Hi again Glenn. I’ve long appreciated your testimony, the research and articles you’ve written (from Morton’s demon to Lake Suigetsu), and your mediating position on Adam and Eve.
We chatted and squabbled a bit on TheologyWeb about 15 years ago. I wasn’t a regular, so I’m sure I remember you better than you remember me. This thread brought on some serious deja vu with the claim that God doesn’t know squat if he didn’t get the science right in Genesis 1. I know you know the rejoinder to that claim, but just for old times’ sakes, here’s one more go at it.
Here’s one I think we’ve discussed before:
Thus says the LORD: …
"The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
“I the Lord search the heart
and test the kidneys,
to give every man according to his ways,
according to the fruit of his deeds.”(Jeremiah 17:5, 9-10, ESV, using literal translation from footnote)
There’s little doubt how Jeremiah’s audience would have heard this statement. They, and other ancient peoples, thought the central entrails contained the organs of thought and will and volition. For instance, when Egyptians prepared bodies for the afterlife, they meticulously preserved those organs in the body cavity while disposing of the brain matter like so much used tissue. Other biblical authors spoke of the heart and kidneys the same way. The Hebrew language had no word for the brain. So the heart and kidneys were not metaphors the way “fruit of his deeds” is. These statements corresponded with the most widely accepted understanding of the day.
So why didn’t God get the science right? Even if there was no word for the brain, why not at least say “head” and get the general location right? My answer is… because the point wasn’t to reveal new details about which organs we think and feel and decide with. God accommodated to their understanding, to their language, to the “science” of their day, and that was sufficient to get the message across. Trying to work in a correction of their physical understanding would only have obscured that message by shifting the focus.
If God is not going to accommodate false things in a culture, then God either stays silent or God begins by creating a new language to teach us. Every human language embeds within its words and grammar the culture and false things of its speakers. That’s inevitable.
Deny God’s ability and willingness to accommodate our limitations, and every passage holds the potential to expose God’s ignorance if we look too close. Even if one lowers the standard somewhat so that it’s okay for God to say we think with our kidneys, such accommodations on our part can’t help but make God appear a little smaller. Why does God only pass our test when we grade on a curve?
Maybe the test is foolish. Maybe God has no intention of meeting its requirements. Maybe it’s grace that God ignores such preconditions for revelation and stoops to speak in ways that we – and they long ago – can hear.