a sermon delivered on January 15th, 2012 at Sayville Congregational United Church of Christ
Scholar John Dominic Crossan stated the problem succinctly when it comes to how we interpret the Bible. Either the ancients wrote a text they believed to be literally true, and many of us are smart enough to read it symbolically; or, the ancients wrote a text they believed to be symbolically true, and many of us are dumb enough to take it literally. Crossan believes the latter. I tend to think it is somewhere in between, the ancients realizing parts were true and parts symbolic, and that many contemporary American Christians are unable to admit to themselves and the world that they are choosing which parts are symbolic and which are literal.
This is nowhere more evident than in the culture wars, the great fight in which a certain brand of Christianity tries to force its understanding of the Bible and its moral precepts on the rest of the nation. The wingnuts from Westboro Baptist become the public image of Protestant Christianity in the hype and spin of the 24-hour news cycle, just as the child-molesting priest becomes the public image of the Roman Church, as the jihadist becomes the public perception of the Muslim. It is human nature to be drawn to the sensational, to seek easy categories.
The truth, as we know, isn’t so simple. There are certainly Christians, very vocal Christians, who, in their selective literalism, deny some of the discoveries of science. This is by no means true of all Christians, but it has always been the case with a select few. Take, for example, the 1633 condemnation of Galileo Galilei. Galileo got lots of stuff wrong. He was wrong about elliptical orbits, wrong about what caused the tides, but he was right when he admitted the truths of Copernicus and Kepler, especially the truth that the sun was at the center of our solar system, not the earth. Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, and under threat of torture, recanted.
Those who tried Galileo insisted on a literal interpretation of select texts. This happens at times in our history, but was never the norm. Christians have always recognized that portions of the Bible are poetic, symbolic. As early as St. Augustine we find explicit warnings against literalism. So why do we have these convulsions, these fits in which the Bible is used as a weapon against science?
I would suggest that, faced with the reality that the earth was not, actually, the center of all creation, the critics and inquisitors experienced a profound crisis of faith. They could not accept a system in which humans were not the center of all creation. After all, what would come next? Could a God who created a system in which humans were one small part on one small planet, could this God be the same God who chose only one group of people, in one region? Could the God of this amazing universe that the Renaissance scientists were discovering be the same God that was the God of Abraham?
The tension created when one recognizes conflicting ideas is called cognitive dissonance. A scriptural example would be the tension when we try to accept that the same God who toys with Job, who allows Job’s family to be killed, that this God is the God of justice and love we find in the prophets and that is proclaimed by Christ.
Cognitive dissonance is annoying, a mental itch you can’t quite scratch. We all suffer from it at times. The good news is that it can go away. We can adjust our beliefs so they no longer conflict, we can numb ourselves to the discomfort through substance abuse or manipulative emotionalism, or we can bury our beliefs so deep that we don’t notice the conflict.
Over the centuries, Christians eventually were able to accept that the earth orbits around the sun, and even that our solar system is part of one galaxy that itself is only one of many. Humans learned to live with that mental itch. A much more recent itch came when Charles Darwin announced his discovery of natural selection. Humans had been using natural selection to their advantage in agriculture for centuries, developing crops and breeds without ever fully understanding the mechanisms. Darwin revealed the natural equivalent of this agricultural science. Humans were suddenly faced with the reality that we had slowly evolved over millions of years.
Now, I’m sure there were people who believed in a literal Adam and Eve, but most folks viewed it as a story, and besides, the fact, or what Stephen Colbert might call the “truthiness†of Adam and Eve was not essential to belief. In fact, there are two completely different accounts of the creation story in Genesis, two accounts that are very different, and in the second one we’re made out of the earth just like everything else, and no necessarily given “dominion†over the rest of creation! What really mattered was the belief that at some moment in some way some amount of God-stuff we call the soul was incorporated into every human. And it didn’t have to be the Mormon version where Adam is literally the Archangel Michael. It just mattered that in some way, humans were marked with the divine.
Following the logic of evolution created a crisis for many. If you couldn’t pinpoint the magic moment when we got the God-stuff, then either everything had God-stuff, or we didn’t either. If everything had God-stuff, then maybe we needed to start treating the rest of creation a whole lot better, which no one wanted to do and few want to do today, a century and a half later. And if we didn’t have God-stuff, well that was too painful to even comprehend.
We might think of this as the fear that monkeys have souls. Even the best theologians haven’t fully reconciled themselves to this notion, this monkey-soul-a-phobia, though some are making headway. And, by the way, the idea that monkeys have souls might not be such bad news to parents who tell there kids that Fluffy and Sparky will meet them in heaven!
Many Christian humans are starting to creatively re-imagine where we fit in the scheme of creation, to embrace the idea that we don’t have to be smaller for God to be bigger. We are becoming okay with the notion that, as the late Carl Sagan has been lampooned for saying, a galaxy is composed of “billions upon billions†of stars, and that ours is just one.
But many, faced with the cognitive dissonance, unable to imagine how we can still be blessed and loved by God given the fact of evolution, left the faith entirely. Others went in the opposite direction, and like the Inquisition, denied reality, using selective literalism to deny the thing that made them uncomfortable. Fundamentalism, as we know it today, is a heresy born in the decades after Darwin’s discovery. Named after a series of 90 tracts produced between 1910 and 1915, Fundamentalism insisted on the literal interpretation of some biblical text while willingly disregarding others. This approach was rare in the first eighteen centuries of the Christian tradition, and remains fairly rare today, even as these zealots dominate media coverage.
So, just so there can be absolutely no mistake, this is what I will declare from the pulpit. Natural selection is real, even if we are still trying to figure out exactly how it works. Evolution is real. Satan did not plant fossils to lure us away from the one true faith. Those who deny evolution are mostly just scared of what it means, and I pray for them. But some that use selective literalism when it comes to evolution versus creation also use selective literalism to preach a gospel of hate, and that’s just sin.
Evolution is real. And if you ask me if that means a monkey has a soul, I’m going to quote from a pastor we have recently encountered in our adult Sunday School class. Her answer, my answer, is this. “I don’t know. I don’t know!â€
It’s okay not to know. Because this morning I woke up and I felt like I had a soul. And I felt like waking up was a good thing, even if maybe some morning I don’t really want to get out of that warm bed. This morning I woke up realizing that everything about this creation, everything, was amazing and miraculous. That there is something instead of nothing. That we are called, oh so clearly called, to transcendence and beauty, to love, even to self-sacrificial love. It does not matter to me that God didn’t do it in seven days. It does not matter to me that it was slow, that this creation has amazing processes that are beyond our understanding. It does not matter to me that I am a flicker in time against the backdrop of billions of years and billions of stars. What matters is this day, in this body, with this God-stuff in me, saved by the God-stuff in Jesus, and called to care for and to love the God-stuff in you and in all of creation. I have no fear of monkeys with souls, though the ones with wings are a little scary. The fact of evolution does not change the simple miraculous fact that I am. I am. And you are. Amen.