The Bible: A Very Short Introduction by John Riches

Author:John Riches [Riches, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192853431
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2000-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

The church under attack: challenges from without

Not all challenges to the received interpretation of the Bible came from within the church. The explosion of human knowledge and discovery which marked the end of the Middle Ages provided challenges of its own to a world-view which had been proclaimed to be all-encompassing and authoritative. In the first place, the discovery of new lands, broadcast in popular travellers’ tales, showed up the geographical limitations of the biblical world-view. There were whole continents which had not even been dreamt of in the account of the world which had been spun out of the biblical narratives. Even if, by vigorous missionary activity, such lands could now be incorporated within Christendom, there remained a lasting question about the place which the new converts’ forebears had had within God’s universal plan of salvation.

Furthermore, the growth of historical sciences made it clear that the Bible’s view of history was far from comprehensive. Historical research undermined the chronology of the Bible; it uncovered evidence of the existence of earlier civilizations not known to the biblical writers. The historical schema found in the Bible simply failed to encompass subsequent history. Daniel 7 speaks of four kingdoms and this, at the time of the Reformation, was widely adopted as a framework for world history. The four kingdoms were identified as those of the Chaldaeans, the Persians, Alexander the Great, and the Romans. The question was what had become of the Roman Empire? The German emperor claimed the title of Holy Roman Emperor, but where did that leave the French king – as his permanent vassal? It is not difficult to see the attractions to those who sought political security of the idea of a final (and therefore humanly unassailable) empire before the advent of Christ. But, like all attempts to stop the historical clock, it would hardly stand the test of time. Empires would come and go and the schema outlined in Daniel would simply not be complex or flexible enough to contain them.

If the view of history constructed out of the Bible was vulnerable to attack, then so too was its cosmology. Copernicus taught that the planets, including of course the earth, revolved around the sun. In the strange and bloodthirsty story in Joshua 10, Joshua, with the armies of the five kings of the Amorites at his mercy, prays to God, ‘Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.’ (10: 12.) The prayer is answered: the sun and moon stand still for about a day, while Joshua’s armies slaughter their opponents. The conflict between the cosmology in this story and Copernicus’s understanding of planetary movements is clear. Even Luther and his disciple Melanchthon use the biblical story to dismiss the views of Copernicus. As Scholder points out, at this time, to all except those with considerable mathematical ability, Copernicus’s theory of the revolution of the celestial bodies would have appeared as just one among a number of current speculations. Melanchthon, after citing

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