How odd. . .

It seems that the question of what to do with Genesis and its account of creation is a never ending question.  Or, perhaps, its answer is not what the questioners will accept and so the work of debunking what God has said continues.  On the one hand what God has said is attacked as myth -- except that nothing in Genesis suggests that it is telling us anything except fact and history.  Add to that the fact that myth is not a genre of the Old Testament people of God.  Add to the fact that no one in the New Testament, including Jesus, treats the Biblical account of creation as anything but fact and history.  The other hand is to attack the text.  God is not responsible for what was written -- only men working within their own limited, uneducated, unscientific, and unsophisticated understanding of things.  Of course, this begs the question of what in the Bible actually does represent God's Word and what is only the word of man.  If reason and science are the criteria for what is God's and what is merely the postulations of men at the time, then surely the resurrection would have to go.  It has never happened before or since so it must be myth or falsehood, right?  If that is the case, then by Paul's own words we are a pitiful people.

Oddly enough, I recently read a liberal Bible scholar complain about those who pressed him on the historicity of Genesis "why do you think God cannot use myth?"  God can do anything, supposedly, even using myth to express truth (except that the truth is devoid of fact or history).  What is even more odd is the whole idea that God has the power to express timeless truth in myth, legend, and fabrication but He does not have the power to create all things from nothing.  Or so it seems.  God is so big that He cannot be limited by the simple categories of fact and fiction but He is not so big that He can speak all that is into being.  Go figure.

Either you refuse to believe Genesis because you have more faith in the postulations of modern science than you do Scripture or you refuse to believe Genesis because you do not believe Scripture is God's Word (but perhaps only contains snippets of it).  In either case, it is clear that you have approached the Scriptures with a doubting mind and heart.  Now the reality is that modernity is in love with doubt.  We are suspicious of those who have no doubts or who have rested their doubts upon the Scriptures and are satisfied.  We are enamored with those who doubt, whose empiricism requires a level of provable truth that removes all risk from believing.  Thomas is the patron saint of the doubters and the hero who alone is true to himself.  The rest of those who believe are duped or fools.  Consider the recent movie The Concave and the appeal of doubts as part of the necessary character of the man whom they would proclaim Pope.  Or look at the death of Francis and his legacy of doubts and challenges to what the faith has always confessed about such things as gender, marriage, children, abortion, homosexual acts, etc...  Francis is a hero to our times because he is not a true blue believer but always found room for doubts (who am I to judge).  In the world today, the best Christian is the one who doubts what the Bible says, the doctrine the faithful have confessed, the morality that has guided holiness of life and speech, and the Gospel of Christ crucified for sinners.  We call these people saints and scholars today but in reality they are little more than doubters who find more confidence in the best guesses of the time for what is and who believe the Gospel is little more than an idea that lives in our imagination rather than in history.  How odd!