Facts or Faith?

Yet, too often, we teach the Christian faith as a body of facts that we should know and affirm. We do this not only in Sunday School classes but also in required religion classes in Christian universities and in theological seminaries. We reduce the Christian gospel to a body of objective facts that we then set out to prove scientifically. We assign priority to knowing all the relevant facts, and having certainty of their objective truth. But naked facts don’t mean anything until we link them appropriately. We must interpret the texture they form. We must add value. We must discover and illuminate the purpose of the whole. If we make the Bible our starting point, we find that it does not present us with a body of factual truths, but with a narrative story of Truth. It forms a storybook: one great, complex, overarching story which comprises a multitude of stories, parables, metaphors, and poems. All of this can be reduced to facts and their importance and truth can be debated. There may be value in this kind of study. But when we analyze it--take it apart-- we lose its life and meaning just as surely as the microscope slide of an alfalfa stem can be analyzed, but no longer flows with the life of the entire plant, root and all.