In his Running Comments for the October edition of Men-Tul Notes, Dan correctly points out that there are things that one could see in more than one way.  What follows might represent an alternative view on a couple of theological points.

In my church we recognize three sources of Divine Authority, the foremost being the Holy Scriptures.  While the Holy Scriptures were clearly inspired by The Lord, They were remembered, recounted, recorded, rewritten, transcribed, collected, compiled, edited, translated, transliterated, debated, interpreted, and published various times by humans, a notably unreliable species.  My favorite Bible, The Oxford Study Bible, includes a series of essays, one of which points out that much of the material of the Bible, particularly the Hebrew Bible, existed  “as oral tradition” for perhaps centuries, being passed “orally from one generation to the next, adapted to new occasions and altered to fit changing social and political circumstances.”  (Reading the Bible, Mary Ann Tolbert) 

To many of us, the Holy Bible is a book of faith and belief:  It tells us what The Lord did and why He did it, rather than getting into the details of how He did it.  Viewing the Holy Bible as a book on geophysics (or of any other science) does a disservice both to The Lord and to Science.  The Lord sees a lot of time and effort being spent arguing among those who already believe, at the cost of advancing His Church Universal, while Science is inhibited by a false contest with Faith.  Indeed, restricting the value of the Holy Scriptures to our current understanding of God’s handiwork (as opposed to that of yesterday) might be seen as another act of arrogance by a species known for that fault.

We also consider our institutional Church as a second source of Divine Authority, the repository for the wisdom, revelations, and learning accumulated over the centuries.  This keeps us on an even keel when trends would otherwise cause us to drift.  In the 19^th century, a number of charismatic individuals broke with their traditions and founded their own churches;  many did not survive the passing of their founding generations and others were beset with bitter questions of succession.  That the Church and its teachings are slow to change has its benefits.

Our third source of Divine Authority is the reasoning powers of the individual members, each with unique insights and experiences to bring to any decision.  The Holy Scriptures give us a good outline as to what the Lord expects of us.  The Church applies these lessons to contemporary society.  But it is up to the individual to decide which Scriptures and which Church teachings are most relevant to a particular situation.  Suggesting that all answers to all questions are to be found in The Bible, or that Church doctrine dictates one’s actions in every circumstance, usually overly simplifies things.  We see a lot of room for individual responsibility and discretion. 

When addressing a problem that needs Divine Authority, we should draw upon the Holy Scriptures for doctrinal direction, but we need to bring along both our corporate experience (i.e., the Institutional Church) and our individual rationality.  From the Holy Scriptures we need to discern what is characteristic of the nature of humans (and of God!) from that what is peculiar the society being addressed by a passage.  We need to discern the historical context of passages, for some were inspired in times of peace and others in times of turmoil.  We need to understand the developmental levels of both the society being addressed in the passages and the current society.  Just as women are no longer derived from the ribs of men, the need for masses of human muscle declined significantly with the Industrial Revolution.

For the Book of Genesis, we need to understand the culture of the ancient Hebrews.  In Genesis 1:3-5 we read that The Lord created “day” and “night,” but Genesis 1:14-19 tells us that on the fourth of such “days” He created great lights to separate the day from the night.  While it might be tempting to try to reconcile the two statements of creation, we might allow that the ancients, without the benefits of atomic clocks, had only a very basic concept of time and numbers and that the Lord had to use the human’s then current understanding of His creation to explain it to them.  My Bible introduces Genesis by pointing out that it contains “the primeval history, which tells how human self-assertion brought the world to the brink of destruction . . ..”  Quibbling over physical minutiae not only diverts attention from the spiritual message of the Genesis, but it also risks dignifying the false Christianity-versus-Science question, to the detriment of the effort to spread Christianity to those who do not (yet) believe.