When I was 17 years old and just really getting back into church, I spoke with one of the men who was going to church with me briefly about the idea of evolution. I'm not sure how the subject was brought up, but I can remember the gist of the conversation. I argued that Darwinian evolution and Christianity are perfectly compatible, based on the idea that Scripture was not really giving us a history in Genesis 1, and that Darwinism simply explained the mechanism through which God brought about humans. The response I received was not an apologetic for Scripture, it was an apologetic for apologetics. My friend told me that I should sit down and read some Ravi Zacharias, or maybe some other works (which he mentioned).
I had never heard of Ravi Zacharias. I had never really heard of apologetics. I had simply attempted to reconcile what I was being taught at school with what I read in Scripture. Being the typical teenager I certainly wasn't going to start asking my parents. After all, I did not think it a discussion worth having, I already knew the answer, why bother asking them for the solution to what was not a problem?
Reading Zacharias introduced me to apologetics. From him I began to read others. From that starting point I realized that there was a lot that I thought I knew that I simply did not know. In my own wisdom I had taken to reading Scripture through a lens that demythologized it. Sure, I still believed in miracles, but when I read about the crossing of the Yom Suf (I blame Dr. Garret for this, if you don't know what it is, I'll explain later) or about any number of other events, I simply assumed that these were not particularly miraculous as much as they were times where God simply used the normal course of events to bring about his will. (Why that is necessarily less miraculous I am not entirely sure. The idea of a God who could arrange things so a major event of world history would just happen to coincide with some otherwise naturally occurring event, so that the naturally occurring event would take on momentous meaning is pretty awesome. Work carefully, I promise that last sentence can be parsed into something sensible.)
Apologetics was my road map back to conservative Christianity. What I mean is that I had bought into a great number of rather liberal assumptions about Scripture. For instance I am sure that I thought that the authors could have made mistakes, that errors could have crept in via copying, and that Scripture was just as open to error as any 2000+ year old document. But, I had never considered what Scripture says about itself, and the logical defenses for that position.
When Paul says, "All Scripture is breathed out by God..." I had not considered that he could here actually mean that God had inspired the writers of Scripture, so that what they said and recorded was actually true and free from error. Further, I had not considered that God himself, as the ultimate author of Scripture, could also be the one to protect Scripture, so that it could be free from error. Therefore, my assumption was that the bible should be treated like all other documents, in how we read it and seek to correct it, because it is just like all any other document. Because I started with a wrong assumption, I came to a wrong conclusion: Scripture, while useful for moral teaching and important as a means of salvation, is not necessarily factually accurate in what it speaks of when it comes to history, anthropology, and every other subject it discusses.
My guide was always my own mind, and what I understood of current science. Scripture was useful, but not essential. God could be discovered through purely rational activity, such as philosophy. Man, while imbued with the unique image of God, was biologically only an evolved primate. Science was my key to understanding life, and so I pursued science, especially Chemistry and math.
But, in being exposed to apologetics I realized there was another way of looking at the world. What if Scripture was unique and special? What if we took it at its word, assumed its accuracy, and then sought to wrap our minds around its implications? What if we looked to prove how the bible has been correct, and did not assume that we, in our modern wisdom, knew more about the past than those who lived at the time and wrote about it? These questions required me to re-examine the bible, and to realize that there was a lot I missed.
Thinking about Scripture in this way transformed the way I thought about everything. Maybe God really did create the world in six day. Why not? What evidence was there to be marshaled against the idea? Could that evidence be explained by the biblical account of creation and fall?
What if everything that Scripture claimed was absolutely true and happened just as it happened? In that case Scripture became more than just a mere record of history, it was the means by which God communicated himself to men throughout every generation. Moreover, it did not record mere chance events of nature, but it testified to the awesome and inspiring work of a God who I could never grasp and who I could never put into a box of limitations.
This view of Scripture did not require me to abandon logic, it allowed me to dive deep into logic, to go as far as my mind could carry me into any mystery, into any question, because at the end of all exploration there was God to meet me once again. God the creator, designer, sustainer, provider, helper, discipliner, and lover. Every question I asked could point me to God, if I followed it through a biblical worldview. And so I realized, understanding Scripture does not limit my exploration, I do not find mindless chaos as when I assume a purely Darwinistic view of evolution, instead I find a God who is abundantly more than anything of which I had ever dreamed.
In every situation we need a guide, otherwise we will never know if we are on the right road. For me, more than anything else I have determined that Scripture is what I want as my guide. I want my mind guided by Scripture, my morals, my heart, and my imagination too. Why? Because, whereas I may vacillate on whether something is right or wrong depending on how I feel, and whereas scientific theory may be overturned tomorrow or in a hundred years, and whereas I may grow confused and make an error in logic, Scripture is God's Word, and it alone can claim to be eternally correct. Without a guide there is no meaning, but what guide can prove more accurate, or give greater meaning, than that which is inspired by God?
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