When I was a kid, I found a really old King James Bible. I thought it was cool, because it had charts and maps in the back, as well as a center column with lots of notes and references. At the top of each page there was a heading that gave you the theme of that particular page. It also gave you a year. The thing with which I was most fascinated was, if you turned all the way back to the book of Genesis, you could find out what year the world was created. 4004 BC. I thought that was amazing, that someone kept records that far back.
It wasn't until years later that I learned this chronology was worked out by a man named Bishop Ussher in the 17th century. In fact, Bishop Ussher had figured it out so precisely, that I was delighted to find the first day of creation was October 23, 4004 BC. I was beginning to suspect that this might not be something we could pin down so precisely, but the thought of this date at the top of my Bible made me smile nonetheless. As I went to high school, and learned about evolution, I struggled with how to fit the six days of creation and the young earth, together with the millions and millions of years required by Darwin's theory. In the end, I understood that Darwin's theory was just that – a theory – and the proof offered to high school students as validation of the Theory of Evolution does not exactly hold up to scrutiny. I also understood, thanks to my faithful pastor, that God's word is true even if we don't understand it fully.
There seem to be many Christians today who are embarrassed of God's word. Some Christians, overwhelmed and impressed by the so-called mountains of evidence that evolution is true, and the world is millions of years old, would like other Christians such as myself to go away. We are an embarrassment. We are fundamentalists, a by-word among the enlightened liberal elite. We take God at his word, and supposedly ignore science. This accusation doesn't bother me much when it comes from liberal theologians, who follow Bultmann, and Ehrman, and Barth, and have long ago given up any notions that God's word is true in a literal sense. It bothers me, however, when the people who are trying to reconcile creationism with evolutionary theory are those in my own denomination, the supposedly theologically conservative Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.
There are good reasons to question the theory of evolution. The things that did it for me were the large periods of time required for evolution, the laws of Thermodynamics, and the Law of Biogenesis. That, however, is an article for another time. What I want to focus on now is the idea that it's okay to believe some parts of the Bible, and not others. It isn’t. I suspect that this is more accurately described as Christians being embarrassed by the supernatural things in the Bible.
Generally, the reason people deny, and seek to explain away the miracles of Holy Scripture, is because they are uncomfortable "asserting and defending the miraculous." This is why Thomas Jefferson created his Jefferson Bible, swept clean of all the miracles of Jesus.[1] This is why your average Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod Lutheran gets squeamish when confronted by non-Christians about the miracles of Christ. It's the reason people are seduced by such explanations of Jesus's miracles as I once heard in a Roman Catholic Church in Evansville, Indiana.
The priest was expounding on Jesus's feeding of the 5000. The priest asserted that we get much more out of this story of the feeding of the 5000 when we realize that nothing supernatural occurred at all. His explanation for the feeding was, when the people had heard Jesus' teaching, and saw that a little child had willingly given his small bit of food to share, they all felt ashamed and brought out the food they had been selfishly hiding from each other. The priest still maintained that this was a miracle, but nothing supernatural had happened. Jesus had simply gotten the people to recognize and overcome their selfishness, and the result was overflowing abundance.
More Law, in other words. Follow these rules to be a good person. There is no sin to be atoned for, simply a “self” to make better. What need is there of Christ to take on human flesh, die, and rise from the dead?
We try to explain away supernatural phenomenon all the time. Who knows, there may very well be natural physical explanations for some of the supernatural incidents recorded in the Bible. The bottom line is, however, if the Bible is not trustworthy when it tells me about creation, Jonah and the big fish, the sun standing still for Joshua, Jesus walking on water, or Jesus miraculously feeding 5000 people with some loaves and fishes, how can I be certain that it is trustworthy when it tells me I am a sinner, and that my sins are forgiven by the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ? The answer is, that you cannot. Denying the six-day creation, and a literal Adam and Eve, and all the rest, eventually brings you to denying Jesus Christ.
If we are willing to believe that God exists, and that he has rescued us from sin, death, and the devil by the vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ, why would we think that this same God was not powerful enough to create the world out of nothing by his word? Why would we be unwilling to believe that He could cause violations of the laws of physics (which we call miracles)? To be willing to believe that God is omnipotent and omnipresent, that he can raise the dead, but cannot create out of nothing, or cause Christ to walk on the water, or multiply the loaves and fishes, is absurd.
You may as well not believe in any of it at all. That is the point to which you will eventually come anyway.
Moreover, if Jesus is God in human flesh, should we not take into account what he had to say about these things? I don't expect non-Christians to accept Jesus's explanation of things, but certainly we Christians should. Jesus believed that the creation account of Genesis was true, and that there was an Adam and Eve. He speaks of these things as though they were historical events. Ken Hamm of Answers in Genesis points this out:
Now, when we search the New Testament Scriptures, we certainly find many interesting statements Jesus made that relate to this issue. Mark 10:6 says, “But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’” From this passage, we see that Jesus clearly taught that the creation was young, for Adam and Eve existed “from the beginning,” not billions of years after the universe and earth came into existence. Jesus made a similar statement in Mark 13:19 indicating that man’s sufferings started very near the beginning of creation. The parallel phrases of “from the foundation of the world” and “from the blood of Abel” in Luke 11:50–51 also indicate that Jesus placed Abel very close to the beginning of creation, not billions of years after the beginning. His Jewish listeners would have assumed this meaning in Jesus’ words, for the first-century Jewish historian Josephus indicates that the Jews of his day believed that both the first day of creation and Adam’s creation were about 5,000 years before Christ.[2]
Jesus also believed that Jonah was really swallowed by a big fish:
Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered, saying, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.” But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and indeed a greater than Jonah is here. The queen of the South will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and indeed a greater than Solomon is here (Matthew 12:38-42).
We don't believe the things that Scripture tells us because we can find rational explanations of their occurrence. We believe these things because Scripture is trustworthy. It is, essentially, the same argument Luther had with Zwingli. Zwingli used rational arguments to say that Jesus's body and blood was only present in a spiritual way in the elements of the Lord's Supper. Luther, on the other hand, pointed to Christ's word: This is my body. We don't understand it, but we believe it because Scripture is trustworthy and tells us it is so.
Now to this purpose the comfort of the Sacrament is given when the heart feels that the burden is becoming too heavy, so that it may gain here new power and refreshment. But here our wise spirits twist themselves about with their great art and wisdom. They cry out and bawl, "How can bread and wine forgive sins or strengthen faith?" They hear and know that we do not say this about bread and wine. Because, in itself, bread is bread. But we speak about the bread and wine that is Christ's body and blood and has the words attached to it. That, we say, is truly the treasure – and nothing else – through which such forgiveness is gained. Now the only way this treasure is passed along and made our very own is in the words "given…and shed for you." For in the words you have both truths, that it is Christ's body and blood, and that it is yours as a treasure and gift. Now Christ's body can never be an unfruitful, empty thing that does or profits nothing. Yet, no matter how great the treasure is in itself, it must be included in the Word and administered to us. Otherwise we would never be able to know or seek it (LC V 28).[3]
Cosmologists such as Stephen Hawking, and popular "scientists" such as Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye, attack people who believe God's word as backward fools. Each one has their own nuance, but the argument always goes something like this: Religion may have been a necessary mechanism for primitive humanity to come to terms with the world around them, and natural phenomenon they could not explain, but it has certainly outlived its usefulness. In religion’s place, we are given theoretical physics. And, if physics doesn't automatically preclude the idea of God, it most certainly limits him in the way he could have created the universe to such an extent as to make Him irrelevant. Though they cry out and bawl, “How,” we speak of the Creation, and the words attached to it. For, if we deny the Creation, we will eventually deny Christ.
[1] Jefferson produced the 84-page volume in 1820—six years before he died at age 83—bound it in red leather and titled it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. He had pored over six copies of the New Testament, in Greek, Latin, French and King James English. “He had a classic education at [the College of] William & Mary,” Rubenstein says, “so he could compare the different translations. He cut out passages with some sort of very sharp blade and, using blank paper, glued down lines from each of the Gospels in four columns, Greek and Latin on one side of the pages, and French and English on the other.” Much of the material Jefferson elected to not include related miraculous events, such as the feeding of the multitudes with only two fish and five loaves of barley bread; he eschewed anything that he perceived as “contrary to reason.” His idiosyncratic gospel concludes with Christ’s entombment but omits his resurrection.
Edwards, Owen. "How Thomas Jefferson Created His Own Bible." Smithsonian.com. January 01, 2012. Accessed November 21, 2017. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-thomas-jefferson-created-his-own-bible-5659505/.
[2] Ham, Ken. "Did Jesus Say He Created in Six Literal Days?" Answers in Genesis. December 20, 2007. Accessed November 21, 2017. https://answersingenesis.org/days-of-creation/did-jesus-say-he-created-in-six-literal-days/.
[3] McCain, Paul Timothy., ed. Concordia: the Lutheran confessions: a readers edition of the Book of Concord. St. Louis, MO: Concordia Pub. House, 2005.
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