Battle Cry Series: Is the Bible true?

Is the Bible true? Is it fact or fiction?

I’ll be completely honest about my shortcomings in this arena. Once I got comfortable with Jesus, who he was, what he did, and what that means for me (basically, the New Testament)…I just took the rest of the Bible (Old Testament) at face value. I understood it was a picture of the character of God, what he loves and hates, how he wants to interact with us, what his expectations are – and I never really went any further into caring about whether this was literal or that was historical. (If you want to understand why the wall was built to those specifications, talk to my husband. If you want to know what building the wall means to our walk with Jesus now, I’m your girl.)

It wasn’t until unbelievers started holding my feet to the fire and asking hard questions that I realized my attitude was a cop out. To be honest, I think I was scared to dig any deeper. I restored my relationship with God about 10 years ago and came over from some very New Age, pluralistic ideas about God and Jesus. If the answer to that question was an emphatic yes, we believe it is literal and historical even though some of it is wholly unprovable at this time, I think I would have struggled with my faith. (Yes, that viewpoint does exist in the Christian community.) I digress…

In the quest to truly understand why I believe what I believe, I realized I didn’t really know what I believed at all. It took me a few weeks to arrive at what I wanted to know and a couple of days to clearly articulate the question (cut me some slack – I have a 7-month-old at home, very little free time to think, and even less energy to go deep.) I arrived at this:

Especially when considering the Old Testament, when we say the Bible is the infallible and inerrant Word of God, do we mean that it is all literal, historical fact? 

In church on Sunday, you hear these words often in reference to the Bible: infallible and inerrant. I always equated those two words to true, but I never really thought about what true meant. Does it mean historically factual? Literal? Is it true in relationship to history, or true in relationship to God’s character and plan, or both?  As I began to work through the information that would shape my opinion about this I realized, I don’t even know what my own church believes about this! We don’t really talk about it in this context; “true” sat in my head as a nebulous concept – and, right or wrong, I was okay with that.    

“The Bible is not written as a history book, but it is a book that contains much history.” I love this quote by Jim Franks because often when in a discussion over the reliability of the Bible, unbelievers will throw out its historical inaccuracy or incompleteness. The Bible is a collection of 66 books written by more than 40 authors over more than 1,500 years. It is filled with allegory, parables, prophecy and poetry, wisdom nuggets, and yes, even history. But the point of the Bible was never to be documented history. It was to take the gigantic concept of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, triune, creator God and let little bitty human us understand what that means about Him.

Our ability to “prove” much of the Old Testament is severely limited on this side of Heaven (although we do have secular support confirming Biblical accounts, we’ll cover that in the next blog.) I believe it is the enemy that gets us to focus on those minutiae; it’s an excellent distraction when you think about it. The point of the creation story is not literal 7 days vs whatever a God that operates outside of our concept of time took. The point is to show a God that crafted this world by hand, carefully handling every detail, who knit us together from nothing and gave us a purpose. Likewise, the story of the fall is about a God who was seeking personal relationship with humans, who called them back to his presence as they hid from shame; who loves us immensely but could not ignore that he was also a just God and consequences for disobedience were in order.

When we begin to splice through scripture ignoring the point of the story in favor of verifying literal accuracy, we risk losing the entire message of God through either obliviousness or misinterpretation. One of the pastors that was posed this question cautioned that we must interpret scripture with scripture; always asking, “does this reflect the heart and truth of God elsewhere in the Bible?” The point of the story is always the truth – what does this teach me about God? The historical or literal context is a far second place.

My husband and I were talking about it like this: God teaching us is like a teacher in a classroom of 35 kids who all learn differently. By design, the Bible would need multiple methods of conveying a message so that ALL of us have an opportunity to “hear” and understand it. For my husband, the size of Nehemiah’s wall, how many feet per day they had to build to accomplish that, what kind of tools they must have been using, how many hours a day they’d have had to work all help him wrap his head around the miraculous provision of God. For me, it’s about how the story developed, how community came together, how God sustained them through the process, how they praised and worshipped him. Both views get you to the truth: God is our provider even in situations that seem impossible…we just have different ways of getting there.

So, is the Bible fact or fiction, literal or allegorical, historical or poetic? In the words of my own Pastor…yes. But let’s not get distracted by the questions that don’t have answers; let’s make the main thing, the main thing. God, in all his power and glory, gave us a book to understand who he is and how he loves us because we matter that much to him.

But in the spirit of digging deep, the next blog will cover the reliability of the Bible and why, whether fact or fiction, we can believe it is truth.