I’ve just finished reading Ancestors by Prof Alice Roberts. She is very much the TV face of archeology being the presenter of the BBC’s annual “Digging for Britain” series as well as presenting programmes on Channel 4 too. Her specialist area of study is studying bones and the information that can be gained from skeletal remains. In this book she reminds us that written history really only started in the UK at the time of the Roman invasion in the first century. All history prior to that has thus been labeled prehistory. This book looks at that prehistoric period through burial sites found around the UK and what they and the remains found there in can tell us. The interesting thing is how our understanding has changed over time – partly due to more information coming to light, partly through new scientific tests and understanding and partly due to more recent Archeologists and historians being willing and able to stop assuming they know the answers. Past archeologists and historians have jumped to assumptions and have missed what is before them, assuming that those who they have found and those who buried them were “primitive”; “uneducated”; “barbaric” or “wild” for example does not allow you to see what actually was going on. Leaving your prejudice at the entrance of the cave, barrow or graveside is important if you truly wish to learn what might have been going on.
Too many people approach faith and the Bible with assumptions. They think to be a person of faith you have to be absolutely certain of everything and have no doubts at all. As I said recently in Church – I was almost profound once when I said “Faith is more about doubt than about certainty”. Because if you still have faith when you have questions and doubts then that truly is faith. If you only have faith because you’ve been told “this is how it is” then that faith will struggle when buffeted by the storms of life. And when we read the Bible we can’t say “this is the infallible word of God” and that it doesn’t have contradictions, stories told twice in different ways, bits that don’t make sense and others that are so very clearly written in, and about and for a specific time. Anyone who claims that you have to believe every word as written because otherwise you are interpreting scripture fails to see that in doing what they say is interpreting scripture too, in a very narrow, uncritical and blinkered way. To allow the Bible to speak to us we must leave our assumptions at the door, we must listen clearly to what it says, understanding its context, its setting and the influences upon the writers too. To truly learn from scripture we have to leave assumptions behind to let God’s word speak to us. Assumptions given us a false certainty, we need to leave those behind us to truly strive to understand.
Just as I am, though tossed about
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
Fightings and fears within, without,
O, Lamb of God I come. (Second verse of the hymn “Just as I am” by Charlotte Elliott)
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