Proving the Unprovable

I read something interesting over the Christmas break.

A friend sent me a forward titled, "Are the Odds in Your Favor?" which proceeded to outline the historical, logical and quantifiable reasons why Christianity is true and provable and for these reasons, to ignore it imperils one's life.

The forward read, "Science has developed a method of studying odds. It is called the science of compound probabilities; a mathematical study of situations and the odds of possible outcomes. One of the most amazing studies conducted using this method was recorded by Professor Peter Stoner in Science Speaks. The purpose of the study was to determine the odds of one man in history fulfilling all the prophecies, recorded in the Bible, that point to the Jewish Messiah. (There are 300 different messianic Bible prophecies.)"

This study began by focusing on eight specific prophecies and argued that that compound probability of these eight prophecies being fulfilled is 1 in 1017 or 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. The chance of any one man fulfilling 48 prophecies is 1 in 10157. The chance of any one man fulfilling 300? The odds stagger the imagination.

"Jesus did not fall victim to the odds, nor did he beat the odds," the forward concluded. "Jesus shapes the odds! Now that the odds pertaining to Jesus and the Bible prophecies have been literally fulfilled, they are no longer odds. They are facts that have become established realities. These are realities that cannot be ignored. Each person reading this article is left with a choice to respond to the facts about Jesus: to receive or reject Him."

I've always been bothered by these sorts of arguments. I guess I feel the logic is flawed. While I agree with what is being said and do indeed believe in God and the Bible, it is the way the author argued his point that I find indefensible.

You can't use a thing to prove itself! And yet I find that is how most Christians practice apologetics. Anyone can write a book, predict a few things and then write them coming true later on in that same book. That doesn't make what is being written about true—it just makes the author good at minding his details. Provide corroborating and outside citations and then you have something.

I guess I'm also just not into the whole "I can prove the Bible" thing. So much of it you can't. And I wouldn't want you to. If you could prove it all and answer every question and solve every mystery, you'd be God. Either that, or else God is very small.

There is far more unplumbable mystery in the Scriptures than any of us are willing to admit. The secret, I think, is to being OK with that.

I said as much when I "replied-all" to the forward, interested in what others thought of the article. Another reader replied with a lengthy and literate response in which he primarily focused on the scholastic veracity and pain-staking attention to detail given to Bible translation throughout the millennia. Anything less than a total belief in the literal interpretation and utter inerrancy of Scripture, he argued, is unfathomable.

Truth is, I agree with the author of the forward and with my friend and his readers. The Bible is indeed a gift from God, used to describe His attributes and to be a guide from which we can learn to become ever more like Him. And becoming like Him and taking on His Lordship, scandalous grace and heavenly adoption is the single most important thing any of us will ever do with our lives.

However, I cannot embrace their view of the Bible.

I was never arguing for a low view of Scripture or for a stance that the Bible was somehow a lesser thing because it can't be proved. I feel quite the opposite. The more unprovable it is, perhaps the greater it's authenticity in my eyes.

What I take issue with is not the source, but this particular author's adopted defense of that source. Again, you cannot use a thing to prove itself. To say, “the Bible contains eyewitness accounts from those who knew of the events personally” cannot be used as proof of the veracity of the Scriptures. In court, you don't release a defendant simply because he says he is innocent. You first examine outside eye-witnesses and outside evidence. To say that a thing is its own best proof is like me saying that flying reindeer exist, but when you ask me to prove it, I say, it's so because I say it's so and you accept that. That is not proof, though thankfully it doesn't make it any less true. (The Bible, not the reindeer!)

Facts are so important for modern Christians. We see them as the ultimate insurance against ambiguity. Westerners (including Western Christians) detest ambiguity. We like everything tied up with neat bows, everything in its place, every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed, every ending an artificially happy one. Compared with most global societies, we are unique in this mindset. Mystery and the unknown scare us and show us how very much of life is far from our control. We want everything to be solvable, rational, quantifiable, knowable, decipherable. We are the children of our enlightenment ancestors, whether we like it or not.

Within Christianity, we look upon mystery, for a large part, as either a hindrance to faith(something that must be accounted for so that there can be no question as to whether or not God is real and more importantly to us, our salvation is valid), or, it's a problem to be solved (we believe, though we rarely say, that God, like our world, can be explained, given enough time, effort and perhaps even prayer). And we erroneously believe that the Bible gives us the tools by which to do it.

There is a modern epistemology that insists, "If you don't accept all of the Bible as authoritative and infallible, you have to throw the whole thing out because it is flawed." As a result, adherents of this belief will throw all their energies into preserving the integrity of Scripture. But that kind of either/or logic is fallible and again, Western-centric. Furthermore, such a stance inherently assumes that uncertainty is cruel. Modernism prizes clarity and linear reason over mystery and holistic thought. Sadly, if certainty is paramount, mystery will always lose.

But mystery is not something to be feared! Uncertainty is not something of which to be frightened. Indeed, in my view, uncertainty and mystery make God larger, less contained in a human-fashioned box. Those people who tell me that we can figure God out or understand the entire Bible literally and perfectly lead me to believe that they worship a pretty narrow and small God. The God of my Bible is so very vast and unplumbable that to be able to fully explain Him, His attributes or even His means of communication with us borders on the ludicrous.

Do I believe in the Bible? Yes. I believe more so in the God of the Bible.

Do I believe the Bible is infallible and uncorrupted through time. No.

Just in my own lifetime the Bible has been altered, abridged, modified, paraphrased and manipulated. And I am supposed to believe this is a new thing in history? All of these versions sit side by side with the supposedly unadulterated texts that can trace themselves back to the very hands of their authors. Am I supposed to believe that centuries or a millennia from now this trend won't have continued and added further corruption with each alteration?

I don't buy the infallibility bit. I can't accept the argument that God has shepherded this book so at no time was there ever anyone who injected their own beliefs, greed, power plays, machinations or even genuine good intentions into it—though I wish I could. It certainly would make life and apologetics easier! But if the Bible was unalterable, why does Revelation speak against those who would remove or alter one jot or tittle. Biblical inaccuracy doesn't make me suspect of God (though at one time it did), it makes me suspect of man.

The gospel is primarily relational/missional, not informational. Raw information is the least of its powers. Imparting information about how to be individually saved is secondary to inviting people into relationship with a king and with members of a kingdom whose foremost concern is wholeness for a broken world, rather than an insurance policy for eternal destiny.

The Bible was not written as an encyclopedia. If we could divide the complexity of our reality into grids and categories, God would have communicated through the Bible in grids and categories. But there are mysteries that cannot be explained logically. There are things we cannot know, things that are beyond our finite minds, things that are unprovable.

I'm not saying there isn't truth. I certainly believe there's Absolute Truth. But I think that, to a vast degree, it is unknowable by us. Aside from certain elements which God, in His mercy and grace, has chosen to reveal in Scripture, most of it belongs to the privy of God alone. And speculating that we can or do know it is not only arrogant, it is sin. And it has led to hundreds of bloody wars fought in God's name.

Making absolute truth claims is so important to evangelism in the modern era. I would rather recruit people who follow Jesus by faith (without claims of certainty or absolute knowledge) with the goal of being transformed and participating in the transformation of the world. Perhaps it is our very lack of example in speech, behavior, love, faith, and purity which may explain why we feel we must rely so heavily on arguments. Faith is relational not logical.

Generally, believers fall into two categories: those who use scripture as proof-text and those who plant the Bible's stories and guidelines in their hearts so it can grow into a life that looks more and more like Jesus. Sure, there are hard words in the Bible, but taken in context we treat them and those they speak toward very differently. The Bible is a love story, not a debate file, a source of heavenly codes, or a battery of scriptures to wield like a weapon. When we see the Bible as a repository of facts and proofs, it is too great a temptation to see it as the ultimate trump card—the “I told you so” of evangelism. Until one perceives it as a love story—a grand, overarching meta-narrative—it cannot become truly alive.

Modern Christianity is obsessed with rules rather than relationships, intent on creating an impossible theocratic utopia on earth. We feel the most important questions are those that focus on biblical authority and the rules by which we live our lives. And while these may be important, even critically so, this is a love relationship, not a court case. Besides, whose rules, or more importantly, whose interpretations of those rules do I follow? Many love to preach against homosexuality (today's pet sin) but say nothing about the consumption of shellfish, the wearing of mixed-fiber clothing, women speaking in church, gluttony, slaves defying their masters, or storing up things on earth. Yet each of these are Biblical mandates. The fact is, Biblical inerrantists ignore hundreds of biblical rules every day. The high-view of scripture set doesn't believe in biblical authority any more than those with a low view do.

An interesting thing begins happening when we are more interested in the Bible as a weapon of proof than as as a love letter—we begin worshiping the Bible instead of its author. We become guilty of what a friend of mine dubbed, biblidolatry.

We care more for the words than He who wrote them. We care more that every jot and tittle is followed than that we actually resemble Christ. We care more that everyone around us is living by some moral code we've extrapolated than that we are loving our God with all our heart, soul and mind and our neighbor as ourselves.

I think it is important to remember that the Bible itself is not holy, though we frequently call it so. The God it describes is holy. The text merely points to Him. In heaven, our Bible will be as useless as toilet paper—a thing to be thrown away and forgotten. One does not hold onto a reflection of light and warmth when one can bask in the real thing.