John Polkinghorne - Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible

Testing
Scripture

A Scientist Explores the Bible

John Polkinghorne

2010 by John Polkinghorne

Published in North America by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com

Published in the United Kingdom by Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge as Encountering Scripture

E-book edition created 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

ISBN 978-1-4412-3740-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

To my friends in the Parish of the Good Shepherd,
Cambridge

Contents

Scripture has been very important to me in my Christian life. For more than sixty years I have read the Bible every day and when in middle life I was ordained as an Anglican priest, I undertook the welcome duty of saying the Daily Office. Every year this takes me through the whole of the New Testament, and a good deal of the Old Testament.

The Bible is in many ways a very complex book. The material in it was written over a period of about a thousand years and the process of compilation ended almost two thousand years ago. The biblical writings originated in a variety of contrasting cultures, all with world views different in many respects from our modern, scientifically influenced understanding. Often biblical writers took over stories and insights from earlier ages, modifying and developing them in ways that seemed appropriate to their own times and experience, producing a text that is many-layered like an archaeological site. Much that we read in the Bible may seem strange to us, particularly in the Old Testament, where there are stories of war and violence that trouble us by being presented as if they were fulfilments of the express will of God. Sometimes, when different writers are telling the story of the same events, as is often the case in the Gospels for instance, there are discrepancies of detail that make it clear that we are reading human compositions, and not the result of an inerrant divine dictation. Despite these problems, all of which I shall have to confront in what follows, there is great spiritual truth and beauty to be found in Scripture. Anyone who has listened to a performance of Handels Messiah, where the text is drawn wholly from the Bible, will have caught a glimpse of the majestic power and hopeful promise that are to be found in the pages of Scripture. Moreover, without the New Testament we would know essentially nothing about Jesus Christ, one of the most striking and influential figures of all time and someone who is of dominant significance in the spiritual history of humankind. The Bible is an indispensable foundational source for Christian thinking.

I have written this little book in the hope that it will be helpful to those who are seeking a careful and thoughtful engagement with the Bible in their quest for a truthful understanding of the ways of God and the nature of spiritual reality, but who are not necessarily concerned to enter into an exhaustive academic study of these issues. I think of the book as a reconnaissance because I want to explore the landscape of Scripture in a manner that notes and takes seriously many of its features, both inspiring and perplexing, but which does not attempt to give an account of the whole biblical terrain. My concern will centre on carefully selected typical examples of what one will encounter on a journey through biblical territory. What I am seeking to offer is a series of insights that have helped me in my own engagement with the Bible, illustrating what I have to say by appropriate citations that raise the issues that I want to address, while not pretending to attain an encyclopedic completeness in what I have to say.

In reading Scripture we should expect to find both inspiration and information. Christianity is a historically oriented religion. Its foundational stories, Christians believe, are not simply symbolic tales given us to stir our imaginations, but are rooted in Gods actual acts of self-disclosure, mediated through particular persons and events. Therefore there is an evidential aspect to what we are told in the Bible. Scripture offers us testimony that has to be evaluated in a careful and honest way when assessing the degree of historical accuracy that is embodied in its pages.

When I became a middle-aged student at a theological college, the lectures I most enjoyed were those concerned with biblical studies. I had had a long career as a theoretical physicist, and the instinct of a scientist in approaching any new field of enquiry is to ask first what are the basic phenomena that will motivate and control the search for a truthful understanding of what is going on. In considering questions of Christian belief, the Bible gives us accounts of the history of Israel, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the first thoughts and experiences of his earliest followers. These are the foundational phenomena of the Christian tradition. I wish to assess them with care and intellectual scrupulosity and so I have endeavoured in this book not to make assertions that do not have significant scholarly support. I have sought only to say things that I believe I could defend with academically respectable argument, even if I do not always set out here all the detail of that argument, often being content simply to indicate its general character. Since the book is angled to the general reader, rather than to the academy, I have not peppered it with scholarly paragraphs and related footnotes that would seek to make good my claim for academic respectability by delving into details of specialist studies. For a similar reason, I have concentrated on trying to illuminate the primary understanding of the text as it stands in the pages of Scripture, rather than moving on to give an account of the extensive theological theorizing that has flowed from that text. In discussing New Testament issues, for example, my concern is with questions such as the reliability of our knowledge of the historical Jesus and the attitudes of the first generation of Christians, rather than the subsequent history of Christological thinking in the Church. Nevertheless, theological theorizing cannot be wholly absent, and I do comment from time to time about how ancient scriptural insights might relate to modern scientific understandings. But that is not the main burden of the book. Its principal purpose is simply to help the contemporary reader to engage in a serious and intellectually responsible encounter with the Bible.

For those who might want to take the academic issues further, I have added a Further Reading section in which I list a highly selective number of books that I believe might prove useful resources. All my scriptural quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. It is the version I mostly use in my own reading, because it seems to me to stick closely to, and to convey well, the sense of the original Greek and Hebrew.