Flooding in front of our eyes: Are we ignoring God in favor of the Bible?

If any of you have been reading this blog for some time you've probably noticed a trend in some of the posts: a struggle with how to interpret the Bible. I see some issues with a literal translation, and yet- what is the alternative? As one of my youth pastors once said: "in picking and choosing what to believe from the Bible you, in effect, become your own god."

But can that be all there is to life? Believe a literal translation of the Bible, blindly, and, through little effort of your own (unless you were unlucky enough to have been born into a non-Christian family and/or country, which would mean you would have expended lots of effort overcoming your cultural background) you reach Heaven? As a non-believe once asked me, "Why would God be so enamored with a bunch of automotons- bent on believing whatever their parents and/or society told them to- without so much as a critical thought?"

It reminds me of a story that I've posted once or twice already, but I think it is worth repeating:

A farmer is in Iowa during a flood. The river is overflowing, with water surrounding the farmer's home up to his front porch. As he is standing there, a boat comes up, The man in the boat says "Jump in, I'll take you to safety."
The farmer crosses his arms and says stubbornly, "Nope, I put my trust in God."
The boat goes away. The water rises to the second floor. Another boat comes up, the man says to the farmer who is now in the second story window, "Jump in, I'll save you."
The farmer again says, "Nope, I put my trust in God."
The boat goes away. Now the water is up to the roof. As The farmer stands on the roof, a helicopter comes over, and drops a ladder. The pilot yells down to the farmer "I'll save you, climb the ladder."
The farmer says "Nope, I put my trust in God."
The helicopter goes away. The water comtinues to rise and sweeps the farmer off the roof. He drowns.
The farmer goes to heaven. God sees him and says "What are you doing here?"
The farmer says "I put my trust in you and you let me down."
God says, "What do you mean, let you down? I sent you two boats and a helicopter!!!"

Now, we all laugh at this joke today and if you're like me you wonder at someone who would believe in something that he can't explain (God) and yet not believe in something he can. It reminds me of those people who deny medical treatment to their kids in favor of prayer. I want to yell out: "maybe God already answered your prayer and sent you a doctor!"

Likewise, I sometimes get the feeling that something similar may be in store in the Afterlife for me if I have lived by a literal interpretation of the Bible alone and ignored everything else as "man's folly". I can imagine God saying, "I created you in my own image (knowledge of self?), gave you reason, gave you the scientific method, gave you the potential for critical thought, etc.- and you chose to waste those gifts? How could you be so confident in something that you devoted no critical thought to? How can you be so pompous as to think you have Me figured out from only one of the tools I provided?"

To me "faith" is a more complex topic than we give it credit for. Believers seem to want to wrap it up in a nice little box and either you have it or you don't. Blind faith, some will say, is what God wants. Doubt, examination, and alternative possibilities are the Devil's tools and man's undoing and overconfidence. And yet I can't get why God would reward an uncritical approach to His universe. Why give us all the tools He has given us if He didn't expect us to use them- not to come to a total understanding- but to grow closer in understanding?

Maybe faith isn't just a blind faith in what our parents and society tells us, but instead faith entails believing that not everything is as simple as it appears. Maybe faith means trusting our senses and not ignoring them when they seem (from our vantage point) to contradict church doctrine. Maybe faith involves assuming that we don't live in a "matrix"-type existence and that what we see, measure, feel, etc.- is reality. To believe that all scientists are part of some worldwide conspiracy headed by the devil seems to me to run counter to that definition of faith.

Surely the knowledge of physics passed on through the generations for the past few hundred years has done wonders for the collective knowledge of the human race. If anything, I would propose it has deepened the mystery as to how God functions and how the universe came into being. I'm not saying ignore all verses in the Bible as false and start believing everything that comes out of scientific journals. But, I'm not sure we should discount them all either- the reality of God may exist in some mysterious mixture of both the Bible AND science- and wouldn't we hate to have been working at cross-purposes because we think our grasp of the Bible gives us all the answers? Can we be so confident?

FEB “Thought of the month”:

The Bible was written in Hebrew- a language with some 1300 words (at the time), that, when translated into other languages- like the 4 million-word English language of today- loses much of its original meaning. To take it literally is to not only ignore the problems associated with translation, but to also miss God’s intent: which was only to provide us with a spiritual guide explaining our relationship with Him. To use it as a scientific textbook or even historical work is taking it out of context. God gave us our own faculties in order to figure out the mechanics of the Universe, how the Earth got here, how we got here, and even what happened back in 2,000 B.C. You might even apply that to some of the stories of Jesus- was it really THAT important to believe that He walked on water- or more important to get the meaning of the story? Jesus talked in parables all the time, why couldn’t the disciples and apostles and other writers of the Gospels have done the same?

Questions for further thought:

- Assuming God is omnipotent (all-powerful), is it possible that He created the world both as current science theorizes it to have happened (over billions of years), AND in a way that would match what is described in scripture (original Hebrew with all its possible meanings)? If God can exist in a Trinity that is so mysterious and confusing as to seem paradoxical to humans, why couldn’t the Creation story be much more complex than the way it SEEMS to be described in Genesis?

- How literal should we take parts of the Bible- since the Hebrew of the time supposedly had only a few thousand words compared to our millions in modern English? Are principles that Jesus taught the more important parts, or does it take away from anything if we don't accept it all as precise facts?- What of the concept that the Bible was inspired by God to be an explanation of His relationship with us- and not as a Historical or Scientific Textbook? If possible- then it would follow that to use it in any manner other than as an explanation of our relationship with Him would be problematic- sort of like using a cookbook to understand lava flows. Or is it a "be-all, end-all" answer to everything and science is attempting the impossible and will always or usually be wrong?

- Do Christians "limit" God by trying to "box" Him into what it says in a literal interpretation of the Bible? Would it be more realistic to assume we cannot know the details of how He operates- to include the universe and the Earth- at least through only the Bible? Would it not make more sense to postulate that He provided the Bible as a spiritual guide, but gave us the tools to discover the answers to the rest of His creation on our own (or at least PART of the answers)? Or, at the least, should Christians couch everything we say in terms that recognize we might not understand God as much as we sound like we do? Or, alternatively, is the Bible all we need and everything else an illusion of our own pride? Can we not even trust our own senses and reason?