Those words came to mind yesterday as I toured the New York Museum of Natural History with my Alpha Generation grandkids.
Surrounded by fossils, after being previously immersed in Big Bang panorama, I thought about what their kids would likely be thinking years to come "should Jesus tarry."
As I traversed multiple floors with a headset in one ear, I paid more attention to questions of children in our small group than the well programmed tour guide.
The kids' knowledge of the universe, far more than mine at that age, helped them to effortlessly follow explanations offered by our guide regarding the amazing and ever expanding billions of galaxies, black holes, invisible wavelengths of light intercepted as evidence of long expired stars, thus the age of our globe, as well as estimates of the relatively short window of time we humans have occupied the earth.
Huge impressive hallways, built as early as 1889, held skeletal remains of ferocious carnivores, extinct dinosaurs, some with enormous skulls and sharp teeth, all professed as 85% cast from true fossils; others, plant eaters, had small flat skulls with long necks.
The guide then led us into another area holding much smaller skeketal remains, though with much longer forelimbs. These remains thought to be winged as their forelimbs became webbed, then feathered. Since the 1960's, accepted as the origin of today's bats and birds.
I did find it interesting when we got to the display of hominids. There, mounted alongside of modern man were two ancestors, the Chimpanzee and an Ape-like "Lucy" of the Neanderthals. The guide sighted the "fact" that all humanoids shared 3-4% of the same DNA, with the exception of those who's origin was from the continent of Africa. That I found interesting, as I understand it was that the location from which mankind emerged according to Moses, out of Eden? Just say'n!
When I was the age of my grandkids' (7&9) anything of such thought was cast off as nonsense, given the fundamentalist nature of religion as I knew it. Preserving the concept of the infallibilty of scripture at all costs was the task, particularly avoiding any hint of Darwinism, with evidence of any sort being literally mocked.
I also had to wonder as we walked through the museum, what my grandparents would have been thinking. For them, even accepting what they once saw on grainy, black and white TV, such as a man on the moon, was difficult to comprehend, debated by some for years. Theirs was a suspect of some sham to further promote secular science, as it seemed such a stretch of the imagination apart from today's knowledge base.
The dinosaurs, Big Bang theory and billions of galaxies would likely have been feared as contrary to the truth as depicted in the Genesis version of Creation.
We later left our guide and wondered back through on our own, first riding an elevator to the top of a sphere-like dome where we witnessed a short video explaining the concept behind the Big Bang. As we left, we traversed downward from the theater upon a more contemporary shaped walkway, multi-leveled in its spiraling circular descent, the wide railings were intermittently labeled at ever billion years, each footstep made by us was said to equal one million years.
At each billion year point, we were further informed both with script and visual illustrations reinforcing our previously viewed panorama of how this rapidly expanding universe, with its ever expiring, exploding stars was releasing energy such that matter was formed, eventually sufficient for those gaseous elements to solidify, platforming life as we know it, and only within the last few hundreds of thousand years humanoids emerged. Whew!!
My scientific mind, shaped in part by a now dated bachelor's degree awarded in 1970 was whirling. Though fairly aware of the logic behind all their presuppositions, most of the mental racing was my wondering how theology as we now presuppose would hold up over the next one hundred years!
As a child, I was raised to escape the world moreso than to change it. Avoiding at all costs entanglement with anything contrary to scripture. Our concept of escatology was "pretrib", so we, unlike the mid-trib and post-trib folks, were awaiting a moment when Christ would rapture the church, and pandemonium would erupt, at least for seven years.
Only of late have I watched theologians massage the long held concepts, struggling still to sustain infallibilty though aided by numerous religious interpretations from theogians past as well as scores of translations of the ancient writ. We seem slowly to be reconciling ourselves to the notion that the Genesis story as written by Moses was more a record of his communication with God, than a dictation from the One who spoke this awesome universe into existence over thousands, if not millions of years ago.
How do we defend the scriptures without sounding to emerging generations as if in denial of much of what science now has to offer? To me it's simple, we live the way that Jesus demonstrated as the "Way," long before we were first called Christians at Antioch or before falling captive to Constatine's Christianity.
They will then know we are Christians by our love, not by our denial of whatever true science has to offer, which might seem contrary to Moses' understanding. To go beyond that seems to the detriment of of the Gospel.
Surely it is becoming more clear that what God was offering to Moses was far from literal dictation of scientific phenomena, but rather communicating to him based on limited capacity only what was necessary for his leadership until the full story could unfold.
Yet, the true mystery of scripture is how it affords a source of spiritual guidance by way of the Spirit, the Word become flesh, which has withstood centuries of human attempts to destroy its impact.
It seems if sincere in our motives, this guidance always aligns with new possibilities over the centuries as we are enlightened both by science and spiritual revelation. I thank God for those who have pushed forward both in faith and their fields of study.
The scriptures remain applicable still today regarding the nature of this Being that once appeared in flesh. Yet, even then as now his behavior was so counter to what religion had to say, that when God finally became flesh we failed to connect the loving substitutional Lamb, preferring religion over reality.
Within three to four hundred years after the empowerment at Pentecost, the church chose political empowerment rather than spiritual, and with that a diminished display of the gifts and miracles that were once so convincing. All that surrendered in return for control of thought as a means of preserving religion.
When Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany, a short window of less than 500 years was opened for the priesthood of believers. Afterwards, the Azusa Street revival reunited the Body of Christ a few years after the Civil War, igniting the Pentecostal Revival out of which my spiritual ancestry evolved.
Later the Jesus Movement swelled from among Hippie-like youth, with "praise bands" following with a more contemporary music which taxed the High Church sounds of pipe organs.
The Institutional Church is now again under scrutiny, declining annually it seems, it's impact damaged by a growing awareness of a history of colonialization under the banner of the cross, moreso than love.
One has to wonder given this digital age, so laden with phenomenal access to information, if our continued denial of reality, both of the truth so mysteriously bound up in scripture, as well as the progressive ideation of science, both balancing lives sufficient for continued survival are not one and the same in their source.
Any denial may soon be seen as a detriment to the Body of Christ and the spread of the Gospel.
They will know us by our love, not our religious debate of science.