Rev Clinton Chisholm, ContributorOn a recent visit to Jamaica, renowned Bishop John Shelby Spong revealed some of his beliefs which have caught the Christian community by surprise. Many debates have been sparked and Rev. Clinton Chisholm has taken the challenge to address issues as put forward by Bishop Spong.
It is quite amazing that late in the 20th century any properly schooled person would repeat the thoroughly debunked false charge that the Bible teaches or suggests that the earth is flat. Yet, this is exactly what the American Anglican Bishop John Shelby Spong argues in his 1991 book, 'Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism' (pp. 26, 27, 30).
By making this claim, Bishop Spong betrays ignorance of the Bible and of the literature pertaining to his false claim.
Has the Bishop never read Isaiah 40.22? This text says with reference to God, "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth." The Hebrew word translated as 'circle', khug, is a rare word in the Hebrew Bible and can also mean 'sphere or horizon.' In the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew) the word is guron, a circle or ring.
There is a general misconception in many minds that belief in a flat earth was widespread in ancient times and especially so in Bible-based cultures. People should read J.B. Russell's 'Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians', 1991, which not only puts the lie to the popular claim that Columbus had to disprove that the earth was flat, but also shows that the vast majority of Christian scholars, prior to Copernicus, believed, consistent with the Bible, in a round earth.
I mention, in passing, that there is much misinformation and exaggeration too about what the Roman Catholic Church really did concerning Galileo (see Philip J. Sampson, 6 Modern Myths About Christianity & Western Civilisation 2001, pp.27-46.)
Spong scoffs at the Genesis account of creation and seems to be mocking when he writes, "Then came the fish, the birds, the animals, and the 'creeping things,' and finally, when all things were ready, God created the man and the woman in the divine image." (p.28).
What Spong does not seem to know or appreciate is the amazing correspondence between the sequence of creative events in Genesis and what scientists theorise as the sequence of the appearance of life forms on earth.
This is quite unique for all ancient creation stories!
Hear a few scientists on the issue.
Geologist, John Wiester: "It is truly remarkable that Genesis 1 is written in virtually the same chronological order as geology textbooks which address the history of the Earth." ('The Genesis Connection', 1983, p. 205).
Scientist and theologian, Dr. E.K. Victor Pearce: "Many doubters have been surprised when I have shown them the British Museum book, 'The Succession of Life Through Geological Time', by Oakley and Muir-Wood. I've put the chapter and verses of Genesis down the margin of this science book. They see that the order of events are the same. Genesis sets it out simply, starting with matter, light, then with green things, then marine creatures, next the land animals and, finally, man." ('Evidence for Truth: Science' 1998, 27-28).
Astronomer, Dr. Hugh Ross, speaking of Genesis 1 and 2 after examining the scientific credentials of statements in the holy books of the world's major religions: "Instead of another bizarre creation myth, here was a journal-like record of the earth's initial conditions correctly described from the standpoint of astrophysics and geophysics followed by a summary of the sequence of changes through which Earth came to be inhabited by living things and ultimately by humans. The account was simple, elegant, and scientifically accurate.
From the stated viewpoint of an observer on Earth'
s surface, both the order and the description of creation events perfectly matched the established record of nature. I was amazed." 'The Creator and the Cosmos', 1993, p.15).
Spong, by blind faith or credulity, swallows hook, line and sinker of the Darwinian view that human beings are derived from non-human or sub-human ancestors (p.34). The more research is done on human origins the more scientists are forced to reclassify fossils and modify their earlier theories concerning the alleged ancestors of human beings.
Regrettably, misleading pictures abound in text-books, popular magazines like 'Time', 'National Geographic' or 'Newsweek' and even in museums, of a series of ape-like creatures on knuckles and progressively becoming more upright in posture until we reach modern humans, walking on two feet.
These pictures are misleading because the drawings of whole entities, on four limbs, partially upright or fully upright on two feet, are done from a real skull, jawbone or some other small piece of a section of the entity depicted and not from whole skeletons!!
Biologist, Jonathan Wells in his devastating book of 2000, 'Icons of Evolution: Science or Myth', quotes specialists in the field of human origins to show the state of research in the field.
Constance Holden writing in Science, 1981: "The primary scientific evidence is a pitifully small array of bones from which to construct man's evolutionary history. One anthropologist has compared the task to that of reconstructing the plot of War and Peace with 13 randomly selected pages." (in Wells, p. 220).
Henry Gee, Chief Science Writer for Nature, 1999:<P> 'No fossil is buried with its birth certificate; the intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent. To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific." (in Wells, pp. 220-221).
It would seem that the author of Genesis, who contends that God directly created the first human pair, Adam and Eve, may be much more scientific than we moderns care to believe.
I encourage you to watch with interest the advances in the study of mitochondrial DNA (inherited from the mother) suggesting that all human beings descended from an original woman dubbed 'African Eve' and similar studies of the human Y-chromosome (inherited from the father) possibly hinting at a corresponding original man.
