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SALISBURY CATHEDRAL LENT LECTURES 2004 - LECTURE 2

Bishop John Baker (Wednesday 7th April 2004)


‘WRITTEN FOR OUR LEARNING’: THE USE AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE BIBLE

Lecture Two: 'The Bible and the Quest for Truth'

'Jesus replied, "This is why I was born and why I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone whose being springs from truth hears my voice." Pilate says to him "What is truth?"'

Bacon thought Pilate mocked: 'What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer'. It was certainly the cynical and contemptuous remark of a callous, totally pragmatic man. But his words have echoed disturbingly down the centuries. What do we mean when we talk about 'truth'?

Jesus had said to those followers who believed in him, 'If you live in my word, you will be truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.' There is a problem here which goes right to the heart of our use and understanding of the Bible. If our loyalty is to Truth, must we not be free to disagree with the words of Jesus or of Scripture as a whole, if at any point they do not seem to us to be true? Or does faith require us to take Jesus of the Bible on trust as true, even where our minds cannot accept that?

Some would object that 'knowing the truth' in spiritual things is not just a matter of the mind. It calls for a moral and devotional discipline, a love and empathy before one is able to recognise that kind of truth. In the 14th century epic, Piers the Plowman, Piers, the hero, at one point invites a selection of church people, lay and religious, to join him on a pilgrimage in search of 'Saint Truth'. But first he explains the disciplined, holy life which will be involved. When he has finished, a prostitute puts up her hand and says 'I'll come!' Then she looks round and says, 'Where have they all gone?' But are such ideas simply the product of religious brainwashing? Do they mean any more than that we have to be predisposed in favour of finding truth in, say the Bible before we start looking? But how then can we make an honest judgement?

My own view is that we must be committed to Truth above all else. On something as important as our fundamental convictions about life and its purpose, we cannot sacrifice our integrity. Besides, ask yourself this. If someone comes honestly to the conclusion that there is no God, or that they cannot accept the Christian God, will the God we love and worship condemn or reject such a person? We also need to take the same stand for the sake of other people. If we are trying to convince someone else of the truth of Christianity, they will want to know that we have ourselves faced and weighted the evidence on the other side. How can the world respect Christianity unless they see the Church and its individual members always putting truth first.

On the other hand, being serious about truth does not mean that we have to keep changing our beliefs every time some new notion seems to throw doubt on the Christian position. The quest for truth can take a long time; and when we do come to a decision it will always be one on balance, before we arrive at a system of beliefs which seems to us as good as we can manage. On any matter which cannot be certified by scientific method, we never shall attain certainty, in this life. Christianity, as Pascal said, is a wager. We stake our lives on something that of its very nature cannot be proved. There is a saying, 'the jury is still out' and we often have to say that about our own opinions. Meanwhile we go on being as good Christians as we can, and probably modifying our own Christian faith-packages in the light of experience. It would be a very unusual church congregation where all the members believed and thought the same thing.

Turning to the Bible let me make one preliminary comment. So far as the quest for truth is concerned there are two different things we may be doing. One is to decide whether what the Bible says is true, and in what sense. The other is to ask whether and how the Bible can help us in our own quest for truth. That is quite another matter, and we need to be aware as we go along which of them it is we are doing, for our estimate of the Bible can vary considerably between the two.

So, when we come to the Bible what kind of truth do we expect to find? Let us take three broad types of truth - scientific, historical and theological.

Most people would not, I imagine, go to the Bible today for scientific truth, meaning by that facts about the universe and theories to account for those facts within the framework of space-time or matter and energy. The Bible comes from a world in which there was considerable interest in observing phenomena, especially the stars; and in Babylon they had attained a high degree of skill in describing and predicting the motions of the heavenly bodies. But this seems to have had little impact on Israel and where it is mentioned it is with derision because of the way it was mixed up with astrological prediction and the worship of the sun, moon and stars. The only major point in this area on which we and the Old Testament would agree is the regularity and reliability of the universe, on which they often comment with admiration and which is of course the basic assumption that makes scientific method possible.

A word about the story of creation in Genesis. Although this does have some remarkable points of contact, at least in Genesis 1, with what we now think probably did happen, it is not the real story. As we all know, there are Christians who feel they cannot accept this verdict, and that the account must have been dictated to its author by the Holy Spirit, and therefore must be factually correct. On the other side, a habit has grown up of defending the sacred writer by saying that it was never intended to be a factual account, but that it is poetry. My own comment may be summed up tersely as 'a plague on both your houses!'. No good purpose is served by dragging in a bogus notion of poetry as something unconcerned with facts. It is done only to save biblical writers from criticism for getting the facts wrong, and as such is intellectually shoddy. It is also unnecessary. It is perfectly clear what the writer was doing. He wanted, as we said last time, to take the history of the world back to the divine initiative in creation, and for this purpose he had to say something about that creative act. He did so by using his imagination, and thinking 'it must have been something like that' and he did it brilliantly. But he also knew there was another version of the story, focused not on the universe as a whole but on the earth and so, after his own grandest scale picture he added the other tradition in Genesis 2. Today we know more and we need to ask instead 'what does our own knowledge tell us about God?' But both he and we agree in relating the cosmos and its origins to God.

The New Testament does not add anything on this subject we need to bother with for the moment, though we shall come back to it later. For the present let us move on to historical truth.

What do we think is happening when someone sets out to write history? It could, of course, be the compiling of pure annals, that is, the most neutral listing possible of bare facts. But such a work would not be what we mean by history: it would be a source for history. All historical works, even the most annalistic, have their own angle on the events they record. They aim to interpret, to uncover motives and pressures, to explain, to pass judgement. And the biblical historians are no different. When Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles, his aim was to bring out of the facts a number of basic truths: that God through the Holy Spirit had taken the Gospel from Judaism to the Gentiles and from Jerusalem to Rome; that the greatest difficulties besetting the infant Church came from the Jews, not from the Romans, who acknowledged Christians as good citizens; and that Saints Peter and Paul had been friends, and that the stories of the disagreements between them had been grossly exaggerated. Was all this legitimate interpretation of the facts? Most critics would say, as about any history today, yes and no.

It is of course, the Old Testament which has brought us a rich harvest of history writing. Indeed, it is arguable that the Court History of David and Solomon in 2 Samuel and 1 Kings, from the 9th century, is the first extant work of history in our sense of the word. The Jewish work is indeed remarkably honest, nothing like the records we have of Mesopotamian kings. If you read it through (and when I do I find I can't put it down) you get a fascinating portrait of David, a combination of a charismatic and religious warrior-hero, a Mafia godfather and a Renaissance despot brought up on Machiavelli. But then, when you turn to the Books of Chronicles, which cover much of the same ground, you find a very different David. No mention now of that wretched business over Uriah and Bathsheba. None of David's deathbed instructions to Solomon on getting rid of old enemies and possible rivals. Here David's greatest concerns as king are cultic. He makes all the arrangements and piles up all the materials for his son Solomon's building of the Jerusalem Temple and lays down the rules for all the cultic personnel, the priests, Levites and singers and porters.

Chronicles also records nine chapters of genealogical material running down to the year 400, so clearly it was written long after most of the events it records. But what it has to say about two of the later kings in the history of Judah, Manasseh and Josiah, is instructive. Manasseh, in the eyes of Israel's historians, was a very wicked king, not because he was particularly oppressive, but because he worshipped pagan gods. He ought, therefore to have been struck down by God early on; but he wasn't, he reigned for 55 years in peace and prosperity. On the principle I mentioned earlier, 'this is how it must have happened', his story must contain something to explain this. In the records they found that one year Manasseh was called up by his overlord, the King of Babylon, to accompany him on a campaign in Syria and Asia Minor, together with many other subject monarchs. Clearly he must have incurred the Great King's displeasure, so that incident was turned into a term of imprisonment which brought Manasseh to his senses, so that he repented and his long reign was explained. Josiah, on the other hand, was a very good king who restored the Temple and enforced the law of God, but he came to a premature end when he was foolish enough to try to ingratiate himself with the King of Babylon by barring the way to an Egyptian army which was passing through to invade Babylonia. Josiah was killed. What had he done wrong? He had disobeyed the word of the Lord through a prophet who warned him not to take on this war.

If we want the whole truth of what happened in the history of Israel and Judah, we shall not find it in the Old Testament. The histories vary in detail and insight and in the degree to which they resist stereotyping, but for faith they are unique because they try to relate history to the purposes of a faithful and ethical God.

Which brings us to our third category: theological truth? How is God involved in human life? What does it tell us about him? On what principles does he operate? Let us look at a test case with important lessons for us about the Bible and what we can learn from it.

This is the episode in Israel's history known as the Babylonian exile. From the time of Solomon's successor, Rehoboam, the Jews had been divided into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and the tribe of Judah in the south with its capital at Jerusalem. In 721 the northern capital, Samaria, was taken by the Assyrians and the northern kingdom destroyed, many of the people being deported to Mesopotamia. In the next century Assyria itself was overthrown and supremacy passed to Babylon. A series of blunders by the Judaean kings then led to a full scale attack on Judah by the Babylonians in 586 BC in the course of which Jerusalem was captured, its walls demolished, the Temple razed to the ground and the king and many citizens taken into captivity in and around Babylon. To all appearances Judah was extinguished as Israel had been. But miraculously, it seemed, in 539 Babylon was overthrown by the Persians and in the next year Cyrus the Persian king even allowed some of the Jews to return to their homeland and even paid for the rebuilding of the Temple on condition that the Jews would pray for him and his royal house.

This dramatic series of events sparked off much theological reflection. First, why had the disaster happened? Some thought it was the wickedness of Manasseh, which had been so great that even the goodness of Josiah could not cancel it out. Others as we have seen, thought it was because Josiah had disobeyed the word of the Lord through a prophet. Others said it could not be blamed just on the heads of state, it was the whole people who had brought it on themselves by pagan rites and general immorality. Yet others said it had happened for the simple reason that the God of Israel was weaker than other gods and unable to protect his people. When they had worshipped pagan gods in Manasseh's time everything had gone well, so the moral was to go back to heathenism - the womenfolk apparently took the lead on this one, having more practical common-sense than the men.

But there was another problem. If what they had believed about God was true and he punished sinners and rewarded the righteous, why had the good and the bad suffered indiscriminately? Two prophets, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, said that in future God would order things differently and that when the nation had been sufficiently punished and brought back to Palestine there would be a new order in which only the wicked would suffer. But one unnamed prophet, a member of the Isaiah circle, came up with an insight that was to affect the whole of Christian history. He said that the sufferings of the innocent were not punishment like those of the evildoer; they were an atoning sacrifice made to God on behalf of the evildoers and that was why it had been possible for the nation to be restored to its home.

All these differing interpretations spring from what was for Israel the permanent perplexity of their faith, running right through their history: if God was indeed Lord of History, and if he had committed himself to Israel as his people in a faithful covenant relationship, why did the nation suffer so terribly, so that at times its very survival seemed under threat. This is still the agony of Israel today and the reason why some Jews feel that the holocaust calls into question their whole traditional belief in God and in themselves as the Chosen People.

In the years after the Exile, when for a while Israel enjoyed peace and security under the Persian Empire, Jewish thinkers gave their minds to this problem at the individual level: why, when I have served God faithfully has he allowed this terrible thing to happen to me or mine? The results was two of the most distinctive books in the Old Testament, Job and Eccliastes. Job is one of the greatest poetic dramas in world literature but theologians have criticised it for offering no solution to the problem of innocent suffering. This seems unfair when theologians have been notably unsuccessful themselves in this exercise but it is even more unfair when they completely miss the real point of the work. Job is an innocent sufferer, true; but the poem is not ultimately about the problem of innocent suffering but about the nature of true goodness. Job is agreed by God and Satan to be a truly good man, but Satan says that he is good only because life has been good to him. Take these things away and he will curse God to his face. So Satan is allowed to put Job to this test. Job agonises over his fate and argues bitterly with his friends whose only suggestion is to say he must have sinned and why doesn't he admit it. But he does not curse God. What he does is challenge God; and although God answers him out of the whirlwind he says nothing to the point. As Bernard Shaw put it: 'If I complain that I am suffering unjustly, it is no answer to say "Can you make a hippopotamus?" But of course, God cannot tell Job what is really going on because he has a bet on Job and to let Job into the secret would be cheating. Eventually Job leaves it to God, admitting he is out of his depth. Satan has lost and Job can be restored to happiness.

So far as we know, the ideas in Job were never followed up in Old Testament times. This is not surprising because Job in fact demolishes the whole basis of one of the Old Testament's main assumptions about God, namely that he intervenes to protect the good and punish the wicked. The writer of Ecclesiastes also attacks this idea, arguing that on the basis of the evidence God lets the world run itself, cause leading inexorably to effect and many Christians today would accept that position. Job complements this with an even more radical critique, maintaining that if God were to intervene to manage things justly that would make the moral life impossible. Good, to be truly good, must be its own reward, chosen for its own sake. Some, of course, have complained that in that case Job ought not to have had his blessings restored but that is the kind of comment that can be made only in the comfort of a theologian's study! Job suffered simply so that God could win a bet and it would be hard if God having won, were then to leave Job to rot on his dunghill covered in loathsome sores. A story is a story.

What is crucial for us is that Job does demolish the very foundations of the main Old Testament view of God's dealing with humankind. The route some within Judaism took through the problem was to move God's rewards for the righteous and punishments for the evil doer into a future world, either through resurrection or because the human soul was immortal. The former you will find at the end of Daniel, the latter in 2 Maccabees and the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha. But this does not help us because it makes no difference whether we look for reward or fear punishment in this life or another one, so long as this is still the basis of God's way with us. What we have to face here is not some defect in this or that story which makes God out to be cruel or vindictive or obsessed with trivia of ritual purity but with the fact that the basic rationale of most of the Old Testament and indeed some of the New is discredited.

What shall we say to these things? Well, first and obviously that it is the Old Testament itself which points this out. The fact that most of us take no notice of its having done so is our fault, not the Bible's. But someone may say, this is only a fraction of the Bible. The majority view is still the one you say is untenable. Does not that mean that the rest, at least of the Old Testament, is mistaken, an unreliable guide? And if so, why keep it?

The answer to which is, to reprise my theme song, that we have to take history seriously. Divine truth does not arrive through the medium of government handouts. It is discovered in the course of the human journey as we wrestle with experience. What the Bible does is to validate this method. Because we see genuine discovery going on there, that authorises us, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to continue the process here and now, working from what the Bible has already discovered for us.

We can do this with confidence for two reasons. First, because the generations in the Old Testament, from the patriarchs through Moses and Joshua, the Judges, the kings and the prophets and sages, whether they got things right or wrong or partly right did so on the common basis of trust. Even if God was, as a disciple of Isaiah put it, 'God who hides himself' he is there and staying with him with all our mind and heart and soul and strength will in the end get us where we need to be. That, it seems to me, is the great message of the Old Testament and the New, and the lesson we have to lay to heart as a Church and in our own lives.

For surely, the New Testament vindicates that message in the most wonderful way. God's gift of Jesus, the crucified and risen Master and Servant, Teacher and Lord, sets us off on a new journey of even more wonderful discovery. What we see in the New Testament is a theological nuclear explosion as writers try to express out of the tradition what Jesus means - in Jesus' own words to 'bring out of their treasures things new and old'.

The writer to the Hebrews begins with ideas from the wisdom teaching of the Jewish schools in Alexandria, seeing Jesus as fulfilling the old ideas of the heavenly wisdom: God's agent in the creation of the universe, the radiance of God's glory, the exact impress of his being in human nature. The Fourth Evangelist is close to that tradition when he equates Jesus with the divine Word uttered at the creation, the light which shone in the darkness of chaos and gives life to every human being. Together they add up to the astonishing claim, expressed also in Ephesians and Colossians, that the clue to the moral and spiritual purpose of the Creation is to be found in Jesus. The hymn quoted by St Paul in Philippians and therefore earlier than St Paul, already presents Jesus as surrendering the divine nature which was his by right in order to come down to live in obedience to the terms of human nature, even to the point of a death like ours, so that everything in all creation should be able to enter the divine glory simply by confessing its solidarity with Jesus as Lord. For Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses, the new Lawgiver, now not just for Judaism but for every nation. For Mark and Revelation he is the Leader in the battle against the forces of evil. For Paul and Peter and Hebrews he is the Priest who by offering himself becomes also the supreme Victim whose suffering takes away the sin of the whole world. And for all of them he is the faithful Son of his Father in heaven and, as such, the Messiah predicted in the prophets and the Psalms.

You will not find here any carefully worked out creed, fine tuned to meet all the demands of philosophy. But within this treasure house of images you discover the conviction that in Jesus we have been given a new and normative window on to God, the correct compass bearing on which to forward in our relationship with him. The human journey is now to move in a new direction; and we have not yet begun to exhaust the discoveries hidden in the story of Jesus' life and in those initial wondering, excited, passionate explanations of what that life had been about. What would be a betrayal of the Scripture would be to refuse to go on, to be inspired to see new divine meaning in the word of the Bible in the light of all the new knowledge we are accumulating about the universe and our planet and our life upon it, and simply to treat what the word meant then to those people as all they have to say to us.

W H Auden has a pertinent line: 'The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living'. To illustrate what I mean let me conclude with a short reflection on the central belief of our faith, the doctrine of the Incarnation. That doctrine itself is not something that you will find in Scripture in the precise theological form it took 400 years later. But it is fair to accept that later definition as crystallising the reality toward which Scripture points, what, if you like, the New Testament was trying to say. What is a disaster is when people fail to see that what were recognised as the implications of that belief then are in no way the whole story. Of course they are basic for us: the love of a God who identified with us, who came to work within the limitations of our human state and to suffer what we have to suffer including even death itself. A Muslim once said to me about the crucifixion, 'I could never respect a God who allowed men to treat him like that'. An imam at the Regent's Park mosque said during a seminar 'It is impossible for us to accept that God could suffer'. Such exchanges should help us realise the distinctiveness of our quest for Truth. Equally no Jew could as yet accept the idea of God living a human life. We may all be 'People of the Book' but the gulf between our various faith-assumptions is enormous. To more than one billion of our fellow humans the thought that has sustained Christians, enabling them to live with their own sins and through their own agonies, that the Son of God came and suffered and died for our sake, is simply a blasphemy.

It would be so easy to stay with that as a sufficiency of truth. But his belief in the Incarnation of God today means so much more. Our recognition that, even though the biblical story of Adam and Eve is not a historical record, yet DNA has shown beyond a doubt that all members of homo sapiens are related means that every human being now alive or who has ever lived is not just our kin but a brother or sister of the Son of God. By the Incarnation God has taken all of us as his family. We do not have to make a profession of faith or be baptised to enter the family of God. We are in it already by God's unilateral act. Faith is not the act by which we come inside, it is the moment when we realise we are and always have been inside. Baptism by admitting us to membership of the Christian Church is a celebration of that and thanksgiving for it. God has united the human race around himself and our mission is to help all human beings live together as what they are, the family of God.

There is another dimension to this. The Incarnation means that in human nature, with all its limitations, God could yet be himself. This surely throws a whole new light on all our fellow human beings of every race and creed. With what reverence we ought to approach them and their wisdoms and insights and spiritualities! That is not to say that all faiths and philosophies are compatible, or that everything in them is true and right. But it does mean that we should approach them with expectation just as we should long for them to accept from us our 'pearl of great price', the Incarnation of God in Christ.

And this aspect of the Incarnation tells us something more. It is not God's power of infinite wisdom which defines his essential character. If that were so he could never have lived within the terms of human existence. What we see in Christ is what St John saw, that the heart of being God and the heart of being human are one and the same: love. Indeed, that is the ultimate reason for believing in the Incarnation: that 'there is no greater love than this, to lay down life for one's friends'. To show himself as love, God needed not only to be one of us but to suffer as we do and since at Easter God put his mark on Jesus crucified as the human being nearest to his own heart, then in Jesus it must have been God suffering on the Cross, for otherwise Jesus would have been more loving than God.

These and many more are mysteries brought to us in Scripture, but unfolded and made real only as we pursue the quest for truth in our own day and circumstances. Like the people in the Bible we shall not get everything right and we shall change our minds on things again and again. But we need not worry. The story that begins with creation and climaxes in Christ assures us that we are walking in the right direction.


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