In the mid to late 1980s the bishop of Durham was a public figure in the way no church figure has quite managed since. He had been a wholly unknown theology lecturer when he went on a scarcely watched television programme to say that he didn’t believe in the literal truth of the virgin birth. He also said that the resurrection “was not just a conjuring trick with bones”. This was reported, with a dishonesty that is still astonishing, as “comparing the resurrection to a conjuring trick with bones”. [...]
Jenkins had brought to public attention the great shift in Bible reading that occurred among educated Christians in the 19th century, at first under the influence of geology and literary criticism. Since that great shift they no longer read the Bible as a collection of unambiguously historical facts and asked what these facts revealed about God. They read it as stories, and asked what those stories were trying to say. You may object that this is to read the Bible like a work of fiction. So it is. But it’s not just the Bible. If you believe in a personal God you are, I think, compelled to read the whole universe as a work of fiction – or at least as something with an author, who has arranged it to convey a meaning. So the Bible, if it is true, cannot just be a database of facts. [...]
This seems to me a profound category mistake. If the truths of religion can in principle be established by historical enquiry, then it’s dead. Faith has to be concerned with the stuff that is radically unknowable and that the methods of empirical or scientific enquiry simply can’t touch. You can’t prove or disprove the existence of God, but Jenkins was trying, I think, to show what it might mean if it were true. That really isn’t something that can be captured by a video camera.
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