Taken from "The Story We Find Ourselves in" (2003) - excerpt taken from my copy of "A New Kind of Christian":One thing that both modern liberals and conservatives have in common is that they read the Bible in very modern ways. Modern conservatives treat the Bible as if it were a modern book. They're used to reading modern history texts and modern encyclopedias and modern science articles and modern legal codes, and so they assume that the Bible will yield its resources if they apporoach it like one of those texts.
He [Neo] took a couple of deep breaths and continues talking. "All my own silliness aside, do they imagine God literally saying, 'Let there be light'? In what Language? Hebrew? Latin or Arabic maybe? Or maybe English, but if so, which accent - American, English, Aussie, or Jamaican? And where did the air come from to propagate the sound waves for God's litteral words; and for that matter, where do the vocal cords come from for God to say those words? And as for the business of the six days, assuming that you're not a flat-earther, you have to acknowledge that when it's day on one side of the globe, it's night on the other. So when Genesis says that the first day begins and ends, from whose vantage point does it mean - Sydney, Australia, or Greenwich, England?... But please don't misunderstand, Kerry. Like the staunchest literalist, I believe in the story of Genesis, but I think I believe it more in the way the ancient Semitic nomands huddeled in their blankets around a winter fire would have believed it, as they told it and retold it, generation to generation, feeling the poetic rhythms - 'and there was evening and there was morning, a second day, a third day, a fourth day...' " ...
Kerry interjected, "you see it as a myth, right? It's just another creation myth."
Neo replied, "No, no, no. I didn't say that. In fact, the more I interact with the story, the less I want to carve it down to fit in any modern categories, wheteher 'myth' or 'fact'. And I certainly don't want to reduce it with a just into anything less than fact...
I disagree very strongly with McLaren on many issues, but here he is making a good point.
