Thursday, March 30, 2006

Do you have to be a literalist to be Christian?

Because most of the science / evolution debate centers around the notion that a literal reading of the Bible is the only correct view, I though it might be interesting to look at ways that the bible is viewed that are not literal, but folks who are both closer to Jesus in time, and undoubtedly Christian. Here are some quotes from various Church Fathers (these folks predate the Catholic church,and helped define what we think of as the basics of the faith). Then there are some quotes from early Fundamentalists (these folks got the movement started), and even CS Lewis. None of them are Biblical Literalists (of the 6 24 hour days persuasion).

I am not trying to say that you can't be a literalist - just that many prominent people in the faith did not seem to think that being a Christian required biblical literalism.

Here are a couple of church fathers who thought that scripture required that the days of creation be 1,000 years long.

Justin Martyr:“For as Adam was told that in the [d]ay [h]e ate of the tree he would die, we know that he did not complete a thousand years. We have perceived, moreover, that the expression, 'The day of the Lord is as a thousand years,' is connected with this subject.”(Dialog with Typho the Jew chapter 81 [AD 155])
“And there are some, again, who relegate the death of Adam to the thousandth year; for since "a day of the Lord is as a thousand years," he did not overstep the thousand years, but died within them, thus bearing out the sentence of his sin.”(Against Heresies, 5:23 [AD 189])

St. Cyprian of Carthage:
“As the first seven days in the divine arrangement containing seven thousand of years, as the seven spirits and seven angels which stand and go in and out before the face of God, and the seven-branched lamp in the tabernacle of witness, and the seven golden candlesticks in the Apocalypse, and the seven columns in Solomon upon which Wisdom built her house l so here also the number seven of the brethren, embracing, in the quantity of their number, the seven churches, as likewise in the first book of Kings we read that the barren hath borne seven”(Treatises 11:11 [A.D. 250])

And Origin does not seem to found of the literal interpretation:
“…We answered to the best of our ability this objection to God's "commanding this first, second, and third thing to be created," when we quoted the words, "He said, and it was done; He commanded, and all things stood fast;" remarking that the immediate Creator, and, as it were, very Maker of the world was the Word, the Son of God; while the Father of the Word, by commanding His own Son--the Word--to create the world, is primarily Creator. And with regard to the creation of the light upon the first day, and of the firmament upon the second, and of the gathering together of the waters that are under the heaven into their several reservoirs on the third (the earth thus causing to sprout forth those (fruits) which are under the control of nature alone, and of the (great) lights and stars upon the fourth, and of aquatic animals upon the fifth, and of land animals and man upon the sixth, we have treated to the best of our ability in our notes upon Genesis, as well as in the foregoing pages, when we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world, and quoted the words: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens."(Against Celus 6:60 [AD 248])

Here is Clement of Alexandria:
““That, then, we may be taught that the world was originated, and not suppose that God made it in time, prophecy adds: "This is the book of the generation: also of the things in them, when they were created in the day that God made heaven and earth." For the expression "when they were created" intimates an indefinite and dateless production. But the expression "in the day that God made," that is, in and by which God made "all things," and "without which not even one thing was made," points out the activity exerted by the Son. As David says, "This is the day which the Lord hath made; let us be glad and rejoice in it; " that is, in consequence of the knowledge imparted by Him, let us celebrate the divine festival; for the Word that throws light on things hidden, and by whom each created thing came into life and being, is called day. “(Miscellanies 6.16 [208 AD])

St. Augustine:
“But simultaneously with time the world was made, if in the world's creation change and motion were created, as seems evident from the order of the first six or seven days. For in these days the morning and evening are counted, until, on the sixth day, all things which God then made were finished, and on the seventh the rest of God was mysteriously and sublimely signalized. What kind of days these were it is extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible for us to conceive, and how much more to say!”(City of God 11:6 [AD 419])

And from this web page, some early Fundamentalists from the 19th century:

By the very early 1900s, even conservative theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary acknowledged to varying degrees:
a) the lengthy history of the earth,b) the transmutation of species by evolution, and even,c) an evolutionary past for the human physical form.

Such theologians included B.B. Warfield, the famous Presbyterian inerrantist, whose famed defense of Scriptural inerrancy and plenary verbal inspiration was published in the Princeton Review (1881), and republished since then (B.B. Warfield and Hodge, A.A., Inspiration. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), and who continues to be highly regarded among conservative Protestants.

Even when the twelve-volume series, The Fundamentals (an interdenominational work that spearheaded this century's "fundamentalist" movement), was published between 1910 and 1915, it contained the cautiously pro-evolution stances of conservative Christian theologians like George Frederick Wright, R.A. Torrey, and James Orr. (It was only in the eighth collection of The Fundamentals that the previous cautious advocacy of evolution was matched by two decisively and aggressively anti-Darwin statements, one by someone who remained anonymous and another by the relatively unknown Henry Beach, both of whom lacked the theological and scientific standing of the senior evangelicals already mentioned.)

Reverend Orr, one of the more renowned contributors to The Fundamentals, was a theologian of the United Free Church College in Glasgow and widely respected as an apologist for Evangelicalism, but expressed doubts as to how literal, Genesis, chapter 3, ought to be taken: "I do not enter into the question of how we are to interpret the third chapter of Genesis -- whether as history or allegory or myth, or most probably of all, as old tradition clothed in oriental allegorical dress..." [James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World (1897), p. 185, see also p. 447]

Evangelical Christian apologist, C. S. Lewis, admitted he was not disturbed by the thought of Genesis being "...derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical" [C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Collins, Fontana Books, 1958), p. 93]. "We read in Genesis (2:7) that God formed man of the dust and breathed life into him. For all the first writer knew of it, this passage might merely illustrate the survival, even in a truly creational story, of the Pagan inability to conceive true Creation, the savage, pictorial tendency to imagine God making things 'out of' something as the potter or the carpenter does." [Lewis' essay, "Scripture," in Reflections on the Psalms] Lewis found more truth in the story of the "Garden of Eden" when he regard it as a myth than as history. [See, Michael J. Christensen, C. S. Lewis on Scripture: His Thoughts on the Nature of Biblical Inspiration, The Role of Revelation and the Question of Inerrancy (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1979), pp. 34-35)]

Evangelical Christian theologian, Henri Blocher, wrote: "The style [of Genesis chapter 3] is lively and picturesque; the pictures take shape spontaneously in the reader's mind. The Lord God takes on a human form: we see him mold clay, breathe into man's nostrils, walk in the garden when the breeze gets up and make for the guilty couple better clothes than their improvised cloths. There is a dream-like garden with strange trees and a cunning animal who opens a conversation; you could believe you were in one of those artless legends, one of those timeless stories which are the fascination of fokelore..." [Henri Blocher, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis (InterVarsity Press, 1984)]