Reason’s Ear

I come from a family that was saturated with the Bible, education, and music. Mom had formed a young atheists club at her high school in Mora, Minnesota. Her life was turned around when at the age of sixteen she became a committed Christian at a Baptist church. Dad’s parents had escaped the Ottoman Turkish attempted genocide of the Armenian people. He grew up on a farm on the east edge of St. Paul, gave his heart to Jesus at the age of twelve, and narrowly escaped death on two occasions during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The two met at the University of Minnesota, were married at the chapel where they served together, and started a church near Sparta, Wisconsin. I came along when my sister was 2 1/2 years old, and ten months later I contracted polio. Mom taught me to read when I was four. My first job was working with Dad to cut out his favorite songs from old hymn books, pasting them onto notebook paper, and alphabetizing them. A penny a page was big money in the late 1950s!

My first clash between fundamentalist Christianity and secular education came when I was in eighth grade in the fall of 1964. Our new earth science textbook talked about ancient geology and seemed to contradict what I had been taught at home—that God created the entire universe in six 24 hour days around 6,000 years ago.

By the time I reached Introduction to Biology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, my views had changed. Dr. Phil Sparks asked everyone in the class who believed in creationism to go to one side of the room, and those who believed in evolution to go to the other. He and I were the only two in the middle—although he later switched to a late date creationist position.

My major professor at Wheaton College Graduate School, Dr. Charles M. Horne, pointed out that the Hebrew word yom could mean “period of time” rather than “day,” and that the six days of creation in the Book of Genesis fell into two sets of three days. The first and fourth days had to do with light, the second and fifth water, and the third and sixth land. Hebrew poetry used parallelism rather than rhyme, so the account of the six days could be seen as poetic rather than literal.

This approach to the creation accounts was supported by several books by Wheaton emeritus professor of English Dr. Leland Ryken. He talked about reading the Bible as literature, arguing that if a passage were written in figurative language, it should be interpreted accordingly.

Dr. Walter Elwell, another of my professors in the graduate school, did me the huge favor of recommending a topic for my thesis: “Analogy and Paradox in Austin Farrer.” Dr. Farrer had taught at Oxford University, and was said to have come the closest of any British thinker to having a complete system. In Freedom of the Will, Farrer suggested that God ran the universe the way the mind runs the brain and the way a hand works through a glove. That idea spawned my song “Everything He Touches Turns to Love,” which can be found elsewhere on this website.

After I finished my master’s degree in theology, I moved back to Wisconsin. Somewhere I heard the term “mere creationism,” a spinoff of the famous book Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis