philosophy I was mentioning before. If Descartes led us to focus on our role as knowers (versus simply assuming that the world was more or less as we see it), Kant would imprison us somewhat in our heads, ultimately opening the door up for postmodernism later. [7]

We cannot know, Kant would say, das Ding an sich, "the thing in itself." We only know it as it appears to us, as our minds organize it. If metaphysics is the study of reality, Kant put a significant footnote on it. He would write a book titled, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. [8] Because we cannot know "things in themselves," it puts a huge damper on the study of such things.

For example, there is a debate in philosophy over whether the world is made of matter (materialism) or ideas (idealism). George Berkeley (1685-1753) wondered if we were all ideas in the mind of God. It's a fun thought experiment. But how would we tell the difference? We do not experience the world as it is. We experience it as we experience it, and our experience of the world is the same no matter what it is made of, whether that underlying substance is something called matter or something called ideas.

A Framework of Understanding
6. Kant's revolution did not end the epistemological debate, which continues to this day. But I have found him to provide a useful starting framework for a working model of how we know things. That framework is that our "knowledge" is a combination of inputs and their organization in our minds. There is far more shaping of the world by our minds than we might like to admit. What we see is not exactly what we get.

For example, psychology has concluded that our brains come to our senses with certain expectations -- certain predictions of what we are going to experience. Far from a blank slate, our minds start with a sketch already in place of what we think we are going to see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Our unthinking bias is to see it -- even if it is not there. Our senses can modify those expectations, but our minds save work by coming to the world with certain predictions of what we are going to see. [9] Our bias is to see them.

The raw inputs of our senses are indispensable, but their role in shaping our understanding is often dwarfed by the interpretive work of our minds. They are incredibly significant, but they can be swallowed up by our mind machine. If we cannot be sure to know the world as it actually is, our goal is to organize the data of the world in our mind in as "useful" a way as possible, meaning that our interpretations account for as much of the "data" of the world as possible in as "elegant" a way as possible.

Let's say that the world is a picture, but all we can perceive of that picture is a selection of dots. Depending on the size of our canvas, we can potentially draw an infinite number of pictures out of those dots because we can draw as much and as far as we want outside the dots. This is the "elegant" criteria. The most justifiable picture will stick closely to the dots. Similarly, the more dots we have, the better chance we have of a representation that corresponds to the reality we are trying to perceive.

There are two related philosophies here. Both are realist. That is to say, both affirm (by faith) that the world outside ourselves and our human communities is real. Both reject what might be called "naive realism," which simply assumes that we see the world as it is. Critical realism is more optimistic about our ability to discern a truthful underlying structure to the reality we perceive. Pragmatic realism more or less says that such metaphysical questions are a diversion. We may as well treat our interpretations as heuristic devices meant to help us make our way through the world.

The pragmatic approach is the ultimate fall back. [11] The constructions that are organized by our minds are most useful if they account for as much data as possible in as elegant a way as possible. To summarize something that Einstein once said, "That explanation is best which is the simplest without being too simple." [12] 

If we wish to call ourselves critical realists, as the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright has explored, [13] we might say 1) the world beyond ourselves is real, 2) our perception of that world is finite and fallen, inevitably skewing our perceptions, although we can approximate accurate knowledge. Here the classic tests for truth are incredibly useful. The correspondence test asks whether the data of the world corresponds well to the theories we construct to account for it. The coherence test asks whether our interpretations of the world are internally coherent. Inner contradiction is taken as a sign of a defective theory.

External Impressions
7. Our unattainable goal is objectivity -- to see the world as it is more than as what it appears to us -- we face an impossible battle. However, I would argue that it is a useful battle -- far more useful in fact than throwing the goal out the window. Some interpretations fit the data better than others. Some interpretations are more elegant than others. We commit ourselves to be "honest" with the lay of the evidence even though we are allowed to take positions by faith as well. [14]

We might think of the inputs of our senses -- from outside us -- as data points. Undoubtedly, some of those data points are real and others are a mirage. But perception is reality -- or at least it is a reality. If our minds perceive some input to be factual, then it is factual as far as our minds are concerned. We do not make decisions or formulate understandings based on the way the world actually is but on the way that we perceive it. 

The quest for objectivity thus requires us to police our data. For example, our internal "paradigms" are naturally selective. We choose some data and exclude others. We find some data more significant than others. The world looks much different if you are only looking at part of the data.

Here the work of Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is incredibly helpful. [15] Our normal operating procedure is to process the data of the world from within certain frameworks or paradigms. These paradigms select certain data as significant and other data as less significant or ignored. I like to call the data that a paradigm ignores "naughty data." These are data points that are anomalous in our paradigm. We like to ignore them. We come up with "ingenious" explanations for them that are ultimately truth-avoiding.

This anomalous data, Kuhn argued, are the seeds of paradigm shifts. He argued that we should not see these shifts as some inevitabe progression toward the truth. Sometimes, a shift is just different from the paradigm before it. There is no inevitable progress of science. Sometimes, we are just rearranging the data rather than improving our interpretation of it in some objective way.

There is thus a social dimension to science. There is peer pressure. There is the herd mentality we have mentioned so often even in science. Extroverted, inspirational, charismatic figures can lead science in a particular direction just as in politics or any other domain of knowledge. We would like to think that this is less the case in science, but inasmuch as humans are involved, it is still a factor. [16]

These frameworks are part of our cultures. We absorb them unthinkingly as children and as we grow up. The more foundational they are for our personhood, the more we resist the naughty data, the harder we fight to keep our paradigms in place. Kuhn explored how resistant "normal science" is to fundamental paradigm shifts. 

But, eventually, the older scientists die off. Einstein never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, but he is no longer here to fight against it. Younger scientists may go for a new paradigm. [17] They may initially be denied jobs. They may have to keep their views somewhat quiet at first. But if they eventually acquire enough power in the guild, they may have the opportunity to bring about a paradigm shift...

[5] Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

[6] Kant, Critque of Pure Reason.

[7] Kant himself did not see this as imprisonment. His trust that God would not lie to us meant that he believed our minds accurately organized reality.

[8] Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.

[9] For an accessible introduction to this "predictive modeling" that our brains do, see especially Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University, 2016). The initial work was done by Karl Friston. See especially now Friston, Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior (MIT, 2022). For a fun example, watch this video.

[10] This, by the way, is a fundamental tenet of Protestantism. The understanding of any visible church is always susceptible to reform (semper reformanda, "always needing to be reformed").

[11] In all that follows, my ultimate justification is that logic, realism, and the classical tests for truth "work" incredibly well when used scrupulously. That is to say, they meet the pragmatic test for truth. We thus need not fall into the abyss of skepticism or extreme versions of postmodernism. I consider Richard Rorty (1931-2007) to be the king of pragmatic realism. Cf. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University, 1979).

[12] The actual quote that comes closest was from a 1933 lecture "On the Method of Theoretical Physics": "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience."

[13] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992).

[14] A key problem with a lot of human argument is that we act like we are trying to be objective when in fact we are taking a position by faith. It is acceptable to take a position by faith, but let's be honest about it.  

[15] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1996).

[16] The main voice here was Paul Feyerabend (1924-94), Against Method (New Left, 1975). We might also note the words of that song from the musical Wicked: "Popular, I know about popular... Celebrated heads of state or really great communicators -- did they have brains or knowledge? Don't make me laugh. They were popular!"

[17] I don't mean to suggest that new paradigms are always a matter for the young or old paradigms always for the old, but you get the picture.

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Previously,
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes 
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)

Science and Scripture 1: Relationships between Science and Faith

In the fall, I teach a course for Houghton that I designed while I was there, called Science and Scripture. The course was originally taught 15 years ago or so by Carl Schultz, a legendary Houghton professor who passed away three years ago. My impression is that the man was a genius, the kind of professor that once gave Houghton its reputation as the Wheaton or Harvard of the Wesleyan Church. 

I've had as a long term goal to traditionally publish a book to go along with the course, although a popular self-published version might actually be more helpful to the church. But a pop version couldn't be used for the class, or at least I couldn't require students to buy it. In any case, in anticipation of teaching the course this fall, I thought I would dedicate my writing time on Tuesday mornings this summer to such a book or -- at the very least -- to creating some reading material for the course. This would replace Ian Barbour's book, When Science Meets Religion.

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Four Views
Over the years, Christians have exhibited several different attitudes toward science. Galileo in the 1600s came into significant conflict with the Roman Catholic Church over whether the sun went around the earth or vice versa. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, we saw strongly negative reactions among some Christians toward the theory of evolution -- convictions which continue unto this day. 

Yet there are also many Christians who see no contradiction whatsoever between their faith and mainstream science. Still others believe in both but aren't quite sure how to fit the two together. They may worship on Sunday and work as a scientist the rest of the week without a good sense of how to reconcile their two identities together.

Various models for the possible relationships between science and faith have been suggested. John F. Haught once suggested four: 1) conflict, 2) contrast, 3) contact, and 4) confirmation. [1] Those who see conflict are those like the atheist Richard Dawkins who sees no possible compatibility between science and Christian faith. [2] Meanwhile, Francis Collins would be an example of someone who sees no contradiction at all between mainstream science and his faith -- "confirmation." [3]

The "contrast" position sees science and faith as complementary or, as Ian Barbour has put it, "independent." [4] From this perspective, science and faith are just doing different things. Stephen Jay Gould says they are "non-overlapping magisteria." [5] By this he means that they are distinct and separate frameworks that each work in their own domains.

Haught's third category, "contact," is a little harder to describe. In some ways, it seems to combine elements from the other three. It would say that, at some points, science and faith are independent of each other (contrast). Nevertheless, they come into contact in various ways. For example, the study of the universe (cosmology) takes us back to the earliest moments of the universe, but it reaches a boundary. It does not ask why the universe exists. That is a question for philosophy and religion.

In that sense, science and faith "hand off" the conversation to one another. Religion says, "in the beginning God" and then hands off the conversation to science to speak of cosmic expansion from a singularity. [6] Coming at it from the opposite side, science gets us back to the moment of creation and then lets religion and philosophy continue the discussion of first causes and such.

If we apply these four categories to Scripture, we have four broad options for how a particular passage of the Bible might relate to mainstream science. It might seem to conflict. It might seem to integrate or overlap well. Scripture might simply relate to something completely different from science. Or they might be distinct but in continuity with each other. Let's call these four options conflict, agreement, independence, and continuity.

[textbox: Science and Scripture
Conflict -- when science and Scripture seem to conflict with each other
Agreement -- when science and Scripture seem to overlap in agreement
Independence -- when science and Scripture are addressing distinctly different questions
Continuity -- when science and Scripture connect with each other on a topic while addressing different aspects of it]

Perception vs. Reality
A key factor in such discussions is the difference between our perceptions of how science and faith relate and how they might actually relate. For example, I may think that Scripture is in conflict with science when I am misinterpreting Scripture. Similarly, the young earth creationist Ken Ham believes that his faith is in complete harmony with true science, but he is in strong conflict with mainstream science. [7]

Here we run into a serious philosophical problem: how do we know what the right interpretation of Scripture is and how do we know what the real science is? In philosophy, we call these problems of epistemology, where epistemology is the branch of philosophy that asks how I can know that I know what I think I know. Related is the branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, which asks what the ultimate nature of reality is.

Throughout this book, we will largely adopt a perspective known as critical realism. Critical realism assumes that the world is real and that we can indeed know truths about it. However, our views are susceptible to significant skew because we are finite and do not have all the data. Similarly, we are hindered by faulty reasoning and the fact that we are "stuck in our heads," unable to fully overcome our biases and unexamined assumptions. From a theological perspective, you might say that our minds are "fallen" and subject to Sin.

We must accept, then, that our sense of whether science and faith are in conflict to a large extent is a matter of our perception -- as is any sense that they are in agreement. We may similarly think they are independent when in fact they should be in continuity or agreement. As we mentioned above, young earth creationists generally think that their perspective is integrated with science, but others would see them as quintessential examples of science and faith in conflict.

Throughout our conversation, we will try to navigate this tension between our perceptions of Scripture and the current understanding of science. Is Genesis 1-3 in conflict with the prevailing scientific theory of evolution? Many would assume it is on the basis of their understanding of Genesis 1-3. Yet we should keep in mind that there is more than one interpretation of Genesis 1-3. Some interpretations of Genesis 1-3 are either in continuity with the theory of evolution or independent of it.

Similarly, science is not static. Thomas Kuhn's celebrated work on paradigm shifts in science reminds us that the prevailing models of the moment may not be those of tomorrow. [8] Newtonian physics as a paradigm was unquestioned coming into the twentieth century before Einstein and the quantum revolution completely reframed it. In the year 1400, everyone assumed that the sun went around the earth. We are not making light of evolution as a theory to say that it is ever-revisable for this is the very nature of science.

The question of science and faith is thus an ongoing conversation. They are distinct domains that frequently come into contact in various ways. At first, they may seem to conflict where once they seemed in agreement. Often, they are simply doing different things. Sometimes, one takes over where the other one left off.

However, we will assume that "all truth is God's truth," meaning that no truth ultimately is in conflict with God. [9] If we perceive science and faith to be in conflict, then our understanding of one, the other, or both needs modification. We will assume that God's thought does not contradict itself and that true faith and true science are thus in harmony with each other.

These are all assumptions. While they may seem reasonable enough, they probably bear some justification. Accordingly, the next section goes into a little more detail on our three key philosophical assumptions: 1) God and the world are "real," 2) our perception of God and the world is finite and skewed, and 3) properly understood, truth in all domains cohere with each other. If these claims seem acceptable to you, you are welcome to skip to the final two sections of the chapter.

Note that the intended audience of this book consists of theists, individuals who believe God exists objectively apart from humanity and that God remains involved with the world. Certainly we will engage non-theist perspectives -- hopefully fairly and as objectively as possible. Nevertheless, the point of view assumed at the outset is a faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum).

Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth

The Nature of Faith

The Nature of Science

[1] Cf. John F. Haught, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (Paulist, 1995).

[2] For example, Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Mariner, 2008). 

[3] Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free, 2007).

[4] Ian G. Barbour, When Science Meets Religion: Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? (HarperOne, 2000), 17-22.

[5] Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (Ballantine, 2002).

[6] Barbour calls this category, "dialog" in Science Meets Religion, 23-27.

[7]  Cf. the well-known website answersingenesis.com.  

[8] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 4th ed. (University of Chicago, 2012).

[9] This expression comes from Arthur F. Holmes' 1977 book of the same name with InterVarsity Press. 

Through the Bible -- Mark 4:1-34

Previous chapters of Mark at bottom.
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1. In the Gospel of Mark up to this point, Jesus has healed. He has cast out demons. He has called disciples. We know that he has preached about the kingdom of God. But it is not really until Mark 4 that we get our first real excerpt of his teaching.

In Mark 4:33-34, we are told that Jesus routinely taught in parables -- or riddles, you might say. You may have heard at some point that parables were stories that made Jesus' point clearer. There was once a book on preaching titled, Learning to Preach Like Jesus whose premise was that the point of your preaching can be clearer if you use stories. [1]

But that is not the sense we get from Mark 4. After Jesus gives this "parable of the sower," he indicates that the purpose of the parables was to filter out those who "have ears to hear" (4:9) from those who do not. They were riddles of a sort. Jesus anticipates that, to those outside the kingdom, his riddles will be heard but not understood (4:12). Although they will see Jesus, they will not perceive him to be who he is.

Ironically, the disciples do not understand the meaning of the Parable of the Sower, whose point is that only those with ears to hear will understand. Jesus remarks, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any of my parables?" (4:13). They apparently do not have ears to hear.

Here is a second major theme of the Gospel of Mark. One theme is the "messianic secret," which refers to Jesus' consistent practice of veiling his true identity as Messiah. A second theme is the dullness of the disciples, their difficulty in understanding the nature of Jesus' mission and his core message. I have sometimes summarized this theme as "the disciples don't get it."

Yet the disciples are in a different category than the outsiders. Jesus will unveil the meaning of the parables for them. "To you has been given the secrets of the kingdom of God" (4:11).

Mark 4:34 says that Jesus didn't open his mouth without a parable -- an obvious hyperbole. But it is clear that parables were Jesus' main mode of teaching. When we then read the Gospel of John, we are immediately struck by the fact that there is not a single parable of Mark's type in it. It alerts us that the Gospel of John is not so much a literal, historical presentation of Jesus as a symbolic, theological one.

2. Jesus delivers the Parable of the Sower by the Sea of Galilee (4:1). The sea remains a centering feature of these chapters. Again, because the crowd is so large, Jesus teaches from a boat slightly off shore.

In the Parable of the Sower, seed is scattered everywhere. Jesus pictures four different types of soil in particular. There is the path. There is rocky "soil." There is soil where thorns are also present. Finally, there is good soil.

These four types of soil are a kind of allegory for how the word of God plays out among those who receive it. [2] For some people, the word of the good news goes in one ear and out the other. They are like spiritual Teflon -- nothing sticks. They might not have even heard you. They have no interest in the things of God or at least the true things of God. They are like seed spread on a path that the birds immediately eat. Satan snatches the word right out of their ears.

There is another kind of soil that is rocky. Because the seed cannot get any deep root, it springs up immediately but just as quickly withers in the sun. These are the shallow Christians, the "fair-weather" Christians. When the faith gets hard, when it demands something of you that makes you uncomfortable or requires you to sacrifice something, you're out of here.

These are also those who like Christian faith when it fits their culture. This can take place on either side. There is the sugar daddy Jesus who gives you everything you want and doesn't require any changes to your life. But there is also the political, militant Jesus who doesn't require you to change your tribal thinking or desire to squash those who are different. These are the cultural Christians who say they find Christianity attractive even though they don't believe in God, but what they find attractive is a skewed version of Christianity without Jesus.

The third soil has thorns alongside the wheat. It eventually chokes out the faith. This can be the cares of the world -- how can I feed my family. But it can also be the abundance of the world -- Mark singles our riches as well (4:19), The world takes over in this person's heart. Perhaps they go through the motions of faith but their heart is no longer in it.

Finally, there is good soil. It takes root. It goes deep. It doesn't wither with correction or persecution. It keeps looking to Jesus even though the cares of the world might try to crowd him out. It reproduces and bears fruit manyfold. 

3. We get to hear these interpretations because the disciples do not understand what Jesus is saying without Jesus' interpretation. But Jesus is willing to give it to those who seek it. I have heard individuals use this parable as an argument for predestination -- you are predestined to be a certain kind of soil. 

However, note that the disciples get to understand. They are not good soil initially, but they take the first step. They ask for Jesus to explain. And so there can be movement from bird food to good soil. Lord, help us to see what we do not see.

4. Mark has probably taken some loose sayings of Jesus and put them here alongside the Parable of the Seeds. We should not find this a problem as it wasn't a problem in Mark's day. Many have a strange expectation that we almost need to be looking at a videotape of Jesus. But Mark's concern was likely to include as much of Jesus' teaching as he could practically fit in an orderly way rather than to give us a blow-by-blow of the order in which things happened. Matthew 13 will expand these parables even further.

Mark gives us three additional parables alongside the Parable of the Sower, a fitting place to put them. First is the parable of the lamp and the bushel basket. You don't put a lamp under a basket because the purpose of the lamp is to give light. And the things you try to hide will eventually come to light (4:22). If the sequence of thought seems a little unclear, it could be because Mark is collecting a few of Jesus' different sayings into one place.

What I mean is that Jesus' sayings likely circulated only by word of mouth for decades. That doesn't mean that they got all messed up like the telephone game -- that's a bad representation of the process. In the telephone game, you whisper something around the room and then see how messed up the message is by the time it gets to the last person. The person who whispered the original message says what it was in comparison to how it gets mangled going around the room.

But in the first century, the message was not whispered, it was preached publicly. Like the end of the telephone game, the first disciples were still "in the room" for decades to correct any inaccuracies in the message. Further, recent studies have shown that the core of oral tradition is usually quite persistent, although the details often vary on the edges. [3] This is exactly what we find in the Gospel traditions.

So it seems likely that Mark has placed some individual oral sayings of Jesus here and there as seemed appropriate. When the train of thought is unclear, that could be a sign of a collection of sayings (e.g., Mark 9:49-50). Of course, it could simply be our (or my) problem of not realizing how the train of thought actually goes. In the end, each statement is true one way or another.

5. One of those sayings preserved here in Mark 4 is that God gives more to the one who has, and takes away from the person who doesn't have (4:25). The measure you give is the measure you get (4:24). If you give more, you get more. These are riddles which, unfortunately, have been twisted in unhelpful directions.

For example, some might take these to say that you will automatically prosper materially the more you give to others. Others have taken these saying as a kind of divine blessing on the rich and curse upon the poor. The poor should have everything taken away, and the rich are those whom God likes. These are self-indulgent interpretations (me, me, me) rather than interpretations with the spirit of Jesus.

The key is not to think of what one "has" in terms of possessions but in terms of faith. When one has faith, more will be given. Also, 4:24 speaks of giving as the key to "getting more," but the more one gets is not money or possessions but divine favor.

6. The parables of the growing seed and the mustard seed are similar in meaning. You can't always see growth in the short term. It seems to happen when you're not even looking. Then suddenly it is there blossoming. The mustard tree is one of the biggest bushes known in Israel, yet it starts out so small to begin with. 

Such is the kingdom of God. You do not always perceive how God is growing it. Yet, suddenly, it is time for the harvest or suddenly, it has grown so much that the birds nest in its shade. No doubt at times the growth of the kingdom did not seem great at first. As we can infer from what Paul says in Romans 9-11, Israel did not seem to embrace Jesus as its Messiah. 

But God's kingdom was growing nonetheless, even if it was not always apparent. The time for harvest would come before you knew it. Then Christ would reign and all would be right.

[1] Ralph Lewis and Greg Lewis, Learning to Preach Like Jesus (Crossway, 1989).

[2] In the late eighteen hundreds, the German scholar Adolf Jülicher suggested that Jesus wouldn't have used allegory (Die Gleichnisreden Jesu). He argued that any allegories in the Gospels were later additions by the church and that Jesus' original parables would have only had a single point.

I think he meant well, but my reaction has always been, "Who says?" Silly German categorizers with anti-Catholic biases. If Jesus wants to use an allegory, he can use an allegory. You and your silly rules.

[3] The work of Kenneth Bailey has been very helpful here, although there are perhaps some extremes to his work (e.g., his chiastic interpretation of 1 Corinthians). For an excellent yet measured presentation of these basic insights, see James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Baker Academic, 2005).

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Mark 1:1-13
Mark 1:14-15 
Mark 1:16-45
Mark 2
Mark 3

Mark 11:1-11 (Palm Sunday)
Mark 11:12-25 (Temple Monday)
Mark 11:26-12:44 (Debate Tuesday)
Mark 13 (Temple Prediction)
Mark 14:1-52 (Last Supper)
Mark 14:53-15:47 (Good Friday)
Mark 16 (The Resurrection)