1.3 Approaches to Scripture

Tuesday Science and Scripture continues. We are in the second half of the first draft of chapter 1: "Four Relationships" 

Previous posts:

1.1 Relationships between Science and Faith
1.2 Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth

The Nature of Scripture 
Since we are asking about the relationship between science and Scripture, we should take at least a moment to clarify exactly what Scripture and science exactly are. It is perhaps ironic that, of the two, we might be less refective on the nature of Scripture than we are the nature of science. There are three main approaches to Scripture in this discussion, all of which likely intermingle in actual practice.

The first is exactly what we implied in the previous paragraph. Many readers approach Scripture in an unreflective, "what you see is what you get" manner, assuming the text means what it seems to say to them in modern English. One reads the words and defines them according to whatever meanings are in your head. If you are reading the Bible in English, then you assume that the normal meanings of English words in your world are the meanings the words have. 

For example, if you were reading the King James Version (KJV) of 1 Peter 1:15, you would encounter the words, "be ye holy in all manner of conversation." If you come to these words from the standpoint of modern English, you will likely think the verse is about how you talk to others. Yet the meaning of the English word conversation has changed over the last few hundred years. Accordingly, the English Standard Version (ESV) has "you also be holy in all your conduct."

Of course, the Bible was not written in English. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (and some Aramaic), while the New Testament was written in Greek. Understanding the original meanings of the Bible's words two thousand years ago and more is not simply a matter of finding an English word that is equivalent to those Greek and Hebrew words. This is because the meanings of words are never exactly equivalent from one language to another. There is always some loss of meaning.

This is because the meaning of words is in how they are used. A dictionary does not tell us some unchanging meaning to words. A dictionary is a popularity contest. The meanings of words are numbered from most common use of a word to the least common. Meanings come and go. New meanings are always being added as they arise in culture, and older meanings (like that of conversation in the KJV as "conduct") first become archaic and then are dropped entirely.

For this reason, the meaning that first comes to our mind when we read the Bible may approximate the meaning the verse had when it was written, but it might not. Our first impression may actually turn out to be quite far from what the verse really meant. An English dictionary is only helpful if we do not know what the English words in our Bible mean, which we probably do.

Further, these meanings are embedded in a cultural world. When I read the word husband or wife in the Bible, I am not reading about a modern husband or wife. I am not reading about families as they likely exist in my world. I am reading about husbands, wives, and families as they existed in the biblical worlds.

Additionally, many Christians tend to read the Bible in an atomistic way. That is to say, we may tend to focus on individual verses rather than reading the Bible the way we would normally read a book, following paragraph to paragraph. If we remove verses from their paragraphs and chapters, we are even less likely to be reading the words "in context." To read in context is to read the words in the flow of an overall book of the Bible as well as in the light of its historical background.

All that is to say, we may assume that science is what needs to be adjusted in relation to Scripture when our understanding of Scripture itself may be incorrect. For example, Martin Luther once mocked the new idea that the earth might go around the sun, quoting Joshua 10 where the sun stands still. [21] Taking Joshua 10:13 literally, Luther assumed that the verse was saying it was the sun that was going around the earth and that it stopped in its course. In the 1500s and 1600s, there were many Christians who saw any language in the Bible about the sun rising or setting as evidence that it was in fact the sun that goes around the earth (e.g., Eccl. 1:5).

Today, we would take this language phenomenologically. That is to say, we take this as informal language that speaks of the world in terms of how it appears, not as scientific statements that should be taken literally. For example, Paul may be alluding to the dead when he says that every knee "under the earth" will bow to Christ (Phil. 2:10), but few Christians today think of the center of the earth as the true abode of the dead, even if we might bury their bodies under the earth. Similarly, when Paul talks about being taken up into "the third sky" (2 Cor. 12:2), few of us think that he is revealing that God's throne is in the upper atmosphere.

What is interesting is that we are usually willing to adjust our hermeneutic -- our way of interpreting Scripture -- in these instances even though Paul and the authors of Joshua and Ecclesiastes themselves may have taken this imagery literally. We are willing to say, "The point of the revelation was not the literal structure of the universe but the event being described or the actual point being made." Determinations of whether we should read such imagery literally or figuratively are often made unreflectively, depending on what our Christian traditions find important or generally ignore.

However, in other cases, we may actually be mistaken about what the text really meant. Our interpretation may be wrong. We may be reading the words as they strike us in our world rather than in the way the words were intended to be understood in their worlds.

In addition to an unreflective reading of Scripture, there are two other approaches that are significantly more reflective. We might call one a presuppositional approach and the other an inductive approach. The first says, "We cannot rightly understand Scripture unless we have a number of key faith assumptions in place." The other says that "We should let the text tell us what it meant by reading the words in their most likely original literary and historical contexts."

What is an inductive approach? An inductive approach simply tries to read the words for what they would have most likely meant when they were first written. This is a potentially complicated task. Indeed, we often lack sufficient evidence to draw conclusions on the original meaning beyond a reasonable doubt. In many cases, the meaning of the Bible is "under-determined." [22]

Nevertheless, an inductive approach draws on evidence from context to identify the most likely original meanings of a passage. This includes the literary context of a passage -- the words that come before and after the text in question. What does the train of thought lead us to think the words most likely meant. It also draws on the historical context of a passage -- its likely historical and situational background. This latter context is much more difficult to identify with certainty.

As relates to science, one of the most important questions is that of genre. The genre of a document is the type of literature it is. For example, we know not to laugh (generally) at an obituary or to cry after reading a comic strip meant to be funny. We absorb these expectations from our culture without even realizing it. 

Yet the expectations of biblical genres were part of the biblical worlds. I will not naturally come to the biblical texts with those assumptions because they were shaped in a world that is ancient and likely quite foreign to mine. What, for example, were the expectations of history writing when the biblical texts were written? What were the expectations of story telling or poetry or prophecy? 

For some, this may seem to be an attempt to dodge the "plain meaning" of the text. Yet, again, the plain meaning of the text to me is a meaning based on my world, not the text's world. Is my world really more important than theirs in determining the meaning? Do not the biblical texts themselves say that they were written to ancient Israelites, Romans, Corinthians, and so forth?

There is, however, another approach to the meaning of the biblical text that we might call presuppositional. To be clear, there are presuppositions -- pre-assumptions -- involved in the first two approaches mentioned above. The unreflective interpreter has largely unexamined assumptions. The inductive interpreter assumes that we have enough evidence to make reasonable decisions about the meaning of the text that at least approach or aim at objectivity.

What distinguishes a presuppositionalist approach is the nature and extent of the assumptions made. First, such assumptions are largely theological in nature -- they have to do with the nature of Scripture, the nature of human knowledge, and how God reveals himself. For example, we mentioned above that the meaning of Scripture is often under-determined. Many "post-liberal" theologians thus argue that it is not only permissible but inevitable that we bring our theological assumptions into our interpretations. [23]

Another group of interpreters that have long emphasized the role of presuppositions in interpretation are those who come from the standpoint of a "Reformed epistemology." The Reformed tradition stands in the stream of John Calvin's thought (1509-64), who famously emphasized that God chooses or "elects" certain individuals to be saved while not choosing others. The basis of God's choice is his decision alone and has nothing to do with any choices on the part of the elect.

It is thus natural that some in this tradition would see a proper understanding of Scripture as something that is given by God rather than investigated. You might say that the most important truths are more revealed than discovered. Karl Barth (1886-1968), perhaps the most influential Christian thinker of the twentieth century, wrote a masterpiece of theology known as the Church Dogmatics. [24] In them, he takes the posture that the most important truths about God are not to be argued for on the basis of evidence but to be believed as a matter of dogma.

Two more recent, leading Reformed figures in this regard are Alvin Plantinga and Vern Poythress. [25] Both would strongly emphasize that science is neither objective nor presuppositionless. We have already seen that this is the case from the work of Thomas Kuhn. 

A second key point that both Plantinga and Poythress make is that science often proceeds from a naturalist or anti-supernaturalist presupposition. What this means is that the possibility of God designing or being involved with the creation or processes of nature is either precluded or bracketed out. Naturalism presupposes that divine intervention cannot be used as an explanation for any scientific data. [26]

On the one hand, it is understandable that science would normally bracket the question of divine or "supernatural" intervention. When you are looking for an explanation for why mold grows on cheese, demons are not a particularly helpful explanation, as we will discuss in the next chapter. Nevertheless, what if God actually does exist and intervene in nature? What if the true explanation for the fossil evidence is that God actively participated in the development of simpler to more complex forms of life, as old earth creationists believe? In that case, the assumptions of normal science would actively preclude arriving at the correct explanation.

Christians are theists. That is to say, historic Christianity both believes that God is objectively real and that God is involved in the creation. A number of prominent scientists from the 1600s and 1700s were deists. They believed that God had created the world as a self-operating machine but that he was no longer involved in the operations of the world. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) would be a good example of someone whose views approached those of a deist. []

However, deism is not an option for a historic Christian, not least because the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the central features of Christian faith. It would be hard to underestimate the degree to which the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus are an "intrusion" into the natural cause-effect flow of nature! For this reason, historic Christians by definition believe that God remains involved in the world.

The degree to which presuppositions about Scripture should be involved in scientific thinking can vary from one presuppositionalist to another. For example, Ken Ham is perhaps the best known spokesman at this time for what is called "young earth creationism." [27] He would interpret Genesis 1 to present creation in six literal 24 hour days.

For him, presuppositionalism not only assumes this interpretation of Genesis 1 but it demands that all scientific evidence must be analyzed with this assumption in view. If you attend a creation-evolution debate in which Ham represents the creationist side, you will hear much about presuppositions in his presentation. In his case, the evidence is not allowed to come to any conclusion but one that coheres with his interpretations of the relevant biblical passages.

On the other end of the spectrum, Francis Collins might represent a theist who looks for minimal involvement of God in the course of nature. Collins is well-known both for his leadership of the Human Genome Project and his strong Christian faith. In the late 1900s, the Human Genome Project mapped human DNA for the first time. Yet Collins is also known for his conversion to Christian faith, a pilgrimage captured well in his classic, The Language of God. [28]

Yet in his acceptance of evolution he largely rejects the option that God might have directed such a process. [29] Although he is a theist, he suggests that resort to the miraculous should be a course of last resort. Any "God of the gaps" approach -- which uses divine intervention to explain current gaps in our scientific knowledge -- should be strongly avoided. [] We will see in the next chapter why this approach is understandable. Nevertheless, it is possible that Collins' assumptions could lead him to miss God's divine hand when it was actually there in a pronounced way. 

[insert discussion of inerrancy]

We will keep these three basic approaches to Scripture in mind in the discussions of this book. Ideally, we would move from unreflectivity about our approach either to a primarily inductive or presuppositionalist approach. However, we likely will adopt some mixed approach, with at least some presuppositions and some evidentiary elements. We should keep these options in mind as we move forward.

[21] In Martin Luther's Table Talk as recorded by Mathesius (1539)

[22] See below for Stephen Fowl as an example of someone who would say that the meaning of the Bible is so underdetermined that it is fully acceptable to read it with theological presuppositions in place, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Blackwell, 1998).

[23] I would describe the post-liberal tradition as thinkers who have come from mainstream (liberal) Christian traditions who have rejected what we might call a modernist, evidentiary oriented approach to the most important truths. Rather, these thinkers emphasize the legitimacy of giving primacy to certain faith assumptions apart from evidentiary reasoning. 

The work of Hans Georg Gadamer often stands in the background of such thinkers. See Truth and Method (Mohr Siebeck, 1960). Gadamer argued that our readings of texts are an inevitable fusion of our "horizon" with the horizon of the text. We thus cannot see the historical meaning of the text-in-itself but only the fusion of our world with the world of the text.

[24] The series was published in English by T & T Clark in 13 parts and 4 volumes from 1936-77.

[25] E.g., Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University, 2011); Vern Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Crossway, 2006). See also Ransom Poythress, Has Science Made God Unnecessary? (Christian Focus, 2022).  

[26] The roots of such bracketing go back to the Enlightenment, not least David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

[27] See especially answersingenesis.com. 

[28] Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free, 2006).

[29] Collins, Language, 45-52