Anyone who has read even a little bit of N.T Wright’s stuff knows that he regularly takes a swing at the whole idea of “timeless truths.” Now I think I know what he is getting at, but I really think the whole subject needs to be nuanced far more than I think Wright does. All bogeymen should be nuanced lest we find ourselves buried under a rock pile of false alternatives.
This should happen for two reasons. The first is that in rightly rejecting a certain kind of Euclidian theology, or the false idea of treating the Bible as a grab bag from which Moral Uplift may always be immediately derived, a real temptation of simplifying the problem exists for us. The difficulty with Euclidian theology and/or Scripture-as-source-of-inspirational-quotes is not that they traffic in “timeless truths.” There is a problem with them, but that is not it. About the only redeeming element of arid propositionalism is the fact that it still has some connection to timeless truth.
And it does no good to set “story” or “narrative” over against “timeless truth.” This is because story is a far more effective way of conveying timeless truth than is memorizing a dry formula. Both story and formula can do it, but story does it far better. Telling us to walk away from timeless truth and to embrace the narratival flow instead is like telling someone to get “out of the pool” and go “swimming in the pond” because it is high time we stopped “getting wet.”
The second reason to be wary is that hammering timeless truth is an easy sell in our day because of the pervasive relativism around us. In an age when nonbelievers readily and easily talk about this as “true for you” and that as “true for me,” it is not hard to garner cheers by attacking “timeless truths.” But if ever a generation needed to be given the hope that only timeless truths provide, it is ours. This is because Jesus is the same, yesterday, today and forever. What is that if not timeless?
Here is an example of how Wright handles this. In Jesus in the Victory of God (a fantastic book, by the by), Wright says this. “And, in particular, the story is not told in such a way as to leave these implications as ‘truths’ or ‘messages’ to be cashed out as ‘ideas’ and filed away safely for any time when need might arise” (p. 178).
“Jesus was not a ‘universal teacher’ of timeless truths, but the starter of a movement which was to grow like an unobserved seed turning into a plant before anyone had realized” (p. 181).
“he [some scholar guy, DW] assumed that the parables were basically timeless teachings, which the early church then directed into some particular cultural setting, different from that of Jesus, by adding to them and variously ‘interpreting’ them. The opposite is likely to have been the case. The parables were originally highly ‘situational’, highly specific to Jesus’ unique ministry. The early church is likely to have made them more ‘timeless’, in order to ‘translate’ them for different situations” (p. 180).
Now this way of describing it is just untenable, especially the last quote that has the church tinkering with the words of Jesus to make them more suitable for generating universal moral aphorisms. That is problematic on basic grounds having to do with the inspiration of Scripture. If it is canonical and inspired, and the timeless truths are there, then let us make our peace with timeless truths! But if we have fallen for the line that only the original words of Jesus are inspired, and the early church messed around with those inspired words, getting the gunk of universal religiosity all over the radically-situated words of Jesus, and modern textual critics must rescue Christians from the early church, then let us all despair and die, for we are still in our sins.
The truth is that true words spoken in any contextualized situation are timeless, and the context that carries them is part of that timelessness. If I understand Moses before Pharaoh, I am helped to understand Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar. And if I understand Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar, then I am helped to understand Paul before Caesar. And if I get that, then I am better equipped to be a Christian in the coming empire. All this, of course, is done mutatis mutandis, making the necessary adjustments for time and place. To deny that stories in Scripture, or the parables of Jesus, and so on, are conveyors of timeless truths is to assert that these stories and parables are basically irrelevant to us today. And conversely, if they are not irrelevant, it is because they convey timeless truth to us.
Take the first story. Adam and Eve are placed in a perfect garden, the world before them. All is theirs. They are merely told that they must not eat from one tree. They eat from that tree, fall into sin, and shortly after are given the promise of their deliverance. Now take our culture’s timeless appropriation of this — the fairy story. Young Tom touches a magic lamp and is transported one day to a castle in the clouds. He has a fantastic set-up there, all that a young boy could ever want. He is merely given one restriction. Under no circumstances may he open the door at the top of the north tower. Now what do you, as the reader know? You know, never having encountered this story before, that Tom will, in fact, open that door, a lot of evil will come of it, and something will happen that will make everything work out okay. And the last day of the world, the day before the Last Trump, some young mother will send her five-year-old boy out into the back yard to play, with just one restriction. The structure of the first story will govern what happens to that boy on the penultimate day, and he will be the only five-year-old boy in the history of the world to have his backyard disobedience culminate in the Second Coming. And boy, will that teach him.
Let us grant that the parable of the Good Samaritan is about far more than just “be kind to strangers in trouble.” And suppose that Wright is exactly correct (as I believe he is) to see these parables as designed to subvert the dominant paradigm of His day. The problem that Wright should have with superficial moralism here is not that it gets timeless truth out of the parable, but rather that it gets far too little timeless truth out of there. There is a lot more timeless truth where that came from. Be kind to strangers is part of it, but just a minor part of it. Have there never been other power structures in world history that could be challenged in just the same way that the parable of the Good Samaritan challenges the power structures of Jesus’ day? To ask the question is to answer it. And if we are living in such a time, then do we not have a duty to see the relevance of the parable to our condition?
So stories carry timeless truths, just like propositions in Euclid do. But isolated propositions fit into little matchbooks, which don’t carry very much. One timeless truth per tiny box. It turns out that parallel lines don’t cross each other and then we put the matchbox away. But string enough propositions together and you get a sea trunk of a story, and you can haul around all kinds of timeless truth. Some of the trunk was packed on the first day of the world, and will not be unpacked until the last day. And this is because the story of the world is being told by God, the one who is without variation or shadow due to change.