Challenging Issues, Keeping the Faith: Challenging issues and keeping the faith: Imperfect scriptures

In last week's column it was explained that the scriptures can be both imperfect and still be the word of God.I also pointed out that prophets will record scripture according to their cultural vocabulary as well as their own personal methods of conveying the intent of their revelations. While imperfect because of the limitations of any language, the message is still more than adequate in drawing people to Heavenly Father. Once we realize, however, that all prophets who produce scripture do so according to their own world views, we can appreciate that some things we read into the scriptures are different than what the author intended to convey.First, it's important to understand that neither ancient nor modern scriptures are written as guides to scientific truths. As Galileo said, paraphrasing Cardinal Baronius (the Vatican's librarian), the intent of scripture is "to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes."Second, it's important to understand that neither ancient nor modern scriptures are written as "histories" in the 21st-century understanding of the term. While scriptures can give accounts of past events, those events are related to readers in a framework that is intended to teach spiritual truths. Many scriptural authors wrote about events that preceded their own experiences by decades, centuries or even millenniums. That doesn't mean that such events didn't happen, but we have to keep things in perspective. Prophets don't have unbiased video footage of those past events — even if they receive visions with glimpses into those events. In the teaching of spiritual truths, scriptural authors may have written about past events according to how they understood those events had happened.Let's use the example of Noah's flood. Many people believe the entire planet was covered with water while Noah floated on the waters in an ark containing two of every animal that eventually would repopulate the Earth. A number of other people — people who also believe the Bible is the word of God — reject this belief (often because of scientific information) and theorize that Noah's ark floated on top of a flood that was limited to what he could see.Either belief is acceptable among committed Latter-day Saints. The real message of Noah's story is about obedience and making covenants with God. The depth and breadth of the flood waters is ancillary to the spiritual teachings in the story. The Hebrew language of the Bible is often very poetic and many words have multiple meanings. The words translated in our Bibles as "earth" can also mean "land" or solid ground (as opposed to water). The ancient Hebrews also did not understand our planet as a sphere like we do today. They saw the earth as flat but shaped like a bowl with the windows of heaven cut out above the earth. Believing in such a pre-scientific view of our planet has no bearing on the author's ability to receive revelation about spiritual messages from God.While Mormons believes the Bible is scripture, and believe Noah was an ancient prophet who communed with God, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints takes no official position on the expanse of Noah's flood, because there has been no revelation clarifying the issue — which is an issue, like so many other issues attacked by critics, that has no bearing on the salvation of souls. For those events in which prophets themselves lived and participated, we must realize that they, like us, would have written from a particular perspective and point of view. We don't have, for example, the Lamanite account of their dealings with the Nephites. Ancient authors also did not think it deceptive or misleading to engage in exaggeration or hyperbole or to take poetic license when retelling a story. Some examples will be given in future columns.We also know that ancient prophets repeated myths and legends and erroneous scientific conceptions because such things were all part of their world view — the way they understood the world, their audience and the way they understood the method or retelling important stories.The next few columns will continue this look at prophets and scriptures and how a study of such things can help us understand anti-LDS arguments against the Book of Mormon.