truth is not literal

literally!

He dwells in us as the the soul in the body, if only we are sound members of his, if we are dead to sin. — St. Columban, aboot

What do the words of scripture mean? And what does it mean to take them at their value?

Journalism, I told a theology school classmate in the middle of last school year, has gotten me thinking more about “the truth” and my responsibility to say what is true than six whole years of studying theology. Journalism is a practice of literal speech — say what you saw or heard. Be honest about how you saw it, where you saw it from, or what it was. Journalism can describe an event’s causes and effects, but it can’t say what it meant — only what various witnesses say it means.

Journalism forms a habit of honest speech. It’s great formation for approaching and listening to other people. But it’s not the best formation for grappling with the speech of one’s faith. It is a beautiful craft to explain someone’s beliefs for others, but the way speech functions in journalism — as a product, mostly, of the Protestant Enlightenment—is not the way speech functions in faith.

We don’t think about this enough or grapple with what it means to be a faith that believes in signs and symbols. Our imaginations have been warped by the scientific revolution. We think that history means “the facts” and only “the facts.” And that historiography is the journalism of the past. But people say all sorts of things—not all of them reflect a reality everyone recognizes. And people say what they mean, but the words they are using to say what they mean may mean something different to someone else. And people may say what they mean, but what they’re describing may be so outside the realm of common life, and so far outside the bounds of language, words fail them. Or the words they reach for may be the closest they have to saying what they mean, but is not quite what they mean.

Language is not reality. Reality is reality, and there is one single Word at the heart of it, that describes it, captures it, encapsulates it. All other words are simply reaching for that Word. Language is a mediator of reality, a transmitter. It is a medium, not a message. But it’s funny that it’s what we have to go on: it’s the best chance we have for explaining what goes on inside us and between us to one another. But I think the more you love someone, you realize how imperfect language is, how unsuited for the task of communication. Love is revealed best in time—in the rhythms and flows of a lived reality between you day after day. Words can express a lot of present realities, but they are not a substitute for a presence, for a reality shaped and shared between you.

So when it comes to Scripture, that’s a medium. That’s a symbol in a symbol: language written down in alphabetic speech. And we believe that it is true, but what do we mean by something being true? Perhaps we mean that it makes reality present. It reveals God — the Word — in its words.

“The true symbol is united with the thing symbolized,” wrote Rahner.

Reality and its appearance in the flesh are forever one in Christianity, inconfused and inseparable. The reality of the divine self-communication creates for itself its immediacy by constituting itself present in the symbol, which does not divide as it mediates but unites immediately, because the true symbol is united with the thing symbolized, since the latter constitutes the former as its own self-realization.

A true symbol is not “just” a symbol, Rahner writes. It makes a reality present in a new medium, in a new way. And this presence in a new medium is part of the reality. What do we mean when we say that we live in a sacramental world? What do the sacraments mean to us? What does scripture mean to us? We live in a world of meaning that cannot just be understood by looking at everything at face value. We are invited to seek the realities underneath. And reality, whatever it is, is not literal.