In his book "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time," Marcus
Borg describes the confusion and trauma that occurred when his childish images
of Jesus collided with the scientific worldview of our culture. As I read his
words, I felt
like he was telling my own story. How well I remember when that collision began.
The year was 1969. I watched the moon landing
that July in our living room in El Paso, Texas. My parents made me watch it. They said,
“Someday you’ll be glad you saw this.” I saw a stark, black horizon and a man
with a strange bounce coming down a ladder. I was mildly interested, but not old
enough to appreciate the changes that science was bringing to my world.
At the end of the summer we moved
into a small home in Forth Worth, so that my father could do some post-graduate
work at the Baptist seminary in town. I began second grade that fall at Hubbard Heights
Elementary, which was about half a mile away. My best friend Mickey and I walked
to school together every day. I admired Mickey because he had to pack his own
lunch. Usually it consisted of ketchup sandwiches and candy bars.
Hubbard Heights Elementary
I got the G.I. Joe Astronaut with space capsule
that Christmas, which was a huge thrill for me. Space toys were replacing Cowboy
toys. Roy Rogers was out, and Apollo was in. I played little league
baseball for the first time that Spring. It was my first experience with
organized sports. I was the catcher for our team, but I didn’t have a
catcher’s mitt, which bothered me greatly.
Mickey and I both fell in love with
the same girl at school. I don’t remember her name, but she had brown hair and
wore it in pigtails.
I was too shy even
to wave at her and was standing around
wondering how to proceed when Mickey, showing a surprising streak of
romantic sophistication, swooped in and gave her a small bottle of perfume. Somehow that
sealed the deal, and the two of them walked around the playground whispering for
a week or so. I was annoyed but at the same time impressed with his savoir
faire. He knew you should give a girl perfume, AND he knew how and where to get
perfume. He was
completely out of my league.
Our family went to Gambrell Street
Baptist Church, which was across from the seminary and a fairly well-known
Baptist church in that city. Martin Estep, whose father was a famous Baptist
historian and professor at the seminary, was in my Sunday school class. He had leukemia, and
we were told quietly that someday soon he would die. The idea of a child dying
was so far outside my view of the world that I didn’t know how to receive the
information. I just filed it away and forgot about it.
Martin loved dinosaurs and was allowed to bring
toy dinosaurs to church, which was against standard policy, but no one made an
issue of it, perhaps because his situation was so grim. Many Sundays Martin and
I played together with his extensive collection of plastic and rubber dinosaurs.
Years later, long after Martin had died, I
attended that seminary and had his father for a number of history classes. I
told him I remembered Martin and his dinosaurs. He looked off in the distance
and said, "Yes, Martin did love his dinosaurs."
I knew about dinosaurs, of course, but had
never considered how they fit into the story of creation that I heard at church.
Up until that time, the only story of the origin of the earth I knew was the one
found in Genesis. God had created the world in six days, resting on the 7th.
He had created human beings on one of those days, but there was some kind of a
glitch, and then Adam and Eve were on the outs with God. That’s why Jesus had to
come to the world.
Children have a capacity to hold many thoughts
and views at once. Truly, we all have this capacity but it is particularly
pronounced in children. So I played dinosaurs with Martin, thoroughly believing
that they existed millions and millions of years ago, while at the same time
holding to the simple view of creation taught to me at church.
And then one day at school, I discovered a
strange book, a book filled with new information and stories I had never heard
before.
In second grade I had just discovered the joy
of reading. The first book that thrilled me was Matt Christopher’s “Catcher
With A Glass Arm,” the story of a boy who was a catcher, like me, only he had a
real mitt. Sadly, his arm was a bit lacking, and this created the drama of the
story. I also read my mother’s old copy of “The Bobbsey Twins” by Laura Lee Hope, falling in
love with it immediately. I read that book 15 or 20 times over the years, even
when I was in high school.
My second grade teacher had a collection of
books in the corner of the room, which we were allowed to browse and read if we
finished our work. One day I pulled out an ancient looking book from behind the
others. My memories of this book are very dim. It had
an old, cloth cover. I suspect that it was published in the first half of the 20th
century, but it might have been published at the turn of the century. The book was about ancient humans
- cavemen and cavewomen, as they were called at the time.
According to this book, many thousands of years
ago, people lived in caves and wore clothing made from animal skins. They made
their own tools and arrow points, and they lived before modern technology, even
before Jesus and the people of the Bible. I remember being absolutely fascinated
by the book's theory of how cooking began. The author theorized that a tree
might have burst into flames after a lightning strike, cooking a squirrel or
some animal in the trunk. Primitive humans chanced upon this tree
and found that they liked the flavor of cooked meat. This is a ridiculously
simplistic view of how human technology develops, but at the time it made
perfect sense to me.
I don't know why, but I became obsessed with
this book for many months. Every chance I got I pulled it from the shelves and
sat on a little carpet in the corner of the classroom, poring over it. I
believed every word of it with the same level of innocent trust that I had given
to my Sunday school teachers.
This simple book didn't address the incredibly
complex questions of human prehistory or evolution, but it suggested a history
of the world and humanity that was different from what was in the Bible. And
these new ideas seemed to make sense to me, even then.
That was the moment the collision began. It
was the moment that my Biblical worldview first collided with the modern worldview of
science. The violence of this collision wasn’t immediately apparent. It was more
like two galaxies slowly passing through each other.
But when galaxies collide, nothing stays the
same.
rlp
