About "The" Book, Part Three

Whether they admit it or not, all humans have certain beliefs and assumptions that affect how they think, and they have self-centric reference points -- their experiences, the culture in which they live, the way words are defined during their lifetimes -- that also affect how they think.

This opens the door to misconstruing things that are written even by our own contemporaries. The door opens even wider when we read things that were written by people in different times, especially if they came from different cultures than ours and spoke different languages than ours.

Which brings me back to the collection of books we refer to as the Bible. And before I get started on anything it says within its own pages, I feel compelled to say that the way we believers often talk about it must be maddening to people who have honest doubts.

We refer to the Bible as "the word of God," which clearly suggests it was written by God, yet everybody knows it was written by people.

How do you think it appears to others when the only explanations we offer for that "word of God" phrase are to breezily say the authors were either "inspired" by God or received "revelations" from him?

If you were to make that claim to people, wouldn't it be fair for them to respond by asking what you mean by that and why you believe it? If they asked you those questions, how would you answer?

When discussing the Bible, if we fail to show humility and fail to acknowledge the human limits of our understanding, we deserve to be dismissed by our audience. Sadly, we often fail on these counts even when talking amongst ourselves.

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It does not take long for us to have different takes on what the Bible is telling us. In fact, we start splitting into different camps right from the beginning, when Genesis opens with the actual words: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

Ancient Hebrew had no word for universe, so it depicted what we now call "the universe" by using the stock phrase "heavens and the earth." Keep that in mind because right after telling us "God created the heavens and the earth," Genesis informs us that the latter was "without form and void" and "the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters" while "darkness was over the face of the deep." It says not a word about how long any of that took.

Then, and only then -- following a paragraph break, and in an entirely new verse -- does Genesis mention those "days" that people have been quarreling about for as long as I can recall.

From where I sit, it is 100% reasonable to read Genesis as saying that an undefined period of time passed between: 1) when God started crafting the universe, and 2) when he started crafting our planet, and 3) when he prepped our planet for various forms of life.

Nevertheless, most people (believers and unbelievers alike) leap straight to the conclusion that the subsequently described "days" are said to have happened concurrently with the broad brushstrokes depicted in verses 1 and 2. Those people could be right, but then again they could be wrong, because both interpretations make sense and we are talking about something that was written down more than 3,000 years ago.

If reading the Bible was like hiking the Appalachian Trail (which, come to think of it, it kinda is) at this point you would have only lifted your foot to take the first step. And before you could lower it to complete that step, your ears would fill with the battle cries of the deliciously combative dispute about how the author of Genesis intended for the Hebrew word yom (which we see rendered as "day" in our English translations) to be understood.

One could spend an entire, degree-laden career duking it out in that pit, so for now I will merely say that it's not a given that yom was supposed to mean "24 hours" in the creation account.

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In my opinion, there are some people who can be fairly described as "Genesis hyper-literalists."

Their passion for the faith is sincere and their ability to memorize Scripture is impressive, but their obsession with focus on Genesis is so intense that they seem to forget that the Bible's other 65 (or 72!) books are not subservient to it.

Their insistence that Genesis was written without grandiloquence or metaphor -- and that it was intended to later serve as some sort of science manual for modern English-speakers, despite being composed at the beginning of the Bronze Age by Hebrew-speakers -- puzzles me.

Try suggesting that the word "day" in the creation account might refer to a long epoch in time rather that a 24-hour blink. The voltage of their response will instantly transform the discussion into something like a Friday night fight club between the Hatfields and McCoys. Their attention will be so fixated on repeating "day means day, and if you don't believe that you don't trust God's word and are trying to accommodate the evolutionists and atheists," that you won't get a chance to ask them if they believe Genesis 7:11-12 (which states "...the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights") means there are giant dormers and jalousies atop the firmament and God opened them to allow water to come through and drown everyone except Noah and his kin.

Many of these people believe humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and Genesis hyper-literalism forms the basis of that belief, albeit in a roundabout way. They begin by noting (correctly) that Genesis says humans were the last living creatures created by God, and thereby they deduce (again correctly) that dinosaurs were created before humans. Then they leap way outside of Genesis, all the way forward to Paul's letter to the Romans, for the verse that supposedly circles back to Genesis with proof of human-dinosaur coexistence.

That verse, Romans 5:12, states that "sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned." I cannot tell you how many times I've seen a hyper-literalist cite Romans 5:12 as proof that nothing could have perished or gone extinct prior to Adam and Eve because "death didn't enter the world until Adam and Eve ate the fruit." But trust me, I've seen that argument be made many times. 

Someday, maybe, just maybe, I'll ask one of these hyper-literalists if they noticed a particular word in Romans 5:12. Namely "men," where it says "death spread to all men because all sinned." But so far I have not asked them, unless this blog post happens to count. Sometimes it's easier better to walk away and save your energy for another day.

I realize I am sounding uncharitable now, to put it politely. Uncharitable enough that I may be rightfully accused of "acting un-Christian." So I guess I had better move on.

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Before I move on from Romans 5:12, however, let me ask: Did you notice how it blames Adam, not Eve, for the entry of sin into human affairs?

I didn't notice that until a few minutes ago, when I was typing the section above, and it smacked me in the face because it's right up the alley of something I wrote more than 16 months ago.

In this post from April of last year I remarked: "The dude was standing there the whole time, watching a serpent tell his wife to eat something he (Adam) had been told would cause death, and Adam did nothing to intervene...it was he who had been warned that the fruit would cause death, for God told him that before Eve was created. So who really committed the first sin? Was it Eve for eating the fruit, or was it Adam for standing by eunuch-like and not lifting a finger to stop her?"

It's almost like the Bible tonight is confirming my take on it from last spring!

But I better shut up because I am not exhibiting any of that humility I talked about in the first section of this post.

I am starting to sound prideful, and I think somewhere in the Bible it says pride will cause you to fall. I've been there and done that before, and don't want to go there and do that again, so I think I'll call it a night.

I intended to spend more time tonight on books other than Genesis. I guess I'll do that next time. Until then, take care.

To be continued...

Also, if you're interested, the first two posts in this series can be read here and here respectively.

And finally, while I have much for which to thank John Lennox, that great and joyful apologist from Northern Ireland by way of Oxford, I want to especially thank him for pointing out the obvious yet overlooked fact that the word "men" in Romans 5:12 stares right at us in black and white.