Modern Bible Studies:  Que Passa?
 
Then we enter the stage of critical thinking, which involves evaluating things we believed and were taught in childhood. The process happens naturally; we do not decide deliberately to do it, and nobody has to tell us to do so. If we grew up with Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, we early on let go of them. If we grew up with the Bible, the process eventually affects our attitude toward it as well. We begin to wonder if the biblical stories really happened the way they're told. It begins to take faith to believe them. We may even become convinced that they didn't happen. But whether that happens or whether we simply have serious d doubts, we are no longer able to hear them as stories.

In our time, this stage is intensified and is often prolonged by the modern identification of truth with factuality. To use language I used in chapter 1, skeptics and biblical literalists alike in the modern world are often "fact fundamentalists": if something didn't happen, it isn't true.  Although the progression from practical naivete to critical thinking is virtually automatic, moving beyond the skepticism of a critical mode of thinking wedded to the modern world view is not. Many people get stuck in this stage, sometimes for their whole lives.

Beyond critical thinking is postcritical naivete. Put simply, postcritical naivete is the ability to hear the central stories of the Christian tradition once again as true stories. Importantly, postcritical naivete is not a return to precritical naivete, for one knows that the stories may not be historically factual. But one also knows that their truth does not depend upon their historical factuality.

It is the ability to affirm, in words I have often quoted from a Native American storyteller, "I don't know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true." It is the ability to hear the Christmas stories once again as true stories, as we did when we were children, even as we know that they are almost certainly not historical narratives.

As T.S. Eliot wrote:
 

 
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
 


Hearing the gospels in a state of post-critical naivete is similar to what is often call "narrative theology." But unlike some advocates of narrative theology who declare the bankruptcy of the historical-critical method, post-critical naivete as I understand it affirms insights from the historical-critical stage and integrates them into a larger paradigm. We need to be liberated from the tyranny of the historical-critical method (of studying the Bible) but we deceive ourselves if we think we can simply abandon it. A post-critical reading does not disavow the critical, but brings the critical with it.

Without using the phrase earlier in this book, I have already provided many examples of reading the gospels in a state of post-critical naivete. Among them are the Christmas stories, just mentioned and treated more fully in chapter 12. Reading the community's interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus in the ways I suggest in chapter 8 provides another example. So also the Emmaus Road story: I hear it as a true story, though I do not think that it reports a particular event on a particular afternoon.

Hearing the gospel of John's language about Jesus as "the bread of life" as true is yet another. As a Christian , I know that Jesus is the bread of life, independently of whether Jesus ever fed a multitude with a few loaves and fishes, and independently of whether he ever said this about himself. We live in a tradition which speaks of abundance and not scarcity, and of meals in the wilderness on or path to liberation. We are fed by spiritual food, even as the gospels' emphasis on material food for embodied people reminds us that he gospel is not simply about spiritual food.

Because I combine historical Jesus research with a metaphorical and narrative reading of the gospels, I can affirm that both the historical Jesus and the canonical Jesus matter. One does not need to choose between the two.

Marcus Borg The Meaning of Jesus p.248
Publisher HarperSanFrancisco