Think back to when you first came to Christ -- when you first acknowledged
that you are a child of God, and that your only hope for salvation is in
Jesus' sacrifice for us on the cross. I'd be very surprised if more than
one or two readers of this list would insist that it was a careful study of
the historical veracity of the Bible that brought such an acknowledgement.
What did it take, then? In my case it took a realization that the humanism
I had believed in led nowhere, and a prayer to the Lord to take over my
life. And down the road, in a crisis, He confirmed that He truly had moved
into my life.
After I had been a Christian for a while, I got interested in the
historical accuracy of the Bible and found that it is very accurate where
we can cross-check it. That gave me a tremendous boost as a believing
Christian. But I would never have reached that point had I not had the
Lord move personally into my life.
Sometimes I worry that creationists have stressed historical accuracy to
the point that they neglect the personal touch of Jesus Christ in people's
lives, which after all is the spark that ignites everything else.
Glenn rightly worries that a faith which tries to force-fit science into a
particular view of Scripture will not be credible to a scientist. And he
rightly worries that a faith that must gloss lightly over chapters of
Scripture is in danger of glossing over ever more Scripture every year.
But the answer does not, I believe lie totally in rigorous scholorship.
Mostly it lies in our acknowledgement that the Lord has done something in
our lives that the world doesn't undersand and living according to His
direction. That means we may not be able to explain in terms a
nonchristian can understand why we have the confidence we do in our faith.
But we had better be showing by example that we are living according to our
faith. And that requires honesty and rigorous scholarship -- but it's no
good if you don't have that unexplainable Presence in your life in the
first place.
Bill Hamilton
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William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
Staff Research Engineer
Electrical and Controls Integration MC 480-106-390
GM R&D Center
30500 Mound Road
Warren, MI
hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com / whamilto@mich.com (home)