Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Testing Scripture, by John Polkinghorne

Chapter Three

1.  The Bible is not really a book but a library. It has within it a variety of different genres: poetry, prose, story, history, laws, letters, and so on. Part of a proper respect for Scripture is to be aware of this issue of genre. The sad irony of so-called ‘creationism’, based on a fundamentalist biblical literalism, is that in fact it abuses the very text that it seeks to respect, missing the point of what is written by mistaking its genre.

- Give examples of where “creationism” generates conflicts in our culture.

2.  Over the centuries, many have seen the unique human capacity for rational thinking as forming the core of the divine image. However, I doubt whether this really gets to the heart of the matter. Surely that image is to be found in the mentally handicapped as well as in the academically brilliant. Its presence is the theological basis for a fundamental belief in the worth of every individual human being. To my mind, it is the love of God bestowed on each individual, and the implicit ability to be aware of the divine presence, that constitute the essence of the imago dei.

- How does “awareness of the divine presence” present opportunity to explore this divine relationship of love of God and love of neighbor?

3.  The greatest of all the wisdom writings is surely the book of Job, a profound tale of human suffering. For 37 chapters, calamities fall on Job and he and his friends argue about the significance of the terrible things that have happened to him and his family. The friends assert that he must have offended God by his sins and so he is receiving just punishment. Job protests his innocence and longs to be able to appear directly before God to mount his defense and make his just protest. Then, suddenly, God is there.

- What happens to Job next?  What allows him to change his attitude?

4.  The wisdom writers were what we might today call ‘natural theologians.’ That is to say, they were seeking to learn something of God through general experience, without overt appeal to the particularities of specific revelatory events. While this approach is valid, it has its limitations. Its appeal to limited forms of experience can only yield limited insight.

- Where do we see such attempts today?  What are the consequences?

5.  Returning to the opening chapters of Genesis, it is time to look at chapter 3, the story of the Fall. Once again we have to recognize that we are dealing with the genre of myth. I do not believe that the chapter is the historical account of a single disastrous ancestral act, but it is a story conveying truth about the relationship between God and humanity. Read in a literal way, the story would clearly be incompatible with well-established knowledge given us by the scientific study of the past.  Once the story’s mythic power is released from bondage to a fundamentalist reading, it becomes full of insight of a kind that can be seen as complementary to the insights afforded us by science.

- Amen!  How do you understand and apply this alliance between the power of biblical myth and the urgency of ever-unveiling scientific insight?

6.  The Fall is indeed a fall ‘upward’, the gaining of knowledge, but it is an error to suppose that humans can thereby attain equality with their Creator, so that they can then live their lives independently of God. This declaration of complete human autonomy, the assertion that we can simply ‘do it my way’, is the root meaning of sin. The refusal to acknowledge that we are creatures in need of the grace of our Creator is the source of subsequent human sins, those deeds of selfishness and deceit that mar our lives as the result of believing the false claim to be completely independent of the assistance of divine grace.

- How does this definition of the Fall explain the persistence of sin?

7.  This turning from God did not bring biological death into the world, for that had been there for many millions of years before there were any hominids. What it did bring was what we may call ‘mortality’, human sadness and bitterness at the inevitability of death and decay. Alienation from God brought the bitterness of mortality, but the relation of humanity to God has been restored in the atonement (at-one-ment) brought by Jesus Christ, in whom the life of humanity and the life of divinity are both present and the broken link is mended.

- Ahhh…divine restoration!  What “broken links” have yet to be mended?

8.  The discussion of this chapter will serve, I hope, to illustrate how ancient religious wisdom and modern scientific knowledge can blend in a way that does justice to the valid insights of both. This is possible because Scripture is not a dead deposit of unchanging meaning, the repository of assertions that have to be accepted at face value without question, but a living spring from which new truths and insight can be expected to continue to flow.

- What a refreshing view of Scripture!  How is it a “living spring” for you?

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