"Narrative Theology" approach to Scripture

Faith & Science Conversation
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Jesus’ work reconciled cultures, for sure, but I think you are giving too much credit to language for shaping thought. It is a chicken and egg argument. Do cultures develop along certain lines because they have a certain language to describe their reality, or do they describe their reality in certain ways because they are culturally disposed to? Most linguists think languages develop to meet the needs and reflect the values of the culture, not vice, versa. The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity has been largely discredited. Ask A Linguist FAQ: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

“Absolute truth” is a concept. It is totally irrelevant what the etymology of the word “absolute” is if we are talking about “what do people mean by absolute truth” because the etymology of an adjective is not what constructs concepts. Words are arbitrary signs with agreed upon ranges of meaning determined by the community of users of the language. Words don’t have any inherent objective meaning in and of themselves. If nobody uses words the way you do, you can’t say you have some secret insight into what words really mean.

You are confusing words and referents though. The referent (the real person Roger, the real being God) is not always an abstraction, but the phonetic label that constitutes the English word is an arbitrary symbol. The words themselves are meaningless unless you have two people using the same word to refer to a common referent. I think it is often hard to communicate with you because you decide words refer to referents no one else agrees they refer to.

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@Christy
Okay, lets talk about “Absolute Truth.” If the Bible is the Absolute Truth, that is the Word of God, then it would be absolutely true that the universe was created in 6 days and all the discussion and evidence to the contrary is meaningless.

From talking to them I find that the YEC believe that the Bible is Absolute Truth, which is the reason why BioLogos has a difficult problem in changing the minds of YEC’s. Because they live in a Western culture, they give lip service to science and evidence, but their mindset is based on Absolute Truth which is not scientific or Christian.

Now it is difficult for evangelicals to argue against the Bible as Absolute Truth, because that it what they have been taught theologically. BioLogos seems to want to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to say that the Bible is Absolute Truth, so it does not put off Evangelicals, when theologically it must accept the fact that the Bible is not Absolute Truth.

The question if the Bible is not Absolute Truth, then what is it? If it is not relativistic truth, which it is not, then it is relational Truth, which it is. However adjusting to the whole concept of relational think is not simple, though it is rewarding, so people would rather not do it.

You are correct in saying that our language is shaped and determined by our community. Part of the problem is that we live in many communities, so we have to shape our language to communicate to each one of them. Paul said that he spoke to each community that he shared the gospel with as one of them. This was not because he was a pagan, but because he wanted to speak in the language and thought world of the pagan Gentile.

In BioLogos we claim to be Christians (which does not mean that non-Christians are excluded.). To me that is the basis of our discussion of faith, biology, and Reality. People do not agree with the way I understand and use the Biblical concept of the Logos. I know that, but does that mean that I should give into their understanding when it is very clear to me that Jesus Christ is the eternal Word/Logos (not Mythos) of God as stated in John 1.

I also disagree with how some people think evolution works, which is why I make a distinction between ecological evolution and Darwinian evolution. That seems to offend some, but it keeps referents straight.

The Logos, the Bible, and Christian theology is the basis of our discussion here as I understand it and certainly try to practice it.

I do not deny that there is a concept of “Absolute Truth,” but it is not the Bible, nor is it Christian. Absolute Truth is Mythos and not Logos (and as such is not true.) It needs to be recognized as such.

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Saying the “the Bible is Absolute Truth” is, in my opinion, an indefensible position. The Bible is a collection of texts that requires interpretation to arrive at meaning. Christians would generally claim that the meaning points us toward absolute truth. How completely or perfectly we can (or need to) access the truth the Bible testifies to is up for debate.

This is you using absolute truth in a way I have never seen anyone else use the label.

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@Christy
You do not say that Jesus Christ is the Absolute Truth, even though Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light.” What is the difference between the Truth and the Absolute Truth? If there is no difference, then this is just a meaningless word, which is very unlikely.

If there is a difference between the Truth, which is Jesus the Logos, and the the Absolute Truth, then the A.T. must be more or less than the Truth as Jesus Christ. It makes no sense to say it is less, so it must be intended to be more, but we know that nothing is truer or better than Jesus Christ. So the Absolute Truth is less then the Truth or, in other words, False.

Does the Bible as God’s word in and through the Holy Spirit point to Jesus Christ, the Logos and the Truth? I and the Christians I know would say yes. In my opinion if one is saved, she or he has completely accessed the Truth of Jesus that the Bible testifies to. There is no debate as to if we can know Jesus and the Truth. There is a question as to how well we understand it and can express it.

Philosophy and science have a problem with Truth, because it takes an expert to understand the truth of these disciplines. One does not have to be an expert to understand the Truth of Jesus, because it is relational Truth, and not propositional truth.

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Right. Because that was a metaphor not a proposition.

Absolute truth is a concept. It refers to the idea that there are facts/propositions that describe an inflexible reality that does not vary depending on who is perceiving or describing it. You can make truth claims about Jesus and label those truth claims absolute truth, but it doesn’t make any sense to say Jesus is absolute truth.

The truth Jesus embodies and teaches is encountered in relationship with Jesus and those who embody Jesus. No argument there. But the rest of what you are saying doesn’t really make sense to me or reflect the way people normally talk about these concepts. A four year old child can "know Jesus. So they have “completely accessed the Truth of Jesus”? What is the point of growing and maturing in your relationship with God or studying Scripture if the entirety of Absolute Truth is bequeathed to you at salvation?

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@Christy

My position is that Christianity denies the reality od the concept of absolute truth as you have defined it. One might compare it I guess to mystical enlightenment as found in Buddhism and other faiths, but that is not Christianity. The Christian ideal of perfection is Love, as found in the saying of Jesus, Be Perfect as your Father in Heaven Who makes the rain fall on both the Just and the Unjust." Love is perfect, complete, but it is not static or absolute.

Yes, the child can access the love of Jesus. I would hesitate to say that he or she has completely accessed the Truth of Jesus, because the age of accountability is thought to be 11. But the true fact is that Truth is not propositional, but it is relational.

Truth is relational, because language, including mathematics, is relational, and life/reality is relational. Jesus is the Logos/Truth, and Jesus is relational. God is the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is Love so God is relational.

Christians receive God’s Truth at Salvation, but this is not an end in itself, but the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Just like falling in love.

Love is love. Truth is truth. No absolute love or absolute truth or absolute hope or absolute faith. "These three will last, or endure, Faith, Hope, and Love, but the greatest of these is Love.

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Okay. But you are just making assertions based on a bunch of unestablished premises. It’s not exegesis of a relevant passage. It’s not interacting with the theological truth claims of any recognizable tradition of Christianity. It sounds like a relaxation monologue that one might hear in a soft soothing voice to the background of cascading water, crickets, and moody piano. I don’t really know what to do with it.

Well, Christianity isn’t a person with volition, but almost all of the Christians I know are pretty attached to the concept of absolute truth as I have defined it. The denial of absolute truth is their main beef with postmodernism.

One generally doesn’t.

Says who based on what? Why not sacrifice? Why not holiness? Why not shalom?

You can’t just speak for “Christianity” and equate your subjective unfounded opinions to “Christianity,” especially if you are saying things that most Christians would say is nonsense.

That verse doesn’t even mention love.

Based on what?

Because you like the word relational, so everything you like gets the label? These are not assertions that you have based on anything resembling a coherent argument.

“Truth is not propositional, it’s relational” is a proposition that makes an absolute truth claim. Am I the only one who finds this oddly ironic?

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@Christy (Please use the @ do the system works properly)

Thank you for your response.

Now we are making progress. People are defending modernism against postmodernism because it maintains the reality of absolutes which they think is basic to Christianity. This is similar to people defending YEC because they believe it justifies the Bible.

YEC starts with a fundamentalist theology and says since my theology is right, YEC is right. Similarly modernist Christians say that because their modernist theology is right, modernist belief in absolute Truth must be right. In other words they really do not start from the Bible to determine what is true, they begin with human theology which is at best secondary truth.

What did interest me above is that both Roger Olsen and N. T. Wright criticized modernism, and if they did so they should have rejected absolute truth. The question on my mind is what concept have they used to replace absolute truth. Relational truth is the best I have come up with.

Christianity is a system of beliefs, or more accurately a family of systems of beliefs. However unless one is a relativist, which I am not since relativism denies the unity of God, Christians believe that our faith is based on the Biblical understanding of the Trinitarian God which is not Mythos, but Logos.

While it may be true that many if not most Christians would disagree with me, I still need to speak for the my best understanding of the faith. If Martin Luther did not speak up for his understanding of the faith, where would we be.

“Truth is not propositional, it’s relational” is a proposition that makes an absolute truth claim. Am I the only one who finds this oddly ironic?

‘Truth is relational’ is as you say a proposition, however it is not an absolute truth claim because what is says is that Truth is not absolute. It is the meaning of the claim that is not absolute.

That verse doesn’t even mention love. You are supposed to know the context. If not look it up.

Jesus said, “if you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the Truth and the Truth will set you free.” Here Jesus is saying that people need to do more than give intellectual assent to what He says. We must live His teachings of Faith, Hope, and Love, and then we will know the Truth, which is Jesus, the Logos, and that relational Truth will set us free from the burdens of sin, hatred, and death.

This is why relati0onal Truth is important, while propositional truth is not so important and absolute truth is nonexistent…

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@Relates

How so? That is a huge leap.

The issues center on epistemology, exegesis, and hermeneutics, not “starting with the Bible” vs. “starting with theology”. All Christians approach Scripture from within a worldview.

Why? Those do things don’t go together.

What does this mean?

Roger, “absolute truth” has an agreed-on definition. It is not in opposition to “relational truth” it is in opposition to “relative truth.” It just means fixed and not flexible, true for all people at all times. So, unless your proposition is just true for you, from your perspective, then yes, you are making an absolute truth claim. You are saying that your observation corresponds with true reality.

Jesus is the Messiah sent from God to redeem humanity.
Jesus is Lord.
Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for sins.
Jesus is the only way of salvation.

Those are all propositions that make absolute truth claims. I don’t understand how anyone could say accepting the message of Christianity doesn’t require accepting the validity of absolute truth claims.

The reason I started this thread in the first place had nothing to do with denying the existence or validity of propositional truth. It is obvious to me (and Olson and Wright it would seem) that Scriptures are full of propositional truth. The argument I am interested in is that all truth cannot be reduced to a a set of propositions. Some truths are better and more fully communicated via story and metaphor and parable. You can reduce story and parable and metaphor to what you believe to be the underlying propositional truth claims, but in the process you lose and restrict meaning. In no way does that argument diminish the importance of propositional truth to Christian theology.

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The statements you list are all true, but are not absolutely true as you have defined it. They all refer to Jesus, but how can someone say the Jesus is LORD, if they lived before the time of Jesus or have no idea Who Jesus was. Therefore how can anyone claim that this statement is true to all people at all times and all places. Again this does not mean that this statement is not true, because it is, but it is not absolute truth.

A better faith statement is John 3:16 (NIV2011)
16 For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have Eternal Life.

This statement is true. Whoever believes in Jesus Christ will receive Eternal Life, but not everyone knows Who Jesus is.

God revealed the Salvation plan within history so that salvation is not universal. Then too Muslims, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses know a Jesus Who is different from the One we know. I do not know how God fixes this, but I trust that God can and will without my help. My task is to find salvation for myself and help all with whom I come into contact.

Sadly absolute truth has nothing to do with Christianity, because it does not exist. What it has done is create a barrier between those who identify with so called absolute values and those who take a less legalistic view of morality. The Christianity taught by Jesus Christ is not a set of propositional statements and a set of absolute values, but a life lived in love relationship to God, self, and others. To make it into something absolute will lead to disaster for all concerned.

Reality is not a dualistic choice between the absolute and the relative, as philosophy claims. It is the choice between caring for others or not caring for others. It is being relational or non-relational or absolute. It is about being in right relationship or wrong relationship.

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I don’t see how you can verify Jonah spending 3 days inside a fish … and living to tell about it.

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@gbrooks9

George, the book of Jonah is not about a big fish. It is about Jonah’s mission to Nineveh.

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It’s about the STORY of a man who went to Nineveh. The fact the story tells a WHOPPER about a man being inside of a fish for 3 days tells us the rest of the story is probably not true either.

George

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The fish incident is just one data point, and if it were excised from Jonah there would still be good reason to think of it as non-historical. The narrative is saturated with melodrama, scripted extremes, and even farce for emphasis:

  • God’s order to Jonah to go and, sincerely and passionately, preach repentance to Israel’s worst of the worst: Nineveh
  • Jonah’s flight in the exact opposite direction of Nineveh - even to the ends of the earth (a boat headed for the far western Mediterranean)
  • The casting of lots and Jonah resignedly letting himself be tossed overboard (whence the sea immediately calms)
  • Jonah’s long, wordy, elegant, thoughtful, beautiful poem - all carefully composed and spoken and yet whilst in the direst of straights
  • God: “OK let’s try this one more time”
  • Jonah’s subsequent sermon in Nineveh - the world’s shortest ever, just a handful of words
  • And nonetheless, the Ninevites’ immediate, over-the-top acceptance of the message (Jonah’s worst dream come true, on steroids)
  • Even the animals of Nineveh repenting in sackcloth
  • Jonah: “Oh God just kill me now”
  • Then the miraculous plant - and suddenly Jonah’s all happy!
  • But then the plant dying - and suddenly Jonah’s a wreck again (the world’s greatest drama queen)
  • And the story finally ending on the punch-line, the takeaway, straight from God

Real history never unfolds in such repeatedly and consistently melodramatic, farcical fashion, as that.

Oh, and there’s the fact there is no historical record of such a mass conversion in Ninevah, and no mention of chronological specifics in Jonah either (unlike regularly found in the other prophetic books - the name of the king of Ninevah, for example, or of the kings at the time in Samaria or Jerusalem).

So, this is a cumulative case, and the bit about the fish is just one part of it; leaving it out from the above makes virtually no difference.

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@dscottjorgenson
@gbrooks9

Thank you Scott for an excellent outline. The book is not historical as I have said in that it does not describe actual events as you have indicated. Bet it is still Logos because it conveys a spiritual message which is verified by the whole Bible, esp. Jesus Christ in the NT, that God does not play favorites. The story is theology (Logos) written as fiction or an extended parable.

The great fish is used to get people’s attention, and it works because it gets our attention. So should the setting of the great city of Nineveh. What hasn’t worked as well is the message of the book. People are just not interested in a message that says that all people are God’s people or too superficial to care about relational Truth. That is very sad, because relational Truth is all we really have.

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@Christy

Biblically the issue of communication and reality is not that complicated, although most people so not understand it.

We have a covenantal faith, Our Bible is divided into the Old Testament or Covenant and the New Testament or Covenant. Christianity is the New Covenant based on Jesus Christ Who is the Author and Finisher of our faith, the Alpha and Omega of our Covenant with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

A Covenant is a relationship, and the Christian faith is our relationship with God, by which we know and communicate with God, the Father/Creator through the Son/Logos and the Holy Spirit/Love.

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@Relates
I don’t see where the Bible proposes a theory of communication or epistemology. But I’m glad it is clear and simple for you. I don’t mean that sarcastically. But the questions I have about language, truth, and meaning and bases of knowledge are not at all addressed by simply affirming the covenantal nature of Christianity or the relational nature of God.

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@Christy

To be sure questions like this cannot be resolved within this narrow format.

However if you are interested in a detailed discussion, I will send you a copy of my book, The GOD Who RELATES.

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At last … the secret to your profile name is REVEALED, Mr. Relates!

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