(My apologies for the length of this post. As I got into it, it began to take on a life of its own. :)
That was the title of the seminary I attended at Butler University last week. A friend invited me to come hear the first in a series of presentations on Darwinism hosted by Butler's Center for Faith & Vocation.
As was to be expected, the audience was a self-described "NPR audience" with more liberal leanings, and given the setting, the presentations were presented with an anti-conservative, anti-creationist bias. It's always interesting to sit incognito in such settings.
The portion of the evening which was of particular interest to me was the presentation by Dr. Michael Zimmerman, Butler's Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Science. He is the head of The Clergy Letter Project, an open letter undersigned by a variety of clergy challenging school districts to an education philosophy such "that science remain science and that religion remain religion." The Christian version of the letter reads as follows:
Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible - Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark - convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation. Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as “one theory among others” is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator. To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God, an act of hubris. We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge. We ask that science remain science and that religion remain religion, two very different, but complementary, forms of truth.
This letter is the original clergy letter, but Dr. Zimmerman also shared a newer letter, specifically addressed to Jewish clergy. For the sake of not making this post any longer than it already is, I'll let you read that letter here, if you'd like to.
After hearing these letters read during the presentation, there seem to be aspects of them which are based on certain assumptions and misinterpretations concerning the conservative Christian position on issues surrounding the origin of the universe. Just a few examples:
"the overwhelming majority [of Christians] do not read the Bible literally..." - This convenient assumption would be disputed by a great majority of Christians who come from a more conservative bent (which, interestingly, are not well represented in the list of the signers of The Clergy Letter).
"To argue that God’s loving plan of salvation for humanity precludes the full employment of the God-given faculty of reason is to attempt to limit God...." - This cliched idea pitting faith against reason, as if the two are always mutually exclusive, is just not factual. I've always wondered why the evolutionist crowd automatically assumes that because a person has religious faith, they somehow no longer have the capacity to think rationally. (I would hope my efforts with this blog support the opposite position, that someone coming from a Christian worldview can present rational, credible logic to support a Christian position on various subjects.) Granted, not everyone may agree with the Christian position, or the argumentation, but a belief in the unprovable should not automatically assume irrationality--Just ask anyone who believes that man came from the primordial soup, as it were. None of us was there to witness it, so we rely on the evidence. However, the actual documented evidence is not has prevalent as many scientists would have us believe. But that does not change their belief that it happened. I do not plead insanity on behalf of such scientists, simply that there is room for faith (or whatever you want to call it) for those holding a variety of beliefs, Christian or not.
[From the Jewish Letter] "The Bible...is, however, open to interpretation, with some taking the creation account and other content literally and some preferring a figurative understanding." - This idea of the Bible being taken literally and figuratively is legitimate. In fact, the vast majority of conservative Christians would agree with that statement--in the sense that different types of literature taken on various forms of interpretation. For example, poetic metaphor is not to be taken literally. Nor is the statement, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction", to be taken metaphorically.
Likewise, the Bible includes statements which would fall into both the category of literal interpretation ("You shall not murder" - Exodus 20:5) and metaphorical intent ("If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away." - Matthew 5:29). The key is trying to determine which parts of the Bible are intended literally and which are intended metaphorically. Confusing the two has serious implications. For example, as I've said in the past, there are people I know who believe passages where Jesus references "hell" are to be taken metaphorically. Is this idea to be interpreted as such, or is it to be taken literally? The reality of hell is one idea in which this question must be answered as definitively as possible.
And there are countless others in Scripture. For example, when it comes to the first two chapters of Genesis, the same thing applies. Is the creation account figurative or literal? The significance of this question is summed up in the first verse of Genesis (and arguably the most important verse in the Bible), "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Is this statement literally true or not? If not, then the Bible is only as authoritative as any other classical work of literature. If it is true, however, then the Bible as God's Word takes on an authority that surpasses that of any mortal being.
And that is the overarching idea that I left the seminar pondering. We tend to interpret the Bible as we think it should be interpreted. So, if we don't like the idea of punishment or personal responsibility, or especially of an idea like "hell", we choose to believe that the Bible must be interpreted in a different way. But, I wonder, what does God think? How does He want us to interpret Scripture? At the end of the day, that is the only question that counts.