[This is a somewhat freewheeling response to Biblical Leadership — first given as a lecture in 1928, a chapter in the book On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, a collection of short writings taken from the various works of Martin Buber.]
In the essay, Biblical Leadership, Martin Buber states:
I believe that we are standing at the beginning of a new era in biblical studies; whereas the past era was concerned with proving that the Bible did not contain history, the coming era will succeed in demonstrating its historicity. By this I do not mean that the Bible depicts men and women and events as they were in actual history; rather do I mean that its descriptions and narratives are the organic, legitimate ways of giving an account of what existed and what happened. I have nothing against calling these narratives myths and sagas, so long as we remember that myths and sagas are essentially memories which are actually conveyed from person to person.
I’ll start out with a quibble which should perhaps be directed at many who speak of historical matters. The term “actual history” is suspicious. There is no “actual history” accessible to man but only specific histories which are narrated by particular, concrete human beings. The term “actual history” implies — at least to me — a direct knowledge of the story God is telling, in its completeness and unity and coherence. I have to confess that I also tend to misuse the word ‘history’, using it at times as if it denoted a direct access to the narrative which is this world, an access implying the perfect knowledge of this world which is, after all, what we aim at, however far it lies beyond our reach. Our human beings are the right sorts of entities to shape minds to encapsulate the very thoughts God manifested in this world, but we are far too small and too weak to actually encapsulate much. We are children playing with make-believe tools in imitation, but true imitation, of our Father as He goes about His work.
But let me return to the specific topic of bible history, that is, a specific set of human renderings of human events within the story God is telling.
There are historians to be sure who specialize in finding and studying manuscripts or royal archives or other public documents which are what they are. Such documents are quite useful but they provide a limited view of a complex reality. ‘Objective and true history’ would necessarily be a replay of events. Judging by the general feel of his writings, I think that Buber knows quite well that history is, and has to be, a literary narrative by a human thinker who organizes material to produce that narrative. Perhaps that term “actual history” was a slip-up — I’m sure I’ve made many such errors. To see that the world is not quite what most men claim it to be is not sufficient to know how to speak more truly. I can understand King David’s viewpoint to some extent but I don’t know what it’s like to dance in procession in front of the Ark of the Covenant nor do I know what it’s like to move up into the woods knowing that multiple groups of competent and brutal warriors wish to kill me. Yet, my mind is totemic enough that I can sort of know these experiences. We can only weakly approximate to God’s intimate way of knowing His own Creation in each and every part. Yet, that we can do that and a competent historian provides a convincing and sometimes entrancing overview of a part of God’s story. So do many others, such as poets and myth-makers and those who design buildings to correspond to a particular view of the world and man’s place in it.
I go along with Buber completely in having “nothing against calling these [Biblical] narratives myths and sagas, so long as we remember that myths and sagas are essentially memories which are actually conveyed from person to person.” My understanding of American history has been shaped by readings of the novels of Hawthorne and Melville and dos Passos, not just by readings of the nonfiction of Nisbet and McDonald and Toucqueville and the Founding Fathers. Moreover, I myself write novels and probably write most of my theological and philosophical works in the manner of a novelist.
History has to be founded on facts but facts alone don’t give the proper narrative structure — that is, moral structure, nor are the facts of history verifiable or even fully objective in the way of measurements of the sun’s radiation output. This is to say that history is an approximate rendering of a very small part of the narrative God is telling, the narrative that is the world — this universe as seen in light of God’s purposes for Creation.
There is another deep problem for localized entities such as a man, one dealt with in that poorly named field of study, Chaos Theory. As I noted in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand:
There’s a pretty good way to generate physical events which are chaotic by some realistic and practical standard. The measurements of those events will be a stream of numbers random by some standard, sometimes quite high. You can simply put two independent systems in contact with each other and observe or measure what happens at the interface. That’s all. It’s a trick used in some of the simple experiments used to generate so-called chaotic motion. For example, take two pendulums with different periods of oscillation. Link the bobs of the pendulums and put one or both in motion. The two pendulums will clearly not be able to move as they would if each moved freely. In fact, the resulting motion will be chaotic, basically unpredictable. Equivalent experiments can be done with electronic components or even with simulations of the independent systems in software. There’s nothing mystical involved in generating streams of physical events which are unpredictable or chaotic, generating numbers which are random by some low standard.
Chaotic motion can be visualized as an orbital path that never quite returns to the same point and is unpredictable beyond some length of time in the future or in the past. If you were to graph the orbits of such an object, and the orbiting earth is such an object, you would get a blur of orbits that lie close to each other and cross over often but no particular orbit is the same as any other. That sort of movement is patternless to human perception and measurement though usually staying within some tight boundaries. Physicists have shown by way of demanding computer simulations that “the orbital movement of planets in the solar system is chaotic… which makes practically impossible any precise prediction beyond a few tens of millions of years…”
The early results of Professor [Jacques] Laskar’s research (his first simulations of the solar system [were carried out] in 1989) indicate that a mere 15 meter error in measurement of the earth’s current position makes it impossible to say if the earth’s orbit will be stable 100 million years from now. Because the equations of dynamics are symmetrical in time, this means it’s also impossible to prove the earth’s orbit was stable more than 100 million years in the past, with that range of ignorance moving with us so far as the future goes and also moving with us so far as the past goes. A few years later, Gerald Sussman and Jack Wisdom of MIT showed that after only 4 million years it is not possible to predict the orbit of the earth, or any of the planets of the solar system, with any confidence.
Undoubtedly, results will have been tightened up in the technical literature to which I have no access. But the principle is what’s important.
In a sense, knowledge is constantly coming into view ahead of us and constantly disappearing behind us. To be more explicit, this means that, despite common sense, we cannot prove by mathematical means that the earth stayed in its orbit 4 million years ago. So far as the equations go, with initial conditions provided by the current state of the solar system, the earth might have crashed into the sun or gone shooting past Mars 4 million years ago. Common sense sometimes tells us things that mathematics cannot.
You shouldn’t imagine that this situation occurs only at the level of planets like the earth. The sun itself is traveling a chaotic orbit around the center of the galaxy. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is dancing around various gravitational centers of local clusters of galaxies and larger-scale clusters of galaxies.
There’s a deep and fundamental lack of determination about the events in the universe, future events and past events alike. The strangeness of quantum mechanics does not really add much to this lack of determination, not in principle, though it’s likely that it gives us a view of this looseness in reality on a different level. We’re duty-bound to use this looseness in the chains of determinism to move towards God. We have a small but significant measure of physical freedom which we can use in making moral choices with some freedom.
There’s a specific example of a chaotic or random stream of events that may be founded upon two interacting, independent physical systems which are largely well-determined — biological evolution. In the short-term and from the viewpoint of the individual organism, which is the entity being selected or otherwise acted upon, both genetic events and environmental events can be presented as well-determined, at least for the first stage of an analysis. The interaction of these two well-determined and independent systems produces a stream of unpredictable and under-determined events which are typically mis-labeled as `random’ by evolutionary biologists and popular science writers. Then again, they’re random if we use the more recent redefinition of randomness to be factuality of a sort. They are random in the same way as the earth’s orbit which doesn’t quite repeat itself and is beyond the capabilities of human prediction, at least, given current understandings of what mathematics is.
Now let me state a principle that might help us move in the right direction away from the current confusion I’ve deliberately stirred up:
Things which exist are infinitely richer than any possible description of those things in either human language or human mathematics.
Statements and equations can only cover specific aspects of things and usually those specific aspects will not be fully covered. Even if it were possible to know a thing has only ten aspects by some system of categorization, you would have to push Humpty Dumpty off the wall to get at those aspects. An equation describing the shell in all its surprising strength, a description of the genes in the yolk, and a philosophical discussion of the potential unity of these fragments and puddles of glop, won’t get you Humpty Dumpty back again. No concrete thing can be broken up into sets of aspects which are non-overlapping but also cover the thing completely. Nor are we so good at dealing with aspects as some think. Again, it’s St. Thomas Aquinas who had the better sense. While he defended the idea that the human mind could, in principle, comprehend all of this universe, he also noted that no actual human mind could fully understand so much as a flea.
The world remains a true narrative with moral purpose but also moments of uncertainty, moral and physical. To understand a man facing a moral decision is not necessarily to know what his decision will be. A man with a mind shaped to be an encapsulation of this world, or even of all Creation, doesn’t know all that will happen or has happened; he only understands what he knows. Many men know much and don’t understand much at all — their minds are shaped to another world than the one God created.
In a sense, we could even say that God, in His self-constrained role as Creator, has accepted a certain amount of ignorance as to the results of these moments of uncertainty. He meets us as someone who will respond to us, converse with us, as we respond to Him and converse with Him. He meets us as if He too were part of the developing world as it moves into a future free in some significant way which is difficult to even name let alone describe. The all-powerful God is the author of this world and its only true Ruler, but He meets us as a personal Lord who wishes us to return to Him, not as if our fate were already a foregone conclusion. This is the “I-thou” relationship so prominent in Buber’s body of work.
So how is it that God can meet us in such a relationship when He’s all-powerful and all-knowing? That’s a subject worth exploring, by novelist and poet and musician as well as by theologian and philosopher and brain-scientist. See Freedom and Structure in Human Life — The Never-ending Project for a discussion of exactly that — the impossibility of completing this project of exploring Creation, that is, the thoughts of God in His freely chosen role as Creator. That’s not bad as such — exploring Creation is one of the more interesting activities a man can take up and it might well be one of our main occupations in the world of the resurrected.