It’s very popular to answer “Yes!”

For example, Reinhold Niebuhr, the great American theologian of human nature, wrote a big book the (apologetic) thrust of which was this (among other things): the biblical description of the nature and destiny of man corroborates like no other description to the actual experience of men. Blaise Pascal, in his even more famous book Pensees, used his religious understanding to propose some elements of a psychology that also rings chillingly true. I would agree with both of these men on many points. But does their biblically formed insight really suggest that the Bible explains life? It would be easy to presume so.

For another example, we all know that one of the chief obsessions of contemporary evangelicalism is Young Earth Creation Science. For many in that camp, the issue boils down to “inerrancy,” a doctrine taken to mean that the Bible does, in fact, explain every element and area of life it touches upon. This issue has such apologetic import for them because they take it as fundamental to following Christ that one must believe the Bible explains life. Supposing for a moment that they are right, that their scientists prove to be the underdogs who win the game and demonstrate as plausibly as scientists can that Young Earth Creationism must be true—what then? Are we justified in consequently supposing that the Bible explains life?

For yet another example, my college, Dordt College, prides itself on maintaining what is known as the neo-calvinist tradition. They lionize Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch thinker whose “Lectures on Calvinism” vastly aided in launching a movement whose popularized shadow is the “worldview movement.” Kuyper proposed that the Bible gives us a world-and-life-view with implications for every sphere of life—i.e., with the potential to explain life, and with the comission to do so in the face of competing world-and-life-views like “Paganism” or “Islam-ism” or “Modernism.” Tellingly, Kuyper’s choice of appelative for the Christian version of a world-and-life-view was “Calvinism”—tellingly, because he put the agenda of Christians on the same playing field as everybody else where we all push our cherished “-ism.” The tradition to which Kuyper gave birth came more and more to cherish the concept of a Christian “system.” With the advent of Herman Dooyeweerd, a philosopher in this tradition, the system then came to stand for a distinct ontology with the glimmers of an epistemology already peeking through it and the utopian hope before it of providing the theoretical basis for a Christian path to concilience. This tradition is perhaps the most complex and rigorous advocate of the belief that the gospel explains life (though in a different sense, as they would haste to point out, than such as contemporary evanglicals).

But what if the Bible doesn’t explain life?

Here, briefly and simplistically, are some questions to consider. If the Bible explains life, then why is it such a raggedy hodge-podge of genres? Why didn’t God just hand down the Encyclopedia Caelestia 6th Ed., instead of this part-story, part-poetry, part-letter, part-dream-record, part-aphorism-collection? Why did Jesus speak in such a way as to purposefully mystify his hearers? (Mark 4) Why is biblical theology such a hotly contested subject? But given that the Bible does leave us with something, are we justified in claiming that this something inspires, clears the way for, limits the horizons of an explanation of life? Moreover, when we take a hard look at this something do we find a “key to all knowledge” or something that shatters the last vestiges of our presumption that we know anything? Paul seemed pretty convinced that Jesus Christ is the gospel, and if Christ was telling the truth on the Emmaus road, then it seems that the rest of the Bible also has to do with this gospel-Christ. But personally, I don’t find the incarnation of the invisible God, or the trinity into whose communion he invites us, or the resurrection for the dead, or the creation of out of nothing, or the origin of evil, or the sinful nature of man, to be particularly helpful in explaining life. In fact, far from knowing more about life, I find that my otherwise workable explanations suddenly falter and fail in the face of such mind-shattering mysteries.

Perhaps Socrates was onto something when he suggested that the best knowledge is a knowledge of how much one doesn’t know?

Suppose that the Bible is serious in encouraging us to imitate Christ. Suppose the posture of dependency and sub-mission (participation in the “mission” of God) really is the point of human life. Doesn’t this preclude the possibility that the gospel will explain life? Instead, doesns’t it implicitly promise that the gospel will challenge the value of explanations altogether?

Suppose, just suppose, that the gospel is an invitation to live in a mystery… How would that change the life of Christians?