That may seem strange. Many people wouldn’t start with the Bible when talking about a scientific theory. But I’m a theologian, and I take the Bible with utmost seriousness. Talking about the Bible is a natural place for me to begin, both because the Bible was principally important in my youth, and because it remains so for me today.

I don’t mean to snub science. Science is important too. I read a lot in the sciences, and I think the evidence supporting the theory of evolution is strong. I try to take this and other evidence with great seriousness.

But the real story – for me – starts with the Bible.

Centrality of Scripture

Fortunately, my parents were committed Christians. Our family was one of those “attend-church-three-times-a-week-and-more” families. My parents were significant leaders in our local congregation, and I began following their footsteps early in life.

I doubt I missed more than a handful of Sunday school classes before I was twenty years old. And I always attended Vacation Bible School – even winning Bible memorizing competitions on occasion. (John 11:35 was my friend!) I participated on youth Bible quizzing team for a while too.

While growing up, I don’t recall anyone telling me that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. But my passion for Scripture and my Evangelical community inclined me toward that position. Scripture was central in my life.

Besides, I wanted a failsafe foundation for my beliefs. And how could I convince my Mormon friends to become Christians if the Bible was not true in every sense, including literally true about what it said about the natural world? Witnessing to God’s truth seemed to require that I believe the Bible was without error on all matters, including matters related to science.

An Inerrant Bible?

My view of the Bible began to change when I went to college. It wasn’t that a liberal Bible professor brainwashed me away from the positions of my youth. Instead, I started reading the Bible carefully and the work of biblical scholars. I began to think it important to love God with my mind in a more consistent way.

And then I took a class in koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. In this course, I discovered several things. First, we have differing English translations of the New Testament, because the biblical text allows for a number of valid translation options. (When I later took Hebrew class, I found the diversity of valid translations even greater!) Second, we do not have access to the original biblical manuscripts/autographs. Our Bibles come from later manuscripts, the earliest of which are not complete. And, third, the oldest texts we have differ in many ways – although most differences are minor.

I also discovered discrepancies in the Bible. For instance, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus curses a fig tree and it withers immediately (21:18-20). But in Mark’s version of the same story, the fig tree does not wither immediately and the disciples find it withered the next morning (11:12-14; 20-21). Mark says that Jesus heals one demon-possessed man at Gerasenes (5:1-20), while Matthew says there were two demon-possessed men involved in that same miracle (8:28-34). Jesus tells the disciples to take a staff on their journey as recorded in Mark 6:8, but Matthew says Jesus told the disciples not to take a staff (10:9-10). Jesus says Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly. Then, making an analogy with his own death, he says the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Mt 12:40). But Jesus was not dead three days and three nights!

I mention only a few of the many internal discrepancies. Once I discovered a few, I noticed more. This, of course, made me question whether I should say the Bible is inerrant in all ways.

What’s the Bible For?

I’m persistent. I don’t settle for easy answers, ignore problems, or appeal to mystery at the drop of a hat. I want to give a plausible account of the hope within me.

My quest for better ways to think about the Bible prompted me to read theologians and Bible scholars from the past and present. What I found surprised me! I had assumed believing the Bible is inerrant in all ways was the traditional position of Christians throughout the ages. I assumed it was the position of my own Christian tradition. I was wrong.

Few if any great theologians argued the Bible was absolutely inerrant. Augustine did not affirm inerrancy in this way. Thomas Aquinas didn’t. Neither did Martin Luther or John Wesley – a least in a consistent way. And I discovered through reading and conversations that those considered the leading biblical scholars and theologians today also reject absolute biblical inerrancy.

I did find a few teachers who said the Bible was inerrant. But when I read their explanations of the Bible’s discrepancies and their views about the differences between the oldest manuscripts, I found they stretched the word “inerrant” beyond recognition. Their meaning of “inerrant” was nothing like the usual meaning. And it was certainly not what most Evangelicals meant when they called the Bible the inerrant Word of God.

Perhaps even more important was my discovery that great theologians and biblical scholars of yesteryear believed the Bible’s basic purpose was to reveal God’s desire for our salvation. Many giants of the Christian faith could agree with John Wesley who said, “The Scriptures are a complete rule of faith and practice; and they are clear in all necessary points.”

The necessary points of Scripture refer to instruction for our salvation. They indicate that, as the Apostle Paul puts it, Scripture is inspired and “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The purpose of the Bible is our salvation!

I also discovered Christian leaders over the centuries did not feel required to search the Bible for truths about science. In fact, they sometimes used allegorical interpretations that seem silly to me now. The vast majority of Evangelical scholars with whom I talked also didn’t think the Bible has to be inerrant about scientific matters.

After my studies, I came to believe that the Bible tells us how to find abundant life. But it does not provide the science for how life became abundant.

Tomorrow, Tom will discuss what his evolving view of the Bible has to do with evolution.

Genesis 8:1: But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2 the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3 and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

The Flood narrative of Genesis 7-9 has played a prominent role in science and religion debates for over three hundred years and gave rise in earlier centuries to geological theories such as old earth catastrophism. While literary studies have uncovered the chiastic structure of the Flood story (see Gordon Wenham, “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative” Vetus Testamentum 28 (1978):336-48) and with it the theological pivot point of the entire narrative (Gen. 8:1 – “And God remembered Noah…), much of the popular attention remains on the questions regarding details (Is there THAT much water in the world to cover ALL the mountains to a depth of 15 cubits? Could you really fit two or seven of every animal species in an ark that size?)

Looking at a smaller matter, we find at the beginning and the middle of the narrative indications of an ancient Near Eastern worldview. As the story is told, the flood was not merely the result of excessive rain, but actually the convergence of the waters above the earth with the waters below the earth. It is, as one translation puts it, as if the sluice gates at the deep and of the heavens were thrown open and water poured in from above and below. This is a consistent picture from the Old Testament of a three-tiered universe—a dome above the earth holding back the heavenly waters, a flat earth with water on its surface, and water under an earth which is held up by pillars.

That the story is told using the cosmology of its time should not be unduly unsettling, nor that the story is reinterpreted as new understandings of the universe come into favor. By way of example, consider John Calvin and his understanding of the structure of the universe. Although committed to the principle of sola Scriptura, Calvin recognized that the Bible would have been written in terms its original recipients would have understood.

Calvin inherited the medieval cosmology of his time, a way of viewing the world heavily influenced by Greek thought and one which was about to receive shocks from astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo. But not just yet. Calvin still subscribed to the common conception of his day in which the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—comprised the earthly sphere and possessed unique characteristics. The nature of air and fire was to rise, while the nature of earth and water is to sink. Earth, being heavier than water, should sink to the center of the cosmos and water should compose the next layer. Both earth and water are spherical, i.e., naturally form spherically around the cosmic center. Thus the heavier spherical element of earth should be encased entirely within the lighter spherical element of water.

Notice what this does to the flood story. For Calvin, the amazing thing is that the world isn’t constantly under water and subject to flooding. In the cosmology of Calvin’s day, it does not take an act of God to cause a universal flood, but rather an actively present and restraining hand of God to keep the waters back in everyday circumstances and make inundation by water something other than universal.

Obviously, Calvin was wrong. Or perhaps we should say that medieval cosmology was flawed and justifiably gave way to new conceptions of the universe. The answer is not to return to an ancient Near Eastern cosmology, but to reinterpret cautiously within new and better cosmologies and to pay closest attention to the text and the theology of scripture.

The geological and planetary sciences bring their own unique contributions and are of more interest than the latest expedition to discover the ark on Mt. Ararat. Is the flood story a universalization of a catastrophic regional event that burned itself into the psyche of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean basin? Various theories regarding a Black Sea venue for a catastrophic flood event are still in process of being sorted out. It’s intriguing. Or the question where the water on Planet Earth comes from? Was it always here as an emanation of vapors from the earth’s crust in its early formation, or has it accumulated over eons through the steady bombardment of earth by small, icy comets? It’s an intriguing scientific question that is in the midst of determination through testing.

Preaching Suggestions

When preaching on the story of the Flood, it is easy to get lost in the debates over particulars. As mentioned elsewhere, to tackle all the peripheral issues threatens to turn a sermon into a geology lecture. Other settings are better suited to addressing those questions, and those are best addressed open-endedly.

A brief explanation of ancient Near Eastern cosmology can be helpful to contextualize the story. If there are those who are tempted to think that a cosmology embedded in the Bible must be inspired and definitive, one can note that cosmology has changed by the New Testament. The Bible itself isn’t wed to a particular structure of the universe.

What is important is to keep the theology of the text front and center, and in that theology there are at least three non-negotiables from the flood narrative. First, human sin and violence threatens to undo a good creation (the flood is a de-creation event, a return of the waters mentioned in Genesis 1:2). Second, God remembers Noah, and never forgets his promises. Third, the end of the flood is a covenant with the whole earth regarding the stability and endurance of the natural order.

As Christians and geologists, we frequently encounter people with stories of storm tossed and shipwrecked faith that started when they began to wrestle with apparent conflicts between science and the Bible. The stories have a common thread. The Bible, they were told, clearly teaches the earth was created a few thousand years ago with life forms fashioned more or less as we find them today. Because the earth is very young, the incredibly complex sequence of rock, sediment, and fossils found on our planet must have been deposited in a very short period of time. Noah’s Flood, as the only plausible causal agent, was obviously a global and violent event. Theories of an ancient earth and adaptation of life forms, they were further informed, have been constructed on flimsy evidence created by atheistic scientists searching for ways to expunge God from modern culture. But as these sojourners began to explore and understand the actual evidence for an ancient earth, they found themselves increasingly convinced of its legitimacy, and thereby increasingly questioning the veracity of their faith – many to the point of relegating Christ to just another wishful myth.

It is our conviction that these stories of strained or lost faith derive not from an inherent unwillingness to trust the Bible, but rather from misguided teaching on the message of Scripture. Those insisting the earth is young are not simply putting their faith in God’s Word, they are putting their faith in their own particular interpretation of that Word. As such, an entirely unnecessary stumbling block to faith is created, where faith in Christ first requires rejection of sound science.

As we have prayed and studied this subject, we have felt God’s call to speak out against this misplaced stumbling block. We are sensitive, however, to the fact that when scientists speak on issues of faith, there is a natural suspicion that science will be regarded as the ultimate arbiter of truth, and Scripture will have to yield whenever conflict arises. It is thus important for us to state here that both of us ascribe to the authority and inspiration of Scripture, the reality and necessity of Christ’s death and resurrection, the existence of genuine miraculous events, and the truthfulness of the Biblical historical narratives. In our understanding, science will never trump Scripture, but by virtue of science being a study of God’s natural creation, it may occasionally assist in our understanding of God’s written Word. Where this has occurred historically and has been accepted by the Church, the invariable result has been the abandonment of an interpretation of some secondary importance, without any change in our understanding of the intended central message.

This phenomenon is illustrated well by the 17th century clash between Galileo’s claims that the earth revolves around the sun, and the multiple passages in Scripture that appear to clearly present a static earth as the physical center of God’s natural creation. The Bible tells us repeatedly that the earth is fixed upon its foundations (Ps 93:1, 104:5) and the sun rises and sets (Eccl 1:5, Ps 19:6). Within the context of the historical narratives (which we are not accustomed to interpreting in any figurative manner) we read statements about “the sun rising over the land” (Gen 19:23), and a miraculous event during a famous battle where “the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down a full day” (Josh 10:13). Likewise in the Levitical law, we find commands to complete the Passover sacrifice “when the sun goes down” (Deut 16:6).

God’s people had interpreted these verses for thousands of years to be authoritative statements about both spiritual and physical realms, and 17th century believers understandably struggled with allowing science to alter traditional interpretations. If God says the sun rises and the sun sets, how could it be otherwise?

Fast forward a few centuries, and we are now somehow quite content to have allowed science to alter our thinking on these verses, without abandoning notions of inerrancy or inspiration. The reason is simply because it was eventually recognized that the primary message of these verses was never on the nature of nature, but on the nature of man and his experience with his environment and his God. Solomon and Joshua accurately recorded their experience from an earthly perspective (sun rising and setting), and David praised God for holding the earth fixedly in His hand (Ps 93:1, 104:5), without requiring a meaning of fixity in space. The central message of these verses was apparent to readers before and after Galileo. Only a secondary interpretation, likely never intended by the writers, was cast off after scientific advances.

So what is the issue regarding Noah’s Flood? The modern debate centers around two questions. Was it truly global in extent, and can the Flood account for the earth’s complex geologic record? To address the first, it is worth being reminded of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome where he makes a statement that “your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world” (Rom 1:8). Entire people groups existed at this time in China, Australia, and North and South America who knew nothing of the church in Rome. Though using wording that literally means the entire world population, Paul is clearly referring to the world known to him and his readers at the time.¹ Paul speaks truthfully from his experience. Allowing for the possibility that Noah’s Flood encompassed all of known humanity without necessarily covering the entire planet is thus consistent with how other passages in Scripture are interpreted by Christians who believe the Bible is authoritative and trustworthy.

Our primary interest in this blog series is the second question, the widely promulgated notion that the Flood can account for the earth’s complex geology, and that all genuine Christians should accept this viewpoint.

Notes

1. Many Biblical scholars define a literal interpretation as one that takes into account the literary genre, figures of speech, context, and author/audience perspective in deriving the intended meaning. By this definition, poetry and allegory are literally interpreted as figurative. In this blog and in our article, our use of literal conforms to its more common definition where a literal interpretation is one that adheres to the precise definition of words without figurative meaning and without requiring additional context to understand.

Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today

My title reflects the book that I published six years ago as The Last Word, which has recently reappeared as Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. In this new edition I have included two substantial new chapters explaining more fully how the model I propose works out in practice. Both versions of the book and the paper I wrote some years before that (from which this series of posts is adapted) cast light on a puzzle which became clearer to me in the early years of the century. At that time I was involved in many discussions within the Anglican Communion on the one hand, and in dialogue with Roman Catholic theologians on the other, in which reference to scripture and its authority was ubiquitous but frequently opaque. That is, everybody says that scripture is authoritative, but few stop to explain what that means in practice. My book gets off to its start by pointing out that in scripture itself, it is God who is authoritative. This may be obvious, but when you chase through the ramifications it becomes less so.

The Christian tradition has assumed, of course, that what scripture says, God says. But even those who were most concerned to make this point – specifically the Protestant reformers – were often, from our perspective, somewhat cavalier in how they applied this. Some reformers were eager to draw on Old Testament narratives and prophecies in order to instruct the princes of their day – I think of Latimer preaching before Edward VI – while others, notably Martin Luther, could say such things as ‘Moses knows nothing of Christ’. What’s more, the idea of the authority of scripture was used as a limiting statute in the sixteenth century (i.e. one should only insist on that which could be plainly shown from scripture, and not insist, on pain of damnation, upon dogmas that did not have scriptural warrant). But in more recent western church life the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ has been used in a maximal sense, especially of course within fundamentalism. And yet the underlying problems of a Christian ‘authoritative’ reading of scripture have not gone away, but only been parked.

The question before us, then, is: how can the Bible be authoritative? This way of putting it carries two different though related meanings, and I shall look at them in turn. First, how can there be such a thing as an authoritative book? What sort of a claim are we making about a book when we say that it is ‘authoritative’? Second, by what means can the Bible actually exercise its authority? How is it to be used so that its authority becomes effective? The first question subdivides further, and I want to argue two things as we look at it:

(1) I shall argue that usual views of the Bible—including usual evangelical views of the Bible—are actually too low, and do not give it the sufficient weight that it ought to have.

(2) I shall then suggest a different way of envisioning authority from that which I think most Christians normally take.

Authority?

Our generation has a problem about authority. In church and in state we use the word ‘authority’ in different ways, some positive and some negative. We use it in secular senses. We say of a great footballer that he stamped his authority on the game. Or we say of a great musician that he or she gave an authoritative performance of a particular concerto. Within more structured social gatherings the question ‘Who’s in charge?’ has particular function. For instance, if someone came into a lecture-room and asked ‘Who’s in charge?’ the answer would presumably be either the lecturer or the chairman, if any. If, however, a group of people went out to dinner at a restaurant and somebody suddenly came in and said, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ the question might not actually make any sense. We might be a bit puzzled as to what authority might mean in that structure. Within a more definite structure, however, such as a law court or a college or a business, the question ‘Who’s in charge?’ or ‘What does authority mean here?’ would have a very definite meaning, and could expect a fairly clear answer. The meaning of ‘authority’, then, varies considerably according to the context within which the discourse is taking place. It is important to realize this from the start, not least because one of my central contentions is going to be that we have tended to let the word ‘authority’ be the fixed point and have adjusted ‘scripture’ to meet it, instead of the other way round.

Authority in the Church

Within the church, the question of what we mean by authority has had particular focal points. It has had practical questions attached to it. How are things to be organized within church life? What are the boundaries of allowable behavior and doctrine? In particular, to use the sixteenth-century formulation, what are those things ‘necessary to be believed upon pain of damnation’? But it has also had theoretical sides to it. What are we looking for when we are looking for authority in the church? Where would we find it? How would we know when we had found it? What would we do with authoritative documents, people or whatever, if we had them? It is within that context that the familiar debates have taken place, advocating the relative weight to be given to scripture, tradition and reason, or (if you like, and again in sixteenth-century terms) to Bible, Pope and Scholar. Within the last century or so we have seen a fourth, to rival those three, namely emotion or feeling. Various attempts are still being made to draw up satisfactory formulations of how these things fit together in some sort of a hierarchy.

Evangelical Views

Most heirs of the Reformation, not least evangelicals, take it for granted that we are to give scripture the primary place and that everything else has to be lined up in relation to scripture. There is, indeed, an evangelical assumption, common in some circles, that evangelicals do not have any tradition. We simply open the scripture, read what it says, and take it as applying to ourselves: there the matter ends, and we do not have any ‘tradition’. This is rather like the frequent Anglican assumption (being an Anglican myself I rather cherish this) that Anglicans have no doctrine peculiar to themselves: it is merely that if something is true the Church of England believes it. This, though not itself a refutation of the claim not to have any ‘tradition’, is for the moment sufficient indication of the inherent unlikeliness of the claim’s truth, and I am confident that most people, facing the question explicitly, will not wish that the claim be pressed.

But I still find two things to be the case, both of which give me some cause for concern. First, there is an implied, and quite unwarranted, positivism: we imagine that we are ‘reading the text, straight’, and that if somebody disagrees with us it must be because they, unlike we ourselves, are secretly using ‘presuppositions’ of this or that sort. This is simply naïve, and actually astonishingly arrogant and dangerous. It fuels the second point, which is that evangelicals often use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ when they mean the authority of evangelical, or Protestant, theology. The assumption is made that we (evangelicals, or Protestants) are the ones who know and believe what the Bible is saying. And, though there is more than a grain of truth in such claims, they are by no means the whole truth, and to imagine that they are is to move from theology to ideology. If we are not careful, the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ can, by such routes, come to mean simply ‘the authority of evangelical tradition.


The next part of our series explores whether we are unwittingly “belittling the Bible” by appealing to the wrong kind of authority.

(Originally published in Vox Evangelica, 1991, 21, 7–32. Reproduced by permission of the author.)

Today's video features theologian Rev. Lincoln Harvey and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Rev. Lincoln Harvey discusses our desire to "domesticate" the liveliness and abundance of God. Harvey notes that the Trinity highlights both the manyness and oneness of God, which can be hard to Christians to fully understand. While this lack of understanding can be unsettling, Harvey encourages Christians not too force God into too neat of a box. Often, this desire to domesticate can be found in our interaction with Scripture. The Scriptures can be understood, but there is still something lively, mysterious, and beautiful in them that resists our desire to tame them. We should instead approach Scripture, as we approach God, with a spirit of humility and openness.

Having had only very limited prior exposure to Driscoll’s work, I was interested in attending the course to see how he handled certain issues (such as the doctrine of Creation, the nature of Scripture as it relates to science, and so on). Part of the reason for my interest was the fact that our church had explored some of these ideas previously in a similar setting by offering the Truth Project lecture series featuring several prominent advocates of Intelligent Design. That experience led me to request an opportunity to explain the mainstream science position on evolution to the members of that class. This request was denied by my church leadership despite interest within the group – at which point an interested friend hosted an unofficial evening session in his own home (that was recorded and eventually found its way on to YouTube, generating an audience far larger than I had anticipated.) So, given the announcement that the church was offering Driscoll’s series, I signed up. A little online research suggested that Driscoll’s series would indeed generate interesting conversation. I also found that the series has been adapted in book form, so I picked up a copy as well.

Science and sola Scriptura

It wasn’t long before material relevant to the science / faith conversation arose. In the second lecture of the series (Revelation: God Speaks) Driscoll sets forth his views on the nature and roles of general and special revelation in Christian life. For Driscoll, the guiding principle is the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura, which he interprets in the following way:

Now, some also called this Prima Scriptura, but the point is that there are lesser courts of authority. Let me distinguish Sola Scriptura from Solo Scriptura. Solo Scriptura is that Scripture alone is our authority. We don’t believe that. We believe that Scripture alone is our highest authority. The Scriptures, for example, don’t tell us how to perform open heart surgery. The Scriptures don’t tell us how to repair a carburetor on an old vehicle. The Scriptures don’t tell us how to turn a double play. If we want to learn any of those things we need to find that information elsewhere. All of the time we go to science, we go to medicine, we go to sociology, psychology, we go to history, we go to all kinds of disciplines and we learn. And that’s all the result of general revelation, okay?

Back to one of my first points. The sciences, the social sciences, other means of learning all falls under the rubric of God’s image bearers working with general revelation. Some people know things about technology and about the environment and about the human body and about medicine and about diet and nutrition and all these kind of things. And we believe in Sola Scriptura, and that is we have lesser courts of lower authority. You can go to college, go to the doctor, read a philosopher, study medicine, science – whatever it is, that’s wonderful and good. That’s enjoying general revelation in its full, and then testing general revelation by special revelation. That whatever we’re learning there we have to check by Scripture and to see that it agrees with Scripture. If it doesn’t disagree with Scripture, then we have freedom.

Recently, Driscoll has applied this approach to the genomics evidence that indicates humans derive from an ancestral population, rather than one individual couple. This allows us to examine how he applies his view of sola Scriptura to a specific, current scientific issue he feels is of pressing concern for believers to address:

Problems arise, however, when we find truths that seemingly contradict the truths of Scripture and, rather than subject those truths to the authority of Scripture, instead consider those truths to invalidate the truths of Scripture. Such is the case today when it comes to the biblical account of Adam and Eve and some modern scientists’ disbelief of the scriptural account in favor of the scientific account. Believers who are scientists bear the primary responsibility for affirming scriptural truths over scientific ones and figuring out how the truths of science affirm the truths of Scripture—not the other way around. It’s impossible to serve two masters.

So, what are we to do in the face of seemingly contradictory truth between science and Scripture? We have two choices: exchange the truths of Scripture for the truths of science and wash our hands clean (Paul is clear in Romans 1:18 and 1:22–23 that many people choose just this option), or we take the truths of science and place them within the context of the truths of Scripture as the highest authority.

So, for Driscoll, the choice is a simple dichotomy: Scripture or science. Scripture is the highest court of authority in all matters, and the role of believing scientists is to affirm Scripture. To fail to do so is to “exchange the truths of Scripture for the truths of science” and to fall into the grievous, idolatrous error Paul describes in Romans 1:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth…

22 Claiming to be wise they became fools; 23 and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. (NRSV)

Even if one chooses not to question the assumptions that might undergird such a view of sola Scriptura (for example, that Scripture and science are “courts of authority” potentially in conflict with one another, or that one’s interpretation of Scripture might possibly be incomplete or even in error), the fact remains that Driscoll’s view sits somewhat in tension with how one notable leader of the Reformation, John Calvin, approached the science / faith issues of his day.

Learning from history: Calvin and science

One issue of potential concern during Calvin’s time was the growing understanding of the relative sizes of the various heavenly bodies. For example, astronomers had determined that Saturn was in fact much larger than our own moon. While this comes as no surprise to us now, nor of any theological importance, at that time this discovery was seen by some in the church to contradict the Genesis proclamation that the sun and moon were the “greater” and “lesser” lights created by God. If indeed Saturn was larger than the moon, would not it be named as the “lesser” light instead? While it might be tempting in the present to dismiss this discussion as trivial, we must remember that for its day, this was a significant concern for some. Which was correct? Science, or Scripture? Could the Bible really be trusted when it spoke about things in the natural world?

Calvin’s approach to this topic may be surprising for some: he advocated for the view that Genesis was accommodated to a scientifically unlearned audience, and not necessarily written with the intent to provide scientific accuracy. As Davis Young recounts in his excellent book John Calvin and the Natural World:

He reminded his readers that … Moses did not treat the stars in a scientific manner, as a philosopher would do. On the contrary, he described the heavenly bodies, “in a popular manner, according to their appearance to the uneducated, rather than according to truth, two great lights.”

This last quotation may be jarring to contemporary Christians who place great emphasis on the idea of the inerrancy of Scripture… Calvin, however, maintained that Genesis 1 is not speaking “according to truth” when referring to the Sun and the Moon. In effect, he said that the Bible does not represent to us the actual reality about the heavenly bodies by providing an accurate picture of their true size. (p. 181)

So, for one of the key leaders of the Reformation a simple science-or-Scripture approach was not seen to be a defining mark of sola Scriptura. Rather, Calvin readily interacted with the scientific findings of his day, even if they posed apparent theological challenges. He was also willing to consider how God may have used inspiration to accomplish His purposes in Genesis in light of what (then) modern science was indicating.

Accordingly, it follows that one can hold a robust view of Scripture and yet explore how general revelation (science) and special revelation (Scripture) work together: not as competing authorities, but as complementary forms of revelation with the same Author. If Calvin can engage the discussion, we are free to do so as well.

In the next post in this series, we’ll examine the third sermon in the Doctrine series: Creation: God Makes.

For further reading:

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears: Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe. Crossway, Wheaton Illinois, 2010.

Davis A. Young: John Calvin and the Natural World. University Press of America, Lanham Maryland, 2007.

The early chapters of Genesis appear to pose scientific problems that challenge our literal, post-Enlightenment lens through which we often read the Word of God. (See this post for a commentary on how this situation came about.) This leads many people to believe that the descriptions in these texts are meant to reveal more than raw scientific fact. Pete Shaw of Crosswalk Community Church highlights the story of Noah and the Ark to explore the possible reasons for adopting a non-literal understanding of this ancient narrative. Shaw first summarizes the story of Upnashatim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a famous Sumerian flood story that the young and old in Abraham’s day would have known well. Upon comparison, these two accounts—the Genesis flood and the Gilgamesh flood—are incredibly similar. Furthermore, Shaw exposes the various practical problems that arise if one takes every word of the Noah story to be a precise truth. For example, he wonders how Noah could have fed and maintained every living land creature in a small boat for ten months. He also explains how a primitive understanding of the universe is heavily reflected in this text. In light of these points, he concludes that whether or not this story is portraying actual historical events, it is presenting rich truths about God, and that should be the focus of the believer.

Transcript

“The first eleven chapters of Genesis are what scholars call pre-history. In other words, they can’t really date what was going on very well in those first elven chapters. After that, twelfth chapter on, it is a lot easier to date, and the stories have a different feel, a different structure… but those first eleven have caused a lot of debate over the years. In fact, the next slide is going to kind of give you the line of where I am going to take you today. You might not be aware of this, but there is a Noah controversy. You and I, when we hear the story of a great flood, the first thing that comes to our mind—when we think of the whopper of all whoppers—we think of Noah and the Ark, but if we lived in Abraham’s time or especially before, the name Noah probably would not have come up. In fact, if we grew up with Abraham, the story we would have most likely known about was the story—I am going to butcher this name—of Utnapishtim.

You are familiar with Utnapishtim aren’t you? And you are familiar with the god Enlil. I am sure you are familiar with Enlil. And you would have been very aware of a storybook that was read by children and adults alike called the Epic of Gilgamesh. And in the eleventh tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh, we have the story of Utnapishtim and the god Enlil. And just so that you would know about that story a little bit, knowing that that would have been the predominant story that you would have understood anytime you thought about a flood, this is how the story went down. So, this god Enlil was the god of thunder and rain and all that and he was not a happy camper (kind of temperamental) as thunder gods can be. And for no clear reason, except to mess around with some of the other gods in his discontent, he made the decision that he was going to wipe out the earth with a great flood. And one of the other gods, a goddess in fact, did not like that this was going to happen and thought that it was unfair, unjust, and so she sent a message to Utnapishtim that this flood was going to come at the hand and the wrath of Enlil. And so Utnapishtim got to work, and he built a vessel (a strange vessel), a cube, but he used some of the similar materials that we saw in the Ark, and he made this massive structure (if in fact you do the math, it is probably at least twice, if not much larger, than the actual Ark) this massive cube that he made hoping that it would float, and he got it done on time.

The rain didn’t come down for forty days, it came down just for seven, but it flooded everything out, and the only survivor was Utnapishtim. And when Enlil came around and saw that some human beings had survived, he was very upset because he intended to wipe out everybody to show his wrath and his anger to the world and to show that he was upset to all the gods in heaven. Well, Utnapishtim obviously saved his own life, the life of his family, the life of his personal animals because those are the animals that he saved—not the rest of the animals of the world. And he took some carpenters along because he didn’t know how to build stuff and once you are starting over you have got to build stuff, and so he brought some carpenters along. In honor of his faithfulness (in light of this word from the goddess) he was given divinity. And so, he became a god, he became one of the gods, he got to reside in heaven, if you will, because of his faithfulness…interesting story.

If you grew up in Sumer, which is present day Iraq, and you grew up with Abraham in what is present day Baghdad that would have been the story that you would have known very, very well. It is because that story exists and other cultures have their own flood stories as well that some scholars look at the story of Noah and the Ark, and they think, ‘well, gee, how should we really interpret this thing? You know, our Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment perspective says it is in black and white, and if it says that is what happened, then that is exactly what happened. There is no way around it.’ Well, what if the first people who shared this story with each other and what if the early writers of this word, what if when they approached the Bible, they didn’t approach it the way we do? What if they didn’t approach the Bible, the Word of God, as a literal, this is exactly how it happened book that our post- Enlightenment eyes are framed to do? How would that change us? And also, some of the things that some of the challengers of this story are bringing out are some of the issues with the story like ok is this really a big enough boat to handle all of the creatures of creation…can they really, really fit?

Some have really tried to make a case that there weren’t as many animals back then as there are now because they got together and hooked up, and now, we have all kinds of varieties and that kind of thing. And so that is kind of there, but you are talking ten months of time! How do you feed all the animals of the world? How do you store all the food? Did they eat fish, because the fish didn’t die? The fish lived on just fine. How do you do that? And what about—it is kind of unpleasant—but all the excrement? What are you going to do with all that ‘bleep?’ Are you going to throw it out the eighteen inch window at the top? Did they have a conveyor belt system? How did it work? And so they look at that and think, ‘I am just not sure about that.’ Would you really take that literally? Is that how we should take it? Is that how they took it around their campfires and around their dinner tables? Did they think about it that way?

And there are other issues too that academics look at, and they challenge somewhat. Like they know that forty days and forty nights is a proverbial statement in Jewish culture. It was like saying (and you see it in many accounts in the Bible), forty days and forty nights was saying a long time, but it probably was not meant to be taken literally. It is just a long time. It is how they thought about things. Then, there is the issue of the rain itself, and how it all came down. Now, the New Living Translation and most modern translations, just simply talk about it as--there is the sky and the rain came down from the sky and you are good to go. But there is another word that is used. If you go to the New King James Bible, for instance, and they talk about the firmament—that the rain came down from the firmament. And so, when we think about firmament, we think, ‘well they are talking about sky or they are talking about the starry host and all that stuff,’ but if we go back to the original word, which the New American Standard version got right (it is one of the most academic and precise versions that is out there), both in the creation story and in the Noah account, they use a different word for sky: they use the word dome.

Now, I am going to butcher this a little bit, but broad stroke version is that the way the ancient people saw the world was that we kind of lived in this bubble, you know sort of like a snow globe, and there was water--not all inside, but outside, surrounding us. There was water below and there was water above, and above us was this massive dome called the firmament or called the sky. And then when it rained it was because God was opening up the floodgates of heaven. That is how they thought back then. They didn’t know any better. And so, kind of what these questions are asking us now is how we make sense of this and do we have to believe like they did in order to believe the story. How many of you believe that the sun revolves around the earth? None! Nobody does. Do you get mad at, do any of you hold a grudge against the earliest people in the Bible, actually, all the people in the Bible, do you hold them accountable and are you angry at them that they believed with everything in them that the sun revolved around the earth and not the other way around?... no, of course not. Do you get angry at them because they believed we lived in a dome and that God opened up the gates of heaven and there you go? No, you don’t hold it against them because you understand that it is the best that they could do given their time.

But we live in the age of Doppler radar, right? We know within minutes, you know, when rain is going to hit Napa and when it is going to move on to Valeo, and so on and so forth. I mean it is that precise, and we know when it is coming hundreds of miles off shore and we can look thousands of miles because of satellite stuff and our ability to understand temperatures and all that. We know how the whole thing is brewing. We know that hurricanes are lining up one after the other in hurricane season because we have cameras up there that are seeing them start to form, and we can gauge temperature in the water and so forth—we do not live back then. So, it would be inappropriate for us to become primitive in the sense of looking at the world the same way they did in that kind of a literalness because we know different, you know what I mean? We know different. And so really the bottom line is that the literalness of the story really isn’t the most important thing to begin with anyway.”

A few editorial reflective thoughts by Darrel Falk: The sermon continues, of course, and you can download it at the above link. What is "the most important thing" to which Pastor Shaw refers as the audio clip draws to a close? Regardless of whether you think it is historical or not, what is the message that God wants to communicate to us through this story? Consider reading Genesis 9 right now. What are the parallels in this "recreation"account to the original creation account? What does God want us to see in making those parallels? What about the rainbow? What does it symbolize for you? Can you sense God's love for all of creation (not just humankind) as this story draws to a close? Why does the story of Noah himself, however, not have a happier ending? Have we seen the theme of nakedness and the need to cover up nakedness in an earlier scriptural passage? Why do you think the story of Noah draws us back to this point (nakedness and shame), just like the story Adam and Eve does? What brought on shame for them? What brings on shame for us? Do you see that God is wanting us to think deeply about this story and its meaning? What is another example of the need to cover up? (Hint: think Moses.) What difference does the coming of Jesus make to all of this? (Hint: see II Corinthians 3:12-18.) Do you see the rainbow?]]> Sat, 12 Nov 11 04:00:15 -0800 Pete Shaw http://biologos.org/blog/the-truthfulness-of-scripture-inerrancy-part-1?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/the-truthfulness-of-scripture-inerrancy-part-1?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Against the repeated claim that the doctrine of inerrancy arose first with Protestant orthodoxy, we could cite numerous examples from the ancient and medieval church. It was Augustine who first coined the term "inerrant," and Luther and Calvin can speak of Scripture as free from error. This is the first of a two-part series, taken from an article by Michael Horton which appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of Modern Reformation. Horton begins by pointing out that the concept of inerrancy goes back to the ancient church but was most clearly developed by Princeton theologians A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield in their 1881 book, Inspiration. Contrary to what many people imagine today, these heroes of the Reformed tradition emphasized that the Holy Spirit worked through limited human authors in a centuries-long process to produce the Bible: “’The Scriptures have been generated, as the plan of redemption has been evolved, through an historic process,’ which is divine in its origin and intent, but ‘largely natural in its method.’” Warfield and Hodge affirm the importance of historical criticism, face textual problems and errors head-on, and caution against thinking of the authors of Scripture as being omniscient or infallible.

Against the repeated claim that the doctrine of inerrancy, unknown to the church, arose first with Protestant orthodoxy, we could cite numerous examples from the ancient and medieval church.¹ It was Augustine who first coined the term "inerrant," and Luther and Calvin can speak of Scripture as free from error.²

Down to the Second Vatican Council, Rome has attributed inerrancy to Scripture as the common view of the church throughout its history. According to the First Vatican Council (1869-70), the Old and New Testaments, "whole and entire," are "sacred and canonical." In fact, contrary to the tendency of some Protestants (including some evangelicals) to lodge the nature of inspiration in the church's authority, this council added,

And the church holds them as sacred and canonical not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without errors, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their Author.³

Successive popes during the twentieth century condemned the view that limited inerrancy to that which is necessary for salvation, and Pope Leo XIII went even further than the inerrancy position by espousing the dictation theory of inspiration. Undoubtedly, this mechanical theory of inspiration is what most critics have in mind when they encounter the term "inerrancy." Nevertheless, it does demonstrate that inerrancy is not an invention of Protestant fundamentalists. Quoting the Second Vatican Council, the most recent Catholic catechism states, "Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures."⁴

The Princeton Formulation of Inerrancy

Although inerrancy was taken for granted in church history until the Enlightenment, it was especially at Princeton Seminary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it became a full-blown formulation. This view is articulated most completely in Inspiration, a book coauthored by A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield and published by the Presbyterian Church in 1881. Their argument deserves an extended summary especially because it remains, in my view, the best formulation of inerrancy just as it anticipates and challenges caricatures.

First, they point out that a sound doctrine of inspiration requires a specifically Christian ontology or view of reality: "The only really dangerous opposition to the church doctrine of inspiration comes either directly or indirectly, but always ultimately, from some false view of God's relation to the world, of his methods of working, and of the possibility of a supernatural agency penetrating and altering the course of a natural process."⁵ Just as the divine element pervades the whole of Scripture, so too does the human aspect. Not only "the untrammeled play of all [the author's] faculties, but the very substance of what they write is evidently for the most part the product of their own mental and spiritual activities."⁶ Even more than the Reformers, the Protestant orthodox were sensitive to the diverse means used by God to produce the Bible's diverse literature. This awareness has only grown, Hodge and Warfield observe, and should be fully appreciated. God's "superintendence" did not compromise creaturely freedom. In fact, "It interfered with no spontaneous natural agencies, which were, in themselves, producing results conformable to the mind of the Holy Spirit."⁷ Just as the divine element pervades the whole of Scripture, so too does the human aspect.

Far from reducing all instances of biblical revelation to the prophetic paradigm, as critics often allege, Hodge and Warfield recognize that the prophetic form, "Thus says the Lord," is a "comparatively small element of the whole body of sacred writing." In the majority of cases, the writers drew from their own existing knowledge, including general revelation, and each "gave evidence of his own special limitations of knowledge and mental power, and of his personal defects as well as of his powers....The Scriptures have been generated, as the plan of redemption has been evolved, through an historic process," which is divine in its origin and intent, but "largely natural in its method."⁸ "The Scriptures were generated through sixteen centuries of this divinely regulated concurrence of God and man, of the natural and the supernatural, of reason and revelation, of providence and grace."⁹

Second, Warfield and Hodge underscore the redemptive-historical unfolding of biblical revelation, defending an organic view of inspiration over a mechanical theory. They note that many reject verbal inspiration because of its association with the erroneous theory of verbal dictation, which is an "extremely mechanical" view.¹⁰ Therefore, theories concerning "authors, dates, sources and modes of composition" that "are not plainly inconsistent with the testimony of Christ or his apostles as to the Old Testament or with the apostolic origin of the books of the New Testament...cannot in the least invalidate" the Bible's inspiration and inerrancy.¹¹ While higher criticism proceeds on the basis of anti-supernatural and rationalistic presuppositions, historical criticism is a valid and crucial discipline.

Third, the Princeton theologians faced squarely the question of contradictions and errors, noting problems in great detail. Some discrepancies are due to imperfect copies, which textual criticism properly considers. In other cases, an original reading may be lost, or we may simply fail to have adequate data or be blinded by our presuppositions from understanding a given text. Sometimes we are "destitute of the circumstantial knowledge which would fill up and harmonize the record," as is true in any historical record. We must also remember that our own methods of testing the accuracy of Scripture "are themselves subject to error."¹²

Fourth, because it is the communication that is inspired rather than the persons themselves, we should not imagine that the authors were omniscient or infallible. In fact, the authors themselves seem conscious enough of their limitations. "The record itself furnishes evidence that the writers were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, and that their personal knowledge and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even wrong."¹³ Yet Scripture is seen to be inerrant "when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense."¹⁴ Inerrancy is not attributed to copies, much less to our vernacular translations, but to "the original autographic text."¹⁵

Notes:

1. See Robert D. Preus, "The View of the Bible Held by the Church: The Early Church through Luther," and John H. Gerstner, "The View of the Bible Held by the Church: Calvin and the Westminster Divines," in Inerrancy, ed. Norman Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980); John A. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); G. W. Bromiley, "The Church Fathers and Holy Scripture," in Scripture and Truth, eds. D. A. Carson and John A. Woodbridge (Leicester: IVP, 1983).
2. Klaas Runia, "The Hermeneutics of the Reformers," Calvin Theological Journal 19 (1984), 129-32.
3. See Alfred Duran, "Inspiration of the Bible," in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910).
4. Dei Verbum (Constitution on Divine Revelation), Art. 11, quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, MO: Liguori, 1994), 31.
5. A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, Inspiration (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 9.
6. Hodge and Warfield, 12.
7. Hodge and Warfield, 6.
8. Hodge and Warfield, 12-13.
9. Hodge and Warfield, 14.
10. Hodge and Warfield, 19.
11. Hodge and Warfield, 25.
12. Hodge and Warfield, 27.
13. Hodge and Warfield, 27-28.
14. Hodge and Warfield, 27-28.
15. Hodge and Warfield, 42.

A Case Study: B.B. Warfield, Concursis, and Evolution

A case study that shows how profitable it can be to approach scientific issues with Christological principles is provided by the career of Benjamin B. Warfield. In chapter 3 [of Noll's book], when discussing the doubleness of classical Christology, we saw how Warfield forcefully affirmed “this conjoint humanity and divinity [of Christ], within the limits of a single personality.” It was precisely this regard for the Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s person and work that enabled Warfield to handle with relative ease the knotty questions about evolution that arose during his lifetime.

From his position at Princeton Theological Seminary, Warfield wrote steadily from the 1880s until shortly before his death in 1921 about many aspects of his era’s developing evolutionary theories.¹ These writings included major essays devoted to Darwin’s biography (“Charles Darwin’s Religious Life” in 1888 and “Darwin’s Arguments against Christianity” the next year); several substantial articles directly on evolution or related scientific issues (“The Present Day Conception of Evolution” in 1895, “Creation versus Evolution” in 1901, “On the Antiquity and Unity of the Human Race” in 1911, and “Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation” in 1915); and many reviews of relevant books, some of them mini-essays in their own right.

In these works, Warfield repeatedly insisted on distinguishing among Darwin as a person, Darwinism as a cosmological theory, and evolution as a series of explanations about natural development. Of key importance was his willingness throughout a long career to accept the possibility (or even the probability) of evolution, while also denying Darwinism as a cosmological theory. In his mind, these discriminations were necessary in order properly to evaluate both the results of disciplined observation (science) and large-scale conclusions drawn from that science (theology or cosmology). Crucially, a Christological perspective was prominent when he applied these discriminations to evolutionary theory.

For positioning Warfield properly on these subjects, it is also vital to stress a conjunction of his convictions that has been much less common since his day. Besides his openness toward evolution, that is, Warfield was also the ablest modern defender of the theologically conservative belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.

During the late nineteenth century when critical views of Scripture came to prevail in American universities,Warfield was as responsible as any other American for refurbishing the conviction that the Bible communicates revelation from God entirely without error. Warfield’s formulation of biblical inerrancy, in fact, has even been a theological mainstay for recent “creationist” convictions about the origin of the earth.² Yet while he defended biblical inerrancy, Warfield was also a cautious, discriminating, but entirely candid proponent of the possibility that evolution might offer the best way to understand the natural history of the earth and of humankind. On this score his views place him with more recent thinkers who maintain ancient trust in the Bible while also affirming the modern scientific enterprise and mainstream scientific conclusions.³ Warfield did not simply assert these two views randomly, but he sustained them learnedly, as coordinate arguments.

In the course of his career, both Warfield’s positions and his vocabulary did shift on the question of evolution. But they shifted only within a fairly narrow range. What remained constant was his adherence to a broad Calvinistic conception of the natural world — of a world that, even in its most physical aspects, reflected the wisdom and glory of God—and his commitment to the goal of harmonizing a sophisticated conservative theology and the most securely verified conclusions of modern science. To state once again his combination of positions, Warfield consistently rejected materialist or dysteleological explanations for natural phenomena (explanations that he usually associated with “Darwinism”), even as he just as consistently entertained the possibility that other kinds of evolutionary explanations, which avoided Darwin’s rejection of divine agency, could satisfactorily explain the physical world.

In several of his writings, Warfield carefully distinguished three ways in which God worked in and through the physical world. The most important thing about these three ways is that Warfield felt each of them was compatible with the theology he found in an inerrant Bible, if each was applied properly to natural history and to the history of salvation. “Evolution” meant developments arising out of forces that God had placed inside matter at the original creation of the world-stuff, but that God also directed to predetermined ends by his providential superintendence of the world. At least in writings toward the end of his life, Warfield held that evolution in this sense was fully compatible with biblical understandings of the production of the human body. “Mediate creation” meant the action of God upon matter to bring something new into existence that could not have been produced by forces or energy latent in matter itself. He did not apply the notion of “mediate creation” directly in his last, most mature writings on evolution, but it may be that he expounded the concept as much to deal with miracles or other biblical events as for developments in the natural world.⁴ The last means of God’s action was “creation ex nihilo,” which Warfield consistently maintained was the way that God made the original stuff of the world.

On questions relating to evolution, orthodox Christology became relevant when Warfield invoked the concept of concursus. By this term he meant the coexistence of two usually contrary conditions or realities. In speaking of the person of Christ he had used a closely related term, “conjoined.” For broader intellectual purposes, the key was to apply the same sense of harmoniously conjoined spheres to other domains.

As we will see with somewhat more detail when taking up Christology in relation to Scripture, Warfield held that the biblical authors were completely human as they wrote the Scriptures, even as they enjoyed the full inspiration of the Holy Spirit.⁵ This principle, grounded in Christology and exemplified in the Bible, was also his guide for positing an (evolutionary) approach to nature where all living creatures were thought to develop fully (with the exception of the original creation and the human soul) through “natural” means. Warfield’s basic stance, expressed first about Christ and then extrapolated for Scripture, was a doctrine of providence that saw God working in and with, instead of as a replacement for, the processes of nature. Late in his career, this same stance also grounded Warfield’s opposition to “faith healing.” In his eyes, physical healing through medicine and the agency of physicians was as much a result of God’s action (if through secondary causes) as the cures claimed as a direct result of divine intervention.⁶ Concursus was as important and as fruitful for his views on evolution as it was for his theology as a whole. It was a principle he felt the Scriptures offered to enable humans both to approach the world fearlessly and to do so for the greater glory of God.

Warfield’s strongest statement on evolution came in 1915 when he published a lengthy article on John Calvin’s view of creation.⁷ Although he never stated it in so many words, it is clear that the convictions he ascribed to Calvin were also his own. He summarizes what he read in Calvin: “It should scarcely be passed without remark that Calvin’s doctrine of creation is, if we have understood it aright, for all except the souls of men, an evolutionary one.” God had called the “indigested mass” into existence ex nihilo, with a full “promise and potency” of what was to develop from that mass. Yet, according to Warfield’s summary of Calvin, “all that has come into being since — except the souls of men alone — has arisen as a modification of this original world-stuff by means of the interaction of its intrinsic forces.” Warfield went on to affirm a robust doctrine of providence, whereby “all the modifications of the world-stuff have taken place under the directly upholding and governing hand of God, and find their account ultimately in His will.” Critically, however, he saw these later modifications taking place through “secondary causes.” And once “secondary causes” were viewed as the means by which the original creation was modified, we have, according to Warfield, “not only evolutionism but pure evolutionism.”

Warfield makes clear that Calvin did not himself explicitly embrace evolutionary theory since Calvin “had no conception” of “the interaction of forces by which the actual production of forms was accomplished.” Thus, lacking the information provided by modern students of nature, Calvin did not advocate a “theory” of evolution. But, Warfield insists, he did teach “a doctrine of evolution” that pictures God as producing the material stuff of the world “out of nothing,” but then “all that is not immediately produced out of nothing is therefore not created — but evolved.” Warfield then translates Calvin’s notion of “secondary causes” into what he defines as “intrinsic forces.”Warfield’s summary repeats a second time: “And this, we say, is a very pure evolutionary scheme.”

The point where Christology enters is where Warfield explains the deeper theology at work. In his summary, “Calvin’s ontology of second causes was, briefly stated, a very pure and complete doctrine of concursus, by virtue of which he ascribed all that comes to pass to God’s purpose and directive government.” For readers of Warfield in the twenty-first century, it is frustrating that he did not go further in expounding on this theological basis. He does say that the “account” of how “secondary causes” work is “a matter of ontology; how we account for their existence, their persistence, their action—the relation we conceive them to stand in to God, the upholder and director as well as creator of them.” But for his purposes with this essay, Warfield does not explore those ontological issues. The regret now is that, if he had taken up these ontological questions, he may have considered the Western tradition of univocity that had, in effect, dispensed with concursus in explaining the physical world.

As it is, we still have a most intriguing contribution to theology, science, and science considered in connection with theology. Warfield’s discussion of Calvin on evolution certainly indicated that he thought his very high view of biblical inspiration was fully compatible with comprehensive forms of evolutionary science (as distinct from evolutionary cosmology). Whether Warfield interpreted Calvin correctly or not, whether Warfield understood correctly his era’s scientific discoveries (in which he was well read for an amateur), or whether his own efforts at bringing together his era’s scientific knowledge and his interpretation of the biblical record were correct — these are all important but secondary issues. The main point lies elsewhere. The Scriptures that Warfield trusted implicitly revealed a God to him who created the world, providentially superintended the world, and gave human beings the capacity to explain the world naturally (in terms of “secondary causes”). The key theological principle that enabled Warfield to draw these conclusions was his belief in the classical Christology of Nicea and Chalcedon.

Warfield’s writings on evolution, the last of which appeared in the year of his death, 1921, cannot, of course, pronounce definitively on theological-scientific questions at the start of the twenty-first century. They can, however, show that sophisticated theology, nuanced argument, and careful sifting of scientific research are able to produce a much more satisfactory working relationship between science and theology than the heated strife that has dominated public debate on this subject since the time of Warfield’s passing.

This excerpt was drawn from chapter 3 of Mark Noll's book Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. If you would like to read the whole chapter, entitled "Come and See: A Christological Invitation for Science", click here.

Notes

1. Most of these works are reprinted, with editorial introductions, in B. B. Warfield, Evolution, Science, and Scripture: Selected Writings, ed. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000).
2. For the direct use of Warfield on the inerrancy of Scripture, see John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961), xx.
3. For example, Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954); Russell L. Mixter, ed., Evolution and Christian Thought Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959); D. C. Spanner, Creation and Evolution: Some Preliminary Considerations (London: Falcon Books, 1966); Malcolm A. Jeeves, ed., The Scientific Enterprise and Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1969); Donald M. MacKay, The Clockwork Image: A Christian Perspective on Science (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1974); Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Davis A. Young, Christianity and the Age of the Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); Charles E. Hummel, The Galileo Connection: Resolving Conflicts between Science and the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986); J. C. Polkinghorne, OneWorld: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Howard J. Van Till, The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens Are Telling Us about the Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); John Houghton, Does God Play Dice? A Look at the Story of the Universe (Leicester, England: Inter Varsity Press, 1988); Philip Duce, Reading the Mind of God: Interpretation in Science and Theology (Leicester, England: Apollos, 1998); Alister McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue in Science and Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2007); Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008); and Karl W. Giberson, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (New York: HarperOne, 2008).
4. Warfield deployed a similar vocabulary in a discussion of miracles that he published at about the same time; see “The Question of Miracles,” in The Bible Student (March-June 1903), as reprinted in The Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol. 2, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1973), 167-204.
5. See below, 130-32.
6. See Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (New York: Scribner, 1918).
7. ForWarfield’s complete essay, see “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Creation,” in The Works of Benjamin B.Warfield, vol. 5, Calvin and Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), 287-349. The quotations that follow are taken from Warfield, Evolution, Science, and Scripture, 308-9.

Introduction

In my last post we looked at Old Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield and his understanding of the “human side” of the Bible. That may not be the best way of putting it, but it reflects Warfield’s view that the Bible is fully a divine/human product. Neither can be seen as less important than the other. This has practical implications for Warfield, for it allows—better, it demands—that the implications of Scripture’s “humanity” be taken with utmost seriousness.

All biblical authors wrote from the vantage point of their particular historical contexts, and their writings throughout reflect that reality. The inspiration of Scripture is not true despite this human side. Rather, the human side is an invariable part of what “inspiration” means. The “human side” is not a problem that inspiration needs to overcome. It is God’s chosen means of speaking.

Old Princeton represented one major arm of Calvinism—the British tradition. The other arm, the Dutch Calvinist tradition, expressed (in my opinion) an even clearer idea of the theological importance of the human side of Scripture.

An “Organic” View of Scripture

In fact, when we turn to these Dutch Calvinists, we see that they were actually critical of their own tradition for failure to develop an “organic” doctrine of Scripture, i.e., one that takes account of its humanness as well as its divine authority.

We see this in the writings of two guiding lights of Dutch Calvinism, Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854-1921).

Abraham Kuyper appreciated the defenses of divine authorship that characterized his Calvinist predecessors, but added:

It can scarcely be denied that they had established themselves too firmly in the idea of a logical theory of inspiration, to allow the animated organism of the Scripture to fully assert itself.¹

Kuyper felt that philosophical arguments for inspiration ignored the human dimension which is an irreducible part of Scripture. In a similar vein, Herman Bavinck noted the overall failure of his Calvinist predecessors to develop an organic view of inspiration:

The Reformed confessions [e.g., the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith] almost all have an article on Scripture and clearly express its divine authority; and all the Reformed theologians without exception take the same position. Occasionally one can discern a feeble attempt at developing a more organic view of Scripture.²

The development of a more organic view awaited the rise of modernity, as Bavinck noted:

In general, it can be said without fear of contradiction that insight into the historical and psychological mediation of revelation … only came to full clarity in modern times and that the mechanical view of inspiration, to the extent that it existed in the past, has increasingly made way for the organic (Ibid.,431).

There is a lot to unpack in these three quotes, but let me focus on the last point. Kuyper and Bavinck were hardly liberal renegades looking to destroy people’s faith. In fact, they were quite open about warning people of liberal extremes. Nevertheless, the rise of modern biblical scholarship, whatever downside there might be to it, served the purpose of alerting us to the thoroughly human product that Scripture is—not exclusively human, but nevertheless, thoroughly human.

The Bible and the Incarnation

Furthermore, in their development of the doctrine of organic inspiration, both Bavinck and Kuyper made bold use of the incarnational analogy of Scripture (as Christ is both divine/human, so too does Scripture reflect divine and human authorship). They argued that inspiration despised no cultural form, but wove itself fully into the fabric of human life at the time.

The following from Bavinck illustrates the point beautifully:

The theory of organic inspiration alone does justice to Scripture. In the doctrine of Scripture, it is the working out and application of the central fact of revelation: the incarnation of the Word. The Word (logos) has become flesh (sarx), and the word has become Scripture; these two facts do not only run parallel but are most intimately connected. Christ became flesh, a servant, without form or comeliness, the most despised of human beings; he descended to the nethermost parts of the earth and became obedient even to death on the cross. So also the word, the revelation of God, entered the world of creatureliness, the life and history of humanity, in all the human forms of dream and vision, of investigation and reflection, right down into that which is humanly weak and despised and ignoble…. All this took place in order that the excellency of the power…of Scripture, may be God’s and not ours.³

Several pages later, Bavinck puts it this way:

The organic nature of Scripture…implies the idea that the Holy Spirit, in the inscripturation of the word of God, did not spurn anything human to serve as an organ of the divine. The revelation of God is not abstractly supernatural but has entered into the human fabric, into persons and states of beings, into forms and usages, into history and life. It does not fly high above us but descends into our situation; it has become flesh and blood, like us in all things except sin. Divine revelation is now an ineradicable constituent of this cosmos in which we live and, effecting renewal and restoration, continues its operation. The human has become an instrument of the divine; the natural has become a revelation of the supernatural; the visible has become a sign and seal of the invisible. In the process of inspiration, use has been made of all the gifts and forces resident in human nature” ("Reformed Dogmatics" 1.442–43; my emphasis).

What I find so refreshing in Bavinck is his eloquent—almost poetic—enthusiasm for the irreducible theological value of the humanity of Scripture. There is a reason why Scripture looks the way it does, with all its bumps and bruises, peaks and valleys, gaps and gashes. As counterintuitive as it might sound to, the “humiliation” of Scripture is there to exalt God’s power, not ours.

Accenting the Bible’s humanity does not mean ignoring or marginalizing the divine authorship of Scripture. Rather, to acknowledge the historical contexts in which Scripture was produced is to proclaim as good and powerful what that divine author has actually, by his wisdom, produced. The Spirit’s primary authorship is not questioned, nor does Scripture’s humiliation imply error. Bavinck’s point is simply that the “creatureliness” of Scripture is not an obstacle to be overcome, but the very means by which Scripture’s divinity can be seen.

In fact, Scripture’s divinity can only be seen because of its humanity—God’s chosen means of communication—not by looking past it. And it is not just humanity as a safe theoretical construct. It is a humanity that is “weak and despised and ignoble.” That is what points us to the divine, just as Christ does in his state of humiliation. To marginalize, or minimize, or somehow get behind the Bible’s “creatureliness” to the “real” word of God is, for Bavinck, to strip God of his glory.

And the point is…

Old Princeton and the Dutch Calvinists understood that the human dimension of Scripture—which pervades Scripture thoroughly—is not merely tolerable of a divine book, but a necessary component of what inspiration means.

These traditions have had a marked influence on contemporary Evangelicalism, and applying their general approach to Scripture to current challenges such as science and faith seems like a continuation of that trajectory.

In my next post I want to look at one example from New Testament scholarship that illustrates this “embrace of the human” in Scripture.

Notes

1. Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles (trans. J. Hendrik deVries; New York: Scribners, 1898), 480-81
2. Reformed Dogmatics, vol 1, Prolegomena (ed. J. Bolt; trans. J. Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 415.
3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Volume 1: Prolegomena (trans. J. Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003) 434–35; my emphasis.

Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield (1851-1921) accepted evolution as giving the proper scientific account of human origins, but he also believed that hearing God’s voice in scripture and the findings of solid scientific work were not at odds. As historians Mark Noll and David Livingston put it,

B. B. Warfield, the ablest modern defender of the theologically conservative doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible, was also an evolutionist.¹

Warfield, however, did not address the matter in as much theological and hermeneutical depth as is needed today, given our growing scientific and archaeological knowledge. In fact, Warfield did not address the latter (to my knowledge) at all. Thus, we should not call upon Warfield, or any other of his contemporaries, to settle the evolution question for us today. The question is whether we see in Warfield (and others) a hermeneutical trajectory for having the needed “Bible in context” discussion today.

In my opinion, there are valuable lessons to be learned here for contemporary Evangelicals.

B. B. Warfield and the “Human Side” of the Bible

The theological reason why Warfield and the other Old Princeton theologians were so open to looking at the Bible in its historical context was because they understood the Bible to be analogous to Christ himself. As Christ was both divine and human, Scripture also has divine and human sides.

Of course, this is only an analogy. No one—least of all Warfield—is claiming that the Bible is “God incarnate” like Christ is. But he is saying that Christ the Word and Scripture the word are both evidence of “God with us” and both have a divine and human “dimension” (if you will forgive the imprecise language here).

The divine and human cannot be separated, either in Christ or in the Bible. Both are what they are. In fact, with Christ, his humanity is essential to who he is. Likewise, the Bible’s “human side” is an essential part of what Scripture is, and recognizing this has practical implications.

In an 1894 essay Warfield put it this way, saying it is fundamental,

that the whole of Scripture is the product of the divine activities which enter it, not by superseding the activities of the human authors, but by working confluently with them, so that the Scriptures are the joint product of divine and human activities, both of which penetrate them at every point, working harmoniously together to the production of a writing which is not divine here and human there, but at once divine and human in every part, every word and every particular.²

Warfield calls this relationship between the divine and human in the Bible “concursus.” He goes on to say:

On this conception, therefore, for the first time full justice is done to both elements of Scripture [human and divine]. Neither is denied because the other is recognized. And neither is limited to certain portions of Scripture so that place may be made for the other. As full justice is done to the human element as is done by those who deny that there is any divine element in the Bible, for of every word in the Bible, it is asserted that it has been conceived in a human mind and written by a human hand. As full justice is done to the divine element as is done by those who deny that there is any human element in the Bible, for of every word in the Bible it is asserted that it is inspired by God, and has been written under the direct and immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit.³

These words were written for a fairly popular readership, not for scholars. Here Warfield had a wonderful opportunity to perhaps mend a fence to protect the sheep against things that were new and might not be understood. But rather he affirmed, positively, and in no uncertain terms, the integral role of the “human element” (as he puts it) of Scripture.

As I said above, Warfield may not have applied this idea as much as we today might have hoped, but he was also keenly aware that concursus has clear practical implications for how we read our Bibles, especially in view of developments in biblical scholarship at his time.

More than an Abstract Idea

In his article cited above, Warfield is clear about the questions he was attempting to answer: “How are the two factors, the divine and the human, to be conceived as related to each other in the act of inspiration? And, how is the Scriptural relationship between the two consequent elements in the product, the divine and human, to be conceived?”

These “how” questions were prompted, according to Warfield, by the reality that,

[r]ecent discussion of the authenticity, authorship, integrity, structure of the several Biblical books, has called men's attention, as possibly it has never before been called, to the human element in the Bible. Even those who were accustomed to look upon their Bible as simply divine, never once thinking of the human agents through whom the divine Spirit spoke, have had their eyes opened to the fact that the Scriptures are human writings, written by men, and bearing the traces of their human origin on their very face. In many minds the [“how”] questions have become quite pressing...

Warfield goes on to say that it is not enough to be content with the “effects of inspiration.” We must also strive to understand how inspiration works (a divine/human concursus). This is not an issue that could be left to the side in Warfield’s day, and certainly not in ours.

One cannot simply appeal to the fact of inspiration to settle disputes about the Bible. One must engage the “nature and mode” of inspiration (as Warfield put it), the fact that Scripture is a divine/human entity. To put this in plain English, according to Warfield, inspiration means the divine and human are working together to produce a product that is of divine authority and bears the indelible marks of its historical context. A proper understanding of inspiration does not marginalize the “human side” but respects it.

Putting it this way does not settle the big interpretive questions, and, as I said, Warfield did not apply this principle as much as we need to today. The principle, however, is not only sound but powerful. What remains for us is honest conversation about how this principle applies to our present challenges concerning evolution.

Notes

1. On Warfield and evolution, see Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingston, eds., B. B. Warfield: Evolution, Science, and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 14.
2. B. B. Warfield, “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” in Evolution, Scripture, and Science: Selected Writings (ed. M. A. Noll and D. N. Livingstone; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000) 57. The essay was originally published in the Presbyterian Journal, May 3, 1894.
3. B. B. Warfield, “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield (ed. John E . Meeter; Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970), 57.

In this video “Conversation,” Daniel Harrell, Senior Minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota, discusses what often gets in the way of getting Christians to consider evolutionary science.

Christians immediately see it [evolutionary science] as a challenge to the biblical authority because it upsets a literal interpretation of the creation narrative found in Genesis. They might say, “If I can’t read six days as twenty-four hour periods, then how do I know what to believe?” In cases like these, there is just some education that needs to occur, says Harrell. For example, if Christians are shown that there is not just one definition for “day” in the Bible, or if they are given some analogies to common experience this could be helpful.

It is also important to “draw a distinction between scientific data and its interpretation,” notes Harrell, because the science has nothing to say about Genesis 1 and how it should be read. Problems arise when Christians try to take on the scientific data itself.

If indeed the world is the handiwork of God, says Harrell, then this [evolutionary science] is the handiwork of God—and to challenge that “is just not necessary.”

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In this video Conversation, Joel Hunter addresses the “slippery slope” argument supported by many evangelicals and suggests that not only is this perspective flawed, but it also may prevent believers from appreciating the fullness of God’s creation.

Hunter explains that when evangelicals argue that to accept science is to reject God (and biblical inerrancy), what is really being protected is a singular way to interpret scripture. Many evangelical parents are guarding the only type of literalistic interpretation that they themselves were taught because they fear that supporting scientific thought would negate the messages they have learned from scripture—when in fact, we can believe in the inerrancy in scripture without discarding scientific truths.

Hunter points out that sometimes we may be approaching biblical texts from an analytic or historical perspective when instead they are meant to be read as metaphor or poetry. By limiting biblical interpretations to a literalistic approach, we are missing pieces of the puzzle; the same is true if we ignore discoveries of the natural world. Thus, if believers are really raising children to know God, they will understand that allowing them to see more of God in nature (through science) will in turn allow them to see more of the creator in scripture.

In this video Conversation, Joel Hunter explains why it is important that we decouple the view of scripture from the “either or” mentality, which stems from the culture’s polarization and politicization of the interpretation of scripture.

Hunter suggests that a view of scripture as the “inerrant Word of God” does not mean that the Bible should be read literally, but rather, it means that God is inerrant. Further, while scripture itself is revelatory, that does not imply that the person interpreting it is inerrant. The disconnect between the view of inerrancy and the liberal low view of scripture is a spectrum rather than a choice.

One can have both the highest view of scripture and a humble understanding of people searching for the best way to interpret the depths of what that scripture actually says more than the literal or “one plane” understanding of that scripture, says Hunter.

The same superintendent spirit of the writers of scripture should be in us when we learn more about how to best interpret the text—only then can God make those same words reveal even more to us. Once we have a more complete sense of the context in which scripture was produced and the context in which we should understand the text today, it will allow us to speak greater truths because the inerrancy will grow with our interpretation.

Atrahasis is the name of the Noah-like figure in this story and it means “exceedingly wise.” The Atrahasis Epic and another ancient story called the Gilgamesh Epic overlap a lot with the biblical flood story. We will get to that issue in a future post. Atrahasis, however, is more than just a flood story. It is a story of the origins of the gods (theogony) and of the cosmos (cosmogony).

Atrahasis is important to biblical scholars because of it similarity to Genesis 2-9. Both stories share a similar storyline: creation, population growth and rebellion, flood. They also share some important details within that storyline.

The degree of overlap between the stories suggests to some scholars that Genesis 2-9 may be an Israelite version of Atrahasis, although it is best not to be dogmatic about that. It is very clear, however, that there is a lot of conceptual overlap between them.

The best way to show the similarities between these stories is in a chart. The one below is from Daniel Harlow, which is adapted from a chart by Bernard F. Batto¹. I have made slight adjustments for clarity.

It goes without saying that there are clear differences between the stories (which we will see in more detail when we get to the flood story). But, just as we saw last week with Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish, (1) the differences only stand out because of the similarities, (2) the differences do not justify minimizing the similarities.

As we saw with Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish, Genesis 2-9 and Atrahasis breathe the same air. They share ancient Mesopotamian ways of talking about origins. This is a clear indication that the second creation story does not speak to contemporary science. Hence, (1) it cannot and should not be harmonized with contemporary science, (2) it should not control what can be concluded from scientific investigation.

Genesis 2-9 is an ancient story asking addressing ancient issues. Understanding that ancient context will keep us from asking this story to deliver more than it is prepared to. And it will also help us mine the theological depths of what this story said to ancient Israelites nearly three millennia ago.

Israel’s two creation stories are clearly distinct, which makes one ask why there are two to begin with and why they are placed side-by-side as they are. Unfortunately, Genesis does not come with an introduction explaining why the author did what he did.

The conventional scholarly explanation is a bit involved, but here is the main outline. The second creation story in Genesis is actually Israel’s older creation story, written perhaps sometime during the early period of the monarchy and fully engaged with common Mesopotamian traditions. The first creation story in Genesis was written second, after the return from Exile (539 B.C.), and was influenced by Israel’s long experience in Babylon captivity.

Genesis 1 highlights God’s complete control over creation, employing and transforming familiar Mesopotamian themes such as the cosmic battle motif. That story was placed at the beginning of Israel’s Scripture. The older creation story was edited to reflect its new position as subordinate to Genesis 1.

As I have suggested in previous posts, one way of looking at it is this: What had been Israel’s original story of creation (the Adam story) was transformed to a story of Israel’s creation.

As I stressed earlier, such a suggestion is not meant to cut off discussion but promote it. The meaning of Israel’s creation accounts has been pondered since before the time of Christ, and no one should think that conversation has come to an end in an internet post or two.

Whatever one concludes about Israel’s creation stories, the extra-biblical stories should not be kept at arm’s length from Genesis. They are clearly very important for understanding the nature of Genesis and what it means to understand it properly today.

Notes

1. Harlow, professor at Calvin College, gave a lecture at the ASA meeting at Baylor University in August 2009, “After Adam: Reading Genesis in an Age of Evolutionary Science.” That lecture will appear in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith in an upcoming issue. Batto’s chart can be found in his classic Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition (Westminster John Knox, 1992), pp. 51-52.

There are so many close similarities between the biblical Flood account and the Mesopotamian accounts that conservative scholars like Alexander Heidel, Merril Unger, Donald Wiseman, John Walton and others have concluded that the biblical and Mesopotamian flood accounts go back to a common tradition about the same flood.¹ This means if we can locate the flood mentioned in the Mesopotamian accounts, we will have located the biblical flood.

Working from inscriptions and the Sumerian King List, the Sumerian Noah, Ziusudra, who lived in the city of Shuruppak, can be roughly dated to c. 2850 B.C. This agrees quite closely with the date of the only Mesopotamian flood that left simultaneous deposits in three locations (Shuruppak, Uruk, and Kish). A number of ancient Near Eastern scholars have, therefore, concluded that this flood is probably the one mentioned in the Mesopotamian and biblical accounts.²

Historian Jack Finegan writes,

Since in Sumerian tradition Shuruppak was the last ruling city before the flood and Kish was the first thereafter, it was presumably the inundation attested at Shuruppak between the Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic periods (and at Uruk and Kish at about the same time) that was the historic flood so long remembered. The date was about 2900.³

It is plausible that the Mesopotamian flood of c. 2900 B.C. was the historical basis of the biblical account. A Mesopotamian flood theory is the only flood theory that explains the fact that no other flood stories are anywhere near as close to the biblical account as the Mesopotamian accounts.⁴ It is also the only flood theory that agrees with the biblical description of the sources of the Flood’s water as all being fresh water sources.⁵

So, there is an objective basis for an actual biblical Flood. Why then do I title this post “Barely Local?” The answer is that neither the flood of 2900 B.C. nor any other actual local flood, such as the Black Sea flood, nor the melting of ice caps at various historical points closely fits the biblical description. Local flood theories do not fit the biblical account with regard to secondary issues such as lasting one year and destroying all the birds (even in a local area). More importantly, no local flood theory agrees with the biblical account at the most critical points: landing the ark in the Ararat mountains, covering the entire Near East (Genesis 9:19, “all the earth” = Genesis 10), establishing Noah as a new Adam, i.e., as a new beginning of the human race⁶, and dismantling the universe by reversing creation days two and three.⁷

We can say then that the biblical account may well be based upon an actual Mesopotamian flood and therefore is not properly designated a myth. At the same time, it is evident from geology, anthropology and archaeology that the above mentioned four critical points in the biblical description, which go well beyond the scope of a local flood, cannot be regarded as actual, factual history. The biblical account would, therefore, be properly described as Legend (or better, Parabolic Legend, as I will describe in my third post).

A fact often missing from the discussion of whether the Flood is global or local is the fact that Genesis 1-11 is accommodated to the limited scientific knowledge of the Israelites. We see this in the Flood account’s definition of “the whole earth.” Genesis 9:19, “These three were the sons of Noah: and of these was the whole earth overspread,” leads us to the author’s definition of “the whole earth.” It is the area overspread by the descendants of the three sons of Noah. Contextually, this area is set forth in Genesis 10. The “whole earth” according to the (final) author of Genesis 6-10 is thus the greater Near East.

This contextual definition of “the whole earth” excludes the usual ideas of a limited local flood as well as the idea that the Flood is described in Scripture as covering our modern globe. The biblical account is not written from the perspective of God’s knowledge of geography but is accommodated to the Israelites’ limited knowledge, wherein “the whole earth” both extends to and is limited to the greater Near East.

In addition, the sources of the Flood’s waters in Scripture depend upon an ocean above the sky and beneath the earth. The account is thus divinely accommodated to the ancient Israelites’ view of the universe.⁸ Since it involves ancient Near Eastern “science,” which has since been superseded, the biblical description is not all actual-factual. The biblical account is, in fact, much grander than the actual event, a point that we will look at in my third and final post.

Notes

1. Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946, 1949) 260. See a list of similarities in Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Waco, TX: Word, 1987) 163–64; Merrill F. Unger, Archaeology and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1954) 68; Donald J. Wiseman, Illustrations from Biblical Archaeology (London: Tyndale, 1958) 8; John H. Walton, Ancient Israelite Literature in its Cultural Context (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989) 40.

2. William W. Hallo and William Kelly Simpson, The Ancient Near East: A History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971) 35–36; Mallowan, "Noah's Flood Reconsidered," 81; Samuel Noah Kramer, "Reflections on the Mesopotamian Flood: The Cuneiform Data New and Old," Expedition 9:4 (Summer, 1967) 18; H. W. F. Saggs, Babylonians (Berkeley: University of California Press, c2000) 39.

3. Jack Finegan, Archaeological History of the Ancient Middle East (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979) 26.

4. John Bright, “Has Archaeology Found Evidence of the Flood?” The Biblical Archaeologist 5 (1942) 56; Derek Kidner, Genesis (Chicago: Inter-Varsity, 1967) 96; Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) 132.

5. Rain is obviously fresh water, and see Gerhard F. Hasel, “The Fountains of the Great Deep,” Origins 1 (1974): 67-72.

6. Kenneth Mathews, Genesis 1–11:26 (Nashville: Broadmans, 1996) 351, 398. The fact that Noah is taking the place of Adam as a new beginning for mankind has been widely recognized for centuries, e.g., “Noah was the beginning of our race” (Justin Martyr, Dial 19, ANF 1:204); “Noah, the second father of mankind” (Charles John Ellicott, Ellicott’s Commentary on the Whole Bible [c. 1863; repr., Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1959], 1:44); “the second origin of the human race” (Benjamin B. Warfield, “The Biblical Idea of Revelation,” in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible [Philadephia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1948], 78); “Adam the father of all humanity and Noah its father in the post-diluvian world” (Bruce Waltke, Genesis [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001], 127); “Noah is a second Adam,” Victor Hamilton, The Book of Genesis Chapters 1–17 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990], 313).

7. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, 291; Mathews, Genesis, 351, see 376; Walter Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 54, cited in John H. Walton, Genesis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) 331; Waltke, Genesis, 139; Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1–15 (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1987) 181.

8. For more details on the accommodation of the Flood account, see my paper, “Noah’s Flood: Its Date, Extent, and Divine Accommodation,” Westminster Theological Journal 66 (2004) 291-311.

When we read Genesis 1.1: "in the beginning God created the heavens and earth" we picture the origin of the atmosphere, space, solar systems, and galaxies. We think of the creation of the planet in our solar system named "Earth," whose shape is an oblate spheroid or a rotationally symmetric ellipsoid. This mental picture is natural, because the English term "Earth" is the name of the planet in this solar system on which humans reside. But in Genesis 1 "earth" does not mean the planet Earth. Genesis reports the origin of the "heavens and earth" as such terms meant in the author's time and within his worldview, which did not include a twenty-first century acquaintance with astronomy. What does "earth" mean in Genesis 1? The answer is provided in the text itself.

Genesis 1.1 "In the beginning God created ha-shamayim and ha-aretz [earth]." Genesis 1.1 is a title for what is to follow. Genesis 1.2a "The earth [ha-aretz] was without form and void" (there was no earth yet). After God created light, named day and night, and made a firmament (the heavens or sky) to divide the waters, God made ha-aretz.

Genesis 1.9 "And God said, 'Let the waters under the sky [ha-shamayim] be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land [ha-yabbashah] appear.' And it was so. 10 God called the dry land eretz [English: "earth"] and the waters that were gathered together he called seas. . . . "

Ha-aretz is "dry land" [Hebrew: ha-yabbashah]. God created land from which seed bearing plants and fruit trees would emerge and on which the creepers would creep. To the biblical writer, this land was not a planet or a globe spinning on its axis or orbiting the sun along with other planets.

Genesis 1 explains the origins of the land on which people live, farm, and travel. Ha-aretz is often a synonym for ha-adamah, "ground" in the Bible. Throughout the rest of Genesis, the biblical writers use ha-aretz to describe one's homeland, property, farmland, other regions, and bowing to the ground. Eretz is translated by the English term "earth" 660 times, and usually it refers to ground, soil, or the place where one is standing. In these cases, eretz is a synonym for the Hebrew adamah, the stuff from which adam is made in Genesis 2.7. The same term is translated by the English "land" or "country" 1,620 times in the Revised Standard Version, meaning location or place, boundaried or unboundaried, as in countryside. In addition, ha-aretz can mean the realm of all creatures, the realm or habitation of the living (Job 28.13; Psalm 27.13). Nowhere in the Bible does "earth" refer to a planet. Why is this important for science and theology?

Ha-aretz translated properly as "land," takes the air out of controversies over whether the Genesis flood story depicts a local or "universal" flood, an aspect of the polemic of young earth theorists and "creationists." (They suppose the earth to be less than 10,000 years old, based on adding the genealogies of Genesis. This is mixing genres--categories of literature--to develop a Western and even mathematical role for the Bible, while genealogies appear to link Abraham to Noah and Noah to Seth).

The term "universal flood" usually means that flood waters covered the entire planet. According to young earth theorists, the one-year Genesis flood laid down millions of layers of sediment across the planet, causing the earth to appear to be millions of years old. The basis of the young earth claim is the phrase "kol ha-aretz" in Genesis 7.3 and 8.9 and translated as "the whole earth." For readers who have a planet in mind, this translation biases them to believe the text claims Noah was saved from a global flood.

But the flood story of Genesis 6-9 assumes the same worldview represented in Genesis 1 and uses the same vocabulary throughout, including ha-aretz to mean land or dry ground. Throughout the flood account in Genesis, eretz and adamah are used synonymously. "Kol ha-aretz" means all the land known to the originators of the flood story, perhaps a location around the Black or Mediterranean Seas, which would have been the "world" of the biblical writers. Although flood stories exist among some ancient cultures and evidence for flooding is apparent in some areas around the world, some regions have no stories or traces of flooding. The layers of sediment and fossils in North America alone demonstrate without question that a single flood could not have deposited them. The ancient texts and artifacts of Ugarit, Egypt, and Japan contain no flood narratives, and there are only a few from Africa. Thus, the closest neighbors of Israel do not "remember" flooding.

Neither is there geological data to support a global flood around ten thousand years ago. Eight times more water than is now on earth would have been required for waters to cover the planet. There would have been the need for a new creation to restore the earth after the flood, because salt water destroys vegetation. Certain geological phenomena would have been destroyed if there had been a global flood. In Auvergne, France, there are cones of scoria and ashes from long extinct volcanoes, but there are no signs of effects of water. In addition, the 35,000 year old cave drawings from the Dordogne area of France (and countless other extant artifacts) would have been destroyed by a global flood.

The Bible was not intended as a primitive science manual that presented rudimentary scientific facts that would be verifiable at a later date when science caught up. When the biblical writers refer to "all the land" or even "the whole world," they refer to their whole world, not ours; they were not thinking of a planet, because they did not know they were living on a planet.

By observing the known world in all its magnificence--noticing, distinguishing, and naming its grandest features--Genesis 1, Psalm 104, Job 38 and Isaiah exemplify fundamentals of science--observation and organizing, but they are primarily theological. They cause us to worship God, as creator of all that is.