Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning.
Good morning, everybody.
Feels like fall has definitely hit. Okay, cooler outside, but hopefully our hearts are warmed and will be warmer at the end of this session as we think about the marvels of our dear Lord.
I have lots of announcements. I hope I remember everything.
Our Dr. Zimiti has a book that he has published that will contain a lot of information we've learned today, and even more so there are 11 flyers that will go around.
If you want to take one when you sign in, please do so. And at the end of the session, we'll have the QR code presented so that if you want to jump in and get that code and buy it immediately, you'll have that option.
This is the last of our series. I'm trying to organize so that I have everything.
This has been a wonderful series.
And next week we're going to start the new series, Faith Seeking Understanding.
And we have some of our cherished members of the church. We'll be giving presentations and it will be following along with this booklet. If you haven't gotten a copy of this booklet, it's in the back. Okay. So you can take one of those booklets so you're prepared because you've signed in to a small group.
I think all of our small groups are closed. I mean, Marshall, I don't know if you know this, but I think.
Do you know that all the small groups are pretty much closed except the computer one, the AI?
Yeah, there's nothing. No, they all say closed. But you can go online.
You can go online and double check. If you haven't signed up for small group, I think that's it then. For those of you who were here, or maybe those of you who are here for the first time for this talk, we have recording of last week, so I encourage you to listen to it.
It's fabulous. It's structured, lots of content, lots to think about.
Okay, so this is part two.
Dr. Zimiti is a scholar of religion and history and is a candidate for ordination in the PC usa. He's published several articles and books and reviews and is the author of two books, Shadows and Solid the and A History of Religion and Archaeology. That's one book. Sorry. The second book is Inside a very Great the Faith and Wonder of love, J.R.R. tolkien. Okay.
All right. Let's gather our thoughts, our hearts, and I'll say a prayer and we can get started. Okay.
Heavenly Father, thank you for this day.
Thank you for the space.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Be alive to learn. Lord, I pray that you will warm our hearts and grant us a little bit more of the mind of Christ.
As we think about these complicated matters, we remind ourselves that the earth is yours and everything in it.
So any human attempt to try to understand what that means is something ultimately that serves your purpose. And we thank you for that. Help us understand.
And may Dr. Zamiti help us understand. May he be a vehicle of that understanding.
Dispense to us. Bless him as a young man in a career with the mind he has, the mind you've granted him. Grant him grace to serve you in the deepest way. I pray this in Christ's name. Amen.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Amen.
Thank you. Path Good morning everyone. It's great to see you again.
Week 2 thanks for coming back. I know I made some big promises last week and so I'm hopeful that we can meet those.
So before we get to our story today, as you are grabbing some coffee, let me remind us of where we have so last week we explored the story of religion versus Science.
I shared with you the story of a tenured professor in my undergrad university being fired over evolution and the literal reading of the Bible.
We followed several archaeologists and biblical scholars who went looking for traces of the supernatural stories in the natural world, only to find nothing.
This story was one of absence. We saw and we unpacked how this absence shapes us even now, to engage the world around us and the churches and our neighbors in particular. It shapes us in three lasting ways.
It assumes and expects that science is disenchanting, that science and religion are locked in inevitable conflict, and that religion and literalism are innately irrational and unscientific.
We then confronted the ways this story shapes a posture in us that can be combative, even a little jaded, in which the whole point of our relationships is built on debunking, of debunking someone else's literal beliefs in order to get to something new.
And what is at stake is being right.
What is at stake is winning an empirical argument. Thus is the tale of religion versus science.
And last week I told you that there is a better story.
And I regret using those words because now you all are ready for this week to be more entertaining and engaging than last week was. And I hope that I can deliver on this. But I want to say what I meant by better is that I think the story we are going to explore today, the story of religion in science, more accurately captures where we have come from and also what is at stake in this story.
So, as most of you realized last week, the heart of the matter of this story is the thing that we call literalism.
And to begin this morning, I want to clarify a few things about literalism.
The first is to emphasize that modern literalism, the kind of which I grew up with, and from our conversations last week, the kind of which many of you grew up with, is not the same thing as the literalism that existed before archaeology. And I know this can be confusing, but because the name stays the same, but what it actually defines and means completely transforms in this story. Are you with me?
Before the 19th century, literalism was not a fixed principle.
It was a posture of trust.
Trust in ancient authors and therefore the texts and the stories that they wrote.
Now, this was a relatively open trust, which meant that even as literalism invited people to read ancient stories like the Bible, as history, it was not dependent on them being history.
As we saw last week, this trust was fostered by things like sacraments and scriptures that held the transcendence and the empirical worlds could meet and kiss.
Yet there is one additional aspect of literalism that is crucial to our story that we have to engage with before we start today. And it is what most scholars call primitivism.
Primitivism is the belief that what came first in history was perfect, that all change is inherently declined and the only way forward is to go back.
You all know this belief really well by different names. You might know it by the movement that says, make America great again.
This story says that the world was once great, and the only way we can be great again is to go back to the way things were now. Primitivism has been around for a very long time, and it actually helped fuel the thing called literalism in this story. Because if we need to recapture the way things were in the beginning, that assumes we know the way the beginning looked like. It assumes we have an accurate history that we can re enter and reincarnate.
It was one of the primary functions of ancient stories like the Bible and the tales from Greece and Rome to relay to the people of the modern world what the first perfect times were like.
Yet for centuries, this was not the only function of ancient stories.
Preachers and theologians from Origen of Alexandria to St. Augustine to John Wesley, could talk about the different levels of ancient texts. The literal, the metaphorical, the spiritual.
And even though all of them thought the literal was really important and a valid part of our reading of the Bible, for them the literal level was not the most miraculous and moving part of a story.
Yet, as we saw last week, by the 20th century, more and more people held to the position that all of The Bible was literal history, or it was nothing.
And so the question is, what happened? Where did the earlier belief go? And where did this hardened principle come from?
Well, let me show you. In a series of vignettes, the invitation to imagine ancient texts as literal history inspired more and more artists to accurately and faithfully locate these stories in timelines and maps that we talked about last week.
These timelines and maps helped readers link the world of their beloved texts with the real world they lived in.
Every character, every event corresponded to a material reality that left a tangible mark on this world.
Genesis, the Exodus from Egypt, the accounts of kings of Israel, Isaiah, Herodotus, Homer's Iliad, and the Odyssey, all of these were trusted as history, for trust is all these readers could really do.
Until.
It's 1738, and a local prince in southern Italy is digging wells for a new palace.
These wells stretch 80ft below the Earth.
Then, from the spearing of shovels, there appears columns, then a statue, then whole temples and arenas and ancient libraries filled with papyrus scrolls.
This buried underground city becomes a thriving tourist attraction, even a pilgrimage site for some.
After more digging, there is an ancient inscription of the name of this place, Herculaneum.
You're not excited about this, but this fires up people in the 18th century because they say, wait a minute. Like the Herculaneum we've read about in the ancient texts that was destroyed in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, The Herculaneum that was founded by the ancient hero Hercules?
That Herculaneum?
Yes. That Herculaneum they think is real and exists beneath our feet.
It's 1791, and Jean Baptiste Chevalier has left Europe for the eastern shores of the Aegean Sea in search for the city of Troy, the setting of the ancient stories of Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey. He asserted to onlookers that it is well known that the long war which was carried on at Troy is not a poetical fiction, but a historical fact.
He reported back to the Royal Society of Edinburgh that you will hardly believe that I found this pleasing dream realized.
Yet he really sparked a search that would take almost 100 years to finalize.
And while there was plenty of back and forth in that search, it ended up being a success.
By 1871, 60ft below the earth, there stood the walls and treasures of the ancient city of Troy, a city that is now confirmed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
In the words of one historian, Troy's discovery and excavation proved again that works of art, meaning artful stories, could be found in the earth. If only you went looking for them.
It's 1846 and Austin Henry Layard is directing one of the largest excavations to date that is funded by the British Museum.
He is digging into the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in modern day Iraq when his workers unearth a corner of black marble at the end of a long day's digging.
Layar joins them in the trench and continues digging to reveal an obelisk lying on its side, 10ft below the ground.
It is covered in inscriptions, and even more remarkably, it is covered in a whole sea of reliefs and pictures from the world of the 9th century BCE.
It commemorates the deeds of Nimrud's king Shalomancer III, depicting all who came to pay tribute and grovel before this king of kings.
Layard is particularly taken with the groveling of one prisoner. Here you see him down below that is dressed in a manner that Layard does not recognize from a people he does not know. Despite all of his historical reading, even when Layard shares it with the famed linguist and translator Henry Rawlinson, Rawlinson cannot initially understand who the prisoner is.
Yet less than a year later, the inscription around the image is translated, reading, I received the tribute of Yahu, son of the people of the land of Omri.
This Yahu is in fact known by both Layard and Rawlinson. He was the king of Israel in the biblical Book of Two Kings.
This artifact remains particularly special, even for us today.
It is still the only portrayal we have of an ancient Near Eastern, in ancient Near Eastern art, of an Israelite or Judean monarch. In fact, it is the only portrayal we have of any Israelite or Judean person from the Bible.
It's 1868 and Frederick Augustus Klein is being led across the rocks and ruins of Deban in modern day Jordan.
The site is an ancient settlement on the eastern slopes above the Dead Sea.
His hosts have told him of a curious stone with a long inscription and a forgotten language that no visitor or traveler has yet been able to decipher.
Klein says that something within him begins to burn with a desire to see.
And his hosts lead him to a large artifact of black basalt, a dark volcanic city stone.
Klein measures, examines, takes a squeeze and makes an Alphabet, which he then shares with more scientific friends.
What comes back amazes him.
The inscription is a proclamation of Victory from the 9th century BCE by King Mesha of an ancient place called Moab.
It reads in part, omri was the king of Israel and he oppressed Moab for many days, for Chemosh was angry with his and Chemosh said to me, go, take Nebo from Israel. And I went in the night and I fought against it from the break of dawn until noon. And I took it and I killed its whole population. For I had put it to the ban of Ashtar Chemosh.
And from there, the inscription says, I took the vessels of Adonai and hauled them before the face of Chemosh.
This is the inscription even in 2026.
This remains the oldest artifact outside of the Bible's pages to mention the sacred name of God from the Bible.
Our last artifact for today comes to us from 1896, when Flinders Petrie is digging in Thebes, the ancient capital of Upper Egypt.
He is the latest in a long line of Egyptologists who have been working in this area since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt almost 100 years before.
He has dug 13ft down into the settled Nile mud and unearthed the mortuary temple of Merneptah, a pharaoh of the 19th Dynasty in the 13th century BCE and the son and successor of the famed Ramesses II.
During his excavation, Petrie uncovers a slab of black granite, 10ft tall and weighing just over 4 tons.
Covered in hieroglyphics, this artifact is laying on its back. But Petrie soon learns that there is another inscription on its reverse side.
To get at this inscription, Petrie digs a small tunnel so that one could, quote, crawl on their back to lie on their back reading a few inches from one's nose.
Petrie's colleague spends a whole day in that small space copying and studying the inscription.
He emerges and he says, there are names of various Syrian towns and one which I do not know. Isar Petri responds, why, that is Israel.
To which his colleague says, so it is. And won't the reverends be pleased.
It is the first artifact to show that Egypt knew of a people called Israel and remains the earliest reference to Israel, even now in the 21st century.
I hope that what you have begun to feel is that there is something deeply enchanting about the science of archaeology.
I hope you can feel some of the thrill and excitement and wonder that occurs when the stories of ancient texts breach the page and intersect with the material world. And if you didn't feel that, just don't tell me.
That feeling is archaeology's presence.
And archaeology and religion both share an emphasis on presence.
Archaeologists literally dig for a deeper reality.
Not only that, the result of the search in the 1st century of archaeology was frequently the discovery of what one scholar of religion calls artifacts of of belief.
These artifacts You've just seen, this scholar says, fueled a sacramental imagination where people glimpsed the spiritual in the material, the supernatural in the natural.
These artifacts were spiritualized objects of memory, he writes, that became a means of grace in that they generated devotion in the mind of the receiver or the user. They infused the beholder with a feeling of the sacred.
By holding these objects, touching them, and connecting their inscriptions to the sacred stories they loved, early archaeologists were drawn further and further into an enchanted world.
If you grew up at the end of the 20th century, you actually know this story already, even if you didn't realize it.
Because if you've seen the Mummy, National Treasure, or Indiana Jones, you have seen the ways that artifacts carry religious and sacred presence.
In fact, the first three Indiana Jones movies, which are the only ones that are worth watching, follows the same trajectory we've been talking about.
There is an ancient story or text that then leads someone to an ancient artifact, and that artifact then becomes the site of modern religious presence.
And the point of this story of religion in science is to say that we set ourselves up from misunderstanding.
When we forget that third column, when we forget the religious work that artifacts do and the ways they are connected to a religious presence, I think it is largely because we have neglected that third column that we have not been equipped to deal both with the power of archaeology and the hold it has in the form of modern literalism.
For presence is just as transformative as absence.
In fact, I think presence is more transformative when a science like archaeology is enchanting.
It opens us up to be changed, not just on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level.
It not only changes what we think, it changes what we love and why we love something.
This powerful presence is what transformed literalism from an open posture into a hardened all or nothing principle.
Thanks to the success of the science of archaeology, ancient stories like the Bible were increasingly seen primarily as history.
Just to give you a tangible example, I brought a fold out timeline on the back that you can see afterwards.
And this timeline actually comes from the 19th century and is one of the first to try to incorporate archaeological artifacts into the embodied literalism. That was a time chart.
And you might wonder, where did I get such a timeline in 2026? And if I told you that it came from the Museum of the Bible, you probably would not be very surprised.
But if I told you that you could buy this in the gift shop of the British Museum, that might be more surprising.
And the point here is that even in places like the British Museum, people are being trained to not only see the Bible as history, but to value it as history, to not only turn to archaeology to validate ancient stories, but to value them.
But what does that mean? What does it matter? That these values have changed?
And for the sake of time, I'm just going to put up a couple of these and we can come back to these and read them. But I would give you a couple of examples. What I think is at stake, from a couple of different voices, that it's not only that Christians more often began to describe the value of the Bible as history, they began to say things like this. And I'm just going to draw your attention to Reverend Robert Traill in 1858.
The ancient world was the only spot on earth where God was want to talk with man.
And that's a sympathy I think you can get from the other two. And I can come back to this.
And the point is this, that as these and other Christians betrayed in their writing, the ancient world was the place God had so visibly, so intimately interacted with humanity in more tangible ways than God did in their modern world world.
Their longing after artifacts came from a desire to be part of a world where God's involvement was evident and uncontested.
Amassing artifacts of belief that appeared to validate sacred stories affirmed that even if the contemporary world was no longer graced by God's tangible presence, it certainly once was.
A literal imagination completely projected the reality of God's presence into the ancient past.
And this is what it meant to value the Bible as history.
This is why Christians believed the Bible was all history or it was nothing.
The problem of literalism is a problem of presence.
And so the point for us today is that we need to be careful when we engage with friends and loved ones and congregations who are literalists.
This story of religion and science is an invitation to think of modern literalism, for lack of better words, as a coping mechanism for those who do not experience God's presence in the here and now, but only in the there and then.
Like any coping mechanism, we need to acknowledge and address the lure of literalism.
Modern literalism was not done in spite of science, but because of science.
It was not a reaction to archaeology. It was a result of archaeology.
This was not a story of what happens when Christians don't find what they're looking for.
This was a story of the implications of when Christians find everything they are after.
And so the first step is taking this seriously, and the next step is not debunking, but modeling a different way of valuing Stories like the Bible.
If you were to ask me now why I value the Bible, I would say I value the Bible because it is a site where I encounter God.
I value the Bible because it is a source of community and that it is the shared story that connects me and you and the church throughout time, whatever that means.
I value the Bible because it opens a vast and expansive world that I have yet to exhaust in all of my explorations.
This world gives me space not just to connect with a living God, but begin to glimpse and imagine an alternative reality than the ones I've been given by tyrants and CEOs and fearful family members.
I value the Bible because it challenges me to look again at things that I take for granted.
It helps me see a deeper reality in the world around me that if I'm not careful, can just become trite.
I value the Bible as a way to escape from our current age that tries to convince me that my worth is only in what I produce, that might makes right, that the only way to thrive is to be rich and powerful because only the rich and powerful matter the Bible has been and continues to be an escape from underneath the wrong that seems oft so strong, yet it is not dismissive or naive about that wrong either.
I value the Bible because it meets me in darkness, brokenness and death, and then it promises me that darkness, brokenness and death don't get the last word and are not the end of the story.
I value the Bible because when I am tempted to despair that nothing will ever change, that we are too set in our ways, it gives me a glimmer of hope that people not only can change, but can change for the better.
I value the Bible because it has a happy ending and a happy ending that is not cheap, but it is free.
And all of this is why I value the Bible.
Which is to say, all this is why I love the Bible.
And while I know that these stories have intersected with history and so I need to be historically prepared to engage it, history is not why I value and love the Bible.
And I could not have articulated that had I stayed in the tradition of my origin.
When the professor at my school was fired, it made sense to me. Because the only way I had to explain the Bible's ongoing worth to the church was because it was true history.
We kept reading it because we needed to know history. It was as simple as that.
This only began to change as I met people who were a present means of grace that connected me to God's living and active presence here and now.
I was completely convinced that these people loved the Bible and had a much more engaging way of reading it than I had.
And it was only after that that I learned that they did not read the Bible literally.
But by that point, that did not matter to me, because I now knew I enjoyed the Bible in ways that were not dependent on it being literal. History for those who have been shaped by literalism and have backed into an all or nothing corner, the approach is not to start with debunking that gets incredibly tricky and a little risky. The approach is to foster connection with God's ongoing presence in the here and now.
The approach is to model and teach a different way of valuing the Bible before debunking any literal historical claims. Because if we're not careful, we will end up dispelling God altogether from their world, cutting off the last drips of water from people who are parched for presence.
