I have been thinking a lot lately about what the Bible says about a lot of things and how that compares to what I have been tought in my secular education. Many things that the Bible says are in direct contradiction to what people are taught in secular schools. When this happens, do we disregard what the Bible says thinking that the Bible is authoritative on matters of faith, but man's ideas are authoritative in history and science? Or do we change our interpretation of the Bible on these apparent contradictions in order to reconcile them with the prevailing ideas? Or do we throw out accepted knowledge and stand firm with the Bible no matter what?
Starting in elementary school, I was taught that after billions of years the Sun, Earth, Moon and everything in the universe developed from the Big Bang. After "time zero", the moment of the Big Bang, it took a few hundred thousand years for stars to ignite. In our solar system, the sun ignited before the planets began to form. It was another several hundred thousand years for planets to form after the sun ignited and then an even longer period for the planet (Earth) to cool and life to begin to evolve. This information was taught as fact, as if to think any other way was preposterous. However, the Bible says that Earth was created first. In Genesis, Earth was created on day 1 while the Sun was not created until day 4. Even plants were created before the Sun was there to give them light.
I was also taught, starting in elementary school, that mankind evolved from primates. After monkeys climbed down from the trees they began to evolve into
homo-habilus . After several intermediate steps,
homo-habilus evolved into
homo-sapien, modern human. Mankind developed in small, nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes that had no political structures, no domesticated plants or animals, weak social bonds, and primitive (if any) religious structures. This lasted for hundreds of thousands of years until the agricultural revolution, in what is today Iraq, about 10,000 years ago. The story told in the Bible is much different. Mankind had a distinct beginning when one man and one woman were created by God as human beings, not as primates who evolved into human beings. Adam and Eve were not nomadic, hunter-gatherer cavemen. They were sedentary, semi-pastoral, literate, intelligent people who had direct contact with God (and therefore strong religious structures). Cain was called 'keeper of the flocks' and Abel was called 'tiller of the ground' so even this early mankind had domesticated plants and animals. Social bonds were extremely strong from the beginning as can be seen between the relationships between Adam and Eve, Adam and Eve and God, and Cain and everyone else after he killed Abel.
What do we do when the Bible contradicts accepted knowledge like this so deliberatly? What about the obscure Old Testament passages like Leviticus 12:1-2 and 19:27? Do we accept them as God-ordained ritual or do we think of them as something that was appropriate for a people 5,000 years ago but not for people today? I tend to drift towards the latter, but then I would wonder why they are in the Bible in such intricate detail? Why did these ritual instructions make the canon and other writings did not? What about some of the harder New Testament passages like Matthew 6:15, I Corinthians 11:6, or I Timothy 2:15? How do we reconcile passages like these in our age of equality and a belief in the sanctity of life? Are these passages still relevant to us today?
I guess what I'm getting at is do we believe that the Bible is innerrant in its entirety? There is a trend towards abandoning belief in inerrancy. Most European Evangelicals no longer believe that the Bible is inerrant and that Americans are strange for thinking that its inerrant and that the inerrancy of the Bible is not important to the Christian faith. Even prominent American theologians and teachers like
Craig Blomberg and
Donald Dayton argue that a belief in Biblical inerrancy is unimportant when it comes to an individuals faith in God. I believe that the Bible is inerrant in every single thing that it says. There is no un-truth in the Bible. The Bible is the Word of God and remains authoritative on all matters, not merely on matters of faith.
