Science and the Scripture with John Walton

In this video, John Walton discusses the problem of trying to integrate ancient scripture with our modern worldview. He notes that while people come to scripture thinking that they need to integrate it with the way we view the world now, it is not appropriate to read science out of the Bible or into the Bible. This makes the text say things that it never meant to an ancient audience.

Video Transcription

I think people come to scripture thinking that they need to integrate it with science, and so they want to either read science out of the Bible, or they want to read science into the Bible. We certainly have to integrate our thinking to accommodate both Bible theology on one hand and the way we think about the world on the other.

That’s not the way to do it, to read science in or read science out, because inevitably you end up making the text say things that it never meant to the ancient audience, and that’s a problem. We want to integrate our worlds and the way we think about the world, but not at the cost of either science or the Bible.

I think that that’s one of the things that we have to work at, to be ready to read the Biblical text as an ancient audience would have read it, and to benefit from all of the power that it has as that kind of text.