BEYOND THEOLOGY

“Evolving with the Bible” (#106)

Host (tease): Do you think evolution is a valid scientific theory? Can you have an evolutionary perspective and still find value in the gospels? Stick around and we’ll take a look at The Bible and evolution. Announcer: Production funding for this program has been provided in part by the Shumaker Family Foundation – promoting social and environmental justice, education, spirituality and the arts. Narrator: In recent years and throughout American history, there’s been a significant amount of debate and discussion related to The Bible and how it applies to various social and scientific issues. People commonly make biblical references to support their views on matters of public interest – like the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools. The Reverand Peter Gomes – a professor of Christian morals and longtime minister at Harvard University -- has written several books about The Bible. He sees it as an integral part of American culture, although he questions how much people really know about its contents.

[program title] Rev. Peter J. Gomes (Memorial Church, Harvard University): You know, every hotel has in the bedside table a Bible -- the Gideon’s have seen to that, and in certain places the Mormons have supplemented it with The Book of Mormon. So it's everywhere, like a telephone directory. And it sort of gives people a sense of mild reassurances that there it is. And, you know, everybody says they own a Bible, everybody says they’ve bought a Bible, every household in theory has one or two or three, but the degree of biblical literacy, what people know about what's in it is pretty thin. Our ancestors knew a good deal more about the Bible than our contemporary

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culture, and they were less literate. I mean, they had fewer resources with which to work. And despite the plenitude of biblical preachers and biblical study groups and biblical television programs and whatnot, there are still people who think, say, Joan of Arc is Noah’s wife and things like that … or that the Bible will tell you how to ward off cancer or other diseases, or the Bible is a key to foreign policy in the Middle East. There's still a lot of people who actually believe that. So it leads me to believe that not many people really have taken the trouble to read the thing or to study it or to appreciate it in its wonderful complexity. Narrator: The Bible has become an integral part of American culture. We use it to underscore the gravity of the ceremonies by which our leaders swear their solemn oaths, and at times, we hear them refer to it in their speeches and public comments. Reverend Gomes contends that the Bible has become an American book. Peter Gomes: Not in the sense that it was written here, but we have as a culture appropriated and believed it somehow is our peculiar property and our map and our way of looking at things. We see in ourselves the chosen people. We see America as the Promised Land. We've appropriated all the biblical figures and metaphors as our own, and we invoke the Bible as a part of The American Way. Narrator: The American Way has proven to be somewhat conflicted at times. Not everyone agrees about how The Bible should be interpreted. This isn’t a recent development. Just as contemporary Christian denominations grapple with matters of biblical interpretation, it’s also left its mark on American history, as religious historian Stephen Prothero explains. Stephen Prothero (Professor of Religion, Boston University): Well, one of the interesting stories in 19th Century American religion is the development out of evangelicalism of liberal Protestantism. And one thing that happened is as the Bible becomes the subject of controversy, Protestants split over to what extent the Bible is trustworthy as a historical document … to what extent we really believe that the Bible was inspired by God. And classicly, evangelicals affirm that – that the Bible was God’s word. It was inspired by God. And particularly after the Civil War some Protestants start to wonder about that. They look at Darwinian evolution and they look at historical criticism of the Bible and they start to wonder. And so, what distinguishes the liberals from the evangelicals is the liberals say the Bible is a guide -- the Bible is something we should listen to, but we can’t really trust it as if it came from God. It’s a human document. And the evangelicals continue to say, no, it’s a divine document. Peter Gomes: Well, in many respects the Bible was not designed as many like to think of it as the believer’s handbook. It wasn’t written as a handbook. The Bible is a library. It's a collection of 66 books -- 66 different points of view. And whether you accept full inspiration or not, you have to acknowledge the fact that The book of Deuteronomy is radically different from the epistle of James, or the Gospel of Matthew is very different from one of the Pauline letters. But they're all put together in one volume -- sewn together, and we're made to think … largely because we're lazy … that this is just one big book -- you start at Genesis and you end at Revelation, and somehow it will all make

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sense and we will make sense of it in terms of ordering our culture. That is simply not the way it works. It would be as if you went to the New York Public Library and said ‘We'll guide our lives by every book in this collection.’ That’s ludicrous on its face -- even though there's very valuable and important and significant stuff of use to everybody in the New York Public Library, you have to figure out how it works and how to make it work for you. Narrator: The Bible serves as a great source of inspiration, comfort and guidance for many people. But at times, situations arise that may appear to conflict with The Bible, and people feel they must choose one side or the other. Consider the ongoing debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Chair, Kansas Board of Education (addressing board members): All in favor signify by raised hand. All opposed. Approved on a 6-4 vote. Robert Wuthnow (Center for Study of Religion, Princeton University): It’s really complicated for a lot of people because when they think about evolution, they do think about it as a substitution for an understanding of creation. And they want the Bible to be understood as truth in all respects, including scientific truth. Other people, of course, are more willing to distinguish the two, and as they comment, for example, on some of these debates about what should be taught in the classroom, some people will say ‘well, let’s teach evolution from the basis of whatever scientific knowledge we have, but let’s understand that that really is not in competition at all with faith.’ You know, as some people say, ‘well, maybe that was how God set it up -- so that it all happened through evolution.’ It doesn’t detract from their view of God at all. Other people may have still a different view. But it is very thorny because certainly many people see the two as being in conflict. Narration: This conflict primarily revolves around the belief that the biblical account of creation represents the indisputable truth about how the world came into being. But those who have studied the history of mythology as it has developed across different cultures at different points in time point out that every story of creation needs to be understood in the context of the historical conditions in which it came into being. Karen Armstrong (Mythologist): The creation myth, for example, at the beginning of Genesis -- God making heaven and earth in six days. This has caused an endless kerfuffle, especially here in the United States, where people are saying it’s true in every detail -- God really did create the world in six days and this is a literal account of the origins of life. But that’s the last thing, I think, on the mind of the Biblical priestly author who was writing this myth during the time when the Israelites in the 6th Century BCE had been deported to Babylonia. And there, they’d lost everything. They’d lost their temple. They’d lost their God, they thought, many of them, because God had been so roundly defeated by the god of Babylon -- Marduk. And every year they had to see these splendid ceremonies in honor of Marduk in the great ziggurat in the heart of Babylon, which re-enacted this creation myth whereby Marduk slew a sea monster and brought … split her carcass in two -- killed a whole lot of other gods and created heaven and earth. And there

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are stories of Yahweh -- the God of Israel, doing the same thing -- creating the world by killing Leviathan, another sea monster. We find it in some of the Psalms, in Job, in the book of Isaiah. So when the Israelites in exile sat down to listen to this myth and heard: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” they would have expected a story of violence … a story of killing, which expresses the difficulty of creation -- the fact that very often our survival depends upon the destruction of other beings or the damaging or belittling of other beings. And yet the priestly author did something different -- no violence. God creates the world just effortlessly by simply speaking a word. He’s greater than Marduk. He doesn’t have to fight. He doesn’t have to have his creation renewed every year at the new year to keep the world in being for another year. It’s over. He’s finished on the sixth day and he can rest on the seventh. So this is very therapeutic for the exiles to, you know, say our God is more powerful. But more important, everything in God’s creation is good. On every day of creation, God looks at everything that he has made and he says, “It is good” and he blesses it. And we have to accept this -- that everything is good and valuable and holy. And if we do that, then we understand the value of this myth. So these stories, if you think about how we can act upon them and find new ways in our own time of acting upon them -- trying them out, then we can give these myths new life. But it won’t … not by simply evaluating them and saying, “Are they historically true or not?” James Forbes (Senior Minister Emeritus, Riverside Church): The sweep of history is so broad measured in trillions of years may make it appear that God did it in seven days and nothing else happened after he rested that day. For people for whom that is a comforting thought, I grant them that a biblical story outlines it that way. I do not think the Bible feels threatened by saying ‘hmm, there are certain things that are so today that were not then,’ and I don’t think God is intimidated, says ‘What is this -- you all making something that I didn’t make in the beginning?’ I believe that God, who is a spirit, delights in ever-continuing creation. So, let’s make a truce. For those who want to talk about creationism, let’s say “yes” and that creationism about whatever God did, however you want to understand it, need not be threatened by the notion that there’s a continuing action of God that advances things. But I’d also have to talk about not only development but devolving -- that sometimes we can take it down and not everything is upward and onward toward the light. So, let’s say God, who is changeless, participates in change and that for those of us who cannot see that, it may be due to our limited vision. News Reporter [Excerpt from Kansas Public Radio report]: It was the fourth time in eight years that the State Board of Education has adopted new science standards. The last revision was in 2005, when conservatives used their six-to-four majority to push through standards that called for teaching criticism of evolution…. Narrator: Although it may be unrealistic to expect a sudden truce in the culture wars and that debates over things like the teaching of evolution will fade away, finding ways to get beyond such divisive encounters could be more productive. It might be helpful to understand how most people relate to The Bible.

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Robert Wuthnow: Most people talk about the Bible as a set of stories. They don’t talk about it as abstract theological principles. Why do they talk about it as stories? Because that’s how they were taught it as children. They read a children’s Bible story book and so those stories become models in a way for how people think about themselves. Are they on a journey like Abraham? Are they facing persecution? Are they feeling crucified like Jesus? Are they out serving other people like Apostle Paul did? The stories become kind of role models in a way. Narrator: The stories that Jesus is said to have told in what have become known as the parables are seen by some to be especially effective in providing moral and spiritual guidance. As professor Harvey Cox discovered in the course he taught at Harvard on ‘Jesus and the Moral Life,’ many students found the parables to be stimulating and thought-provoking. Harvey Cox (Professor of Religion, Harvard University): The plan of the course was to read the gospels, especially the first three gospels -- Matthew, Mark and Luke, and just follow the trajectory of the life of Jesus -- and then talk about the moral significance of Jesus for issues that these students were either grappling with at the time or knew that they would eventually grapple with. More and more as the course unfolded over the years, we focused more on the parables cause I saw that they really spoke to the students in a way. What the parables do is put you in a situation that you might not ever find yourself in. Good Samaritan -- you’re walking along the road and here’s a person who’s been beaten up and bleeding and robbed and so on. You might not ever actually find yourself in that, but you have to ask yourself ‘what would I do?’ So I often had the students write a contemporary narration for the prodigal son or the Good Samaritan -- how would Jesus have told it now, using the kinds of issues and people that we are familiar with? They loved doing that. And there were some wonderful ones. I may try to publish them sometime. I still have them in a file. They were just wonderful. And what it did was to push them into thinking about situations that they had not met, might not meet, and thus expanding the horizon of their moral choices and moral reasoning and their moral imagination … imagination – you have to put yourself into a situation you have not been in. Now that requires imagination. Peter Gomes: My mind works at two different levels -- there's the practical level, where I have to do what I have to do: I've got to get up; I've got to pay my taxes; I've got to go to school; I've got to write these letters of reference; I've got to keep these appointments. I have to do that. But there's another level in which I imagine what might be, what ought to be, and how could I see myself better than the person that I am, or how can I see a situation better than it is at the moment? How do I see beyond the limits of reality in terms of what ought to be good and beautiful and just and pure. And if you can't imagine anything better than this, you're really in a sad state. But if your moral imagination conceives of a time or a place or a way or a circumstance which is redemptive, which is holy, which is good, which is a goal worth pursuing, then you can go from reality as it appears to be towards that which you are only capable of imagining. And if you're capable of imagining things better than they are, you may very well work for them and

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they may very well become better than they are. So that’s what I think a moral imagination is all about. James Forbes: The parables and the stories have two levels. We know this piece, but what is it related to that’s larger than itself? We see the particular. What is the universal that rides in the wagon of the story about the prodigal son? Yes, story was invented by heaven to make people who are on the earth have a clearer sense of the values which uphold the earth and the world. And so, I think that he did not speak to them except in parables, one section says, is because he understands that we all have to have bi-focality. We have senses and they convey so much, but then there’s another realm not particularized in literal expression or historical accuracy, and a story does that duty. It makes it possible for us to see on two planes because human beings live out their lives within the time-space continuum, but we also are impinged upon by that which transcends the boundaries of time and space. Story does a good job. Helps the pieces of who we are to cohabit with each other and maybe challenge us towards a fuller humanity. Harvey Cox: I think Jesus’ parables … you have to be very careful when you read Jesus’ parables – these are not morality tales; these are stories which are meant to jar you into seeing the world in a somewhat different way. Perhaps the most important thing about the Good Samaritan story that we were just talking about -- the man beaten by the side of the road and the people who pass him -- is that the Samaritan was an outcast, the least likely person to do this, you see. And it would have been a bit of a shock to his hearers to see a Samaritan cast in that role. And there’s a whole idea in Zen Buddhism that the objective of these strange kind of Zen koans that they tell is not for you to find an answer. You’d only go looney if you tried to do it -- what is the sound of one hand clapping? It’s to shake up your view of the world and release you from some of your prejudices and the confinement of a particular worldview so that you can look at things in a fresh way. And I’m convinced that’s what Jesus was doing -- in most of the parables, that’s exactly what he was doing. Narrator: Stepping out of habitual ways of seeing things and experiencing the world anew requires courage and a venturesome spirit as well as a good deal of moral imagination. Peter Gomes points to the pilgrims as good examples of what he thinks is most effective in this regard. Peter Gomes: The thing that I always admired about the pilgrims was their sense of adventure -- here were people who could have just stuck it out in Europe, stuck it out in England or in Holland where they were. But they were driven, and their moral imagination imagined something greater. The book of Hebrew as it talks about the community of the saints and it says they imagined a brighter country, a fairer country, otherwise they would've returned to the land out of which they had come. One of my favorite old Victorian hymns about the pilgrims describes this -- “Like pilgrims sailing through the night in search of shores more wide and free, a dauntless view they went apart in search of grander liberty.” I like that notion of setting out and taking some risks, because you imagine, you believe, you are convicted that there's something better than where you are. And America at its best has been a pilgrim country. I mean, the whole

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movement from the Atlantic to the Pacific, accompanied by a lot of dreadful things, nevertheless was a notion that there was something out there awaiting us. I deplore along with everybody else that that imagination came at the cost of other people’s experiences and lands, and what we did to the Native Americans will be forever a shameful matter for American civilization. But nevertheless there was, and there remains at our best, a kind of notion of things better than they are, and hence we live not as we are but as we ought to be or as we would like to be or as we hope to be. And a moral imagination fuels all of that from where I sit. Narrator: Looking to the future of America, it might be helpful to keep the pilgrims in mind and think about the obstacles they overcame. It wasn’t an easy journey and there were mistakes made along the way, but they persevered and set us off on a course that continues to reveal new vistas. Perhaps by employing our own moral imagination and looking beyond present dichotomies, we’ll find our way to a new world. I’m Charles Atkins, Jr. Thanks for being with us.

[comments during credit roll]

Host: Have you ever heard the term “co-creation?” Have any idea what it means? Joan Chittister (Benedictine Sisters of Erie): God did not create this world finished. God left the world unfinished for us to do … to complete. James Forbes, Jr. (Riverside Church): We need also to suggest that the nature of the evolution of things into what they are becoming – that that has been something that was not just God, but that God, in love, invited us to be participants. Scottie McLennan (Stanford University): So it really is our fault if we globally warm this Earth in such a way that we destroy it. It really is our fault if by development and use of nuclear weapons, we destroy this Earth. Host: Learn more about emerging views on a spirituality of co-creation on the next edition of Beyond Theology. Announcer: Production funding for this program has been provided in part by the Shumaker Family Foundation – promoting social and environmental justice, education, spirituality and the arts.

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