Sunday, June 1, 2014

TRUTH OR FACT?

I know it has been a while since my last post. Since then I moved and changed jobs. I accepted a position at a great justice-focused organization, HOPE CommUnity Center (www.hcc-offm.org), which I am sure I will be sharing more about in future posts.

But today's theme is another. Its has to do with confusion around how we use the term “truth” or “true.” In certain juridical or contractual settings it is common to invoke the oath to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Some versions add as a final phrase, “so help me God.” Usually in this setting, what is being declared is a commitment to express what one understands to be an accurate accounting of some observed event or set of facts. Not living up to this commitment would involve failing to account for all that one knows about the event or intentionally mis-representing what one observed. In other words, it would involve giving false testimony, telling a lie.

The same understanding is employed when we say, for example, that a particular story is a true story. The suggestion is that the events or details involved literally took place, that they represent a factually accurate accounting of the incident. The contrast would be a fictional story, a story that is about imaginary events or people; events or people that are not real.

Where the rub appears for me is when the use of language I have just summarized leads us to the equating fact with truth. As I have expressed in earlier posts (see, for example, "A Strange Mix"), there are many things in the Bible that I do not believe represent literal facts. The creation story is one. The first chapter of Genesis describes a flat earth with a bowl-shaped dome over it, with moon and sun traveling across the dome. As a person of the 21st Century, it is impossible for me to understand this account as representing accurate factual material. Similarly there are aspects of the so-called “history” of the People of Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures that from the perspective of modern historical research would appear not to be based in a factually accurate accounting. Similarly, between the Gospels we find contradictions in the account of Jesus' life, suggesting that not all accounts are fully factually accurate.

Now, the fundamentalism within which I grew up could not admit to any such judgments concerning scripture. Contradictions had to be explained away. Thus the biblical survey courses at Moody Bible Institute were titled “Bible Synthesis.” Claiming the over-all authorship of God, God's self, passages were pulled from different authors and places in scripture to seam together a single and allegedly internally consistent narrative. Needing to counter “modernist” claims concerning evolution, it was affirmed that the Genesis creation is a literal factual accounting of how the world came into being just a little over 5,000 years ago. The idea within fundamentalism is that if we could have been witnesses as the world was being created, we would have seen before our very eyes the appearances of the various aspects of the earth and universe as God called them out. We would have witnessed literally God taking up clay and shaping a man, as well as surgically removing Adam's rib and forming woman. And within the milieu of this biblical fundamentalism, to claim otherwise would be regarded as undermining the truth of the Bible. Similar glosses would be made to address other "difficulties" in the biblical narrative. Truth, according to this view, is to be understood in the sense of the “true story” referenced above, as contrasted to falsehood or fiction.

               "There are parts of the Bible I believe to be 
                              factually inaccurate."

However, over the years I have come to the conclusion that there is another way of understanding this and it has to do with what we mean when we use the word “truth.” A helpful distinction, I believe, is to separate our understanding of “truth” from “fact”. There are parts of the Bible that I believe to be factually inaccurate. Some sections, like the creation story, were in my way of thinking never intended to be thought of as fact (in the literal, scientific way we imagine today). This does not mean however that these biblical passages are lacking in truth.

My view is that for something to be true does not require that it be grounded in fact or that it be a factually accurate description. At times I have used the story of Pinocchio as an example. I suspect there are few of us who would claim that the story of the wooden puppet who became a living boy and whose nose grew every time he told a lie is an historical or factual accounting of events. Nevertheless, the story being fictitious does not remove it's truth, does it? Is not the truth of this story something about the importance of being honest and the downside of being dishonest? Similarly, concluding that portions of the biblical accounting of Israel's history or of Jesus' life are not historically grounded or factually accurate does not remove their truth value. Rather, we must ask ourselves: what was the author wanting us to understand, learn or grow in as we hear his narrative? Is it God's greatness or faithfulness in the life of the Hebrew people? Is it a story to help us understand the profound significance Jesus had in the life of the early Christian community? These are the truths in these accounts which stand independent of the facticity of the account itself.

So when I hear someone talking about what is true or what is required for something to be true, I find it helpful to keep this distinction in mind. For me, factual accuracy is one thing. Truth is something else. And the validity of the latter does not depend on meeting the criteria of the former.