Adams and Atoms: A TE foray through Scripture and Science.

I have explained quite a bit about the place of Jesus Christ in Christianity. But what about the Bible, then? Where does it fit in?

I will start with this: that the Bible is a divinely authorized record of God's historical dealings with man. Now, if you have had any experience with TEs you might be surprised at my wording. But I am choosing it deliberately: there is a world of difference between that and this, which I don't believe:

The Bible is a divinely authorized historical record of God's dealings with man.

What a difference a small change in order makes! I will elaborate more on why I feel that the first is correct but not the second later. But first, let us look at how Christians popularly conceive the Bible. It is telling how many of them use this phrase, "the Word of God", to describe the Bible, when the Bible nowhere calls itself the Word of God. Instead, it calls Jesus the "Word of God", and that alone is an important clue to what the Bible was actually given to us for. But there is at least one other religion which calls its holy Scriptures the "Word of God" ... Islam.

Being a Christian in a country like mine makes for very interesting inter-faith discussion, and one thing I have always been interested in is how much reverence the Muslims give the Quran. Most Qurans have beautiful Arabic calligraphy on their covers. The Quran is normally stored on a high shelf, all on its own with no other books sharing its shelf. A Muslim has to perform a short ritual cleansing and (IIRC) a prayer before even touching the Quran, let alone taking it down to read it. (Recently in my country a Chinese minister swore on the Quran, and it raised a bit of a furor because of the possibility that he had desecrated it by touching it improperly.) When a Muslim reads the Quran, he does not hold it in his hands or open it touching the floor, but has a special stand on which it can be laid open. (Besides the theological aspect, it is probably more practical too - I've seen some Qurans intended for reading which are at least 10 inches wide )

One can see this even in those rare Malays who convert to Christianity, they inherit this deep respect and place it on the Bible. My friend recounted once being in a camp where the principal was a Malay convert. Once, during Bible study, she needed to go to the washroom and inadvertently stepped over (not on) a friend's Bible. After she came back out, the principal suddenly started lecturing her about having more respect for the Holy Scriptures!

Why do Muslims have such high respect for the Quran? Because to them, the Quran is the ultimate revelation of God's nature. This has several important implications. The most important is that the Quran is as uncreated as God (Allah) Himself - the ultimate description of God must have meaning as long as God Himself exists, and since God is uncreated so is the ultimate description of Him. Because of that, the language Arabic is even considered God's language (since it is the language of God's ultimate revelation). And when the text is translated to another language, such as English, the result is not called an "English Quran" - the Quran must be Arabic! - but rather an "English interpretation". When verses are read on TV, with the Arabic text on top and a Malay translation below, the term they use for the translation is "This scripture means: ... " instead of, say, "This scripture says".

I believe that this commitment to the Quran as an ultimate revelation is at the heart of the burdens facing the Muslim world today. Why? Because any textual revelation cannot be unrooted from its cultural context. See how careful they are, that even a translation cannot be considered equivalent to the original revelation any more. The Quran in its Arabic is the Word of God; a Quran even in English is no longer the Word of God but rather a word of man based on it. On a deeper level, the Quran cannot hold its authority when applied to a situation different from its original culture. When Allah says this about a particular situation, it is the Word of God; when a modern Muslim tries to extract a principle from this and apply it in the modern world, it has become a word of man based on it, not the Word of God, unless the principle has been explicitly stated elsewhere.

And yet this brings a black-and-white certainty to the practice of the Muslim religion. If it is in the Quran, it is of God; if it is not, then it is not. This is precisely why some Christians view the Bible in the same way Muslims view the Quran: because it makes life easy. But that doesn't mean that what they believe is right. And in my next post, I will elaborate on what alternatives to a Quranic interpretation of the Bible are present to us.

I forgot to say something about the role of historical interaction between God and His people. But I think the point is clear and simple enough. While God's full revelation was through the Incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection, God revealed/reveals Himself partially in His historical dealings with His people. When I say that someone is selfish I may have in mind an incident where he could have shared something with me but didn't; when I say that someone is proud I may have in mind an incident when he wouldn't admit that he was wrong. In the same way, many attributes of God are best described by incidents in which He manifested them. In fact, the Bible seems to indulge in this kind of storytelling: the Bible tells us that God is love, but doesn't just say it straight but in addition speaks of how God has been seen to be loving.

Now, a lot of Christians want to place the Bible as the ultimate revelation of God. I understand their concerns, and I will agree with them in that here and now it is the primary revelation of God. There is a difference between those two, however. While the Bible is useful and even necessary for faith, it should never be confused with the Word of God. I would describe the Bible in these terms (slightly different from those I used above) : The Bible is a divinely authorized collection of responses in human writing to God's acts of redemptive history.

Notice that the revelation of the Bible is at one reserve. God reveals Himself ultimately through the witness of His Son and of the Holy Spirit, and through the consistency of those with what was revealed through God's historical interaction with man. And the Bible serves as a record of this revelation in a form suitable for future preservation, public profession, and private edification. The Bible can never replace Jesus in the way that the Quran is central to Islam. But it does, however, serve as a faithful witness to who Jesus is.

I would depict the difference by reusing my Turing Robot analogy from post #18. Imagine that instead of sending out my Turing Robot to parties, I commission various authors to write a grand, 66-volume biography of me, and get a moving company to lug the biography around to any party I'm invited to. What do you think the response will be now? The Turing Robot was a perfect substitute for me. The biography, though, is not. People have to read the biography. People have to interpret those words themselves, and if my biography is written in English I won't make any headway at all in, say, Beijing (assuming there aren't any English-readers there). If I use Malaysian colloquialisms like "whatever-lah" nobody besides Malaysians and those blasted Singaporeans will understand it, but if I use Queen's English I might come across as too highbrow.

More importantly, the biography is finite and limited. The biography might be able to answer a lot of questions about me, but unlike the Turing Robot, it can't answer everything about me. It may not tell anyone, for example, what color underwear I will be wearing tomorrow. (Presumably the Turing Robot has a decision-making program identical to my decision-making process, allowing it to predict that and other oddities.) But more seriously, I'm sure everyone here knows the limitations of knowing a person through a book. To know Mahatma Gandhi, George Bush, or anyone else as someone who has read the biography is really different from knowing them as a friend or someone personally involved. What more God, who is infinite and therefore de facto cannot be (completely) described by any finite collection of words?

In the same way, the Bible is an expansive, but still limited record of God's historical dealings. There are even places where the Bible tacitly admits that it had to leave out some things: the references to the Book of Jashar and the Annals of the Kings in the OT, indicating that there is additional information not included in the Bible, or the admission by John that nobody could ever fully record all that Jesus did and said. Can anyone claim that "to see the Bible is to have seen God the Father" in the same way that Jesus did?

Only in terms of how the Bible reveals Jesus. I will say that while the Bible is not the ultimate revelation of Christianity, it is still the primary revelation of Christianity - for the simple reason that Jesus Christ is no longer physically with us. And since we can only know Jesus through the Bible, we are often forced into treating the Bible like a Quran - treating it like it is the Word of God, for in a sense it does serve as our only portal to the Word of God. But it is merely a portal, not the Word itself. And correcting that mistake is the first step away from creationism.

It's been a while since my last posting here, but let's keep on track. My last two posts have been about delineating the authority of the Bible, and it's not stopping any time soon. "Aha! I knew he was a Bible-burning atheist in disguise!" But on the contrary, sometimes one needs to define the scope of authority ... or lose even what authority one had. If a judge decides to go into politics, even if he gets a bigger say in doing things, he loses authority, because he is claiming authority he never had. In the same way, when Christians try to apply the authority of the Bible to areas where the Bible never claimed authority, they end up trivializing the authority of the Bible.

What is the Bible, then? It is a divinely-approved writing with the purpose of communicating God's character through the retelling of His historical interactions with humanity. It traces the story of God, from when He created the universe, to when He set apart a chosen race to manifest His blessing, to when He came down as man, to when He left His church here to prepare for His return. These are all undoubtedly historical events. These are all things that really happened. The question is, even if these are historical events, can we assume that their descriptions in the Bible are historical descriptions? Probably not. This is really one of the major keys of understanding TEism: that what the Bible describes really happened, but that the Bible did not describe it in a way which has to be historical or even "factual" in the sense which we consider factual today. That is why TEism sees no contradiction between the particulars noted in the Biblical record and the scientific picture of our origins. And this will be the focus of the next few postings, how a non-historical account can adequately transfer a historical truth.

It can be counter-intuitive to imagine God transmitting His truth through means that seem unorthodox to us. After all, we've spent our lives being taught that defending the faith means showing that it is not "just a myth". And yet, myths are powerful vehicles of revelation. A story can tell us as much about God as a history, perhaps even more. This reminds me, really, of a physical phenomenon called the wave-particle duality of light. What happens is that light undergoes certain phenomena that suggest that it is a wave: those rainbow-things you see when you look at a CD under white light, or the appearance of dancing colors on oil slicks. But if light was only a wave, it would behave very differently in solar cells and photoelectric systems - but if light was only a particle, it wouldn't interfere and diffract to give those colours! The description that "light is a wave" works in some situations, but in other situations it's useless and we say that "light is a particle".

What my physics teacher told us was "Don't try to imagine light. Light isn't really a wave, and it isn't really a particle. It's something weird-la [Malaysian interjection ] ... don't crack your head trying to picture it. Just accept that sometimes this description works, and sometimes that description works." In other words, the physical reality of what light is transcends complete description as either a wave or a particle, although both are useful descriptions. But during the 19th century, when the nature of light was being sorted out, there were disparate "corpuscular" (particle) and "wave" camps. Each side thought they were completely right and the other side was completely wrong. For if we can describe light as a wave, surely you cannot describe it as a particle!

The similarity I see is that literalists can sometimes be locked into a particular way of viewing the written revelation of God, even if it is something which cannot be classified. At points, true, it is far more comfortable to view this revelation as historical. We are all used to proving how something historical is true; we aren't used to seeing something non-historical as true. And yet, just like how light is sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle, revelation can sometimes be as effective, if not more, when presented as a story.

It can be unfamiliar ground - but not unrewarding. The Bible, after all, is simply the story of God, and who are we to tell Him how He should tell it?

The next post is a guest post by a much-respected friend-of-a-friend who blogs here: http://www.shermankuek.net/ ... to clarify, I'm not at all sure if he's a TE or not, and by posting this here I am not trying to say that he is a TE. But I feel that what he has to say is relevant within the ongoing series of articles about Scripture.

================


In the academia, there sometimes seems to be a strange sense of competition among scholars of different fields. It is a rivalry for dominance and primacy, each claiming his field of expertise to take a position of greater significance than the rest.
This is true not just of all fields, but also particularly of the field of theology. Even in talking about God, a very human tendency can sometimes overwhelm. We eventually come to hear overtones that seem to claim “my field of study” to be “of greater significance than yours.” In fact, such claims are most often made in the absence of the other “accused” parties so that they are not around to defend their rightful legitimacy in scholarship. This is most unjust and unethical for the spirit of healthy scholarship.

Theology, as it stands today, consists of various fields of specialised expertise: biblical theology, philosophical theology, historical theology, practical theology, and various other such fields.

Take, for example, the biblical theologian who claims dominance and self-sufficiency, thereby ignoring the legitimate contributions of the other fields of theological scholarship. She may claim, “Scripture is our rule of faith, hence, biblical theology is sufficient for engaging the needs of the world today. We do not need to articulate anything that goes beyond the confines of scripture. We are Christians, hence, the bible to us is all sufficient. Anything more than that is unnecessarily erroneous.” Underlying this claim for significance are some very telling assumptions embraced by the claimer.

Firstly, there is the assumption that the contents of scripture pertain to every dimension of life. In that case, then what does scripture say about stem cell research and human cloning? Absolutely nothing. Even when scripture does contain seemingly synonymous situations to those of contemporary situations like, say, war, one cannot take for granted that warfare in scripture is entirely synonymous to contemporary warfare; such a naïve assumption would require too big a leap and may lead to too simplistic a conclusion. In order for us to engage the contemporary realities of the world, more needs to be said than mere scripture-quoting; and this is the task of the theological ethicist. Scripture says much, but it does not say everything. It provides sufficient knowledge to bring humankind to an enlightened understanding of God’s story, but it does not exhaustively present ethical prescriptions for the community of faith that seeks to be a continuation of God’s story in the here-and-now. The theological ethicist brings the task of scriptural interpretation towards contemporary relevance, thereby emerging with more informed prescriptions of life in the present order. Whenever the biblical theologian tries to undertake the task of the theological ethicist by prescribing what scriptural principles mean for the ethical faith community today, she does so deficiently, for she is not trained to take into consideration various other non-negotiable factors.

Secondly, there is an assumption that doing biblical theology is the safest way to prevent one from pandering to hermeneutical bias. For a scholar to claim that the only trustworthy answers are to be found in scripture is already to betray her own culturally conditioned understanding of scripture. Where does the scholar acquire her hermeneutical lenses from? Or is the scholar ignoring the reality that there is no hermeneutical effort that can exist in a truly objective cultural vacuum? Because this assumption itself stems from an era of Christian history when it was thought that the epistemological enterprise could take place devoid of subjective cultural passions; this in itself was a culture dominating the scholarship of that era. Today, it is the contextual theologian who alerts all readers that no hermeneutics exist in a state of undisputed objectivity. The establishment of a science of interpretation that assumes the possibility of having no bias in one’s hermeneutical endeavour is itself a bias! And this is a bias that a contextual theologian readily admits to; perhaps the biblical theologian should do the same.

Thirdly, there is an assumption that doing biblical theology is simply about “returning to scripture” without having to take into due consideration the voices of other interpreters throughout the history of the faith community. It is thought that “returning to scripture” preserves the purity and simplicity of the faith. But it is purely and simply naïve. History has evidenced how the Protestant Reformation eventually broke out into a plethora of split after split because groups of people wanted to “return to scripture” without taking into consideration the scriptural interpretation of the church fathers and contemporary scholars. To continue uncritically in that tradition is to not have learned from our painful past. It is the historical theologian who rides upon the foundational interpretive task of the biblical theologian and brings to light the wisdom of past voices. It is the historical theologian who tells us what scripture says today in the light of what our church fathers have witnessed together with scripture.

In theological scholarship, we must never say, “No, I!” Humility is a most fundamental and non-negotiable component of theological scholarship. When the community of scholars gathers in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we acknowledge the intertwining of our spirits and minds as a Trinitarian community. In that attitude, we confess, “I cannot do without you, and we cannot do without the voice of the Spirit.” Then this will truly reflect the beauty of theology in all its abounding fullness.

Yes, we.

Every once in a while you will hear the word "phenomenological" pop up here in our discussions at OT. It is probably the longest regularly used word here (clocking in at a massive 16 letters and 7 syllables; "phenomenologicality", the cognate noun, has 19 letters and 9 syllables!), and I'd jump in joy if we had a far shorter substitute for it. Typing "phenomenological" is phenomenally painful on the fingers, particularly on mushy old college computer keyboards. So what does it mean, and why do we use it?

It's an extremely important word because it connects directly to the previous discussion: that the Bible is the story of God, and that its description being a description of God is far more important than its description being a historical description. And phenomenologicality (phew!) is a very important effect of this.

Phenomenologicality is basically the fact that Biblical descriptions of phenomena are descriptions of what a phenomenon appears to be, instead of descriptions of how a phenomenon is caused. The classic example is Joshua's long day:

On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel:
"O sun, stand still over Gibeon,
O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon."
So the sun stood still,
and the moon stopped,
till the nation avenged itself on its enemies,
as it is written in the Book of Jashar.
The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the LORD listened to a man. Surely the LORD was fighting for Israel!

(Joshua 10:12-14, NIV)

Luther famously said that "Joshua commanded the sun to stop, not the earth!" when he was confronted with the Copernican / Galilean heliocentrism. In the context of our modern knowledge, however, this is a good example of phenomenologicality. The phenomenon, whatever it was (whether the earth's rotation was stopped, or some other light source was introduced which looked like the sun, or God gave extra energy and strength to the Israelites so that it seemed to them that the sun had stopped as they completed an immense chase), was not the sun and the moon "stopping". But to the Israelites it sure looked like it did, and that's what the Israelites called it: the day the sun stopped.

We haven't progressed much since then, really. I'm sure any scientist would have no problem saying "I'll only be home after sundown", even though the sun doesn't actually go down in any meaningful sense between 3:00pm and 9:00pm except in appearance. One might ask: does this mean that the scientist doesn't believe in heliocentrism? Of course not! But "sunup", "sundown", etc. are culturally stable and useful words to use to describe certain times. They have been divorced from the framework in which they were formerly used, that of geocentricity.

What if I were to ask then, "If God's words in the Bible were that the sun stood still and the moon stopped, does that mean that God believes in geocentrism?" Of course not! And yet, why would God use those words? Aren't they misleading words? They misled Luther, after all. The deeper issue is, can we call this a lie? Of course we cannot. But how can we defend this assertion?

Consider this: When the scientist says, "I'll only be home after sundown", what is the scientist trying to say? Is he saying that he will be home at the time when the sun physically moves in the sky down to the horizon? All he is saying is that "I'll only be home after 7:00pm". "Sundown" is merely a convenient label for that time. The scientist isn't trying to convey that the sun is moving, but at what time he will be home. Therefore I would not consider it a "lie" for him to use that word while believing in heliocentrism.

Can we make the same argument with God? Note in addition that the Israelites themselves perceived what God did as causing the sun to stand still and the moon to stop. That was their language; that was how they understood the world. What was God's intent? In recording the incident, God was not trying to teach them cosmology. God was giving them a written memory of a particular occasion when God sided Israel and gave them the victory over their enemies. Would it have been necessary for God to teach them that "No, the sun's not actually moving, it's just that the earth is round, and it's rotating along its axis, and .... " for Him to record that incident? Not at all! God was content to use the framework they had in understanding the universe to communicate His truth.

Phenomenologicality points to an important observation: that God was not ashamed to accommodate His people's framework of the universe (in this case, that the sun moved across the sky) to transmit His truth, even if it was scientifically wrong. We shall see how this is true in the account of Genesis 1.

(Speak of the devil, Mercury!)

The topic may not seem to have anything to do with origins theology but it's a good description of the "other" content of Genesis 1 and 7-8: the stuff most creationists miss out. It is taken from the book "Act and Being" by Colin E. Gunton.

==========

It is not only the Greek philosophers who have produced critiques of the anthropomorphic pagan deities. There is a biblical equivalent, and it is very different from the tradition of cosmologically grounded philosophical theology. In sharp contrast to the latter, it proceeds by assertion, not negation. Two examples will indicate the difference. The first is the critique in the book of Genesis of the gods of the culture surrounding Israel. [The second is Isaiah's critique of the idols, not as relevant to OT.]

Implicit in the way in which its author presents what can only be called its demythologized version of the ancient myths is a theology of the divine attributes which overturns the rival theologies. Genesis 1 presents a revelation of the powerlessness of the pagan deities. Over against claims that the sun and the moond are gods, our author simply asserts that they are placed where they are by an act of divine sovereignty. We cannot say it too often: Genesis presents an account of the knowledge of God the creator, not by negation but by affirmation of his power and absolute creativity, incomparable with anything attributed to the pagan gods.

It is noteworthy that in Genesis 1:14-17 the reason for the creation of the heavenly lights is given before their creation is described. Why such an apparently illogical order of treatment? It is most likely to prevent them from being considered divinities. 'In neighbouring cultures, the sun and the moon were some of the most important gods in the pantheon, and the stars were often credited with controlling human destiny.' This is absolutely ruled out by our passage. God may allow the lights to 'rule over the day and over the night', but only as his creatures.

It should be noted in how matter-of-fact a manner this is stated, simply continuing as it does a theology of creation as a realm in which life can take place: the lights are there to divide the day from the night; to mark the seasons, days, and years; and to give light on the earth. This is emphasized in verse 15: 'let them [the lights] be for lights' - that is, for nothing else, and certainly not to be worshipped. It is, however, the next verse which above all distinguishes Genesis absolutely from all other versions of the creation myth, with its wonderful throwaway line: 'and he made the stars also'. This author simply devotes a brief clause to what other cultures considered as gods.

[Footnote here:] There is plentiful other evidence also. 'God created the great creatures of the sea ... '(verse 21) These are not, as in the myths of the pagans, divine bodies from which the earth was created, but simply God's creatures. A similar point can be made about the divine rest on the seventh day. Far from being a limitation on God - as if he was tiered, which is not suggested - this reinforces the freedom and sovereignty with which this book describes God's work. [Footnote ends.]

The Noah story introduces us to another attribute. Despite all apparent indications to the contrary, it is at once a narrative account of God's immutability and a moral critique of the pagan gods. On the face of it, God is presented as rather changeable, in repenting and changing his mind, and although we would be right not to take this literally - whatever that might mean - it does not follow that it should be entirely philosophized in the way that has sometimes happened. [followed by Barth quote on discussions of the biblical passages referring to God's repenting]

Once there is a creation, and once it has fallen, it is clear that God allows himself to be affected by the antics of his creatures. But the overall point of the saga of Noah is the contrast between God's moral constancy and the ludicrous behaviour of the pagan gods. Take the parallel in the Gilgamesh epic, a polytheistic account incorporating rival gods, not all of them in favour of the plan, whose general frivolity contrasts with the seriousness of the Genesis account. 'According to the extrabiblical accounts, the heavenly council led by Anu and Enlil decided to destroy mankind, for multiplying too much and making too much noise.' The pettiness of their motives contrasts with God's utter seriousness in this account. It is a kind of account of God's immutability, in the sense which Barth has isolated, preferring, however, to speak of God's constancy rather than immutability.

I don't know; is this backed by any similar-sounding creation stories in the Bible? I'm very emotionally attached to the idea that (in Colin Gunter's words) the creation story of Genesis 1 is a "demythologization of the neighbouring myths". The commentaries I've seen interpret this as a recounting of the crossing of the Red Sea, with Leviathan as an image of Egypt, which I admit sounds strange to me too. Then again, there is no element of struggle recounted on the part of Leviathan, nor is it a divine body as you noted. So while I don't like its apparent lack of fit with the pattern of "demythologization", I don't see that it would be in conflict with the general veneer of how God is described as a creator in the Bible. It does add depth to the question.

Shall we start a new thread on this?