Verbus

The blog has a purpose. I was pondering just how I could bring Catholics and Evangelicals together when I recalled one of the events in my life that started turning me toward Rome. I was challenged to read the Catechism and could find very little I disagreed with. I was amazed that the Roman Catholic Church toward which I held such animosity was, in fact, pretty much in agreement with most Protestant doctrine, at least in matters of faith and morals. Sure, there were things I felt I could not accept, but I really had to look for them.

So it is in this spirit that I would like to start an exploration of one of the most fundamental expressions of Christian orthodoxy, the Nicene creed. But before I begin I would like to explore what it is and why it came into being.

The creed takes it’s English name from the first word in the Latin version, “credo” – “I believe.” It was adopted primarily to counter the heresy of Arianism which held that Jesus was a created being and not co-eternal with the Father. As Christians, Protestant and Catholic alike, we believe in the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and it was in this creed that most of the theological elements of the Doctrine of the Trinity were set out in detail. There have been subsequent controversies regarding elements of the creed, especially between Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church, but they are irrelevant for our purposes here.

I plan to discuss each section of the creed in separate posts and examine them in terms of both Evangelical and Catholic theology and see where or even if we disagree. I’ll be using the current form adopted recently by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) as it is a much better translation of the Latin form which was in use at the time of the Reformation. In other words, this was the creed that Luther and the Reformers confessed. And it is the creed that sits as the foundation of Evangelical theology.

In one of the discussion threads on christiannews.net the issue once again arose regarding the age of the Earth. This particular discussion dealt with newly discovered intact fossil fish. The debate raged (on and on and on) about geology and Genesis and man’s creation. But I asked a question several times and could not get any responses (save one) from “young earth” believers: Is the Earth the same age as the universe or is it much older?

So in the next series of posts I want to explore if and how the Biblical account of creation squares with our empirical understanding. I will start by exploring the first created thing: light.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. – Genesis 1:3

You can’t get much earlier than that.

Sir Isaac Newton is considered the first scientist to explore the nature of light. He was able to determine that white light was actually composed of many colors, i.e. a spectrum. Isn’t it interesting that the God left a spectrum (rainbow) as a sign that he would never again destroy the Earth.Was light composed of many colors prior to the Flood? We have no way of knowing for sure, but we can be certain that such is the case today.

Another thing that Newton determined was that light behaves like a wave. Using a double slit experiment he observed the interference pattern that one would expect a wave to produce. In the physics of that time, it was believed that waves were fluctuations in density of some medium, so if light were a wave then there must be some medium in which it propagated. No one knew what it was, so they proposed a hypothesis that the universe was infused everywhere with a substance with no mass which could occupy the same space a other objects. It was deemed the luminiferous aether (or ether). It was a major goal of 19th century science to determine its nature.

If there were such a thing as the ether, then it was reasonable to expect the velocity of light to differ depending on the direction in which it was measured. After all the Earth was speeding through space at considerable velocity.One experiment sought to prove the hypothesis that the velocity of light differed depending upon the direction in which it was measured. This is the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. It is one of the classic examples of a falsifiable hypothesis and this experiment is a stunning example of falsification What they found was that light propagated at exactly the same velocity irrespective of the direction in which it was measured. In other words, they determined that the velocity of light in a vacuum was a constant.

This would have major repercussions in physics leading eventually to the Special Theory of Relativity. It is of such major importance that the question must be asked: Is there anything in Michelson-Morley the contradicts the Biblical account of the creation of light?

I am very interested in getting the response of anyone (especially a pastor or teacher) who holds to a more literal reading of Genesis. If we can’t come to some common ground on this topic there may be little hope in harmonizing the Biblical creation account with current cosmology.

Let’s hear what you have to say.

“Jennifer” replied to one of my posts on christiannews.net regarding concerns we have over the direction Pope Francis appears to be taking us. I had expressed some reservations about his Jesuit worldview and she agreed that she had similar concerns.

Specifically, she wondered how those who believe in the True Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and those who deny it can operate under one roof. This cuts to the very purpose of the blog site. It’s one thing to want Christians to work together to achieve positive change in this increasingly anti-Christian world, but how exactly do we overcome our differences? What kind of “roof” can we operate under?

I have two approaches to that. First, to list the things that we all share in common and that cause us to identify as Christians. And second, to identify the specific evils in the world that we need to address together.

The first is what C. S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity.” What does that mean? Here’s my (perhaps incomplete) list:

• That Jesus Christ was truly the Son of God.
• That Jesus Christ lived and walked on the earth
• That Jesus Christ performed miracles
• That Jesus’ death on the cross is the sole means by which we obtain salvation
• That Jesus intended His church to survive eternally

Catholic believe these things to be literally true. Evangelicals believe these things to be literally true. And although there are other immense theological differences between us, we can still choose to set these aside and choose to cooperate as Christians in love and brotherhood.

Here are some of the evils in the world we must work together to overcome:

• The evil of abortion
• The evil of inhibiting the free exercise of our religion by limiting our speech
• The evil of compelling us to operate against our religious principles
• The evil of a hostile LGBT minority that seeks to demonize any deviation from their political agenda by any means at their disposal
• The evil of religious genocide
• The evil imposition of Sharia law by force

This may not be an exhaustive list, but I think it lays out both the common ground for our cooperation as well as goals towards which can agree to work.

If out of this comes a greater tolerance of one another’s beliefs, then it is all to the good. But that is not necessary to begin to accomplish the tasks at hand.

I liken our problem to two people in the midst of a burning building, arguing about whose firefighting techniques are the best instead of just putting out the fire any way they can.

Why can’t we just put out the fire?

Luke 1:48: From now on all generations will call me blessed.

Do you call her “blessed?”

Isaiah 7:14: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.

Mary is “the virgin” not “a virgin.”

Her name was Mary.

Do you call her the Blessed Virgin Mary?  If not, why do you claim to be scriptural?

My college education was long and chaotic. Some might call it eclectic but it would more accurately called undirected. For a good part of the time I was an anthropology major at Wayne State University studying under Dr. John Cole, a student of the famous social anthropologist Leslie White. One of the foundational principles in studying other cultures is never to bring your cultural biases into your field work. Most of the field work of the nineteenth century was terribly flawed in this regard. “Civilized” anthropologists went out to study “primitive” cultures, imposing their values on what they observed. 

One of the most common errors was to treat oral traditions as “myths” in the sense of being fables or legends. They assumed that the indigenous people “believed” literally the stories they told. This was a bias made by members of a literate culture observing a non-literate (not illiterate) culture. The meaning of the concept of “belief” they held was much more concrete than the understanding of the speakers. 

The role of story-telling in preliterate cultures has a distinct evolutionary advantage. Stories are the means by which the deepest truths of the culture are preserved intact even after many generations because stories contain a relatively small number of details which must be preserved if the story is to make sense. Let me illustrate

Have you ever had the experience of hearing someone describe an event at which you were also present? Did you notice that the other person always got it “wrong” by leaving out facts, adding new ones or distorting some? Personal memory is a very unreliable way to store information, so if we are to transmit cultural wisdom we have to have some way to ensure that information is preserved intact through countless generations.

If you have children or grandchildren you must have told them some classic bedtime stories which are pretty much known throughout our culture. And did you notice that when someone else told them the details were pretty much exactly intact? Why? Because unlike the memory of actual events, they are not dependent on personal recollection but rather on the fictional details, repeated time after time.

So in preliterate societies, the story tellers were responsible for passing on the culture And we call these stories”myths.” Myths are not untrue in a modern Western sense, but rather they contain essential truth wrapped in a fictional structure that protects that truth from distortion. As a culture begins to develop writing, these myths start to be written down, not so much as a historical record as a modern person would define it, but as a memory aid to ensure even more the accuracy of the story. When we approach these texts as modern Westerners, we tend to bring our understanding of textual criticism with us. And many people approach early texts incorrectly with that bias.

Creation myths are cultural universals, that is they appear without exception in all cultures. I happen to believe that the creation myths of the Jews were in fact inspired by the Holy Spirit and provide infallible information about God and our relationship to Him. I don’t think one needs to read them in a literal, Western sense to understand the truth contained within. For instance, I do not need to believe in a literal Garden of Eden with a literal serpent in order to accept as true the fact of Man’s fallen nature. I also believe that God is revealed to us in two manners: via the direct evidence of His magnificent creation, and by direct revelation through the Holy Spirit. They are each true in their own way and cannot disagree. When science seems to conflict with Scripture, I think it is reasonable to assume that our reading is where the problem lay. Bear in mind that God can only reveal Himself in the language and the mental constructs of the men (and women) he inspires. The fantastic vision that Ezekiel saw, of wheels within wheels, would have been described entirely differently by a native of of a mesoamerican culture that did not yet have the technology of wheels. God’s revelation is so immense and so entirely beyond our ability to express it in words that anything we say is in one sense “mythic,” not that it speaks of the untrue but rather of the unknowable.

So to answer my question, it would be entirely correct to say that God “wrote” genesis since He was the only one around at the time. But I also believe it was the earliest writers of the Pentateuch who received the revelation of God and passed it faithfully to us. For me, the most important thing is that God the Holy Spirit can speak directly to us via the Scripture in order to know Him and, in so doing, begin to know ourselves.