How Do You Want Your Children to View the Bible?

Posted byChaplainmikePosted inFaith & Science, Mike the Geologist

How Do You Want Your Children to View the Bible?

In this BioLogos Forum discussion , “Gabe” raises the question about how to reconcile a biblical worldview with science.  He is struggling with verses like:

Acts 17:26 NIV

From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

1 Timothy 2:13 NIV

For Adam was formed first, then Eve.

2 Peter 3:5-6 NIV

But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens came into being and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.

He says he is: “…still struggling to reconcile Peter and Paul’s beliefs in things like a global flood and traditional Adam and Eve as significant points in their theology with the idea that science says that there was no global flood or first pair of humans.”

Moderator Phil McCurdy (jpm) gives an answer that most of us are probably familiar with:

“We often speak of “God meeting us where we are,” and I think that that is what is happening. The text is not addressing science and origins, it is addressing theologic concerns, and God is accommodating their knowledge and belief and using it to make a theological statement, revealing himself to us through our finite senses.

I have no real doubt that Paul and Peter had a literal historical concept of those things. No doubt they also believed in geocentricity, if they were well versed enough to believe in a spherical earth, though they may have accepted the description given of the cosmos in the Bible as flat and covered by a dome, or by concentric shells supporting the heavens, or whatever. But that is not the point of the scripture.”

It’s a pretty good answer.  Christy Hemphill, another Moderator, fleshes out the answer by referring to cultural contexts of Paul’s answer to Timothy that Paul “…was probably countering the Roman Artemis cult in Ephesus that taught women were created first, were superior to men, and should forego marriage and childbearing. So, the communicative intent was more to point people back to the teaching of the Christian church that held marriage as sacred and good, and women as not justified in trying to lord it over men or become completely independent from them from a position of alleged created superiority.”

But the money answer, Christy notes, is “…I think a lot of these questions come down to your doctrine of inspiration– what you believe it means that human words are God’s words and how it all works.”

Now I read to the end of the comments with no mention of how old Gabe was, but I’m betting he is a young person.  Which led me to ponder how I am communicating the Bible’s importance to my children and grandchildren.  What doctrine of inspiration am I promulgating to them?  Towards the end of the discussion, commentator “Peter” delivers the most succinct and valuable summation of the issue:

“It is the central theme of this site and the project of most modern religions – not just Christianity – to find some way to reconcile scriptures written in the past with what we know today. The strategies vary from losing one’s faith entirely to denying science entirely, and everything in between. Francis Collins has tried to find a way to reconcile them so that they are both true.

Here is the thing. For them both to be true, and to accept science as being about the natural world, we must accept the literal truth of the results of science (although they are ultimately provisional) and do the work of finding new ways to conceptualize bible verses.

As has been commented here, many translations, changes and additions have affected the bible as read today and so this discussion is prone to lead us down fruitless pathways that ultimately teach us nothing other than that we don’t know what the original verse was or what it was meant to convey or if it really was just a metaphor or allegorical or poetic, or literal.

I am no biblical scholar, and I know that this problem has been written about by many many learned folks before this, but I would say that a more profitable use of your time is to not see science as destroying your bible, but to see the bible as a means that God used to convey ideas to simple, primitive people in ways that they could comprehend. There is no way that the people of that time could have been convinced of the world being a sphere orbiting a gigantic thermonuclear furnace, or about the eons of time, survival of the fittest, evolution and common ancestry (particularly when these people knew such or a small number of lifeforms), or about physics, genetics, organic chemistry, let alone the fact that the vast majority of people could not read and had little formal education.

Yes, God could have done anything, but as it is, the bible is a useful device to teach God’s word to people who have little understanding of the greater world and the actual reality as has since been revealed by science. Now that we have science, we must focus not on what the bible says that conflicts with science, but on what was meant by those things. That is the whole point.

On this reading, there need not have been an actual global flood to cleanse us of sin, but a story that teaches us of the need to be cleansed of our sin, or more importantly to avoid the need to be cleansed!

Similarly, we have no need to try to shoe-horn Adam’s genetic code into each of us, and bend the laws of inheritance to our beliefs. Adam can be the metaphorical ancestor of us all spiritually, and could have existed not as an individual but as ‘all of us’ in spirit, and that could have been 250,000 thousand years ago or 6,000 years ago because once we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of literalism, we are free to grasp what is truly important.”

That’s a money quote there: “…once we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of literalism, we are free to grasp what is truly important.”  That is what I want to communicate to my descendants.

80 thoughts on “How Do You Want Your Children to View the Bible?”

  2. Hi all – just wanted to let you all know that I’ve tested negative for COVID, and can finally schedule my mom’s graveside service.

    Tuesday is the goal.

    Thanks so very much for you kindness and continued prayers.

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  3. Ah, now you’ve gone and done it Craig…maybe the bible is a fabrication resulting from the religious impulse (= the sum of all our fears and anxieties) and “God” is a construct of those impulses.

    ;o}

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  4. I thought the Progidal Son story was a tale of 2 sons actually. The Fundies love to talk about the one was lost but found, but remember there was another son in the story as well.

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  6. I suspect the ancient writers and editors intended much of this to be understood literally, and were simply wrong about the origin of humanity and so on. There’s no particular reason to suppose they (or Jesus) were right about God or morals, either.

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  8. Most people don’t think about these things rationally. They decide whether to belong to a particular group (assuming they have any choice in the matter), and once they do, they usually go along with whatever the group believes. Since you are a convert, you’ve shown them that one is not limited by the religion of one’s parents, but can “go where they’re treated best,” as the saying goes. Their impression of Russian Orthodoxy is likely to be negative.

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  9. So “Peter” ses the Bible “as a means that God used to convey ideas to simple, primitive people in ways that they could comprehend” and “as a useful device to teach God’s word to people who have little understanding of the greater world.” A bit condescending, but fine. What is the benefit of this point of view, over the view that the Bible is entirely the product of these ancient cultures, without any involvement by God, and that none of its views–scientific or theological–ought to be accorded any authority?

    I get that “Peter” wants to repackage his religion into a form that his children can accept without being ignoramuses, but why shouldn’t the children just let church go the way of fraternal lodges and bowling leagues? Sure, the Bible is poetically “inspired,” in a sense, but is it any moreso than Homer or the Qur’an? I suspect that what “Peter” is really after is the psychological comfort that comes from belonging to a multi-generational identity group.

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  10. You’ve been told this already: because the continued existence of and operation of creation is the continued direct action of God. God isn’t a divine being like Zeus or Odin, that came into being alongside creation and started manipulating a creation that was already there and would otherwise have got on and done it’s own thing without him. God creates existence out of nothing, so that every operation of nature and physical law is operated by and through God, and can have no separate existence beside him. All the processes of creation *are* the direct action of God.

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  11. No Seneca, you actually got very detailed explanations–just not the Ken Hamm type you may have wanted. You see, you didn’t want a theological explanation but an anthropomorphic account.

    BTW, have you ever seen God with your own eyeballs?

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  12. ” They reject it as a source of knowledge about God,”

    As a source for knowledge about God it’s like reading an anthology where “God” is the subject but each writer has a different view of the subject. There is NO one view as to what God is like, until perhaps we get to the NT–and even then subsequent interpretation is not unanimous.

    If the Bible is used as the only “source” of knowing what God is like then we’re forced to pick and choose. And that is why I think Robert Capon has the best take on hermeneutics. Capon (watch Shelter Island Retreat) taught that when you pick your story (and we all pick the story we want in scriptures, and either explain away all other possible stories from them or just ignore them all together). Robert said, “when you choose a story, pick one with a good ending. Why pick a bad one, when it’s obvious most people choose bad ones? And pick one that is GOOD news and NOT BAD news. And finally pick one that you love so much that you could stay up all night talking about it.”

    Until the three horses of the Evangelical hermeneutic are hobbled–Inerrancy, Univocality, and Harmony of the text–a slavishness of literalism will prevail and good people will continue to be stupid.

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  13. That’s not what the post is about. It’s about literalism being a straitjacket that prevents interpreting and understanding the Bible in intelligent and mature ways that leave room for scientific understanding.

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  15. Jon, the statement about the bible being “the word of God” makes me cringe. The reality is that the bible is our (human) words about the Word of God–who is Christ.

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  16. You discount the rampant visible church corruption scandals (sexual and otherwise), Divine Worship of Donald Trump and Q-Anon His Prophet, and Weaponized Scripture. Why would anyone be interested in a Bible they see being used as a weapon?

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  17. Because three out of four Evangelical Christians mistake him for Jesus Christ, God come in the Flesh.

    Trump Worship has joined YEC, anti-mask, and anti-vaxx as the latest Litmus Tests of Salvation.

    Remember “The Coming Evangelical Collapse”?
    Well this is It.

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  19. Bingo.

    This also gets at the deeper truth about the question I asked Seneca earlier, which was, “At what point was God involved YOUR creation?”

    His answer: Eternity.

    So… how did God stitch “Seneca Griggs” together over eternity? Was He involved in every single coupling of man/woman that kept some sort of gene pool going that would eventually put his mother and father’s gene mix together to form Seneca? A lot of people could claim that it was just random couplings that eventually produced Seneca as he exists today. Others would say, No, God’s hand was in it all along.

    Whatever the case, it took eternity.

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  22. Well, I’ve struck out trying to find out how I-monkers believe God was in the process of his physical creation.

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  25. YES!!!

    Pilate said rightly: “Behold, the man…” In Greek, the word usually translated “man” means a human. Jesus Christ is the Image of God in which each of us has been made, and he is the first Truly Human Being, offering himself in love unto the utter humiliation of death for the benefit of each and all, as every human being has been created to be and do.

    Dana

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  26. ” Current evolutionary theory doesn’t require God in ANY of the process.”

    True that but it also does not require the absence of God.

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  30. Well, faith in Trump has become an essential plank in a large segment of Christian evangelicals in our country, and this segment increasingly overlaps with adherents of QAnon. The two groups in process of becoming one group.

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  31. God creates in God’s time, not ours. From my perspective as a human being and a Christian, I view creation as starting with Christ’s Incarnation. The Incarnation was retroactive, actually creating the past, as well as proleptic in opening up the future.

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  32. Let me try again; did God create two ameobas and let the whole thing precede from there?
    [ Current evolutionary theory doesn’t require God in ANY of the process.]

    Did he start it that simply and then the process was on it’s own without further input from Him?

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  36. Wow, the fastest something has come out of moderation EVER!

    Moderator – feel free to delete this thread of posts.

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  38. Comment in moderation for some reason. In case Christiane and Dana missed it yesterday, Susan posted an update late yesterday as a comment to yesterday’s post.

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  39. FYI… she posted this update late yesterday on yesterday’s post.

    ———————

    Susan Dumbrell says
    December 2, 2020 at 3:54 pm

    Hi Fellow Imonkers.
    I am home from hospital and doing OK.
    My daughter has been a tower of strength.
    Thank God for her.
    Susan

    ——————————-

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  44. Prayers for Susan in Australia continue.

    Susan, please let us know how you are doing.

    sending ‘hug’

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  46. My children, like Mule’s, aren’t interested in it. They respect it as certain peoples’ Holy Book, and they know some of the content, especially my son.

    How would I like for them to view it? As a gift from God that has been handed down through the Church, and understanding it needs to begin with the Resurrection of Christ. All the other stuff can be addressed within that parameter, including literary genre, the place of science, etc.

    At this point, no grandchildren are on the horizon, which is the great sadness of my life.

    Dana

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  48. It’s more like panentheism, where all of the created world is capable of showing forth God because he created it that way. In order to be that way, created things have to somehow have been created “from the inside”.

    St Maximos the Confessor (about the year 600 AD) explained this; much of it is beyond me, but much of it makes a great deal of sense.

    Dana

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  50. I, too, think this is the money line:

    “…what you believe it means that human words are God’s words and how it all works.”

    This is the bottom line: We have had to use human words to convey God’s Word (being His actual words and also the Word being Jesus). They will never work fully to convey absolute truth. They will always be a bit askew, a bit like looking through a glass dimly, just a shadow of what’s real above us.

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  51. –> “There is a lot I want my kids to understand about the Bible.”

    All I’m hoping my daughter gets out of it is:

    Grace and Love, Grace and Love, Grace and Love.

    If she comes away living the Bible out that way, we’ve succeeded.

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  52. –> “You rely on the expertise of others unless you are willing to attain the expertise yourself. But it does require expertise.”

    It’s like trying to talk knowledgeably about Lord of the Rings/Middle Earth with someone who has read The Silmarillion a million times. Eventually, unless you’ve also read it a million times, you just say, “I’ll trust you that that’s the way it is.”

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  54. –> “I don’t get too caught up in all the old earth, young earth debates, but I don’t want my children being forced into the false dichotomy that they either have to believe in a young earth or reject all of Scripture.”

    I don’t either, but I do cringe whenever I hear someone spouting YEC opinions as if they are TRUTH.

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  55. Yes. Some ages get the “you’re ready to hear the full answer” and other ages get “babies come from mommy’s tummy.”

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  56. Hi, Seneca! I have a serious question for you as well, which is a slight extension of your question.

    At what point was God involved YOUR creation?

    (If you give this serious thought, your mind will be blown.)

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  57. +1. This alone is brilliant…

    “Eve without guidance from her elder Adam was deceived, and then taught Adam to do the same and Adam was then deceived also: the pupil should therefore listen to the teacher or be deceived herself, and not purport to teach the teacher and deceive him also. It’s not about men in general being senior to women in general, that I can see.”

    Iain for President. Or at least, Ruler of the Internet for a Day!

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  58. Not only that, I understand Genesis 1 is structured as a parody of the Babylonian Creation Myth. As it reached its final form when the Jews were forcibly displaced to Babylon (probably having to reconstruct their Old Stories from memory), that would have been the Creation Myth that “everybody knows”. So Gen 1 takes the structure of that myth and turns it upside down.

    Now THAT’s actually more impressive than “GAWD Saith Word-for-Word”. And meshes with the “one-eighty twist endings” to “what everybody knows” of The Prodigal Son and the Romans 1-2 Decline Narrative.

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  59. More like grants wishes to those who are Absolutely Utterly LOYAL.
    LOYAL above and beyond the constant “Two Plus Two Equals Five” Loyalty Tests.
    (Yet another reason why three out of four of them mistake Donald Trump for Jesus Christ and Q-Anon for Inerrant Scripture.)

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  60. “I think it’s best to think of the Bible as a human attempt to comprehend the relationship between the human and the divine filtered through a particular cultural and social matrix.”
    I love this explanation!
    Somewhere along the way, American Christianity seems to have lost any sense of the divine beyond seeing it as a cosmic Santa that grants wishes to those who listen sufficiently and correctly. Comprehension of the divine becomes a kind of purity test (which currently seems to be how you vote and if you wear a mask) that gets you goodies if you understand it right. If you don’t do it right, you are a loser and your problems in life are your own fault.

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  61. At this juncture my children’s negligence of the Bible is more troubling to me than their misunderstanding it. They are uninterested in it from just about every angle. They reject it as a source of knowledge about God, preferring the dorm-room bullshit-session presumptions of their peers or the fifth hand deformations from those few pop-culture sources that still reference it, such as Supernatural or Lucifer.

    They sneer at it as a guide for behavior, having heard somewhere that it is a relic of a long-dead patriarchal culture that has nothing to say to a egalitarian, self-identifying Brave New World. Except where it has a rough correspondence with the platform of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, In those places it recovers something of its lost moral authority.

    As literature it is less engaging than other works of the same era, and it’s easier to watch the movie or the miniseries anyway.

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  62. There was one passage in an apologetics book by Peter Kreeft that came to my mind as I read this. The narrator (an obvious stand-in for the author) was on a Philosopher’s Quest and talking to various personifications of theological and philosophical schools. At one point he meets two men arguing – representatives of the schools of Transcendence and Immanence, “God is everywhere!” “No, He is Nowhere!” After listening to them argue for a bit, the narrator asks, “Why can’t He be both?” The two arguers stare at him for a second and then cry out in unison, “IMPOSSIBLE!” At which point the narrator basically says “Have fun, guys,” and moves on.

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  63. There is a lot I want my kids to understand about the Bible. High on the list is that I want them to correctly apply the concept of genre, not merely to the Bible as a whole but to the books individually, and in some cases the different parts of a book. Understand the genre conventions the writer was working within, and where he subverted them. This is a necessary condition to understanding what the author is trying to convey.

    Before anyone asks, the genre of the first chapter of Genesis is Ancient Near Eastern Creation Myth. The author subverts the conventions by inserting an obscure tribal god as the prime mover. Much of the confusion about it derives from the other Ancient Near Eastern Creation Myths being lost. Without these, the context was lost. Compare this with the Psalms, which are lyric poetry. The genre of lyric poetry was never lost, and indeed is going on strong today. This makes the Psalms much easier to understand, and we tend not to see “literalism” nonsense applied to them.

    One way to understand the division in the church today derives from the 19th century rediscovery of Ancient Near Eastern Creation Myths through the work of archaeologists. One faction embraced these rediscoveries as a tool to better understanding of scripture. The other faction did not.

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  64. In just about every Orthodox service I can think of, we invoke His “good and life-giving Spirit”, The Greek is more powerful – zo?poi? – ‘life-making’ or ‘life-fabricating’. We sometimes get the idea that God created the Cosmos in the same way a blacksmith makes a wagon wheel in his smithy, overlooking that He indwells and interpenetrates that which He is making. He is fully capable of creating ‘from the inside’, as it were.

    yeah, I know it sounds a lot like pantheism, but OK guilty as charged.

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  66. “Consequently when I went to school I had no problem with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton etc”

    Me too!

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  67. Looking back my hardcore fundamentalist upbringing had both good and bad aspects. Bad because I was taught a lot of silly things. Good because I was raised in one of the last few cultural bubbles where the “word” was important and I thoroughly imbibed King James English, the point where the English language was sparking all cylinders. (Consequently when I went to school I had no problem with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton etc ) All that is pretty much lost now since even the hardcore fundamentalists don’t use the KJV because nobody can read it. (Except for a fringe group of “KJV only” zanies but I suspect they can’t really read it either. They just quote it.)

    I think it’s best to think of the Bible as a human attempt to comprehend the relationship between the human and the divine filtered through a particular cultural and social matrix. In one sense you read it like any other ancient literature. You rely on the expertise of others unless you are willing to attain the expertise yourself. But it does require expertise.

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  69. A big Amen Mike! Jesus spoke “with authority”, unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees. That’s because he was ‘author’ing as he spoke. Authority is the power to create. The scriptures to Jesus were a living breathing word that he rightly divided. They were a life creating tool. Spermatic if you will. Seeds of life. When he spoke, life happened. Literalism finally ends in a stale cycle of tedium. Once you’ve heard it for the 1400th time, or so, boredom sets in. Not so with the living word. It forever has the capacity to put us on the edge of our seat. There are no spoiler alerts because the end of that movie never arrives. The only caveat is that the ticket price for hearing that living dialogue and seeing that vision is steep. Very steep. The purchase price is of course the cross and our willingness to pick it up daily. No two of us hear or see that communication in precisely the same way. Some may have actual visions and so forth and there is no quantifying it or ordering it. Mother Theresa spent decades not seeing or hearing anything but it would be difficult to conceive of her as not in the living flow. There are difficulties and mysteries and the weakness of the human condition but a continuously opening heart will arrive at life. Jesus guaranteed it: “Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.” We are co-authors of the faith. We don’t need to change the scriptures to do that. We learn some and live some. Learn a little, live a little. Eventually we live and breathe Christ and that makes their meaning apparent, with authority!

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  70. A big Amen Mike! Jesus spoke “with authority”, unlike the Pharisees and Sadducees. That’s because he was ‘author’ing as he spoke. Authority is the power to create. The scriptures to Jesus were a living breathing word that he rightly divided. They were a life creating tool. Spermatic if you will. Seeds of life. When he spoke, life happened. Literalism finally ends in a stale cycle of tedium. Once you’ve heard it for the 1400th time, or so, boredom sets in. Not so with the living word. It forever has the capacity to put us on the edge of our seat. There are no spoiler alerts because the end of that movie never arrives. The only caveat is that the ticket price for hearing that living dialogue and seeing that vision is steep. Very steep. The purchase price is of course the cross and our willingness to pick it up daily. No two of us hear or see that communication in precisely the same way. Some may have actual visions and so forth and there is no quantifying it or ordering it. Mother Theresa spent decades not seeing or hearing anything but it would be difficult to conceive of her as not in the living flow. There are difficulties and mysteries and the weakness of the human condition but a continuously opening heart will arrive at life. Jesus guaranteed it: “Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.” We are co-authors of the faith. We don’t need to change the scriptures to do that. We learn some and live some. Learn a little, live a little. Eventually we live and breathe Christ and that makes their meaning apparent, with authority.

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  71. I want my children to view the Bible as the word of God. Does that mean I want them to use it as a science text book? No. But I do want them to view it as the truth in what it teaches us about God, the nature of mankind, our need for salvation, the good news about Jesus Christ, how God calls us to live, etc. I don’t get too caught up in all the old earth, young earth debates, but I don’t want my children being forced into the false dichotomy that they either have to believe in a young earth or reject all of Scripture.

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  72. Very good, and spot on. An analogy I like to use is this. I have a good friend who is a physician. He doesn’t talk down to his patients but is very thorough and assumes they can follow him, even in technical details. If I ask him ‘where do babies come from’, he will give me a 15-minute technically-correct medical explanation of the process of fertilization, growth of the embryo, etc. But, if my 5-year-old granddaughter asked him that same question, he would probably say something like ‘when a mommy and daddy love each other very much . . .’ That’s what the Bible is like – God is explaining ‘creation’ (not the event, the universe) to a 5-year-old (scientifically speaking), and trying to relate larger ideas in the context of their limited understanding of that ‘creation’.

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  73. At all points. And He still is involved and always will continue to be. Naturalistic explanations are simply the details of how, not the reason why.

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  76. Geo Mike, a serious question: At what point is God involved in creation? Did He have a hand in it starting or like the evolutionist, God was not required for it to start. What are you beliefs here?

    I’m quite interested in what YOU believe was God’s part in creation.

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  77. Literalists don’t actually exist, though plenty of people who believe they are “literalists” do. Unless “….we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of” believing that literalism is possible, we eventually end up with phenomena like QAnon; I don’t have children, but ending up with QAnon and its ilk is bad for the entire human race and all its descendants.

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  78. Very informative MikeM. Thank you very much.

    As a 12x grandfather I’ve come to dislike children’s bible storybooks. I’m thinking that children/grand children would be better served by listening to bible stories as told by their parents or grandparents. Reading and listen are two different activities where the brain processes information differently. Children, especially preschool kids are naturally wired to the auditory process. And, how much worse could the parents versions of the stories be than the storybooks??

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  80. Funnily enough, the NIV here has actually distorted the text of Acts 17:26 here to make it about a literal Adam when it isn’t. The Greek says “out of *one* he made every nation to inhabit the whole earth” – Paul is saying merely that all the nations of the earth have the same origin, he is saying nothing about a literal Adam.
    I second the understanding of 1 Timothy 2:13, although I think it unnecessarily general. It’s a passage specifically about women being taught the faith, and it endorses them learning (which was counter-cultural) but (for reasons that may be related to those on the article) cautions a women to listen to her teacher and against her purporting to start teaching the class and taking over from / usurping the man. (This is often mistranslated as “exercise authority over” the man but it really means “seize”,”usurp” or “take over”). I think Paul is using the Adam and Eve story to illustrate this specific point by casting the new pupil in the Eve role and her teacher in the Adam, which is why he is emphasising that Adam was created first. Eve without guidance from her elder Adam was deceived, and then taught Adam to do the same and Adam was then deceived also: the pupil should therefore listen to the teacher or be deceived herself, and not purport to teach the teacher and deceive him also. It’s not about men in general being senior to women in general, that I can see.
    NB The NIV – and others – also re-write verse 15 to make it say that women generally will somehow be saved through / by childbearing, when in fact it says that “she” (singular), I.e. Eve, will be saved by bearing children if “they” (plural) I.e. the children of Eve, remain in faith, love, sobriety etc. The point of the verse seems to be a restatement of Paul’s general theology that Christ now was enabling through the believers (all of whom were Eve’s children, who was the mother of all mankind) the reversal and redemption of the fall then.

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