I had hoped to have the Science and Christian Education series wrapped up before I went on vacation, but that’s not going to happen.  So until I return, shoot the last two lessons and edit them — I’ve decided to at least post the final script for Lessons 15 and 16.  Comments welcome…

Lesson 15 Script:  Begin Here —————–
Every morning I get a traffic report from the Washington D.C. metro area. Like most traffic reports from around the country, this report has common elements that would be familiar to most commuters around the country – such as stalled vehicles, road construction and fender benders. But it also contains many distinct elements that might mean something else to those living outside the DC metro area – such as the Outer Loop, the Inner Loop, the Mixing Bowl, Woodbridge and Crystal City.

When playing with a yo-yo, the phrases “outside loop” and “inside loop” refer to different tricks. In the kitchen, the “mixing bowl” has nothing to do with traffic. When driving through the countryside, the term “woodbridge” might simply refer to a wooden bridge. And growing up, I always thought that “Crystal City” was the secret place where Superman lived — but in the context of a DC metro area traffic report, these phrases all have very specific meanings.

Interestingly, the report itself never explains or defines its own context. The author simply assumes that the listening audience gets it. Now this assumption is fine when both the report-giver and the report-hearer share the same commuting context, but what if somebody from, say Chicago, wanted to truly understand a D.C. Metro area traffic report? If they simply focused on the literal meaning of the verbiage, they might have a difficult time with it – because the key to understanding the report actually lies outside of the report itself.

The same is true for many biblical narratives, especially the creation story and the flood account. When Genesis speaks of such things as “the surface of the deep” or “the firmament” or the “windows of heaven” or the “waters above the heavens” or even the “earth” itself, we have to understand what these phrases would have meant to the original audience. Filtering them through a 21st century western cosmological context that didn’t even exist until thousands of years later misses the point entirely.

Looking outside the bible for clues to its interpretation is nothing new. For example, the style of Hebrew and Greek spoken by the biblical authors is not the same style of Hebrew and Greek used today. So to better understand the literary intent of the authors, scholars must study other documents that circulated during the time in question. This gives them a feel for how certain words and phrases were commonly used because, as we know all too well, the meaning of words can change over time.

Case in point: my grandmother used to collect political campaign buttons and display them proudly on her walls. Growing up, I never really paid attention to politics until the late eighties, so none of the buttons ever made much sense to me. But you can imagine my horror when I saw this button from the 1972 presidential election…

 Now the phrase obviously means, “our political opponents can’t beat our favorite candidate, Richard Nixon” – but without access to the proper political context, I naturally filtered the plain meaning of the slogan through the interpretative grid that was most familiar to me. And unfortunately, my public school-bus lexicon was not the least bit helpful. If the meaning of a phrase can change that much in one or two generations, imagine what can happen over thousands of years and across several cultures and languages?

Sadly, many Christians fear that studies in comparative literature will undermine biblical authority. We tend to think that if the human authors used common thoughts and ideas to make their points, then the bible isn’t really that special. But consider this: when we hear a traffic report come over the radio, the authority of the report depends somewhat on its being properly situated in time and space. Since we can only see the car in front of us and the car in back of us, and the people responsible for giving the report supposedly have access to helicopters and traffic cams, we desperately want to believe that the report has something unique to tell us, something that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. But that desire is simply not enough by itself. Unless we can identify some familiar streets or landmarks, we have no reason to believe that the report applies to our situation. Quite simply, if the report were not situated in time and space, specifically right now and right here, we would have little reason to accept its authority.

In addition to understanding and respecting the implied context of a narrative, we must also understand the assumptions and expectations of the actual communication medium used to convey the narrative. On October 30, 1938, the popular American radio drama, Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast an episode entitled War of the Worlds based on the novel by H.G. Wells. It was a fictional story based on a book that was already popular at the time. But when the story of alien invasion was adapted for radio broadcast, the medium of communication shifted to something normally associated with breaking news reports. As a result, many people confused the fictional narrative with a live newscast.

Of the 6 million people who heard the broadcast that afternoon, almost 2 million listeners believed the story to be true. Widespread panic ensued, especially in the New Jersey area surrounding the fictional ground zero of events. Some people actually rushed to the site of the disaster to give assistance. Princeton sent a team of geologists to examine the meteor impact. The story didn’t change, only the medium – and that was enough to throw people off.

Now, what do alien invasions, traffic jams, and presidential elections have to do with science and the Bible? Well, if we’re trying to understand how the Bible relates to our scientific knowledge of the physical universe, then we should first understand the scientific context assumed by the human authors. If we clumsily impose our culturally-specific scientific worldview onto a text that was authored from within a different cognitive environment than our own, then we are at serious risk of missing the point of it. But we also undermine biblical authority by shifting the interpretative reference point away from what the original authors intended, to whatever it is we happen to think is important at the time. Let’s look at an example of this from History.

During the 4th century, Greco-Roman science influenced how both Christians and non-Christians saw the world around them. This was a time when the writings of Plato and Aristotle circulated among educated persons. As a result, there were fierce philosophical debates about such things as the relative weight of the elements. Now when we speak of the elements today, we have in mind the 117 chemical substances on the period table. But during the 4th century, there was only earth, wind, fire and water. Now, it would have been a perfectly natural thing for Christians to participate in these spirited discussions. But some believers were apparently searching the scriptures for proof-texts that could be used settle the issue. One such text was Psalm 136:6, which says,

“To Him who spread out the earth above the waters, for His loving kindness is everlasting…”

Clearly the relative weight of earth and water was of little concern to the pre-scientific Hebrews, just as the question is of little concern to us today. But for a brief moment in our intellectual history, earth, wind, fire and water were very important. While some early Christians assumed that the authority of Scripture included answers to contemporary scientific disputes, St Augustine had this to say,

“Let no one think that, because the Psalmist says, ‘He established the earth above the water,’ we must use this testimony of Holy Scripture against these people who engage in learned discussions about the weight of the elements. They will more readily scorn our sacred books than disavow the knowledge they have acquired by unassailable arguments or proved by the evidence of experience.”

You see, by failing to respect the implied context of passages like Psalm 136:6, which have nothing to do with chemistry, early Christians were pressuring the text to answer the questions they thought were most important. But clearly, questions about the physical properties of matter fall outside the scope of biblical authority. Certainly God knows which elements are heavier than others, but if revealing these truths to us is not His intent, then forcing the bible to answer such questions undermines its authority. The modern-day creation science movement is still making these types of mistakes.

When faced with a passage of Scripture that appears to teach something contrary to the scientific consensus, many Christians feel that there are only two possible ways to faithfully resolve the conflict: Option (1) is to make adjustments to the scientific consensus so that it concords with the straight-forward reading of the biblical text in question. This tendency to invent our own unique “bible-friendly” science is how we end up with the problems discussed in the previous lessons. Option (2) is to make adjustments to our interpretation of scripture so that it concords with the scientific consensus. I like to refer to this approach as “hermeneutical gymnastics”. By employing creative interpretations of scripture, we can spin the Bible so that is never out of sorts with mainstream science.

But these are really just two sides of the same coin, also known as concordism. Concordism is the view that a proper interpretation of scripture will always be in harmony with our contemporary scientific understanding of the physical universe. Many Christians are convinced that Concordism protects biblical authority by ensuring that the Bible is never wrong in scientific matters. But concordism is ultimately a no-win position. Conservatives will tend to reject mainstream science where is disagrees with scripture, and liberals will tend to re-interpret scripture to make it agree with science. And there is no consistency as to what science is accepted and what science is rejected in the name of Scripture.

For instance, the modern geocentrists we looked at in Lesson 6 reject the solar system because scripture plainly says that the heavens revolve around an earth that rests firmly on its foundations. And yet they conveniently re-interpret the 35 biblical references to earth being flat so as not to contradict the scientific consensus. On the other hand, YECs will reject the cosmological and geological consensus of an old universe because the Genesis creation account clearly takes place over a period of six literal days; and yet they conveniently re-interpret the 67 biblical references to the heavens revolving around a fixed earth so as not to contradict the modern solar system. YECs might fancy themselves as the guardians of literal truth, but the modern geocentrists consider them to be liberal compromisers who would rather believe the godless speculations of Copernicus and Galileo than a straightforward reading of the Scriptures. And then there are those creationists who will reject the biological consensus of common ancestry because scripture plainly says that God only creates things after their own kind; and at the same time, they force the creation week of Genesis to span billions of years so that it does not contradict the modern scientific consensus of an old earth.

Consider one final example from history: Genesis 1:6-7 says this

“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.”

So here we have this thing called a firmament that sits between the upper waters and the lower waters. Now consider the plain and straightforward reading of Genesis 1:16-17, which says,

“And God made two great lights…and the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth.”

So now we have the sun moon and stars situated between the upper waters and the lower waters. This might sound strange to a modern person, but believe it or not, this was the scientific consensus of the civilized world for thousands of years. Not only did the other Mesopotamian cultures believe this, but Moses would have been taught this exact arrangement while growing up in Egypt. And clearly, he saw no good reason to depart from it.

While modern Christians might choose to play hermeneutical gymnastics with these verses to avoid their clear meaning, Martin Luther explicitly warned against this sort of thing when he wrote,

“Scripture simply says that the moon, the sun, and the stars were placed in the firmament of the heaven, below and above which heaven are the waters… It is likely that the stars are fastened to the firmament like globes of fire, to shed light at night… We Christians must be different from the philosophers [scientists] in the way we think about the causes of things. And if some are beyond our comprehension like those before us concerning the waters above the heavens, we must believe them rather than wickedly deny them or presumptuously interpret them in conformity with our understanding.”

Given this stern warning from Luther, why do all Christians today summarily reject these waters above the heavens? Have the words of Genesis changed? Or, has scientific discovery forced us to change their meaning? Were it not for scientific progress, would we still side with Luther since that is the plain meaning of the biblical text? You see, with concordism, there is no consistent way to interpret Scripture. We are simply left to conveniently pick and choose what verses we want to interpret literally, and what verses we want to interpret non-literally. Each new scientific discovery forces us to either play hermeneutical gymnastics with Scripture, or it forces us to simply ignore scientific progress. As I’ve been saying all along, concordism is a no-win solution to conflicts between science and faith.

But there is another way to approach these matters: it’s called the principle of accommodation. With accommodation, we simply accept that God never intended to reveal scientific truths in the Bible that transcend culture, but rather kept all revealed scientific knowledge within the context of cultural beliefs. Therefore, we shouldn’t expect God to fill the bible with scientifically relevant trivia so that every generation of man, regardless of his scientific progress, can perform some objective test that confirms the truth of Scripture. Instead, we believe that God naturally accommodates his revelation to the scientific worldview of the original audience. So, just as our traffic reports must be situated within a particular time and place, the authority of scripture is not based on its scientific uniqueness, but rather its scientific situatedness. If the bible had referred to any scientific worldview other than the one shared by the original authors and their audience, the scriptures would have been completely useless for thousands of years.

The principle of accommodation allows us to stop pressuring the text to answer the kinds of questions that modern post-Enlightenment Western Christians tend to ask, and instead encourages us to see the creation narrative through the eyes of the original Hebrew audience – through ancient Near-Eastern eyes.

In our next and final lesson, we’ll look how one goes about doing this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 11:07 am and is filed under Christian Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.