While Christianity means following Jesus, the starting point for that journey today is the Bible – whether you’re a fundamentalist who takes the Bible as literal truth, or a Catholic who views it through the lens of dogma and tradition, or a rational theist like myself who treats the Bible as primary source material.
But one thing you can’t do with the Bible – even if you’re a fundamentalist and thinks it’s literally true, or a Catholic who believes in the richness of orthodox doctrine, and especially not a rational theist – is actually prove anything with it, not without breaking the meaning of “proof”.
Perhaps I’m oversensitive about this point. In colloquial language, proof can just mean evidence offered to reach a conclusion: you can offer your driver’s license as a proof of your identity, gather facts to prove innocence or guilt, offer those proofs as trial to help a jury reach a conclusion.
But that’s not the way that people used the word “proof” to argue about the Bible when I was growing up, nor is it the way that I’ve seen people use the word around me to argue for their beliefs. Those people use the word proof like this: “You should believe X, same as me, and I can prove it with the Bible!”
The most egregious example I heard was a Catholic priest at Christmas mass give an enormous list of Catholic doctrine – mostly, political doctrines – which they then followed by the extraordinary statement that all of these things logically followed from the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But the theology of the Catholic Church – four hundred pages of catechism in my 1983 copy, near nine hundred in the 1994 edition, thirteen hundred pages in McBrien’s Catholicism, or 1500 pages in the latest edition of Denzinger – do not logically follow from the hundred thousand words of the Gospels and Acts.
You can take the Gospels on faith. You can take the Bible to be mythical truth, like the Catholic Church does, or to be literal truth, like fundamentalists do. And, guided by grace, you can build a theology on it. But you cannot use it as a foundation for logical argument, for the text requires interpretation.
The Bible consists of around seventy books with a wide variety of content – myths, histories, stories, songs, proverbs, parables, essays, biographies, letters, and prophecies. These texts are not written with sufficient precision for them to serve as axioms for logical argument – nor were they meant to.
The reason is simple to understand: axioms for logical argument must be atomic, with meanings that are completely self-contained to serve as bases for logical deductions; but the meaning of any particular passage of the Bible must be taken in their textual, historical and religious context.
This isn’t an argument for relativism or for radical textual analysis, but the simple point that even the shortest sentence in the Bible, “Jesus wept,” has a meaning which can only understood by reading the story in the text that surrounds it – and every act of reading is an act of creative imagination.
Researchers in artificial intelligence have discovered that reading even the simplest possible stories generally requires inventing novel concepts that don’t yet exist in the mind of the reader. Each reader must recreate within themselves knowledge contained in the stories, knowledge they don’t yet have.
And they recreate that information based on what they already do know, and so will idiosyncratically create their own unique interpretations of the concepts of the story. Perhaps this is why different Christian groups I encounter seem to read the Bible in such different ways.
Now, most groups of Christians I know are convinced that there is one true way to read the Scriptures. One friend once claimed that there was “only one true interpretation” – despite coming from a tradition that claimed each Christian was responsible for their own interpretation of the Bible. And yet …
Catholics complain Protestants ignore the plain words of Scripture in which Jesus gives spiritual authority to Peter and his descendants – which is the source of the authority of the Pope over the Church – or the words that indicate that the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the literal body and blood of Jesus.
Protestants complain Catholics read into the plain words of the Scripture things that are not there – interpreting the metaphorical language of the Last Supper to be literal – or read out things that are there – like ignoring the existence of Jesus’s brothers and sisters to preserve the doctrine of the ever-virgin Mary.
You might be able to build a theology on such a foundation. And, if guided by grace, you might even be able to build a true theology on such a foundation. And that theology itself might contain logical arguments. But those arguments rest on your interpretations of the Bible, not the Bible itself.
Actual logical arguments require a funny kind of paradox in their application. Mathematics is repeatable reasoning, an act of creative imagination that builds tools which enables one person to build an argument which another person can reproduce precisely. But this repeatability comes at a terrible cost.
Logical arguments need axioms which are unambiguous within the context of their formal language – even though they are not precisely defined in the real world. And the conclusions you draw from those axioms are true only within the context of that language, even if they have a broad scope of application.
Points and lines in Euclidean geometry have a precise meaning in relationship to each other, but are “undefined terms” with respect to reality, only qualitatively described. This enables us to use the proofs of Euclidean geometry for a vast variety of practical applications, even though ideal “points” do not exist.
And even though Euclidean geometry doesn’t describe the real world at all. Space is actually curved – not a barrier for mathematical analysis, though it is more complicated – and intermixed with time; but the more precise details of the Einsteinian space-time continuum don’t show up at normal human scales.
But it does show a deeper truth: if an argument is rigorous enough to be logically true, that truth is restricted to the formal realm, and may not correspond to reality; if an argument is grounded in reality, its truth is contingent upon evidence which can be overturned, and cannot have the force of a formal proof.
In the early days after Jesus’s ascension, Peter thought he had it all worked out, following both Jesus and Jewish law. But God spoke to him in a dream, making Peter realize that the old rules weren’t appropriate for new believers, leading to a decision to no longer require all of them.
We build elaborate theological structures on top of our interpretations of the Bible. But insofar as they’re based on the Bible, they’re not proofs; and insofar as they are proofs, they’re not guaranteed to apply to the Bible. We need to be humble about what we can prove, to leave room for the Spirit to work on us.
-the Centaur
Pictured: King James. Yeah, that King James, commissioner of the King James Bible.
