Genesis Lesson #2
We discussed last week about the thought of a war between science and the Bible. And how we are in the awkward position of having to choose. This controversy is everywhere.
So, we must decide how we make our decisions. We have to know the claims of each side. So now, we will look at the claims the Bible makes. We will look closely at what the text says. We will look at the text of Genesis through ancient eyes, that is thinking about the text as an ancient document. We have to be careful about reading the Bible as a modern text. We need to find where the Bible’s authority comes from.
We know that God’s purpose is carried out through human purpose. We have a duo authorship going on here, human and divine. And God decided that he was going to communicate through particular human beings, in a particular language, a particular culture, in a particular time and place. This was God’s decision. That means if we are going to get God’s message we have to go through that author. So, there is authority vested in the human author. It is not the human author’s authority; it is the authority of God. But we have to go through the human author to get it. That means we have to try to understand what that human author is communicating, because what he has to say, in his time and place and language, to his audience, that has authority. So, we understand the Bible was written ‘for us, but not to us’. The message transcends culture, but the form is culture bound. We get a message from scripture that we can all benefit from, it is sound theology and is revealing God to us. But the message is culture-bound and that means we have work to do to understand it. We must take our place in that ancient audience. They will not have our questions, our issues. For instance, when they thought of kings, it was not the way we know of in recent history such as the kings of France and England. When we read of cities in the Biblical text, we can’t think of New York or London or Paris, Jerusalem and Babylon are far different places. When we talk of marriage in the Biblical text don’t think love and romance, marriage was not built that way. When we think of slavery in the Biblical text, we don’t find ethnic exploitation or the bigotry that comes with that, because that’s not what slavery was in the ancient times, we have to try to think about the world the way they thought about the world. We have to think this way, so we don’t impart our thinking about the text without realizing it. So we have to see the world the way they did, and we will start taking that up next week.