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.

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.