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The Bible's Ancient Cosmology - Did the Sun Stand Still?
100 Plays9 months ago
When astronomers like Copernicus and Galileo challenged conventional beliefs, Christians held to their understanding of Scripture’s plain teachings against the dangerous new ideas. Today we look back at those who stuck to their Biblical convictions and we celebrate … the astronomers. In this episode Nick and Matt reflect on the church’s response to heliocentrism and compare modern approaches to reading the Bible’s cosmology, and how understanding strange (to us) ancient cosmology can help us read the Bible better.
Resources Referenced: The Firmament and the Water Above by Paul Seely, The Hebrew Conception of the World: A Philological and Literary Study by Stadelmann, Luis, Ancient Near Eastern thought and the Old Testament by John Walton, John Calvin on Nicolaus Copernicus and Heliocentrism by Wyatt Houtz, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture After Genetic Science by Scot McKnight and Dennis Venema, Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli, The Faith and Reason of Father George Lemaître by Joseph R. Laracy, Geocentrism: History and Background by Danny R. Faulkner, NET Bible Translation Notes
Interlude Music: On a Stroller by Harry Edvino, Space Waves by Ben Elson
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
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Transcript
Introduction to Biblical Wisdom
00:00:06
Speaker
What that means for what the Bible is trying to teach us and the wisdom it's trying to give us. Enjoy the conversation.
Renaissance Astronomers vs. Church Doctrine
00:00:27
Speaker
During the Renaissance, astronomers like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo challenged the common understanding that the sun and other planets orbited a fixed earth. Many Christians opposed these new ideas.
00:00:39
Speaker
They used scripture to discredit to the idea that the earth could orbit the sun. They believed that scripture clearly teaches that God fixed the earth immovably in place, and that he made the sun and moon stand still during Joshua's battle with the Amorites.
00:00:52
Speaker
The Roman Catholic Church deemed the New Science heretical for explicitly contradicting in many places the sense of Holy Scripture. So this was called the New Science? The New Science, yes.
Evolution of Church's Cosmological Stance
00:01:02
Speaker
This heliocentrism or whatever? Yeah, the seemingly crazy idea that the Earth was not actually fixed in one space. Those modern scientists, you gotta watch out for them.
00:01:12
Speaker
Martin Luther, speaking of Copernicus, said, John Calvin that those who believe new science reveal their monstrous nature, and that when we see such minds, indeed confess that devil possessed them. and not the earth john kelvin said that those who believe the new science reveal their monstrous nature and that when we see such minds we indeed confess that the devil possessed them So they had similar attitude towards these new ideas of heliocentrism, just like some like modern kind of conservative evangelicals have towards, say, like evolution or something.
00:01:44
Speaker
Yeah, they had very strong ideas, believing that this was a new science that was attempting to contradict or disprove clear teachings of scripture. It was atheistic or whatever. And in the centuries since, the church has mostly changed its opinions on heliocentrism.
00:01:59
Speaker
I don't meet a lot of people who still believe that the earth is fixed at the center of the solar system. You haven't been on the internet long enough. I guess not. So how is it that Christians went from demonizing this idea to basically accepting it as a fact in the last 500 years?
00:02:14
Speaker
I think this history can serve as a good cautionary tale for us, and it can encourage us to think carefully about how we read and understand scripture. Now, if you don't consider scripture to be special in any way, then you can just say it's wrong about the universe and move on with your day because it doesn't really matter.
Interpreting Biblical Texts with Modern Science
00:02:28
Speaker
However, for those of us who believe the Bible to be more than just any other ancient document, I've seen basically four approaches that Christians take to interpreting these biblical texts, where the Bible seems to say something that doesn't match what modern science says. Yeah.
00:02:42
Speaker
Yeah, this has been a real problem throughout church history, and there's been apologists trying to deal with it ever since. Every time this science changes about things. Christians have taken a variety of approaches to these passages.
00:02:53
Speaker
And sometimes these four approaches I'm going to describe here kind of get mixed and matched. You don't have to pick one and then take that approach through all the Scripture. Different parts of Scripture might demand that we take different approaches here. sure So I'm going to go through these four and I just want to get your gut opinion on these four approaches. Okay, Nick?
00:03:07
Speaker
All right. So opinion number one is basically the Bible says it, so I believe it. This idea says that the Bible teaches an ancient cosmology. So they would say that the scripture describes a fixed earth with solar bodies that move around it.
00:03:22
Speaker
So that's what must be true. Yeah, that'd be nice. It's simplistic, certainly. There's a degree of like faithfulness to it. You're like, well, I'm going to stick with the Bible to hell with everything else.
00:03:33
Speaker
The only problem is i don't think anyone actually does that. Yeah, there are not a lot of people. I will say I'm sitting here next to a book called The Earth Does Not Move.
00:03:44
Speaker
Which makes a strong argument that because the Bible describes the Earth as fixed and describes the sun and moon traveling around the Earth, that if we're going to believe the Bible, we need to believe exactly that.
00:03:55
Speaker
We need to believe in a geocentric universe, one where the Earth is at the center and everything, the sun, the stars, the moon, all revolve around it. I'll give him his kudos for consistency.
Cosmology in Biblical Interpretation
00:04:04
Speaker
Approach number two would say that these scriptural passages are actually teaching modern cosmology. if There's not really any problem here between the Bible and modern science. We just need to read the Bible more carefully.
00:04:16
Speaker
I know the earth orbits the sun, and I know the Bible is true, so the Bible must teach what is true. So God fixing the earth in its place is actually meant as a reference to God fixing the earth securely into its orbit, or something like that.
00:04:29
Speaker
Again, this would be nice if this is true, but I feel like what ends up happening here is we just twist the clear meaning of the scriptures. And in that sense, we disrespect them and don't seem to care at all what they meant and what they mean, which is not something people that respect the Bible should be willing to do.
00:04:48
Speaker
Unfortunately, sometimes it strangely is Yeah, it'd be really nice if we could just read the Bible and say, look, it lines up with everything that modern science teaches, but that ends up with kind of a really weird approach. The hermeneutic gets really twisted up if going to take that approach.
00:05:01
Speaker
You have to start doing a bunch of gymnastics with the individual biblical texts and be like, well, it looks like they mean this. The Greek and the Hebrew say they mean this, but actually, I think this is what they meant.
00:05:14
Speaker
And they must have meant this because the Bible can't be wrong. Yeah, the criticism made against this approach sometimes is that it tries to do what's called concordism, reading the Bible through modern context.
00:05:26
Speaker
So it's taking modern science or modern ideas and then reading the biblical text and saying, OK, I'm going to find ways that these match up, even if that might not be what the author really meant. Yeah, this is basically a postmodern approach, willing to read the text through the eyes of the modern reader.
00:05:41
Speaker
It can start to abandon what we would typically call like a historical ch grammatical hermeneutic. Right. The idea that says we need to try to read the Bible and understand it first and foremost through the authorial intent. What did the author of the Bible intend it to mean?
00:05:54
Speaker
Yep. Approach number three. This is what i'm going to call the only theological approach. This approach would say that this sort of language is essentially theological. The authors of the Bible didn't intend for what they were writing to represent any actual cosmology.
00:06:08
Speaker
They approach passages about God fixing the earth in its place, making the sun stand still, and say, well, these are just describing what people would have seen. Nobody here is trying to describe what's actually going on.
00:06:19
Speaker
They're not meant as precise statements about the earth or the sun. And in fact, most of us today, when we describe the sun setting and rising, we're doing the exact same thing. This type of language is usually called phenomenal language.
00:06:31
Speaker
Yeah, what I like about this approach is fundamentally it does observe one true thing, and that is that these texts are trying to teach theology. Even the historical accounts are riddled with polemics against the other gods and trying to prop up Yahweh, the God of Israel.
00:06:47
Speaker
It's basically doing apologetics. And very intentionally so. So this approach recognizes that, and that's true, fundamentally good. However, I don't think I would want to say that the meaning of the text to the original authors could be reduced to that. That'd maybe be too large of a claim to make.
00:07:05
Speaker
I would have to prove that they had no interest in presenting anything other than theological teachings. yeah I think this approach is a lot easier to take in certain parts of scripture than it is in others.
00:07:18
Speaker
Sure. So if you're in like the Psalms or other prophecy where poetic language would be normal, it's easier to take that language and say, okay, the author is using the sort of poetic language and isn't trying to describe anything about the actual universe itself.
00:07:33
Speaker
It's interesting. It's actually a Joshua 10 passage that describes the sun standing still that tended to be right at the heart of that debate between Christians and then this new science. And I think that's because that Joshua 10 passage is right in the middle of a narrative. It's a little harder to point to language in the middle of a narrative and be like, oh well, that's phenomenal language. Sure. Yeah.
00:07:52
Speaker
Okay. Last approach here. This what I'm going to call the use ancient cosmology to teach theology approach. It's a long title there. It is. So this approach would say that the biblical authors do describe an ancient cosmology.
00:08:06
Speaker
In fact, they believed that the earth was fixed in its place because that's what everyone used to believe. The biblical authors are using this shared assumption about the world to teach theology. So from the perspective of the biblical authors, they would say something like, Everybody knows the earth is fixed in place. I'm writing to teach that it was God who made that happen.
00:08:24
Speaker
wasn't just always that way. wasn't created out of the body of another god. it was fixed in its place by our god, Yahweh, the creator. mean, I think this approach the most faithful to the original meaning of the text.
00:08:37
Speaker
It is the most respectful reading of the text that allows the text to speak for itself, define its own terms. And we just try to find what meaning that is and have to deal with it as such.
00:08:50
Speaker
I think some modern conservative evangelicals kind of have a problem with this approach sometimes because it rubs up against their concept of inerrancy doctrine, to which maybe I would respond, well, maybe we need to adjust our modern concepts of inerrancy doctrine, but that's a whole thing. And yeah, that does turn some people off to this, what I would call the most respectful reading of the text.
00:09:12
Speaker
Yeah, this approach suggests that in the biblical text are descriptions of wrong cosmology. Which I think is just patently the case. That may make us uncomfortable, but it doesn't help to lie about it or to spin the text to mean something they don't mean.
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah, but I think hearing that definitely sets off warning or alarm bells for a lot of people. Because of the way
Theological Intent of Biblical Cosmology
00:09:33
Speaker
that we modern American evangelicals have done our biblicism. I want to do a little thought experiment here.
00:09:39
Speaker
Imagine that we live in a small town with a big landmark tree in the middle. Everyone in the town calls this the big oak tree. Now, if I lived in that town and you, Nick, needed directions to my home, I might use that big oak tree as a point of reference because it's something everyone knows.
00:09:55
Speaker
So I might give you directions that are like, oh, heading north on Main Street, take the second right after the big oak tree. like Great. You use those instructions. You're able to find my house. And then we sat outside by the fire and we navel-gazed for hours chatting. It was a good time.
00:10:08
Speaker
Classic. Now imagine that years after my death, an arborist visits town and happens to take a closer look at the big oak tree and finds that this huge landmark tree in the middle of the town is actually a poplar tree. Yeah.
00:10:21
Speaker
I guess nobody in the town ever actually thought to check. Everyone just called it the big oak tree. That's what everybody knew it as. There was even a sign out front that said lone oak. Yeah, exactly. So here's my question for you, Nick. Are the instructions I gave you wrong?
00:10:34
Speaker
Technically, but the intent of them were perfectly normal and they got me to where I needed to go. They were trustworthy instructions. Yeah, I used a shared assumption, which is actually used a lot in good communication.
00:10:47
Speaker
But it was also a shared misconception. Yes. On one technical detail. see Yeah. and So I think this gets to an interesting question about communication. I would say the intent of the communication isn't wrong just because a shared assumption happens to be wrong.
00:11:01
Speaker
So when the biblical authors teach about God and his relationship with creation, they're doing so with an assumed shared understanding of cosmology of the world around them with their audience.
00:11:11
Speaker
That's not actually a strange artifact of scripture. It's a basic feature of human communication. What else are they to do? Unless God dictated to them all the things about their scientific theory from their culture that were incorrect, they would have no way of knowing what shared assumptions were also shared misconceptions about the nature of reality from a scientific perspective.
00:11:35
Speaker
To try to communicate anything meaningful without some shared assumptions would be almost impossible. I would argue that the directions i gave you are true, even if I held the false assumption that the tree was an oak tree.
00:11:48
Speaker
And likewise, the Bible is true in what it teaches, even if the cosmological assumptions of its day are wrong. Most communicating that we do today right is with people from our own culture, people who share the same assumptions that we do.
00:12:03
Speaker
That makes it really easy when we're communicating to intuitively separate what's assumed from what's the intent of the communication. When we read documents written by people from an ancient culture who hold very different assumptions, it becomes way harder to start separating what those assumptions are and what the actual intent of the communication is Yeah.
00:12:22
Speaker
That's especially true with something like cosmology, where cultural assumptions have shifted radically in the last five centuries. Yeah. mean, we're talking about just even Martin Luther and John Calvin, and they clearly had very different assumptions about how the world worked around them than we do today. Mm-hmm.
00:12:38
Speaker
The Chicago Statement on Inerrancy is a statement put together about the inerrancy of Scripture, and it's a statement held to by a lot of conservative churches. In this statement, they say, We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose.
00:12:57
Speaker
So if the purpose of Scripture isn't to teach cosmology, then it's not proper to evaluate Scripture by the assumptions about cosmology that it expresses. They, in that statement, are basically allowing for approach number four that you just offered. and Yeah, I think so.
00:13:13
Speaker
So if scripture is trying to teach something about God, and in teaching that thing about God, it describes God fixing the earth in its place, because that was a common assumption that was held in the ancient world, then it's not right of us to gauge whether scripture is inerrant or truthful based on that assumption that it uses to express the idea about God.
00:13:32
Speaker
Right, because again, they had no way of knowing it wasn't unless God divinely revealed that, which it just happens to be the case that he didn't. And if we have a problem with that, we can ask God about that someday.
00:13:46
Speaker
Now, if the purpose of Scripture is to teach cosmology, if it's meant to teach us what the world is like around us... Then we do have a problem because it's wrong sometimes. Yes, then that would be a valid standard for valuing Scripture.
00:13:58
Speaker
We would have to say that Scripture is inerrant about that cosmology if that was the purpose of Scripture. Hence, approach number one. The assumption is that the Scriptures are trying to teach us scientific truth about the nature of reality, trying to teach us physics, cosmology, etc., etc.
00:14:15
Speaker
And therefore, as consistent Christians who respect the Bible, they're just going with it. They're digging in their heels and they're like, all this modern science stuff, it's all just wrong. It's a big facade. It's the devil himself behind it.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. they They really see that as like a key element of their faith is not being swayed by NASA and all these other scientists who've taught cosmology in the last 500 years. I'm telling you these folks are very consistent. So I got to respect them for that. Yeah.
00:14:42
Speaker
So the distinguishing question between do we go with approach number one but do we go with approach number four here is whether or not scripture is trying to teach cosmology. How do you answer that question? Because it's just my assumption that it's not.
00:14:58
Speaker
And maybe I've arrived at that assumption because I've been convinced that the writers of Scripture do present their theology in ways that are scientifically imprecise or just wrong, according to the you know standard scientific theories about things.
00:15:13
Speaker
But as a good Christian that respects the Bible, I'm unwilling to let that influence whether or not I follow the Bible's teaching. And so then my assumption is just like, oh, God didn't teach them everything about physics.
00:15:26
Speaker
And that's fine. I guess it's fine for them to make mistakes about that. So that's been my approach. Maybe this is more of a temptation to modern Westerners. If for whatever reason, you really do feel that this thing that we call trustworthy and true needs to be true at every level of analysis, needs to be like a textbook. It cannot make any type of mistake and certainly can't be making misstatements about the nature of the cosmos.
00:15:53
Speaker
Then you are just left with this choice. Am I going to go with the modern scientists and distrust God and his word? Or am I going to say God is trustworthy even if it doesn't look like it?
00:16:07
Speaker
But I guess I don't know precisely what distinguishes my approach, which would be the number four approach, from the number one approach, because I do think we both respect the scriptures. Yeah. Well, let me make a case for why scripture is not teaching cosmology.
00:16:40
Speaker
My basic assumption here is that when scripture is written, it's meant to teach something to people. Of course. So when we look at scripture and we compare it to other writings and thinkings of the ancient world, my basic idea is that if scripture is meant to teach cosmology, I would expect it to say something novel about cosmology.
00:16:58
Speaker
Ah, I see where you're going with this. But when we look at scripture and we look at the way it describes the shape of the world, it always matches common ancient ideas. It's all the same.
00:17:09
Speaker
When we look at ancient writings like those we have from Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt, we find that they describe the shape and movement of the cosmos in the same way that the Hebrew scriptures do. Explain.
00:17:20
Speaker
In Israel's time, their neighbors understood the earth, or ground, was fixed in place on foundations. Above the earth was a hard sky dome that held up the waters above.
00:17:31
Speaker
Stars are attached to the sky dome, and the sun and moon follow set courses through the sky. Mm-hmm. Now, the Hebrew scriptures are definitely unique in teaching that God existed before and outside of the cosmos and that the cosmos is good, that it was created by God and ordered for his glory.
00:17:50
Speaker
It was designed with a purpose. The Hebrew scriptures challenged the theological understanding for the purpose of the cosmos, but it communicates the actual shape of the cosmos with that shared cosmology and the shared assumptions of all of its neighbors. yeah It wasn't arguing for a different type of world.
00:18:10
Speaker
It was arguing for a world that had a different purpose and a world that had a different creator than its neighbors believed. Yeah, that's definitely true. And multiple places throughout the Old Testament, not only in Genesis 1, in the beginning of the Bible, of course, but throughout. You'll see language of the lights moving along tracks.
00:18:30
Speaker
You'll see, obviously, that hard dome type of language. And go down the list, it's all shared cosmology with their neighbors. Yeah, the Hebrew people were very different from their neighbors in lots of ways.
00:18:42
Speaker
But no ancient person would have been surprised to read the Hebrew Bible's description of the cosmos. Right. That was just a shared assumption. If the Bible was trying to teach cosmology, I would expect something that challenged the shared assumptions.
00:18:56
Speaker
I would expect a passage in there that sounds something like, the Lord says, listen, O Israel. Your neighbors believe the earth was fixed on its foundations, but I tell you that the Lord formed the land and water into a sphere and set its course spinning in orbit around the sun.
00:19:12
Speaker
but If we had a passage like that, then I would say, oh, wow, look, this is a novel cosmology. I think scripture trying to teach something here, but we just don't.
Scripture's Role in Scientific Interpretation
00:19:20
Speaker
We don't have passages like that. And this solar system is a speck in a galaxy that is a speck of the known visible universe, which is 46 billion light years across.
00:19:33
Speaker
Yeah, we just we don't. There's ah a guy named Georges Lemaitre. He was a Belgian priest in the early 1900s. He understood clearly that we shouldn't read scripture as if it's attempting to teach cosmology.
00:19:45
Speaker
He's also a mathematician and a physicist who presented the theory that the universe was expanding from a single location in space in the distant past. He's the father of the Big Bang. Einstein was initially very skeptical of Lemaitre's theory, but was actually eventually convinced by him.
00:20:02
Speaker
After Lemaitre's work was published, Pope Pius XII saw this Big Bang theory as evidence for God's creating universe from nothing, the ex nihilo creation. Lemaitre met with the Pope and convinced him to stop making public statements about scientific discoveries.
00:20:18
Speaker
So this theory that this Christian guy came up with was used by the Pope for apologetic purposes for the existence of God. Like, hey, this is wonderful and amazing. yeah Before this, God was. That's actually how modern Christian apologists argue. It's called the cosmological argument.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, but Lemaître went to the Pope and said, no, the biblical authors were not trying to teach us about the things that I'm studying here. That's interesting. So his theory was like, I think this is true as a physical description of the universe, but I'm not trying to say that the Bible is teaching this.
00:20:50
Speaker
Yes. It just happens to be true and the biblical authors weren't informed of this. So don't use this to be like, hey the Bible teaches this too. Exactly. Because that's a misreading of the scriptures. And in fact, there's physicists today who are arguing that the Big Bang was not just the beginning of our universe, but was possibly the end of a universe that existed before.
00:21:08
Speaker
Sure. So the Big Bang there is certainly not the same as some sort of a creation ex nihilo. So Lemaître said of the supposed errors in scripture, Hence, it is utterly unimportant that errors in historic and scientific fact should be found in the Bible.
00:21:23
Speaker
The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation, they must also be right on all other subjects is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.
00:21:36
Speaker
Interesting. Okay, so he thinks that our going to the Bible for all of our questions about not only physics and cosmology, but who knows, maybe psychology and everything else, that our going to the Bible for answers to all these questions is birthed from maybe a good place, but also a place of misunderstanding. and The scriptures weren't actually given to us to answer all of our curiosities about everything under the sun.
00:22:00
Speaker
As I say, under the sun. Yeah. Before you go looking to answers from scripture, you should first try to understand what questions it's posing and trying to answer. yeah Reading it on its own terms.
00:22:12
Speaker
Exactly. Let's look at another example of cosmology described in scripture that may seem strange to us. It's the Rekia in the sky. It's translated in this version with vault.
00:22:23
Speaker
In Genesis 1, 6-7. Reading from the NIV. And God said, Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water. So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it.
00:22:36
Speaker
And it was so. And then in verse 14. And God said, is this being described?
00:22:44
Speaker
and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times and days and years and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth and it was so what is this vault being described Well, ancient peoples believed that above the earth was a rigid dome structure that held up the waters above.
00:23:03
Speaker
Holes in this rigid dome permitted waters above to fall through as rain. The stars in the night sky were believed to be fixed to this dome. Paul Seeley described ancient understandings of the sky.
00:23:15
Speaker
They had no reason to doubt what their eyes told them was true, namely that stars above them were fixed in a solid dome, and the sky literally touched the earth at the horizon. He goes through evidence from cultures worldwide who believe there was a rigid dome-type structure above the earth.
00:23:31
Speaker
Peoples wondered what material it was made out of and how thick it might be. They wondered if you could stick an arrow into it or cut a hole in it and pass to the other side. Some thought it must rise slightly every morning to allow the sun to slip into the dome and then rise again in the evening to allow it to leave again.
00:23:47
Speaker
Third Baruch was written in the first century. It retells the events of the Tower of Babel and portrays the tower builders seeking to pierce the sky dome so they can learn whether it was made of clay, brass, or iron.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah. This was a widespread idea. The first historical evidence that anyone thought the sky may just be empty space is from China around 200 AD and didn't become popular in most of the world until much later than that.
00:24:12
Speaker
so how are we to understand these Rikia passages? Well, if we take a look at these kind of four approaches, we'll go through these again. So approach number one is the the Bible teaches ancient cosmology and I'm going to believe what the Bible says approach.
00:24:24
Speaker
So this would say that the Bible teaches that God built a sky dome over the earth. That's what must be true. Those that take this approach want to stick to believing exactly what the Bible says. So they trust that the sky is actually a rigid structure with stars attached to it.
00:24:38
Speaker
Usually this idea is kind of attached to like a flat earth, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. It was what could be described as a snow globe cosmology. Flat on the land with people, creatures, plants, and then over the top of that land, arcing from all the edges up into the center in the middle, which is the highest, was this hard dome. So call it a snow globe.
00:24:59
Speaker
So who patrolled the edge of the flat earth before NASA? a but Wasn't it just icebergs? It didn't have to be patrolled because no one could get out there. That's right. Ocean all around.
00:25:22
Speaker
Approach number two, the kind of teaches modern cosmology approach. This would say that the Rekia is a reference to the atmosphere, which holds water vapor in the sky. This idea lends itself to the translation expanse, which shows up in some translations.
00:25:36
Speaker
But Genesis also tells that the stars were placed on or in the Rekia, in the vault. So sometimes they'll take the Rekia to also mean everything beyond the atmosphere, right? So Rekia there is just kind of a reference to the atmosphere and then everything beyond off into space. Yeah.
00:25:52
Speaker
The NET translates for Kia with expanse, and in their translation notes, they have, The Hebrew word refers to an expanse of air pressure between the surface of the sea and the clouds, separating water below from water above.
00:26:05
Speaker
They say in verse 8, it is called sky, an expanse. In the poetic texts, the writers envision, among other things, something rather strong and shiny, no doubt influencing the traditional translation firmament.
00:26:17
Speaker
Job 37, 18 refers to the sky as poured out like a molten mirror. Daniel 12, 3 and Ezekiel 1, 22 portrayed as shiny. The sky or atmosphere may have seemed like a glassy dome. And then they go on to reference some other places.
00:26:30
Speaker
That's interesting that they describe it in that way. Because in my reading of Genesis 1, it seems very much like it's describing the hard thing that's keeping back the waters above.
00:26:41
Speaker
it definitely is in Genesis
Ancient Cosmological Beliefs in Scripture
00:26:43
Speaker
1. Now, there are other places in scripture where the Rekia is described as something that is stretched out. Like the body of Tiamat and the Enuma Elish? Kind of, yes.
00:26:53
Speaker
So God creating the Rekia could mean he stretched out the sky rather than reference to the creation of a physical rigid dome. John Walton, who's done a lot of cultural context work, actually holds to a view similar to this for Genesis 1.
00:27:06
Speaker
He actually argues that the ancient Hebrews did believe in a rigid sky dome, which they call a shehakim that gets referenced elsewhere in scripture. But he would argue that the rekiah is a reference to just empty sky.
00:27:16
Speaker
Hmm.
00:27:27
Speaker
The third approach to these passages, the sort of theological-only approach, would point out that in Genesis 1, this is all part of a poetic literary pattern of creation and separation that teaches us about God's intended order within creation.
00:27:41
Speaker
So we shouldn't look for this description in Genesis 1 to have any exact correlation with anything in the world. Some people with this opinion point out that descriptions of solid sky domes were typical in mythical type descriptions of the creation of the universe.
00:27:54
Speaker
So sometimes the sky was formed out of the body of a god, sometimes a god who had been split in half and stretched out. So clearly we shouldn't take this as a meaning that the ancient people actually believed that they were describing something that existed physically.
00:28:07
Speaker
William Lane Craig. My boy. Says, I doubt that any ancient Israelite believed, for example, that if he traveled far enough north, he would eventually come to some gigantic pillar supporting the dome of the sky.
00:28:18
Speaker
ah think you'd be disappointed that they actually did. Now, ah the n NET text notes are interesting because for Rekia in verses six and seven, they argued there that Rekia was a reference to an atmosphere.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, their exact language was yeah air pressure. Yep. But in verse 14, where we're told that the lights are placed in the Rikia, their text note reads, The language describing the cosmos, which reflects a pre-scientific view of the world, must be interpreted as phenomenal, describing what appears to be the case.
00:28:49
Speaker
So they would argue that Rekia in verses 6 and 7 should be read as a reference to actually something that fits modern cosmology. But then in verse 14, you have to read it with phenomenal eyes because they're just describing something as they would have seen it.
00:29:03
Speaker
So why are they inconsistent there? i don't know. Are they trying to do apologetics or what are they trying to do I'm not going to try to argue why the NET is taking exactly the positions that they do, but it seems really strange to me to take two very different opinions on the same word in the same creation passage.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, this seems potentially motivated and not very objective, but who knows? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
00:29:38
Speaker
Okay, so this fourth approach, this using ancient cosmology to teach theology approach, would say that Genesis 1 is describing a sky dome. It's written by and two people who all assumed there was a sky dome.
00:29:49
Speaker
The intent of Genesis is to teach its audience that the sky dome was created and placed by God for his purposes. Paul Seeley, again, says the basic historical fact that defines the meaning of Rekia in Genesis 1 is simply this.
00:30:03
Speaker
All peoples in the ancient world thought of the sky as solid. Yep. There's no evidence to the contrary. so should we think that the biblical authors also believed in a sky dome?
00:30:14
Speaker
Yep. There's no evidence to the contrary. Seely summarizes his argument. When the original readers of Genesis 1 read the word Rekia, they thought of a solid sky. And so did virtually everyone else up to the time of the Renaissance.
00:30:27
Speaker
After the time of Christ, there were occasional dissenters. But by and large, Jews and Christians, Greeks and barbarians all believed the firmament was solid. And when you look at biblical translations, they attest to this idea.
00:30:40
Speaker
So the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, translates rikia with stereoma, literally the firm, solid thing. oh so they certainly understood rikia to mean that. Yes. Why can't we just take their lead on it?
00:30:52
Speaker
Literally, the Bible Paul was using in Greek was like, yeah, and by the way, the Hebrew Bible's rikia means hard, solid thing. Yeah. About 400 years after Christ, in the translation of the Vulgate. In Latin now. In Latin, they used firmamentum.
00:31:06
Speaker
That's where we get the English firmament then in the King James translation. Yeah. A thousand years later. And not just King James, other translations like the Geneva and Tyndale all used firmament for Rekia in Genesis 1.
00:31:19
Speaker
So that's what's interesting. It seems very clear to all of them, even in Reformation era and post-Reformation era Europe, that these Christian translators of the Bible, these aren't detractors, these aren't atheists, right? They seem to think that the Bible was definitely describing a hard thing that went over the earth.
00:31:40
Speaker
And they might have believed that still at the time. A lot of them did, I think. though this was obviously started to be debated now because this post-Galileo and the Copernican Revolution, there is still like Christian apologists that are arguing against this new science. We got to stick with the Bible. And this is one of the areas of controversy because usually...
00:32:03
Speaker
The firm, solid sky dome, snow globe type of cosmology coincided with a geocentrism. And then new science perspective of heliocentrism coincided with the belief that the Earth was spherical.
00:32:19
Speaker
That's not 100% neat, but that was the case that those two ideas were pretty much aligned. In fact, I have a good example of this. There's this Christian guy named John Edwards, not like the Jonathan Edwards, but this other guy, John Edwards, in the year 1696, I think when his book was published.
00:32:35
Speaker
He's railing against this new science perspective of heliocentrism. And in this passage, he's not specifically talking about the skydome. But again, remember that the skydome cosmology was typically associated with geocentrism.
00:32:49
Speaker
And here he's very much arguing for geocentrism as a matter of being faithful to the clear teachings of scripture. So speaking against the new science, he says, Now this relation either true or false. He goes rail against this that earth is orbiting sun by saying,
00:33:05
Speaker
for there we read that the sun stood still in joshua's time and went back and king hezekiahs now this relation is either true or false he goes on to rail against this notion that the earth is orbiting the sun by saying Again, I argue the motion of the earth can be felt or it cannot.
00:33:26
Speaker
If they hold it cannot, they are confuted by earthquakes. Now he's like getting into this apologetic for why the earth doesn't actually go around the sun. But this is all clearly motivated from this like desire to be faithful to the Christian scriptures that clearly teach solid sky dome, sun, moon, stars rotating around the earth, probably in this track.
00:33:50
Speaker
And this is in 1696. Like plenty of Christians at this time still thought this is a clear teaching of scripture and we need to hold to it, even against other Christians that would teach to the contrary.
00:34:03
Speaker
It's interesting that before the Copernican Revolution, you don't see a lot of Jewish or Christian interpreters going to these passages and saying, ah, well, the clear and important teachings of these passages is the cosmology it describes.
00:34:15
Speaker
Because that wasn't a point of argument. It wasn't something people were debating. it wasn't something people were worried about. It wasn't until new ideas popped up that suddenly Christians felt the need to use scripture for cosmological arguments.
00:34:29
Speaker
Not that we know the motives, but I do find it a little bit puzzling that like the net Bible that we usually love, that their note was so confusing and kind of confounding on this.
00:34:40
Speaker
And also a lot of other modern translations will say something like expanse. Mm-hmm. It's a bit puzzling to me. And I do kind of wonder, like, why are you doing that? We actually know the clear meaning of this.
00:34:52
Speaker
And without getting into motivations, it's like, are we just trying to, like, fudge with the meaning of the text so that it's compatible with our maybe assumption number two option? Or what are we doing there?
Challenges of Modern Interpretations
00:35:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think if we don't separate the assumptions of the biblical authors from their intent, there is a strong motivation to interpret scripture as if it teaches modern cosmology.
00:35:15
Speaker
Like, we know it's trustworthy because it's so scientifically accurate. It contains scientific understandings that were millennia ahead of its time. But we have to be very careful that we don't start allowing modern science to influence how we read the scripture.
00:35:29
Speaker
If we sit down with a modern textbook and Genesis and start trying to line things up, we can end up with an interpretation that's actually dependent on the state of modern science.
00:35:39
Speaker
Oh, man. That should be a clear problem, because it means that if our interpretation of Scripture is correct, then anyone from any other time or culture who took the same approach as us, where they got out their Bible and their version of a modern textbook, they would have ended up with a different interpretation.
00:35:57
Speaker
That's damning. That is absolutely unacceptable from my perspective. If the scriptures are ever going to teach us anything, they can't be dependent upon my assumptions about the nature of reality that are read into the text.
00:36:12
Speaker
That's eisegesis. Yeah, if I end up with an interpretation of scripture that demands that everybody else up until my modern time period had to have been wrong, that should make me really uncomfortable with that approach that I'm taking to scripture.
00:36:27
Speaker
Absolutely. Now, maybe some would argue that scripture really does contain an accurate, modern, scientific understanding of the cosmos, but that this correct interpretation was lost through much of history and now has been regained.
00:36:42
Speaker
This view sees scripture given by an omnipotent God describing scientifically accurate cosmology far ahead of its time, like the existence of an atmosphere, a globe earth, the Big Bang.
00:36:55
Speaker
The problem is that looking at history, we just don't have any evidence of that. Ancient Israel didn't have an advanced understanding of the universe. Humanity's big advances in cosmological sciences didn't come through study of the Hebrew scriptures.
00:37:10
Speaker
They came from elsewhere. I don't think that should bother us as people who hold the scripture in high regard. It just means that we need to recognize that what scripture was intended to teach was not the same thing that those cosmological sciences are seeking to understand.
00:37:26
Speaker
i think the idea that the cosmology described in scripture has to be correct for the teaching of scripture to be true is very prevalent today. Answers in Genesis is an organization well known for their stance on literal interpretation of the creation account.
00:37:42
Speaker
In addressing the ideas of ancient cosmology in scripture, they write, Critics of the Bible have said that the writings of Genesis reflect an unscientific view of the universe, one that reflected the cosmology of the ancient world.
00:37:55
Speaker
One of these criticisms centers on the Hebrew word rachiyah used in the creation account of Genesis 1. They continue, the argument from these Bible critics is that the ancient Hebrews believed in a solid dome with the stars embedded in the dome.
00:38:08
Speaker
They say that the word firmament reflects the idea of firmness, and this reflects erroneous cosmology. Therefore, the Bible is not the inspired word of God, and we don't need to listen to its teaching.
00:38:19
Speaker
I don't know about that. Therefore, they are everything they said preceding that, other than also the Bible critics part, was accurate. I think it's just true. Yeah, but they take an all or nothing approach, right? They don't distinguish between assumption and intention, so they're left having to take everything as a yes or everything as a no. So you'd expect them to be in the number one category, which is take this entire text as teaching the true nature of reality directly from God's mouth, and we got to ride with it.
00:38:52
Speaker
We got to go hard dome. We got to go geocentrism. We got to go with it. Interestingly enough, Answers in Genesis won't do that. No. They'll be very inconsistent on this. They're actually not faithful number one-ers here.
00:39:04
Speaker
No, for sure not. It's kind of interesting. That's what they're known for. They're faithful approach number one-ers in that argument about the age of the earth and about human evolution. But on Rekia, they very much take other approaches.
00:39:16
Speaker
I would argue they just change the plain meaning of the text to kind of fit their assumptions on those other passages, which to me is a no-go. I'm not going to do that. looking at their approach to explaining Rekia, they basically find a way that the word could have meant something that doesn't conflict with our understandings of the atmosphere.
00:39:36
Speaker
They write, "...the context of Genesis 1 makes it clear that Moses intended his readers to understand Rekia simply as the sky, the atmosphere, and heavens or space above the earth." As even the sun, moon, and stars were placed in them.
00:39:50
Speaker
In fact, in modern Hebrew, rekiah is the word used for sky. And there is no connotation for hardness. Of course, there's no connotation of hardness now because we're post-Copernican revolution. Yeah.
00:40:02
Speaker
It's funny. They appeal here to modern understandings of sky. with modern understandings of the location of the sun, the moon, and the stars, and the meaning in modern Hebrew, which is very strange.
00:40:14
Speaker
Just from a methodology perspective, this kind of argument should throw up a lot of red flags. It is for me. My biggest concern in this debate is not about the modern apologetics questions that Christians are facing.
00:40:27
Speaker
My much bigger concern is in faithful reading of the Bible.
Adopting Ancient Worldviews for Understanding Scripture
00:40:32
Speaker
I think that if we really want to understand well what the biblical authors are teaching, we have to be willing to find out what questions they're trying to answer.
00:40:42
Speaker
What is their intent? We need to learn to divide their assumptions that they're using for communicating and what their intent of that teaching is. Yeah. I think being able to do that well means being able and willing to dive into an ancient understanding of the world.
00:41:00
Speaker
I actually think that's a really helpful and beneficial way to improve our Bible reading is to learn to kind of see the world through the eyes of an ancient person. Right. And we said this in our first series that we did on this podcast.
00:41:12
Speaker
It's not like everyone can do that with their free time, but we would hope that everyone is listening to Bible teachers and theologians that have done that legwork. And if you're not, maybe you should.
00:41:24
Speaker
Yeah. And it's important because cosmological language, the sky, the land, the sea, the stars, the sun, the moon shows up all over scripture. Yeah. The biblical authors frequently use that kind of language, and they use their understanding of the cosmos to demonstrate what they're trying to teach is true about God.
00:41:43
Speaker
One place where I think this is interesting is in the Lord's Prayer. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. May your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth, on the land, as it is in heaven, in the sky.
00:41:58
Speaker
is God's will done in the sky? Well, yeah, apparently. it was thought that since the sun, moon, and stars followed their routine courses for times and seasons and years and months as described in Genesis 1, that you could extrapolate from that that they are all ordered and following God's design.
00:42:20
Speaker
In the same way, the Lord's Prayer is asking, ah may that order be achieved on earth just as it is up there in the sky. In fact, the word planet in Greek means the wandering ones, like those wayward ones that don't follow this set times and seasons and days and years.
00:42:39
Speaker
They aren't following the tracks as the rest of them do. So they're going wayward. But even that indicates that these ancient Hebrews were thinking about everything up there in the sky being very ordered.
00:42:52
Speaker
And God, would you please do that here on the land as well? I think it's kind of a beautiful way to look at the world, but it does, I think, reflect an ancient cosmology. Now I want to go watch the night sky night after night and say the Lord's Prayer while I watch thousands of stars move in perfect unity across the night sky. Besides those darn planets that break the rules. Besides the wandering ones that go back and forth cause all kinds of problems.
00:43:15
Speaker
The erroring ones. Your point about sky or heavens here is an interesting one because it's kind of unfortunate that we have two separate words in English, sky and heaven.
00:43:26
Speaker
And for the most part, we use those really differently. Yeah. Oh, I apologize. Everything I just said, I was using them interchangeably because, well, I just happen to know that they can be and they should be used interchangeably.
00:43:38
Speaker
That might not be obvious to everyone listening to this. Yeah. In both Hebrew and in Greek, there's one word in each of those languages that gets used for both heaven and sky Yeah, that which is above you.
00:43:49
Speaker
Yeah. So when you see heaven or sky in your Bible translation, we shouldn't be seeing any distinction there. Heaven is what you see when you look up, just as sky is in some way representative of God's space.
00:44:01
Speaker
And the reverse is what we're usually accustomed to. Sky is what you see when you look up, just as heaven is representing God's space. But what you're saying in Greek and Hebrew is it's just one word.
00:44:12
Speaker
Yeah. God's space is up there. The sky is up there and that's where God's will is done. Yeah, the the heaven or sky in scripture is where the birds fly. It's where that Rekia vault exists.
00:44:24
Speaker
When rain falls, it falls from the heaven or sky. The sun and moon and stars are in the heaven sky. We haven't even mentioned that the stars are sometimes thought to be like divine beings up there in the sky, the realm of God, the divine council, perhaps. Yes. When we hear that today, I think we want to make a clear distinction. Like, wait, were they thinking of objects of light or were they thinking of some kind of divine being?
00:44:48
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Yeah. They just wouldn't have had any reason to start making those distinctions the way we want to today.
Cosmos and Theology in Ancient Understanding
00:44:55
Speaker
In my conversation with Dr. J. Richard Middleton, he makes that comment where he says the ancient people, the ancient Hebrews, didn't think of stars as fiery balls of energy. Like they didn't understand there to be nuclear fission and nuclear fusion going on. They didn't understand any of that at all. They thought of them very oftentimes as luminaries, sometimes as like God type figures, spiritual beings up there.
00:45:22
Speaker
and Very foreign to how we think of that. It's a very broad term, the sky or heaven. Traditions begin to think of the sky or heaven in various layers, sometimes composed of three, five, even seven layers of the sky or heavens. Paul reflects this. Doesn't he say, I was caught up into the third heaven? Yeah, he describes a journey into the third heaven where he says paradise was visible.
00:45:45
Speaker
Typically, in these systems, the highest of these layers, whatever was out past that Rekia vault, was considered God's dwelling place. Ah, so Yahweh was thought to be above Rekia, like totally over that.
00:45:58
Speaker
Yeah. That makes sense, right? God is above all, right? Yeah. Above all the other gods. There's actually a passage in Ezekiel 1 where the prophet sees these crazy looking winged creatures that fly up to like the ceiling of the Rekia. And from above that Rekia vault where there's a throne, he hears the voice of God.
00:46:17
Speaker
Right. That's right. Oh, yes. So God sits enthroned on... The Rikia. I've heard that language before. I think there's a verse that says that. Yeah. In 3 Maccabees 2.15, of course your dwelling place is the highest heaven beyond the reach of human beings. Hmm.
00:46:36
Speaker
Man, I kind of want to go to number one and believe this. like I wish I could get my brain to disbelieve the modern scientists that tell us there's not a hard dome up there.
00:46:47
Speaker
Darn it, because this is a beautiful worldview. It is one I think you have to kind of find yourself in to be able to understand and read scripture really well. The way they were doing theology was from within this cosmological understanding.
00:47:04
Speaker
Definitely. So you at least have to
00:47:14
Speaker
Absolutely. I think it would only help to do that anyway. It certainly can't hurt. Right. Right.
00:47:23
Speaker
Amen.
00:47:37
Speaker
Now, just like the heaven or the sky are concepts that we kind of have trouble keeping together, we have the same problem when the Bible talks about the land or the earth. So in the Bible, the land or earth is, again, it's one word that can refer to the land, the ground, the soil, even a district going ashore or the countryside.
00:47:58
Speaker
It certainly doesn't ever mean what we tend to think of when we think of a planet or a globe or a capital E Earth. Right. Ancient maps of the world tended to be pretty local.
00:48:10
Speaker
i mean, think about it. What extent of land would an ancient person or even an ancient peoples be familiar with? It wouldn't be a ton. They would understand a section of land surrounded by waters or wastelands on every side.
00:48:22
Speaker
The English word Earth still does that. i can say the Earth or the ground around my home. I can say the Earth as opposed to the lake or the Earth as opposed to the sky and think in very geographically local terms.
00:48:38
Speaker
However, like because my cosmology is such that I happen to know the Earth is spherical, very often i also will use that word to refer to the spherical Earth that's orbiting the sun.
00:48:51
Speaker
and The Hebrew word Haaretz is the same thing. In fact, that is actually very often still used to refer to very localized regions, specifically the land of modern Israel-Palestine.
00:49:03
Speaker
In fact, there's a very popular newspaper in the state of Israel called Haaretz, and it's the land, as in the land of Israel. Not a reference to like the daily planet where Superman works. Correct. That is, they're not saying the globe.
00:49:17
Speaker
I will say that Aretz can then be used to refer to the whole earth, which we now know is a globe. But that's a modern usage. Exactly. Again, post-Copernican revolution.
00:49:30
Speaker
It's interesting, these terms for earth or land tend to exclude the waters. So if you go out into a boat in the New Testament, that means you're leaving the land. Now to say that somebody got in a boat and left the earth, I think would sound strange in English.
00:49:44
Speaker
So in these contexts, it usually gets translated sure Oh. In Luke 5, 3, Jesus got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore.
00:49:55
Speaker
That word there for shore is the same word that gets used for earth everywhere else. Jesus leaves the earth. The first astronaut. Exactly, yeah. So your point is, when we're reading the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, we will be quite possibly closer to their cosmological conceptions.
00:50:11
Speaker
If we use the English word land more often instead of earth, because earth has our spherical yeah implications, land is much more akin to what they are really referring to. They're distinguishing it from yeah from the waters or from the sky. Yeah. I think sky and land do a much better job of forcing us into that ancient worldview.
00:50:33
Speaker
So, as an example of that, and anyone can do this right now if you want, read Genesis 1.1. In the beginning, God created the what? You have a choice to make here. i can verify this.
00:50:45
Speaker
The better English words to translate those Hebrew words would be sky and land. It's not to say heaven and earth is a bad translation.
00:50:55
Speaker
But it has very modern scientific and religious implications that the ancient Hebrew writer would not have had. and What it's communicating is in the beginning, God created the sky and the land.
00:51:09
Speaker
When I'm reading those texts, I actually consistently will do that because I find it very helpful to get within their frame of mind. Yeah, I think that's a really important practice. I would hope more modern translations incorporate that.
00:51:21
Speaker
In English, they're always so wary to like depart from the King James tradition. It's really strange to me. Now, speaking of Genesis 1, I have a trivia question here for you, Nick. On what day does God create water?
00:51:32
Speaker
um Well, before day one, the deep exists. Yeah. Before even the six days of creation are described, the spirit of God hovers over the waters. Now, God creates the land by separating it from the waters.
00:51:45
Speaker
And? Creates the rakia to separate the waters below from the waters above. So the concept is when God starts creating, it's all water. Mm-hmm.
Symbolism of Chaos and Order in the Bible
00:51:54
Speaker
Then he separates those waters so that you have this hard dome keeping waters back above, which creates this sort of airspace.
00:52:03
Speaker
And then he pulls out land from the waters underneath. Yeah. But nowhere in those six days does God ever create water. Oh, darn. Now, it's interesting because later scripture recognizes that certainly God did create the waters, right? They didn't have their source somewhere else.
00:52:19
Speaker
Revelation 14 actually gives a more thorough list of the parts of the cosmos where it says, worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea, and the springs of water.
00:52:31
Speaker
So when this passage gives a full list of all the elements of the cosmos, it lists the sky, the land, saltwater, and freshwater. So my question is why doesn't Genesis describe the creation of the waters?
00:52:45
Speaker
Scholars, Hebrew scholars have observed this for a long time, that Genesis 1-1 isn't giving an ex nihilo account of all physical things that exist. It kind of starts with water, at least.
00:52:58
Speaker
In fact, not to get nerdy on this, we could talk about this a whole episode, but there are plenty of Hebrew scholars that will argue that the best translation of Genesis 1 is in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth looked like this.
00:53:11
Speaker
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was this way and then God formed it. It's very interesting. That translation does find its way into some modern English translations like the NRSV does that because it's a really strong grammatical case to be made that that's how we should be reading it But that's just making the point we already made that, descriptively, the waters are already there.
00:53:32
Speaker
Yeah, and that idea that the waters just were there at the beginning of creation was pretty common in the ancient world. It was typical in antiquity that bodies of water represented that sort of primordial, unordered chaos.
00:53:44
Speaker
They hadn't been formed in anything useful yet, and so water kind of remains representative of this chaotic, uncreated space. Some ancient creation myths depict the gods' origins as coming from the sea The Hebrew Bible is unique in that it depicts the creator God as pre-existent and separate from the waters. right And he has power over those waters.
00:54:06
Speaker
He can separate them as he desires. He fills them as part of his creative work. But the biblical authors were kind of happy to keep that assumption shared across the ancient world that the seas represented this unordered, uncreated space.
00:54:20
Speaker
Right. At least the Hebrew authors. Obviously, later in the New Testament, you have several passages that are like, oh, God obviously created everything. Yeah. But it is interesting in Revelation, where John describes the non-existence of the seas, this would have been understood as a way of communicating the completion of God's creating work.
00:54:39
Speaker
So in Revelation 21.1, we read what can be really surprising for some people. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and there was no longer any sea.
00:54:51
Speaker
I.e., no more chaos, only ordered creation again. Exactly. Just like God was attempting to do and Genesis 1 before humans buggered it up. Exactly. Yeah.
00:55:04
Speaker
That's really cool. But I think to appreciate that, you really have to be willing to sit in kind of an ancient worldview. You have to be able to look out at the cosmos, look up at the sky, look down at the land, look out at the sea, up at the stars and the sun and the moon.
00:55:19
Speaker
And you have to be willing to see those the way an ancient person would have seen them because that lets us better understand the scriptures. I don't find ancient cosmology all that interesting on its own.
00:55:30
Speaker
i mean, some parts of it are, but I wouldn't go study ancient cosmology just for the fun of it. Because you're not convinced by it as an argument of the description of the cosmos. like Yes, I don't believe there's a rigid sky dome. Right, you're not tempted to go number one here and be like, I'm rolling with it.
00:55:46
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and trust Copernicus and that the Earth is orbiting the sun. I mean, through some weird spiral pattern, if you try to like plot it out. The expansion of the universe.
00:55:57
Speaker
I trust modern cosmological science. Limited, yes, but I trust what they've taught. But I want to be able to sit in that ancient world so that I can see the Bible and see scripture through ancient eyes because I care so much about what they intended to teach.
00:56:13
Speaker
And understanding that ancient worldview is helpful for understanding what they were trying to teach. And that gets me excited. Absolutely. So Nick, if you were a Sunday school teacher and you got to decorate your classroom, would you put a poster of a flat earth with a sky dome up on the wall?
00:56:29
Speaker
Seems like a great idea, honestly. Not because I believe in one, but because the ancient Hebrew authors probably did. so And they did theology from within that cosmological understanding.
00:56:42
Speaker
yeah And therefore, it's a worthwhile journey to take a class into that context, do our theology before we zoom back out and get back into our scientific understandings. Yeah.
00:56:55
Speaker
And that's not to say none of that theology will translate to our time. But again, if the Bible is inspired, if it's God's gift to humans to give us wisdom, we got to try to understand it on its own terms, even if it makes assumptions about the nature of reality that I don't actually believe and I'm not like compelled to believe.
00:57:15
Speaker
So you start there, get its theology, and then you move to the modern world and try to apply that theology. Yeah. I think we put ourselves in a much better position to understand scripture well when we leave aside the scientific debates and simply ask of scripture, what is it trying to teach?
00:57:34
Speaker
I would argue that this approach actually takes a much higher view of scripture because it seeks for scripture to guide both the questions and the answers, rather than starting with the modern questions that our culture might have and looking to scripture for just the answers.
00:57:50
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of Bible reading can go wrong when we view the Bible as providing answers to all my questions. We fall into this simplistic sort of proof texting.
00:58:01
Speaker
Hey, I have this idea. Let me see what the Bible says about it. Of all the bazillions of ideas there are in the world, the chances that the Bible addresses mine specifically is virtually zero.
00:58:13
Speaker
So the only way to read the Bible respectfully is to let it dictate its own questions that it is trying to provide answers for, like you just said.
00:59:13
Speaker
you