Final Reflection
I took this class because while I grew up Catholic, I had never read the Bible outside of church, and I had only a cursory understanding of select stories from the Bible. As a result, for my commonplace book, I liked to connect our readings from class to my prior knowledge of Christian teachings so as to expand upon that knowledge. Specifically, I find the relationship between God and His people extremely fascinating and found myself focusing on that dynamic throughout all of my posts.
As a STEM major, I have always had an inner conflict about being an ardent believer of science as well as a religious Catholic. After all, how was I supposed to seriously take as fact anything from a book, specifically the Old Testament, that has no corroborating texts outside of itself? The fundamental first step for reading the Bible religiously is to consider it an infallible and sacred text, but as a scientist, I could never properly do that. Additionally, while I did not know much of the details before this semester, I was always skeptical of the Creation account. I knew that God had said “let there be light”, and He made EVERYTHING in six days while resting on the seventh, but I don’t think I ever actually believed it. From the get-go, I was a believer of only everything including and after Abraham because that was when the Biblical storyline became grounded in the reality that I knew to be true. My personal belief was that God sparked the Big Bang and created our universe with the laws of physics that we know, but while He was the catalyst, He let His laws take it from there. Furthermore, I was never sure how to confront the presence of God in our everyday lives. I knew that He was extremely involved way back in the past with creating the nation of Israel and the coming of Jesus to Earth in more recent history but having never seen an explicit or obvious divine sign since, I was not sure how seriously to believe that God was always watching over me. Even understanding, or at least acknowledging that He is supposed to be omnipotent, I could not properly imagine a universe where God was watching the lives of every single person on Earth and perhaps even the lives of other organisms in the universe. Even though I would pray every night for God to protect me and help me get good grades and whatnot, I always thought myself a little too insignificant for the deity to worry about.
These kinds of thoughts have plagued me for years which is why I have spent so much time in my blog posts reflecting on the relationship between God and mortal, Biblical characters. Even when I did not talk about such explicit interactions between God and man as was the topic of my post “Evolution of Covenants”, I pondered the differing viewpoints of God and man in posts like “Thought Experiment on Perspective”. I was constantly fleshing out the relationship between God and man now that I was finally studying a text that focused on that very relationship. Despite my reflections, however, I still feel a disconnect between myself and God. The problem is that the majority of my posts were on the Old Testament, but everything in the Old Testament is more than 2,000 years old, from an age without any accounts of Biblical stories outside of the Bible. As a result, it is really easy to feel as though God may have been much more involved in the past, though right now, He is absent for whatever reason. Moreover, without corroborating texts, it is also easy to imagine that the Old Testament stories simply did not happen. Instead, they could have been stories dreamt up by believers who wanted to teach lessons to other believers on how to best act individually and collectively in a manner honoring God. While the New Testament is much more recent and has the benefit of other sources verifying part of its material, Jesus still lived a very long time ago, and we have not witnessed anything on par with his level of miracle work since. Further, in my posts over the New Testament, I pondered such questions as what is the Holy Spirit, and what are Heaven and Hell according to the Bible? Clearly, my Holy Spirit post did not have a definitive answer, and while I got a clearer understanding through my analysis of Heaven and Hell, I am still not satisfied. As I discussed in that post, my conception of Heaven and Hell, imparted to me by my Catholic family, seemed to be completely wrong, and I never explained why that would be. How can so many people get it wrong if we all have access to the source material? It makes me doubt my analysis, and after all that, I feel just as confused as when I started.
However, I have learned a lot from this class, and this commonplace book especially has been a lot of fun. I had the opportunity to relate an educational endeavor I was genuinely interested in with my love for astronomy, and the combination of the two boosted my understanding of both the Bible and the James Webb Space Telescope. Additionally, perhaps the reason that I can’t develop a concrete understanding of the Bible is that it is just fundamentally confusing. After all, I am a firm believer that the Bible is not purely divine nor infallible. How could it be? People had to write down everything in the Bible, so from the beginning, it was subject to human error even if the writing was commissioned directly by God. On top of that, we don’t have any original copies of the Biblical text, so how can we say for certain that we are reading exactly what God intended us to and are not, in fact, missing material? Furthermore, considering how the Bible is subject to translation, even if the text in the original language was perfect and infallible, who’s to say that nothing would be ‘lost in translation’? Finally, given that there is not even one singular Bible among all Christians, it is easy to see that the Bible is a human construct subject to human interpretation, imperfection, and corruption. We are not perfect, so the Bible is not perfect, but honestly, that is okay. There may be slippage between chapters and metaphors that no one really understands, but the important part is the framework. After all, Judaism and Christianity are founded on the concepts of making humanity better so that it better reflects the image of God. We have the Bible not so we know exactly who Noah’s great grandfather was, but so we know how to interact with each other and God in a productive manner for everyone on Earth. As I talked about in my post, “Is the Cosmos an Allegory for the Bible?”, I don’t think we should take the Book of Judges as having actually happened. Instead, we should view it as a collection of folktales steering us away from human corruption because, again, the important part of the Bible is the development of God’s people as I discussed in “Stars of Heaven”.
Everything Considered, I am okay with not having all the answers. If I ever feel the need, I can reread parts of the Bible and even review my old blog posts to rethink my interpretation of the Bible, but I know I will probably never have a perfect understanding. Instead, I can continue to look at pictures of the cosmos from JWST and ponder the interplay of the divine, the celestial, and me in this grand universe I call home.
Comments
Post a Comment