Today we begin a new series on “Questions Thinking People Ask About the Bible and Christian Faith.” I chose that title carefully, because over the next four weeks we’re going to be examining questions – questions that often beget more questions – questions that don’t very often yield the definitive answers that we’d like. But I think that dealing with the questions is often more satisfying because it stimulates our thought processes. The older I become the more I’ve come to believe that I learn a lot more by asking questions than by spitting out answers (which is a temptation for us minister-types).
So today we begin with a great question – probably the most asked in the survey we gave to the congregation (at least a lot of the questions were variations on the theme). The question was phrased variously as “Do the Bible and Science agree?” But that led me to the larger question and that is – what is the Bible and how do we deal with it, given all we know now through the disciplines of science?
These are the kinds of questions that come up when, say, you visit a natural history museum. It’s fun to go and look at all the dinosaur bones and the natural history that’s been uncovered. But the question always comes up – where does all this pre-history fit into the biblical account of creation? What about evolution? How old is the earth? This is the kind of stuff that school districts fight over – do we teach creationism or evolution? Or something in between?
It’s natural to wonder about the natural world. But even more than the questions about the origins of life are the questions about how nature continues to function. There are natural events that give us pause—think of something like the tsunami in southeast Asia in 2004. A horrific tragedy – more than a hundred thousand people killed, even more homeless – a “natural” disaster – the scale of which has been described by some in the media as “biblical”. But what does it mean? Sure, we can scientifically understand how tectonic plates smash into one another and 20 ft. waves are generated, but is that the only reason? Is it a random act or, as insurance companies might call it, “an act of God”? And if miracles are possible, as the Bible seems to indicate, why didn’t God do something to stop it? Big questions (and Joe will deal with the question of why bad things happen to good people a little later in the series).
When we deal with such big questions, people tend to respond by grabbing something off the shelf – some book, some text, to provide the answers – be it a Bible or another book or, more often, we “Google” it. Given the vast amount of technology we now have at our disposal, we’re used to simply looking up the information and systematically explaining things and then holding tight to our opinions.
That’s because most of us in this sanctuary today are children of the Enlightenment, or “moderns” as some sociologists call us. Our worldview, our way of thinking, is governed by our place and time in history. To understand our approach to the Bible, we have to understand our approach to knowledge in general. Here’s a very brief history lesson to explain what I mean:
We might think of history as being divided into periods: There’s pre-history (before writing) – then ancient history, beginning about 2500 BC and lasting until about 500AD – the time of the great empires – Greece, Rome, Assyria, Babylon. The time in which the Bible was written – a time where history, theology, and science were not separate disciplines but all combined into one comprehensive worldview.
Then came the medieval period – roughly 500AD to 1500 – the time of the church, popes, castles, lords, and serfs – the feudal system. A time where peoples were tightly controlled by the dominant theological worldview of their region – be it Christian or Muslim. It was the time of the crusades and religious relics. Science was beginning to emerge as a discipline but was in conflict with the Church – people like Copernicus (who said the earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa), Galileo, and others were persecuted.
Then in about 1500, things shifted significantly. Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Catholic Church in Wittenberg, Gutenberg invented his printing press, industrialism, the rise of machines and the rise of modern science ushered in the Enlightenment – or the “modern” era – which said basically that just about everything can be broken down into scientific categories – from the natural world to human behavior – there was no mystery, it seemed, that couldn’t be explained. This period also ushered in the concept of objectivity – a mechanistic and measured way of looking at the world. The underlying belief was that science could provide the answer to everything – the age of Darwin, the age of secularism. The dominant phrase for this era can be summed up by the old Dragnet quote. Remember? “Just the facts, ma’am.” This is the age that most of us were born into. Think about your education – lecture, drill, test. Learning was equated largely with ingesting and regurgitating information.
To put it another way, the modern way of thinking puts most things on a continuum like this:
A————————————-B
A vs. B. A range of knowledge with finite extremes. Creation vs. Evolution. Liberal vs. Conservative. Spiritual vs. Secular. Most of us find ourselves located somewhere along this continuum because we’ve reasoned ourselves to that point and, in most cases, we’ll doggedly defend our positions as “factual”.
So, here comes this text – the Bible – talking about a seven day creation, about Noah, seas parting, people walking on water, etc. And we tend to look at it on that continuum – Bible vs. Science. Biblical literalists argue that all of this is factual and scientific secularists argue that it’s all mythology with no basis in empirical proof. Humans were directly created by out of dust God vs. they evolved from the primordial soup. Others try to find the middle ground by saying things like, “Well, the days of creation were really millions of years”. And so it goes.
But here’s the thing. The Bible isn’t a modern document, written in the modern era. It’s not written with science or objectivity in mind. While we moderns look for the “how” of creation, miracles, history – the Bible is more concerned with “WHO” and the WHY.
When we look at the creation accounts, for example, we have to understand that they were not written to counter science, but rather, the worldview of the other pagan peoples around the Israelites. Most ancient near eastern cultures had a polytheistic worldview—many gods, and these gods consort together to make the world. The Mesopotamians, for example, believed that the earth was created as the result of a great battle, where the god Marduk slays the great dragon Tiamat and splits her into two pieces—the earth and the sky. Along comes the Bible, however, suggesting a radically different view—that there is one God, and that God creates the world out of nothing, just by speaking.
Now, when you think about science and creation, we understand that the Bible’s account is a lot closer to what science tells us, that the universe came to be as part of an ordered process brought into being and managed by the one true God. But the point is really not so much the details of precisely how it happened, but that it happened and that God did it.
The Bible is thus concerned with God, and it’s the story of God’s interaction with a particular people – the Israelites, and it’s the story of how God will work through these people to redeem the creation he made (however he may have made it). The ancients weren’t as concerned about empirical verification as we are. They build their lives on a story—a true story, but true in ways that are more than just the facts.
Our modern approach to biblical interpretation is often, on the one hand, as a rule book or answer book and, on the other hand, as an ancient myth. It’s a printed page, written by humans in an ancient context, open to interpretation. But the reality is that the range of interpretations we find ourselves defending really say more about us than they do about God or the Bible itself. When we ask whether the Bible is a salvation story or a science text, maybe we’re asking the wrong question.
When Paul writes to Timothy, he says that all Scripture is “God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness – equipping us as God’s people (2 Timothy 3:16). Often we want it to be God’s encyclopedia, God’s rule book, God’s answer book, God’s five happy hops to heaven instruction manual, God’s little book of morals for all occasions. But the only people in Jesus’ day who have had anything close to those expectations of Scripture would have been the scribes and Pharisees! For Paul, the Scriptures represented the whole story of salvation history-a story inspired by God, but written by people. It’s not dropped out of the sky in complete form. God inspires it, because God is the primary actor, and the story is centered around God’s relationship with his people, who write the story. The Bible thus points us to God, not to itself. It is, as Paul says, a story that “equips” us for every good work. The text is vitally important, but only if we see it as pointing us to the God whose love is, ultimately, expressed in the person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus was always calling people to look above the text. When he encounters the Samaritan woman in John 4, she wants him to give a definitive answer – on which mountain should we worship God – this one or the one in Jerusalem (a continuum question). Jesus says to her, essentially, neither. But the time is coming when the true worshippers will worship God in spirit and in truth. Not here or here…but up here. When the Pharisees want to pin him down on the legal issues of Sabbath laws and forgiveness of sins, Jesus wants to pull their attention beyond the legalities of the text and get into the purpose and intent of God for God’s people and the whole creation.
What if, rather than locating the Bible somewhere along this continuum, we instead look somewhere above the line – outside the box. What if the issue is not as much the authority of the text itself, but rather the authority of God, moving mysteriously and awesomely ? As Brian McClaren puts it in his book A New Kind of Christian, “What if the issue isn’t a book that we can misinterpret with amazing creativity but rather the will of God, the intent of God, the desire of God, the wisdom of God – maybe we could say the kingdom of God?”
He gives an example: Think about a math book. Is the value of a math book the answers in the back? Or is the value in the learning about how to work the problems, how to think them through so that they can be applied to everything from construction, to accounting to rocket science? Could we look at the Bible and its stories and worldview in the same way?
Now, admittedly, this is a different way of looking at Scripture than most people are used to – call it (as some sociologists have) a “postmodern” view. I am a trained historian, thoroughly a modern-educated man. I was trained in absolutes – memorizing, interpreting, valuing the Bible as an empirically historical, scientific document – something to be learned, interpreted, analyzed, parsed, and parceled.
But the more I’ve studied the Bible, the more I’ve seen it on the ground and working in the lives of people and communities, the more convinced I become that the Bible’s value is way more than the sum of its parts. It’s the grand story. The story that we all find ourselves in. It’s the story of God and our story – not so much the how (thought there is some of that) but the who.
To use another analogy – if you were a student going to dissect a frog – what would be your feelings about the frog? You’d probably want to know the directions, compare the frog’s anatomy to another animal, measure and weigh the organs. But it would be a very dispassionate exercise.
Contrast that with the way a young boy approaches a girl at a high school dance. How does he do it? Not dispassionately! He approaches her relationally, playfully, joyfully. He wants to know everything about her because he wants to be part of her life and wants her to be a part of his.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that we should approach the Bible more like that boy on the dance floor! To dance with the text, to understand her for who she is, and to get to a higher level of interpretation – the level of love.
One of the questions that someone asked on one of the cards was about Jesus and the reason he spoke in parables instead of bullet points. Why did Jesus use these little stories instead of just giving us five principles or four laws—something you can easily quantify and explain?
Well, I think it has to do with the power of story. When we tell a story or hear a story, we’re invited into it, and we’re invited into a relationship with the storyteller. Stories move us in closer, and provide us with nuance, wonder, and imagination. Bullet points, on the other hand, just give us information in a dispassionate sort of way. We memorize bullet points, but we live stories. Jesus saw his stories as being part of a larger story, and invited people into the story he was weaving in his own life, death, and resurrection—the climax of the larger story of Israel.
Most people tend to have a rather truncated view of Scripture—a view that’s organized around their worldview, or organized around a few texts that fit the doctrinal view that they hold. Most Bible studies that are published, for example, start with a topic and then the author will go out and grab some Scripture passages that support his or her particular worldview. Very rarely do Christians seek to understand Scripture as being a whole narrative, a whole story, instead of merely the sum of its parts. It’s a story that is expressed in many different genres, just like we read different genres of literature in order to understand our own culture.
Yes, there is history, but not history in the coldly objective, chronological, post-Enlightenment sense (which is a fallacy in itself, but that’s another lecture). It is history told from the particular perspective of a particular people in a particular time and place…as all history is! This isn’t history for history’s sake, it’s the history of Israel, and the story of the one true God who enters into history in the person of Christ. You need to know—I truly believe that Jesus was, indeed, God in the flesh, and I believe that he was raised bodily from the dead. The Gospel writers and Paul believed this, too, and wrote about what they saw and experienced. But they weren’t concerned with exactly HOW that all worked physiologically. They approached the resurrection not as a coldly empirical exercise, but with wonder and amazement. Trying to explain the incarnation and resurrection scientifically is an interesting exercise, but it misses the point. When God is at work, that work transcends our categories.
In addition to history, however, Scripture includes poetry, there is allegory, there is some wisdom literature like proverbs, there is visionary apocalyptic that uses highly symbolic language, there is commentary. We cannot read all those different genres the same (nothing ruins poetry more than trying to analyze it, for example), but understand them in their context and within the categories of the style of literature. What we have in the Bible is not a single document, but a library that is oriented around a particular story—a story that orders and guides every other story.
The Bible is real truth, but its truth is designed not just to be studied and analyzed, it is truth to be lived out in us as we continue the story. Dinosaurs, miracles, all of creation is a part of the wonder. Let science continue the quest for how – in fact, the more we learn at the micro level of biology the more scientists are seeing evidence of intelligent design – wonderful, mysterious, unexplainable. But let the Bible shout to us joyfully about the who – the God who stands in the midst of creation to be in relationship with us. The Bible is a book about God, and we are called to worship him, and not merely the book that points to him. It is God’s authority, expressed through the story but not limited by it, that really matters.
Biblical truth goes way beyond the facts or even the text itself. As John Wesley said, we discover the truths of scripture through our reason, our experience, even the traditions and experiences of our ancestors. It’s not a static document, but a living breathing witness to a God who seeks to be involved in our lives—the God who is still working the story to its glorious conclusion.
Now, you may not agree with this assessment, and that’s ok. I’ve had many conversations with people who are certain that their particular view of Scripture is the only valid one. My only caution is this: be careful that you don’t become so enamored with your position on the continuum that you miss the real story and the ultimate intent of the Author—the redemption of his good creation. We have to be careful to not be so enamored with certainty that we miss the mystery and wonder of what God is up to in the world.
I think that’s what it means to be a Scriptural Christian—to be one who lives into the story, one who engages the mission of God, one who understands the Bible’s authority as being subject to the authority of God.
Sources:
McClaren, Brian, A Generous Orthodoxy. El Cajon, CA: Youth Specialties, 2004.
McClaren, Brian, A New Kind of Christian. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001.
