Let’s get a little wild here. I think we can afford it, as long as we try to refrain from drawing hasty conclusionst.
During biblical times, as far as we know, people had no idea about the vastness of the universe. So thoughts about UFO:s or inhabitants on other planets would at least have been very different fro our thoughts about such a subject and most people wouldn’t have thought of it at all.
For different reasons though, many Christians are skeptical about life on other planets. One of the main reasons seems to be the centrality afforded to the human race in The Bible.
On the other hand, most Christians also recognise that The Bible was written by humans. Humans that were faulty and that had limited knowledge of the world, trying to communicate something coming from an ultimate, perfect, unlimited reality.
This also brings up two other questions. Namely why God chooses to make his presence known the way he does and what can be said about it. Ultimately, this leads to the question: Why isn’t God’s communication direct and clear?
Since there is, as far as I can tell, no fully satisfying answer to these questions, even though many have tried to give such answers, I believe that this should call for some openness. Openness should though not be mistaken for permission to interpret everything any way that we want. And this is a very important point, so please don’t rush by it. Give it some thought. Because it is very easy to get confused about openness and permission to interpret everything in any way that we want. And it seems to me, as if it should be easier to interpret scriptures if we keep that distinction in mind.
We make so many implicit assumptions about how to interpret The Bible and other religious texts. And any other information that isn’t crystal clear for that matter. Often without taking into account just how different the lives and understanding of the world, of those that wrote it were. We all bring with us our personal experiences and the beliefs that we have chosen to accept and reject. We bring with us our limited perspectives and degrees of openness.
In this context, other questions could be asked: What theologians have shaped our thinking? Do we have primary or secondary knowledge about their ideas? Are we open to the texts that were excluded from The Bible it the first council of Nicaea? Why / why not? Did we know that such a council took place before reading this blog post? Did we know on what grounds the texts were accepted or rejected? Do we find those grounds reasonable? Reasonable enough to have complete faith in them?
The answers to such question and how thought-through they are, all shape how we understand The Bible. Another interesting fact to consider, is the fact that the first council of Nicaea was instigated by the emperor Constantin I. In fact, this wa something that I had completely forgotten about, until I googled the council just now. Should we trust the converted pagan emperor that turned Christianity into a political religion? And yes, the last question was a loaded question. I believe that there is good support both in The Bible and in history, for the stance that politics and religion should not directly mix, even if that doesn’t necessarily mean that religious people should never act within the political sphere.
Furthermore, it seems clear that many parts of The Bible have both a literal and a symbolical interpretation. Sometimes it might even have many symbolical ones. We can also add the normative interpretations of mainly the New Testament, that go beyond the legalism of the Old Testament. And on top of the, we have the personal meanings that we find when we read The Bible and find books, chapters and verses that seem to speak directly to us and where we’re at.
All of the above serves to illustrate the argument that I wish to make here: that The Bible leaves room for much that many exclude. As said in the beginning, The Bible does not say that there can’t be life on other planets or whether the inhabitants of said planets might be visiting us. It does not give clear cut answers to what spiritual realities might exist beyond this physical one.
It does also not set absolute limits for what humans are or what we can do. On the contrary, all the way from the beginning, it states that we were made in God’s image. Jesus says that other humans will be able to do what he did and more. The apostles Peter and Paul raised the dead, just like Jesus. Faith can move mountains. And so on.
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