In an aside in a recent sermon (in our series on the theology of the atonement: March 2009), one of our ministers said something like “I can assure you that the Lock Ness monster is not a dinosaur left over from Noah’s ark, apologies to those who are upset by that.”
I can’t remember if he mentioned Noah’s ark, but if not, it logically underlays the statement.
Now, I couldn’t care less what any one thinks of the Lock Ness monster, or what it might be. The evidence is so unreliable as to leave any views in the realm of speculation; and as we all know, we can speculate until the cows come home and still know nothing.
What intrigued me is the incongruity of the remark and its internal baselessness. If this is an example of how theologians think, then no wonder we cannot communicate hope to a world without it!
The starting point is how did he ‘know’ that the Lock Ness monster (if it exists) is not any particular thing? He must have seen it to make that statement, and know what dinosaurs were at the time of Noah’s Ark. This is, of course, impossible.
I suppose if he was referring to some contemporary stories about the age and history of the biosphere, he might have thought that he could make that statement with confidence. He might even have a theological theory that would lend the statement some credibility. But, as none of this was stated, the remark was disingenuous, at worst, meaningless at best.
If he accepted contemporary stories, I suppose he would have structured his declamation on the basis that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago, long before mankind was created, and therefore there were no dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, irrespective of his beliefs about the ark and the flood.
But his is basing a claim on a set of assumptions that commence with the assumption that there is no God, or the softer, but still highly unchristian assumption, that God relates to his creation as deism describes. So he possibly attempts to overturn a view that could be a logical outworking of a view of the history of the world drawn from biblical data using views that reject the Bible. Nice!
On the other hand, he could be letting the deist basis of the modern chronology of the world sit to one side, while denying that the Bible has any content that relates to the world we are in, but only has content that is theological in character. But this amounts to arbitrarily imposing a filter on the scripture that doesn’t emerge from the scripture itself; a striking move when the Spirit very explicitly puts the covenant between God and man in its physical setting, so as to provide the ground of the covenant (pun intended) and the locus of the relationship.
As I’ve argued elsewhere in this blog, the soteriological arc extends from the initial conditions set out in Genesis 1. If it doesn’t, and the initial conditions are fictional, at some level, then we have theology that has become story-telling, in the fairy story sense of the phrase.
Not good!
