Last week I began a three-part series designed to help us understand how the Bible fits in Christian life.  In the first article, I spoke briefly about what the Bible is.  This week I turn to a different question:

How is the Bible true?

To answer this question we have to return to an observation I made in passing in my first article.  In a manner of speaking, the Bible is a book.  Speaking more accurately, however, we should say that the Bible is a collection of books.  These books fall into different genres.  For example, the Bible contains narrative, poetry, and letters.

Let’s take a couple of examples to help us see why this point is so important for our considerations about biblical truth.

The Song of Solomon is probably most frequently heard at weddings, even though it does occur Sundays in the Revised Common Lectionary.  It is a poetic book about the passionate love between a man and woman.

If one were to read this text as an historical account, the spiritual pickings would likely be very slim.  Where does one really get by asking these questions: Were there really two such people? Did they really love each other this much? I have never seen a commentary of this sort on The Song of Solomon.

By contrast, medieval writers like Bernard of Clairvaux saw in the Song’s poetry a powerful metaphor for God’s love for us and our love for God.  The truth here is not a one-to-one correspondence between word and world.

Let’s look now at a different genre.  St. Luke’s Gospel starts with the claim by St. Luke to his reader Theophilus that Luke intends to make an ordered account of Jesus’ life.  The Gospels in general fall under the ancient genre of a Life (a sort of biographical account).

Readers of the day would assume that a Life is about a real person doing things in the real world.  The birth, life, death and resurrection refer to real events.  What these events mean for us derives from the fact that they really occurred.

In other words, because Jesus died, our sins are forgiven.  His death is not simply a metaphor for how laudable it would be to forgive.  Again, because Jesus rose from the dead we are heirs of eternal life.  Resurrection is not a metaphor for second chances and new beginnings.

To say that the Bible is true is then to recognize that parables, poems, letters and historical narratives are true in different senses of the word “true.”  In any event, the Bible teaches us about reality: about God, about his claim on our lives, about our vocation in his creation, about our condition and his response to it, about the nature of right conduct, about the structure of justice, and about our eternal destiny.

Whether the genre (like the Gospel narratives) involves a word-to-reality correspondence or the genre provides a metaphorical grasp of reality (like parables and poems), the Bible is true.

Next week I will address the question of the Bible’s authority.