Category: Christopher Smith’s story

I enrolled in Harvard College after graduating from high school. While I was at college, my life continued to trace out the trajectory defined by its most important influences. I participated in Christian activities, joining the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, leading Bible studies, serving on the group’s executive committee, and becoming its president in my senior year. Literature was equally prominent in my life at college. In fact, it became the “business of my life,” at least for my college years, once I became an English major.

I had been uncertain of what I wanted to study when I first enrolled, but after taking a wide range of courses in my freshman year, I quickly realized that I liked my literature courses the best. I believe the “pleasure principle” that guides us in our vocational explorations was operative in this case. I liked my literature courses the best because they pointed to why I was there (at school) and why I was here (on earth).

To explain a bit further: As I have had the opportunity to study and teach in more recent years about the Christian doctrine of vocation (the doctrine that God has a special, knowable purpose for each one’s life), one principle I have accepted is that the use of God-given abilities brings pleasure and satisfaction—thus, these abilities are self-reinforcing and self-identifying.

During these college years I actually began to integrate, for the first time, the two strong interests that reflected my calling and the way I would fulfill it. The integration took place in one direction only to begin with: I asked what influence the Bible had had on literature.

In pursuit of this question, I undertook studies of the poems of Donne and Herbert, as well as works such as Paradise Lost. I eventually wrote two papers on Milton’s masterpiece, arguing in one that the seraph Abdiel was its “epistemological hero,” and examining Milton’s transformations of the epic genre in the other. My junior essay was on individual belief and social reform in the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, and my senior thesis was entitled “A Sense of Progress: The Spiritual Growth of Bunyan’s Pilgrim.”

It didn’t occur to me at the time to pursue integration in the other direction in which it might have taken place. I did not ask what influence literature had had on the Bible, that is, how the Bible’s character had been shaped by the conventions of the ancient literary genres in which it had been written. I continued to approach the Bible in the way typical of the broad movement within which I had come to a personal faith in Christ, as if it could be read meaningfully a verse here and a verse there.

I did take a couple of tentative steps in the direction of literary interpretation, however. For two of my literature classes I had the same teaching fellow, who introduced us to the concept that every work of literature has a “shaping principle,” some overriding goal that accounts for its specific elements such as plot, themes, imagery, and characterization. The better the work of literature, the clearer the shaping principle, because the goal has been more effectively reached.

After writing several “shaping principle papers” on works of English literature, I had the thought that it would be interesting to write a book one day on the shaping principles of the books of the Bible. The articles I eventually published on the literary structures of the biblical books of Revelation, Leviticus and Matthew reflected this longtime interest. (I feel that this dream was finally realized when I had the opportunity to draft introductions to all the books and sections of the Bible for an edition of the NIV that presented the biblical books in their natural literary forms, The Books of the Bible.)

We also did some “manuscript studies” in our Christian Fellowship groups, in which we considered a book of the Bible as an integrated whole and dispensed with potentially misleading chapter and verse divisions. This was a good introduction to the rudiments of literary interpretation of the Bible. But even in these exercises, we tended to treat books of the Bible as if they were unrooted in time and place. We did not ask much about their historical context, and we never even brought up literary genre.

One specific consequence of my failure to apply literary methods to biblical interpretation was that some questions I had heard asked over the years about the early chapters of Genesis remained lurking, unresolved, in the back of my mind. They were unresolved because they were unresolvable within the paradigm for biblical interpretation I shared with my Christian community, in which isolated verses or passages were read literally and non-contextually. In fact, although we didn’t realize it at the time, the only answers we could give to these questions were ones that would hold up only if we didn’t examine the rest of the text very carefully.

For example, when I attended the Creation Research Society program in high school, I heard a woman from my church ask Henry Morris a question during the break between two of his talks. She wanted to how the Tigris and Euphrates rivers could have been known in the pre-flood world if the deluge had been so great a transformation of the earth as the creationists described, with oceans washing over the continents and the like. Dr. Morris replied that she must not think the rivers we know by these names today are the same ones described in Genesis. Rather, he explained, our contemporary rivers were simply named after very different antediluvian rivers when the earth was resettled by Noah and his descendants after the flood. He cited as an analogy the way so many towns in New England were named after ones in “old” England. This made sense to the questioner, and to me, since I knew of towns such as Norwich and Greenwich in my home state of Connecticut. It was only years later that I noticed the Genesis text places the antediluvian rivers in precisely the same location as the ones called by their names today. Dr. Morris’s detailed and confident answer, by contrast, seemed to presume that they had moved.

Another time, again during my high school years, my family was camping at the Monadnock Bible Conference in southern New Hampshire, where we listened to a week of presentations from Calvin Chao, founder and president of a mission called Chinese for Christ. (He and his wife Grace later stayed in our home and spoke at my father’s church.) In one of his sermons he described his difficulties in coming to faith. He had attended a missionary school and had been assigned Bible reading as homework. He was told to write down and turn in any questions that occurred to him. After reading Genesis 1, he submitted the question, “How could there have been light on the first day when the sun was not created until the fourth day?” His professor returned his paper with the comment, “This is a very good question.” But no answer was ever provided. “And so,” Mr. Chao summarized, “it was difficult for me to believe the Bible.” And in all of his presentations that week, even though he told us how he eventually came to faith, he never gave us a solution to this problem, either. And so I was left with his “very good question” rattling around in my brain for the next several years.

The peaceful coexistence in my mind between the Bible and science, which had been mediated by literature, was disturbed in my early teen years when, along with an introduction to a deeper and more personal faith than we had previously known, my family and I were also introduced to a way of reading the Bible that held, essentially, “It can’t be poetry.”

In the early 1970’s, a renewal movement was sweeping through mainline churches, such as the one my father served, and also through the popular culture, where the so-called “Jesus People” appeared very briefly, as a offshoot of the “hippie” movement found faith in Christ. Some of these “Jesus People” were among my fellow high school students. When I recognized the same living faith in them as I had witnessed in my parents, who had recently experienced the renewal of their own faith, I sought for myself the peace and joy I was seeing in these others, and made a personal commitment of my life to Christ.

I deeply cherish the priceless gifts that my church upbringing had previously given to me, especially the importance of reaching out to those in need through practical demonstrations of the love of Christ, and a fearless openness to culture—art, music, literature, philosophy, and so forth. And now something vital and just as priceless was added to it, from another tradition within the broader church that had different but complementary emphases: a personal faith in Jesus.

As the renewal movement spread, and a critical mass of Christian students emerged in my high school, we began to meet weekly for Bible study and prayer. We also went frequently to youth rallies and conferences, on trips that were organized by the various churches we students attended. These outings constituted a broad and rapid exposure to this other part of the church that I hadn’t been introduced to before. The result was that the mainline Christian theology I’d learned to that point was quickly supplemented by an amalgam of fundamentalist, evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic perspectives.

One of these trips was to nearby Fairfield University for a conference sponsored by the Creation Research Society (CRS). Both Duane Gish and Henry Morris spoke at the conference. What I heard from them was very different from the mild position on origins with which I’d previously been comfortable.

Gish and Morris, in their presentations, were militant in tone, evangelistic in their appeal, and highly detailed when it came to the when and how of creation. Their fervor and documented scientific credentials combined to have an impact on me sufficient to make me abandon my previous, casually-held position (which, I learned, was considered “theistic evolution”) and accept their literal reading of Genesis and a young-earth paradigm for natural history.

After the conference many of us bought their books and took them home to read. I personally read Gish’s book Evolution: The Fossils Say No! I also signed up for the CRS newsletter, Acts and Facts, which I received for the next several years. My new convictions became part of the message I shared with others. With my fellow believing students, I handed out, along with Scripture portions and other gospel literature, Jack T. Chick’s tract “Big Daddy,” a brief cartoon in which a Christian student embarrasses a hostile evolutionist teacher by presenting evidences for recent creation.

I submitted a creationist term paper in my own biology class. My teacher, who had never been hostile, commented on it graciously and without evident embarrassment. One day, as I was riding home on the late bus, a fellow student engaged me angrily and at great length on the subject of evolution. The discussion, which was spread over most of our town, given the circuitous route of the late bus, reached no conclusion, although a third student whispered encouragingly to me on her way out the door, “I agree with you.”

I submitted an even longer creationist study as my research paper in junior English. The teacher gave me credit for developing my argument by extensive use of sources, but asked me to consider whether some of my conclusions might actually be based on personal opinion, rather than on hard evidence. It didn’t seem to me at the time that this could be the case. I really wasn’t living with any doubts or tensions in these years. I felt I could trust the scientific work of the creationists. They had Ph.D. credentials in the relevant fields, and the way they read the Bible was the same way everyone else read it in the part of the church where I’d been invited to meet Christ personally.

But I didn’t have to pursue my vocation much further before the creationist paradigm I was holding in my mind began to erode.

PART I: CREATIONISM AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION

This post begins Christopher Smith’s personal story.

When I was only a few weeks old, my parents presented me for baptism in the Congregational church where my father was the pastor. The Rev. Otto Reuman, minister emeritus of the church, performed the baptism so that my father could, with my mother, make the promises asked of parents on such occasions. Mr. Reuman said all of the usual and necessary things, but he also added something out of the ordinary. As he was baptizing me, he said, “I dedicate this child to be a minister of the gospel, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.”

Mr. Reuman had not consulted with my parents before making this declaration. I learned of the incident from them only years later, when I was a junior in college and shared that my plans were to attend seminary and prepare for the ministry. They, in turn, shared this story, and added that they hadn’t told me any earlier because they hadn’t wanted me to be unduly influenced. Having finally learned of this unusual occurrence, I can only conclude that God has always had a particular plan for my life. (I also conclude that God has a good sense of humor, since the child whose call to the ministry was first announced at his infant baptism grew up to be a Baptist minister!)

But for the purposes of this volume, how I have gone about being a minister—in some ways like, and in other ways unlike, my father and grandfather—is just as significant as the fact that I became a minister in the first place. As I wrote recently to a friend in seminary, “When God calls you to the ministry, he calls you.” That is, such a call must be fulfilled by drawing on and developing the specific abilities, interests, and gifts that God has given.

In my case, I have drawn extensively on literary and linguistic interests and aptitudes. As I have used and developed these, particularly in biblical interpretation, they have enabled me to articulate my faith in God as Creator in a way much freer of unresolved tensions than I once could.

I began to show signs of these literary and linguistic aptitudes, I’m told, from an early age. One Saturday when I was in grade school, for example, my grandparents came to visit for the day, bringing me as a gift the book Treasure Island. I disappeared upstairs as they visited with my parents. When the time came for them to leave, I came down to say goodbye, and when my grandmother said, “We hope you enjoy the book,” I replied, “Oh, I did.” I had already finished it.

Such a voracious appetite for reading, while indicative of a later vocation in which literature and language would figure prominently, was also only to be expected in someone who grew up in a family like mine. My mother was a part-time professor of English literature, and the interests that had led her into this work made themselves felt throughout the house.

To pass the time while washing and drying dishes, for example, we would make up and recite limericks at the kitchen sink. If one of us five children ever expressed something in non-standard English, a discussion of some fine point of grammar inevitably followed, in which we all joined enthusiastically. (I can still remember the happy day on which I was first introduced to the counterfactual subjunctive, after saying “If I was” instead of “If I were.”) And then there were those irresistibly fascinating books on my mother’s desk, with titles such as How Does a Poem Mean? In one way or another I’ve been asking myself that question ever since.

In high school I recorded that it was my future ambition to be “a minister, a writer, a linguist, or all three,” and I seem to be on my way to fulfilling that ambition. I’ve made it my commitment to preach each week from the original Hebrew or Greek texts of the Scriptures. I’ve published articles in journals of church history and biblical studies, including studies of the literary structure of biblical books, for which I’ve done research in French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Recently I taught a summer seminary course on “Discovering the Bible’s Inherent Designs,” meaning the literary designs of its individual books.

It will be equally clear from what I have just written, however, that my life’s work has also been shaped by the influence of my father’s Christian ministry, just as much as by my mother’s literary bent. Indeed, while I believe my call to the ministry comes directly from God (how could I argue with this, given how it was first announced?), I also recognize that my father’s ministry has furnished precedents, prototypes, and possibilities that have enabled me to discover, by both comparison and contrast, what my own ministry should look like.

As children we met many fascinating and engaging church leaders when they came to the house as Sunday dinner guests: missionaries, preachers, conference speakers, devotional authors. Holiday dinners typically featured a different kind of guest—people who otherwise would have had no family to eat with. Through these and countless other means, Christian ideas, and Christian practice, were continually held up to us.

Because our home was characterized by the confluence of Christian ministry and enthusiasm for literature and language, we never sensed a sharp conflict between the Bible and science. Stated simply, literature was available to mediate any conflict that might have arisen. The question of origins, specifically, had never really been troubling to us.

I remember my mother once showing us children an article she’d just finished reading in the religion section of the newspaper. In it, a man who described himself as trained in both paleontology and theology had written, in effect, that “God created the world, but used evolution to do it.” This made sense to us. Even if the early chapters of Genesis didn’t seem to be talking about evolution when read literally, why couldn’t they be poetic? Interpreting them would then be just another case of answering the question, “How does a poem mean?”