Krisan Marotta draws on a TED Talk about post-truth thinking to challenge Bible students to study scripture with more rigor, humility, and intellectual honesty.
Key takeaways:
- Confirmation bias affects Bible study just as much as it affects public discourse.
- Good Bible study means asking questions designed to eliminate your preferred interpretation, not just confirm it.
- Consulting commentaries you expect to disagree with sharpens your thinking.
- The goal is to know not only what you believe and why, but why the alternatives fail to persuade you.
The Problem: A Post-Truth Bible Study World
The Oxford Dictionary defines "post-truth" as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
We might just call it the fake news world. But it raises a fair question: do we live in a post-truth Bible study world?
Increasingly, sermons are heavy with stories and emotional appeals and light on critical explanations of the author's intent. Speakers tend to read a passage and then jump immediately to application.
The application may not even be wrong. The speaker may have done solid Bible study to get there. But when they don't show that work, they leave listeners with little room for discernment. You have to work hard to figure out how they got there and whether their conclusions actually hold up.
Bible study still involves asking a lot of hard questions, and those questions deserve more space on Sunday mornings.
Confirmation Bias and the Will to Believe
The TED Talk "What to trust in a 'post-truth' world" by Alex Edmans makes a point that resonates deeply with Bible study. Edmonds says, “Due to confirmation bias, we never consider the rival theories because we're so protective of our own pet theory.”
Scripture echoes that idea. The Bible talks about belief being a matter of the will. Ultimately, we believe what we want to believe. The first step toward saving faith is a willingness to believe the gospel might be true.
That same principle applies to Bible study. We have to be willing to believe that a different interpretation might be the best one.
Good Bible students learn to ask questions of the text with the underlying assumption that their preferred answer might be the wrong one. Questions like:
- Why would the author pick that word and not a different one?
- How does this idea relate to the previous idea?
- How does this phrase modify what was just said?
- Why would the author make that point in this context?
The purpose is to look for rival interpretations, not just to confirm what you already believe. And that requires the humility to accept that your favorite answer might be the one that's wrong.
Bible Study Disagreements: 2 Fixable Causes and How to Promote Understanding
Testing Your Theory, Not Just Confirming It
Edmonds describes a study by a psychologist who gave subjects a set of three numbers and asked them to identify the rule that generated them. This maps almost perfectly onto the process of Bible study.
Say the numbers are 2, 4, and 6. Most people guess the rule is “successive even numbers.” So they test it by proposing sets like 4, 6, 8 or 8, 10, 12. Those fit the rule, so confidence grows.
But here is the problem: that kind of testing only confirms the theory. It does not prove it.
A better test would be something like 4, 12, 26. If that set also fits the rule, you have eliminated the requirement that the numbers be successive. If 4, 13, 26 fits, you have eliminated the requirement that they be even. Maybe the only rule is that the numbers increase.
That kind of testing is essential to Bible study. The goal is not to confirm your interpretation. The goal is to prove it by eliminating the rival interpretations. That requires asking the questions most likely to show you are wrong.
As Edmonds puts it, quoting Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that won't work. Finding out that you're wrong is the only way to find out what's right.”
Or to put it as a sequence:
- A story is not a fact, because it may not be true.
- A fact is not data, because one data point may not be representative.
- And data is not evidence if it is consistent with rival theories.
How to Study the Bible: The 5 C’s that Clarify Any Passage
Three Tips for Bible Study in a Post-Truth World
1. Approach every text with the assumption that you could be wrong.
Attitude matters. A healthy dose of humility and a genuine willingness to be wrong can go a long way toward getting things right.
2. When you consult commentaries, always check more than one.
Include both a classic work and a contemporary work. And make sure at least one of them is a commentary you expect to disagree with. Scholars you routinely disagree with are often the most useful, because they force you to ask whether you have actually proved your assumptions or just made them.
The wider the net you cast, the more likely you are to learn something.
3. Hold two goals at once: learn what you believe and why, and understand the other side well enough to know why it does not persuade you.
It is not enough to know your own position. You need to know what the other interpretations are and be able to articulate specifically why they fall short. That is the difference between a conviction and a preference.
Click here for a transcript of Alex Edmans' talk
Photo by Joel Bengs on Unsplash
Season 13, Bonus Episode 25
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