The All-Important Question: What Does this Mean?

My previous post related John Shelby Spong's view that the all important question in biblical interpretation is not "Did this really happen?" but "What does this mean?" I agreed to the extent that we Westerners have indeed failed to discern truth in myth, legend, intuition, and poetry. We have rather tended to feel that only that which is literal and objective can be true. So we've spent inordinate amounts of time and spilled tons of ink trying to prove that the Bible is scientifically precise, historically literal, and nowhere contradictory. We have tried to force pre-modern works into a modern mold. 

In terms of the pre-modern and non-literal, some would argue that the creation narrative in Genesis is neither historically literal, nor scientifically plausible. It is rather a poetic prose, true in the sense that it affirms God as the source of all that is good. The description of humanity's failure is also theologically accurate. It's a situation which has consistently repeated itself down through the ages as human beings have sought complete autonomy for selfish ends, resulting in disastrous consequences. 

So perhaps the important question in the creation accounts is not so much whether everything came into being in six literal days, whether a snake really talked, or whether digesting forbidden fruit exposed nudity. But what the narrative means is the all important question. Will we seek to live autonomously with delusions of godhood or will we submit ourselves to living under God's Word which speaks new creation into existence--a Word that transforms chaos into order.

Some believe that the Book of Jonah is a parable as opposed to literal history. So the important question would not be whether Jonah was really swallowed by a fish. The important question is whether we will be a light to the nations, compassionate to everyone regardless of their ethnicity. Or will we allow prejudice, hatred, or vengeance to blind us?

Was the Samson story a Paul Bunyan type tale (as a friend once suggested to me)? Did he really tie three-hundred foxes tail-to-tail using their tails as torches to light the grain-fields? Is it important to believe this is literal history or is the all important moral to this story more about the danger of compromise? 

And did Jesus cast out literal demons? Or was the language of demon-possession the Gospel authors' accomodative language to a pre-modern world in reference to various diseases which at that time lacked scientific diagnoses?   

Moreover, the cosmology assumed in the Hebrew Scriptures is not a scientific description of the cosmos. It is certainly accomodative language as the authors communicate truth within the framework of a pre-modern package.

I'm not saying whether I agree with any or all of the above viewpoints. Let's just say that I'm sympathetic to them and I don't reject someone who holds to these conclusions. (Nor will I be posing these questions in Sunday morning sermons where the point of these texts will be "What do they mean for us?")  

But are there indeed parts of Scripture that simply must be understood as literally true and historically accurate before one is considered "orthodox?" Stay tuned.      

Comments

[Frank]

Wade,

This isn't a can of worms you've opened up. I'm thinking it's more like pythons!

As you know very well, the path that says, "This didn't necessarily have to happen in order for it to have significance" comes to an end for most people who take that position. For example, C. S. Lewis once wrote that there are "legendary" stories in the Old Testament. But it would be impossible, he would say, for us to have true Christianity without a death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus as those events are reported and understood in the New Testament.

Biblical conservatives in the modern era have typically taken the all-or-nothing approach: "If you can throw out the historicity of some of it, what's to keep someone from throwing out the rest of it?" Whatever we make of that rhetoric, we have to realize that it strongly resonates with a desire for a certain Word in an uncertain world, and that it has played very well through the years in groups like the Churches of Christ.

I'm stopping now. This makes my head hurt.

[Darren Beachy]

Wade,
I have struggled with these vary questions! Good post! Like you, I will not pose these questions from the pulpit for sure.
As for Jonah, I do believe he is larger than life.