In what sense is the Bible truth?

The original korean text: http://blog.naver.com/stevision/50025322019

 

 

(an opinion posted up on donga.com's netizen forum, Nov. 10, 2003)

 

Simcheongjeon, a korean classical novel, is clearly a fiction. But, if a historian refuses to read it, saying, "The novel doesn't say facts," and accuses the writer of lying, this condemnation is unjust, for he is making a mistake, i.e. to identify truths and lessons of literature with those of history.

 

The story of the Noachian deluge came into the Genesis. How did this story come to get in the Bible? The story, I think, underwent following process.

 

Once upon a time, a God-fearing man, deploring the sins of the world, climbed the highest mountain in the world he had known. He did it so that he might depart from the foul world as far as possible and pray to God in a quiet place. By the way he discovered an amazing thing at the top of the mountain. He saw fossil shellfish there(!), but this was an incident at which modern people knowing the knowledge of earth science wouldn't be surprised.

 

What could this man think? He may think that the God the Creator of the world destroyed the mankind full of sins by an enormous deluge as a judgment for such sins. He justly concluded that, according to the size of the shells, all of the mountains in the world must have been under water for about 150 days. How else can he explain the shells? So he created the Noah Flood Story based on this. It was not a mere fiction, but nearly an inevitable story under the situation of the scientific knowledge of the time. This flood story spread all over the world to become an agency that spoke of the justice and judgment of God and the sins of men properly. Because, everywhere you go, there are mountains which once were under the seas and now become high mountains by crustal movements. And the story had led a lot of people to God for a long time, so that it was adopted as the word of God by God's people, or by christian community.

 

The message the Flood story tried to give us was the omnipotence of God and his righteous judgment. This is the common faith of him who wrote the story, those who read it, those who accepted it into the Bible, those who preached the Bible, and those who heard the sermons. The content of this faith is the truth.

 

It is ridiculous to reject the lessons of Simcheongjeon because it is not historical facts. Furthermore, it is even wrong to denounce the writer as a liar. Likewise the Bible is a book that gives us the truth valid for God and man through such literary genres as myths, historical novels, poems, letters, predictions, apocalypses, and etc.

 

The Bible, in fact, used historical facts and persons, but its purpose was not to describe the exact history. Of course, the writers of the Bible didn't mean to distort the actual history. They just had less historical knowledges at that time than now.

 

We need to acknowledge that the errors themselves found in the Bible were the best knowledges of the time. Many of them who lived those days knew so, and got the faith unto the salvation through the story reconstructed from those knowledges, even though they are manifestly errors now. (But who knows whether or not the God really did exactly what are written in the Bible for he is omnipotent? You can't altogether deny the Noachian deluge described in the Bible. You can't disprove it!)

 

Therefore, Christians should not make modern science and historical knowledge the criteria for the evaluation of the truth of the Bible. Because, then, errors of the Bible rather are pointed out to them. Instead, you'd better let people know the background of the Bible as literary works, and know that the Bible is a book of religious truth. And I hope that non-Christians will not overlook the real truth of the Bible when they meet the scientific and historical errors of the Bible.