In a recent edition of a local Christian newspaper "Eternity" an article appeared authored by Greg Clarke, a worker at the Centre for Public Christianity. He made the somewhat undergraduate claim that Christians who take the opening chapter of the Bible at face value are, somehow 'idiots'.
I wrote to Clarke as follows:
I was in many ways pleased to see your recent article in Eternity. I was particularly encouraged having heard you speak at the Centre for Public Christianity supporters’ lunch a couple of months ago at the Wesley Centre in Sydney.
However, as I read the article, I became concerned at the pejorative language attached to an historic Christian position held with respect to our understanding of the opening chapters of the Bible.
I must say, I was surprised, no, disappointed, in the use of the term ‘idiot’ to apply to some of the greatest names in church history, many respected Christian people and, to an extent, to myself as well. It reminds me of a similar lapse many years ago when Archbishop Jensen, who was then principal of Moore College and had been a regular preacher at my church, lampooned the historic Christian doctrine of creation as being a ‘hill billy’ view!
It seemed that his, and perhaps your, preferred take on the scriptures was to set them aside in deference to the world view which starts with the axiom that there is no God, and if there might be, he certainly hasn’t spoken meaningfully to us in terms congruent with the world we are in (yet how contrary this is to the import of Genesis 1). This aligns with the deist roots of modern views of cosmogony and Earth history that makes of God a mere cipher with no real connection with either the material cosmos or ourselves.
The irony in your declaration that people who accept the Bible’s account of creation at face value are ‘head in the sand idiots’ is its similarity to the more vehement declarations Richard Dawkins makes about Christians in general! His point is that any insertion of the supernatural into the evolutionary scheme is a sign of insanity. It was amusing to hear him on ABC TV’s Q&A program stating his view that he doesn’t mind if church worthies accept evolution alongside the Bible, because he saw such acceptance as the death knell of religious views. Why should he worry, he’s won!
Irony aside, the repugnance of your claim is the implications it has for the believer’s humility before the revelation of God, the preconceptions that constrain your particular hermeneutic, and the general failure to engage with conservative scholarship, let alone scientific criticism of the very old pagan view that the world, the ‘real’ world, really made itself over vast amounts of time, and we merely ‘clip on’ God, as a fiction, as most materialists see it: not as the credible creator who started it all.
I know that your colleague John Dixon is of the view that Genesis 1 has a literary structure that precludes it being an account of actual events, yet his case is not made, in my view, and he appears to simply trot out ideas that E J Young, as an example, had discussed and rebutted in the early 1960s. So, nothing new under the sun! Dixon does venture further into some more complex literary considerations, with his reference to the chiastic structure of Genesis 1, but he fails to indicate how this necessarily precludes the text being an account of events, given the ubiquity of the structure in the Bible and in ancient literature.
But it is at the point of ‘realism’ that I think your claim hits a snag. The view you appear to extol seems to me to have more in common with the anti-realist views of broadly conceived paganism and its contemporary dress-up, philosophical idealism. This set of views is perfectly happy with the Bible being regarded as conveying information by not conveying information, in some incoherent twist of logic, while pretending to adopt the realist stance of the Bible: that things can be as stated, and the world came from God’s hand as a unitary creation. That is, we think, understand and live in the world as a consistent whole, including the illumination of that world from the word of God, when it in fact rejects any realist stance and makes the Bible discontinuous with the world that it claims God made for encounter between him and us!
At bottom, you seem to be more impressed by contemporary materialism, its acolytes and deep cultural assent, and align yourself with a non-believers’ critique of the Bible. This alignment has never produced a change in materialists, but paves the road to disbelief by saying that God has nothing to do with this world, it just is.
