Formative moments (5): there was no flood covering the whole of planet earth

Since I'm on a roll...

A couple of years ago, I had to preach on Genesis 6 and 7. So, for the first time in years, I had to take the Flood seriously. I didn't feel that I could fudge the issue, so after a good bit of reading, I concluded, and said from the pulpit, that there was no way that a flood covered the whole of the planet we now call earth.

In a sense, that seems a bigger deal than rejecting young-earth creationism: Genesis 1-3 has many possible readings. Genesis 7 tells us (TNIV):

Every living thing that moved on the earth perished — birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and the entire human race. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.

But, it seems to me that even assuming that some major cataclysm affected Noah and his family, it did not affect, say, the kangaroo. Nor even, perhaps, the Aboriginal Australians. That seems evident from the geological record. But to say so is, somehow, Evangelical heresy, since it says that the "plain meaning" of the biblical text is "wrong".

It's tempting to make a special case for the stuff in Genesis which precedes Abraham; to give it the status of myth, whose purpose is to tell us about God and his dealings with man, not to give us a history of the near-East (nor less, a history of mankind). But that leaves an awful lot of questions, since the author or ancient editor of the book has linked everything together with genealogies.

Now, I guess I had all that in the back of my mind for years. But coming out and admitting very publicly, that I don't think we can take that part of the bible (at least!!) at "face value", is most definitely a "red pill" moment.

"Plain meaning", "face value", and "wrong" are in quotes, because I realise that there's a huge amount of scholarship in the background here which I'm simply skating over. But that's what Evangelicals tend to do :-). As for me, now, I'd prefer to talk in terms of "a different way to read the text" and so on, but a bit of me is an unreconstructed modern thinker who has in the back of his mind "what you mean to say is, you don't believe it".

This is another rabbit-hole whose depth I don't really know. But somehow, I feel happier with the falling sensation, than the previous feeling of standing on something which I knew couldn't bear the weight.