The Stranger Pilgrim

I Don't Know

2010-08-17T00:24:20Z

While studying 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12, I read:

And thus we who have not their knowledge wish and are not able even with pains to understand what the apostle referred to, especially as his meaning is made still more obscure by what he adds. For what does he mean by “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now holdeth, let him hold until he be taken out of the way: and then shall the wicked be revealed?” I frankly confess I do not know what he means. I will nevertheless mention such conjectures as I have heard or read. — Saint Augustine, The City of God, XX 19

“I don’t know” is the second hardest three-word phrase to utter in English. (For some, the first is “I love you”; for others, “I need help”.) I frankly confess that I don’t know what Paul is on about sometimes, but I see that I am in good company.

Someday we will know, but for now we peer through an unwashed window (1 Cor 13:12). In the meantime, it is good to admit when we are simply passing along such conjectures as we have heard or read.

Take it Seriously

2010-07-31T00:47:48Z

I’m not stalking John Hobbins (don’t mind me, I’ll just wait here in the bushes while you finish eating dinner), but:

Rather, ancient texts, including the Bible, are “right” almost by definition, so long as we interpret them in accordance with the genre expectations, sociolinguistic register, and rhetorical strategy they instantiate. To be sure, it’s always possible to quarrel with the ultimate truth claims of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Bible, and the Aeneid. If you quarrel with one, you will probably quarrel with all the others. The alternative: take them all seriously, on the model of Amos 9:7. — Mr. Hobbins, ”The Amarna Tablets and Jerusalem Tablet 1 are Right After All”

I concur, as I wrote previously about finding difficulties in the text:

As an exegete, you have three choices: Ignore it, explain it away, or deal honestly with it. I choose the third path, but I don’t worry about it much. They knew what they knew then, and we know what we know now. And it’s okay for them to have been [“]wrong[“] at the time. We’re probably wrong now, too. — Me, ”Further to Ancient Science”

The take-home idea? Deal honestly with the text. Take it seriously.

Don’t overthink. Just read. Read as much of the text in as many versions as you can. Don’t pull up a dictionary or commentary until after you’ve done your reading.

Suspend disbelief. If it is a narrative, take everything it says at face value. Imagine every event the text purports exactly as the text purports it, nearest you can tell.

Be generous. If it is rhetoric, try your best to understand what the author is saying and if you can’t, give them the benefit of the doubt. If there is an argument put forth, grant it. If a poem, see/touch/taste/feel it right to your bones. If it is philosophy, ignore your own metanarrative while you adopt the one espoused by the text. Assimilate it later; for now, just absorb.

Prepare to be wrong. It’s inevitable. Humble yourself, and read timorously. You cannot resolve every difficulty, but you can learn from the inability nevertheless.

Enjoy. The Bible is a story, and a darn good one. It even has a happy ending!

Play the skeptic some other time; check the text critically against other texts or against what you know (or think you know) about the world at large as you understand it. In the meantime, take it seriously, by which I mean naively, with the kind of doe-eyed credulity described in Matt 18:3-4.

That Crazy Chronicler

2010-07-17T00:48:23Z

Bible Study Magazine has published the first “Bible as Art” article by yours truly, under the title “Crazy Chronicler.”

It’s been said that the books of the Chronicles are painful to read. So many lists and genealogies! So many speeches! Compare Chronicles to Samuel and Kings — real page-turners both — and you may be tempted to conclude that the Chronicler is lazy, stupid, or insane. (Worse, you may tie yourself in knots trying to harmonize the accounts.)

He is none of those things, and more: He is an author, and like any author, he has a peculiar point of view which compels him to tell his story in a peculiar way. Skim if you must, but he finds the lists and genealogies especially meaningful. Go ahead, roll your eyes, but he finds David’s adultery and Solomon’s idolatry not worth including. Beside the point. Beside his point.

Then there are the theo-political embellishments: Compare 1 Kings 14:21–31 with 2 Chronicles 12:2–15 and you will find that the Chronicler’s version of Pharaoh Shishak’s invasion is embroidered with all manner of extra detail. Why?

For one thing, the Chronicler tells his story from a Judah-centric point of view. But more importantly, it is his theological bent that gives his viewpoint that delightfully cockeyed slant. He looks back on history and sees everything fitting into place: When the king and/or the people are faithful, it is the best of times, and when they are unfaithful, it is the worst. Schema in hand, he omits, changes, or embellishes the details to fit the template. Does this make him a liar and a scoundrel? Is his theological “spin” an inexcusable distortion of the facts?

Well: He reports, you decide.

Subscribe to Bible Study Magazine today to read this and many other fine articles.

The Stories We Tell

2010-07-17T00:47:37Z

Narratives are memories of things that may never have happened but are nevertheless true. They are the human way to make sense of a senseless world, to give meaning to meaningless events, to fill in where cold reality would otherwise leave us blank.

Think back on your last failed relationship. With the perspective granted only by hindsight, you have constructed yourself a narrative that arranges events in a reasonable procession: You did this, your partner did that, you did this in response. You had your reasons, they had theirs. The story has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it has a background, a setting, a conflict, complications, and a denouement. No, it wasn’t like that at all, not at the time. Each event in situ was a perfect mystery, fraught with unknown motivations and unknowable consequences. You didn’t know exactly why you said what you said, or did what you did, never mind what they said or did. Yes, you were there, and you saw — through the keyhole of each moment as it happened.

That is, until the narrative came along.

He said, she said. Your version of events is different from that of The Other. Perhaps you were virtuous and they were wicked. Perhaps not, or both, or neither. Nevertheless, your narrative proceeds from your viewpoint, and not from theirs. Likewise, their narrative belongs to them and not to you. Each version is simultaneously at odds with and in support of the other, close but far away, like braneworld universes, lying practically atop one another, but unable to touch. Each is true, allowing that Truth may swim in the muddy waters of our own subjective experience — as we must. (The knot cannot be so easily unraveled.)

Not all narratives are memories. Some are prototypes, templates that govern our actions and drive our expectations. Think about going to the doctor: You have a malady, you decide to act, you make the appointment, you feel a certain way about it, you show up, you go to the desk, you fill out whatever they ask you to, you read the magazines, you go behind the counter, you are led to a room, you disrobe, a nurse takes your temperature, pulse, and blood pressure (not necessarily in that order), you see the doctor, you explain your distress, he nods sympathetically and writes on his clipboard, a diagnosis is made, he prescribes a cure, you thank the doctor, he leaves, you re-robe and re-orientate yourself, you take a wrong turn on the way back out, you take your slip to the front desk, you make another appointment (sometimes), and finally you drive home and enter another template — eating dinner, or perhaps playing with the kids. This is not the narrative of an event; rather, it is the aggregate of many such events, distilled down to their core sequence. You may never have a doctor’s visit that follows the template exactly; nevertheless, this is the template. (Yours must look different, because it is yours, not mine.)

And then there are the meta-narratives, the structure that overarches all the other narratives in our lives and makes sense of them. Do you believe the world was created by a loving God who is grieved by human wickedness and who nevertheless sent his Son — himself — to atone for that wickedness and provide you (even you!) a path to reconciliation? Then your meta-narrative is a Christian one. Do you believe the world at this moment is the last in a long chain of arbitrary events, each of which was necessitated by physics and not by will? Then your meta-narrative is pointless and sad, an undifferentiated journey along the cline of meaningless existence and meaningless non-existence. Enjoy!

Some narratives, like these, are never written down. They are woven into the fabric of our world view and then forgotten, silently overwriting the foggy facticiousness of memory with the crisp gestalt of a good story. What choice do we have? Otherwise, none of it would make any sense.

But some narratives are written down. They are woven into our world view, but not silent. If memories and scripts and meta-narratives are liable to evolve, written records are not (so much). Does that make them superior? No, only more stable.

So what?

History, in the naïve sense of a purely factual narrative, is impossible. Reality is not subject to forms, but narratives (historical or not) are. Once events and personages slide down the dark corridors of time, they are no longer accessible; only their narratives remain, like the glowing after-images seen with just-closed eyes on a sunny day. Not the thing, but its ghost. Ceci n’est pas Napoleon.

So: Is the Bible “historical” or not? I answer with a question: Is your memory of your own childhood “historical”? You were there; surely you know all the facts, just as they were! If we hold the biblical narratives to an impossible standard, we lie to ourselves about our ability to discern the difference between what was and what we think was. In so doing, we condemn ourselves, not it.

So what?

The Bible is a narrative, and as such, it is the memory of things which may or may not have happened but are nevertheless true. Let me capitalize that for all the postmodernists in the house: True. And it is: Truer than any memory you’ve ever had. Otherwise, nothing makes any sense.

A Brave New World

2010-07-08T23:19:58Z

Common sense notwithstanding, I’ve been given a regular column at Bible Study Magazine. After writing several “Biblical Humor” columns there, it was decided that I would be better suited to write about narrative mechanics, biblical poetics, and literary features — in short, the craftsmanship of the biblical texts.

The column runs under the heading “The Bible as Art” and will makes its debut in the July-August 2010 issue. I hope you will read it. If you do, I hope you are not too much offended. If you are, I hope it will at least make you think.

What? You haven’t got a subscription to Bible Study Magazine yet? How do you sleep at night? Go, now, while you still have time! It will be the best $15 you’ve ever spent.

Inviting Jesus In?

2010-04-30T01:24:13Z

I invited Jesus to come into my heart. That may succeed as a marketing slogan or it may not, but as a theological formula it is wondrously beggared.

I — Yes, it’s all about me! I did it, all by myself. I am, after all, the center of the universe. It is my glory that illuminates the cosmos, you see. Malarkey! It is he who saved me, not I who saved myself. Never mind if free will is real or an illusion, I know I just didn’t do it. Couldn’t have. Wouldn’t have if I could.

invited — I, in my infinite grace and magnanimity, invited him. I am host, and he is guest. He visits my kingdom. Sits at my banquet. Hogswallop! I have no property to share, no prerogative to exercise, no hospitality to extend. I need Christ infinitely more than he needs me. My righteousness is like filthy rags. His is like a pearl of great price.

Jesus to come — If countless kitschy caricatures are to be believed, then Jesus is still in this world, and I can invite him over for a beer. Balderdash! Jesus remains where he is, ascended into heaven. We move closer or farther away from salvation in relation to him. We cannot move him; he moves us. Besides, the God who is in the world now is the Holy Spirit. Remember him?

into my heart — I am apparently so large that even my heart is the size of a house in comparison to him! Mini-Jesus stands outside, begging to be let in. Pibbledyswicket! Indeed, Jesus does “stand at the door and knock” (Rev 3:20) — at the door of the lukewarm church whose members believe they have need of nothing because they are rich. (Draw your own parallels to the American church which popularized the phrase.)

Just this: I never invited Jesus into my heart, as if I could. He invited me into his. Dragged me kicking and screaming, even. (John 6:44) I am the servant, and he is the master. I don’t move him, he moves me. My blood never saved anyone, nor is my image anything worth conforming to. It’s not all about what I did to stuff and squeeze him into my tiny little black and sinful heart, but what he did to himself on my behalf that allowed me to enter into his rest.

Yes, he did come “in the form of a slave” (Php 2:7), “not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45). Mind-boggling, that. But these days he is seated at the right hand of the Father, reigning in glory. Which is his rightful spot, and my point.

Treasure in Earthen Vessels

2010-04-15T00:34:27Z

I concur:

“[A]s a happy-go-lucky inerrantist, I consider the entire Bible to be treasure in earthen vessels. Qohelet for sure. He’s a cranky old coot who has every reason to give up on believing in a God of justice but never does. I can’t imagine the canon without Qohelet. I can’t imagine the canon without texts like Psalm 137. If the Bible left out the human cry for vengeance, if God was not a God of vengeance, but the passive and impassive God of Aristotle, I could not possibly believe in him. If God is actually the God of the philosophers rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then it is not the case that God made us in his image, and the entire conceptual framework of Judaism and Christianity falls to the ground.”

— John F. Hobbins in a post on his blog, Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Indeed: The God of the Bible is rough around the edges. He is warrior, physician, conqueror, peace-mongerer, creator, destroyer, master, and lover. And more.

The Bible of this God is similarly rough around the edges. It is epic, history, propaganda, ethics, story, rhetoric, poetry, lambaste, rant, and romance. And more.

If the Bible really were the sterile and prissy manual of the button-down church, or a technical treatise on how the world works and how humans ought to behave, or a dry recounting of historical facts, I could not possibly love it so. Give me Mark, with his inscrutable ellipses and John with his sophisticated thought couched in simplistic language; give me Ezekiel, brash, weird, and lewd; give me the entire psalter, even Psalm 88 and 29; give me the wonderful patchwork quilt that is Pentateuch, seams and all; give me the Chronicler, with his theological and political axes to grind. And yes, give me Qohelet, that “cranky old coot” of Ecclesiastes who goes by the epithet “Preacher.” I do love him so, just as he is, not as he “ought” to be.

The Bible is not a theological manual, though it contains theology. It is not a manual of personal ethics, though it contains that, too. Neither is it a rulebook, science book, or history book — though it contains (transcends!) all of those as well.

It’s a story. A story of a loving/hating forgiving/punishing creating/destroying God with all the vexing complexities that you would expect of a living Person, who made all manner of things (including you and I) that need not have been made, for his own use and pleasure, for his own reasons and toward his own ends, employing means and instruments only partially disclosed, for purposes only he may fully understand.

At the crux of that story is an Event. And standing at both ends — let us say, at positions alpha and omega — a person. (Have you guessed it yet?)

Overheard

2009-07-07T02:18:24Z

“If God wants to lay a mystical egg on my head, that’s fine, but I don’t want anyone else doing it!”

“Why is it that scholars always want to extrapolate from the obvious to the unnecessary?”

Michael Heiser, that’s who. His desk sits about fifteen feet of open air away from mine. Like the rest of us, he spends most of his time diligently working on the various products and services that our employer provides. [Stating the obvious: My employer pays me to do a job, and this isn’t part of it. My idiocy here should in no way reflect on them.] But every now and then I overhear bits of conversation, and I have to tell you: That Dr. Mike can be a pretty witty fellow.

If you’re not reading one of his many blogs, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

The Tyranny of False Choices

2009-01-24T23:58:04Z

Not long ago I overheard someone say, “Which do you think is the right view of the crucifixion? Substitutionary atonement or christus victor?”

I wasn’t party to the conversation, but I piped up anyway, “Why does it have to be either-or? Why can’t it be both-and? Why couldn’t Jesus have had multiple objectives to accomplish, and why can’t he have accomplished them all? Why can’t a myriad consequences proceed from that single act?”

Begging the question, to be certain. Yet: Which do you think is the right view of my going to the store yesterday? Hunger or boredom? Yes and yes. In going to the store I gave myself something to do, as a consequence of which I was no longer bored. I also assembled the materials to fix myself dinner, a necessary (but not sufficient) condition to overcoming my hunger, nourishing my body, adding enjoyment to my life, relishing God’s creation and providence.

A silly example? Perhaps. But even simple actions may have complex motivations and many levels of consequence. Imagine how complex the motivations and consequences might be for something as monumental as the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ!

Did Christ die to cover the sins of the elect? to break the power of sin and death? to pay the just penalty of the law? to bring many sons to glory? to earn a most excellent name? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All that and more.

Christ, no more or less than the Father, is a person, and as such his intentions, motives, and desires can be many and overlapping. Why must we choose among them? Why does it have to be either-or?

I blame Aristotle, or someone very much like him. When it was decided that a thing cannot be simultaneously one thing and its opposite, the western world was set on a particular path: If you find two truths to be contradictory in any way, you must choose among them.

Logic and reason are fine as far as they go. Damn useful, even. But logic will betray you at several spots.

For one thing, false premises lead inexorably to false conclusions. Reason is a ledger that once unbalanced remains unbalanced. The only way to avoid this trap is to ensure that all your premises are flawless, that all your assumptions are true. Good luck with that.

For another thing, “true” and “false” are discrete categories in a gradient world. (I will discuss this in more detail later under the rubric of postmodernism.)

Finally, experience routinely teaches us that “A is not A”. For just one example, take the “love/hate relationship.” Is it that sometimes you hate the thing, and other times you love it? That you vacillate between two discrete states? Rather, don’t you sometimes do both at the same time? It may not make sense, but it is nevertheless true. Does your experience therefore run counter to your assumptions about reason?

The Bible, as it happens, plays by different rules. It is not so much illogical as it is un-logical. Para-logical, perhaps. The methodologies of Reason are not so much violated by the biblical authors as ignored. Unknown, and beside the point in any event.

Take a simple example:

4 Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. 5 Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.

— Proverbs 26:4-5 (NIV)

These verses are taken by some to be evidence of “contradictions” in the Bible: Not only is the Bible sometimes erroneous in its claims about the natural world, they say, it isn’t even coherent. Look, it teaches that “A is not-A” all the time!

But Proverbs 26:4-5 stands in a tradition of wisdom that is different from — you might even say incompatable with — Aristotelian logic. Holding two opposing truths, considering how they are and are not opposite, compatible, or mutually exclusive, is a kind of contemplation that is encouraged by the Bible in various places.

Christ is fully God and fully man. At the same time. God is one, but he is three. At the same time. Salvation is by faith, and faith is by works, but salvation is not by works, lest any should boast. At the same time. Ponder these imponderables and you are off the path of reason, but heading toward wisdom.

Compare Romans 4:2-3 and James 2:20-24. Abraham is either justified by his works or by his faith, two mutually exclusive possibilities. Each author explicitly affirms one possibility and rejects the other. Paul teaches it one way in Romans (Abraham justified by faith, not works) and James has it the opposite way in his letter (by works, which are faith). Not only are these two premises baldly contradictory, they use the same verse from the Torah as support! It won’t do to say that Paul is talking about one thing and James another. It won’t do to subsume Paul’s point under James’ or (as is more usually the case) James’ under Paul’s.

(That was Luther’s solution, famously wishing James’ “epistle of straw” had not been written.)

Rather, consider them both. Imagine they are both true, both manifestly the case: We are saved by faith alone, a free gift of grace from God, not based on our works. Nevertheless, we are saved by our works, which manifest our faith.

You can’t have it both ways, they say. Yes you can. If you claim to be a biblical theologist, you must. Any doctrine of salvation that does not account for both Paul and James (never mind Jesus!) is incomplete. Besides, even a “Pauline” doctrine of salvation must account for Paul having it both ways as well, as in Philippians 2:12-13:

12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (ESV)

Well, which is it? God’s sovereignty or man’s free-will? Both. Scripture has it both ways so we ought to as well: Save yourself through works because God works to save you. Does that make any sense? By Aristotelian standards of reasoning, perhaps not. But by the standards of wisdom put forward by the Bible, yes and yes. And yes again.

Just this: Next time you find yourself reaching for “either-or”, ask yourself if it couldn’t be “both-and” instead.

Further to Ancient Science

2009-01-20T02:33:16Z

My colleague Rick Brannan of ricoblog fame has found some rather curious science in the Epistle of Barnabas. Do check it out.

Never mind the plainly silly science, the exegetical method the author of EpBarn is using here is creative, to say the least. Of all the lines of reasoning I can think of not to be a pederast, this wasn’t one I thought of:

A — The Mosaic law declares certain kinds of hares to be unclean.

B — Hares grow a new posterior opening to the alimentary canal each year.

Therefore — A means, “Don’t (ahem) mess around with young boys.”

Clearly, when we read ancient texts, we are dealing with with a world view in most ways foreign to our own. Our assumptions concerning many facts about the natural world are different, and when that happens, the ancient folks are usually just wrong. Hares do no such thing. The causes of disease, the mechanisms of fecundity in mammals, the function of organs in the human body, the nature and composition of the stars and planets: Our assumptions now are fundamentally different from theirs then.

They knew what they knew then, and we know what we know now. So what?

There is an understandable impulse in believers to exempt the Bible from this phenomenon, along these lines:

A — God knows everything;

B — God wrote the Bible;

Therefore — The Bible doesn’t have any of these weird science moments.

I disagree:

Premise A — God may know everything but I certainly don’t, never mind the backward folk who have read the book throughout the centuries. It does not follow that God, when communicating his message to humankind, must freight it with facts that cannot possibly be understood by his audience. Sacrificing the comprehensibility of your message in favor of technical precision is a rather perverse way to communicate, and I tend to think of God as something other than perverse. To the contrary, he seems genuinely to want to get his message across.

Premise B — God didn’t “write” the Bible. He inspired human beings to write it. This is not the post in which I will wade into that particular patch of tall grass, but suffice it to say that this premise is an oversimplification.

Conclusion — Sorry, no. The Bible has plenty of bad science. For just one example, rain does not come from sluices opened in the firmament (Gen 7:11). Such plainly false assumptions about the world and its workings underpin both the imagery and argumentation of the biblical text.

There, I said it: Plainly false.

As an exegete, you have three choices: Ignore it, explain it away, or deal honestly with it. I choose the third path, but I don’t worry about it much. They knew what they knew then, and we know what we know now. And it’s okay for them to have been wrong at the time. We’re probably wrong now, too.

A Timorous Method

2009-01-10T23:52:53Z

I’ve just begun reading Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, where he writes:

The characters of nature are legible, it is true; but they are not plain enough to enable those who run to read them. We must make use of a cautious, I had almost said, a timorous method of proceeding. We must not attempt to fly, when we can scarcely pretend to creep. In considering any complex matter, we ought to examine every distinct ingredient in the composition, one by one, and reduce every thing to the utmost simplicity, since the condition of our nature binds us to a strict law and very narrow limits. We ought afterward to re-examine the principles by the effect of the composition, as well as the composition by that of the principles. We ought to compare our subject with things of a similar nature, and even with things of a contrary nature; for discoveries may be, and often are, made by the contrast, which would escape us on the single view. The greater number of the comparisons we make, the more general and the more certain our knowledge is likely to prove, as built upon a more extensive and perfect induction.

If an inquiry thus carefully conducted should fail at last of discovering the truth, it may answer an end, perhaps, as useful, in discovering to us the weakness of our own understanding. If it does not make us knowing, it may make us modest. If it does not preserve us from error, it may, at least, from the spirit of error; and may make us cautious of pronouncing with positiveness or with haste, when so much labour may end in so much uncertainty.

— “Preface”, p vi

Seems that a “hermeneutic of humility” would look very much like this, don’t you think? And in all our efforts of reading and interpreting something as complex as Scripture, we ought to be willing to let our failure to fully understand at least answer a useful end: to make us modest.

And further, I am reminded of Php 2:12-13, Prov 11:2, and Ec 12:11-12.

Science is not Truth

2009-01-10T23:27:59Z

Though many believe it so, it ain’t.

To say that science and truth are one and the same is to propose that the truth changes over time: that 120 years ago space was truly filled with a luminiferous ether that suspended the stars and planets in a fluid gel; that 500 or so years ago the planets in fact revolved around the earth; 1,000 years ago that disease was in reality caused by the imbalance of bodily fluids. Or offensive smells. Or evil spirits.

But wait! you say: Just because people were wrong back then doesn’t mean that underlying reality was different. They were just wrong.

Precisely.

Science does not proscribe truth. Rather, it is a strategy for coping with the limits of our faculties and a method for expanding upon what knowledge we can acquire. As such, the Bible is a scientific book. It is just that its science is a pre-Enlightenment one.

Go back 2,000 years ago and you will find that intelligent people believed all manner of glumdiggle about the composition and mechanics of the natural world, some of which forms the underpinnings of the world view of the biblical authors, and some of which makes it into the pages of the biblical texts.

But let us be fair: What we find in the Bible that we now consider jabberwocky was, in its day, cutting-edge. It was “known” to be “true” by learned and respectable men and women everywhere.

It’s downright uncharitable to hold Moses and his ilk guilty for being innocent of, for instance, the wave-particle duality of light, just as we hope that future generations will not ridicule us too much for believing such obvious (from their point of view) hogswallop today.

Imagine that Genesis began this way:

In the beginning, all matter and energy, as well as time and space, were compressed down into a single point. Something (let’s call it “God”) caused the point to explode into a million billion trillion quinta-gazillion stars and galaxies.

I barely understood that paragraph, and I wrote it. How could we expect an ancient Israelite to? Besides, within a generation or two that theory of cosmic origins, popularly known as “The Big Bang,” will no doubt be considered shamefully foolish. Superstitious, even.

Just this: Reality doesn’t (necessarily) change over time, but our models of it certainly do. And that is what the Bible gives us: a model of reality from a particular time and place. And that is precisely all that science gives us.

Models come and models go, but the newest models are not always the most useful. For example, nowadays it is held that the Bohr model of the atom Just Ain’t So. Nevertheless, it is indispensable to the task of stoichiometry. One must suspend disbelief long enough to use a model that is known to have little or no correspondence with nature in order to do something useful: Balance an equation so you can mix chemical A and chemical B without blowing your fingers off. For that particular task, a more accurate model of the atom is not only unnecessary, it’s downright unhelpful because it’s beside the point: Dr. Heisenberg would be well-advised to stand by and keep his opinions to himself while I determine precisely how much sulphuric acid to pour into this flask.

As stoichiometry, so hermeneutics: A more accurate understanding of the cosmos is not only unnecessary to understanding, say, the message of the Psalms, it is downright unhelpful because it is beside the point. Theories of interpretation that pound the square pegs of scripture into the round holes of scholastic and post-Enlightenment philosophy take an already brackish pond and muddy it further.

On the one hand,

Science thrives on open questions. So does faith rightly understood. Both are journeys into the unknown with the lightest of equipment: a metanarrative or mathematical formula for a compass, and a few fixed reference points on a map that may, who knows, be turned upside down.

— John F. Hobbins, ”Psalm 8: The Common Epistemology of Faith and Science”

On the other,

People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations.... For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations.... You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that.

— G.F.R. Ellis in W. Wayt Gibbs, “Profile: George F. R. Ellis,” Scientific American, October 1995, Vol. 273, No.4, p. 55.

I conclude that humility is always a good idea.

A Stone Too Heavy

2009-01-10T02:11:19Z

I for one am done with the philosopher’s God. I do not worship Reason or Reason’s God, nor the Unmoved Mover, nor the Greatest Thing Conceivable, nor the Universal Principle, nor the Great Watchmaker in the Sky. My God is none of that and more: He is a being with a real personality, who can move and be moved. He can be grieved (Eph 4:30), he can weep (Jn 11:35), and he can see good in all he has made (Gen 1:31).

He is not an abstract principle, nor a set of propositions. He is not “A or Not A”; he is Alpha and Omega (Rev 1:8, 21:6, 22:13). He is capable of both thought and emotion. As a personality, he is in no way impoverished or constrained.

In short, he is a living God, wishing to be known rather than arrived at. Knowing someone requires a certain amount of risk to be assumed by both parties, and knowing God is no different: He is both dangerous and kind; unpredictable yet trustworthy; brutally just and infinitely merciful; the author of truth and wisdom, but still able to spin a great yarn.

He is not a tame lion.

(And yet the real risk in the relationship is assumed by God. Why? Because he has never failed to hold up his end of the bargain with his human children, but we, individually and corporately, betray him again and again.)

If God exists, he does so whether or not you or I can come up with a logical proof that says he must. In the meantime, he extends his hand and entreats us to turn from our wicked ways and be reconciled to him (Ezekiel 18:32). Paradoxes? Proofs? Those are a stone too heavy for me to swallow.

A Stranger Pilgrim, Indeed

2009-01-09T09:42:06Z

I have long wished to be one of those luminaries in the starry host that is biblioblogdom. The time is finally coming, and now is.

I’m Eli Evans, I’m a real person, I live in Washington state, I am a Bible-believing follower of Christ, and I don’t have any qualifications whatsoever. I intend here to write about the things that are most important to me. This is mostly just me talking to myself, but you’re welcome to listen in.

Why “Stranger Pilgrim”? I take Genesis 23:4, Hebrews 11:13, and 1 Peter 2:11 as inspiration. I’m a stranger and a pilgrim in the earth, just passing through, a citizen of a “better country” (Hebrews 11:16). That, and I may just be stranger than the average pilgrim. You’ll have to be the judge of that.

Shalom!