David Brisbin Podcast

Dave Brisbin 2.1.26 Asked by email: Do you believe the Bible? That the plagues of Moses, long day of Joshua, fiery furnace of Daniel really happened? Just the way the question was posed mirrored our view of scripture. In other words, if I don’t believe that each event literally happened, I’m not believing the bible. For the past five hundred years in the West, we’ve been equating accuracy and truth. For us, something is true if it’s accurate and accurate if it’s true, but to the ancients who wrote and interpreted scripture, truth and accuracy were not the same. Something could be true even if not accurate. The ancients knew that spiritual truth existed beyond thought and words, that the infinite could only be experienced and pointed toward, never defined or rationally explained. So, with the experience of God ringing inside them, they pointed to that experience in every way they could—allegory, simile, hyperbole, metaphor. They played with numbers, using them symbolically to convey meaning rather than as l