The Hermeneutics of Ham, and His Wrong Idea of “Authority”

When it gets right down to it, the main problem with Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis, and the entire young earth creationist movement, does not have to do with their take on science and their pseudo-scientific claims. Any rational person using his God-given intellect will be able to see their so-called “scientific” claims are nothing short of silly.

1. If the universe is only 6,000 years old, how do you explain tree that have 9,000 rings on them, when we know that trees get one ring a year? Ham’s answer: They could have gotten more rings per year in Eden! In an article entitled “Tree Rings and Biblical Chronology,” Answers in Genesis argued that there could have been multiple tree rings during wet years, and that the “pre-flood greenhouse environment” could have been a factor in multiple tree rings every year. –Any evidence of this? Not at all.
2. If the universe is only 6,000 years old, how can you explain, according to the speed of light, that the universe is closer to 14 billion years old? Ham’s answer: Well, maybe the speed of light isn’t constant! Or maybe there are “time zones” in space! –Any evidence of this? Not at all.

I could go on, but I want to focus on the real problem with Ken Ham and the young earth creationist movement—the problem that makes them come up with such silly pseudo-scientific claims: it’s their wrong (and dare I say idolatrous) view of the Bible.

Ham’s Claims of Authority
Ken Ham claims that what is really at stake is the authority of the Bible. Therefore, if the Bible says God created the universe in six days, and if you can total up the genealogies in the Bible and get 6,000 years, then that must mean God created in six days, a mere 6,000 years ago—case closed. If you “put your faith” in things like the constant speed of light, radiometric and carbon-dating, the results of the Human Genome project—then you are putting “man’s fallible word” in authority over “God infallible Word.”

But is that correct? Are we to believe Ham when he essentially turns “faith” into “believing certain supposed facts are true without any factual evidence that they are, in fact, true”? I’m sorry, that’s not the Christian faith I know, and that’s not the kind of faith the Bible itself talks about. But in any case, the question at hand is, “What are the early chapters of Genesis really saying?”

Exegesis and Hermeneutics
Answering that question requires what scholars traditionally call “exegesis,” or “hermeneutics”—i.e. getting the original meaning out of the text.  Because we believe the Bible is inspired, we believe that God had an intended message he wanted to convey to the original audience. Therefore, the primary challenge for us today is to make sure we understand what the original, inspired message was back then. How do we do that? We study the original language, the idioms, the genre of a given passage, as well as the historical context of a given passage.

Once we understand the original, inspired message, we then wrestle with the text, and within the context of the Church and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we seek to apply that original inspired message to our situations and challenges today.

I’m pretty sure that Ken Ham would agree with what I just said. In fact, at Answers in Genesis, they make a point of saying they use the “historical-grammatical” method of exegesis. If you want to read their fuller treatment of this, you can here:

http://www.teachingtheword.org/apps/articles/?articleid=59202&view=post&blogid=5772

I want to focus on one particular glaring problem with their take on the Scriptures—their understanding of “authority.” At one point in the above article, they say, “Extra-Biblical resources, such as language helps, commentaries, the writings of the so-called church fathers, and archaeological and scientific evidences, can be useful resources in correctly interpreting Scripture. But since they are the words and works of fallible men they are not authoritative.” They later say, “Where scripture and human scholarship come into conflict, our attitude must always be, “Let God’s truth be inviolate, though every man becomes thereby a liar.”

Now technically, that’s true: commentaries, scholarly views, etc., are not infallible or “authoritative.” But they are attempts to come to a right understanding and interpretation of the Bible, and how else can you come to a right interpretation of the Bible, other than through study and scholarship? What the above quote betrays in an attitude that runs all throughout the young earth creationist movement: “We already know what the correct understanding of the Bible is, particularly with Genesis 1-11; so any scientific, archaeological evidence, or any scholarly opinion that conflicts with what we already know the Bible to be saying (i.e. that Genesis 1-11 is a modern scientific “eyewitness account” of the creation of the material universe), we will thus reject and accuse them of being a liar.”

A Wrong Understanding of Authority
And how do they already know Genesis 1-11 is a modern scientific “eyewitness account” of the creation of the material universe? Biblical Authority! –But that isn’t really an answer, is it? If I ask, “How do you know what this passage in the Bible means?” and you respond, “It means what it obviously says it means!” you haven’t answered my question. And if I then press you and say, “Wait a minute, I’m not sure your interpretation is what the Bible is saying,” and you respond with, “You’re undermining the authority of the Bible!” what you are doing is not defending the authority of the Bible, but rather your own particular assumption about what the Bible means—namely, you’re defending your own authority, not the Bible’s.

We must remember that in Matthew 28:18, Jesus declared that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him, and that he in turn bestowed that authority on his followers, the Church. That authority was for proclaiming the Kingdom of God and for bearing witness to the Lordship of Christ. In time, the Church compiled the early writings of the first Christians and established the New Testament canon of Scripture. That, along with the accept canon of the Old Testament, formed what we call today the Bible.

Now yes, all Scripture is inspired by God (II Timothy 3:16)…it is useful for teaching, correction, reproof, and training in righteousness. And yes, the Scripture acts as the canon of belief and teaching. But the Bible can never “stand alone” as an authority unto itself. Heretics and false teachers quote and distort Scripture—so how do you know the correct interpretation and meaning of Scripture? You look to the authority of the Church as it bears witness to the Lordship of Christ.

Simply put, authority doesn’t lie solely in the Bible as it is put on a pedestal. Authority lies in the life of the Church, in the life of Christians in community, reading, wrestling with, and applying the truth revealed in the Bible to the world around them. It is a living and breathing authority, empowered by the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church, and the Bible is a vital part of the life of the Church. But as soon as you separate the Bible from the Church and put it on a veritable pedestal, you are, in fact, turning the Bible into an idol that can and will be manipulated by the powers of any given age.

The power of our current modern age is that of the Enlightenment worldview that assumes that “truth” can only be reduced to “facts” and “objective claims” regarding the natural world and history. Therefore, the fundamental problem with Ken Ham’s approach to Scripture, particularly Genesis 1-11, is that his presuppositional starting point is the modern-Enlightenment assumption that Genesis 1-11 is addressing modern, Enlightenment, scientific questions. For him, in order for Genesis 1-11 to be “true,” it must be “true” in our modern understanding of “truth”—that being “the only kind of truth is scientific/historical facts.”

Therefore, whenever someone says, “I don’t think Genesis 1 is talking about a literal six days, I think it look a lot more like Hebrew poetry,” Ham responds with, “You are undermining the authority of the Bible, because what the Bible says is true—“truth” meaning, “scientifically and historically accurate facts”!

This is crucial when it comes to understanding Ken Ham’s take on the Bible. He says that the goal is to get to the original, intended meaning of a passage; he says that the way you do that is through things like studying the original language, the idioms, the figures of speech, the literary genre of a given passage, and the historical context of a given passage—all that is completely true. That’s how you strive to get to the original, intended, inspired meaning of a passage.

…but in actual practice, he does no such thing. We’ll see this in the next post.

In reality—as odd as this may sound—Ken Ham’s supposed “biblical worldview” is not based on the Bible. His worldview is rooted in modern Enlightenment thinking, and he is imposing those Enlightenment presuppositions onto his reading of the Bible.

…and he can’t see he is doing it. Why? Because he has put the Bible on a pedestal, mistakenly has taken the authority Christ has given to the Church, and has put that authority onto the pages of Bible that he has completely divorced from the life of the Church.

Don’t get me wrong, the Bible is fully inspired. But it is the Church, the Christian community, that exercises Christ’s authority as it reads, studies, and applies the Bible. The Bible is a part of the Church—to divorce the two, to put the Bible on a pedestal, and to assume that it speaks “authoritatively” on modern scientific questions is to, in fact, turn the Bible into an Enlightenment idol.

In case your head is spinning right now, let me remind you what I said in an earlier post: sorting out all of Ken Ham’s claims is like going into a house from Hoarders–there are so many unaddressed issues and faulty assumptions, it can be daunting. But it’s time to start cleaning things up. Don’t worry–I worked as a custodian for years! I’m going to see the job through and get the job done!