carving new roads in reading the Bible

One of the most contentious topics on the internet and especially the blog-o-sphere must be the creation vs evolution argument. Some of the most popular posts come out of this, but I’m not going to write one of the most popular posts. Usually popular posts take on one of the extremists positions. Either the “I’m an atheist and how can you be so stupid to think that there is any reality behind the concept God“, or “we believe the Bible, and our interpretation of the Bible is correct, and anyone not agreeing with us is wrong and probably going to hell”.

The past day or so this has been the most-read post on wordpress :

97 – Where (and How) Evolution Is Taught In the US

Or some of you might remember How Hubble Killed God from a couple of months ago.

For the Afrikaans crowd, maybe you’ve come onto When ignorence is called God.

And I’m sure we can find thousands of examples. This is just some of the very popular ones that were around wordpress in the last couple of months.

I’m busy reading The Bible after Babel, and it sketches the picture ofwhat happened in Biblical Sciences the past few decades. To many times it’s the picture of the minimalists, which sometimes didn’t consider the Bible to be of any historical value, and the literalists, which took the Bible to be historical, and of much more historical value than any other sources of discoveries. (PS. I don’t consider minimalists to be atheists and literalists to be creationists. That is four different concepts, I’m just trying to show the similarities between the two arguments)

But is there a new way emerging? Where reading the Bible doesn’t make me a creationist. Where asking critical questions doesn’t make me an atheist. Where I can admit when that I might be wrong, while admitting that reality will always be bigger than I can know. Where we can be critical of the historical value of the Bible, without uncritically discarding the historical value of the Bible. Where we can carve out a new way without being categorizable in one of the standard extreme categories.

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