Reading the Silence

Dave Brisbin 2.1.26 Asked by email: Do you believe the Bible? That the plagues of Moses, long day of Joshua, fiery furnace of Daniel really happened? Just the way the question was posed mirrored our view of scripture. In other words, if I don’t believe that each event literally happened, I’m not believing the bible. For the past five hundred years in the West, we’ve been equating accuracy and truth. For us, something is true if it’s accurate and accurate if it’s true, but to the ancients who wrote and interpreted scripture, truth and accuracy were not the same. Something could be true even if not accurate. The ancients knew that spiritual truth existed beyond thought and words, that the infinite could only be experienced and pointed toward, never defined or rationally explained. So, with the experience of God ringing inside them, they pointed to that experience in every way they could—allegory, simile, hyperbole, metaphor. They played with numbers, using them symbolically to convey meaning rather than as literal renderings of factors and sums. And yes, sometimes they told stories exactly as they happened. Both Hebrew and early Christian theologians saw layers of meaning, from the literal to the mystical, that they understood to be simultaneously true, a pool of meaning creating the fullest possible pointing to truth. The holy grail here is original intent. Believing the bible means believing the original intent of the authors, which means swimming in their pool of meaning, not just scraping off one layer, imagining it matches our cultural definition of truth. But as important as knowing how to read what the authors wrote, is knowing what they didn’t write. They wrote for each other, not for us. So if something was culturally understood by all, it didn’t need to be stated, however critical to meaning. We do the same. Context tells us where to put the missing pieces. Original intent means learning to read the silence too. I believe the bible. That it is fully true. I also believe that much of it was never meant to be accurate…just the best humans can do to point to truth always residing a bit beyond what words can convey.