Theological Daze

So for all those who have a problem with trying to make sense of what the Bible says, how are we to approach it. A literal understanding of the text won't do, because that leaves most of us in denial about some of it, and those who tend to a very conservative approach or are fundamentalists invent wordy arguments about how this doesn't apply any more, so letting themselves off the hook. There are a number of ways of resolving this problem and which give the Biblical text full respect. I am not going to rank them in order of importance or significance: the ordering is merely because I have to start somewhere. Perhaps we should start with my first post which indicated a different way of understanding the first chapters of Genesis. If we understand this as a piece of theological writing rather than an attempt at writing history, we get ourselves out of the endless controversy which surrounds these passages. This approach bears fruit with many other passages too, some of which...

Another issue I had with my own reading of the Bible was the issue of consistency. I began to think about many of the texts with which I and many of my friends had difficulty. These ranged from proscriptions against same gender sex to clothing taboos, and from prohibited food to assorted barbaric punishments, to name a few. There were also the texts about slaughtering enemies which seemed to be the direct command of God - a problem I will look at later. The thing was (and still is) that I knew of virtually no-one who accepted the entire stock of Scripture at face value. Whilst many acknowledged the various taboos and restrictions, nobody observed them in their entirety. Everyone drew and still draws a line somewhere. Speak to the most hard line fundamentalist Christian you know, and ask them about restrictions concerning the wearing of mixed fibres in one garment of clothing for instance, and they will give you some spin about these rules having been set aside by the New Testament tea...

After many years of defending the use of the word "day" in Genesis Chapter One, I finally saw it all very differently. You know how it goes. Sceptics say that we know that the universe was not created in a matter of days, nor was planet earth. Indeed we do know this. Science has, in my opinion, securely established some basic knowledge about the development of our universe and of planet earth. Arguing that the word "day" in Genesis One could be a metaphor for millions of years seemed increasingly to me to give the ground of the argument to the sceptics. It felt like I was on the run in my defence of the Bible. Then one day I was reading Chapter one with a view to talking about it, and I noticed in a way that I hadn't before, the repetition of the word "good". I mean, I had noticed it but had kind of taken it for granted. It was like background noise to the text. So I started to think about it. I figured that at the supposed time of writing there wer...