wordsout by godfrey rust
The sailing of
the ark about
commentary
Sailing
out of
history
A
commentary on the bible story of the ark
The
story of Noah’s Ark is one of the best known in the Bible, and has
somewhat
perversely been a favourite for young children despite being among the
most violent and problematic in the whole canon. It takes up
three early chapters of Genesis and is a useful test case for what kind
of library the Bible is. Here
is part of
it:
The
LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the
earth,
and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only
evil all
the time. The LORD
regretted that he had made human beings on the
earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the LORD
said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have
created—and
with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the
ground—for I regret that I have made them" (Genesis 6, vv
5-7, New International Version).
In
synopsis:
a well-intentioned but exasperated creator god loses patience
with his rebellious creatures and decides to
clear the decks and start again with the best of a bad lot. As we learn
later on, the god is
seemingly
unaware
that the survivors will fare little or no better in future
than
they have to date, under
the new unilateral
contract (or "covenant") laid down by the god later to Abraham, who
would become father of the nation of Israel.
So
the story of the Ark and its unlikely menagerie begs the big
question of
theodicy—how and why does a perfect and all-powerful god allow evil to
exist?—but goes much further,
showing the god being willing to carry out an almost total
annihiliation of
terrestrial life and blame the
creatures for failings that would, in a human context, be seen
as primarily the god's
responsibility as the executive or
parent in charge.
The
problem is
made more puzzling by the fact that the god is repeatedly
described elsewhere in the Old Testament as
unflichingly benevolent, knowledgeable and infallible, as well as
solely
accountable for the creation and direction of everything from before
the beginning of time (for example, "All the days ordained for
me were written in
your book before one of them came to be" - Psalm 139 v16). So
how
did it all get into such a mess? The all-powerful, all-knowing
god appears to be saving Noah and his family, but hardly anyone else,
from
the consequences of the god's own incompetent planning
and
short-sightedness.
The
story exemplifies many of the
problems of biblical accuracy, both internally to the text and
in relation to knowledge since discovered:
-
There are two
narratives from
different sources edited together and containing conflicting
information (were
there two or fourteen of each clean animal?).
-
An important
element of
the story
is anachronistic: how could Noah know which animals were clean or
unclean when
the Mosaic laws hadn't yet been given?
-
There
are
obvious anomalies: why
didn't the people who already had boats avoid drowning? What happened
to fish?
-
Finally, it
is impossible in the light of scientific
research—for example, fossil records of
cataclysmic floods are only local, not global, and there is no evidence
of a
point in history in which all human and animal life was concentrated to
a
single point, as suggested by the conclusion at Ararat.
There
is a close
parallel with the subsequent
Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, which assumes that there
was once a universal human language,
transformed through a single dramatic event into multilingual anarchy.
Research in
linguistics, I am informed by one whose career has been devoted to such
things, shows that the first assumption is not entirely impossible
(though
vanishingly unlikely) but the second is.
The evidence against the Ark and Babel stories
outside the biblical text is incontrovertible unless,
like some, we think that the god has deliberately falsified the
evidence to fool us or test our "faith" in the biblical text: things
simply didn't happen like this.
For
most people these are not problems,
because the Flood is understood as a legend grown from the
history
of
actual, more limited inundations, a good story coming out of a
scientifically primitive but morally sophisticated culture, in which
the emphasis (as in today's
disaster movies) is on good news for the survivors and
come-uppance for
the bad guys (which, by implication, is unlikely to be us,
its
readers or hearers), and which is to be treated metaphorically.
But
for evangelical Christians it highlights a
particular and central issue. If the bible is the god's
comprehensive account of
the truth required by humanity, and not merely a limited and flawed
human attempt at it,
then when a major biblical story like this is historically and
scientifically inaccurate as well as theologically and
morally compromised,
the entire
scriptural enterprise becomes highly questionable. The god, it would seem,
not
only made
the Flood happen, but if the Bible is his inspired and authorized word,
he must have intended and
inspired the
story to be reported in
this unsatisfactory,
confusing and anomalous way.
I
have some respect for the most
extreme, literal fundamentalists who go to great
lengths to argue
that (for example) the world is less than 10,000 years old, that man
lived alongside
dinosaurs and that the god really did change the natural physical laws of
the
entire universe to "stop the sun" and give Joshua an hour more
daylight to defeat the Amorites in battle. They recognise what is at
stake:
once you concede a single detail of the bible as being incorrect, the
defences
are breached and the credibility of absolute scriptural authority is
fatally
undermined. If you can't trust one biblical statement,
why trust any
other?
Most
evangelicals who accept the primary authority of the Bible shy away
from such an
extreme view, claiming to be more reasonable about these
things and
approaching different passages contextually—but
this is only moving
the problem elsewhere. Where such a less deeply conservative
evangelical describes the bible as "reliable",
"authoritative" or "logical" they are using the methodology of Humpty
Dumpty, changing the meaning of such words when necessary to suit the
subject matter to which the words refer. The bible, all agree, is an
aggregation
of diverse literary genres created by many authors and editors, many of
them
unknown, at different times and for different reasons, but whether any particular passage
is to be regarded as true in an
historic, allegorical, prophetic, scientific, metaphorical or ironic
sense is
a matter of interpretation: the bible itself gives little explicit
direction.
For
example, the six-day Genesis creation story is usually accepted
even in fairly conservative circles as allegory, myth or
metaphor rather than historical testimony; but a thousand years ago it
was not
generally so, and the change has come about because we have
better science and we know that you can't grow vegetables before you
create the sun. Something similar has happened to the
theology of the Fall, and the once-popular theological notion that
disease and death are the result of a corruption of the natural order
brought about somehow by humanity's sin. Today it is taught otherwise,
even in our church schools: life has existed for
earth for
several
billion years, and not only have disease and death been an
inherent part of life from its beginning, but much "disease" is
caused by the natural predation of one (god-created) life form on
another. These are accepted, except by those with the blindest of blind
faith, as facts of life, and our biblical interpretation must be
revised
accordingly.
There
is no such thing as uninterpreted scripture, and no such
thing as truly objective interpretation, and in our generation there is
not even a general consensus
among those who have considered carefully the most important details.
The bedrock
Christian doctrines of Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the
Atonement, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, the final Judgment and
of the nature of
Heaven and Hell are reviewed, disputed and reconfigured as never before
from all
points within, as well as outside of, the evangelical movement. It is
notable, for example, that N T ("Tom") Wright, the mainstream
evangelical successor in the UK to John Stott as both popular and
serious
theologian, can formulate only a tentative general idea of the possible
nature of Hell from within the three irresolvably
conflicting alternatives normally on offer; and that in recent
serious theological
study of the Fall the view gaining adherence is the biblically obscure
and philosophically bizarre notion that inherited human sinfulness
and the corruption of the created order is the consequence of a
pre-human angelic rebellion—the
"Fall of the Angels"—because the
traditional Augustinian view has been found to be not
only scientifically but also biblically unsupportable: if
creation was perfect before the fall of Adam, why was the serpent
corrupt?
These
are not matters merely of academic interest.
It is difficult for the church to fulfil the command to preach the
gospel when it is
not at all clear what that gospel is, except that it is good
news and that it is about Jesus. Maintaining the illusion of consensus
can be a painful and exhausting balancing act, and many eventually fall
off the wall and break; some
are never put back together again. The sailing of the ark
was
written, in part, for broken Humpties.
Where
does this leave us? My own view
at present, mythologized in Sonnet 22, is that the bible
reveals a great deal of truth about the god and humanity, but that the
whole text itself is not
under the god's editorial management. Many of its writers are inspired,
some knowingly, and some words may come
"directly" from the god and are recorded as such, but it is in sum
a compilation
of human attempts to make sense of the god and their interaction with
humanity,
written from the limited perspectives of various ancient Middle Eastern
communities
over a period of a thousand years or so. There is no question that many
of its words
have great spiritual authority and power, but scientific or historical
accuracy was clearly not on the god's agenda.
The
Word was made flesh, and has been further revealed
through written words, but the two are not to be confused. The
first may be flawless (in a moral sense), but the second is not and
cannot be, where
the medium for their conception and delivery is flawed humanity. The god
seems to be content that this should be the case, or else we may assume
he would have organized
things otherwise. Why they did not choose to make things clearer is
itself
puzzling, and says some profound things about their intentions, if we
could only decipher what they are. In part I think it is to do
with not making scripture into an idol (see Sonnet
20), although that is exactly what many have done anyway.
Insistence
on an untenable literal
interpretation of the bible also prevents us from engaging with its
more profound mysteries: we hide truth instead of revealing it.
For example, if we insist on the literal truth of the Genesis
account of creation, in conflict with the generally accepted scientific
modles of the Big Bang and
later of DNA and evolution by natural selection, and devote our mental
energy to the suppression and denial of this painstakingly acquired
knowledge, then we will not learn anything of what the scientific
account might tell us
about the god's methods, or begin to grasp the power, intelligence and
sheer strangeness
of a creator god through study of his original creative act and the
extraordinary physical laws the god conceived and brought into being.
We will remain, in the words of Paul, playing with, and arguing about,
"childish things".
This
realisation helps us when faced with the more obvious and personally
troubling questions of pain, suffering and alienation. The
gospel really is absurd, in the technical
philosophical meaning of the word: faith transcends the rational and
exists in the domain of paradox. It is not that the truth is difficult
to
understand—it is impossible
to understand in terms of a systematic set of propositions (as
summarised in a lighthearted way in Sonnet 14).
When the god says in Isaiah "As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your
thoughts" they are not describing a more taxing logic but a quite
different way of thinking
which transcends the limitations of logic
and to which the bible only gives us clues. All
the evidence is that the god specializes in the
avoidance of obvious behaviour, and it makes sense to embrace
this. Such an approach does not take us away from belief in the
incarnate, suffering and risen Christ: on the contrary, it makes such a
chain of events more reasonable.
Images of
the ark
The Ark legend,
as told in the sequence of images accompanying the sonnets, has
another function here. The progress of the story—the impending storm,
the
building, the gathering of the animals, the sailing, the search for dry
land and
finally the disembarking at Ararat—mirrors the psychological and
spiritual journey
of the poems, from unease, through crisis, pilgrimage and to a new
beginning. In this role, the story told by the images is not an
allegory but
a parallel. There is no complete one-to-one correspondence of picture
and poem,
although on occasion (for example, in sonnets 12, 13, 14, 15,
20, 27,
30, 33
and 36)
there is a pleasing
aptness, sometimes accidental, in the particular pairing of
words and
image.
As with many
other images
on this site, I have credited but do not have explicit permission to
use these images gathered from unprotected sites on the internet, and
will of course remove and replace any immediately on request.