PK Confessions--Dinosaurs and other conundrums

Right around the time I got saved (8-ish), I got a brand new Bible--a New Revised Standard Version (or perhaps a New International Version). Anyway, it was leather, with my name in tiny gold letters on the front cover. I was very proud of it, and my parents were proud that I was proud of it.

Understandably, then, when my father discovered that I had drawn a large, complex picture in the back of it, on the last page of Revelation (last book in the Bible), he was upset. He confronted me, Bible in hand opened to the page in question. I think I stammered something, some excuse that wasn't cutting the mustard with him, when Mama intervened.

"I think," she said, examining my artwork, "he was drawing the scene in Revelation with the Christians surrounding God and Christ. Is that what it is, John?"

Relieved at my mother's ability to put into words what I had tried to put into images, I nodded, pointing out to my father the exact verse references. Though I think he mentioned something about maybe not drawing right inside the Bible, the explanation mollified him.

In truth, I was quite a doodler as a child. I'd doodle mostly in the innumerable church services, splitting an offering envelope silently open to make a triptych of three blank spaces to fill with superheroes, spaceships, or--sometimes--bits of Bible imagery.

Because--to be honest--there's a ton of cool stuff to imagine in the Bible. Aside from the Hi-Def pictures of heaven and hell I absorbed as a child.

I was particularly drawn to the images in Revelation. For someone interested in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, that book is a goldmine of nightmare sequences. Take Revelation 9, where an army of flying scorpion-locusts emerges from smoke coming from a bottomless pit (the result of a star crashing to earth): "In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces. their hair like women's hair, and their teeth like lions' teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. [Here's the really good part] They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is the power to harm people for five months" (9:7-10, NRSV).

Cool-o, huh? Well, horrifying, really. But still.

Lots to imagine, and it was all true. It had happened--or at least it was going to happen. Everything from the 6-days creation, the serpent and Garden of Eden, the flood, the tower of Babel, the 10 plagues, the Exodus, the loads of wacky-weird stuff in the Hebrew Testament that most people don't know about (a talking donkey, gruesome dismemberment, flaming chasms that split the earth to swallow hundreds, wild bears that kill teenagers who make fun of a prophet's baldness--I could go on and on). And that's all pre-Jesus!

And, truthfully, I could believe it--the literal truth of it. Jonah swallowed by a big fish, lives there three days, gets vomited out on the shore? Check. A multitude of people fed with a few loaves of bread and fish? Check. Flying scorpion-locusts? Shudder/check. Heck, I believed in God, and all-powerful, all-knowing invisible Being who created everything. Still do, actually. After that hurdle, the other stuff is an easy-cheezy hop of faith.

The problem for me came initially not in what was in the Bible, but what wasn't in there. Take dinosaurs. Like many youngsters, I liked dinosaurs a great deal. We had seen, on vacation, huge dinosaur excavation museums (I think Daddy described that vacation as "if there were dinosaurs, we went there").

Yet I wasn't able to find much evidence of them in the Bible (sorry, but general descriptions of behemoth or leviathan in Job didn't cut it). What about the dinosaurs? And mammoths? And cave men (cave women, too)? In that respect the Genesis accounts of creation and the flood seemed... lacking. Dinos and other such creatures/epochs, I gathered, formed a significant part of Earth's history, but zippo mention of them in a book that's supposed to be Everything. Even the picture books or comic books of those accounts tended to omit dinosaurs.

And, switching to non-extinct subjects, what about other people in the big, wide world who had nothing to do with the Jewish or Christian stories? Asians? Australian Aborigines? Native Americans? Inca? Maya? Southern Africans? Northern Europeans?

The more I learned about the world, about history, about science, about the universe, the narrower my Bible--the sovereign Word of God for All People--came to seem.

I began having a lot of perfectly normal, perfectly reasonable questions about just what the Bible was about.

Luckily for me, I had at my disposal two seminary-trained professionals to consult...