It was September, the first day of class and I was heading to a waiting room of 100 plus eager first-year students to teach the intro course Christian Spiritual Formation. It was one of my favourite classes. It was a fun because of the range of students. I had a considerable amount of cultural Christians (they knew the story behind Christmas and Easter) some serious seekers, some Sikhs, a Muslim or two and for good measure some Christian zealots who knew what they believed but were not too sure about the professor. On this day before I stepped into the classroom, one of those students intercepted me. He politely introduced himself and queried, “do I believe the earth was created in 6 days.” Time was not on my side and how do you answer such a question in a sound bite while walking to class.
I answered with something Jesus taught me 😊 and returned the question with another question and asked the student, “is this question important to you?”
He responded, “yes! I have been asking all the professors this question to see who actually believes in the Bible.”
“Oh,” I responded and then said, “We have to go to class right now.” “Tell you what, attend your classes here at Prov this year and come to me at the end with this question and we can talk about it.”
In the end we never did have that conversation, in fact I don’t think he ever attended any other class I taught but to his credit he did stay the full course and graduated a few years later after I had retired.
His question was a litmus test to see if I believed in a particular literal reading of the Bible. In his mind, anything short of that meant I did not trust/believe the Bible. Of course he is not alone in that kind of selective thinking. In fact others might add that it must be a King James 1611 version of the Bible to be authentic.
I am not sure how a younger me would have responded. I know today such a flat reading of the Bible is of little interest to me and I would argue does more harm to scripture. At the very least we need to recognize that reading the Bible needs to take into consideration genre, historical and cultural analysis. For example, one would not expect to read poetry in the same way as prose.
In recent times both, the late Rachel Held Evans and A. J. Jacobs tasked themselves with living out the Bible over a year in a manner as literally as possible. Evans,’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood and A.J. Jacobs The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, were both informative and hilarious. And in the end, they exposed the impossibility of such endeavors.
On a more serious note, going back to the original question. Was the earth created in six days? Today, I would argue the question is largely irrelevant. The intent of the author(s) is not explaining how the earth was created. I liken Genesis 1 to what philosophers John Searle and J.L. Austin describe as Speech Act. Searle and Austin suggest that while most language is constative in nature. We ask what does this mean? Much of speech is better understood as Speech Act where we ask instead what does this do when spoken? If indeed Genesis 1 became written fodder sometime during the Babylonian exile as most scholars suggest. We might want to ask then, what did these creation stories do when they were told to each with people living in exile. At stake, I do not think they were concerned with the mechanics of creation..
But I digress. Many would disagree with my thought pattern on this. But remove it from a flat literal reading and at least we can talk about it in an insigthful way.
Proving that the Bible is scientifically correct or historically accurate is meaningless insomuch as you are asking the Bible to do something that it was not intended to do. Besides, if one must use modern day science to prove the authority of Scripture then science is of more value to that person than the Bible.
Like so many things, faith is best held with an open hand, nurtured by both boundaries and imporovisation, tradition and innovation. Rachel Held Evans in Wholehearted Faith p.38
My reading of the Bible was heavily influenced by a small book that I read sometime in the 80s from Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. In the 90s I used it to teach an adult Sunday School in the church I was attending at the time. (I didn’t tell them anything about the author). Entitled the Prophetic Imagination (1978) Brueggemann engaged the Old Testament Prophets not as foretellers but as contemporary critics to “nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” In the language of everyday people, the prophets are not interested in crystal ball gazing but giving readers eyes to see what needs to be dismantled/deconstructed and pathways that lead to hope.
As a student preparing for ministry in college in the 70s, I remember being taught the pathway to good preaching always favored exegetical over topical preaching. Topical was at best suspect. It was much later after exegeting the experience of hearing many sermons that I concluded exegesis was usually the ruse to get to the topical – some propositional statement that the preacher wanted to put forth that may or may not have anything to do with the actual text. But the preacher got the moral high ground claiming, “see this is biblical.” Brueggemann taught me to enter the thickness of the text which more times than naught takes the reader down unfamiliar paths refusing to be codified into a sound bite, or even a fixed single point. It is the difference that C.S. Lewis described between using a text and receiving a text. Of course, a paragraph is hardly helpful in understanding the methodology of a Brueggemann. I recommend reading Brueggemann and a good place to start is with Prophetic Imagination.
Recently, I had the occasion to meet Graham Bondar a former student from my early days at Providence University College. It has been several years since we had last spoken. He reminded me the day I played U2 song, “I still haven’t found what I am looking for", in class. And while the occasion was lost in my memory, he reminded me what I said to the class[1], “when you graduate, I hope you can still resonate with this song. The learning never stops.” Today thinking back on the memory, I would add, the moment you say, “I found it” whether in reading the Bible, or following Jesus, you have probably lost it. Any spark one might have had has probably been extinguished.
[1] A teacher may be forgiven getting excited whenever a former student 20 years later remembers something you said in a positive way.
My comment should more correctly be "Take the Bible literally except when you can't.... The word "until" gives the impression that you are throwing the whole thing out. The word "except" provides a more "pick and choose" options.
Taking the Bible literally until you can't (fill in reason here...cultural, poetry, science, etc) seems easiest to me.