Well, the key here is calling into question the idea that some statements can be made or held to be true without the personal involvement of the individual. This is the whole idea behind the realm of "facts." Like I was getting at in the last post, these statements are not supposed to depend on any personal characteristics or circumstances of the person who holds them to be true. Ideally, that stuff shouldn't matter. A fact is just as true today for a person in the U.S. as it was for a person 150 years ago in Africa. The idea behind a "fact" is that you kind of get a free pass as a person, whether you are making a claim about physics, Christianity, parenting, weight loss, or whatever. If something can be established as a "fact," you don't have to be personally involved with that idea. Why would you? It's a fact - not an opinion.
There are a couple of problems with this way of thinking: 1) it avoids issues of belief, faith, and assumptions which are crucial to the process of humans knowing anything, and 2) it obscures the fact that all of our historical situatedness (ethnicity, socioeconomic status, history, age, gender, etc.) colors the way we look at the world. I'll just come right out and say that these are assumptions in and of themselves. I don't know that I could "prove" them, any more than anyone else could prove that value-free statements like "facts" exist. But, let me give a few reasons why I think that this is a better way to understand the world, and then say what that means for Christianity.
First, I think it's a more honest way of looking at the world. We just cannot escape the reality that our ways of seeing and understanding things are completely colored by all the unique stuff about us like: the place where we grew up, the culture we grew up in, the values of our parents, and so on (along with the factors in the previous paragraph). Let's just acknowledge and accept this instead of fighting against it by trying to suggest things that can be known and stated without personal involvement and perspective of some sort.
Of course some people will want to try to come up with short propositional statements that can be supposed to be "true," no matter what personal factors may exist. There are a couple of problems with that for Christians, the first being whether or not we want the deepest truths of who we are and what we believe reduced to propositional statements. Is that the way the scriptures came to us? Of course not. They came as letters, poems, stories, visions, and prayers. Do we want to take the richness of those genres and reduce their "truth" to propositions? I hope not. Likewise, Jesus did not write a book (full of short propositions or not). Instead, he founded a community. There has to be something here for Christians in the way that they understand "truth."
Another way to understand this is to think about it in terms of language. When I try to read the Hebrew scriptures, I start to recognize how much language is an unseen part of the way I view the world. Very little exists that can be translated "straight across" from one language to another. Every translation is an interpretation of some sort, no matter how small it might be. So, the idea of culture-free, value-free facts starts to break down around issues of language and translation.
So, what does this mean for Christians? I think a few things:
1. For those who have stubbornly held to the view that the Bible must be a collection of facts - I say that this view must be abandoned. First and foremost, as I've tried to show above, the notion of what commonly qualifies as a "fact" is a bad one (something supra-cultural that can be universally known and held as "true" for all people and usually expressed in propositions rather than narrative or poetry). Don't reduce scripture to that. It's not what it's meant to be. If you do reduce scripture to that - it will disappoint you. You will have to do all sorts of mental gymnastics to get it to fit into that category, and it doesn't belong there anyway.
2. For those who have no trouble sticking with the system and then saying: "scripture isn't factual - but the point is its values anyway" - you are not off the hook either. The problem is that you have still bought into the same system that is stuck worrying about facts (as defined above). Scripture likewise is not just about a good value system from a loving, forgiving God. That's essentially the reduction that takes place for the values people: once you have given up caring about whether or not scripture is factual, you are more or less free to take or leave what you want - depending on whether or not it fits with your value of love. Don't like the idea that God asked the Israelites to kill the children of their enemies - oh well. Don't like the idea that there actually could be a hell? - forget about it. Don't like the idea of God condemning homosexual practices? - just ignore it. The point is not whether the values people are right in their views on those issues - it's more about them writing off scripture because it doesn't conform to their values. There is no wrestling with the text, or being challenged by the incredibly wild, bizarre nature of God. Instead, the wrestling ends before it begins because it doesn't line up with the values of the reader.
I guess after writing all this I need to write another post about the nature of scripture, and how this fits in with the facts-value divide. Well, that'll be for another day.
A final aside: although I think it's a minority opinion, you can see some scientists realizing some of the stuff I was getting at in this post as well. If you are interested, check out this article on "biocentrism." It's kind of the physics and biology version of what I am talking about here.
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