The Good Book

Rufus Jones wrote the following about the Bible in his 1948 book, A Call To What Is Vital: “…no other book that has ever been written has received such a searching examination, such minute and painstaking research, at the hands of an army of trained experts as has happened during the last three generations to the Scriptures of the Old and Nw Testaments.  That the whole perspective has been altered by this historical research there can be no doubt.  For those who are familiar with the results of this extensive examination the great Book is bound to be seen in a new light and it can no longer be read in an attitude of Biblio-idolatry.  The theory of its verbal infallibility is of course gone.  The idea that it is a divinely ‘dictated’ Book is untenable.  That the Book is an unbroken unity, all the parts of it on the same moral and spiritual level, is on longer a possible view.”  

Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote in his 1924 book, The Modern Use of the Bible, how in light of scientific fact, biblical research, and the vicissitudes of the modern world, we must approach the Bible not by “denying the discoveries of science, and insisting on the literal acceptance of every Biblical idea,” but by reason and experience.

Why is it then, now, in 2019,  that a wide swath of Christians and Christian churches continue to proclaim that the earth is only 6000 years old when science suggests that the earth is at least 4.5 billion years old? Why then, do many still cling to the notion that God dictated every word of the Bible, when, in fact, those very words often contradict each other?  Why then, do some say God created the world in six days, or that Joshua caused the sun to stand still?  Is it just a matter of ignorance, stubbornness, or blind faith?  Of course, denying scientific discoveries, and abandoning “reasoning” is not limited to the Bible.  “It is an astonishing fact,” writes Norm Chomsky, “about the current era that in the most powerful country in world history, with a high level of education and privilege, one of the two political parities virtually denies the well-established facts about anthropogenic climate change.”

“Religion” (Bible), wrote a professor of theology, “is a dangerous drug, unless it is wisely administered.”  Harper Lee, in To Kill A Mockingbird has one of her characters say, ““Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)…” The Bible is a “Good Book.” I read a portion of it everyday—and I read it in the light of this modern day.