May I make a further suggestion? That is that, the Bible not only supplies us with answers to our questions; it also tells us what questions we should be asking. Sure, as we study the Bible, naturally we have things we’re looking for – whether we realize we’re doing it or not – but the Bible tells us, no, don’t look for this, look for that.

To use your “prospector” imagery: someone might be scouring the Bible looking for silver, and because he is not keeping an eye open for gold, he might be throwing away all those heavy yellow rocks that are not silver.

In the specific case of, let’s say, “free will,” I have no doubt that you will find verses. You might miss out, however, on many other verses that couldn’t quite fit in it. If you were to expand your hunt to “verses that have to do with the human will” you’ll find a bunch of things that you might not have expected.

Just a thought. Many blessings in God’s Word today! Gary

We’ll leave point 4 for another conversation.

I would say, yes, the Bible claims to make objective truth statements about the world, and where it clashes with myth there is sometimes a self-conscious distinguishing of the truth of Moses, the prophets, Jesus and the apostles from the category of myth, as we would define it sociologically. Not that, my myth is better than yours, but that my story transcends myth, in particular, through the incarnation.

A couple of observations:

1. Being from Amish country, I could probably track this down, but: I can’t imagine that the two categories of truth you mention exhaust the entire Amish idea of truth. In other words, they might use “fiction” and “fact” as you mention, yet if I lied to one of them, wouldn’t an Amish have a category for it and tell me I’ve broken the 9th Commandment? Therefore, an Amish person would be able to separate a fake Jimmy story from an historical one.

2. Speaking of the 9th Commandment, in the “pre-Modern” Torah, one is told to testify about what really happened. The Torah especially forbids lying in exchange for a bribe or lying for friends. That is, you don’t need to be a modernist to make the distinction between true and false witness. If truth is more I/Thou, then wouldn’t faithful Israelites be responsible to defend their friends, rather than defend an abstract idea of “it did/didn’t happen” in reality?

3. Again, the example Paul and Thecla – Tertullian reports that the church rejected that book even without our modernist epistemology, since “it didn’t really happen” even though (Amish, hearken!) they believed the miracles and so forth could have happened; and they disciplined the author despite the usefulness of the book for boosting purity. I think we make way too much a distinction between pre-modern and modern categories of truth.

4. I really don’t want to unpack the last paragraph – or do you want to provide examples of God’s deception? – but only to say that your distinction betwee I/it and I/Thou doesn’t convince me at all, viz.:

If I take a fundamentally I/it approach to Christian truth
and then circumstances indicate that my faith content has let me down,
then I feel cognitive dissonance, the mental disquiet that comes from contradictory truth claims.

But:
If I take a fundamentally I/Thou approach to Christian truth, making it subjective,
and then circumstances indicate that God has let me down,
then I feel personally rejected, stabbed in the back by a friend.

How could the second option better prepare me for life in the world?

As it is, true spirituality involves I/it as well as I/Thou, at least as I see it.

My starting point is that the Bible creates the category of “lie” – if I follow what you’re saying, haven’t we voided that category of any real meaning, and disregarded the biblical insistence that the category exists and is highly meaningful?

To go back to my point: seeing that you and I must live in this year, in this culture, is it justifiable to say “I knew a boy named Jimmy”, using the codes our culture supplies to label the story as newspaper-story-verifiable?

I especially appreciate your insight into the possibility of different nuances and connotations for the word “truth” as it has been used within different discursive fields. Because we live in a culture that has been conditioned by at least two-hundred years of scientific discourse with its corresponding privileging of facts and data, we think of truth in those terms: it reflects something objective about the world. I think, from what I can pick up from reading ancient texts, that the prevailing discourse field for the ancients was relational. It is difficult for me, conditioned as I am, to get at what a notion of truth in such a discourse field connotes, but I suspect that it would have to, in some way, reflect the subjective relationship between human beings and the rest of the creation: an “I/Thou” framework rather than the “I/It” framework that we use.

The Amish have an interesting literary division between fact and fiction. Fiction is something that could not possibly have happened (talking animals) while fact is something that might not have actually happened, but could have (the Jimmy” story).

I want to be careful that I do not import my particularly modern-western notion of truth into ancient texts and in the process, make the text do work that its author did not intend it to do. This cautious approach allows me to more comfortably accept the idea, present in both the OT and the NT, that God himself, on occasion, uses deception as a means to accomplish his ends while still remaining a God of truth. These two aspects of God’s character are impossible to reconcile within a scientific discursive field, but easier from within a relational discursive field.

As always, Gary, it is a pleasure to dialogue with you.

If someone tells a story as true,
and I later find out it was fiction,
do I feel as if I had “been had”?

In that case, I think it crosses the line.