Introducing Mything The Point, A Podcast of Biblical Interpretation

Introducing “Mything The Point” A Podcast of Biblical Interpretation If you are familiar with some of the arguments between science and religion, you will know there's a long history of church authorities suppressing a narrative of life on this planet, and the universe around us, from a scientific point of view; that is from a narrative based on discovery and the development of physical laws and logical theory. Galileo discovered through observation that the earth orbited around the sun. He concluded the earth wasn't the center of the universe. The Church imprisoned Galileo for his scientific conclusions. It took 500 years for Roman Catholic authorities to admit the church was wrong to have persecuted Galileo. The same is true of secular authorities suppressing a narrative of life from divine revelation. Intelligent Design Theory is a theory that suggests that the order and complexity of the observed universe dictates that a mind of great intelligence must have designed it. Adherents to Intelligent Design have been sidelined, or silenced through intimidation, in academic circles and corporate sectors. One Christian was fired from a bank position for wishing customers a blessed day. The pendulum of persecution swings in both directions. The church maintains that the Holy Bible is the result of God revealing to its many authors inspired knowledge about human life on earth, our origins, our purpose, our challenges, and our ultimate future. The basis of knowledge is not from observed data and scientific analysis, but a supposed revealed knowledge given to humanity by the creator of the universe. Science can forecast future weather patterns based on past weather observed. They build predictive models based on collected data of the past and project with a favorable percentage of certainty what the weather will be like in the future. I recently read a news article on the World Bank’s Groundswell Report about the effects of climate change. The report predicts a massive movement of populations, over the next 30 years, away from regions that climate change will impact negatively. Droughts will dry up wells. Plant life will diminish. Rivers and oceans will swell, flooding cities and towns. Concerning scripture, the church maintains that God has revealed things that are beyond our current ability to observe and analyze, things about the beginning of our universe, and especially about the planet we inhabit. God has revealed not only information about our origins, but also where humanity and the whole cosmos is ultimately headed. The Bible predicts a fiery end to this planet and the universe around us. It will end, and a new created order will emerge where the suffering we now experience will no longer be an issue. Human hopes are met in scriptural promises of a happy afterlife, where there is plenty for all and perpetual peace. You can see how these two sources of knowledge rub against one another in our lives. We learn the scientific narrative in schools and universities, from YouTubers, documentary films, and television programs. The scientific narrative is pervasively promoted in the public sphere. The biblical narrative, which was once the narrative most Americans knew at one level or another, is today regarded as archaic and irrelevant in the public mind. Science is, for many, the best of human achievement, and the source of the greatest knowledge. Whatever religion puts forward as fact, which is not supported with observable data, cannot be accepted as credible knowledge. And yet religion continues to attract adherents and captivate curiosity. Religious literature sold nearly $670 million in the US in 2020 . That’s up 17.5% from 2017 book sales. Religion and Spirituality is the third best-selling category of hard copy books sold on Amazon and the leading category in ebook sales. I suggest to you the continued interest in religion and spirituality is because science alone will not satisfy our search of meaning and significance. Facts and figures leave us flat. Science doesn’t seem interested in why we exist, beyond the creaturely functions of reproduction, nurture of offspring, and the consumption of resources. There was a time when science and religion were partners in the discovery and understanding of truth. The church is responsible for creating colleges and universities, a higher education system that is now often inhospitable to a religious worldview. Some of science’s greatest thinkers were men and women of faith. Francis Bacon is one of the originators of the empirical method used in all science endeavors. He is credited with establishing the inductive method of experimental science via what is called the scientific method today. Francis Bacon was a Christian. He had no problem gaining knowledge both by empiricism and by divine revelation. Part of the reason for the hostility between science and religion is a history of church and governmental suppression, oppression, and even violence against scientists with ideas that run counter to religious understanding. Theology was once known as the queen of the sciences. Many today are uninformed about the history between science and religion and are disinterested in religious sources of knowledge. Unconvincing or even ugly encounters with religiously minded persons within academia and business sectors make matters worse. The same can be said of the atheistic scientists who paint religious thinkers as absurd and deluded. One of the big fights between science and religion led to a courtroom battle in the early 20th century here in United States. It became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. The issue at hand was whether public schools in Tennessee should teach Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The court found John T. Scopes guilty of teaching evolutionary theory and fined him $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned the sentencing, finding the court had issued fine apart from a jury, but upheld the constitutional right of the state to dictate that Darwin should not be taught. The US Supreme court in 1968 ruled such a restriction to be against the First Amendment. The Scopes trial was broadcast live by radio and was later portrayed in theater productions and film. In some ways the battle continues today. There are a growing number of scientists who recognize the inadequacy of Darwin’s evolutionary theory to explain the order and complexity observed in the universe. Explanations of chance, natural selection, and environmental influences fail to satisfy their scrutiny. While most people consider evolution to be an accepted fact, it remains only a theory which has not yet been ousted by a better explanation. Intelligent Design Theory posits there must be an intelligence behind the appearance and development of the universe, something people of faith have believed for millennia. Having laid a bit of background to the tensions in our society between science and religion, I now turn to why I’m doing this podcast. There is a long scandalous history in how we got the Bible in the form we now have it in English. There is a bloody history in the scriptures coming to be the number one selling book. William Tyndale was strangled to death by order of the king of England and then his body burned at the stake. His bones were later desecrated. The church and state together persecuted scholars who sought to put the scriptures into the homes of the people. They thought it dangerous to let the people have their own interpretation, without the church’s learned hand leading. Indeed, the German-American theologian Philip Schaff despaired of the religious landscape in the United States. “Anyone can hang a shingle and start a religion!” Schaff wrote. I am the product of American Christianity, for better or worse, and I benefit from having access to a plethora of English Bible translations and paraphrased editions. There is a vast amount of free Bible study resources available to anyone with an internet connection. I consider it a privilege of the Information Age. Yet I sympathize with Philip Schaff in bemoaning the propensity of strange and biased readings of the Bible leading to unhealthy or even deadly religion. We only need point to Jim Jones and The Peoples Temple as one of the worst examples of Christianity gone terribly wrong. After the assassination of a US congressman and his team sent to investigate Jonestown, an agricultural religious commune in Guyana, South American settled by The Peoples Temple, Jim Jones led his people in mass suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. Those who refused to drink were shot to death. Over 900 people died on November 18, 1978. Jones preached from the Bible. Some would say that the Bible is dangerous because it can be abused in such as way as the horrific Jonestown Massacre. Yet the Bible reveals how such things happen! It’s not the Bible so much as it is people who are flawed. But let’s face it. The Bible is the product of human effort, albeit divinely inspired through and through. Might the Bible itself be flawed, since its creators are flawed human begins? People make mistakes. People have selfish inclinations. People can just be downright ugly and nasty and mean! Read Saint Paul when he suggests his opposition be castrated! Church doctrine says the scriptures are the divinely revealed word of God. When Darwin’s On The Origin of Species hit the shelves, the church responded defensively. Regarding evolutionary theory, many segments of Christianity continue to take a defensive stance. Princeton University, once a stalwart of Christian thought and leadership, fashioned a doctrine on the nature of scripture in response to evolutionary theory and modern biblical criticism. In their minds, God was being pushed out as author and sustainer of creation, while natural selection and causality took center stage in the public mind. This doctrine, also called biblical inerrancy, stated that the Bible was divinely inspired, religiously authoritative, and without error. The Princeton Seminary professor of theology Charles Hodge insisted that the Bible was inerrant because God inspired or "breathed" his exact thoughts into the biblical writers (2 Timothy 3:16). Princeton theologians believed that the Bible should be read differently than any other historical document. The doctrine of scriptural inerrancy became a rallying cry to threatened Christians everywhere. In Petersburg, Kentucky there stands a $25 million museum dedicated to promoting a biblical worldview that comes from a literal interpretation of the Bible. Its popularity and theme-park-like attractions gather thousands upon thousands each year. A life size Noah’s Ark carries dinosaurs! The people behind the Creation Museum and the Ark Experience believe the entire universe came into being in 6 days, just like it says in Genesis chapter one. It must be true, they insist, because that’s what God’s word says. The inconvenient fossil record, which reveals reptilian beasts of an ancient era millions upon millions of years ago, tells a very different story. According to the minds behind the Creation Museum, carbon dating is flawed and bogus. In their reading of the scriptures, the earth must only be 6000 years old. While I find these claims laughable, I say that because I am a product of American education. My thinking is shaped by the scientific method. I have an engineering degree. I can attest to the validity of the scientific approach with confidence. At the same time, I am sympathetic to the desire to put forward a God-centered universe, as opposed to a mechanistic worldview devoid of a loving creator, cold, abysmal and without meaning. Christians say you are here because God willed it and your life has divine purpose and immeasurable value in God’s eyes. I believe that, or at very least, I admit I want to believe that. I too am shaped by the narrative of divine revelation. Science tells me I am here purely by chance, the sperm cell from my father’s body that outperformed all the competing sperm cells, penetrated the ovum from my mother’s body and my body successfully gestated to full term. There was no divine hand guiding the sperm cell. Heaven was not involved in the timing of the specific ovum’s availability to said sperm cell. We are all just here by chance in a vast universe that doesn’t care about you. Nature is cruel and the forces of nature have no noble or altruistic inclination driving them. Lives are taken year after year by flood, earthquake, mudslides, storms, and volcanic eruptions, disease, and violence. The forces of inertia and gravity do not care that your little girl was killed in a car accident, or your parent died a slow painful death from cancer. I am a Christian because I was raised by Christian parents who came from Christian families themselves. And I have embraced faith in Christ as my own and have grown in a trajectory far different from my parents’ faith. I studied theology in seminary with liberal training in scriptural interpretation. In fundamental circles my seminary was called godless. My experience was anything but godless. I sensed God intensely all throughout my time in seminary. While I did not embrace every idea I was exposed to, I was certainly formed by a liberal approach. My New Testament professor shared how he thought of the Bible as a child, as if each page came floating down from heaven written by the hand of God. Indeed, the Ten Commandments are depicted as hand-written by God in the scriptures. The seminary experience proceeded to tear down my childlike Sunday School faith to expose its various pieces and parts. The seminary taught me to assemble the parts of my faith into a coherent and credible system of thought that was relevant to the needs of our time and would hold up to intellectual scrutiny. The Bible contains a collection of writings from different eras, spanning at least 13 centuries from their sources. The 66 biblical books are from over 40 different authors. The Bible contains different types of literature. There is poetry. There are historical chronicles written from both political and religious points of view. There are collections of wise sayings and here is even romantic or erotic material. And there is myth. Myth is a form of literature meant to pass along truth, wisdom and morals. We have all heard about the moral of story, like in one of Grimm’s fairy tales. I remember the Greek myth of Icarus who flew too close to the heat of the sun with wax feathered wings and plummeted to his death. I still remember the story from elementary school and the warning that came with it! I can’t even begin to solve a differential equation, which I used all through engineering school. That should say something about the power of myth or narrative. People love stories. Stories captivate the imagination. Billions of dollars have been spent on the production of films, television series, books and comics. Video games contain story elements. And billions have been spent in the consumption of these. Story is powerful and more likely to make a lasting impression upon the human mind and spirit, than a recitation of facts and dates. Israel chose to write about their history, through the lens of their relationship with God who called them out of slavery to be His chosen. The Hebrew and later Christian authors used narrative and mythic literary forms to communicate their history, purpose, and destiny. A strict literalist approach to interpreting the Bible is problematic on various levels. If one reads only the English translations, there are nuances and meaning in the original languages that English fails to convey. All translations are subject to the theological bias of the translators. Since most of us aren’t likely to study biblical Hebrew or Kione Greek, we are left to rely on the translator’s opinion. In most cases that is sufficient, but we will find that a literal reading of the opening chapters of Genesis does the text a significant disservice to the intent of the authors and later redactors. When the text is in the form of myth and not exactly history, (although mythology in the Bible is often rooted in actual history), a recognition that the authors chose a mythic literary form is essential to interpretation. As my Old Testament seminary professor taught me, “The question to ask is not, is the story true, for when you do you impose an empiricism of the 20th century upon the text relating to proven facts and dates. The scriptures do not have that primarily in mind. Instead, you should ask, ‘What truth is in the story?’” Doctrines like scriptural inerrancy tend to give readers a pass at working to uncover the original author’s message. Some will insist, “It says what it says. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be!” As a result we get widely different versions of what the Bible says and very different kinds of religious communities. Hateful versions of Christianity, who picket the funerals of gay and lesbian persons with condemning signs, are ugly and unfortunate. I was appalled to read in the Indianapolis Star, many years ago, of a Unitarian Universalist Church in Texas which painted a pagan pentagram upon the altar floor of their worship space. It was out of pagan ignorance that God called Abraham. To be inclusive, they have abandoned the core beliefs of Christian faith, that God has spoken authoritatively and supremely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Such a community has a very different relationship to the Bible than I do. I spoke with a man from the Unity Church back when I was in my 20s. I asked him to tell me about his church. He said flatly, “We don’t talk about God.” I realize that what I have to offer in the way of biblical interpretation will not be everyone’s cup of tea. I love the Bible because God touches my soul and transforms my life for the better through it. I meet God within the pages of scripture. God’s word is more than ink on page. The word of God is a creative force, able to build up and tear down, and make new. And I cannot pretend to know all there is to know about God, but I do believe God has revealed enough to save my soul and any who answer his call. Whether I prove to have a coherent thought on God’s word is up to you the listener to decide. I only ask for your patient ears on this journey as I share my current insights into the scriptures. I hope to enlighten and inspire, but also to steer you away from teachers who are mything the point. More on that in our next episode: If the Bible contains myth, can it be trusted? Thank you again for listening to Mything The Point Podcast. Any comments or questions can be emailed to MTPpodcast@gmail.com