Didn't our hearts burn within us?
In the beginning (of the bible) God said, "let there be light!" and it was so ... "Let there be life!" and it was so. God's words appear to have creative power. But do we believe that God can make things with words? We might ask, "Is this language to be understood as poetic?" And if we ask this, do we mean, "Not to be taken seriously?" Does poetic language have less a claim to legitimacy? Is poetic language less true? No that can't be so.
Because the bible is full of non-trivial challenges to our logical analysis of reality, we tend to call it a great book full of dramatic stories whose writers certainly took a little poetic license. And then we dismiss it as an illegitimate discourse on reality.
But this isn't fair to poetry, nor to God. Do we regard Shakespeare with less seriousness, because he wrote poetry? No, in fact we are thankful that there is a way of writing that encompasses the huge emotions that the great writer of love poetry felt. And so poetry might do a better job of capturing huge love than prose. And so, what better way to communicate the greatest love story ever told? To put it another way, we can be thankful that the Bible is not full of stories told in pedestrian, scientific language. Because to just hear the facts is not to hear the story.
Because the bible is full of non-trivial challenges to our logical analysis of reality, we tend to call it a great book full of dramatic stories whose writers certainly took a little poetic license. And then we dismiss it as an illegitimate discourse on reality.
But this isn't fair to poetry, nor to God. Do we regard Shakespeare with less seriousness, because he wrote poetry? No, in fact we are thankful that there is a way of writing that encompasses the huge emotions that the great writer of love poetry felt. And so poetry might do a better job of capturing huge love than prose. And so, what better way to communicate the greatest love story ever told? To put it another way, we can be thankful that the Bible is not full of stories told in pedestrian, scientific language. Because to just hear the facts is not to hear the story.
