WordsOut poems by Godfrey Rust | sequence The sailing of the ark | home         

The challenge of the ark

The story of Noah’s Ark is one of the 'best loved' in the Bible, and at the same time among the most violent and problematic stories in the whole book. This is part of it:

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them" (Genesis 6, vv 5-7). 

Theologically, the tale is obviously of some importance, as it takes up three early chapters of Genesis. At face value it might be summarized like this: a well-intentioned but exasperated deity loses patience with his rebellious and disobedient creatures and decides to clear the decks and start again with the best of a bad lot, seemingly unaware that the survivors will fare no better in future under the new unilateral contract laid down by the god ("my covenant") than they have  to date.

So in the opening section of the Bible we have a big story which not only begs the big question of theodicy—how and why does a perfect and all-powerful God allow evil to exist?—but goes further, showing God as the instigator of the almost complete destruction of terrestrial life and blaming his creatures for what, in a human context, would be seen as primarily his responsibility as the executive or parent in charge.

This problem is made more perplexing by the fact that God is cited elsewhere in the Old Testament time and again as being unfailingly benevolent, knowledgeable and infallible, and solely accountable for the creation and direction of everything from before the beginning of time (for example, "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be" - Psalm 139 v16). How then did it all get into such a mess? God appears to be saving Noah from the consequences of his (God's) own incompetence and short-sightedness.

The story also exemplifies many of the difficulties of biblical authority. It appears there are two narratives from different sources edited together and containing conflicting information (were there two or fourteen of each clean animal?). An important element of the story is anachronistic (how could Noah know which animals were clean or unclean when the Mosiac laws hadn't yet been given?). There are obvious anomalies (why didn't the people who already had boats avoid drowning? What about fish?). Finally, it is highly implausible according to scientific research—fossil records of cataclysmic floods are only local, not global, and there is no evidence of a point in history in which all human and animal life was concentrated to a single point (as suggested by Ararat).

There is a close parallel here with the earlier Genesis story of the Tower of Babel, which assumes that there was once a universal human language, transformed through a single dramatic event into multilingual anarchy. Research in linguistics, I am informed by one whose career has been devoted to such things, shows that the first assumption is not impossible but the second is. The evidence outside the biblical text is incontrovertible (unless, like some, we think the God has deliberately falsified the evidence to fool us or test our "faith" in the biblical text): things didn't happen like this.

For most people these are not problems, because the Flood is understood as a legend grown from the history of actual, more limited inundations, a good story coming out of a scientifically primitive but morally sophisticated culture, in which the emphasis (as in today's disaster movies) is on good news for the survivors and come-uppance for the bad guys (which, by implication, is unlikely to be us, its readers or hearers), and which is to be treated metaphorically.

But for many evangelicals it highlights a particular and central issue. If the bible is God's comprehensive account of the truth required by humanity, and not merely a limited human attempt at it, then when a major biblical story like this is historically and scientifically inaccurate as well as theologically and morally  compromised the entire scriptural enterprise is under threat. God, it would seem, not only made the Flood happen, but if the Bible is his inspired and authorized word, must have intended and wanted the story to be reported in such an  unsatisfactory, confusing and anomalous way. 

I have some respect for the most extreme, literal fundamentalists who go to great lengths to argue that (for example) the world is less than 10,000 years old, that man lived alongside dinosaurs and that God really did change the natural physical laws of the entire universe to "stop the sun" and give Joshua an hour more daylight to defeat the Amorites in battle. They recognise what is at stake: once you concede a single detail of the bible as being incorrect, the defences are breached and the credibility of absolute scriptural authority is fatally undermined. If you can't trust one biblical statement, why trust any other? 

Most evangelicals who accept the absolute authority of the Bible shy away from such an extreme view, claiming to be more reasonable about these things and approaching different passages contextually—but this is only moving the problem elsewhere. Where a less conservative evangelical describes the bible as "reliable", "authoritative" or "logical" it is Humpty Dumpty's methodology, changing the meaning of such words when necessary to suit the subject matter to which the words refer. The bible, all agree, is an aggregation of diverse literary genres created by many authors and editors, many of them unknown, but whether any particular passage is to be regarded as true in an historic, allegorical, prophetic, scientific, metaphorical or ironic sense is a matter of interpretation: the bible itself gives little explicit direction. 

For example, the six-day Genesis creation story is usually accepted even in fairly conservative evangelical circles as allegory, myth or metaphor rather than historical testimony; but a thousand years ago it was not generally so, and the change has come about largely because we have better science. Something similar has happened to the theology of the Fall, and the once-popular theological notion that disease and death are the result of a corruption of the natural order brought about somehow by humanity's sin. Today it is taught otherwise, even in our church schools: life has existed for earth for several billion years, and that not only have disease and death been an inherent part of life from its beginning, but that much "disease" is caused by the natural predation of one (God-created) life form on another. These are accepted, except by those with the blindest of blind faith, as facts of life, and our biblical interpretation is revised accordingly.  

There is no such thing as uninterpreted scripture, and no such thing as truly objective interpretation, and in our generation there is not even a general consensus among the faithful on most of the important details. The bedrock Christian doctrines of Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the final Judgment and of the nature of Heaven and Hell are reviewed, disputed and reconfigured as never before from all points within, as well as outside of, the evangelical movement. It is notable, for example, that N T ("Tom") Wright, the mainstream evangelical successor in the UK to John Stott as both popular and serious theologian, can formulate only a tentative general idea of the possible nature of Hell from within the three irresolvably conflicting alternatives normally on offer, and that in current serious theological study of the Fall the view gaining adherence is the biblically obscure and philosophically bizarre notion that inherited human sinfulness and the corruption of the created order is the consequence of a pre-human angelic rebellion - the "Fall of the Angels" because the traditional Augustinian view has been found to be not only scientifically but also biblically unsupportable (if creation was perfect before the fall of Adam, why was the serpent corrupt?).

These are not matters merely of academic interest. It is difficult to fulfil the command to preach the gospel when it is not at all clear what that gospel is, except that it is good news and that it is about Jesus. Maintaining the illusion of consensus can be a painful and exhausting balancing act, and many eventually fall off the wall and break; some are never put back together again. The sailing of the ark was written, in part, for broken Humpties. 

Where does this leave us? My own view at present, mythologized in Sonnet 22, is that the bible reveals a great deal of necessary truth about God, but that the whole text itself is not under God's editorial management except in some very general and undefinable sense. Many of its writers are inspired, some knowingly, and some words come "directly" from God and are recorded as such, but it is in sum a compilation of human attempts to make sense of God and his interaction with humanity, written from the limited perspectives of various ancient Middle Eastern communities over a period of a thousand years or so. There is no question that its words have great spiritual authority and power, but literal accuracy was clearly not God's objective.

The Word was made flesh, and has been further revealed through written words, but the two are not to be confused. The first is flawless, the second is not and cannot be, where the medium is flawed humanity. God seems to be content that this should be the case, or else we may assume he would have organized things otherwise. Why he did not choose to make things clearer is itself puzzling, and says some profound things about his intentions, if we could only decipher what they are: in part I think it is to do with not making scripture into an idol (see Sonnet 20), although many go down that route anyway.

Insistence on an untenable literal interpretation of the bible also prevents us from engaging with its more profound mysteries: we hide truth instead of revealing it. For example,  if we set the Genesis account of creation up to be in conflict with the Big Bang and evolution, then we will not learn anything of what the scientific account tells us about God's methods, or begin to grasp the power, intelligence and sheer strangeness of the Creator God through study of his original creative act and the extraordinary physical laws he conceived and brought into being.

This realisation helps us when faced with the more obvious and personally troubling questions of pain, suffering and alienation. The gospel really is absurd, in the technical philosophical meaning of the word: faith transcends the rational and exists in the domain of paradox. It is not that the truth is difficult to understand - it is impossible to understand in terms of a
systematic set of propositions (as summarised somewhat tongue in cheek in Sonnet 14). When God says in Isaiah "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" he is not describing a more taxing logic but an entirely different way of thinking, which transcends the limitations of logic and of which the bible only gives us clues. All the evidence is that God specializes in the avoidance of obvious behaviour, and it makes sense therefore to embrace this. Such an approach does not take us away from belief in the incarnate, suffering and risen Christ: on the contrary, it makes such a chain of events much more reasonable.

Images of the ark

The Ark legend, as told in the sequence of images accompanying the sonnets, has another function here. The progress of the story—the impending storm, the building, the gathering of the animals, the sailing, the search for dry land and finally the disembarking at Ararat—mirrors the psychological and spiritual journey of the poems, from unease, through crisis, pilgrimage and to a new beginning. In this role, the story told by the images is not an allegory but a parallel. There is no complete one-to-one correspondence of picture and poem, although on occasion (for example, in sonnets 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 27, 30, 33 and 36) there is a pleasing aptness, sometimes accidental, in the particular pairing of words and image.