We Have a Scientific Explanation for Just About Everything . . . And That Shapes How We Read the Bible {It's Hermeneutics Huesday!}

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We are continuing our Hermeneutics Huesday series on the book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by Randy Richards and Brandon O’Brien. Chapter 7 was so broad (and important!) that I decided to spend a couple of weeks on in. In “Part 1” we considered the significance of relationships in the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament authors, and how those authors explained the Christian gospel using terms and concepts from their highly relational context.

Richards and O’Brien suggest that our tendency to reduce salvation to an accounting transaction or court ruling flows from our Western way of seeing the world. It is not uncommon for us to hear explanations of the atonement that are so technical and literal-minded that you can’t help but imagine God holding an actual pair of scales or an accounting ledger in his hands when he saved you. How precious. The focus for us tends to be the transaction that occurred in that moment of conversion. The point that Richard’s and O’Brien try to drive home in chapter 7 is that the thought-world of the biblical authors was way more fluid, nuanced, and alive than that. We would do well to remember that even what is considered the clearest, most technical explanation of Paul’s doctrine of salvation – the book of Romans - is in fact a letter. A letter to a church. A letter to a church comprised of real people. A letter to a church comprised of real people who were struggling with unity. When he dictated the epistle to the Romans, Paul was not attempting to systematize his theology. He was trying to help Jewish and Gentile believers in local house churches set aside their convictional differences in order to live as one people of God. Every word is ultimately driven by a gospel-shaped vision for relationships. If we miss that, we miss the whole point. (If you’ve never thought about Romans this way, check out Reading Romans Backwards by Scot McKnight.)

The priority of relationships for the biblical authors isn’t the only thing Richard’s and O’Brien address in chapter 7. They also talk about why rules and technical details reign supreme for us modern Westerners. The short answer is naturalism. The dictionary defines naturalism as “the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.” It’s a post-enlightenment worldview fostered by the ever-increasing ability of humans to explain the universe using science. No bible-loving Christian, regardless of where they live in the world, fully embraces a naturalistic worldview. Belief in the supernatural is fundamental to our faith, evidenced by how we make a regular practice of praying for miracles. What we often don’t realize is that our desire for miracles reveals that naturalism has had a much bigger impact on the way we see the world that we’d like to admit.  For us, a miracle happens when God overrides natural law. We all know that time doesn’t go backwards, large bodies of water don’t part, post-menopausal women don’t get pregnant, angel armies don’t appear in the sky, fire doesn’t fall from heaven, a small basket of fish and bread doesn’t feed a crowd of 5,000, and people with congenital blindness aren’t suddenly cured. Because science cannot explain any of these phenomena, we relegate them to the category of the “supernatural.” There’s nothing wrong with this as long as we understand is that the distinction between the natural and supernatural did not exist for the biblical authors. Old Testament scholar John Walton puts it this way:

“There is no concept of a ‘natural’ world in the ancient Near Eastern thinking. The dichotomy between natural and supernatural is a relatively recent one. Deity pervaded the ancient world. Nothing happened independently of deity. The gods did not ‘intervene’ because that would assume that there was a world of events outside of them that they could step in and out of. The Israelites, along with everyone else in the ancient world, believed instead that every event was the act of deity – that every plant that grew, every baby born, every drop of rain and every climatic disaster was an act of God. No ‘natural laws’ governed the cosmos; deity ran the cosmos or was inherent in it. There were no ‘miracles’ (in the sense of events deviating from that which was ‘natural’), there were only signs of the deity’s activity (sometimes favorable, sometimes not).”

¹

Here's the BIG implication of this for our reading of the Bible and our hermeneutical method:

“As a result, we should not expect anything in the Bible or in the rest of the ancient Near East to engage in the discussion of how God’s level of activity relates to the ‘natural’ world. The categories of ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ have no meaning to them, let alone any interest (despite the fact that in our modern world such questions take center stage in the discussion). We cannot expect the text to address [our modern issues], nor can we configure the information of the text to force it to comply with the questions we long to have answered. . . Though we long for the Bible to weigh in on these issues and give us biblical perspectives or answers, we dare not impose such an obligation on the text. God has chosen the agenda of the text, and we must be content with the wisdom of those choices. If we attempt to commandeer the text to address our issues, we distort it in the process.”

²

(emphasis added)

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

The absence of naturalism in the Bible is why there’s no clarity on things like how old the earth is or exactly how God made it from a scientific standpoint. It’s why attempts to reconcile a literal reading of scripture with science are so fraught. The Bible is a pre-scientific book. God saw fit to reveal himself to its ancient authors and audience in words and concepts that those ancient authors understood. The absence of naturalism in the thought-world of the biblical authors is also why our preoccupation with big questions about things like the origin of evil, the relationship between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, and the nature of the afterlife are often met with a frustrating lack of scriptural details. The information we do manage to find often seems bizarre or contradictory, which is absolutely maddening to our modern minds. We crave specific answers that can be organized into our razor-sharp theological categories and turned into a power-point presentation. (Pay no mind to the fact that most of these categories have only been around for 500 years and would be largely unrecognizable to the biblical authors!)

A group of about 50 of us recently read Supernatural by Michael Heiser for the Her God Speaks summer book club. (If you missed it, you can go back and listen to those episodes anytime.) Everything presented in that book was common knowledge in the ancient Israelite world - things like Yahweh’s divine counsel of other gods (Deuteronomy 32, Psalm 82) and the rebellion of Genesis 6 where spiritual beings have sex with human women and produce an unholy offspring that threatens the entire human project. For us, these ideas read like conspiracy theories that cray-cray weirdos like to write about on the internet. (To be fair, there are a lot of cray-cray weirdos writing about the Nephilim on the internet. 😜) Whether or not to believe that little “g” gods actually exist or that demigod creatures called the Nephilim were real historical characters is something we all have to grapple with. What we can know for sure is that the biblical authors believed those things, and they wrote them into the story of the Bible. You’ve likely never heard of them because you (and me!) and the many generations of Christians before you read the Bible through a naturalistic lens. If there’s one thing I learned from our summer book club, it’s this: For people who believe in a Savior who was virgin-born, God incarnate, and who rose from the actual dead, we are remarkably uncomfortable with the supernatural.  

The Bible is full of weird stuff. Our naturalist tendency is to set the weird stuff aside and move on. We don’t like what we can’t explain. But what if we saw the weird stuff – the stuff that doesn’t fit into our tidy theological systems and categories – not as an annoyance or an outlier, but as an invitation? What if we saw it as a signal that there’s something about the world of the ancient authors that we don’t yet understand but should? What if we got curious and gave ourselves permission to lean into the uncertainty, to explore the possibilities alongside scholars who take historical context seriously? What if we had the humility to admit that we might need some new categories?

If you’ve got any questions or comments about this episode, you can shoot me an email at aprile *at* hergodspeaks *dot* com. There is an “e” at the end of Aprile, so don’t forget that. Or you can leave a comment below.

Next week we’ll cover chapter 8 of Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, which covers our Western assumptions related to virtue and vice. See you then!

1. John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 18.

2. Walton, 19.