When the pastor asked me to lead today's service, he passed me a sermon circulated by the Synod for this weekend and told me I could use it if I wanted. He also told me I was free to deliver my own ideas, so when I read the sermon and it did not speak to me, I decided to give sermon-writing a try
So, if you will indulge me, I will share with you some elements from my personal faith journey. I admit to not having any experience writing sermons, so if this appears more like a lecture, it's because that is my background.
Since I was a young child, I've always been interested in science and in history. I was also always interested in the Bible, and have long been troubled by the apparent discrepancy between the what the Bible says and what history and science say. Major areas of question include things like the Creation story, the story of the Flood and Moses and the Egyptians.
Those of you who have heard my comments in Bible Study know that I return to this topic often. I can't claim to have any answers, just more questions. Still, I pray that the Holy Spirit is guiding me, and hope that some of my insights will be helpful to you.
As I see it, people fall into three camps:
There are those who believe every word in the Bible to be absolutely accurate, without question. Wherever Science and History disagree with the Bible, it is Science or History that are wrong.
Jerry Falwell, a well-known conservative preacher in the U.S. was being interviewed on the American news program, Sixty Minutes, and "corrected" the interviewer:
"The Bible does not CONTAIN the Word of God. The Bible IS the Word of God", he said.
Then there are those who almost see modern scientific understanding as the "new Scriptures", though they wouldn't admit it. For them, the Bible is just another interesting collection of national myths and stories, which have some moral value, but which cannot be considered accurate.
Out of this approach comes what I see as some of the "modern" approaches to Biblical scholarship: They start out by deciding that nothing "supernatural" will be considered. If you take the supernatural out of the Bible, there's not much left. There's Jesus without any miracles, without any angels at his side, and certainly without any Resurrection. A famous group of Biblical scholars called 'The Jesus Seminar' put the Gospels through this filter and came up with little more than a thin pamphlet's worth of parables uttered by a popular rabbi who lived a couple of thousand years ago.
This "modern" understanding is not limited to Christian scholars. I have at home a definitive history of the Jews, which states that anything pre-dating King David is of doubtful historical value: The Jews never really came out of Egypt. It was just a myth.
In the third group are most of the rest of us. People sort of believe both the Bible and Science at the same time, but in different corners of the brain. They try not to think about it too much. Imagine the poor fundamentalist geologist who works all day with rock samples half a billion years old, and then tries to explain to his children how the Earth was created only 5000 years ago.
I've come to believe that a major source of the problem is our own arrogance. People today have a firm belief that our "modern" approaches are somehow better, more advanced, and of more value than anything that has gone before. Everything has to be re-evaluated in the light of today's understanding. Because we have better technological toys than the 4th century Christian scholars who collected the books of the New Testament, we are now in a better position to decide which books should be in or out of the Bible. We know better, today, how to translate the Isaiah's ancient Hebrew words - "Behold, a virgin shall conceive" - than did the scholars of the ancient Alexandria who gave us the Greek form. Now, two and half millenia later, we know they really should have used "young girl" rather than "virgin"
Our arrogance goes even further, in believing that there is nothing that modern humans are not capable of understanding. This is despite the fact that we are told in many places in the Bible that God's ways are so far beyond our ways that we are like little children. The disciples lived with Jesus for three years, and still could not understand what he was trying to say. But, of course, we understand it all today!
This arrogance exists on both sides of the debate. There are those who believe that anything not blessed by modern Science cannot exist (which is a mis-understanding of what Science says, by the way: Scientists say that anything they cannot measure, they cannot speak about. They do not say angels do not exist, just that we cannot yet detect them with our instruments.)
Then there are those who believe that our modern understanding of the Bible and what it is trying to tell us is completely accurate. They have no doubt about anything that it says in the Bible. They understand it all!
My personal belief is that we must approach the Bible with humility, acknowledging that our "understanding" is like that of a small child trying to grasp the complex world around them.
I believe a personal breakthrough came when I realized that the Bible and Science and History must agree. Science is simply our understanding of God's creation around us. It is, in a sense, simply a different aspect of the Word of God.
They must agree. Where they appear not to agree, it is either because our Science or understanding of History is wrong, OR (and this is a big 'or') our understanding of what the Bible is trying to tell us is wrong.
Science is not perfect. Think of radio waves. These were not discovered until around the beginning of the last century. Before that, for all of human existence, radio waves were part of the "supernatural" What else is there like that? Angels? Scientists at the cutting edge of research in any field will be the first to tell you how little we actually know.
I would argue that our understanding of what the Bible trying to tell us may also be coloured by our modern experience, in ways we may not even realize.
First, though, let me say that I believe the Bible to a relatively accurate historical document, even leaving aside the Hand of God in its creation. The "myths" of earlier peoples, their oral traditions, have been shown to be very accurate. The discoverer of the Viking ruins in northern Newfoundland followed the old Norse sagas, not written down until 300 years after the fact, and these led him like a tourist guidebook, right to the spot. The city of Troy, and the famous battle around it, was long considered a Greek myth. That is, until a researcher read the stories as if they were true, and they led him right to the place. When he told the local, illiterate peasants that he was looking for ancient Troy, they laughed and said, "Oh, its under that mound over there."
Often myths get changed and embellished over time, but they almost always contain a kernel of truth. Let's take Flood, for example. Stories of the Great Flood appear not only in the Bible, but also in the stories of kindred peoples from the same geographical area. Clearly something big happened. But also, clearly, the "whole world" was not covered with water a few thousand years ago. So is the Bible wrong? I don't think so.
When we read the story of the Flood, we err in applying our modern view of the world to it. To those who experienced the Flood, the "world" would not be a planet 2400 miles around with 5 continents and seven oceans. It may have been only what they could survey from a high hill. In many tribal cultures, the term "people" refers only to the tribe. All others are "non-people": non-human, so to speak. They may feel more kinship with animal totems than they do with "home sapiens" from other tribes and regions. So, when the first father tells the first son, "All the world was covered by water and all the people perished, except for me and my three sons and our families and animals", he may have been telling the absolute truth.
This is pure conjecture, of course. The important thing is to remain open to other possibilities. More importantly, note that God's message of salvation in the Flood remains unchanged by either interpretation!
I think many of the so-called 'errors' in the Bible may stem from just this sort of mis-interpretation. Nevertheless, there are isolated cases where the text of the Bible has been shown to be just plain wrong. The pastor has loaned me a book which deals with these cases, and it gives me headache to read it, as Christian scholars try to debate with nay-sayers, as if the Bible could be proven by debate. Both sides fall into the trap of modern arrogance I described before.
Fundamentalists fear that if we take one brick out of the Bible, the whole thing will fall down. How can the Word of God contain mistakes? I cannot imagine the prophets and the apostles sitting down and taking dictation from God. They wrote what they wrote for their own time and their own purposes. They wrote human words. But, because they were, at the same time, inspired by the Spirit, the Spirit of God entered those words as well, and dwells within them.
I've come to believe that the words of the Bible, themselves, are the not Spirit or the Word of God, but that Spirit and the Word of God lives within these words. This is how the scholars of old recognized what writings to include in the Bible, or not. They felt the Spirit within the words. This is how these pages can continue to speak to us, generation after generation. It is not the words that were written down thousands of years ago that speak to us, but the living Spirit of God that dwells within the words.
In my model, the words themselves are like the cells in our brain. "Who we are" lives in these cells, but the cells themselves are not who we are. If you cut open a brain, you will not find us. Here, I believe, is the failure of modern Biblical criticism: It cuts open the Bible and tries to find God in the words.
And so, there can be the odd mistake and error in the words, because the words were written with human hands. And it does not make any difference, for The Word of God, which lives within these human words, does not have error and will never lead us wrong. The only way to experience the Word of God that lives in the Bible is to approach the human words with faith and humility, and open our minds so that God can find a way in. Then God will find us.
Lord, I trust in you and pray that these insights that I have just shared are indeed works of your Spirit. Help me to ever remain humble and no to fall into the trap of arrogance in my own understanding, for it is only with your help that I can even dimly grasp the true nature of your creation.
In Jesus' Name I pray.
Amen
Roger Kenner
June 27, 2004