This is a discussion of what we will refer to as the "vine corollary" from the book of Daniel. This is predicated on our understanding of Jesus’ statement in the book of John 15:5, "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." The vine concept is very noteworthy in the book of Daniel. There is an organic connection between Daniel, his mind and his mastery of events in this book that appeals to this kind of a vine/branch relationship. I want to take the time to extrapolate this a little bit so that we can see what this amounts to and some of the implications that it brings forth for our understanding of how to live relative to the world situations in which we find ourselves.

So if we draw on a page a vine that represents "eternity" and then there are some "branches" that come out of that; and the branches launch themselves out into the "temporal world." They express themselves out into the material world. But the branches are derivatives aren’t they of the vine? Now suppose we think of the vine as eternity and the branches as temporal. The fruit upon those branches is produced because of the connection that the branch has to the vine. There has to be an organic relationship between the branch and the vine for this structure to work.

In the book of Daniel, we find this man facing a number of needs that we might refer to as temporal needs. There is a need for personal survival; there is a need for protection. He has all the temporal needs that any other human being would have in this kind of a situation. But there is a master need in his life. That master need is to know God. Suppose we think of the master need as the vine and therefore the temporal need simply plugs into that as the branches. So because the master need is taken care of consequently the temporal needs will be addressed which is much in concert with Matthew 6 when the Lord instructed us to think this way about the world of physical need; that is, not to worry about these things, they will be given to us as we pursue the spiritual kingdom. The temporal needs would act as branches and this master need of a connection to God really acts as the vine. One follows the other. There is an organic relationship between temporal needs being represented above the branches and the master need, which is the vine itself.

We might think of life as being the branch (that which grows out of the vine) and the relationship to God as the vine. So there is an organic relationship that exists between a relationship to God and life lived in the temporal dimension. There is a need for temporal well being which we see in the New and Old Testament that might serve as a branch. Of course in the book of Daniel, these men have need of well being. The people of Israel in general have need of well being. But the vine would be the non-situational source from which well being is drawn. In this case it would be obedience to God. In Chapter 9, Daniel makes much of the case that the people of Israel disobeyed God. They were not plugged in to obedience. They were not plugged in to the vine, so their well being was forfeited. He expresses his faith. He says, "Yes this is why we are in Babylonian captivity. Because neither our kings nor our princes nor our people listened to the words that the prophets brought. So well being was forfeited." There was an organic connection to be enjoyed between well being in the temporal sphere as the branch and its connection to the vine, which would be obedience to God. This was what Israel was instructed to be.

There is a need for physical survival, which would act much like a branch, but there is a master requirement. That master requirement is to know God. In Daniel 10:12, Gabriel announces to Daniel, "Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them." He had a master requirement, which served as the vine. His survival was plugged into that vine, just as a branch is plugged into that reality; and that is why he was doing as well as he was. So there is an organic connection that runs between the branches and the vine. In our study of scripture, we use the scripture in a sense as the vine. Our generalizations from the text act as the branches. There has to be a proven organic connection between the generalization that we make and the scripture that we read. If that cannot be established, then the generalization simply is going to be revealed as spurious and it has to be dispensed with because it is not true. Any and all validity in terms of generalizations would have to be built upon this organic connection. In the same way, faith might act as a branch because that is well within the temporal dimension where human beings live relative to world situations. And God himself in the aggregate would be seen as the vine. An organic connection between God and faith is quite reasonable. There is an organic connection between the horizon of the world situation and a non-situational intelligence, the "pushed" intelligence. So there is an organic relationship—a vine-to-branch kind of relationship. We talked about non-situational meanings and non-situational outcomes being realized within the temporal world. There is an organic connection between those non-situational meanings and outcomes, with the non-situational intelligence of God. So it is this vine-to-branch kind of construction.

Now in our world we are very prone to an intellectual exercise that we call "reductionism." We take certain things and we cut it up into its constituent parts. We try to understand how that part works and then we try to resynthesize or bring the whole thing back together and then explain how the entire organism might work after we look at individual pieces. Now in that way of looking at the world, we have simply destroyed the vine symbol. An individual might come to a conclusion, "Well I’m old. I’m advanced in years. I am no longer able to work and therefore I have no way to assure my well being." He might conclude on that basis that he is going to starve, or suffer some other kind of reverses. What he has done is very reductionistic. He has taken that particular aspect of his overall existence; that particular part of the universe. He has isolated it and is looking at it as if it had its own closed dynamics and was no longer a branch. He doesn’t perceive his physical needs, his temporal circumstances any longer as a branch attached to the vine. So it might bring him to a conclusion that there is great reason for depression or for anxiety or for pessimism to say the least or even despair.

Often when individuals lose their jobs, they have a tendency to reduce that part of their existence as if that need or that situation is separated from the vine and therefore the only indication is they will be thrust into poverty, irredeemably so, and this is the beginning of the end. So we move from reductionism to synthesis. However, when we take a look at this vine corollary, we are looking for an entirely different structure. We are talking about something that has branch profile.

There are a number of illustrations in the book of Daniel about things that should and did not have branch profile. One of those cases is that of Belshazzar in Chapter 5. The handwriting appeared on the wall after a drunken party one night in his palace. And the Lord has weighed him in the balance and he is found wanting. When Daniel is called in to interpret the handwriting on the wall, he is very blunt with the king and he says to him in 5:22: "But you his son, O Belshazzar, have not humbled yourself, though you knew all this. (He is referring back to all the experiences that happened to his father Nebuchadnezzar. He knew what it meant. He knew the significance of it.) Instead, you have set yourself up against the Lord of heaven." This is not a man who is occupying a branch profile. Either situations and/or personalities can have branch profiles. Belshazzar has no branch profile. He is operating as if there is no organic connection between who he is, what he is, where he is and the eternal vine that sustains him. In verse 23 of Chapter 5, as Daniel continues this criticism of his reign, he gets very personal with the king and says, "You had the goblets from his temple brought to you, and you and your nobles, your wives and your concubines drank wine from them. You praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or understand. (Another appeal to intelligence). But you did not honor the god who holds in his hand your life and all your ways." He is talking about something that controls life and all of his ways. He is talking about something that has branch status. Belshazzar did not understand that this is the way the universe operates. He may have operated somewhat in this reductive sense. This, of course, is a modern proclivity; but we are not the only ones that have ever done this. There has to be this relationship. Everything is dependent upon our connection to the vine.

In Ecclesiastes 11:13, Solomon came to the same conclusion. He says, "Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." Now those who fear God and who are maintaining this relationship to the commandments, to the written word of God are acting on this branch profile. They are acting on a branch status and everything else follows that. Of course, this is true of Solomon. He had tried everything else and he finally comes down to this well-rounded conclusion about the way in which life is supposed to be lived. Life is a branch and it owes its existence, its definition and its well being to its connection to the vine.

There is a theory of truth that is very popular from people in high academic circles to people on the street and in everyday walks of life. It is referred to as the "correspondence theory of truth." What we mean by that is something like this. Suppose I were to stand on a street corner of Avenue Q and 34^th Street here in Lubbock and watch a car go through the intersection. If an accident happened as a result of the passage of that car through the intersection and later I was called to testify, what they are expecting me to render in my testimony in court is a set of statements correspondent to the actual events. If the car rushed through the red light and precipitated the accident, then my words should be correspondent with the actual events so I would say, "I was standing on the corner of Avenue Q and 34^th Street. A car blared through the red light and caused the accident which occurred." Now the truthfulness of my testimony is dependent upon its "correspondence" to the actual events. This is something that I have created, of course, out of my experience and exposure to those events. But let’s say that there were four other people who were also gathered around the same intersection. In their testimonies, they were asked, "Did this individual ignore a red light and did he cause the accident?" Suppose the other witnesses say, "No, the light was not red. The light was green. This individual was not at fault" as each one comes to the stand and gives their testimony. They would then come to me and then say that my testimony was not in sync with these other four witnesses. They are not likely to call me a liar and say that I acted out of perjury. They are simply going to say, "Well he thought it was red, but it was actually green. He made a mistake there. There’s no correspondence." In order to compare my testimony to the other four, they are going to compare it against the experience of the other four and they will conclude that my testimony is probably somewhat lacking.

Now this brings up the question of what we refer to as "isomorphism." "Iso" means "same." "Morphism" means "form." Same form. In other words, my testimony, the words that I give in court should be isomorphic. It should have the same form as the events that I witnessed. This becomes the basis of what is "true." He came through the intersection, I say, "the light was red" and my words are isomorphic or have the same form with the actual events. On the basis of that isomorphism, we have a rendition of what we call the "truth." And all of this is based on a correspondence theory of truth.

Now, let’s think a little bit about an incident that occurs in the life of Daniel in Chapter 2. When Nebuchadnezzar is given a dream by the Lord about a successive number of kingdoms, he doesn’t understand what this is about. But Daniel and his three friends pray for wisdom the night that this situation develops and they receive an answer from the Lord. The next day Nebuchadnezzar calls for Daniel and he stands before him and he explains the dream. There is an interesting statement in Daniel 2:45. The last part of the verse reads, "The great God has shown the king what will take place in the future." And then he says something very important. "The dream is true and the interpretation is trustworthy." Let’s look at this statement closer in more detail.

Firstly, Daniel says to Nebuchadnezzar that the dream is "true." In other words, Nebuchadnezzar had required of his wise men that they not only interpret the larger significance of the dream, but without them knowing it they were expected to conjure up what the contents of the dream were—what he had seen, the images in his mind. These men thought this was quite unreasonable for him to expect that kind of rendition of things, and so they tell him so, and they say, "There is not a man on earth who can do what the king asks! No king, however great and mighty, has ever asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or astrologer. What the king asks is too difficult. No one can reveal it to the king except the gods, and they do not live among men." It is beyond their capacity to deal with this adequately.

Now Daniel comes in and does give him the rendition of the symbols. Here’s the dream now in Nebuchadnezzar’s mind. He sees this tall visage. Now we have Daniel’s words. As Daniel relates the dream, "As you were lying in your bed, O king, here is what you saw." Then he takes him through the elements in the dream, the head of gold right on down to the feet composed of mixed iron and clay. This is very correspondent with Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. In other words, Nebuchadnezzar had a vision, and Daniel brings words to bear on Nebuchadnezzar’s mind and his experience. Daniel’s words at this time, are in complete correspondence because Nebuchadnezzar is able to say, "Yes, what you say is ‘true’ because the words that you are speaking, that are exactly what I saw in my mind. You are giving me an exact correspondence between the vision that I experienced that night as I lay on my bed that so troubled me and the words that you have spoken. There is complete isomorphism. Your words have exactly the same shape as the image that I saw. He says, "That’s true." That would have been very impressive to him because he could measure that against his experience. He has the dream; he has the vision. Then Daniel, to whom the king never related the substance of these symbols, is able to walk in and tell him exactly what he saw. He could measure that against his experience and tell Daniel that what he told him was true. Why? Because of its basis in correspondence theory; because of its basis in isomorphism.

Later Daniel himself will have a similar experience in Chapter 7 (and following chapters). He will say that he had a vision. Then he will say what he saw. And what he tells us and what he writes is correspondent with the vision. But he didn’t understand at that point the fuller rendition of it. This correspondence theory that depends upon this kind of relationship between facts and words is something that is quite measurable. He could measure it against his experience. Going back to the previous example, when I sit in a courtroom, and we all give our testimony, we measure the words against our collective experience. Because I am the only one out of five people who says, "the light was red," they are going to measure my words up against the experience of everyone else and what they say is "the light was green and that I was mistaken." So they determine the "truth." The truth is found in a correspondence between the experience of the majority and their interpretation of the events.

Daniel also says in the last phrase of 2:45, "and the interpretation is trustworthy." I don’t think that is an indiscriminate usage of language. We move to another level of dealing with this same experience of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. Now Daniel gives him the total significance of the dream. He will tell the king that this represents a wave of successive kingdoms one after the other that will occupy a certain space and time. In other words, we have the total significance of the dream and we have Daniel’s interpretation. However, while Daniel says this interpretation is "trustworthy," Nebuchadnezzar cannot measure the words of Daniel’s interpretation against his own experience. He has no way to conclude on the basis of experience that what Daniel is saying to him is "true." Now he does know something about kingdoms and he knows something about the rise and fall of kingdoms because he has overturned a few. But he cannot from within his own personal experience measure the accuracy or the trustworthiness of Daniel’s interpretation. There is no correspondence that exists as far as Nebuchadnezzar is concerned between the significance of the dream and Daniel’s interpretation of the dream. This is not measurable. Therefore this is an understanding of truth that is not built on measurability. This is not a correspondence of truth. There is no isomorphism in Nebuchadnezzar’s experience to be had between the total significance of the dream and Daniel’s interpretation of the dream. This evaluation of truth is based on revelation pure and simple. The first part of the dream where Daniel can speak relative and up against the experience of the king can be measured by his own experience. But this interpretation cannot be measured by the king’s experience. Something has changed.

This is a quotation from a book entitled, "Language: A Pragmatic Introduction" page 172, by John W. Oller III. I wish to highlight this by way of drawing a kind of contradiction between what is written here and some appraisals that we can make from the scripture. Here is the quotation: "It is in this way that extensional meaning or pragmatic meaning outranks intentional meaning or semantic meaning." Not to draw a distinction here we have to show a difference between these two kinds of meaning.

"Extensional meaning" is that kind of meaning that can be compared. A comparison can be made between words and people’s experience. "Intentional meaning" has to do with words that cannot be connected exactly in that way to experience. So our author here takes a position that extensional meaning outranks intentional meaning because of its isomorphic quality. "Without any connection with the empirical world," the quotation continues, "intention is empty. If representations fail to conform to facts, in any way, the facts logically outrank the representations of them. The practical rub is that facts are known to us only through representations. However, this difficulty does not in any way reduce the logical requirement that representations ultimately answer to whatever is." This is key: He states the logical requirement that representations ultimately answer to whatever "is" has got to be taken into consideration. That is called a "logical requirement." We should remember that.

On the same page, there is another quotation that needs to be added to this record. He writes in summary, "In spite of their mutual interdependence, pragmatics, the domain of extensional meaning outranks semantics, intentional meaning, because as Einstein noted ‘everything depends upon the degree to which words and word combinations correspond to the world of impression.’" That’s exactly the kind of correspondence that would have impressed Nebuchadnezzar. But we note that he was not terribly impressed with the greater significance of the dream because right after this in Chapter 3, he elevates a ninety feet high and nine feet wide gold image on the plain of Dura. He is not impressed with the greater significance but he is impressed with the correspondence aspect of Daniel’s rendition to him. Or paraphrasing the quotation of Einstein, "Everything depends not merely on abstract possibilities of meaning, but on their concrete practical uses."

I am going to propose that there is a biblical theory of truth quite

separate from the correspondence theory of truth, (which is largely in vogue today). We shall refer to this in our discussion as the "connective theory of truth." Connective as in the sense of branch to vine. That is to say that truth is what it is NOT because of its practical effects, NOT because of its isomorphic value, but quite to the contrary it is true uniquely because of its connection to the vine and for no other reason. In the correspondence theory of truth, there is supposed to be an isomorphism that exists between an observation and a sample that is being observed. My observation should be isomorphic with the sample. Let’s suppose that we are observing the celestial bodies, and our observations and the way those observations are rendered should be isomorphic with the sample. And if they are, then our observations are considered "true." Of course, there is a limitation because your observations do not tell us that it is God who created the universe.

There is supposed to be an isomorphic relationship or a correspondence between inductions built on a number of experiences and the significance of that connection or that series of experiences with experience itself. I drop the rock and every time I drop the rock it falls. That’s the experience. The induction is that every time it drops it will fall and so if I drop it now, it will fall. If I put my foot under the rock that is dropped every time the rock falls; and every time the rock falls and hits my foot it hurts. The inductive premise that is constructed from this experience because it is seen as isomorphic with the experience is considered to be true. Our measurements are to be considered true if they are isomorphic to objects on the other. if there is a correspondence between the two. Measurements do not tell us about the nature of the universe as being controlled by God and manipulated by his will. They are robbed of their branch status in precisely this way. We are told that representations have to fulfill a logical requirement and that a logical requirement is that they must answer to whatever is.

Charles Sanders Peirce, well-known founder of "pragmatism made much of the importance of practical effects and he would say all we can know about any object has to do with its practical effects. This was denied. Nebuchadnezzar in terms of the greater significance of the dream and the rendition of that as Daniel formulates it in human language. Peirce furthermore stated that the knowledge of the object is synonymous with the practical effects of the object. If this is true, it means that human intelligence is the center of pragmatics. It means that knowledge is founded in logic. Peirce and others are quite willing to agree that truth is not founded, not anchored in physical reality but rather it is anchored in logic. We are told that Emmanuel Kant agreed with this. We are told that David Hume agreed with this. Einstein agrees to the effect that knowledge is not founded in the physical reality, it is however, founded in human logic. However, that does not bear up from a biblical rendition of the nature of truth. In the connective theory of truth, there does not appear to be any correspondence between the words and the experience in many cases. For instance, in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, there is no correspondence in his experience between successive waves or a wave of successive kingdoms and his own experience precisely this way because God is precipitating the changes and setting men on the thrones and taking them off. This is very much an elemental part of the greater significance of this.

This becomes even more pronounced in another dream that is given to Nebuchadnezzar in Chapter 4. We are making the observation and calling for this consideration that in the connective theory of truth, truth is not rooted in logic, it is not rooted in physical reality (as our radical materialist friends have insinuated) but rather it is true because it is rooted in revelation. Now these are what we might refer to in linguistic parlance as intentional meanings. The question is does revelation have extensional meaning or is it empty? The statement has been made in our quotations that if words have no extensional meaning, if they cannot be measured against human experience, then they are empty. They are "empty" if they do not meet the logical requirement that all representations, all verbal expressions, all such testimonies must answer to whatever is.

In the case that I posed, about standing on a street corner in Lubbock and witnessing an accident, if I make correspondent statements or isomorphic statements, and if they are found to be exactly isomorphic—if the light was red—that still does not tell me about the greater truth of the event that I have seen. Perhaps a gunman is hidden in the back seat of the car and has forced this individual through a red light, or perhaps his wife is expecting a child and he rushes through the red light in order to get her quickly to the hospital. Even those things can be measured. Although I might not know about these events, they still can be measured against the human experience of people—doctors and nurses in the hospital, neighbors who saw the family rush out, or some other witnesses—can be brought in to corroborate the details. But that is still part of the correspondence concept. It would never tell me whether or not the Lord had marked the driver of the vehicle for judgment or for discipline. Or that he has marked the lives of others involved in the accident in some way. It tells me nothing about that. That does not have correspondence with my experience. That is true only because it would have been rooted in the mind of God and that would have to be revealed if we are to know it.

We are being told that intentional comprehensibility or extensional comprehensibility really depends on the facts more than anything else. There is another way of trying to draw a distinction between a correspondence theory and a connective theory of truth. Let us discuss this ranking procedure that has been discussed in our two quotations. Under correspondence theory, it would be stated that extensional meaning outranks intentional meaning. Extensional meaning would stand more or less for our experience. Intentional meaning would more or less refer to scripture because it cannot often be connected to things in our experience. We are expected to operate even in an absence of the corroboration of our experience. For example it is not going to be corroborated that we are going to walk across the Red Sea on dry ground when we are pursued by our enemies. Nor can it be corroborated when we are hungry and thirsty in the desert that water will come from a flat rock or that manna will appear on the desert floor. Because we have thought in terms of extensional meaning outranking intentional meaning may be the very reason why we have assigned the Bible a historical status. These things are going to be looked at uniquely in relationship to the experience of others and its far removed from us. These statements that are made in the text are outside of our own experience, outside of the way in which our society lives and the way in which it approaches the role of women, the role of men, the role of money, the role of medicine; but there are some things that we distill from it which would be soteriological, doctrinal, and certainly a set of moral ethics.

(This discussion will be continued in Part II of this study)