Another View 1

I have indulged myself with a fascinating book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen. Loewen is a Professor of Sociology at University of Vermont, and the thrust of the book is how history has become uninteresting. He suggests that history has been marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misfortune, and outright lies -- and he surveys twelve leading high school American history texts, not one of which makes history interesting or memorable. They omit, in his opinion, almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past.

I’ve been thinking the same thing about our Bible for at least twenty years -- scholarship has been committed to a particular way of seeing, called the “historical-critical approach” to scriptures, and it has become the signature way of seeing our sacred text. It’s value is to look at the text in its culture, in its context, and then bring the meaning from these two as a way of understanding what was happening. Facts and history became the serious content of interpretation of scripture.

Therein, for me, is part of the difficulty. History and fact lie in a past, in memory and reflective thought. The practice of this kind of interpretation has created a confusion, for it talks about mythology and metaphysic in the language of science. And, of course, that which existed before culture and context were the thousands of years of storytelling and myth-making (myth is the complex images of a story that is inspirited with the deepest truths of life) which we have called, and rightly so, oral tradition.

Let’s take for example the name “God.” The name itself is an abstraction. Each person, if asked to define God, would be stretched and confounded, but would use a myriad of adjectives, nouns, and perhaps a few verbs, to describe this Reality. The difficulty, generally, is that God is described as a fact, or a thing. That’s because theologians and scientists alike consider themselves to be talking about an “objective reality” when referring to God -- which is to say, things and events.

Metaphysics says that God is not in the class of things, that God was not an event in time, not a body, had no divisions or parts -- but rather used terminology like eternal, infinite, ineffable, and so on.

The resulting confusion has been so vast, and has so muddled Western thought, that all our current terms, our very language so limiting, that we can hardly straighten ourselves out. There are several types of knowledge, and we have limited ourselves pretty much to one -- science. It’s what we know, what we’ve become accustomed to -- it has gained our trust. And, science is one kind of knowledge among other kinds of knowledge. There is our forgotten reality, so it seems to me.

The other kinds of knowledge are as follows: metaphysic, which is the indefinable basis of knowledge. Alan Watts (for whom I am grateful for the following ways of seeing) says it is a consciousness of life in which the mind is not trying to grasp or define what it knows.

Differentiated from this, there is metaphysics(Greek and Western), which is most often highly abstract thought that deals with such concepts as being, nature, substance, essence, matter -- and so on, treating each of these as if they were facts on a higher level of objective existence than our sense perception.

Still another kind of knowledge is myth, which is a complex of images or a story, whether factual or fanciful, taken to represent the deepest truths of life, and not dependent on reason for its truth -- therefore, deeper even than reason.

And finally, theology, which was meant to be an interpretation of combining myth and metaphysics -- as the Greek and Western understanding -- in which myth and metaphysics are treated as objective facts of the historical and scientific order.

So --what is science. Well, again difficult, but basically it is the record or history of recorded facts, which are parts of experience designated by nouns and verbs. My hope over the next weeks, and perhaps months, is to explicate a different way of seeing and interpreting scripture predicated on a way of knowing that preceded our present foundations of interpretation, and to offer what I hope will be a “greater” seeing, more profound and hopeful, and to take a language that in the culture of today has become desacralized (raped of its deep, sacred meaning) and reconstitute that language in meaningful and helpful ways of seeing and experiencing.

I do not proclaim this to be the only way of seeing, of experiencing but certainly a forgotten way -- hence, it will be Another View.