I wonder what most fundamentalists believe stars to be. Do they think they are angels? I can't imagine that many do. I suppose most accept that stars are burning blobs of heated and pressurized gas, just like scientists say that they are, like every person with a basic education and grasp of the facts knows they are. Yet in the Bible, stars are presented as living beings, as angels or other heavenly beings. For just a few examples, see: Deuteronomy 4:19, Judges 5:20, Job 38:7, Daniel 8:10, and Revelation 12.
Now, again I say, what do fundamentalists say stars are? If they don't think they are angels, then they cannot believe in line with the world-picture of the Bible, as they claim. And if they think they are balls of gas, then why do they think God spoke about them as living beings? Could it be that God was speaking to mankind in a language that he could understand? Could it be that God's language had to appropriate the language of man, to be effective? It would seem so to me.
And if God can appropriate the mythical language regarding stars to tell deeper truths, might He not also have appropriated the mythical language of creation to tell other truths?
God was not concerned with revealing precise scientific information to ancient peoples, information they could not possibly have understood anyways. God was dealing with people as they were and addressed them with what they could possibly know then. We are under no obligation to accept the scientific picture that was ascendent when the Bible as written, a picture that God USED to tell deeper truth. We are under obligation to discern those deeper truths, and to use the scientific picture of the modern day to communicate them.
No comments:
Post a Comment