The Bible: Fact or Fiction?
Matthew 7: 24-27
The movie, The Da Vinci Code, opened in theaters around the country on Friday. Anne and I went to see it.
Unlike many in the Catholic Church who have called for a ban or boycott of the movie, I believe every thinking person should read the book and see the movie and then set about thoroughly examining the Biblical and historical evidence.
While I am angered by the purely humanistic view of Christ and the Bible that is portrayed in this film, I am almost equally angry over the flagrant abuse and distortion of history that Dan Brown warps and twists and misrepresents in order to justify his own ends.
In a recent Today Show interview with Producer, Ron Howard and the cast of The Da Vinci Code, Matt Lauer asked the group how they would have felt had the movie borne a prominent disclaimer that it is a work of fiction. Actor Ian McKellen stated, "I’ve often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying ’This is fiction.’ I mean, walking on water? It takes an act of faith. And I have faith in this movie."
This Bible certainly is a most unique and unusual book. No other compilation of religious literature even comes close in religious and historical significance.
What we have within the covers of this book is in fact a library of 66 books, written on three different continents, in 16 different countries, in three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) over a period of 1,600 years. No other book in history took that long to write. And those 66 books were written by more than 40 individuals from almost every walk and station of life – shepherds and fishermen, philosophers and poets, doctors and military leaders, kings and servants, and even a First Century IRS agent!
While the issues addressed by each author were written within specific historical, political and cultural settings, they speak with one voice to all people everywhere in every time and place and status.
The book was never intended to be a book of history, though it is full of verified historical data. It was never intended to be a scientific textbook, though while some things may still be hard to understand and replicate from a scientific perspective, there is much within it that parallels what science has thus far discovered.
The primary purpose of this book was to serve as a written record of God as the source and origin of all that is.
• Of God’s purpose in creating us humans for fellowship and relationship with Himself.
• Of what we did to disrupt that relationship and
• Of how God has worked all throughout history to heal the breach, restore that relationship, and fulfill His perfect plan for all creation.
The Gospel writer John, sums up what could be said for all of Scripture, for from Genesis to Revelation it all points to Jesus Christ: “These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” [John 20:31]
Woven throughout the pages of the entire Old Testament is a single message of a Holy One who is to come who will conquer sin and restore righteousness. The Gospels of the New Testament announce that this Holy One, Jesus of Nazareth, has come and through His death and resurrection has overcome Satan and sin and opened the door to God’s Kingdom for all who believe. The New Testament Letters instruct us that this Holy One, the Son of the Living God who came once is preparing to come again to eradicate all evil and bring to earth the eternal, just and righteous rule of God.
Talk about The Da Vinci Code? There is within the pages of Holy Scripture "The Divinity Code" that is evidence for those with eyes to see and ears to hear that the true origin of this book is much more than merely human.
Can you imagine 40 or more composers, over a span of 1600 years and from vastly different cultures and ethnicities, without knowledge of, or collusion with, any of the other composers, each writing their own unique part to one grand symphony that would only get to be played as an entire piece generations after their death?
I believe that is what we have here within the pages of the Bible and for me the best and most rational explanation that fits the evidence of such a unified message, is that behind it all there has been a Master Conductor who has inspired and directed the various participants in such a way as to bring this Book into existence as a faithful record of His dealings with and His perfect will for all humanity – past, present, and future.
And I say, “I believe” because that is the only conclusive statement I or anyone else can make about the Scriptures. God, in His wisdom, has chosen to make His existence and His intervention in human history a matter of faith and belief rather than a matter of incontrovertible and unquestionable concrete evidence that any un-aided sane and rational person should be able to see.
Hebrews 11 helps us understand this process by stating that “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen...By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear…and without faith it is impossible to please God. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
In other words I cannot just come to God and know God solely by means of unaided scientific or historical evidence. To that raw empirical data I also need to apply the action of my love for, my trust in, and my belief in the God who has at various times and places through prophets and priests, through shepherds and kings, through thunder, wind and fire, through a still small voice, and finally through His own beloved Son entered this tangible and material world to reveal Himself, His word and His ways.
I can best compare it to looking at a 3-D movie without the special glasses that totally transform the data, the information from being fuzzy and blurry images on the screen into a most magnificent and almost magical dimension of being caught up within the presentation itself. I did that recently at the Pacific Science Center where I viewed a magnificent underwater adventure. Without the special glasses you have all the necessary data there on the screen - but it is flat and only one dimensional and almost impossible to appreciate what you are seeing. But the moment you slip on the glasses everything is transformed to where you seem to be right there swimming along with the sharks, the great manta rays, and schools of multi-colored fishes swimming all around you. For me, faith is the application of those special glasses that not only gives life and vitality to the raw historical data of the story, but places me right there within it myself. It then becomes a personalized story that includes me!
Well, having said that, and acknowledging the vital role that faith must play in the mix, just how reliable are the documents themselves? After all, if the historical records themselves are fraudulent, inaccurate, or fictional then our faith in what they proclaim is futile and worthless. The value of Scripture is then reduced to little more than a collection of Aesop’s Fables or Grimm’s Fairy Tales. And for some – sadly even some clergy and religious professors – that is about all that they are – mythical or legendary stories with a moral but not literal and factual truth for which men and women would willingly lay down their lives.
Bill Hybels is the senior pastor of the 12,000 plus member Willow Creek Community Church in the NW suburbs of Chicago and he tells of a secular talk radio show he happened to tune into one day while driving in a rental car somewhere on the West coast. People were calling in and spouting off on the topic of religion when one fellow called in and said that all their talk about religion was just a total waste of time and then concluded with these remarks: "Anyone who has read the Bible knows that it’s full of bad history, worse science and terrible psychology. Sooner or later, smart people will figure this out and the whole thing will go away." So he said, "Just everybody take a chill pill here. The Bible’s full of bad history, worse science, terrible psychology. Smart people are going to figure that out and it will all go away."
Well, what do you think? Do you agree with those comments or not? As I read Bill Hybel’s response to that young man’s perspective that the Bible is full of bad history, worse science, and terrible psychology, it struck such a chord with me and captured so much of what I believe that I will do my best to summarize his response for you.
Let’s begin with the first statement of the young man that the Bible is "bad history" and let’s first determine just what is "good" and what is "bad history".
Listen to these four statements and tell me what makes them bad history:
1. World War I was a bitter four-year conflict fought from 1890 to 1894. [Wrong dates: 1914-1918 – good history pays attention to dates and gets them right]
2. World War II was a bloody conflict between Allied and Axis forces fought on the battlefields in Central China from 1939 to 1945. [Wrong location - Europe, South Pacific, and a few other places – good history gets its geography right]
3. The Soviet Union premier, Margaret Thatcher, will always be remembered as the leader who engineered the unraveling of the USSR. [Gorbachev, not Thatcher. Good history pays attention to the people facts.]
4. Michael Jordan played basketball for over a decade for the Chicago Bulls in the 80s and 90s, but his play was rather lackluster. [Date and place may be right but essence of story is wrong – his play was fabulous!]
Bad history is any attempt to play fast and loose with dates, times, places, people, and events. Like the recent attempts of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, trying to make the point that the Holocaust during WWII did not happen and was instead a Zionist plot to gain support in the world. There are more than enough credible living eyewitnesses and mountains of documentary and other hard evidence to disprove such false accusations.
In like manner, when you pose the question if the Bible is good or bad history, you discover that in many cases it is excellent history and that there are many more supporting documents – even outside of the Biblical records themselves - for the events it records than for other secular historical events that no one has ever dared question.
There was a time when secular scholars scoffed that Moses wrote the first 5 books of the Bible, because they believed that the people of that time were pre-literate. But subsequent archeological digs uncovered tablets, scrolls, and writing instruments that clearly demonstrate the literacy, intelligence and sophistication of a good portion of Moses’ entire culture. An embarrassing acknowledgement that perhaps the Bible was not such bad history after all. That same story has been repeated time and time again as the initial assertions of secular scholars concerning the veracity and credibility of certain events, locations, or personalities mentioned in the scripture have been proven accurate as archaeological evidence has subsequently verified. The Bible is indeed good history.
The second assertion of the young fellow on the radio is that the Bible is full of worse science. Of course the Bible was never written to be a scientific textbook. It’s entire purpose is to heal the broken relationship between us humans and God. But the statement of the young man – and of many who believe that the only genuine truth and reality is that which can be replicated or proven conclusively by means of the scientific method seems to pit the Bible and science across an unbridgeable chasm.
But Hybels shows that common ground at least in a couple of areas – between Bible scholars and committed atheistic or agnostic scientists - is starting to develop:
• Some are seeing a possible parallel between the creation story of the Bible and the Big Bang Theory - saying that at some point maybe, just maybe, something or someone ignited the activity that resulted in the world taking form.
• Another point of agreement between them is that no new matter is being created. The first law of thermodynamics states that the actual amount of energy in the universe stays constant, with nothing being added. Well, that’s the position the Bible has held for thousands of years. Genesis 2:2 tells us that that after he completed his work of creation, God stopped creating. He rested and did not add anything additional to the equation of creation.
• Genesis also tells us that God formed man out of the dust of the ground. Well after centuries of speculation about what makes up the human body and some bizarre theories along the way, modern scientists have agreed these days with theologians that the constituent elements of the human body are the same as those elements found in the earth – more common ground between science and biblical scholars.
• Of course there are still many stories in Scripture that are hard to comprehend from a purely scientific standpoint – like water instantly being turned to wine, or a man walking on water, or someone who had died coming back to life 4 days after being in a tomb as in the case of Lazarus, or Jesus’s Resurrection body capable of coming through locked doors or overcoming the force of gravity and lifting off the face of the earth.
But the true scientist should know and appreciate that our limited scientific knowledge and understanding of some processes now cannot on principle exclude the possibility of us grasping a deeper and greater knowledge and wisdom further down the road. 200 hundred years ago, who would ever have thought that humans would one day fly, or land on the moon, or cure leprosy or transplant hearts, lungs, kidneys, or create technology so small that it can only be observed under ultra high power microscopes.
• I believe that as scientists discover and learn more about our universe and the wonders of creation, there will come to be a greater – not lesser agreement that the Bible contains excellent science.
The third assertion of the young man was that the Bible is full of terrible psychology.
I wonder if he had ever read the Bible or was just making these brash assertions out of some unresolved anger against or disillusionment with Christianity and the Church. So often that is sadly the case. When you try to get such people to give specific examples of the so-called lies, inaccuracies, myths and mistakes they say the Bible is full of, they can barely mention one.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I have built my entire life and Christian ministry of 31 years on the message of this book. I’ve taught and preached from this book in South Africa, in Europe, and here in the US – in Indiana, in Texas, in New Mexico, and now in Washington states.
• I’ve seen the message and “psychology” of this book bless and transform the lives of little children, teenagers, young adults, and the elderly.
• I’ve seen it heal the hurts and divisions caused by pride and arrogance, selfishness and insensitivity among people of many different ethnic groups.
• I was there in Washington DC in the summer of 1997 among the million men and boys from every social and ethnic segment of American society who fell on their faces in brokenness and repentance for the racial, sexual, social, and political sins in their lives as the message of this book was proclaimed.
• I may never have seen it turn water into wine, but I’ve seen it help turn alcohol and drugs into furniture, a good education, contented families and responsible living.
• I have never met a single individual who has truthfully put the message and “psychology” of this book into practice in his or her life and as a result has been battered, bruised, and broken and in now need of special psychological care.
• However, I have met and counseled hundreds who have lived by and been poisoned and wounded by the psychology of this world that encouraged the idea that THEY and not God were the center of the universe and that everything revolved around them. That taught them to “do their own thing”, “to be their own boss”, “to do it if it felt good”, “to do unto others BEFORE they could do unto you”, or to “retaliate twice as much just to teach someone a lesson”.
• And finally they cry out after the umpteenth marriage has failed, or the business has gone belly up, or the kids have rebelled and left home in anger, or the substances have wasted their bodies and they wonder if God will still listen.
• Of course He will and does – but look at the misery they might have spared themselves had they not listened to such destructive psychology!
At the end of Jesus Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7, He said: "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."
The one who listens to and applies the message of God’s Word, the Bible, to his or her life is not promised a life free of the stresses, the strains, the pressures and turmoil that life in this world certainly brings with it. But they are assured that practical obedience to that Word will result in a foundational stability that will guard and keep them through the storm.
On which foundation are you building your life?
