Notes Along the Way -- Asbury 2.3 -- Barth and Bultmann

For the previous breadcrumb, click here.
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1. Last week, I mentioned that I would eventually get to Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). I decided that this week was actually a good time.

Bultmann was quite the boogie man in seminary, another person for me to mock. Certainly someone for Wang to mock. Why? Because he didn't think that the resurrection was historical.

Wang's arguments for the resurrection have blurred in my mind with Jimmy Dunn's, my Doktorvater. Dunn's book on the subject was The Evidence for Jesus. 

The historical argument for the resurrection hangs on two key points: 1) the empty tomb and 2) the eyewitnesses to the resurrection. Both seem beyond reasonable doubt to me. That is to say, the body of Jesus was not to be found on Easter Sunday, and a lot of people were convinced that they had seen Jesus alive thereafter. 

A force multiplier for the second point is the fact that 1) they were not expecting a resurrection and 2) many were so convinced that they were willing to suffer and die for that belief.

A corroborating argument for the first -- one that I may have first heard from Wang -- is that the rumor in Matthew 28 that the disciples stole the body only makes sense if in fact there was no body to be found.

Bultmann did not believe that the resurrection really happened in history.

2. However, if God takes the heart into account, Bultmann was actually trying to save Christian faith in his own way. That is to say, his head told him that the "Jesus of history" was not the "Christ of faith." He believed, like Albert Schweitzer, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who died with great disappointment.

But Bultmann believed in the "Christ of faith" as he understood him. He believed that the resurrection was a metaphor or a parable for an existentialist choice. I'm sure that many of you are thinking, "What are you talking about?" Welcome to seminary.

Existentialism is a philosophical school that basically holds that we have to choose the meaning of life. For Kierkegaard, this is a leap of blind faith. It is a very personal choice. For 1950s existentialists like Sartre or Camus, life in itself is actually meaningless. But that's the glass is half empty way to look at it. The positive way to think of it is that we can pick any meaning we want.

Victor Frankl, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, put it this way, "A man can live with any how if he has a why." Your "why" could be any number of things as long as you truly and wholeheartedly believe in it.

3. For Bultmann, the resurrection was the ultimate symbol of finding meaning out of meaninglessness. It was a metaphor for meaning rising from the dead meaninglessness of existence. To be raised was to find authentic existence in the midst of a dead world.

You might remember me mentioning Hendrikus Boers at Emory beginning his sermons with, "Let me tell you a myth" before then preaching a perfectly wonderful sermon. Boers had studied under Bultmann at Marburg, and he was echoing him with this line. But "myth" for Bultmann was not the hamfisted myth of David Strauss. A myth for Bultmann and Boers was a meaning-expressing story, a story that expressed a fundamental truth or mystery of life.

So when Bultmann said that the resurrection was a myth, he was saying it was true in a symbolic way. To him, it was the consummate expression of humanity's search for meaning in a meaningless world.

If God ever looks at the hearts of people who's heads are wrong, then we may find a once confused Bultmann in heaven. During the Nazi regime, Bultmann -- like Bonhoeffer -- was part of the confessing church. (Bonhoeffer too was not exactly orthodox, by the way)

There is an unpleasant truth here. Unorthodox thinkers sometimes turn out to be more in tune with the heart of God than some conservative ones. I stayed in the home of Frau Else Michel when I was in Germany in 1995. Her husband, the great conservative Hebrews scholar Otto Michel, was initially in support of the Nazi cause. Only when it got to a certain point did he realize his error. He would spend the rest of his life after the war working toward reconciliation between Jews and Christians.

I wish my German had been better, but I did understand her when she mentioned that Bultmann had once stayed in their home. She smiled as she said with understatement, "Natürlich, er war ganz anders als wir" ("Of course, he was entirely different from us").

There is something about conservatism that regularly falls for the strong man. Kristin Kobes du Mez has at least captured some elements of the equation in Jesus and John Wayne. I suspect that part of the issue is taking some of the anthropomorphic elements of the Old Testament too literally. There is also perhaps some confusion of tradition with faith.

So, there is the paradox of two men. One was orthodox but initially fell for National Socialism. The other was a heretic but saw right through it. I believe this is a story that regularly repeats itself.

4. What convinced me to go ahead and write on Bultmann was the memory that my project for Wang was to evaluate Bultmann's History of the Synoptic Tradition. It was an overly ambitious project (as usual) and I did not succeed at working through it. It was too far beyond me at that time. (Too bad ChatGPT wasn't around -- I could have had it explain the book to me.)

I don't remember much from the book except I think that Bultmann argued that the Transfiguration might have originally have been a resurrection appearance story.

I would overestimate my abilities again in Dr. Wang's Romans 1-8 class. We were all supposed to pick a commentary and follow along as we worked through Romans. I picked Otto Kuss' Romans commentary in German.

What German did I know? Well, I had dabbled with it at home, checking out a German language record over a summer from the Broward County library. And I had taken Dr. O'Malley's German for Reading Knowledge course, which used Jannach as a textbook. Suffice it to say, I was grossly underprepared to read a German commentary on Romans.

It is mostly my fault, but I didn't get much out of that class. I believe David Smith might have also been in that class. One incident I do remember is when a former missionary at the end of class asked Dr. Wang about another possible way of reading a passage. Although he repeated himself more than once, Dr. Wang couldn't quite see what he was saying.

Finally, I think on the third pass at it, Dr. Wang said with a grin, "Oh, oh, oh, oh. I see what you're saying. I'll come back next time with three more reasons why I'm right." He was a good natured soul.

5. In my senior year, I took Steve Seamands' course on Karl Barth (1886-1968). I did not get Barth. I wanted to. I remember asking in class once, "So is Barth saying we have a God shaped vaccum waiting for God?" Dr. Seamands explained that that would be quite the opposite of Barth's approach.

Barth, like Bultmann, was part of neo-orthodoxy. Both, in their own ways, were trying to reinvigorate faith after critical German scholarship had more or less wittled it away. The Liberal Christianity before them had the ethic of Christianity without the orthodoxy.

Bultmann reasserted faith in a non-literal way. Barth did it by way of "dogmatics." To me, his system hung in mid-air without any support. Apologetics was anathema to him. He was in a sense an incredibly verbose fideist -- someone who holds that you just have to believe.

I was nevertheless intrigued by the early Barth of the 20s who focused on the otherness of God and the necessity to know God by analogy. This seemed to me a more humble version of Aquinas. Of course, Barth would then go on to write his immense multivolume Church Dogmatics.

I also would like Barth's emphasis that Jesus is the Word of God (John 1:14). This is of course both biblical and orthodox. The fundamentalism of my circles, however, ran the risk of seeing the Bible as more the word of God than Jesus himself. This may also be one of the reasons why conservatives sometimes lose focus. I have heard a conservative say to stay away from anyone who might say Jesus is the Word of God in comparison to the Bible.

Preaching, then, for Barth, was a third level word of God.

6. Barth was really cool in the 80s and even in the 2000s when I was teaching at IWU. We had a Monday reading group and one semester we read portions from the Dogmatics, with Chris Bounds to lead and others like Keith Drury and Steve Lennox along for the ride.

In the end, Barth didn't speak my language. I think faith should be able to cut the mustard of evidence and reason if it is legitimate. Barth strikes me as a very smart dodger. The post-liberals of that era strike me the same way. They gave up on the evidence game. Or they used Gadamer to cloud the truth in uncertainty. The subconscious goal in each case, it seems to me, is to shield faith from evaluation.

But if faith is true, it should be able to stand up to such scrutiny, it seems to me.

Post-Conservative, Post-Liberal...

I had an interesting call from a new friend out there in blogland. He was interested in how I would categorize myself and mentioned some fairly recent terms, "post-liberal" and "post-conservative." Both of the terms tend toward each other somewhat in the middle, the biggest difference being the direction from which they're coming.

"Post-liberal" is a term whose origins trace quite a bit back to Yale in the 80s (e.g., Lindbeck, Frei).  A lot of people at Duke and Princeton have some of that influence.  These are people who've come from a more or less liberal background who have rejected the faithlessness of former liberalism. They are "unapologetic" about faith (versus apologetics). Think radical orthodoxy. This sort of person seems to really like Barth.

"Post-conservative" is more appropriate for people who don't like the way previous generations of conservatives have framed a lot of issues.  Roger Olson favorably quoted this description from Steven Sherman:

"Basically, they [postconservative evangelicals] compose a loose coalition of thinkers who are seeking to facilitate a number of ‘beyond’ moves, theologically: beyond the agenda of the modernist/fundamentalist dichotomy toward what they see as a more holistic theology... beyond concentration on rationalism toward incorporating additional ways of knowing; beyond inerrancy debates and concerns toward an instrumental use of scripture; beyond academy-centered theologizing toward ecclesial and community-oriented thinking; beyond gatekeeping on boundary-setting doctrinalism toward a generous orthodoxy with pietistic emphasis; and finally, beyond what they view as a fixation on the concerns of modernity often motivated by a fear of liberalism, toward a more positive view and selective appropriation of postmodern insights."

To me, that really sums up Wesleyan well, by which I mean the spirit of Wesley across Wesleyan denominations like the Wesleyans, Nazarenes, and Free Methodists.  It is an excellent description of the thought ethos of the religion division at IWU in the 00's.  I am convinced that the previous paragraph will describe the broader Wesleyan thought-leaders of the days to come.

Grudem: The Necessity of Scripture 1

Continuing my weekly series reviewing Grudem's Systematic Theology: http://cafetutorials.blogspot.com/2012/07/christian-theology.html

This week is chapter 6, "The Necessity of Scripture."
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Between last week and this week, I've done a little research on where Grudem gets his "four characteristics of Scripture" from.  Obviously there's no verse in the Bible that says, "Here are the four characteristics of Scripture."  This is the slightly insidious quality of Grudem's approach whereby he thinks he is simply following the Bible when actually there are Christian traditions significantly guiding his interpretive wand.

In this case, it is the Reformed tradition.  The four characteristics of Scripture are a Reformed interpretation of the Westminster Confession (1646).  I don't know if Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) was the first to summarize its position on Scripture in this way, but one article started me in that direction. To reject some of his theology is thus to reject a particular Christian tradition, not to reject God or the Bible.

Here is what he means by the necessity of Scripture: "The necessity of Scripture means that the Bible is necessary for knowing the gospel, for maintaining spiritual life, and for knowing God's will, but it is not necessary for knowing that God exists or for knowing something about God's character and moral laws" (116).  In a footnote, he explains that a person can hear about this message orally, but that "these oral communications of the contents of the Bible are based on the existence of written copies" (116 n.1).

This seems a rather peculiar doctrine. What, for example, was the fate of Christians in the decades between Jesus' resurrection and the first bits of the New Testament?  The gospel had a fundamentally oral character during that time.  Here we once again see the embarrassingly literary orientation of Grudem (and perhaps the later Reformed) view of the Bible. No wonder Van Til hated Barth, who pulls down the curtain of such a post-printing press charade.

Barth rightly recognized that Jesus was the consummate Word of God, Scripture the witness to Christ as the word of God, and Christian preaching as a word giving witness to the witness of the Word of God. Grudem's approach, by contrast, can't see the history of revelation prior to the 400s when the Bible and Christian theology finally became a written package with an orthodox message. He is a typical pre-modern who can't see the historical development that produced his reading of the Bible.

We also see here why this sort of Reformed folk have been scrambling over the New Testament interpretation of the Old.  If we read the Old Testament inductively, we realize that the Old Testament books on their own terms did not have an understanding of Christ sufficient for the knowledge Grudem needs them to have had.  When New Testament authors see Jesus in the Old Testament, they are largely reading the Old Testament spiritually and figuratively rather than literally.

Genesis in context knows nothing of a coming Messiah, nor does Exodus, Numbers, or Leviticus. [1] The Historical Books don't want a king in the first place and then already have one. When early Christians saw Christ in the Psalms and the Prophets, they were again largely seeing spiritual meanings in words that had other original meanings. The messianic psalms were originally royal psalms, for example. And in so far as some passages may look to a future king, they understand only that Israel will one day have a Davidic king again.  They do not look for God to come to earth. The key text in relation to Jesus' death, Isaiah 53, would not have been understood by anyone to foretell the Messiah's death until after the fact, and of course this is a key element in Grudem's understanding of the gospel.

All that is to say that Jesus was a massive upgrade from anything anticipated by the Old Testament read in context. The Old Testament Scriptures meet Grudem's standard of necessity only when they are read through New Testament eyes.  They would not guarantee any Old Testament saint salvation on Grudem's terms. And of course we look forward to see what he will do with children who die before they reach the supposed age of accountability invented to circumvent such problems.

Necessary
Grudem sees three ways in which Scripture is necessary: 1) It is necessary for a knowledge of the gospel, 2) It is necessary for maintaining spiritual life, and 3) It is necessary for a certain knowledge of God's will.

It is surprising to see someone who used to be involved in the charismatic movement have so little room for direct revelation. What if Jesus were to appear in a dream to someone deep in a Muslim country but who had never seen a Bible or heard of its contents? Is it impossible for such a person to be saved since he or she does not have the written word?

Indeed, even Grudem's key Pauline text, "Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God" (Rom. 10:17) is not a reference to Scripture but to preaching about Christ.  There is no scriptural text in Acts 17 and 1 Thessalonians has almost no Scripture. We can wonder if Paul used Scripture in his preaching when speaking to Jews, but probably didn't so much use Scripture when speaking to Gentiles who weren't associated with the synagogue.

The gospel was the good news about real events that had just taken place in history.  It was "live."  Scripture was brought in secondarily.  The living Jesus was the main event, not a book.

Is the Bible helpful for spiritual life?  Absolutely.  I consider it a sacrament of revelation, a divinely appointed meeting place.  By all means, eat the word for your nourishment.

Can God speak to you directly?  Absolutely.  Can God nourish you through other books?  Absolutely.  God can do whatever he wants. Again, it is fascinating to see how Grudem has chucked this part of his charismatic heritage.

Again, the word of God in Scripture is not primarily a reference to Scripture.  The "word become flesh" in John 1:14 is Jesus, and the background for this word is not the written word but the Logos of Hellenistic Judaism.  The word of God in Hebrews 4:12 similarly is not the Old Testament or the written word but this same logos which is the will of God in action in the creation. This fundamental and pervasive inability for Grudem to read the Bible in its historical context is embarrassing.

The necessity of the Bible for certainty in knowing God's will runs into the problems of the previous chapter. The Bible does not come inserted on our hard drives. It is an object of interpretation.  We have to define the words. We have to fit all the words together. We have to work out the potential difference between "that time" and "this time."  We have to do it.

Grudem's reading of Scripture is that of a pre-modern who can't see himself in the mirror.  His Reformed tradition has already done the defining, the joining, the time-shifting for him and he doesn't even know it.  The clarity he sees--and the certainty he sees--is the clarity of his tradition. His Bible is as certain as attending a Reformed church and the assumption that the people here are elect.  Walk down the street to the 40 other denominational churches reading the same inerrant Bible and we'll see how certain and clear it is practically speaking.

Part 2 to come...

[1] The wonderful Genesis 3:15 was originally about why snakes and humans don't get along. I omit Deuteronomy so as not to get into debates about what Deuteronomy 18:15 was originally about.

Amanda (Hontz) Drury on Doubt

Heard a great sermon this morning by Amanda Drury at College Wesleyan Church, best sermon I can remember ever hearing on the subject (I love it when God gives object lessons showing that women can preach every bit as well as men).  One of the lectionary texts for today was John 20, where Thomas doubts Jesus' resurrection.  The sermon should come up on the CWC site sometime this week.

I personally had several take-aways:

• Don't doubt alone--doubt among friends (although Amanda indicated that the Josh McDowell approach to doubt is less than helpful for the sincere doubter, let me take her one step further and say that the "Oh, you just need to learn a few things" approach to doubt usually comes from those who know far less than they think they know and is just as likely to push the doubter into an even greater crisis).
• From Karl Barth (pronounced BART): Don't weigh your quantity of doubt against your quantity of faith.  The measure of your doubt doesn't count.  Faith "the size of a mustard seed" outweighs vast measures of doubt (she pitted a bowling ball against a clump of balloons).
• Wait for Jesus to appear next week.  In John, there is a week between when Thomas doubts the appearance to the disciples and when Jesus shows up to quell his doubts.  It may be more than a week before Jesus makes his presence known to your heart... just keep putting one step in front of the next until it happens.
• Trust in the faith of others when you are struggling yourself.  For Amanda, she trusted in the faith of John during a hard spot.  You can also read Scriptures and read the creeds and affirmations of faith during a dark spell--focus on what you believe in them, not on what you are doubting.
• For one of my friends, the main take-away was that you cannot control the "what" of your doubt and you cannot control the "when" of your doubt, but you can control the "how."  Doubt like Thomas did, not like Pilate did.

Great sermon!  Listen to it when it comes up on the CWC site.

Categorizing the Hermeneutical Landscape

I'm now on my third draft of an introduction to a proposal. I hope this new approach is a winner. Here's a summary. Any critique?

Primary stimuli of developments in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
1. presuppositional changes: such as non-supernaturalism and those who read the Bible as they might have read other books

2. developments in contextual understanding: a) deepened perspectives on literary context because of reading the words as one might read other books and b) deepened perspectives on historical context because of engagement not only with already known literature, but also with increased archaeological discoveries of other ancient literature and material culture.

Trajectories that emerged
1. non-engagement with these developments: those outside the West who were not exposed to such discussions, revivalists, Pentecostals, dispensationalists to some extent. They not only continued with traditional presuppositions, but continued largely unaware of how to read the biblical books in context, read the texts a-contextually as primary default.

2. accommodation to many of these developments, including non-supernaturalism: mainstream Christian institutions. Miracles are part of a mythological worldview. Jesus was an exemplary individual and model to be emulated but not divine, Bible inspired like other literature

3. rejection of these developments: engaged fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals. Clear acceptance of supernaturalism and historical context accepted in principle, but varying degrees of rejection of contextual conclusions, Bible/Babel controversy, parallels often denied or reinterpreted, primary focus on alternative explanations of data

4. acceptance of contextual readings of the Bible but with supernaturalist presuppositions: In our typology, this group accepts the consensus opinions of mainstream scholarship (which evangelical scholars often do not) but does so in the belief that the Scriptures do indeed give witness to God's saving events within history. Individuals like Oscar Cullmann come to mind.

5. rejection of the historical paradigm as the principal paradigm for understanding Scripture. In some respects, this is an informed return to the pre-modern paradigm of #1. Karl Barth perhaps is a forerunner of this approach in that he advocated the idea of the Bible "becoming" the word of God as God speaks through it. Barth was well aware of historical critical interpretations but did not find them the locus of Christian significance to the biblical texts. In the same way, theological interpretation today rejects historical context as the be all and end all of Scripture's meaning.

8.4 Faith and Evidence

In the final chapter of this book, we will step back and overview what we might call "postmodern" developments in philosophy, which aptly describe the state of thinking Western philosophy currently finds itself in. However, you will hopefully recognize at that point that you have already seen much of its impact in the other chapters. We saw a glimpse of postmodern impact way back in chapter 2, where we talked about faith and reason. There, we encountered one Christian school of thought that sees faith largely as blind, as something we can legitimately affirm with or without rational proof. For example, we came across "radical orthodoxy," a current Christian trend that is unapologetic in its affirmation of faith, believing without needing to substantiate its faith.

But we have especially seen the impact of what we might call "postmodern uncertainty" in this chapter. The chapter started with the suggestion that ancient myth was much more about expressing the mysteries of reality rather than explaining how reality worked. There we wondered if in fact scientific theories today are really a kind of "myth" as well, only much more precise than ancient ones. We use our contemporary, scientific "myths" to express in great detail the mysteries of what we call the physical world. These myths express the operations of reality so well that we have been able to use them to go to the moon and build things like computers and flat screen TVs. We may not be able to say exactly what reality itself actually is, what "things-in-themselves" are made of, as we heard Kant say at the end of the previous chapter. But our expressions of reality have worked astoundingly well in the age of science.

In the previous section, we saw the impact of postmodernism on the philosophy of science. We encountered Thomas Kuhn's analysis of how scientific revolutions take place. For him, scientific developments are not really developments, but shifts in thinking that inevitably take place because no scientific theory can adequately account for all the data. New theories inevitably arise and take over in the attempt to account for such "naughty" data. But these new paradigms are just as doomed to fail as the ones they replace. According to Kuhn, scientific revolutions have as much to do with the personalities and sociology of the people doing science as they do with anything like truth or real progress in understanding.

At this point, many Christians will want to bring in God as a Guarantor of certainty, a deus ex machina like the "god of the machine" that sometimes arrived in the nick of time in ancient plays to rescue the hero from a hopeless situation. Indeed, philosophers like René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant did bring in God at exactly such points of uncertainty in their philosophies. Someone might want to bring in the Bible as the direct revelation that removes what would otherwise be uncertainty without the possibility of resolution. Someone else might suggest that God has given us clarity through the church.

But as we saw in chapter 4, we cannot get outside our heads to read the Bible or play out the teaching of the church apart from human reasoning and thought. And indeed, the words of the Bible themselves, as well as all the creeds and traditions of the church, were understood within the categories of their original authors and audiences. We saw this dynamic in the second part of this chapter as we looked at the way the Bible discusses creation in dialog with the paradigms of its day. In the end, whether by God's original design or as a result of human sin, all human understanding seems to involve interpretation, and interpretation would always seem to involve human paradigms and categories. [1]

As we conclude this chapter on science and faith, we would like to suggest a "critical realist myth" that 1) is full of faith, yet 2) takes adequate account of the limitations of human understanding and 3) allows us to continue to benefit from the scientific paradigm. You will remember from the end of the previous chapter that critical realism as we define it is an approach to reality that 1) affirms by faith that reality exists and that there are better and worse conceptualizations of it yet 2) recognizes that we can never get a bird's eye or God's eye view of it, that we are stuck in our heads, and that our understandings of reality inevitably take place from a limited and ultimately skewed perspective. Let's unpack those last two points.

First, apart from our affirmation of existence itself, every single thing we believe about every topic and matter involves and ultimately comes down to faith. Descartes believed that because he thought, he must exist: "I think; therefore, I am." But in actuality, his thinking only proved that whatever we might call "thought" exists. It does not prove that "I" exist nor does it prove that what I am calling "thought" is accurately or best understood as thought. My thought could be a sophisticated computer program or something I could not possibly conceptualize.

We operate in this world overwhelmingly by faith, faith that the things around us are real, faith that I am real. We cannot prove these things. Nevertheless, faith in reality works really well. "I think; therefore 'thought' exists" is all we can say with absolute certainty. Everything else involves a hefty dose of faith.

The opposite of faith is thus not reason but proof. In science, it has to do with the way we glue the evidence or data at hand together. It has to do with the way we fill in the blanks between the evidence, not to mention our basic apprehension of the evidence itself. In logic it has to do with the premises or presuppositions we assume in making an argument. Whether faith is "blind" or not depends on how much glue we have to supply to make our paradigms work and how well our assumptions fit the evidence we seem to have.

In a postmodern world, blind faith is not necessarily irrational, especially if we are up front and honest about the apparent lay of the evidence. Logic can be incoherent, and we can still call that kind of thinking "irrational." But in a world where virtually everything is a matter of faith, there is a way in which we can affirm ideas that do not seem to fit the evidence we have or that do not seem to work very well, and we can do it rationally and logically. All we need to do is be honest about it. Radical orthodoxy is thus a rational and coherent approach to Christian faith, even though it has no interest in justifying or defending itself rationally.

At the same time, we wonder what the longevity of such an approach to truth will be, beyond its initial adherents. In Christian thinking, such an approach fits well with the ideas of the most significant theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth (1886-1968). For him, the beliefs of Christianity are not based on evidence at all but purely on God's revelation. Truth is revealed, not discovered or proven. Accordingly, Barth had no interest in questions like whether it is historically likely that Jesus' tomb was empty on Easter Sunday or whether archaeology tends to support the historicity of the Bible's stories. If he were still alive, he would certainly affirm those who say that Christianity is unapologetic about its beliefs.

One potential issue with this line of thinking is that it leaves no reason to believe in Christianity. For thinkers in the Calvinist tradition, this is not a problem, because they believe God orchestrates faith anyway. The only ones who will believe are those God has chosen to believe. But for those who think God makes it possible for humans to choose or not choose Him, this approach is more problematic. Barth and the radically orthodox give the unconvinced no basis to adopt a Christian understanding. For them, it is largely irrelevant whether Christianity seems to make sense to anyone but those to whom God makes it make sense.

In the end, if the claims of Christianity are not basically reasonable, if they do not at least generally fit the data of the world, we can question what sense it makes to say that Christianity is a religion of truth. We are not suggesting that "the evidence demands a verdict" or that faith is provable--not at all. We are suggesting that it would make little sense to say that God is a God of truth if the normal thought processes that work so well to get us through life contradicted Christian faith in some substantial way. It makes little sense to get out of the way of moving traffic and then turn around and say that you would believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus even if someone could prove that they had found the bones of Jesus.

So any interpretation of the world involves 1) faith that the world exists and 2) a recognition that our interpretations of the world are exactly that, interpretations from a point of view that is not exactly God's point of view. God knows all the data of the world, and He knows it all in proper relation to all the other data of the world. By contrast, we know the smallest, infinitesimal portion of the data, and we know it in only the most partial of relationships to the other data. A little reflection on these last two sentences should be humbling to all of us, including textbook writers. How strange it is for us to think we know much of anything about anything!

At the same time, given the current lay of evidence at any given time, there would seem to be better and worse interpretations of reality. If we return to the three tests for truth we mentioned way back in the third chapter, a better interpretation is one that 1) relates well to the data we have (correspondence), 2) is logical and does not contradict itself (coherency), and 3) it works well in the "real" world, the world in which we live and operate (pragmatic). From these basic tests, we can suggest reasonable criteria for distinguishing between more and less likely interpretations of evidence, given whatever evidence we have.

First, the more data, the more evidence we have, the more certainty we can afford the hypothesis or theory. The social sciences speak of having enough data to constitute a "valid sample." You cannot really say that a certain pattern applies to millions of people if you have only seen the pattern in ten.

True, it is difficult to speak of "data-in-itself" in the first place, of evidence that does not already involve interpretation. Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous skeptic, once suggested that "there are no facts--only interpretations." [2] There does seem to be some truth to this idea. Nevertheless, by evidence we simply mean the most basic of things, like an object with a certain apparent size and shape, mass, etc. In historical research, we might be speaking of a primary text, a document that says such and such a thing in such and such a language. The Bible is also a text written in certain languages saying certain things.

Secondly, the theory that accounts for the most data in the simplest or most "elegant" way is the better hypothesis or theory. Again, it may very well be that the more complicated theory is the right one. We cannot prove it isn't, and a person can believe in a less likely theory by faith and be rational. But the more of the picture we have to draw outside the "dots" of data we have, the less likely the theory is given the evidence we have. We can consider that hypothesis a worse hypothesis on the basis of the evidence. This rule is sometimes called Occam's Razor. It is the idea that the simplest explanation for a set of evidence is the more likely explanation.

Thirdly, the rules of logic would seem to be as certain as anything we can know in the world. A theory that does not contradict itself is a better theory than one that is logically inconsistent or incoherent. The quantum world of physics has made it clear, however, that we must be careful even here. The various formulae of quantum mechanics do not fit with each other. They currently contradict each other and are not consistent with each other. In their cases, the rules of logic apply to a part of physics, but not to all of it. And thus we return to our suggestion at the beginning of the chapter than even in science we are dealing more with expressions of reality rather than explanations of the way the world actually is.

Finally, a theory or hypothesis that seems to predict what will happen or that seems to account for what did apparently happen is better than one that requires us to explain away past and future events that do not fit our theory. In short, a better theory is one that seems to work in the unfolding of events, whether past or future. The more exceptions we have to account for, the less helpful the hypothesis. And as we saw in the previous section, such "naughty data" is the stuff of paradigm shifts.

When it comes to Christian faith, then, or even interpretations of the Bible, these rules would seem to apply. We can rationally believe in things that do not seem to fit the current lay of the evidence as best we can tell. After all, all of our beliefs, except the affirmation of existence itself, require varying degrees of faith. What is more important, we think, is that we are honest with the lay of the evidence.

A Christian biologist, for example, can rationally disagree with the overwhelming majority of their colleagues on the topic of evolution. But apparently (and I write this as a layperson who is not competent to judge) it would be difficult for such a biologist to suggest reasonably that the current lay of the evidence makes his or her hypothesis a better scientific hypothesis. Given the overwhelming consensus, it would seem that such a Christian biologist should acknowledge that his or her understanding is a matter of faith. That does not in any way imply that this understanding is false. It simply says that given the data as we currently understand it, such an interpretation seems more a matter of faith than evidence.

[1] Some have of course suggested that there is such a thing as pre-verbal apprehension of reality, a kind of blunt, brute knowledge of the world as it is in itself prior to human conceptualization (e.g., Arthur Schopenhaur [1788-1860]).

[2] ref.