A Rebuke from St. Augustine
October 17, 2008
I was reading Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind last month in preparation for a talk, and I was very surprised by how contemporary a quote by St. Augustine appeared. In the passage from “The Literal Meaning of Genesis”, Augustine warns about the armchair science that Christians of his age engaged in. It made me think about how critical it is for Christians who care about creation to really know their subject–to learn from the world God made as well as from the Scripture He gave us.
It also made me very thankful for faithful scientists like Cal DeWitt, Tim Keyes, Dorothy Boorse and scores of others who interpret God’s revelation from the created world. And it sounds a cautionary note for us to pay careful attention to science and its conclusions about how the world works, for those of us who are just awakening to the creation care mandate of scripture. Here’s Augustine’s quote in full, from pp. 202-203 of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind:
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the word, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehood on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wisest brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion” [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].
Rusty Pritchard is the editor of Creation Care magazine.
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