A voice was crying in the wilderness … ok actually it was from the back seat of my Scion xB as we were driving home.
“Mom? I have a question for you.” It was my oldest daughter Claire, who at the time was 10 years old. She sounded a little hesitant, so I said, “Sure honey, what is it?”
“Well … is everything in the Bible true?” ...
Oh boy! One minute you're driving home and the next minute you're on the road to a profound moment in parenting! Kids never seem to give you a "heads up" that something like this is coming, do they? Whether or not I was ready was irrelevant, her question was a good one, an important one … and a courageous one. It took a lot of chutzpah for her to ask her seminarian mother if everything in the Bible is true. But I knew there was something behind it, so I said, “That’s an excellent and important question that deserves more than just a quick answer. But I’m wondering what prompted you to ask me this. Can you tell me more?”
“Well, you know I went to camp last week and when I was there, one of my counselors said that everything in the Bible was true. So I raised my hand and asked him, ‘So do you believe that the universe was created in six twenty-four hour days and Adam and Eve were real people?’ And he said, ‘Yes. The Bible is God’s word and God doesn’t lie. If the Bible says it happened that way, it happened that way.’”
Now I must let you know that this young man was a graduate student at an evangelical Christian institution, so his more literalistic approach didn’t completely surprise me. But his answer wasn’t really sufficient for my 10 year old. Her hand went up again and she said, “Well, if that’s true, how you account for dinosaurs? The fossil evidence says they were around for millions of years before people and that doesn’t make sense if the world was created in six days.”
I thought, “Way to go Claire! Play that dinosaur card!” but I asked, “So what did he say to that?”
“He said if I didn’t sit down and be quiet, he’d send me to the camp director to talk this over with her.”
“So what did you do?”
“I sat down and shut up ‘cause I didn’t want to talk it over with her.”
“Smart move. There’s an old saying, ‘You gotta know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em’ and you knew when to let it go.”
But this encounter left her with the question: Is everything in the Bible true?
It may seem odd for me to talk about what the truth of Biblical witness means on Rogation Sunday where we traditionally focus on our relationship with creation; however, given the impact of global climate change on God’s creation, I believe it is more important than ever to find a way forward which integrates the truth of scientific discovery with the truth of Biblical witness. But to do this, we must first ask the same question Pilate asked of Jesus, “What is truth?”
It has only been in relatively recent history that our cultural definition of truth has been tightly bound to factuality. In this paradigm, if something is “true” it must be “fact.” It further develops to say if something is fact it also must be true. This view of truth largely comes from science, a discipline built on what is factual, observable, replicable, and measurable in our world. We are the product of a scientific age which has blessed us in countless ways, but its interpretive lens has narrowed our definition of truth so as to seemingly be at odds with the Bible.
The problem with defining truth as only what is factual is that it fails to give us the full spectrum of what truth encompasses. It’s as if we could picture truth as a rainbow, but then we decide to ignore all the colors except red … and then we say red becomes the definition of what a rainbow is. Pretty silly, right? It is this narrow definition of truth which on the one hand can make hard scientists want to throw out the Scriptures as irrelevant and on the other hand make Biblical literalists want to ignore science as “Godless.” Both are falling into the same trap of narrowly defining truth.
Our pre-scientific ancestors who wrote the Biblical accounts did not approach the holy story with this narrow bandwidth description of truth. In their world, truth was not limited to “just the facts ma’am” but instead included story, metaphor, image, symbol and even sacrament. They saw the whole spectrum, the rainbow, of what truth is. I am persuaded that recapturing this broader definition of truth as something more than mere fact is at the heart of reconciling the truth of scientific discovery and our faith in the truth of the Bible. But how was I going to make sense of that to my 10 year old in the back seat?
I told Claire, “Truth is a pretty deep concept. Truth is more than just facts, but sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking that truth is only facts.” At this point, I thought I’d use an illustration that made more sense to her. “You read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Remember what happened towards the end when Professor Quarles (who was overcome with evil) touched Harry? What happened to him?”
“He disintegrated, Mom.”
“Right! And then Harry wakes up in the infirmary at Hogwart’s School and Dumbledore is sitting on his bed explaining what happened: What did Dumbledore tell Harry about why Professor Quarles disintegrated?”
“He disintegrated because Harry had love in him.”
“Right! So … is it true that love conquers evil?”
“Yeah!”
“Right … but … Professor Quarles isn’t a real person … and Dumbledore and Harry aren’t real people either. But was the story true?”
“Yes!”
“So yes, the Bible too is true, but it is more than just facts. I believe the creation story of Genesis says a lot of true things about God creating everything and how it was good, but Adam and Eve don’t have to be real historic people to make it true. And maybe God’s first words weren’t, ‘Let there be light.’ Maybe God just said, ‘BANG!’”
“So my counselor was right – everything in the Bible is true.”
“Yes honey, he was right.”
“And I was right about the dinosaurs too, huh Mom?”
“Yes you were … and the Lord God made them all.”
Amen.
