Can Scripture Still Reveal Truth?
A Conversation with Dr. Yoram Hazony
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Few lines in world literature have spilled more ink than Nietzsche’s infamous declaration that “God is dead.”
Yet despite his reputation as the West’s secular prophet, the 21st century hasn’t seen religion disappear.
From biblical passages invoked in public policy to cries of “Christ is King” or “Allahu Akhbar,” millions of people – leaders and regular citizens alike - still turn to ancient scripture for their deepest convictions.
The certainty offered by scripture has a counterpart in radical materialism, which holds that everything is ultimately reducible to physics and chemistry. Advanced by Sam Harris and other new atheists, it argues that free will is an illusion and that we are governed entirely by impersonal laws.
Both are forms of literalism. Each begins with the assumption that their preferred language—whether scripture or physics—describes reality completely. Anything that falls outside the frame is dismissed as evil, irrational, imaginary, or simply explained away. Perhaps unsurprisingly, both have grown more influential in an age marked by great complexity and uncertainty.
There is, however, a third tradition – one stretching back at least to the medieval world. It begins with a different premise: that human beings make sense of life’s deepest questions through analogy, metaphor, and story. In this tradition, religious and philosophical texts aren’t instruction manuals; they’re poetic attempts to express truths that resist literal language.
From its perspective, treating either the “laws of nature” or the “laws of scripture” as complete explanations is to make the same mistake: confusing a map for the territory.
What if ancient religious texts were better understood as early works of history and philosophy?
What if they required interpretation – including the use of reason – rather than demanding unquestioned belief or outright dismissal?
Viewed this way, scripture can be mistaken in many particulars while still preserving profound insights about human nature, ethics and society – insights that remain open to reinterpretation today.
It may also offer a way to bridge the widening divide between religion and secularism.
My guest on this episode is award-winning philosopher, bible scholar and political theorist Dr. Yoram Hazony.
For decades, he’s explored the relationship between biblical thought and the Western philosophical tradition.
He begins by challenging the familiar distinction between “Greek reason” and “Biblical revelation”: the “rational” Greeks routinely invoked gods and divine powers, while the authors of the Hebrew Bible often reasoned from observation and experience – even when describing “divine encounters”.
In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Hazony argues that the Bible contrasts two moral archetypes – the farmer, who values order, convention and stability, with the shepherd, who prizes independence, initiative and innovation. It’s the shepherd - not the farmer – who repeatedly earns divine favour. This suggests the values the biblical authors sought to elevate.
We explore the Bible’s understanding of truth – not as that which fits a pre-established framework, but as that which survives repeated testing – as well as its case for hard-won autonomy over the comforts of imperial rule.
We also discuss several contemporary questions, from the meaning crisis and the culture wars, to whether ethnic nationalism can coexist with democracy and civil liberties. Many of these themes also appear in Hazony’s award-winning book, The Virtue of Nationalism.
By the end of our discussion, I found myself wondering whether today’s deepest divide isn’t between liberals and conservatives – or even between the religious and the secular – but between those who can think symbolically and those who insist that a single explanatory framework can account for all of reality.
You can begin with this short clip on the increasingly fragile separation of church and state in America.