Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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record reveals that the church of the middle ages did much to advance science. How
frequent it is that accounts of the controversy neglect to mention that Nicholas
Copernicus was a Catholic priest, or that Galileo was a committed Christian. Galileo,
along with the tribunal judges, shared the conviction that science and Scripture could not
stand in contradiction. In truth, it is more often secular humanists that have
misrepresented the issues and attacked the church, than visa versa.
Lesslie Newbigin notes from Graf Reventlow’s work, The Authority of the Bible and
the Rise of the Modern World (1985. Fortress Press), that humanist attacks on the
Christian worldview began much earlier even than the Renaissance and the rise of
modern science, “in the strong humanist tradition which we inherit from the classical
Greek and Roman elements in our culture, and which surfaced powerfully in the
Renaissance and played a part in the Reformation” (Newbigin, 1989:1). Reventlow said
that while ordinary churchgoers remained rooted in their biblical worldview, humanist
notions increasingly controlled intellectuals. Here really began the modern duality, or
division, of natural truths versus biblical truths. “As the eighteenth century rolls on, we
find that the really essential truths are available to us from the book of nature, from
reason and conscience; the truths which we can only learn from the Bible are of minor
importance, adiaphora about which we need not quarrel” (ibid. 2). The marginalization
of the Bible continues with great force from this point, bringing ever-greater scrutiny and
criticism brought to bear against it, and reducing it to a text “full of inconsistencies,
absurdities, tall stories, and plain immorality” (ibid. 2).
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa