‘Different kinds of truth’

I’d like to share with you my favourite Bible verse. It’s 2 Timothy 4:13 (ESV): “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.” What great spiritual sustenance there is in this little verse, how it draws us to follow Jesus in life, what comfort it gives us in sorrow…Of course, I’m joking. It’s a passing remark that Paul makes in a letter to his favourite co-worker, and it signifies no more or less than what it says (although we might cobble together from it a sermon on the importance of books). I quote it to demonstrate how absurd it is to treat every jot and tittle of the Bible as sacred text to rule every detail of our lives. 

Of course very few of us really do that, no matter how we claim to be ‘Bible believers’ and declare that every word of the Bible is inerrant and infallible. We don’t, for instance, keep to any of the ceremonial or food laws of the Old Testament (unless we are Seventh Day Adventists), and most of us no longer require women to have their heads covered when they pray or prophesy – in fact those traditions most keen on women covering their heads are often also the keenest on forbidding us to pray or prophesy! We are all, in reality, selective about what parts of the Bible we prioritise – in my experience conservatives prioritise the epistles and liberals the Gospels, which is odd because we are supposed to be disciples of Jesus not Paul. 

Reading through the lens of Jesus

My real favourite verse of scripture is Hebrews 1:1-2 (NRSV): “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.” This to me is the hermeneutical, or interpretive, key to the whole of the Bible: God’s revelation in the life, teaching, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus relativises everything else in scripture. By this I don’t mean that it makes anything in the rest of scripture less important, but that since Jesus, everything else in the Bible has to be related to God’s revelation in him, and read through the lens of Jesus.

Everything else in the Bible has to be related to God’s revelation in Jesus

To be fair, the ‘but’ in this verse isn’t actually there in the Greek, but it is implied and used in most translations. And it connects clearly with what Jesus says repeatedly in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said…but I say to you…” (Matthew 5:21-48). Note that Jesus’ revisions of the law here are not to relax its requirements, but rather to take it further, to apply it to inner attitudes not just outer actions. However the main point is that once Jesus comes, all of scripture has to be reinterpreted in his light.

This is a particularly Anabaptist approach to the Bible; the earliest Anabaptists in the 16th century, pioneers of the Radical Reformation, objected to how the mainstream reformers like Luther looked to the New Testament for salvation, but then turned back to the Old Testament for civil order and government. Which is why those reformers felt free, just like the Catholic Church, to persecute and kill Anabaptists.

Believing the Bible

Can we, then, believe everything we read in the Bible? To quote Professor HJ Joad, a regular participant in the old radio programme The Brains Trust: “It all depends what you mean by believe.” I believe that Paul left a cloak and some books at Troas, though if some archaeologist somehow discovered Paul had misremembered and in fact left these items at Ephesus, it would not for a moment destroy my love for the Bible or my belief that it is, in Paul’s words just a chapter earlier: “inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16, NRSV). This is all the Bible claims for itself, and it is enough for me. 

I do not need to believe there was a literal Adam and Eve, or a real Jonah who was swallowed by a large fish, in order to benefit from these stories. There’s a poem by one of the 1960s Liverpool poets about reading a poem to his young daughter and her asking: “But is it the truth?” “It’s a poem”, he answers. Which takes us back to those opening verses of Hebrews: they tell us God spoke to our ancestors “in many and various ways” – and that is exactly what you would expect from what is not in the end a book but a multi-authored library. There are different kinds of truth; fact is only one of them, and sometimes the least. The Bible goes deeper than that.