This is why I don’t care if the Bible is true.

[Mikeb]

It is not that I think less of the Bible, I think less of truth. After studying truth for many years in all its epistemic and mythological manifestations, I am convinced that the Bible offers more. The Bible is of God, and the gift it offers is life and life everlasting, not through the truths it reveals, but through the stories it tells.

Before all else, there were stories. In Eden, as hunter gathers we sat around flickering campfires and told our stories to one another. God was there, our compatriot, His presence was our light and His Tree of Life our food. We were alive and shared our life with one another through our stories. Unlike the cold truth and myth and knowledge we were left with after eating the awful Fruit of death, stories are themselves alive. They come from the life of the teller, and they grow in the life of the listener. The young child, hearing his father’s stories of the hunt, gives life to these stories as he grows. In his first hunt his own experience gives substance and breath to his father’s tales making them a part of his life. The touch, the smell, the thrill, the sounds, and the colors of the hunt animate his father’s words and bring the father’s life into the son. The story is the pre-mythic, pre-Socratic, pre-epistemic way we communicated, the way we shared our life, the way we talked before we ate the awful Fruit and had only death to share.

The stories in the Bible are the stories of our life, of your life and of mine, of all people everywhere. As those stories to grow within us, the Tree of Life begins to flower once again. To be sure, the Bible holds within its pages wonderful wisdom, and truth, and knowledge, but, in every case, the function of that wisdom has been to preserve the stories of the Bible, to pass those stories down from generation to generation, and sow them anew in every time until they find root and grow. In particular, the Bible preserves its two great stories, the Story of Eden where we lost our life, and the Gospel where Christ reclaimed it for us. In these stories resides the fruit of Life, and life everlasting.

A story is a living, breathing thing, like a tree that is fed and grows and bares fruit. We can cut a tree down and make lumber out of it. From this lumber we can build a home or fashion a chair or create any number of useful items. Yet when we do so, we loose the living value of the tree. We loose the oxygen it produces for us to breathe, the fruit it grows for us to eat, and the shade, and the smell, and the beauty of the living tree itself. In the same way, we can harvest our stories, and draw from them rules, archetypes, beliefs, and principals. With these rules and beliefs we can fashion a congregation, a city, or a civilization. Yet as we do so, we loose the living value of the story itself. We loose the way a story lives within us feeding on our experience and growing to inform us about what we are and be itself formed and sustained by what we become.

[Carl Smuda]

Greetings Mikeb,
God Bless you abundantly in the mighty name of our Living Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! Your post...on that note...what is the down to earth living story of the Master's Master Thought: The Kingdom of God?
respectfully,
Carl

[Mikeb]

Carl,

God Bless you too.

What????

Mikeb

[Socrates]

Jesus affirmed the historical accounts of the Bible to be historically true. This includes Creation, the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Jonah and the great sea creature. So as a Christian and a logical thinker, I follow what Jesus believed.

[Mikeb]

Thanks for your post Soc.

And since you have settled the question of your correctness in you post script, I guess we are all doomed to agree.

Wasn't it Neitzche that said "The last Christian was Christ and he was a Jew."?

[TheFiveSolas]

Isn't Nietzsche referred to as the "Insane Philosopher"?

[Mikeb]

He died of Syphlis, if that's what you mean..

Yeh, I think insanity is close to where that ends up without penicillin.

That seems like kind of insensitive name-calling though doesn't it?

[Bill K.]

Hey Mikeb,
That was an interesting post. If you are looking for dialog on your epistomological position you have probably come to the right place. On the other hand, if you were simply making a dogmatic statement about what you see to be truth (after ironically denying you seek such a thing), you may have something more than a dialog on your hands.

You said, "I think less of truth", but then went on to make a lot of truth-claims about a lot of propositional statements. How do you reconcile this?


You said, "The Bible is of God, and the gift it offers is life and life everlasting, not through the truths it reveals, but through the stories it tells." Do you mean that the feel-good nature of the Bible will cause us to live forever? Marcus Borg says something similar.

You said,"Before all else, there were stories." So, you were there? Did they come out of thin air? This quote of yours implies some epistemic claim on your part with regard to historical knowledge. Somehow you have gained some "truth." Do you see this disparity between the different aspects of you post?




You said, "God was there, our compatriot..." Now you are claiming, not just historical truth, but also theological truth. For a person who has shunned the search, you are making some pretty dogmatic claims.

You said, "but, in every case, the function of that wisdom has been to preserve the stories of the Bible..."
So, now you propose a doctrine of inspiration? On what basis?

You said, "A story is a living, breathing thing, like a tree that is fed and grows and bares fruit."

All stories equally? What made this clear to you? Perhaps you do not see it, but you have in fact established within your own soul an epistomology. Has your examination overlooked your own contribution to your search?

Just some thoughts.

IN Christ,
Bill

[Pilgrim]

I hate it when irony is confused with oxymoron. Just a pet peeve.

[Carl Smuda]

02-20-2003 @ 07:07 PM
Mikeb:

Carl,

God Bless you too.

What????

Mikeb

Hello again Mikeb, what I meant was, if one looks at scripture the way you described, that they are an evolution of folklore, or some such-but grander I think; then, where did the Christ's 'Master Thought' originate? Have you thought any on the origin of "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel." (Mark 1:15).

[Mikeb]

Bill K,

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

I did not mean to make any claims of truth or of knowledge, for I have none to make. I was just trying to tell a story. If I used the categories and language of knowledge, I am sorry.. (well, not really sorry, more wistfully regretful perhaps). I had no choice. We are bound in a world of knowledge and power that touches life at no point. If we talk or communicate at all, we must use the categories and structure of knowledge to convey our meaning. The depths and totality of our bondage within this world is, however, extremely difficult to express within those categories. Perhaps the image of the Power Plant in the movie The Matrix might begin to give us a fairly accurate depiction of our dilemma. The colors and lights and images of our world flash by us, enthralling, entangling, and exhausting us. We can see nothing more or expect nothing else.

You seem to be well fed from the tree of knowledge, and, if the truth were known, I too have gorged myself on the sweet fruit from her branches many times. Like the residents of Eden, I “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise.” In the last few years, however, I have, remembered God’s warning, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

The fruit of knowledge is as deadly today as it was when Adam and Eve took it so many eons ago. When they ate that fruit they laid the cornerstone for the world of death we live in today, the world of knowledge and of power.

As for stories, they exist on a pre-epistemic level. When you read or are told a story, particularly the stories of the Bible, they breathe life into your experience and learning. Stories are shared experiences………………….Never Mind.. I’m sure you’re right. I’ll go out and repent.

One question: Doesn’t it seem the least bit ironic to you that God’s first warning to man was not partake of the knowledge of Good and Evil because it would kill him, and that now… all these long years later we use God’s Word, the Scriptures as our primary source of the forbidden fruit?

Just a question.

GBU

Mike

[TheFiveSolas]

Mikeb wrote:

You seem to be well fed from the tree of knowledge, and, if the truth were known, I too have gorged myself on the sweet fruit from her branches many times. Like the residents of Eden, I “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise.” In the last few years, however, I have, remembered God’s warning, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

The fruit of knowledge is as deadly today as it was when Adam and Eve took it so many eons ago. When they ate that fruit they laid the cornerstone for the world of death we live in today, the world of knowledge and of power.

Here's my take on your assertions. You are misunderstanding the scripture you refer to by equating the "knowledge of good and evil" with "knowledge" itself. You then imply that knowledge itself is evil however, this is not what scripture teaches. As a counterpoint, Hosea 4:6 says, "My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I will reject you..."

In actuality Genesis forbid man from acquiring a certain KIND od knowledge, namely that of good and evil. God alone is sovereign and as creator He alone has the prerogative (due to His inherent righteousness and holiness) to define good and evil. Man tried (as he does even today) to usurp this prerogative. That is what brought death, not the mere acquisition of knowledge, but the attempt to become "gods" ourselves.

[Mikeb]

TheFiveSolas,

Thank you for your comment. Would that you were correct.

If, however, you examine the growth on knowledge over the ages, you will find that the whole tree grew from the knowledge of good and evil. The idea that knowledge is in some way separated from moral knowledge is an invention of the Enlightenment. Thinkers of that time wanted their toolmakers to be free from political and moral constraints, and so they invented science.

You are right about man usurping God however. That is what knowledge does. Knowledge is power, and power is what the serpent offered Eve, and what she choose, and we continue to choose and choose and choose…..

Christ’s story, the Gospel put the Tree of Life into the Scriptures.. but we continue to butcher it to erect our systems of belief.