When people today read the Bible in a non-literal fashion, this is not a retreat from the advances of scientific knowledge. It is rather a return to the classic way of approaching these texts. The only people who are allowing the concerns of modern science to determine the way they read the text are, ironically, the fundamentalists, who seek absolute certain scientific explanations in a text that does not offer them.<\/p>\n
If you are looking for inerrancy in Scriptures and won\u2019t take no for an answer, I suspect that most Christians would be grateful if you would try Islam or some tradition that at least claims<\/i> to offer such a text. But please, please stop trying to make Christianity live up to your strange modernistic expectations. Not only will it never do so, leaving you feeling the need to \u2018take things on faith\u2019, but the fabric of Christianity gets warped and distorted even through the futile attempt.<\/p>\n
Taking things on faith is extremely dangerous. But what the Bible calls for isn\u2019t that. The word \u2018faith\u2019, like the word \u2018truth\u2019, had primarily to do with trust and trustworthiness. The object of this trust was not, in most instances, a text or words, but a person.<\/p>\n
The question that we then have to ask next is this: when, if ever, is it appropriate to make leaps of trust<\/i>? My own answer is that this leap is one that we might make in relation to that all-encompassing reality that we refer to as God<\/i>. This is not an expectation that supernatural interventions will sort out all our problems, but a confidence that the reality of which we are a part is neither simply hostile nor ultimately meaningless. Even in this respect, however, we make a leap not in darkness and ignorance, but based on intuition and the evidence we have available. As I have said before, to feel that we can go beyond<\/i> the evidence and the explicable is not necessarily inappropriate, whereas to ignore or deny the available evidence clearly is<\/i>. To paraphrase Hebrews once again, \u201cFaith is the evidence of things unseen \u2013 not<\/i> evidence that the things that are<\/i> seen don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
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