Inverse Relation

• The Egyptians knew nothing of an exodus.
• Augustus Caesar knew nothing of the birth of Christ.
• Assyrian monuments show some unwilling respect for the house of Omri, to which Ahab belonged.

Clearly, the Bible is a violently partisan book: as with any other form of propaganda, what is true is what the writer thinks ought to be true; and the sense of urgency in the writing comes out much more freely for not being hampered by the clutter of what may actually have occurred.

The general principle involved here is that if anything historically true is in the Bible, it is there not because it is historically true but for different reasons. The reasons have presumably something to do with spiritual profundity or significance. And historical truth has no correlation with spiritual profundity, unless the relation is inverse.

~ Northrop Frye, The Great Code

Many serious Christians start getting really nervous if someone suggests the stories of the Bible might not be “historically true.” Why? The assumption would have to be — since I assume everyone who reads the Bible as a divinely authoritative book is interested in “spiritual profundity” — that history (“what really happened”) is spiritually profound. But why should that be the case? One should probably think that the history of a fallen world is precisely NOT spiritually profound.

The concern must rather be about the “historicity” of God Himself, not what “really happens” in the world, but what God “really does.” The imputed danger of the Bible not being “historical” is that God might not have really “done” what the Bible says He did. This is the threat of modern atheism. There is no God, so of course He didn’t really “do” anything.

But I wonder if the truth of the matter doesn’t lie in a curious paradox between “bringing God down to earth” and the recognition of the existence (and concern) of God in providing human beings — via the Bible, and perhaps other sacred literature — with spiritual profundity. If God comes to earth and stomps around, beating up the bad guys, how profound is this? And yet, if He really did it, He was “really here.”

If God tells stories of creation, exodus, and the follies of kings, which turn out to carry significant spiritual profundity in them — whether or not they are historically true — hasn’t He also been “really here”? Not literally as a character stomping around in those stories (though He often is depicted that way as well), but as the literary Giver of those stories in the first place — “given over to us for our contemplation” (as Fr. Alexander Rentel always says of the liturgical texts given to us by the Church on every day of the Church year).

If the history of a fallen world is precisely the opposite of spiritual profoundity, and if the more anthropomorphized God gets, especially in a grossly historical sense, the less “profound” He is, then we should expect the ahistoricity of Scripture, should we not? Consider that when God does finally come “really” in the flesh, He comes as an infant born of a carpenter and his virgin wife in a backwater Galilean town; and when He leaves, He dies a criminal on a Cross. Such would be proof — against the atheists — that God is real, and bigger than the Fall. He never stomps around like Pharoahs and Caesars.