Blog

A Matter of Interpretation

Posted: Sep 15, 2011 by Jonty Rhodes

This week we began our new series, ‘Origins’, looking at the first few chapters of Genesis.  Inevitably this raises age-old questions of science and the Bible.  Is there a conflict and if so how are we to resolve it?
 
The Bible tells us God is a personal God who speaks to us.  Theologians have traditionally spoken of God revealing himself in two ways.  Firstly there is ‘General Revelation’.  This is God’s revealing of himself in the world, a world he created by speaking, as we saw in Genesis 1.  So Psalm 19 tells us ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’.  Then there is ‘Special Revelation’, God’s saving words to us, now found in Scripture: ‘All Scripture is God-breathed’ (2 Timothy 3:16).  As both are spoken by God, there is no conflict between General and Special Revelation.

However both forms of revelation need interpreting.  When we study General Revelation we call it science.  When we study Special Revelation we call it theology.  And it is here that there can appear to be a conflict.  After all, as finite and fallible human beings we can make mistakes.  The important thing to recognise is that it would be possible to make mistakes in interpreting either or both forms of revelation.

This is where the debates over Genesis and science come in.  There is no clash between the text of Genesis and the reality  of the world ‘out there’ (rocks, fossils, stars etc) but there is clearly a clash between some people’s interpretations.  So amongst Bible believing Christians, broadly speaking one group tells us that the world was made in six twenty-four hour periods, and that popular interpretations of the age of the earth (radiometric dating, geology and other scientific processes) are wrong.   Another group argues that to interpret the days as literal twenty-four hours is a mistake, and that the interpretations of the world by the scientists are correct. 
 
Without getting into who is right and who is wrong, it’s useful to note that both camps are engaged in valid projects.  Clearly we must use the Bible to interpret the world around us: after all it is our highest authority.  But it is not our only source of knowledge.  We all learn from General Revelation too, and bring that knowledge to the Scriptures to help us interpret them.
 
So for example when I read about stars in the Bible, I will not discover that they are burning balls of gas.  But GCSE physics will teach me as much, and I can now read the Bible with an even greater grasp of God’s power and majesty.  Similarly I learned what a mother, king, donkey, Roman centurion and boat were from the world around me, and this study of General Revelation helps me understand the Special Revelation of the Bible.
 
As we turn to Genesis 1 then, we need not be worried about looking to modern scientific knowledge to help us understand it.  At times we will perhaps decide that we are sufficiently certain of our interpretation of Scripture (theology) that we will disagree with the National Curriculum understanding of General Revelation (science).  But at other times perhaps the interpretative work of scientists will cause us to re-examine our theology.