Saint Augustine On The Interpretation of Genesis In Relation To Science

"Now, sobered by his own earlier speculations and by repeated contact with learned individuals of his own age, Augustine, while defending the need to interpret Genesis "literally" (as he defined the term), nonetheless had no patience with those who used the early chapters of Genesis to promote views about the natural world that contradicted the best science of his day:

'Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and the orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and the 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 the 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 that 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 ressurection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods 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 wiser 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 obviously 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].'"

~Mark Noll's quote of St. Augustine's The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1:42-43.

Biblical Literalism Quote

"A biblical literalism, gaining strength since the 1870s, has fueled both the intense concern for human origins and the end times." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 194.

Intellectual Giants of Christendom

"What J.S. Bach gained from his Lutheranism to inform his music, what Johnathan Edwards took from the Reformed tradition to orient his philosophy, what A.H. Francke learned from German Pietism to inspire the University of Halle's research into Sanskrit and Asian literatures, what Jacob van Ruisdael gained from his seventeenth-century Dutch Calvinism to shape his painting, what Thomas Chalmers took from Scottish Presbyterianism to inspire his books on astronomy and political economy, what Abraham Kuyper gained from pietistic Dutch Calvinism to back his educational, political, and communications labors of the late nineteenth century, what T.S. Eliot took from high-church Anglicaanism as a basis for his cultural criticism, what Evelyn Waugh found for his novels in twentieth-century Catholicism, what Luci Shaw, Shirley Nelson, Harold Fickett, and Evangeline Paterson found to encourage creative writing from other forms of Christianity after they left dispensationalism behind - precious few fundamentalists or their evangelical successors have ever found in the theological insights of twentieth-century dispensationalism, Holiness, or Pentecostalism." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 138.

Evangelical Thought

"Evangelicals do not, characteristically, look to the intellectual life as an arena in which to glorify God because, at least in America, our history has been pragmatic, populist, charismatic, and technological more than intellectual." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind , 55.


"In a culture that mounted a frontal assault upon tradition, mediating elites, and institutions, the Bible very easily became... 'a book dropped from the skies for all sorts of men to use in their own way.'" ~Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 182; the quotation is from John W. Nevin.

"The Keswick, "higher-life" movement ... also contributed to a reduction of interest in biblical theology and deeper scholarship. No Christian in his right mind will desire anything other than true holiness and righteousness in the church of God. But Keswick had isolated one doctrine, holiness, and altered it by the false simplicity contained in the slogan, "Give up, let go and let God." If you want to be holy and righteous, we are told, the intellect is dangerous and it is thought generally unlikely that a good theologian is likely to be a holy person ... You asked me to diagnose the reasons for the present weakness and I am doing it .... If you teach that sanctification consists of "letting go" and letting the Holy Spirit do all the work, then don't blame me if you have no scholars!" ~ Iain H. Murray, D. Marytyn Loyd-Jones: The Fight of Faith, 1939-1981 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1990), 72-74.

"If that community's habits of mind concerning those things to which the community pays most diligent attention and accords highest authority - that is, to the Bible and Christian theology - are defined by naive and uncritical assumptions about the way to study or think about anything, so will its efforts to promote Christian thinking about the world be marked by naivete and an absence of rigorous criticism." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind , 130.

"Thus, when fundamentalists defended the Bible, they did so by arguing for the inerrancy of Scripture's original autographs, an idea that had been around for a long time but had never assumed such a central role for any Christian movement. This belief had the practical effect of rendering the experience of the biblical writers nearly meaningless. It was the Word of God pure and simple, not the Word of God as mediated through the life experiences and cultural settings of the biblical authors, that was important." ~The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, 33.