July 5, 2015
YAFI-The Bible Can Be True Without Being Literally True
- Genesis 1:1-3:24
- Rev Ruth Chadwick Moore
I did not read any scripture passages this morning because I am going to talk about the bible in general today. I love to read the bible. I love to teach bible study groups. The bible speaks to me in a way no literary book could ever do. I believe that God’s action in history and God’s good news are revealed in scripture. But I bet some of you are uneasy with the title of this sermon. The title comes from Marcus Borg’s book, Convictions – How I Learned What Matters Most. Like Dr. Borg I believe that the truth of the Bible and its importance for Christians does not depend upon its being literally true. But I also believe that the bible’s major stories and themes are true regardless of their literal-factual truth.
Because scripture is sacred and important, the bible can have what Borg describes as a more-than-literal meaning. Another way to describe that is to say the bible has metaphorical meaning – with metaphorical referring to the surplus of meaning that stories can carry. And metaphorical stories have symbolic meaning too – they point to something else or to something beyond the literal meaning or idea. Many – actually most – of the bible stories are metaphorical or symbolic in this sense. Our biblical ancestors didn’t tell the stories they told for the sake of providing a factual account of what happened – they did not feel like it was their job to be reporters or historians. Instead, they told the stories they told because of the meaning they saw in them.
Jesus told stories like this. His stories – his parables – are full of metaphorical and symbolic meaning. His parables were “made-up” stories. Their purpose was not to report something that really happened. His parables of the good Samaritan or the prodigal son were not factual stories – they were and are stories about meaning. Parabolic stories, metaphorical stories, symbolic stories – whatever you call them – are not factual reports. Their meaning has both less-than-factual and more-than factual meaning. The purpose of the stories, the narratives in the bible, is their meaning, not their factual veracity. And the notion that biblical stories are about facts and not meaning has created an enormous distortion in modern Western Christianity – especially among Protestants.
Biblical literalism or biblical inerrancy is foundational to some Christian churches and traditions. Taking the bible literally then becomes a loyalty oath or a litmus test that identifies you as a “true” Christian or not. Think about the controversy about “creation” versus “evolution. About half of American Protestants reject the theory of evolution because they belong to churches that teach that the Genesis stories of creation are literally true. So let’s look at the creation stories in Genesis.
In the first chapter of Genesis on Day 1 light was created and we had day and night. On Day two God created the sky and ocean. On Day 3 God gives us land and vegetation. On Day 4 we get sun, moon and stars. Day 5 gives us birds and sea creatures and Day 6 gives us land creatures including humans.
This sequence is impossible to reconcile with a literal-factual interpretation. The time span of six days versus billions of years is not the main problem. Even if we extend the factual meaning of “days” to long periods of time, the sequence doesn’t work. In the first three days, light, days, earth and vegetation are created – but we don’t have a sun, a moon or the stars until the fourth day. Scientifically, factually, we can’t have light without a sun so it doesn’t make sense.
But if we understand Genesis 1 as a parable of creation, the story doesn’t conflict with ancient or modern scientific knowledge. Taken as a metaphor or a parable all that is important is that creation comes from God. And the created world is good – each verse in Genesis’ first creation story ends with the phrase, “and God saw that it was good.” Nothing in the created world should be shunned because it is evil. It is all good.
The second creation story begins in chapter 2. You know that story – Adam, Eve, the tree of life, the tree of good and evil, the crafty evil snake and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise. The story has symbolic names for humankind, special trees and a talking snake – so I’m pretty sure it is a story that is to be interpreted symbolically. At a simple level, this second creation story offers an explanation for sexual desire and marriage, why there is pain in childbirth, why hard labor is required with its sweat and toil and why snakes crawl on the ground. At a deeper level it is about what went wrong in paradise. In a world created by God and declared by God to be good, why is there so much pain, suffering and misery?
However you interpret this story, it is a story of paradise lost. Was it lost because of pride or hubris? Is it a story about the birth of self-consciousness, the awareness of opposites and especially about the distinction between self and the world? Can it be all of the above?
Among Marcus Borg’s convictions is that the creation stories are true even if he does not imagine that they are factual. If we move past the facts to the parabolic or symbolic interpretation of the story, then the created world has its source in the sacred – in God. And it is good, very good – all of it. It is filled with the glory of God and displays God’s handiwork.
Yet we don’t live in Eden or paradise do we? Something happened to our primordial ancestors and something happens to us and the result is life “east of Eden.” The bible then is the story of life east of Eden and our desire to get back there – to return to paradise and a life centered in God and to transform the way the world is into what it was meant to be.
Another example of parabolic interpretation is the birth stories of Jesus. If we look at the gospel stories, Mark and John do not mention the birth of Jesus. Matthew and Luke both speak of Jesus’ conception by the Spirit of God, but in Matthew Mary is hardly mentioned – the focus is on Joseph. In Luke Joseph is almost invisible. How much of the Jesus birth stories really happened? Of course I believe that if God wanted to come into the world through a 14 year old virgin then God could do that. But if you interpret the birth stories parabolically, or symbolically, you don’t have to wonder what really happened. Instead you could focus on the meaning of these stories. What did they mean for the people who told the stories? What do they mean for those of us who live and stand in this tradition today? Are they about spectacular events that happened or didn’t happen a long time ago or are they about the meaning and significance of Jesus? It really doesn’t matter if the details are factually true or not, because we learn that Jesus’ conception by the Spirit means that Jesus is of God and of Spirit. We learn that the titles for Jesus – Son of God, Lord, or Savior, affirm that Jesus, and not Caesar, is the true Son of God and the savior who brings peace on earth. And we learn that the light imagery from the star story in Matthew means that Jesus is the light in the darkness – the light of the world.
The bible is sacred scripture for Christians. But think about this, when the books of the bible were first written they were not sacred scripture. Instead they became sacred over time and were eventually declared to be sacred by our ancestors in the process of canonization. The documents themselves are written by humans – they are human products. But the status of these books over time became sacred. Their status is also their function – they are foundational for Christian understanding and identity. To be Christian means being in an unending conversation with the books of the bible. The bible is our foundational document, and as such it is sacred in its function and its status.
But if we literally and factually interpret the bible, then we deny a huge amount of generally accepted knowledge from astronomy, physics, geology, paleontology, anthropology, archeology, biology, and even cave painting. Does being Christian mean that we have to reject much of modern science in order to believe that the entire bible is literally, factually and absolutely true? Is that what Christian faith is all about?
As a book written by humans, the bible is to use a phrase from Paul, a “treasure in earthen vessels.” The treasure is the gospel, the good news, the message about Jesus. The earthen vessels or clay jars are the humans that wrote the bible – all of them fallible and finite human beings who undoubtedly had an agenda and an expectation of results when they wrote their stories. The treasure of the bible comes to us through the earthen vessels of our religious ancestors and it contains their stories about God and their experiences with God. It shares their convictions about what God is like and how we should live. The bible contains their praise and prayer and their grief and despair. It contains their confusion and their questions. The bible contains their ethical teachings.
All of this and more is in the narratives and the songs and poems of the bible. And the way the stories are told gives them parabolic meaning that does not depend on the facts or the details. Like Dr. Borg, I believe the stories of the bible are true even though I do not believe they are factual. Like the Native American Black Elk said: I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true. And as Thomas Mann said about the word myth: it is a story about the way things never were but always are. Not taking the bible literally shifts the emphasis from believing that events really happened, to seeing and affirming their meanings. It means going deeper into the stories.
Faith doesn’t mean that we believe in the literal truth and factuality of the bible regardless of how improbable or even impossible they seem. Instead, faith is about something so much more important. It is about our relationship with God and about centering our minds and our lives in God and being faithful to God. It means trusting God. And I can do that. How about you? Amen.
Resources:
Most of this sermon comes directly from the book Convictions, How I Learned What Matters Most by Marcus Borg and the chapter entitled “The Bible Can Be True Without Being Literally True.”