Tag: Young Earth Creationism

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Reading Genesis 1 Literally

Genesis 1 in a 1620 edition of the King James Bible. Reading Genesis 1 today is much more contentious than it was in 1620!
Genesis 1 in a 1620 edition of the King James Bible. Reading Genesis 1 today is much more contentious than it was in 1620!
Genesis 1 from a 1620 edition of the King James Bible

I recently received feedback to my post on my crisis of faith from a good friend. This post wasn’t really about reading Genesis 1. But it did address that obliquely. My faith crisis was brought on by a realization that some of the evidence that I had received for young earth creationism as a child was bogus. My friend points out that he had nearly the opposite experience. He was taught as a child that “the creation story was not literal and had to be ‘interpreted.'” Later, he adopted belief in young earth creationism.

In this post, I’d like to focus on this very wide-spread notion among Christians of a more progressive or mainstream bent that reading Genesis 1 literally is not appropriate. Many of them would say that it has to be interpreted symbolically. Sometimes well-meaning believers attempt to make their faith look respectable. Thus, they try to make Genesis 1 square with modern evolutionary science. Even if they don’t take this approach, it is very common for Bible interpreters to reduce the entire text down to pure symbol. They completely abandon any shred of a literal, primary sense.

Reading Genesis 1 Literally, not Scientifically or Symbolically

I think that both of these approaches are a mistake. Personally, I have no problems at all with evolution. But you just can’t find anything evocative of modern scientific theory in the biblical text. (That goes for the pseudo-science of young earth creationism, too, however). But that doesn’t mean that reading Genesis 1 isn’t legitimate. So, in this post, I am going to argue that Genesis 1 is an inspired text with authentic, divine revelation. I am also going to argue that as such, it has a literal sense to which biblical interpreters have to give proper attention. They must do this before proceeding forward to any spiritual senses the text might have. In so doing, it will become evident that this literal sense has nothing to do with any of the distracting concerns of the evolution/intelligent design debate.

The Literal Sense

To begin with, we have to define what we really mean by “reading Genesis 1 literally.” Then we have to distinguish it from strictly literalistic interpretations of the Scriptures. Although they sound very similar, these are not the same thing. By “literal sense,” I am mostly referring to the “Author’s Intended Meaning.” I’ve already discussed this a bit elsewhere.

The truth is, even texts whose authors never intended for them to be read in a woodenly literal manner have a literal sense. Just consider this example from Song of Songs 2:

1I am a rose of Sharon,
a lily of the valleys.

2 As a lily among brambles,
    so is my love among maidens.

3 As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,
    so is my beloved among young men.
With great delight I sat in his shadow,
    and his fruit was sweet to my taste

Now, obviously the author of these lines did not intend for us to actually believe that this is all about a botanical love affair between a rose and an apple tree! This text has a rather clear literal sense. Simply put, it is erotic poetry. It uses abundant metaphors to convey its celebration of romantic love. But those symbols convey the author’s intended meaning. Of course, both Jewish and Christian interpreters have reveled in deeper, spiritual interpretations hidden in these words. But those spiritual interpretations depend upon the literal, erotic sense.

How Should We Go about Reading Genesis 1?

Returning to reading Genesis 1, the first thing that we have to acknowledge is that the author’s intended meaning cannot possibly have anything to do with the modern scientific method. This is because he just wasn’t familiar with it. So, there can’t be any kind of evolutionary process described in symbolic terms there. On the other hand, the author isn’t using his own, particular scientific terminology in ancient Hebrew, either. (Baraminology is a particularly egregious attempt to say this sort of thing). No, whatever the author’s intended meaning is, it has nothing to do with science as we conceive of it today.

If the author of Genesis 1 is not intending to say something scientific, what is he trying to say? How would we ever determine that? How should we go about reading Genesis 1?

Clues from Enuma Elish

Our first clue is the fact that Genesis 1 evokes another creation story in unmistakable ways. This story is from ancient Babylon. It is known by its opening line, Enuma Elish, “When on High.”

Now, before I proceed any further, I need to dispense with two widespread misconceptions about Enuma Elish. The first is the very popular idea among skeptics that Genesis 1 is simply a cheap “knock-off” of the Babylonian story. Ever since George Smith widely disseminated a version of Enuma Elish in the nineteenth century under the title Babylonian Genesis this idea has enjoyed popular appeal. But anyone who has carefully read both of the texts will tell you that the differences between them are far more striking than their similarities. No, the author of Genesis 1 is aware of Enuma Elish, and intentionally uses some of the vocabulary and even the cosmology of the text, but all with a mind to subvert its ideology. The result is a piece of literature that transcends its source material in breathtaking ways.

Dispelling Weird, Fundamentalist Ideas about Enuma Elish and Reading Genesis 1

Fundamentalists have also perpetuated some weird ideas about Enuma Elish. I don’t hear this as much as I used to, but some Bible teachers have said that the Babylonian author of Enuma Elish actually had been reading Genesis 1, or maybe was familiar with the traditions that lay behind Genesis 1. I think that it will become apparent why that cannot be the case as I proceed. But let me say here that it is extremely unlikely that anyone in Mesopotamia would want to bother with the religious traditions of the Hebrews.

First of all, there is a serious language divide. Although Hebrew and Akkadian are both Semitic languages, it’s not as though someone from Babylon could pick up a Hebrew text and read it without much difficulty. The differences are substantial. But apart from that, from the perspective of the empires of Assyria and Babylon, Israel was merely a backwater people who posed the annoying problem of occupying some of the most strategic territory in the Levant. There is simply no evidence that anyone from Mesopotamia exhibited any curiosity about the traditions of Israel until the Christian era. If they copied Genesis 1, this would be a remarkably singular incident in ancient history.

All of the evidence points to the influence going in the other direction. Enuma Elish was probably written long before Genesis 1. The author of Genesis 1 seems to have been well-acquainted with it.

Enuma Elish

Utter Chaos

Let me offer a brief summary of Enuma Elish. It begins with utter chaos. Nothing existed in the beginning, not even the gods. Somehow, from the midst of this nothingness the two primeval waters emerged. Abzu, the fresh waters, mingled his waters with Tiamat, the sea. Their union engendered the first gods. These gods had their own children, and so on. Eventually the cosmos was chock-full of rowdy, juvenile deities carrying on and having raucous parties.

The Demise of Abzu

Abzu got irate. He couldn’t get any sleep because his progeny were too noisy. So he and his vizier Mummu conspired to kill all of the gods. Tiamat tried to talk them out of it, but they were too committed to their plan.

Unfortunately for Abzu, one of the gods, named Ea, learned of his plot. He created a counter-plot. With his magic, he slew Abzu. Then he poured him into the well of the earth. He used Mummu as a cork to keep him imprisoned there.

Marduk

Tiamat grieved over Abzu, but soon settled into a new life. That was, until Marduk came along. Marduk, the grandson of Ea, was a precocious young god. Ea doted on him, and gifted him with his very own bag of winds. Marduk loved to take it to the beach and let the winds toss dirt into Tiamat’s waters and whip them into frothy whitecaps. Eventually, she too became irate, and decided to create an army to destroy the gods.

Tiamat Strikes Back

First, she married another monster like herself, a consort named Kingu. And then she proceeded to create one brood of warriors after another. There were scorpion-men and fish-headed men and bull-headed men and mushmahhu dragons. (With venom for blood! Shudder!).

Marduk with a cute, little mushmahhu dragon.
Marduk, with a cute, little mushmahhu dragon.

The Beer Party Counsel of the Gods

Once again, Ea and the gods found out about Tiamat’s plan. But this time, they were genuinely scared. They convened a council. (The description sounds a lot more like a beer party, to be honest). And then they selected Marduk as their champion to march out against Tiamat. Marduk happily volunteered on the condition that the gods would bequeath upon him the power of divine fiat. They did so, and then he tried it out by speaking a star into existence, and then speaking it out of existence. Then he rode forth in his chariot to meet Tiamat.

The Battle Between Tiamat and Marduk

The battle was a bit anticlimactic, actually. With all of her monster-troop behind her, and with Kingu at her side, Tiamat swooped upon Marduk with her maw gaping wide. He released his winds into her jaws, and then, when they had blown her up like a balloon, he shot her with his arrows. Her army immediately surrendered. (He subsequently pressed them into his own service).

Marduk Creates the World

It is at this point that Enuma Elish begins to sound especially familiar to those of us who have read Genesis 1 carefully. Marduk, after slaying his ancestress, considered and decided to construct a cosmos from her corpse. He began by cutting her in half. The top half he took and made the waters that appear above the earth, the sky. The bottom half he poured into the basins of the earth, and they became the sea. And then he proceeded to mold the land that peeked above the waters into the great land masses.

When he had completed his work of creating the earth, he conceived another project. He imagined a life of luxury, with slaves to build things for him whenever he wanted, and to bring him good things to eat. The thing to do was to craft such slaves. And so he took Kingu, Tiamat’s consort, and slit his throat. As his black blood poured out of the gaping wound, he collected it into a bowl. Then, he shaped the blood into lumpy, black-headed people. And that, according to Enuma Elish, is the origin of human beings.

Marduk Enthroned

Enuma Elish concludes with a hymn. The black-head people built Bab-ilani, the “gate of the gods,” and began to worship the deities there. (You have heard of Bab-ilani. You call it “Babylon”). And then they chant the fifty names of Marduk in his temple. This is the real theme of Enuma Elish. It’s all about how Marduk emerged as the great god of Babylon.

Parallels and Differences Between Enuma Elish and Genesis 1

Parallels

There are a huge number of parallels between Enuma Elish and Genesis 1. Let’s list a few of them.

  • Both stories begin with chaos, and conclude with an established order.
  • “Tiamat” is from the same Semitic root as the Hebrew word for “deep,” tehom.
  • A divine wind/spirit blows over the deep in both stories.
  • Both creation stories feature dragons. (In Genesis, the “great sea monsters” of verse 21 are obviously related to Tiamat and her mushmahhu dragons).
  • In both stories, the heavenly waters and seas are sundered from one another and placed in their respective domains in the cosmos.
  • Like Marduk, God has the power of divine fiat.
  • Both stories culminate in liturgy. (Enuma Elish ends with the hymn to Marduk. The creation story in Genesis concludes with the Sabbath.

Differences

The differences between these stories are immediately apparent, as well. By focusing on the differences between Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish, it begins to become evident what the author’s intended meaning was, and how we should go about reading Genesis 1.

The Minor Differences

  • In Genesis, unlike Enuma Elish, the chaos is not primeval. “In the beginning God ….” And God doesn’t have any grandparents, either.
  • The deep and the chaos do not pose any real threat to God. There is no combat. The sea monsters are created by God’s hand.
  • The tehom has been “demythologized.” It is not a deity, but the primary building material for creation. When God divides the waters into sea and sky, it is not a violent act at all.
  • This is somewhat controversial in Old Testament research right now, but I am convinced that the “divine wind” in Genesis 1:2 (Ruach Elohim) is already setting the stage for the fuller revelation of the Holy Spirit. In any case, it is not just a natural wind like the ones in Marduk’s bag. The God of Genesis 1 is not a storm god, but the transcendent and unique Creator God Who reveals Himself to Moses as Being.
  • Marduk has the power of divine fiat, but he doesn’t actually use it to create a dang thing! In contrast, Genesis 1 proclaims that everything is created by the Word of the Lord.

The Major Differences

  • Perhaps the biggest difference in the stories has to do with the creation of humankind. In Genesis, God creates us in His own image and likeness. In Enuma Elish, humans are made from monster blood. Moreover, God does not create humans to be his slaves, as Marduk does. Instead, we are made to be his vassal rulers over the earth.
  • Enuma Elish depicts worship as slavery. The gods are hungry, and it is our duty to feed them. The gods are powerful and fickle, so we lavish praise on them to appease them and keep them happy with us. In contrast, Genesis 1 depicts worship as rest.
  • The purpose of creation in Enuma Elish is a bit of a mystery. It feels a bit as though Marduk does it because he is looking for something to do. But in Genesis, God creates the world as a Temple in which humanity will worship Him. (More on this to come).

Reading Genesis 1 in Light of the Author’s Intended Meaning

So, why would the author intentionally echo so much of Enuma Elish if he ultimately rejects its world-view? I am convinced that the echoes are intentional. He knows that his audience knows the Babylonian account of creation. So he has chosen to subvert it in dramatic ways. His vocabulary and the sweep of the story have just enough in common with Enuma Elish to force us to come to grips with what is wrong with that story. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he has produced a counter-myth that infinitely transcends its “source material” and contradicts it at its most salient points.

I suppose that Genesis 1 was written by a priest exiled to Babylon. We know that Nebuchadnezzar pressed the elite members of Judaean society into his personal college of scribes. (The first chapter of Daniel preserves memories of this indoctrination process). So, this young priest had been forced to learn the very difficult language of Akkadian, probably by copying and re-copying Enuma Elish day in and day out. Eventually, he said, “Enough! This is a lie!” And then he wrote the most beautiful creation account ever composed in protest.

The Unique Revelation in the Literal Reading Genesis 1

Just consider the number of things that God revealed through this anonymous priest and his story of creation.

  • Creation ex nihilo.
  • God’s eternal existence.
  • The very beginnings of Trinitarian theology: God creates everything by the power of His Word and the mysterious participation of the “Spirit of God” blowing over the primeval waters.
  • The astonishing dignity of human beings created in God’s image and likeness.
  • The goodness and purpose of material creation.
  • The identification of worship with rest in and with God.

So, yes, Genesis ought to be interpreted literally. Its authentic message is unparalleled. But that message has nothing to do with science as we conduct it today, and very little to do with history. No, the literal sense of Genesis is a theological statement, and a supreme challenge to the pagan worldview of ancient Babylon … and the pagan worldview of the 21st century.

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He Was There With Me In the Furnace: Remembering a Crisis of Faith

I had the great benefit of growing up in a deeply religious family. This meant that we were in church every Sunday, said grace before meal times, and regularly had spiritual conversations. My parents gave me a Bible for my seventh birthday. I read it through from cover to cover by the time that I was ten. It was only natural that I should decide to attend Bible college and prepare for ministry as a preacher and missionary. So, when I experienced a crisis of faith years later, it was a truly excruciating experience.

In my church and Bible college there were certain assumptions about the parameters of biblical research. There was a simple logic behind it all that went something like this. We can recognize that there is a God because of the world around us. We can perceive that this God is wise, all-powerful and that He is good from the same testaments of creation. If God is wise and good, then surely He would communicate with us.

The Bible is the record of that communication. If the Bible is the message from the all-good, all-wise, and all-powerful God, then surely He has preserved it from errors of every kind. Consequently, anyone who is trying to provide an alternative to the history and scientific information in the Bible is actually attempting to undermine the Bible’s credibility. We portrayed the people doing this as having a well-thought out agenda. We also labeled them “liberals.”

My Fundamentalist Upbringing

I learned that the world is only about 6000 years old, in accord with a strictly literal acceptance of the biblical chronology. The scientific establishment manufactured their so-called evidence for evolution as part of a vast conspiracy. Moses wrote the Pentateuch. Isaiah wrote Isaiah. David wrote the Psalms ascribed to him. Anyone who suggested otherwise was a liberal, chipping away at the foundation of faith in the Bible as God’s Word.

This is what I learned, taught and preached up until I was nearly thirty years old. This was an extremely chaotic period in my life. We were living overseas. Exposure to Judaism, the ancient churches of the Holy Land, and the Church Fathers had caused my wife and me to begin the difficult journey into the Catholic Church. And then, late one night, I decided to investigate a developing suspicion that kept niggling at me. So began my crisis of faith.

How I Met Nyū Nesshii

When I was very young, I attended a Creation Science seminar. It was quite sensational. In one of the slideshows, there were pictures of human footprints alongside of dinosaur footprints from Glen Rose, Texas. The speaker regaled us with amazing eyewitness testimonies of cowboys encountering pteranodons in the Old West. And then he showed us this:

The Zuiyo-Maru Carcass-A basking shark that looks a bit like a plesiosaur in its decayed state. Believe it or not, this picture contributed to a crisis of faith.
Many creationists claim that this is a picture of a plesiosaur, but it has been proven to be a basking shark.

Nyū Nesshii: A Plesiosaur?

That is a picture of a cryptid that the Japanese call Nyū Nesshii, i.e., “New Nessie.” The Japanese fishing trawler, the Zuiyō-Maru, hoisted it up off the coast of New Zealand in 1977. Unfortunately, after the crew took a small sample of its corpse, they tossed Nyū Nesshi back into the ocean because it smelled so terrible. But this photo created a minor sensation, because based on appearances alone, it really does look like a plesiosaur.

This really is a plesiosaur.
Reconstructed skeleton of a plesiosaur. Photo by Kim Alaniz / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paleo_Hall_at_HMNS_plesiosaur.jpg.

The speaker acknowledged that the scientific community had determined that the Zuiyō-Maru carcass was a basking shark, not a plesiosaur. He did not tell us how they had determined this. (More on that in a bit). But who were we going to trust, after all? These scientists were obviously in cahoots with the other scientists driving the evolution narrative. We could not trust these ideologues. I mean, look at that picture of the rotting corpse. Does that look like a basking shark to you?

Basking Shark
Just your run-of-the-mill basking shark. Photo by Greg Skomal / NOAA Fisheries Service / Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cetorhinus_maximus_by_greg_skomal.JPG.

I loved this sort of thing when I was a kid. The idea that dinosaurs could still be living in the ocean depths filled me with wonder. I thrilled to the pictures of baby brontosauruses on Noah’s Ark. And of course, it was comforting to be able to read the Bible and accept everything I read uncritically and at face value, especially as I grew older and life became more and more confusing.

I Research Nyū Nesshii As an Adult

For some reason or other, when I was about thirty years old, I dredged up all of this stuff about the Zuiyō-Maru carcass again. (Did you see what I did there?). I don’t remember if it was something I came across on the Internet late at night, or if it came up in conversation with a fellow that I drank coffee with back in those days. But someone somewhere challenged my easy-going belief that the the Zuiyō-Maru had pulled up a plesiosaur from the ocean in 1977. I was heading for a crisis of faith.

It was time to do some research. I googled “plesiosaur, Japanese fishing boat” and began to sift through the information. I wanted to reassure myself that the evidence for this being a basking shark was questionable, at best. What I found was something quite different.

Nyū Nesshii: Not a Plesiosaur

It turns out that the research done on the Zuiyō-Maru carcass extended well beyond “hunches” that it was a basking shark. Scientists extensively examined the tissue sample that the fishing boat took from the carcass.

There have been several publications that have dealt with this. The most complete and accessible one that I know of is an article by Glen Kuban, “Sea-monster or Shark? An Analysis of a Supposed Plesiosaur Carcass Netted in 1977,” published in Reports of the National Center for Science Education , May/June 1997, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 16-28.

There is a whole lot in that article, but two things really convinced me that this was a basking shark, and not a plesiosaur. First of all, the cell structure of the flesh was in the form of “horny fibers” that were “rigid, needle-like structures that tapered toward both ends and had a translucent light-brown color.”

This structure is exactly what researchers find in the cartilage of basking sharks. Secondly, scientists conducted a gross amino acid analysis of the samples from the carcass, and discovered that they were full of elastoidin, “a collagenous protein known only from sharks and rays (not reptiles or even other fish).”

What Young Earth Creationists Have Done with this Research

These studies were conducted in the late seventies, immediately after the discovery of the Zuiyō-Maru carcass. They seem to have conclusively proven that what those fishermen hauled up was a basking shark, not a plesiosaur. And yet, the speaker at that seminar, and numerous other sources that I encountered later, assured me that the claim that the carcass was a basking shark was really only a clumsy guess, motivated by the incredulity of scientists that this was indeed a plesiosaur.

To this day, creationists continue to gloss over the compelling evidence that the Zuiyō-Maru carcass is actually a basking shark. This site is just one example. This is unconscionable and deceitful. The Ten Commandments command us, “You shall not bear false witness” (Exodus 20:17). That some Christians continue to bear false witness in regards to the Zuiyō-Maru carcass is a cause of scandal.

Bearing False Witness

That some Christians continued to bear false witness in regards to the Zuiyō-Maru carcass was a cause of scandal to me, personally. It instigated a crisis of faith. When I discovered that there was more to the story of the plesiosaur, information that seemed to have been intentionally withheld in those seminars, books, courses, Sunday School classes, etc., I felt betrayed. I was extremely angry.

But a terrible thought generated in the back of my brain, and grew in intensity until it screamed in my mind day and night: if people that I knew, loved and trusted had lied to me about a stupid, fake plesiosaur, what hadn’t they lied to me about? If this wasn’t true, what was? Was anything that I had believed true? Now my crisis of faith was edging into doubt.

Cast Into the Furnace: My Crisis of Faith

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, a whole lot was going on at this time in my life to contribute to this crisis of faith. We were living overseas. We were considering becoming Catholic. I was working on a graduate degree in Hebrew Bible. Studying Church history and the writings of the Church Fathers brought up all kinds of other questions about things that I had heard about the Catholic Church, things that I was finding out were just not true. And studying the Hebrew Bible was convincing me that the old, traditional claims for authorship of many books of the Bible were extremely problematic.

All of this underlined my deepening suspicions that for much of my religious education, my teachers had given me a carefully constructed version of reality. As this version of reality began to crumble, I began to feel paranoid and alone.

Trying to remember this experience is difficult now. My crisis of faith comes to me in images. I see myself falling through space, as though the bottom has been pulled out of everything. I picture myself in a dark cave, unaware of a way out.

For a few days, the terrifying possibility that I was going to become an atheist loomed large before me.

The Burning Furnace of Doubt

This was absolutely excruciating. Since faith was such an intrinsic part of my personal identity, I didn’t know how I would carry on. What would my life look like without it? I was tempted to retreat into an easy and assured Fundamentalism, and abandon my no-holds-barred search for truth. But the incongruence of ignoring certain truths for the sake of religious Truth stared me in the face, and so I carried on through my crisis of faith.

I took stock of what I did and did not know for sure. Had any of my religious teachers been completely honest with me? I was in the middle of considering a transition to a new set of teachers in the Catholic Church. There was no assurance that they were any more worthy of my trust.

And now the possibility emerged that even the Bible, up till that moment the foundation of my faith, might not provide an exit from my doubt. The human authorship of the Bible was becoming more and more apparent, and the old proofs for its divine authorship that I had learned in church and college now appeared tattered and thin.

The Burning Furnace of Doubt Begins to Swallow Up Everything

For all that, I wasn’t ready to trust other human authorities, like the scientific establishment, either. If people in the church could lie, people in lab coats could, too. And I had audited a course in the philosophy of science. I knew that scientists had their own blind spots. Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions played an important role in that regard.

And I certainly wasn’t prepared to go relativist. I trusted my own instincts and perception least of all. As much as the Zuiyō-Maru carcass had eroded my confidence in my creationist instructors, it had made me aware of my own incapabilities to discern what was true.

I was adrift in a sea of doubt, sinking into despair.

The Familiar Presence in the Furnace of Doubt

And that’s when I was enveloped in a familiar grace. In the midst of this ocean of skepticism, as I was desperately attempting to tread water, there was one reality that imposed itself so strongly on my mind and emotions that I simply could not cast it aside with everything else. Any rational arguments for belief in God seemed hollow now in contrast with my indisputable experience of His presence and work in my life. And that presence and work was especially palpable in the person of Jesus.

Existentially, I simply could not apply the same radical skepticism to Him that everything else was just crumbling under. With Him it would not work. Past experience of miraculous intervention was compelling enough on its own terms. (Perhaps I will share a few of those stories here). But at this moment in my life, what I found most indisputable was the undeniable sense of His presence.

So, together, we started to make our way back to solid ground. Beginning not with any teachers, or a particular church, or even the Bible, but with Jesus Himself, I was able to recover my faith. My faith was different. It had been stripped down, and built back up. Lots of things that I would have regarded as essential to my faith before the crisis were gone. But there was also continuity.

Jesus is the Foundation of My Faith

One of the things that I had learned in my Young Earth Creationist days was that modern scientific theories were an attack on the very foundation of our faith. This image, from Ken Ham’s “Answers in Genesis,” is illustrative.

"Castles in Conflict" from Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis. Young Earth Creationism is presented as the foundation of Christianity.
“Castles in Conflict” from Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis. Young Earth Creationism is presented as the foundation of Christianity.

This particular image is from a 2004 publication. But I remember an almost identical one from materials that I saw in the 80s and in my Creation Science course in the 90s.

In the gradually accumulating peace that followed my crisis of faith, I thought about this image many times. I realized that folks like Ken Ham would now perceive me as one of the foolish Christians firing away at the foundation of the Christian faith. And then I realized what a terrible lie this piece of propaganda is. No single theory of human origins or cosmology could ever be the foundation of our faith, no matter how biblical it was. Jesus is the foundation of our faith. In fact, St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:11, “For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

The Freedom of Making Jesus My Foundation

Making a determined effort to live with Jesus as the foundation of my faith, and, really, every other aspect of my life, has proven to be remarkably freeing. I don’t have to force science to fit a preconceived notion of what I think the Bible is saying about it. I can be more flexible with different possibilities proposed by biblical scholarship. Since my faith is not founded on the Bible, but on Jesus, I don’t have to be threatened by ideas that challenge what I have thought the Bible was saying. I’m not attempting to force the Bible to bear a burden that it was never intended to carry. The result has been that I now believe more than ever that the Bible is a faithful testament to Jesus.

I realize that my own interpretations of the Scriptures are prone to error. As a Catholic, I am thankful for the guidance the Holy Spirit provides through His Church, but even so, there is room for doubt. The only thing that I know for absolute certain is that Jesus has personally intervened time and time again in my life to envelope me in His grace. To date, the most dramatic evidence that I have for Jesus’ faithfulness is His presence during those horrifying few days when I wondered whether or not I actually believed anything.