A class on the Bible At St Andrew is interesting. We talked last week about ‘narrative truth’ vs. ‘factual truth’ – the first is the truth such as ‘my favorite color’ that you can’t prove. ‘Factual truth’ are things that can be measured or proven in some other way — ‘absolute truth.’

People who require the Bible to be true everywhere on the level of ‘factual truth’ have a lot of work to do. Like the author of the book we are using in the class says, ‘they believe they’re defending the Bible, and because they believe that only verifiable facts can be accepted as truth, they have to make sure that every detail in Scripture is consistent.’ He also says that this assumption is not an ancient but a modern innovation, having arisen in the Enlightenment period with the development of modern science, and many in the Enlightenment and into today believe this is the only valid truth.

The enlightenment assumption also influenced the development of the idea of inerrancy in the past couple hundred years. It is assumed that all information in the Bible must be able to be factually proven or the entire Bible loses its value.

“These Christians imagine that the nature of biblical authority is perfectly clear; they often speak of Scripture as inerrant. In fact, however, they have tacitly abandoned the authority of Scripture in favor of a conservative Protestant theology shaped largely in the nineteenth century. This fundamentalist theology they buttress with strings of quotations to give it a biblical flavor, but it predetermines their reading of Scripture so thoroughly that one cannot speak of the Bible as having any independent voice in their churches.” (See L. William Countryman, Biblical Authority or Biblical Tyranny? (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. ix-x)

1/27/2010