Antifragility and the Bible
How Forcing a Narrative Ruins the Truths
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines, to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic continues to explore what happens when we force a narrative on a story that doesn’t need to be there. We’ll find how that typically makes the story fragile and, worse, causes the original value to be lost. Come join us and discover how antifragility can apply to mythology and theology to unlock new insights.
Intro
I’m going to start with a quick example of forcing a narrative to set the stage for the real topic of antifragility. I promise it’s not too esoteric. 🙂
A few weeks back I was talking to a friend about the Bible and the prophesies, specifically those related to the Messiah. As most of you know, Christians believe that Jesus is the Messiah and fulfills the Old Testament (OT) prophecies.
The challenge with this entire conversation is that it starts with a narrative that immediately begins to break apart the very foundation of the OT that carries these prophesies. This is because the OT never prophesied about a second coming, only a first. Every OT prophecy that is used to support Jesus returning is, interestingly enough, just a prophecy about the promised Messiah. Put another way, there’s nothing in the OT prophesying a Messiah will come and do what Jesus is said to have done. This means there has to be a second coming now.
If you start with the OT and read the promise of the Messiah, by the time you get to the New Testament (NT), Jesus starts to raise some eyebrows. This is Exegesis, which we’ve covered before, and goes back into the text and looks at how the people, in the culture, with that language, would have interpreted the text.
But if you start with the NT and accept that as Truth and then go back to the OT you end up interpreting what you already believe from the text. This technique is called Eisegesis which is reading into the text, after the fact, and trying to make it work towards a presupposed conclusion. Simply put, a supporter of the NT starts from the foundation that it has to be true and forces that narrative back on the OT.
Now, I don’t want to go too deep into the nuances of Biblical apologetics and critique because that’s been chewed on ad nauseam. The point is that, because it has to be chewed on ad nauseam, it’s a great example of where trying to force a narrative makes the story increasingly fragile.
Fragility also emerges when people feel that they MUST contextualize the Bible into history and work very hard to make each story historically true while missing the incredible value that is actually captured on the pages. A perfect example is a book recently published called The Gen-X Bible.
Lest you be confused by the title, it has absolutely zero to do with Gen-X. It does attempt very hard to place Bible stories into history while getting a lot of facts wrong.1
The problem is, as we just discussed, this effort opens the reader up to more questions than answers. As one of the reviewers eloquently states.2
The author says he’s a redactor… he means it in the context of pulling together many sources, but he ends up redacting, as in removing and eliminating all historical and biblical elements that contradict his narrative. Bottom-line, he skillfully trail-mixes the Bible, just picking and choosing the bits he likes.
The Whole Truth
I’m going to step back from this example and provide a bit more personal context. I was raised that the Bible was the capital-T Truth! All of it had to be taken literally. I was a young earth creationist because the Bible said it took seven days and only has 6000 years of genealogy. I believed that Moses literally parted the Red Sea, etc., etc.
At one point, I was loosely affiliated with Hebrew Roots, a group that tries to get back to the foundation of the Bible. As we studied, we found tons of what looked like pagan traditions merged into Christianity. (think Christmas) We were after the ground truth and do you know where that led a lot of them? Flat Earth. Talk about fragility!
Back to young earth creationism, my Army buddy Carl, of Lazy Leadership, and Benevolent Dictatorship fame, introduced me to a book called The Science of God which showed that the creation story had flexibility while still being scientifically and biblically true if you stopped forcing Genesis 1 to be interpreted narrowly.
That idea opened up a new insight: the harder I worked to make the Bible capital-T True, the more difficult the book became. I was pressured to ignore science and history if it contradicted the Bible but that meant the story started to fall apart the harder I squeezed.
I made the Bible fragile by trying to force a narrative.
When I finally stepped back, I realized that Jesus himself spoke mostly in parables and allegories that weren’t meant to be literal. I realized that Genesis 1 is a poem, not a scientific text. I realized that the Jews use a teaching concept called a Midrash which compares things that are similar. (This is what Matthew is doing in the first book of the NT with all of his ‘as foretold/prophesied.’3 )
Moreover, I was missing the actual meaning behind the stories because I was forcing them to do something they weren’t designed to do.
I was breaking the Bible.
Letting Go
When I stopped trying to force a narrative on a book as old, amalgamated, and complex as the Bible and started to look around at how the stories flow together towards a common and repeatable theme, I was amazed at what I’d been missing. Then, when I compared those stories with other nations and put them in context, I found more value than before.
For example, Moses is a classic hero’s journey that people like Jordan Peterson have explored in depth in his Biblical Lecture Series. One of the more interesting ones is that his killing of an Egyptian and his striking of a rock for water were actions of violence when God had instructed him to use words and negotiation instead. (The pen is mightier than the sword you might say)
It also allowed me to realize that the origin story of Moses is an even older Mesopotamian story told about Sargon and repeated later with Romulus and Remus. There is clearly something more going on that bears deeper understanding.4
Letting go of a narrative opened up the stories for meanings that aren’t antithetical to the core fundamentals of the Bible in any way. Themes like dying to your old self and being reborn, striving for a higher calling, and giving and receiving grace and redemption.
This is the story told by Heather Hamilton who wrote Returning to Eden about her journey back to faith… just not the same faith she was raised with that was so fragile it shattered her life. Instead, she found the antifragile nature of the Bible and unlocked so much more value. She writes:
“I began to wonder if there was, in fact, a deeper meaning to the biblical stories that otherwise seemed rationally unbelievable. Perhaps I was missing something valuable by viewing the Bible through the false dichotomy of a ‘literal or lie’ lens.”
Returning to Eden is a fantastic book that I highly recommend about applying an antifragile view on a precious corpus of stories that contain much deeper and more revelatory meaning.
Conclusion
Whether it’s the Bible or anything else in life, if we force something into a narrative; if we squeeze something too hard to fit a worldview; if we refuse to let an idea have flexibility, we create a naturally fragile system.
My cousin and I talk about this all the time regarding our theological adventure after the Truth where we discovered that we were chasing the wrong things and losing the value of the stories in the process. I now have much greater respect for what the Bible has to offer and I find myself studying the stories and applying them in them in ways I’d never done when I just thought they were history.
Do I believe the Bible is The Truth? No.
But I believe it contains thousands and thousands of truths that help me become a better person when I properly contextualize them and stop forcing my own view.
I’m learning to make the Bible antifragile.
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The author had posted on LinkedIn “What really happens when Abraham faced down an Iranian Army?” Except Iran did not exist at that time. Abraham faced down the Elamites who refer to a people far to the NE as Iranians… so not the same people. The author did not take kindly to this correction which just goes to show how fragile he’s made the story.
This reviewer was part of the engagement in footnote #1 and the review mentions that.
Midrashes are comparisons and similarities because none of what he cites would have been seen by the people in the OT as a prophecy.
Isaiah 7 is a great example. We now count that as a double/split prophecy (which there aren’t any other examples) because it was a prophecy for King Ahaz and fulfilled in his time. But Matthew midrashes this as ‘like that’ because it talks about God fulfilling promises.
Even the Jesus story of a man, born of a virgin, with twelve disciples, dying and three days later being resurrected permeates Mesopotamia from Mithra, Dyonesus, Ishtar/Tammuz, Osiris, Horus, Buddha, Krishna, Zarathustra, Hercules, Hermes, and Adonis. Most of these stories occurred hundreds to thousands of years before Jesus.
I'm a pragmatic naturalist, which entails local atheism for most if not all known religions, so I definitely do not believe the Bible is literally true--or any other holy book of any other mainstream religion for the matter. And still, I can see a lot of value in these books, not only for the cultural and anthropological insights they can give us, but also in a more personal sense, because they contain a wealth of wisdom passed down by generations of thinkers. It would be a shame to cast it all as false and pass on the many valuable ethical lessons.
I'm fascinated by the ways in which the approaches mentioned here were already anticipated by some ancient Christians, particularly Origen. I happen to have a quote handy from one of my long-ago blog posts:
"This, however, must not be unnoted by us, that as the chief object of the Holy Spirit is to preserve the coherence of the spiritual meaning, either in those things which ought to be done or which have been already performed, if He anywhere finds that those events which, according to the history, took place, can be adapted to a spiritual meaning, He composed a texture of both kinds in one style of narration, always concealing the hidden meaning more deeply; but where the historical narrative could not be made appropriate to the spiritual coherence of the occurrences, He inserted sometimes certain things which either did not take place or could not take place; sometimes also what might happen, but what did not: and He does this at one time in a few words, which, taken in their “bodily” meaning, seem incapable of containing truth, and at another by the insertion of many. And this we find frequently to be the case in the legislative portions, where there are many things manifestly useful among the “bodily” precepts, but a very great number also in which no principle of utility is at all discernible, and sometimes even things which are judged to be impossibilities. Now all this, as we have remarked, was done by the Holy Spirit in order that, seeing those events which lie on the surface can be neither true nor useful, we may be led to the investigation of that truth which is more deeply concealed, and to the ascertaining of a meaning worthy of God in those Scriptures which we believe to be inspired by Him.” (On First Principles 4:1:15)
On First Principles was finished around 230 CE, but even that early, someone as perceptive as Origen had recognized the Biblical text often contained material that wasn't strictly historical and/or that might not have a "physical" application, even though it had a spiritual one.
People generally accept the fact that the parables aren't factual stories but are used by Jesus to illustrate a point. Why should it be so shocking that other parts of the Bible may function in the same way?
Use of nonliteral interpretation is even sanctioned by the Biblical text itself. In Galatians, Paul treats parts of the Abraham story as an allegory.