John Bauer
Reformed
- Jul 21, 2022
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I asked only because you said a clear sign would give you “the resolve to trust it and start exploring the Bible.” You wanted a sign “in order to move to the next step: believing enough to explore Christianity.” It sounds to me like you need not a sign but epistemic permission to take the text seriously without feeling intellectually irresponsible. What you need is a logically coherent hermeneutic—a set of assumptions and rules (often implicit) that govern how you interpret a text: what kind of text it is, what questions it is trying to answer, what would count as a mistake in reading it, and what would count as a reasonable conclusion.
You don’t need to lower your standards, even in the presence of a divine sign; the question is how and where you apply them. Also, exploration doesn’t require belief; it requires a willingness to ask whether there is a coherent way the Bible or Christianity is meant to make sense. Belief can follow once obstacles are removed. (Whether it does or not is another matter, but it can.)
The contents of Genesis can certainly appear silly when read naïvely—that is, when a modern English Bible is read without critically questioning your assumptions about the text or attending to its original language, grammar, and historical-cultural context, the very habits a genuinely skeptical reader brings to any serious text. With even a vague grasp of the original Hebrew (provided by biblical scholars) and the ancient Near Eastern cognitive environment of the original author and audience (described by historians), especially with a consistent hermeneutic possessing canonical coherence and explanatory power (provided by biblical theologians), the text no longer exhibits the silliness reflected in that naïve reading.
And that, I might add, is what exploring the Bible is about, rather than merely reading it.
You come away realizing that Genesis isn’t an account of natural history in the modern sense, an idea that rests on a material ontology—which didn’t even exist when Genesis was written. Light is said to exist when separated from darkness and named, the firmament when it divides waters, and so on. Genesis 1 is replete with separating and naming, framing existence not in terms of constituent physical material but of function and covenantal relation to God (which is why its original state was described as “formless and empty” [תֹ֙הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ, tohū wābōhū]). We shouldn’t expect an ancient Near Eastern ontology to be the same as our modern Western ontology.
Scripture is theocentric (God-centered) and Christological (about Christ), which means it’s not about natural history but redemptive history—which means the two are not mutually exclusive. That is why it’s possible to believe that the days in Genesis 1 were normal 24-hour periods, that Adam and Eve were real historical people, that the events in the garden actually happened and only a few thousand years ago—while also believing that the universe is several billion years old, that the evolutionary patterns of history are real, and that Homo sapiens have existed long before Adam. Both redemptive history and natural history are true; the key is realizing they are not the same thing, thus they can have different starting points without producing any theological or scientific conflicts. Natural history began more than 13 billion years ago, while redemptive history began less than 10,000 years ago (with an archetypal and covenantally ordered historical narrative that points to Christ).
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