Being Baptist

     Welcome back.  I hope my blog finds you healthy and happy.

     Occasionally, Dr. Marcus Borg, one of the academic contributors to so-called   Emergent Christianity or Progressive Christianity, addresses the audience at the January Adventure on Saint Simon's Island, Georgia.  He asks for a show of hands from various denominations.  Most of the denominations are well represented.  Episcopalians and Methodists seem to attend in greater numbers than the rest.  Usually, only two or three Baptists attend.  I know that because I listen to the lectures on CD.  I also know that because John and Debra are my friends.  

It is not easy being a Southern Baptist these days.  Once or twice in my life I considered switching to another denomination.  The Southern Baptist Convention is often an embarrassment to me, yet when I examine other denominations, they can be just as embarrassing to their adherents.

Humanity is a kinship for we are the same species.  The church is a kinship too.  Our tradition says we are brothers and sisters in Christ.  That is a metaphor, by the way, and any metaphor yields some interesting results once you start to think about it.

We all have that relative whom we hope does not show up at the weddings or the family reunions.  If he or she does show up, we often wish they do not stay for very long.

Christianity is like that.  We often embarrass each other, but we must always be invited to the wedding.  

I am proud that an African American is currently the president of the SBC.  Considering the Southern Baptist complicity in slavery and the subsequent indignity of Jim Crow, electing a black man to the SBC presidency is as incredible to me as electing a black man for president of the United States six years ago.  I hope he is the best president we have ever had.

Now, past SBC presidents have proved themselves to be silly men.  They declared the earth is a mere six thousand years old.  They cited the Bible as evidence.  This was very embarrassing as people tend to equate being ignorant with being a Baptist.  

This is tantamount to Pope Urban VIII insisting the earth does not move by citing those verses in the Bible that explicitly say our planet is fixed and immovable as well as those that implicitly assume the earth is a fixed, circular disk propped up by mountains.  This actually happened in the 17^th Century. 

Allow me to present briefly, the case of Urban VIII vs Galileo Galilei. 

The evidence for an earth that moves was based observation.  The evidence that the earth did not move was based on scripture.

Explicit Verses

1 Chronicles 16:30:  Tremble before him, all the earth!  The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.

Psalm 93:1: The Lord reigns, he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed in majesty and armed with strength; indeed, the world is established, firm and secure.

Psalm 96:10: Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns.” The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity.

Psalm 104: 5:  He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.

Implied Verses

Ecclesiastes 1: 5: The sun rises and the sun sets and hurries back to where it rises.

Indeed, Genesis assumes a flat, fixed earth with a sky not so far away.  The sky was living quarters for the heavenly host.  Jacob sees earth and sky connected by a stair case (or ladder).  Noah’s flood assumes a smaller, flatter earth than our enormous planet.  In the tower of Babylon story, the sky dwellers get really nervous when the earth dwellers begin to build a tall tower so they can live in the sky too.  When Jesus is set on a high place, he saw all the kingdoms of the world.  That would be literally impossible if the earth is a sphere.

And then, someone in the Bible reveals incredible insight when he writes:

Job 26: 7:  He spreads out the northern skies over empty space;
    he suspends the earth over nothing.

The argument that the earth is fixed and flat sounds silly today.  Imagine how silly the young earth argument will sound in two hundred years.  To some, it already sounds really foolish.

I remember the first time a philosophy professor quoted 1 Chronicles 16:30 after I had declared in class that the Bible was infallible and inerrant.  I was shocked.  I had no answer for it.  

To make it worse, I was an English major.  It would never have occurred to me to reply that the writer was writing metaphorically or symbolically.  One does not say the writer really believes the earth was orbiting around the sun, but was being poetic especially when time after time writers declare the earth is not moving and never will.  Besides,orbits are not fixed and immovable in reality or in poetry. 

Most intellectually inclined people would have bolted out of church right then and there.  Not I.  I did not leave God just because the Bible expresses God the way it does.  I did leave Campus Crusade for Christ.

Ironically, it is poetry that expresses God’s logic, even when the poet who writes it does not understand how the world works scientifically.  He or she cannot help but use the categories and concepts of the known cosmos of their day.  How could it be otherwise?

Indeed, atheists and fundamentalists are fond of saying, “If one thing in the Bible is false, then the whole Bible is false.”   I wonder, do they think that way about poetry?  Do they read poetry?  If they concede that much of the Bible is poetic, would they insist on such an impossible standard of factuality? 

Next time, I’ll write about my stubborn refusal to leave the people who love to say, “No.”  

I hope to see you there.  Blessings…