Biblical Stories

The actual stories of the Bible are the least important part of its doctrines.  It does not matter if someone is familiar with every popular story from the Bible if they do not understand the philosophical underpinnings of Christian theism and the moral commands at the heart of the Bible.  Reading about what the Bible says happened at various points in history, like the line of rulers in Israel or even miracles central to the general Biblical story, is useless apart from the moral instructions that are not always mentioned in the stories themselves, although many will pretend like it is the other way around.  There is actually a very limited range of things in the Bible that form the heart of Christianity in a way that distinguishes it from basic, amoral theism, and would make a book of special revelation necessary to begin with.

If Christianity is true, the only things in the Bible of the utmost importance for God to communicate through it are the moral obligations humans have and the means of salvation.  Nothing else in the Bible is both vital and incapable of being proven or at least evidentially supported completely apart from the Bible.  The existence of an uncaused cause and some kind of external world of matter are both examples of something provable through reason as opposed to appeals to other people or documents, and both of these things are philosophically vital and fully verifiable.  The concept of angels existing, in contrast, is neither philosophically foundational nor provable, just logically possible.

The Bible speaks of things like the concept of angels even as it does not refer to everything at the core of epistemology and metaphysics, like the laws of logic.  Why would the Bible do this, especially if it is true, given that logical axioms are absolutely certain and the only possible starting point for true knowledge, while something like the existence of angels has little to no impact on our lives even if they exist?  First of all, the Bible does not specifically mention the logical axioms at the core of all truths and possibilities, but it is still entirely consistent with them.  It never denies the intrinsic veracity of reason, the necessary existence of some sort of reality (truth), or the self-evident nature of one's own conscious existence.

The Bible also mentions plenty of things that, while potentially intriguing or somewhat important, are far from the core or most important parts of Christian theology and valid philosophy, such as a specific creation story that goes beyond crediting God with the creation of time and a finite universe or the details of how various prophets lived out their relationships with God.  Absolutely none of these additional details are of ultimate centrality in the very core of philosophy, and the details like this are always found in the stories.  It is how people should live and what can be done to restore oneself to God that the Bible, if its contents are true, is needed for, as everything from the existence of truth to the external world to the uncaused cause could be discovered and thought about without any book.

Of course, logical axioms are the most important thing of all.  Without their inherent, self-verifying truth, there is neither anything that is true nor any way to know what is true.  It is axioms like the necessary truth of deductions without assumptions that everything from scientific models to Biblical doctrines must be consistent with in order to at least be possible, and even being possible does not make an idea true.  The Bible does not need to mention this specifically because literally any conscious being that grasps reason could discover this in a total vacuum of sensory experiences if they only tried.  However, not everything that the Bible does contain is of the utmost importance even if all of it is true.  Historical events and whether something like angels exists, among other things, do nothing to illuminate whatever moral obligations there might be, and without moral clarity, the very heart of Christian ideology as opposed to general theism and rationalistic philosophy is missing.