Ultimate Truth: Which Is Our Standard?

            What I'm getting to is that the Christian's ultimate standard is the Bible. It's what we build our mind and actions around. It's what preserves us and defines us. Without the Bible every doctrine could be challenged as unauthentic or outright heresy.

A Horrible Scenario

            Now imagine a Christian looking at Jesus' life and saying, "You know, I believe the Gospels are no longer correct the way they've been read for almost two thousand years. Yes, they are history... but modern scholarship tells us that those kinds of miracles are impossible. But I don't want to chuck out all of the Gospels, so here's what I'll do.

            "I'll REINTERPRET these previously historical documents and claim they contain general, vague, poetical truths. Never mind that the authors intended them to be taken as historically accurate point by point. They just contain things that science has shown cannot happen naturally. I'll pick and choose what I want to take literally."

            Now, what is immediately apparent? This Christian does not hold the Word of God as his ultimate truth! He hold the opinions of the scientific majority as the higher truth. When the scientific majority disagrees with the Bible, it's the Bible that must be reinterpreted, not the research done by these scientists.
            But Christians wouldn't do this to the Bible, right? Right?

Not So Fast

            This is exactly what's happened to the way we treat Genesis. In Genesis chapters 1-11, the Bible is crystal clear that the world was created in six literal days. Moses is also clear that animals reproduced after their own kinds ("kind" meaning the modern genus or family, not species). He is also clear that the flood was global.

            This interpretation (Young Earth Creationism, or YEC) has been THE interpretation for thousands of years. Granted, the occasional person –Augustine comes to mind– liked to play around with the Creation week. However, the flood was global, the animals didn't change kinds, the earth was young, and so on and so forth.

             Then in the 1700s and 1800s, non-Christian naturalist scientists started seriously coming up with ways of looking at the world apart from God. Now, they weren't the first academics that didn't believe in God, it's just that their previous theories never gained very much traction in the pro-Christian Western world.

            The first thing they tried to do was to make the world old. "With time, anything is possible" has been the naturalist's cry. Geologists looked at rock layers and chucked catastrophism (the worldwide flood), replacing it with uniformitarianism (the slow-moving processes we see today have been going on since the earth formed).

            With geology having been done in, the focus went to the animal world (zoology, biology, etc.). With Darwin's theory becoming popular, it was pretty apparent that God wasn't necessary to explain the life we see. With Evolution, all you need is time. Billions of years of it, if you believe today's scientists.

            Now what was the Christian to do? Could these non-Christian scientists really be wrong? Of course not! This is science, the ultimate standard of truth! The Bible must be reinterpreted to accommodate naturalism, obviously.

            So we panicked. In came Old Earth Creationism (OEC, also known as theistic evolution), which was the Bible with the first eleven chapters being thrown out. Six days? Preposterous! They must've been six undefined ages. Animals reproducing after their own kinds? Never! We obviously came from an ancient one-celled organism. A global flood? Ha! Moses was obviously being poetical, or the flood was local.

            We held the opinions of the scientific majority as our ultimate truth. Never mind that the people behind these theories were not Christians (and therefore looking to explain the world naturally). Never mind that Genesis is pretty clear about how everything came to be (otherwise it wouldn't have taken until the 1800s for a seriously contradictory interpretation to come out). The clear teaching of the Word of God bowed to the majority of finite scientists.

            We are no better than the man who reinterpreted the Gospels.