How old is the earth and what do the days of creation measure? Was the flood local or global? How much of evolutionary biology can Genesis 1–2 incorporate into its testimony?
I began teaching high school Bible seven years ago. Had you had asked me to describe what a Christian’s role was in engaging faith and science, questions like these would have immediately come to mind. When looking for intersections between faith and science, I used to be limited to the topic of origins. However, participating in the FAST project made me consider how unexpected stories and themes throughout Scripture (outside of just Gen. 1–2) could form and shape how Christians put faith and science together. I’ll offer two examples here (see the “Resurrection” Activity Map at teachfastly.com).
Science as One Way of “Knowing” Truth
The revelation of Jesus Christ is at the heart of our Christian faith, regardless of different positions on origins, genetics, environmentalism, climate change, or any number of potentially divisive faith and science issues. Take away the resurrected Christ and the corresponding hope we have in our own resurrection at His return disappears. As Paul puts it, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). Perhaps starting with “in the beginning” from John 1:1 instead of from Genesis 1:1, would help correct our theological balance here. I have my twelfth-grade students read these affirmations at the start of our doctrine of creation unit for this very reason.
However, acknowledging that the Easter reality provides shape and meaning to Christian life can prove difficult when confronted by materialistic scientism. Modern science obviously shows that “dead people stay dead,” as we are reminded by any number of YouTube videos of New Atheist denunciations of miracles in general or the resurrection in particular.
One way to pull the rug from under the feet of this sort of skepticism is to engage students in the realization that the ancient Israelites actually agreed with the notion that “dead people stayed dead.” Throughout much of the Old Testament, no notion of an afterlife existed, save for a shadowy sort of underworld (sheol in Hebrew) from which there was no escape. Take Job 7:9 for instance: “As a cloud vanishes and is gone, so one who goes down to the grave [sheol] does not return.” Or the mysterious, borderline agnostic language of Ecclesiastes: “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?” (3:20–21). Challenging students to confront this stark reality of death and the underworld allows them to see that rather than being gullible about spirits, afterlife destinies, and immortality, the ancient Israelites were actually quite realistic about what happens when people take their last breath: it’s game over.
And yet, experiencing the “death” of Babylonian exile caused the captive Israelites to welcome further revelation from a merciful, life-giving God: the revelation of resurrection hope. By the time of postexilic prophets like Ezekiel (see chap. 37) and Daniel (see chap. 12), students should recognize a shift from “dead people stay dead” to “dead people stay dead . . . until the day when God reestablishes His reign and raises people to new, bodily life!”
Perhaps ancient Jews were no more prone to superstition than we are: they were simply inspired (by God) to hope for a “new creation” reality where common sense saw only decay and death. Further (as writers like N. T. Wright have pointed out), they expected God to bring His kingdom to earth and resurrect all the righteous at the end of the age. Yet suddenly Jesus, one man, was raised right in the middle of history, right under the Roman imperial occupation of Judea, no less. When early Christians began proclaiming “Jesus is risen,” they were probably as initially (yet delightfully) shocked as we in modern Western culture might still be.
This, however, presents a wonderful opportunity for students to acknowledge that science occupies only one place in our belief-forming capabilities. It is only one way that we “know” things to be true. Ask your students, for example, what did you eat for breakfast this morning? When were you born? What is the person next to you thinking right now? In discussing their answers to questions like these, students become aware of the role that things like memory, perception, and trustworthy sources play in belief formation. I rely on my assumption that my memory usually is operating correctly to believe I ate cereal this morning, on my experience with my own consciousness for my perception that people have real minds in their heads, and on my trust in my parents concerning my birth date; and when they present me with a birth certificate, I have no reason to doubt its authenticity.
But science cannot prove any of these realities by itself. Christians and non-Christians alike need a certain level of faith to know these things to be true. One might even say I need a certain level of love in order to believe, whether in the scientifically unverifiable knowledge that I love my wife and she loves me, or in the even deeper, all-encompassing love that kept Jesus on the cross and then burst Him from the grave.
The resurrection of Jesus may indeed be known ultimately, and only, by faith. But this faith needs grounding in trustworthy sources and experiences, ones that we and others who have gone before us know to be true, even if by sources outside of science alone. I hope that my students leave class realizing that scientifically we can never prove that Jesus’s resurrection happened, not because scientists are all unbelievers but because science is not the right tool for unique historical events. We can celebrate the historical truth of the resurrection based on the transforming power it unleashed on the world. We see the evidence in the disciples’ unexpected response, Scripture’s witness, and the Spirit’s continued movement today.
The Moabites and the Israelites
A different example pushes students to practice the kind of unity that the gospel of the risen Jesus announces right in the midst of disagreements and tensions. I love having my students consider the identity of the Moabites and how different biblical texts grapple with their identity and place in God’s family.
To put it bluntly, the biblical Israelites did not like Moabite people. At all. Taking a brief tour through the Old Testament, we first stumble across the tale of a shocking, incestuous encounter between a drunken Lot and one of his daughters, which produces a boy named Moab (Gen. 19:30–38). Israelite men are stated as having “indulged in sexual immorality” specifically with Moabite women (Num. 25:1). The writer of Judges describes the fate of the obese Moabite, King Eglon, whose bowels discharge when he is stabbed in the gut by the crafty Israelite judge Ehud (3:20–23). David orders his Moabite prisoners of war to lie down on the ground and then he executes two-thirds of them (2 Sam. 8:2). Nehemiah beats and rips out the hair of certain Israelite men guilty of marrying non-Israelite women, including Moabites (Neh. 13:23). We could go on.
Yet standing poignantly in the midst of this chaos and animosity is the beautiful book of Ruth. The story of how a widowed foreigner (from Moab!) is welcomed into the Israelite family. A Moabite who pledges herself to her Israelite mother-in-law, Naomi, and to the Israelite God, Yahweh. A Moabite shown compassion by Boaz, an Israelite who might know the unpleasant stories about “those people” but who also knows his God’s compassion for the outcast. A Moabite who even becomes part of Jesus’s family tree (Matt. 1:5).
In the past, I might have skipped the unpleasant texts above and jumped right to this story of acceptance and grace. But thinking about how the Bible connects with debates about faith and science invited me to consider a different route. First, I divide my students up into small groups, with some assigned the negative Moabite texts and some assigned texts from Ruth. I ask them, “What does the Bible say about Moabites? How did the Israelites view them?” Of course, the students who read stories of drunken incest, fat engulfing swords, and callous, mass execution assume one thing, while those who read highlights from Ruth will have a completely different perspective. The tension between the different groups’ answers replicates the ancient Israelites’ uneasy dilemma, recalling both Moses’s warning to never enter into a treaty of friendship with the Moabites as long as they lived (Deut. 23:6) and the story of a faithful Moabite woman in their midst.
We discuss how the Bible itself models the reality of disagreements in a human community, even in the body of believers. So, it’s important not to base conclusions on controversial faith and science topics on a single part of Scripture. Second, this example shows that reconciliation is possible. Look at Ruth, the ancestor of Jesus. Look at the Jewish Messiah with Moabite blood in his veins. Maybe the way forward is in realizing that through God’s covenant people “all people on earth will be blessed” (Gen. 12:3), which is reaffirmed in Revelation 5:9–10, where the church consists of people “from every tribe and language and people and nation.”
Though it clearly didn’t happen overnight, the conversation about Moabites turned from hatred and exclusion to compassion and love. Similarly, try having your students practice this same kind of “reading and reconciling” technique when confronting the Acts 15 dilemma over what to do with new Gentile believers in a previously Jewish Christian community. Do we follow the “everlasting covenant” of circumcision in Genesis 17:7 or not? What would it look like in our school communities to practice this kind of reconciliation within diverse viewpoints, following the lead of our unifying-yet-diverse story of Scripture? Is there anything to be learned from past tensions within the people of God as we face current disagreements about faith and science?
Faith and Science, This I Know
Making connections in the classroom between faith and science depends on so much more than whether we get the question of origins based on Genesis 1–2 right. As Bible teachers, let’s encourage one another to look for unexpected points of contact throughout the whole story of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation.
Let’s celebrate our unity as Christians in the reality of Jesus, our risen Savior, across all our differences and diversity. And let’s equip our students to live out that claim in a way that neither overestimates nor dismisses the role that science plays. May God give us the grace we need to pursue this reconciling work together.
Ben Tameling studied religion and history for secondary education at Calvin College and recently completed an MA in Bible and theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. He teaches Old Testament survey, Reformed doctrine, and social studies classes in secondary school.
