This paper was originally presented at the ISCA in 2018. It has been somewhat shortened, checked over for grammatical errors, and published with the permission of the original authors, Dr. Doug Bookman and Dr. Russ White.

Modern Western culture is obsessed with progress. The desire to find faster, more efficient ways to create, produce, find, and consume reaches the level of a compulsion that determines whether companies succeed or fail. Disruption, regardless of the cost to human life, has moved from being an unfortunate (but necessary) part of the business cycle to being a positive good. One primary way this is manifested is the modern treatment of information. An entire field of information technology has arisen in the last 50 years to create, classify, and manage information as a commodity. Information technology relies on information theory, which converts all communications into transmissions along a channel and gauges the outcome of communications by its impact on the world in terms of its “surprisal effect.” Ultimately, the value of information is judged by how it is consummated as part of—and integrated into—the “background noise” of knowledge and culture (Gilder 2013, location 218-220). The treatment of information as a commodity has had a significant impact on the way information is organized, studied, and understood. Within the information age, meaning is converted into data and organized to facilitate easier searching and browsing.

In contrast, God reveals himself first through narrative. Meaning in narrative is embedded in a stream of chronological events, with complex plot lines unfolding over time. These narratives emphasize the development of relationships and personality across time. The thesis of this paper is that the shift from narrative-driven communications to data structured for search and browsing has had a negative impact on our reading of the Scriptures.

The Divine Pattern of Self-Revelation

If man is to know God, God must take the initiative, and this is because man is twice crippled: he is finite, so he cannot comprehend an infinite God, and he is fallen, so he is not inclined to know a holy God. But, of course, God has taken the initiative. He has revealed himself to man, and that divine self-revelation is recorded in Scripture.
Regarding the issue at hand, it is the pattern of epistemological priorities reflected at every stage of God’s revelatory activity. God’s activity is always instructive and, perhaps, corrective. Quite simply, God’s effort to communicate to man truth regarding himself and his purposes has always included two distinguishable stages. First, God has spoken through event revelation. That is, he has broken into human history with “mighty acts” (Ps 106:2; 145:4, 12), which any human effort or machinations could not accomplish and thus could not be mistaken for anything but divine intervention. One might say that God began the revelatory process by “perpendicularizing” himself to human history. But event revelation alone would not suffice; man would certainly misunderstand and/or distort the revelatory truth being communicated (cf. John 12:29). And thus, event revelation has in every case been followed by word revelation as God raised divinely appointed and authorized spokesmen (OT: prophets, NT: apostles) who were assigned a two-fold stewardship. First, they were to record the event revelation, thus giving succeeding generations a dependable, Spirit-enabled narrative of the “mighty acts” at stake (cf. John 14:26). And second, those spokesmen were to interpret the event revelation, making clear the truth being communicated by God via those “mighty acts.”

In the effort to appreciate the dynamics and the effectiveness of the revelatory strategy at stake, a simple thought experiment: how well would we understand the evangel if we had Matthew, but we did not have Romans? The event revelation is the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth – the narrative recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. The narrative is itself a revelation – it is the absolutely true record of historical events and words that unfolded in the real space-time succession of moments that we know as history. All of that is actual divine revelation. However, the revelatory effort also and necessarily included word revelation: an apostolic spokesman named Paul, in the course of later historical events, penned with divine superintendence an epistle that articulated with precision and passion the significance of that event revelation.

The epistemological priorities in divine revelation suggest that narrative is essential and necessary to knowing. How well would we comprehend the evangel if we had Matthew but did not have Romans? It is narrative that gives context, color, flavor, personality, and relationship to the truth communicated in word revelation.

The undeniable reality is that God’s method in self-revelation has been to begin with narrative and then to frame, define, and color the truth inherent in that revelation through didactic instruction (i.e., word revelation). The suggestion is that in that divine pattern, epistemological reality deserves to be honored and emulated and certainly should not be regarded as meaningless or irrelevant to man’s habits of mind.

Structuring Information for Search

Imposing classifications on the natural world started at the creation itself. In Genesis 2:19–20, God brings all the “beasts of the field” to “the man, to see what he would call them” (ESV). This classification, dividing the world into parts, is important for several reasons. Classification allows for the creation of abstraction in a system, controlling the amount of information being managed or processed. For instance, books in a library are organized by topic and author, which allows patrons to find the right aisle and then the right shelf without consulting the card catalog. Gathering all the books by a single author into a single space and then all the books on a topic into a single space (a superset of the space in which authors are placed) organizes the information by removing levels of detail.

Furthermore, classification is crucial in understanding the relationships between things and the causal connections between them. In Genesis, the beasts are divided into kinds (Genesis 1:25). The beasts of the field are distinguished from birds and sea creatures (Genesis 1:21, 26). “Flying creatures” and “beasts of the field” are presumably grouped by their method of movement so that every creature within any particular kind is related in this way. Based on these passages in Genesis, Linnaeus classified plants and animals into orders, kinds, and species. Linnaeus classified plants based on their reproductive systems and held the created orders represented the Aristotelian forms (Pearcey and Thaxton 1994, 102). Darwin used this “tree of life,” combined with other observations, to posit the theory of evolution; his Origins contains a tree-like chart illustrating his theory:

Figure 1: Evolutionary Chart from Darwin’s Origins (Darwin 1937, 121)

The tree-like structure in Darwin’s illustration is clear; he has drawn the root node towards the bottom of the page, with the branches and leaves moving towards the top of the page. Most tree-like structures are drawn with the root node at the top of the diagram, making it more difficult to “see” the tree, but the principle is the same no matter where the root node is located.

Tree-like structures are a natural way to organize various types of information; humans have likely used them to classify items into a more easily understandable structure. However, the Enlightenment’s quest for a rational explanation of the entire world led to a “rage for order” (Fisher 1990, 142), which resulted in the classification and division of ever larger parts of the world into tree-like structures.

Tree-like structures, such as Darwin’s, are the most efficient way to search for information. Computers are “good at” just a few things: mathematical calculations, storing information, and searching through (or for) information. Because of this, most problems presented to computer scientists and software developers are quickly reduced to one of these three problems, making them tractable for a computer to efficiently search for data is using algorithms such as Dijkstra’s Shortest Path First.

For instance, the classification of objects of any kind is a search problem; the problem of finding the shortest or fastest route between two locations in a network (such as a road system) is a search problem, etc. The focus of any problem to be solved in an information technology system quickly becomes search.

The Ethos of Search versus the Ethos of Reading

The preference for searching to browsing and browsing to reading has made substantial inroads into modern culture; an example might be helpful. A useful starting point is the structure of the World Wide Web (WWW, or just the ‘web). In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee was working on a documentation system and decided that rather than including references, he would use hypertext links (Berners-Lee 1989). When one section of the text needed to refer to another, the user could follow a link in the text to navigate between sections. These hyperlinks solved the problem of maintaining page locations to refer between sections, as the reference would always move with the text itself. Hyperlinks led to the first web browsers and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is an early precursor to today’s‘ web.

The Indexing of the Internet

There was an explosion of growth in the global Internet and the ‘web in the mid- to late-1980s (which continues to the time of this writing), so it only seemed natural to start somehow indexing websites. One of the first website indexes was called Yahoo; Figure 2 shows an early and then a more recent version of the Yahoo website.

Figure 2: Yahoo search engine in 1996 and 2018

In the 1996 version, to the left of the illustration, the Yahoo web page was a list of topics, much like the table of contents of a book. Users were expected to browse through the directory by clicking on links. Berner-Lee’s original idea of having hypertext links within a document became a page of hypertext links. In 2018, the Yahoo page was primarily dominated by current events and advertising. The directory is hidden, making it impossible to browse through topics as they once did. Instead, users are expected to use the search box on the top of the page to find information. The history of hypertext, then, is from hyperlinks within a document (reading) to a page of links (browsing) and finally to search.

Humans adapt their minds to their tools as much as they adapt their tools to their minds; computers are no different than any other tool in this regard. Computers, however, are good at managing short bursts of information organized for quick classification, search, and retrieval. The result, as Nicolas Carr notes, is a move from linear to search-focused thinking:

We seem to have arrived … at an important juncture in our intellectual and cultural history, a moment of transition between two very different modes of thinking. What we’re trading away in return for the riches of the Net—and only a curmudgeon would refuse to see the riches—is what Karp calls “our old linear thought process.” Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better. (Carr 2011, 10)

Shifting from linear thinking to a mind that absorbs information in short, disjointed, overlapping bursts has a distinct impact on the way Christians read and study the Scriptures.

The Indexing of Scriptural Knowledge

A second helpful example brings out this shift in thinking and directly relates to our study of the Scriptures. Begin with a Bible presented in a format closer to its original form. There are no chapter numbers, and there are no verse numbers; these are added later to more rapidly find a passage in the midst of pursuing an argument or tying together multiple passages related to a single topic. Still later, a cross-reference system is inserted; here, the printed Scriptures reach the same stage as Berners-Lee’s hypertext documents. Examining the column of the Bible provides information on where the reader can find further details on the topic or event addressed in the current verse.

To this, add a concordance or an index. Such a concordance enables the user to locate every passage in the Scriptures related to a specific topic, person, place, or event. The move from narrative to browsing shifts the concordance to the front of the printed Scriptures, using it as the primary interface into the Scriptures. The final step of the information revolution is to remove passages from their original context and place them into a topical arrangement. Reading is replaced with using, and the reader becomes a user. The user can consult the concordance at the front of the printed Bible, find a topic, move to the corresponding page number, and then locate the specific passages needed to understand what the Bible says on the topic. The Bible itself has, at this final stage, been reorganized into a tree-like structure to facilitate quickly searching for passages related to a topic. There is a parallel in the systematic theology; Grudem describes systemization this way:

…the focus of systematic theology remains different: its focus is on the collection and then the summary of the teaching of all the biblical passages on a particular subject. Thus systematic theology asks, for example, “What does the whole Bible teach us today about prayer?” It attempts to summarize the teaching of Scripture in a brief, understandable, and very carefully formulated statement. (Grudem 2004, 23)

In fact, the adjective systematic in systematic theology should be understood to mean something like “carefully organized by topics,” with the understanding that the topics studied will be seen to fit together in a consistent way, and will include all the major doctrinal topics of the Bible. Thus “systematic” should be thought of as the opposite of “randomly arranged” or “disorganized.” In systematic theology topics are treated in an orderly or “systematic” way. (Grudem 2004, 24)

Systemization, the creation of a tree-like structure into which the facts of the Scriptures and theology are poured, entered the world of Christianity. While there are many positive aspects to this entry, Christians have not often asked “what is gained, and what is lost.” The emphasis has been on gain rather than loss.

The Results of Systemization

Three points can be made about this progression from the linear to the topical.

First, the argument here is not that systemization of the kind described thus far is useless or should be abandoned. Instead, the argument, thus far, is Christians are falling into the habit of using systemization as the primary lens through which all of life, including the Scriptures, are viewed. The tree-like structure of organized data supported by small snippets of fact is the first attempt at understanding any topic of note rather than the historical unfolding of relationships within a narrative. The usage pattern of classification and search, developed during the Enlightenment’s “rage for order,” has been codified in the very fabric of computers and has become embedded in culture, becoming the dominant way in which the world is accessed and consumed.

Second, the transition from a linear organization to a topical organization causes the user to focus on small snippets of text that answer a single question. Multiple answers may be strung together to form an argument, but this argument will not flow or work in the same way an argument grounded in linear thinking will. Their interaction with technology has so shaped the user’s mind that this sort of search-driven interface is expected, even in relation to Scripture and theology.

Third, the move from linear reading to topical reading causes one kind of information to be preferred over all other kinds of information: the self-contained fact. Information embedded in long passages, especially in narratives, does not lend itself to this sort of search-based use of the Scriptures. The didactic passage, which asserts a fact about God or makes some theological claim, is, in this kind of reading, naturally preferred over the narrative. When the narrative appears to clash with the didactic, the didactic “simply wins;” there is no need to attempt any kind of harmonization or to consider how God has revealed himself. While the reader might search for meaning in God’s process of self-revealing, the user finds the relevant fact in the most provable form possible—the didactic passage directly addressing the question at hand—and quickly jumps to the next fact.

The Hermeneutical Result of Making the Didactic Primary

The primacy of the short, direct fact is keenly felt in hermeneutics. Didactic passages are taken as facts, while narrative passages are downgraded into “anthropomorphisms” or “accommodations to the human condition.” Rather than struggling with the intersection of didactic and narrative passages, scholars are tempted to find a single passage or a set of passages that appear to state a doctrine clearly and then “explain away” any contrary evidence, particularly if the evidence is presented in the form of a narrative. Two examples might be useful to illustrate this point: God’s relationship to time and the narrative of the fall of Jericho. The first of these examples will illustrate the “scripture on scripture” didactic versus narrative problem; the second will illustrate the “scripture on history” didactic versus narrative problem.

God’s Relationship to Time

The debate over whether God is temporal—or in time—or atemporal—outside time—has been raging in philosophical circles for generations. Aristotle, for instance, holds that God is outside time. Philosophically, the debate between these two positions is undertaken through a wide array of arguments, including the argument from personhood, the argument from tensed statements, and the apparent incoherence of a God who can be in the same relation to two moments in time. The argument of most interest for this paper, however, is the argument from the Scriptures.

The argument from the Scriptures generally proceeds as follows: (1) An atemporalist will point out the many passages of Scriptures that appear to state God is outside time, such as Genesis 1:1, John 8:58, and 2 Peter 3:8; (2) A temporalist will note the many passages that appear to state God interacts with humans in time, such as the narrative at the Oaks of Mamre in Genesis 18; (3) The atemporalist will then point out that all the passages supporting the temporalist position are narrative, while the passages supporting the atemporalist position are didactic. Some extensive quotes will be useful in illustrating the line taken from this point forward in the discussion.

Now when it comes to Scripture, the literature contained therein is definitely not of the genre of philosophy of religion like Philo’s On the Creation of the Cosmos or Aristotle’s Metaphysics, though metaphysical truths are certainly found therein. Rather much of the Scripture, especially the Old Testament, is, very broadly speaking, in the genre of narrative. Israel told stories about the saving acts of God in calling and redeeming his people. These stories display the vividness and drama that are part and parcel of the storyteller’s art. It is hard to exaggerate how thoroughly anthropomorphic they are in their portrayal of God, not just in the obvious ways in speaking of God’s face and eyes and ears and arm but also in the subtle and doubtless unconscious ways in which they speak of God as hearing, seeing, turning, coming and so on. There is just no reason to invest such portrayals with metaphysical significance. These stories describe God from our perspective, as he is related to us. If the static theory of time were in fact correct and reality were a four-dimensional, tenselessly existing, space-time manifold that God transcends and in which he timelessly produces effects at times t0, t1, t2, would Israel’s storytellers have told their stories any differently? (Craig 2001, 223)

Before addressing specific texts, a word concerning hermeneutics is necessary. First, the open theists’ arguments are very compelling on the surface. Clearly a perfunctory reading of the text presents God as authentically interacting with humans in a give-and-take, temporal way. But it also presents God as having arms, eyes, a mouth, etc. “At the heart of the theological differences between the Christian eternalist and temporalist is a different estimate of what constitutes such a good reason as not to take some scriptural representation of God literally.” Opponents of divine timelessness want the text to be taken literally unless there is just cause to relegate it to anthropomorphism. While this initially seems like a responsible thing to do, it does place a heavy burden on the interpreter’s ability to decide just cause. A more responsible standard may be that one should be completely open as to how a text is accepted. … Narrative texts in particular are notorious for anthropomorphizing God’s interactions with man. Calvin asserted that all Scripture was written for man to understand and, as such, must be held as an accommodation to his weakness. (Marshall Wicks 2007, 50–51)

The response of atemporalists to the narrative passages of Scripture is just this: the events described in these passages cannot be taken at face value. Regardless of the outcome of the God in time debate, this tendency to reduce the narrative to nonliteral stories, essentially myths, with minimal value in forming an understanding of God falls directly into the trap of the modern Enlightenment method. Systemize first, then find the bare facts, and then you will know the truth.

Temporalists have answered this argument in several ways. For instance, Wolterstorff responds to Craig’s criticism, quoted extensively above, by saying that it seems Craig is asserting that almost nothing can be known about God from the Scriptures (Wolterstorff 2001, 228). Another line of argument would be that of the first section of this paper: God reveals himself in narrative first. A close examination of the passages taken as didactic in the debate over God and time reveals that all the didactic passages are ultimately grounded in a narrative passage elsewhere in the Scriptures. If it is true that God reveals himself in time first and primarily, then the narrative portions of the Scriptures must be taken more seriously than they appear to be in the debate over God and time.

The Narrative of the Fall of Jericho

The impact of prioritizing didactic “facts” over informing and contextualizing narratives is demonstrated by the prevailing persuasion in contemporary evangelical circles that the “lesson” of a particular biblical narrative can be regarded as adequately communicated and established, irrespective of the historical veracity or integrity of that narrative. A poignant illustration of this tendency and its impact is the debate over the historical accuracy of the account of the fall of Jericho recorded in Joshua 6. Less than a generation ago, Eugene Merrill asked, “If Jericho be not razed, is our faith in vain?” (Kingdom of Priests, 1988, p. )  He argued that the answer is “yes,” and that was undoubtedly the persuasion of the inerrantist evangelical world (cf. The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy, 1978). But such a univocal response would not be forthcoming from that community today.

Absent the time to consider in any sort of detail the issue of Joshua 6, suffice it to say that the predominant position among evangelical scholars is that archeology has proven that biblical record to be historically untenable and that Bible believers thus must adjust their understanding of “inerrancy” to make room for narrative embellishments and exaggerations of what really happened historically, if not for the entire invention of events recorded in Scripture as history.

A narrow illustration to make the point. In the book Five Views On Biblical Inerrancy (Zondervan, 2013), each contributor was asked to respond to three biblical texts which “constituted a potential challenge to inerrancy and by which they would have to test their view of inerrancy” (). The first of those texts was Joshua 6, “since current archeological and historiographical evidence calls into question the details of the text’s account” (). In introducing this element of the book, the editors state:

Obviously, those who maintain a strictly factual account of inerrancy must defend the Bible’s factuality. But for those who have a broader or different understanding of truth, or for those whose understanding of inerrancy does not extend to factual accuracy, we wanted to see how Joshua 6 could still function as Scripture without being factually correct. According to our reading, of the five contributors, one insisted upon the historical factuality of the account (Albert Mohler); the others embraced the idea that the teaching of the passage was not dependent upon the historical veracity of the narrative (Kevin Vanhoozer, Peter Enns, Michael Bird, and John Franke). For instance, Enns states, “the archaeology of Jericho is now more than one hundred years old, and there is an overwhelming consensus that, whatever history there may be behind the biblical story, Joshua 6 does not represent ‘history’ in a way amenable to inerrantist expectations.”

Though possibly (I would say likely) rooted in the memory of ancient conflict, the biblical conquest narratives do not ‘report events’ with inerrantist expectations of historical accuracy. These narratives are the rhetoric of a tribal people, who understood their own existence and their God’s role among them in terms of the categories of tribal culture: gods are warriors who fight for their people against enemies, giving victory for faithfulness but withdrawing their hand for unfaithfulness. The Israelites were an ancient people and portrayed God and their relationship to him in that way.

Less adamant but certainly open to the idea that the biblical record is not historically factual, Vanhoozer suggests that:

“[i]n any case, the key function of the Jericho story is to mark Israel’s transition from wandering in the wilderness to reaching their promised inheritance in the land (Josh. 4:13). The emphasis is on the victory given to the Israelites by God alone (Josh. 5:13–6:5), and Jericho is the only city named in Joshua’s recollection of the conquest of the land, highlighting its importance as a memorial of the acts of God in Israel’s salvation history (Josh. 24:11). An infallibilist reading of this story will always be interested in its historical reliability, since it narrates an act of God in history; however, the main thrust of the story is God’s promise to take his people into the Promised Land, and it’s on this point that our faith is said to rest.”

In a similar vein, Franke opines:

…when all is said and done, the reality remains that we simply have no way of verifying or falsifying the explicit details contained in the story of the fall of Jericho. From my perspective, this does not pose a problem for the truthfulness of Scripture. Its ultimate purpose is not to provide precise, literal details of history but to form a covenantal community called to be a blessing to the world in keeping with the mission of God. In this context, it is a mistake to tie the authority of Scripture to an approach that cannot be verified and faces serious external challenges.

The authors of this paper will adamantly reject, based on careful study, the claim that the archeology of Jericho disproves the historicity of the biblical narrative. Further, we will just as adamantly affirm that the only way to explain the copious archeological evidence of Jericho is to acknowledge the truthfulness of the biblical narrative. But that is an argument for a different time and place. The point to be made here is that, as read by these scholars, the biblical narrative is not only secondary to perceived didactic “fact” but is, in fact, irrelevant.

The purpose of Scripture “is not to provide precise, literal details of history but to form a covenantal community called to be a blessing to the world in keeping with the mission of God.” Joshua 6 should be read to make the didactic point that God can be perceived as working “to take his people into the Promised Land.” Whether the narrative which bears the weight of that “fact” is historically factual is not germane to that communication. The didactic fact would have been just as meaningfully communicated had God stated those perceived realities in a propositional sentence. Or the story might just as well have included beings half-goat and half-man or a princess who slept for 100 years after taking a bite from an apple, as long as it could be read to teach these perceived verities. And further, those perceived truths are themselves subjectively determined. Perhaps the story of Joshua 6 was intended to teach that 7 is the perfect number (after 6 failures, 7 times on the 7^th day…), that and nothing more. At any rate, whether the narrative is historically factual is unrelated to its revelatory intent.

In summary, it appears that, due to a combination of disparate cultural trends, technological influences, and theological presuppositions, the epistemological priority of biblical narrative has been eroded, if not abandoned, in many quarters of the evangelical world today. Pride of place has been assigned to perceived didactic facts as if those teachings were not organically or necessarily grounded in or related to the informing narratives. The authors of this paper will insist that such a habit of mind is counter-productive and corrosive. The biblical narrative is revelatory in and of itself. It is not a loosely told, largely mythologized, historically imaginative morality tale to be mined for some subjectively selected “lesson.” The biblical narrative, in all its parts, is a revelation – a divinely ordained and inerrant record of God’s mighty acts in human history. Further, it is the informing and animating ground out of which the equally important “facts” of word revelation are necessarily sourced.

Conclusion

This paper begins with an examination of how God reveals himself in history, emphasizing the narrative and the formation of a relationship over time. The structure of information in information technology systems was then examined to lay the groundwork for understanding the “habit of mind” that prioritizes search. The primary points of this section are that humans not only bend their tools to their minds but also their minds to their tools; in the case of information technology, the shape of the tool is categorization and search. The third section considered the overall impact of a search-first view of the world, using the indexing of the ‘web and the movement from a linear reading to a more topical reading of the Scriptures as examples.

The fourth section considered the hermeneutical impact of a search-first view of the world. Prioritizing short bursts of facts—the didactic—over longer relational developments—the narrative—reduces theological engagement and devalues large sections of God’s Word. Finally, this paper considered the apologetic impact, noting that apologists need to move beyond a “bare facts” approach and work to build community and relationships within the Church, ultimately reaching beyond the Church into the world. The arrangement of information is not coincidental to its purpose, import, or impact.

 

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