The bible is true in a very strange way...
What you do as an educated person is sample that, this structure that constitutes the sum total of the texts of our civilization. If you mapped out the relationships between all books that there are you'd find that the most fundamental book is the Biblical Library, and i think hat's even merely true histrionically it's partly why the Museum of the Bible was so interesting to me, because walking through it you see how the books were, how the book aggregated its-self across time, and became fundamental the first book that was really widely available for purchasing for printing purchasing and all the books that we know about now on the millions of books that we have.
Emerged from that base, that trunk and they're all related to that, and it's certainly possible that without an understanding of that fundamental book, you can't understand all the other books, and maybe it's possible that without an understanding of that book you can't understand other people.
So, you know to be people of the book means that we're all inhabited by the same book or but, it's probably more complicated than that like it's not just the Bible because there's lots of books, it's the biblical corpus which is a library and it's the relationship between all the texts in that book to one another, and then it's the whole structure of the relationship between all the texts that grew out of that, and you could imagine a map of that, and then you could imagine that.
What you do as an educated person is sample that, and, so, there's this structure that constitutes the sum total of the texts of our civilization and then there's you as an agent that needs to understand that structure, but you can't read all the texts, obviously, because how much time do you have?
Nowhere near enough time to do that, you have to sample it in a way though that gives you an understanding of the let's say of the gist of it, something like that, and so maybe the best way to do that in a fundamental sense is to become familiar with the biblical writings per se and then to move on to other literary forms from that.
And, so, one of the ideas I've been wrestling with here and you guys can think about what you think about this, you know people of faith, Christian faith believe that the Bible is true, but that's never been that satisfying to me because, I don't know what people who make that claim mean when they say the Bible is true, it's like well what do you mean exactly?
Is it true like, is it true like a videotaped recording of what you did this morning is true. Now, if it's not the Bible it might be some other corpus of texts, but it might be, it isn't, and if it was, well is it going to be a corpus of texts that we share because if it isn't then we can't share our perceptions and our values, and if we can't share those then we fight, those are the options right we either stabilize our hierarchies of value in some way that we agree upon mutually or we fight, that's or we're unbelievably chaotic and confused and that'll just produce fighting in any case.
And so, we have this structure of texts, built from the bottom up, it's predicated on the biblical narratives, and the texts exist in relationship to those underlying narratives, and derive a fair bit of their bit of their meaning from meaning of the underling narratives and, vice versa, you know?
And, so, then the biblical is it possible that biblical truth is the sort of truth that is the precondition for truth, right because you think well it's religious people make the claim, people of the bible make the claim the Bible is true.
The Bible is true in a very strange way, it's true in that it provides the basis for truth itself, and, so, it's like a meta truth without it there couldn't even be the possibility of truth, and so maybe that's that's the most true thing, the most truth thing isn't some truth per se, it's that which provides the precondition for all judgments of truth, and it seems to me that I can't see any holes in that argument, and I can't see any holes in it from a scientific perspective either.
Because, I think we do know well enough now as scientists that the problem of deriving ethical direction from the collection of facts is as intractable problem, there's too many facts, there's an infinite number of facts, they do not provide an unerring guide for action, they can't, there's too many of them, they have to be prioritized, and as soon as they are prioritized, well, then you're in the ethical domain, and the begs the question what's the valid ethical domain, and the postmodern answer is well, there isn't one it's all the expression of domination and power.
And I think that's nonsense, I don't think that's a tenable solution, I think that we stumbled onto the proper answer in some sense in our religious enterprise which is that we aim at what's highest or we don't, we aim at what's highest jointly or we're divided, we aim at what's highest and that's gives meaning to all the things we do that are subordinate parts of that, we aim at what's highest and that's what collects us and gives us structure all of that you know singly and jointly and that's all what we've been trying to communicate all these centuries as we've been trying to communicate the whole religious corpus generation.
After generation and to sort this out and to straighten it out and to try to understand it, and I think that's where we're at now. Maybe a little bit more conscious of what this all means, and maybe a little bit more capable of being more certain as people of the book that the faith we have in the textual corpus that we inhabit is we just haven't done better than that, and we strive to flesh it out we strive to understand it but, fundamentally, it seems to be true in that fundamental sense that I just described which is not merely true but the precondition for truth itself.
