Is the Bible real? Who Jesus really was and how we believe what is true

Lots of people fight over the reality of the Bible and God. Maybe you have thought, "Why should I believe in something that I can't even believe is real?" Many people say that God must be real. They say that the disciples would have never put their life on the line for a lie. But we all know that isn't true, because many people have died for lies in history. So why should we believe? In this challenging episode, I say we are usually asking the wrong questions and using the wrong methods of proof when it comes to faith. I tell you a story about learning what truth is and how we need to think about history differently. If you understand this, it helps you understand how to be a better person both for yourself and for the people around you. 

Notes from the adult Real Bible Rob episode:

The Jesus Seminar and its work to elucidate a historical Jesus ran out of steam. Robert Funk, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and others did done a lot of great work to put the gospels in historical context. They famously voted on the historical plausibility of the Jesus narrative using colored beads. But by the time the Jesus Seminar disbanded in 2006 after twenty years, they really have seemed to only show how tenuous the historical Jesus really is. I argue in this insightful podcast episode that the main problem of the Jesus Seminar is that they were answering the wrong question. They fall into the same trap of historical criticism that fundamentalists do. They rely on fact rather than narrative. This is a major fallacy of biblical apologetics. I describe how Walter Brueggemann's book "The Prophetic Imagination" was a watershed describing the shift to Narrative Criticism and other biblical interpretation methods that are much more widely adopted in today's scholarship.

I was talking with someone who I really care about. He was frustrated that the liberal church he grew up in was obsessed with Historical Jesus, and the Jesus Seminar with Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan. He thought it cheapened the divinity of Christ, he was stunned when I agreed. The Historical Jesus sought to answer the wrong question however. It had its purpose, but whether Jesus, his life and the bible is historically correct is a fools game that comes from the enlightenment. It's the same game as fundamentalists play. It adds to scripture rather than illuminates it. That's why I love Walter Brueggemann’s work so much. It's the narrative that's important not historical fact. Even history is narrative depends on the author & the perspective of the reader. A very important lesson I learned in seminary. Prophetic Imagination is not a luxury, but the heart of biblical interpretation. God speaks to us in stories not bulletin points on PowerPoint. 

Transcript

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Welcome to the Real Bible Rob teamcast. Today I'm going to talk about what does it mean to have faith and what is real and not real? People fight over the reality of the Bible and God all the time. And you may have even thought, well, why should I believe in something if I can't even prove that it's real? And a lot of people really try hard to say, you know, God is real. God must be real. The Bible must be true history, 100% accurate. And they'll say things like, you know, those disciples of Jesus, they wouldn't have died for a lie, you know, because they uh were died. They were martyrs. They died because they believed in Jesus. Well, why would you do that? But we all know if you look at history, we all know that that's not true. Many people have died for lies. Many people do that over time. And so you go, well, why should I believe? If it's not real, why should I believe? Well, what I'd like to do is walk with you through this and say that maybe we're asking the wrong questions. Maybe it's not about whether something's real or not real, or what is it that means that it's real? And what do you mean about proving things when it comes to faith? Because something that is really important is about storytelling and how we learn about each other. What does history mean? Is history like fact, like we have facts that we do, or how people can look at the same thing and say, well, that's a fact, and still have different uh views on it. And they'll say, I'm looking at this and you're looking at it, and um, I'm I think you're lying, and I'm telling I know the truth and you don't. That happens all the time, and it's really confusing. So if you understand this and we understand where history comes from, this idea about fact and fiction and about um stories and something called narrative. Narrative is the way you tell a story, it's about the the way uh a story is told, like in writing or uh verbally. But if you understand what those mean and how people uh give information, how it's received, and how whether you believe what the same thing that another person believes, and uh how things happen in our brain, if you understand that really well, you'll be a better person. You'll be better because you'll be understand yourself better, you'll treat yourself better, you'll stop fighting with yourself as much, and you'll do the same for people around you. So uh go with me uh through this a little bit, and I'll tell you a couple stories that I think really help this. Uh, first, I'll tell you a story about that's personal. Uh, I have a son-in-law, and my uh my daughter is married to this wonderful man, and uh they he grew up in the same kind of church that I grew up in, and uh a Presbyterian church, and um he became very disappo disappointed with that church as he grew up, uh, because that church kept saying things about Jesus and about the Bible that he didn't agree with, because um there's this thing that called um the historical Jesus. And when he was uh younger, that was a big deal. So that's about 20 years ago or so, so quite a while a while ago, people talked a lot about the historical Jesus. What part of Jesus um and history can we believe in? Can we, you know, not maybe not everything that we read about Jesus, not everything we read in the Bible is, you know, um provable fact, but there are certain parts of it that are provable fact, and and maybe we can understand Jesus better. Well, what happened was that um this became a big part of um uh Christianity and a lot of discussion about what's fact and what's not. And by itself, that's not a bad thing. But what happened was that uh, especially for my son-in-law, he was kind of uh growing up in this as a teenager and thinking, oh my, you know, you're just taking everything that um the Bible says about Jesus and you're not believing it. So why should I go with you? And he became uh he rejected that. And I've always found that really interesting because I grew up in a time where my church, which was also a Presbyterian church, uh was kind of uh really uh fundamental. In other words, that meant that um absolute truth, the Bible has absolutely must read it absolutely literally. Everything happened, Noah's flood happened the way it uh it says, that um Adam and Eve was the way it says, Um, that Jesus, everything that we read in the Bible, Jesus actually said, and things like that. So I grew up with that kind of a thinking, that kind of thinking, and I rejected that as I got a little bit older because I started seeing, uh-oh, it's not what they're saying. Well, my son-in-law, um, uh, you know, of course, is younger than me, and he got the opposite experience in church. He grew up uh hearing about how um, you know, a lot of the things in the Bible aren't real. It's not, no. So we need to go and we need to understand and sort through everything in the Bible. And I and so he said to me, and he and I have talked about this a lot, but then he goes to me, goes, I just don't get this. I don't like what happened. And I agreed. I said, I understand what you're saying, because really what's happening, my experience where somebody is saying that the Bible's absolutely 100% accurate in everything, and his experience of people saying, Well, we have to sort which things are accurate and true and which things aren't. I said, It's the same problem. And that is that people are using the Bible as history and that they want to use it to prove something about Jesus, prove something about uh things happening. And I said, one of the things that I've grown as I've grown older is that that is the wrong question. We're asking, when we're asking about proof about things of faith, we're missing the point. So, um, and there's a lot of things that I learned, especially when I started going to college for uh becoming a minister, I learned that really helped me with this. So I'm gonna try to share that with you as um you know as straightforward as possible, because I think that whether you're struggling with this or not, you always have to ask that question: what is history? And how do we know it? And how do we know whether it's true or not? And then we have to ask, how does God communicate with us? And how do we learn these stories and who the real Jesus was, who Jesus really was, and how maybe if we understand who Jesus was and the stories about Jesus, we can learn to believe differently. And we don't have to worry so much about whether something's absolutely true or not. Instead, what we can do is we can we can understand and seek Jesus, and we can understand and seek uh our faith in a way that we uh that we can grow in our faith, that we can uh become a better person through this. So let me tell you a little bit about that history. Um until about um until about 500 years ago or so, it's a long time ago, um the idea of history and how you told stories is different than what we do today. Um they they didn't see truth and false, they didn't see fact and fiction in the same way that we do. Um, with the rise of science and the rise of a lot of different kinds of philosophy about 500 years ago, it's a a part of history that's called the Enlightenment. And many of us who, you know, especially if you live in America or in the Western world, or you live in Europe or places like that, then you see that um we love the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment gave us things like science and democracy and what we call critical thinking, this idea that we can question things and not just uh take them by by themselves, and that we can test them. We can say, well, this is you know, this has proof and this doesn't have proof. And these are all very good things. And we uh hope for that. In fact, when we find and hear people that talk about, you know, conspiracy theories or things that just don't make any sense, we say, no, you're wrong because there you don't have any proof for what you're saying. So though those things have given us great um benefits uh because we wouldn't have the kind of world society that we would live. We wouldn't, you wouldn't have the technology that you're hearing uh me speak through without this kind of rise of science and critical thinking and um searching for truth and all of that. So uh and I'm I think that that's a wonderful thing. But what happened is that um when we came to things like the Bible, which was written long before this, and was written for different reasons than uh being like a history book or a fact versus fiction type thing, or things like that, these are stories that were told. And what happens is that sometimes when we think about you know science and all of these fact and fiction, we think that the stories aren't important anymore. We think that the stories must always be fact in order for us to believe them and think that they are good. But what's so interesting is that most of us like stories that we know aren't factual, that we know aren't true in fact, but maybe true in their meaning. So a great example, of course, is if you if you love uh Harry Potter, and we all know that that's fiction. There's no way, but it why do people like that? You know, is magic real in the way that it's shown? Well, no, we we've never seen it, but we like it and we believe parts of it because there's there's truth in that. It's a great story. And of course, if you go back and you know, uh you think of Star Wars or you think of um Lord of the Rings, or you think of uh Narnia, if you like uh C.S. Lewis, uh uh all kinds of stories that you like to read about, the best stories are not fact. They're but what they do is they tell us the truth about what it means to be a human being. It tells us truth about uh what loyalty is, about what goodness is, about what evil is, and um and and how uh people can be fooled. Isn't that interesting that people um can learn the most about what it's like to be human and can learn the most about evil for things that by reading things and listening to stories that aren't factually true? Well, this helps a lot when you think about it, because one of the problems that we've had with the Bible in the last 200 years is that as we learned more about science, we heard more about things like evolution, we heard more about things like um uh thing uh chaos and and and other things, we have seen that a lot of the things that we read about in the Bible, especially historical things, don't make a lot of sense from a scientific point of view. So, like I said, if you take that and just say, okay, well, I can disprove the Bible, it doesn't make any sense to me. Um, it does it's not factually true, therefore I can reject all of it. Well, what happened was that about 200 years ago, as we learned more about science and things like that, a lot of people did the opposite of that. They said, um, well, uh, you know, no, the Bible is more true than the evidence and the science. So they started rejecting uh um the true history or the things that were provable about the Bible, and they just started saying, well, you're not a good Christian if you don't believe in the Bible 100%. And it's so interesting because before this, for 2,000 years almost, for a long, long time, hundreds and hundreds of years at least, people didn't really look at the Bible that way. They didn't look at it as a fact book. Now, they usually took it that, they usually took a lot of things in the Bible as fact because they didn't have better information. But it's only been in this last uh time that we know about uh that we really became very much, we either believe what's in the Bible or we don't believe what's in the Bible. And uh this is where that becomes a problem. This is why the people who say it's 100% 100, there's no contradictions in the Bible, there's nothing uh in there, even though there is, those people are trying to um push away evidence. They're trying to uh say it's true because you must believe it because the way God wants you to believe it. And then there are the other people on the other extreme that say that there's no truth in the Bible, there's no historical truth or no uh evidence of Jesus or anything else, and I'm just gonna reject all of it. That both of those are really the same idea, and that is that truth, there is just truth, and that nothing else matters. But you and I live in the real world, and the real world is that where story, fiction, what we call the narrative, does matter. And in fact, that's the way we learn the most about what it means to be a human being, right? And how we work together. It's stories that do this, and these are, and when you look at Jesus, he tells parables. You probably have heard that word. Parables are stories that aren't real, they're fiction, but he tells them to show us deep truth about who we are and who he is. So um, that's why when my son-in-law comes to me and says, Ah, I just so I'm so tired of these people putting down Jesus or making it like Jesus wasn't real or anything like that. That's why I said, I agree with you, because they are missing the point, just like the people who say, you must believe absolutely what uh the Bible says and what Jesus says. Do you see the difference in that and why that's so important? This is where I think you can uh develop a more mature faith, and you can develop, you can have a faith that lasts your whole life, and that really helps you, and like I said, makes you a better person, makes you want to help and serve others, and makes you want to support and be uh in community with other people. So that's why this is important. So let's talk about what history means. There's something that I learned, and I uh and I learned in college and in when I was studying to become a uh a pastor, is I learned something about what's called communication theory. And this is the idea that when you have an idea in your mind, and you have to turn that into language, you know, whether you're speaking it or you're writing it down or or you're typing it into a um a blog or a Facebook page or something like that. You have to take that thought, you have to turn it into words, and then you have to send it out to somebody. So let's say I'm just talking to you, I have thoughts in my mind, I'm turning those into words, and I'm talking, and then you hear those words or you see those words written down, then you in your mind have to take the and you have to decode, you have to take those words and turn them into meaning in your own mind. And so you can see that's always a multi-step process, is that this process of taking thoughts, writing them down, and having people um learn on the other side and tell or take listen to that, and then you do it again. So you come back and you may say something to to me or someone else, and you you have to take the thoughts in your mind and you have to turn them into words, and then you have to um speak them or write them or transmit them somehow, and then the other person takes them in and listens and so forth. This is so important because this is what history is. So have you noticed, maybe you've noticed this. Sometimes will people say about the same thing that happened in history, the same event, and maybe in your old own life, is you something happened yesterday, and you're with your brother or your sister, and you see the same thing happen, and one of you says, Oh, well, this happened, you know, this way, and then you come in and go, No, it didn't happen that way. I was there, I saw it this way. This is the way history is too, because there are many perspectives, points of view on that. Also, especi when you're looking back in time, our ability to um none of us was standing there with Jesus and hearing his stories. We only know what was written. Now, Jesus' words, he didn't write them down either. Someone, a few um uh 10, 20, 30 years later, there were these stories going on where people were talking and they were talking and they were telling stories about Jesus. So you look at and read the Bible and you see all these wonderful stories and sayings that Jesus had. And then people, um, especially when people were starting to lose their memory about Jesus or things were changing, they they really, you know, worked quickly to write them down and make them into um the books that we have today that we read. And that's not just true of Jesus, that's true of everyone and all of the Bible is that where people uh at certain times, and it happened in chunks, it didn't happen uh continuously, is that every once in a while the people felt the real need to take the stories that were they were talking about and turn them into um and write them down, turn them into books or scrolls that turned into books and then turned into our Bible. So uh you go, well, how is that different? Well, it's true for anything. Even if today you're reading a story about Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, or even somebody much more recent, like a famous person or president or whatever, is you can have uh uh Somebody has to take and interpret, take all of these things, because you can't have um Abraham Lincoln and ask him a question, right? Nobody can. They can only take what was written, what he wrote down, and what was written about him, and then turn that into a story for you then to read or hear. And then you can um get a good idea. And that's true. We do get good ideas, a good, you know, understanding of the way people were by the stories that we read and hear about. Today we have things like, you know, we we can watch on the movies or you can see video or or whatever. So you we even have a better way of doing that today for people that were here that have you know been here in the last 100 years or so, because we have you know electronic records of who they are. But the story is still the same, no matter what kind of uh information you have, what kind of medium or what kind of way that you receive this, whether it's a book or a video or something like that, you still have to um see their point of view and you have to make have it make sense in your own mind. Once you understand this, then you realize that everything that you're taking in, all of the things that you um look at as truth or not truth has a story behind it or is part of a story. Some stories do have better evidence, they have more data to support it, and some don't. Some are pure fantasy, right? There and there's everything in between. So the Bible actually sits in between this. There are historical things that happened in the Bible, for sure, because we can look at uh you know, we can go to places like Israel and Greece and we can see these places. We also know that there were many different people that wrote about this because the Bible has always been so important. Christianity has been such a big part of uh our human existence for 2,000 years, and then before that, Judaism uh the Jewish faith, and it's so important to us that people have written so much about it and have spoken so much about it for thousands of years. So, because of that, we have a pretty good understanding of what's going on, and this is where this idea of a historical Jesus comes from. Because we have some good evidence and uh we have lots of writing about it, we can construct or we can build a story, and we can take those stories and we can understand which ones are truth, which ones are parable, in other words, just stories in order to help us understand things, and which ones are kind of like history. But even but they're very ancient, so it's hard, it's harder to do that. But you can see that, and there's value in that, right? We we don't want to believe in something that has absolutely no basis in reality or is a lie, because there are historical lies too. It has to make sense to us. But if we look at it instead of this idea of where we use our imagination. So about 50 years ago or so, um, the normal way to read the Bible was to, like I said, is to say, this is true, this is not true. This is um accurate, this is not accurate, this is fiction or fable or fact or history. That's the way people read the Bible uh for a while, uh, about I'd say 50 years ago, 100 years ago. And that's the way a lot of people teach it today still. But um what happened over time is people started understanding this idea that you need to use their your imagination, that good Bible teaching isn't just the facts, that good Bible teaching also requires imagination and thinking like the characters in the Bible, as much as we can. This is called prophetic imagination. And uh there's a some wonderful writing about this. There's a um a professor in the in that time called uh Walter Brugeman, you don't need to know his name, but he um did a very good job of showing us this change from everything being fact or fiction and only thinking about history in one way about the Bible, to this idea of looking at the stories, look at the narrative. And he, uh, along with many others have come to understand that today, most serious um Bible scholars, people who look at the Bible for and study it for a living, understand the value of storytelling and what's called narrative or narrative criticism, they call it. And um, there's a big shift in that. I think, um, and this is very important to me because I'm trying to tell stories and help people understand how the Bible works. This is very important to me because if I can have people understand that the stories that they're uh hearing, that the things that they are hearing about in church or in the Bible or whatever, are really no different than hearing stories from uh Star Wars or or any other uh even fantasy story that you're doing, because it's not about the true, you know, the truth or the fiction or whatever about it. It's the message that comes through, because the message is what's what's important. The message that comes through that we I hope that you get from these stories and that you've heard in my podcasts, and you may have heard from others is that we have a God of love. We and that our God um has given us everything that we need in order to survive. Some of it's very bad, some of it's very good, but that we have a God that walks with us, and that the Jesus story is much more about that this one person is the embodiment, is the is God in a human being, the same God that we pray to, and that we are guided by the Holy Spirit. This is sort of the traditional Christianity that I am a part of. And that human being in Jesus is the one that gave so much of himself, taught so much, showed who God's character, his nature, who he was in his storytelling and in who he was. And it became so much the point that that by upsetting people and by telling the truth, he died. He was killed. And that that wasn't the end of the story. The end of there there is not an end of the story. The story continues with Jesus resurrecting, coming to life again. And this is a story that we walk through. We are like this. Each of us dies to our old self and rises to a new self. That we uh in our we believe that that's what sin is about, right? We have an old self. We may have committed sins, we may have had a sinful nature, and uh, but that's okay. We can let that go. We can rise again in a new understanding, a new truth, and we can be forgiven in that way. This is the way I think we should look at the Bible, and we should look at history too, is we have old ways of understanding history, we have old ways of reading. We have we were told things that are really a lie. You know, for example we've been told that, you know, um a big problem in uh American history is that we've been told that white people are superior to people who aren't white, and that's a lie. Uh, we've been told that men are superior to women, and that's a lie. So we and e and there are so many ways you can look at even the Bible, or you can look at other things and say, well, but that's truth. That's what people said, but we know it's a lie now. There are many things where we are asked to believe things that aren't true, but the only way that you're going to um put away uh those old lies, those old things, those old sinful things that you've done and come into new life and a new way of understanding and um and to be saved, redeemed from those lies, the only way you can do it is through faith and not through fact. Uh because yes, facts can help you. Uh, understanding and having good evidence, good information can help you, but always, always, always you have to think this is a matter of faith. And you have to just be able to say, uh, you know, God, I have a new way of understanding. Thank you for that. Thank you for giving me this. I can put away the old way and I can take on a new way. If you're, you know, if you're young, you may have not done this many times in your life. But as you get a little older, you really see it. You can go back through your life and you can think about, wow, I really believed this, but now I understand that that wasn't, I understand it better. Maybe what I believed a long time ago maybe was true, and now I understand why. Or maybe what I believed back then was not true and it was a lie, or somebody was trying to manipulate me or make me believe into something that was not good, and now I understand better. That's and if you know you're as old as I am, um, I've done that many times. Uh, so I'm well practiced. I know what it's like to put away old ideas and come up with new ideas and not feel bad about myself then as much, because I was younger and I didn't understand as much. And now I'm older and I've I've seen more things. Um, maybe God has revealed something to me that I just wasn't able to uh hear or listen before. So I think that no matter where you are in life, if you can look at it that way, that we are part of a story, you have a story, you are being informed by stories. Yes, sometimes the stories have provable fact in them. A lot of times they don't. But that's the point, the fact or the fiction isn't the what makes the story real. What makes the story real is does it tell us something that's true about um our about being a human and what it's true about us? And um, and this is why you can't just look at faith only as fact and fiction, that instead you do need the Holy Spirit. You knew I believe you do need to pray, you do need to be with other people to just to talk about these things, uh, to um to hear other points of view, because then that becomes part of your story as well. So this is why uh the old the idea the old ideas are um we need to do put those away. We need to begin to say, uh and a lot of times you'll hear this, you know, your truth or my truth or whatever. Um, yeah, there's some validity to that because each of us does have a different point of view. There is a truth, though, and the truth that that you know that is really true does change as we get more information and as we do more analysis. As we that's what history is. It's looking at things that happened in the past and then analyzing them, making having them make sense with the new, maybe with new information or different information that we have, and then creating a story. All history is a story, including the Bible, including your faith, including the things that you say about your past, about your family, about your friends. You're always telling a story, and I think that that can really help you be prepared for what's coming next. So, with that, I just I'm so glad that you have listened to me. I'm so glad that I could tell you a little bit about my story, about the things that I've learned in history and all of the ways in which I uh have developed my faith. I'm hoping that the way my faith has grown can inspire you to think that way too. That it's okay to question, it's okay to look back and reject old ideas, it's okay to take on new ideas, it's okay to look back in the past and say, you know what? Maybe I was right. Maybe I was told the truth by this teacher or this pastor or my parents or whoever. Uh now I understand what they were saying. That happens all the time. That happens all the time when you look back, especially your parents, you know. When you're younger, you go, I don't know if I believe what they say. They're so old fashioned and they don't understand. But then, you know, when you get a little older, you go, you know what? They weren't so dumb after all. Maybe there is something to learn from them. So, with that, I say thank you again. And uh I wish you the best and God bless you.