Continuing down the road of “reading the bible again for the first time”, Borg shares his thoughts on the cycle that takes place (or should take place) when one stands before the bible and tries to understand it. The cycle starts at precritical naviete to critical thinking to postcritical naviete. These, he says, “identify ways of reading and hearing the Bible that we recognize in our own experiences.”
Precritical naivete is an early childhood state in which we take it for granted that whatever the significant authority figures in our lives tell us to be true is indeed true. In this state(if we grow up in a Christian setting), we simply hear the stories of the Bible as true stories.
It did not occur to me [Borg] to wonder, “Now, how much of this [biblical stories] is historically factual, and how much is metaphorical narrative?” I [Borg] simply heard the familiar stories as true. Moreover, it took no effort to do so. It did not require faith. I [Borg] had no reason to think that things were otherwise than the stories reported.
Critical thinking begins in late childhood and early adolescence. One does not need to be an intellectual or go to college for this kind of thinking to develop. Rather, it is a natural stage of human development; everybody enters it. In this stage, consciously or quite unconsciously, we sift through what we learned as children to see how much of it we should keep.
In modern Western culture, critical thinking is very much concerned with factuality and is thus deeply corrosive of religion in general and Christianity and the Bible in particular. As critical thinkers in that culture, most of us no longer hear the biblical stories as true stories–or at the least their truth has become suspect. Now it takes faith to believe them, and faith becomes believing things that one would normally reject.
Postcritical naviete is the ability to hear the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.
This way of hearing sacred stories is widespread in premodern cultures. A favorite of mine [Borg] is the way a Native American storyteller begins telling his tribe’s story of creation;”Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” If you can get your mind around that statement, then you know what postcritical naivete is.
Importantly, postcritical naivete is not a return to precritical naivete. It brings critical thinking with it. It does not reject the insights of historical criticism but integrates them into a larger whole.
Though the movement from precritical naivete into critical thinking is inevitable, there is nothing inevitable about moving into the state of postcritical naivete. One can get stuck in the state of critical thinking all of one’s life, as a significant number of people in the modern period do. The initial movements into critical thinking is often experienced as liberating, but if one remains in this state decade after decade, it becomes a very arid and barren place in which to live.
We need to be led into the state of postcritical naviete. It does not happen automatically. This is one of the major tasks in our time as we learn how to read the Bible using a historical and metaphorical approach.
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