Paradigms on Pilgrimage

After the “gap” theory, Dr. Kline took up the so-called “day-age” theory, in which the “days” of creation are understood not as 24-hour periods, but as long stretches of time, possibly lasting millions of years. This view appeals to the frequent figurative use of the word “day,” in Hebrew as in many languages, to mean a longer period of time (for example, “in the days of the Romans”).

I had encountered this view before as well. Once a biology teacher in our high school (not the one whose course I had taken) visited our weekly Bible and prayer club and asked why we had trouble believing in evolution, when the best description of it she knew was found in the opening chapter of the Bible. She meant that Genesis 1 described simpler forms of life coming into being before more complex ones. But her reading depended on a figurative understanding of the word “day.” It would also have broken down with more careful scrutiny, as in Genesis life appears on land before it appears in the sea, contrary to the evolutionary scenario. But I did not entertain her interpretation long enough even to make this simple observation; I was convinced that a day was a day was a day.

Dr. Kline’s analysis of the “day-age” theory included some observations about its impracticality. He questioned, for example, how there could have been vegetation on earth (day 3)—not to mention light (day 1)—for many millions of years before the sun was created (day 4). This had been Calvin Chao’s “very good question,” I recalled. He described the typical answer to this objection: the sun actually became visible on earth on the “fourth day”; before this, it was in existence and warming the earth, but obscured by clouds or mist. But such a statement, he observed, appears nowhere explicitly in the text.

I found this very convincing. But most of his response to this interpretation, like his response to the gap theory, did not require going outside the text to show the impossibility of correspondence with natural history. Rather, he just challenged us to read more carefully. He called our attention to the way the “days” of Genesis have “evenings” and “mornings.” Why should this be specified, he asked, if they were not meant to be understood as literal days? I was with him all the way on this one.

Things got more uncomfortable for me, however, when he took up the third prevailing interpretation, the so-called “literal” reading of Genesis 1, whose natural-world corollary was a young earth. Here he found the same sequence problems as in the day-age view, if this chapter were to be taken as a description of actual events: light and vegetation before the sun.

The solution to this problem I had always heard within creationist circles was that God had exercised some supernatural influence on the created world during the first week, until everything needed for its natural operation was in place. For example, God would have made vegetation spring forth from the earth even in the deep freeze before the sun’s creation, and somehow have sustained it until the sun was created and had warmed the earth. If one was already prepared to believe that God was performing supernatural acts such as creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) by the spoken word, certainly the notion of a divine greenhouse effect could not strain credulity.

But Dr. Kline asked a question that would never have occurred to me: What does the Bible say about how God sustained the creation while it was in process? Was this through supernatural agencies, or through natural providence? He called our attention to Genesis 2:5, which read, according to his translation, “Now no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up, because the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.”

If “no plant of the field was yet in the earth,” he noted, we were back in the six-day period; the narrative of the book proper (2:4ff) was picking up the story at a certain point in the prologue (1:1-2:3). But clearly, during this period, God was working through natural providence: there were no plants because there was no water and, in effect, no one to mow the lawn. Once these were furnished, plants could grow—naturally.

This did not sit well with me, as the premise of supernatural agency was the key to my literal reading. I wrote in my notes, “The whole argument rests on ‘because.’” Dr. Kline had acknowledged that this word was not to be found in most translations of the Bible. (The majority of versions do say “for,” which can mean “because,” but it can also be interpreted in other ways.) I raised my hand and asked him why he thought this was so.

What I was getting at was, “Why do you think your translation is right and everyone else’s is wrong?” But it did not even occur to him to defend himself against my implication that he was adopting a self-serving translation. He simply replied, with evident frustration at other translators, “I don’t know why it isn’t in our translations, because it’s definitely there in the original.”

Not knowing any Hebrew, I was not qualified to investigate the matter myself, but I found reassurance in the thought that the consensus favored a translation that posed no problem for my literal-supernatural reading. (Years later, when I did learn Hebrew and began using it regularly in sermon preparation, I discovered repeatedly how tradition and extra-textual exigencies do slant our translations. And I saw for myself that “because” really is in the text of Genesis 2:5.)

Having objected to the three prevailing understandings of Genesis 1, Dr. Kline proceeded to present his own view. (I’m not sure whether it was original with him, but my generation of Gordon-Conwell alumni will always associate it with him.) He first made the case that the opening creation account in Genesis must be considered “poetry.” He showed us that the whole account consisted of a sequence of formulaic “strophes” (variations on the sequence “God said . . . God made . . . God called . . . God saw . . .”), punctuated by a repeated refrain (“and there was evening and there was morning, the Nth day”).

He also assured us that in the original Hebrew the account featured the poetic devices of alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds) and assonance (repetition of vowel sounds). And even in English we could appreciate the presence of parallelism or repetition of meaning, a defining characteristic of Hebrew poetry—for example, “God made man in his own image, in the image of God he created him” (v. 27). So our expectations of this account should rightfully be those of poetry, not of narrative. It was literal interpreters who had to labor under the burden of proof.

He then showed us, from the text, how days 1-3 describe God making “creature-kingdoms”: day and night; sky and sea; the dry land. Days 4-6 then show how God populated each of these kingdoms in the same sequence in which they were made, setting within each a “creature-king”: the sun, moon, and stars to populate the day and night, with the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night; fish to swim in the sea and birds to fly in the sky, with the “sea monster” to rule the sea; and cattle, creeping things, and humans to populate the land.

Humans, Dr. Kline noted, are “creature-kings” not just of the land, but of the sky and sea as well. They are God’s vice-regents, in other words. But even they must defer to God’s prerogatives, hence the sabbath of the seventh day, when the entire created structure pauses to acknowledge its Creator. (Dr. Kline winced at the separation of the seventh day from the first six by an unfortunate chapter division in modern Bibles.)

Here was an amazing depth of meaning I had never appreciated before in the account of the days of creation. This passage was not so much a description of how we got here as an explanation of why we were here. It had a moral purpose, challenging humans to acknowledge God’s supreme lordship, despite their pretensions to self-determination and self-sufficiency. I was immediately won over to Dr. Kline’s reading of the passage. His literary arguments had had a compelling effect on a literature major.

Having sensed a call to the ministry even before entering college, my plan had always been to go to seminary afterwards. The summer after graduation, however, these plans were suddenly but pleasantly put on hold for a year when I became engaged to a young lady with whom I had maintained a long-distance friendship over the years, Priscilla Godfrey of Sherbooke, Quebec. After devoting a year to wedding preparations and to deepening our relationship, we were married on May 23, 1981. (In the process, I became formally related to my future co-author, Stephen J. Godfrey, as his brother-in-law.)

I entered Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary that September. As a multidenominational evangelical seminary, Gordon-Conwell exposed me to a much broader range of Christian thinking and practice than I had yet encountered, all of it nevertheless falling solidly within the stream of historic Christian orthodoxy. I would soon discover, as I took classes in church history, that the evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, and Pentecostal groups with which I had become familiar, even though they appeared quite diverse from one another, were really very close cousins within the extended family of Christendom. I would meet greater and greater numbers of my other relatives in the faith as I engaged my professors and fellow students in the days ahead.

One of the most remarkable of these newly-discovered relatives was Dr. Meredith G. Kline. I took his Old Testament Hermeneutics course in my first semester at Gordon-Conwell, as did most students in those years. I sat back in awe as he spoke: He was brilliant, and a meticulous scholar, but his deep faith and Christlike character shone through everything he said and did. This was a rare combination. I felt it set a standard towards which I should aspire.

Much of what Dr. Kline presented in class was very challenging to me, but in a most welcome way. He was, for example, an Orthodox Presbyterian and as such a “Five-Point Calvinist.” (The Calvinist tradition stresses the sovereignty of God, as opposed to the “Arminian” tradition with which I was familiar, which stresses human freedom of will and consequent moral responsibility. The “five points” are total depravity, specifically, the fallenness of human reason; unconditional election; a limited atonement; the irresistibility of grace; and the perseverance of the saints, or their eternal security.)

Students would chuckle outside of class that Dr. Kline somehow found the elect and the reprobate on every page of Scripture. From him, and from other professors in the same theological tradition, I received a new appreciation for the grace of God by which alone we come to salvation. I did not embrace all of the “five points” in the end, such as the notion of a limited atonement, but in retrospect I recognize that my theological categories were helpfully broadened by the encounter.

This was not the main way Dr. Kline influenced me, however. His theological commitments, strong as they were, were not primary; he was first and foremost a biblical scholar, and he carried out his scholarship specifically through a careful reading of the text. His insightful reading of one text in particular, the account of the days of creation at the beginning of Genesis, changed forever the way I would understand that text, and the way I would henceforth read all others.

In a class lecture presenting research he had published in one of his early articles, “Because It Had Not Rained” from the Westminster Theological Journal, Dr. Kline explored and assessed the interpretations of Genesis 1 then current among evangelicals. This was a lecture he probably gave countless times, but hearing it was a watershed in my personal understanding of the Bible. These interpretations, he explained, arose in light of the need readers felt to reconcile the Bible’s apparent description of a recent creation with geologic evidence suggesting the earth was very old.

One of these interpretations was the so-called “gap theory,” which postulated that a very long period of time had transpired between the events described in the opening sentence of the Genesis creation account (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) and in the next sentence (translated to read, “The earth became without form and void”). The former statement, in this interpretation, was a description of an original creation in which all of the dinosaurs and other extinct creatures known from fossils had lived, and the latter was a description of some catastrophe that had wiped out life on earth. The rest of the account of the “days of creation” was held to be actually the story of a re-creation. I had heard this interpretation before, in a “Jesus People” coffeehouse, but I had dismissed it, mostly because I saw no need to accommodate a long period of time in the story of creation, convinced as I was by young-earth claims.

Dr. Kline also took issue with this interpretation, but on very different grounds. He explained that, in keeping with the conventions of Hebrew literature, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” was just a summary introduction, like a headline or lead paragraph in modern journalistic writing. (Other examples of this literary convention abound in the Hebrew Scriptures; to cite one other instance, the statement later in Genesis, “Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more,” provides a summary introduction to the account that follows about Joseph sharing this dream with his brothers.

Proof that the opening statement was indeed a summary of the entire account, the “creation of the heavens and the earth,” could be found later in the account itself, in verses 7-8, where the creation of the “heavens” was described in more detail, and in verses 9-10, where the same was done for the creation of the “earth.” The cosmological implications, of course, were that gap theorists would have to argue for a total destruction and re-creation of the universe, not just the ruin and restoration of terrestrial life. But Dr. Kline did not find it necessary to draw out these implications. It was enough for him to show that these interpreters were reading literature badly.

This was probably the first time I’d ever seen that if we want to interpret the Bible accurately and credibly, we need to approach it on its own terms, that is, by understanding and respecting the literary conventions according to which it was written. The integration I had not made so far, between literature and the Bible, was now under way.

Even though I now had many questions, I continued to believe that the opening account in Genesis was an exact description of the events of the first six days of the physical creation. If I’d had to account for light without the sun on the first three days, I would have appealed to some supernatural agency. But as I would later learn from Meredith Kline (about whom much more will be said in future posts), the Genesis text itself posits natural agencies at work during these days instead.

At the start of one year in college, another member of our Christian fellowship described to me her experience setting up a weekly Bible study for the summer that had just ended. She had gathered several interested students who were home from different colleges, and it appeared that she and another young man would take turns leading the study. But the first week, she told me, it turned out he wanted to explore such questions as, “Why are there two creation accounts in Genesis?” This approach struck her as too critical, almost skeptical, and she came home very distressed. She told me that it was an answer to prayer when he suddenly proved unable to attend any more of the meetings. Even though she had to lead them all herself, she had a much more comfortable experience than she had imagined she would after the first week. I was genuinely happy that her group had been free from tension and discomfort. But I also could not help wondering, “Why are there two creation accounts in Genesis?” I wouldn’t get an answer to that one for a long time.

I dealt with any difficulties in my literal reading of Genesis, in other words, by suspending judgment on questions it could not resolve. I was not in the habit of seeking explanations of difficult statements by careful attention to the surrounding context, and this shielded my position further. I therefore was able to go through Harvard College as an open-minded but pretty thoroughly convinced creationist.

In fact, when my grandfather gave me a gift to allow me to buy any books I’d been wanting, as his personal acknowledgment of the “Detur Prize” I’d received for being among those in our freshman class who’d achieved highest honors, I chose three creationist books, including Whitcomb and Morris’s The Genesis Flood. Looking back, I can see that these books appealed to me particularly during this time when I was working so hard to integrate my faith within a new realm of intellectual activity because they represented an attempt to reconcile faith and reason. They didn’t reject science; instead, they claimed to present scientific evidence that validated a literal reading of the biblical accounts. I would find out later that both this “evidence” and that way of reading were problematic. But for the time being, these books helped reassure me that the two ways of knowing were compatible.

Still, the presence of these writings on my bookshelf at college sparked many interesting discussions with fellow students, especially other members of our Christian fellowship, some of whom turned out to be, to my astonishment, “evolutionists.” When I mentioned to one such Christian student, completely outside the context of discussions we’d had earlier about creation and evolution, that I admired the works of C.S. Lewis and hoped one day to write books myself defending the reasonableness of Christian faith, he replied, “Just don’t use anything from the Creation Research Society in your books.” This unexpected reference made quite an impression on me. I admired both the faith and the thoughtfulness of this student, who was a year ahead of me in school. His adamant opposition to what I considered good science and good biblical interpretation made me consider creationism with some suspicion, practically for the first time.

In my final year of college I roomed with a Christian biology major who wrote a creationist senior thesis. It was quite puzzling to me when my roommate’s extensive presentation of the best evidences creationism could muster did not seem to sway his faculty readers, who were surely in a position to appreciate these evidences. Was it really the case that these professors were willfully blind to physical facts because they wanted a moral carte blanche?

I didn’t know much about these particular readers, but I’d encountered many other Harvard professors in my own courses, and I had found them in general to be fair-minded and objective when it came to the strengths and weaknesses of positions they didn’t personally hold. Indeed, one of them, a history professor, had explained a troubling passage in the Bible for me better than any preacher ever had. “When Jesus said, ‘The poor you will always have with you,’” this historian had explained, “he meant orphans and widows, not victims of structural injustice.” So I had to entertain the possibility that the Harvard professors who had read my roommate’s thesis could have been, like their faculty colleagues whom I knew, objective people of good will. Was the problem therefore with what we considered evidences of a recent creation? The only other option was that the biology department had attracted most of the bad apples in the school.

I now find it significant that when I graduated from college and took my other possessions home, I left my creationist books behind. Officially I donated them to our Christian fellowship’s small, eclectic library. But I think symbolically I was leaving them for others to wrestle with, in the place where I had become much more disillusioned with their teaching than I realized at the time.

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?”