In the year 1543, just before he died, Nicolaus Copernicus published “De revolutionibus orbium coelestium”. This treatise, in development for nearly 30 years, advanced the idea that the earth revolved around the sun (heliocentrism), rather than the long held idea that the earth was the center of the universe. It is unclear whether Reformer John Calvin was aware of Copernicus, but it is clear that Calvin still held to the idea that the Earth was fixed in place, and everything else moved around it. In 1554, in his introduction to his commentary on Genesis he wrote:
We indeed are not ignorant, that the circuit of the heavens is finite, and that the earth, like a little globe, is placed in the center.
Luther on the other hand, was clearly aware of Copernicus, and clearly did not accept his theories. He had this to say about Copernicus:
People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. This fool…wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.
Luther made this statement in 1539, four years before Copernicus’ book was published, but Copernicus’ ideas had already been circulating in Germany for quite some time.
For the most part Copernicus’ ideas were largely ignored by the church for decades. It was a theory that was easily defeated with a strong apologetic. The matter came to a head in 1616 when the Catholic church considered banning the works of Copernicus. The astronomer Galileo traveled to Rome to try to persuade the church not to do so. Galileo, while not the inventor of the telescope, had been using it to confirm Copernicus’ work. The church did not accept his arguments and Galileo was eventually convicted of heresy in 1633. He died in 1642, almost 100 years after Copernicus.
The year Galileo died, another future scientist was born, Isaac Newton. It was Newton’s work on gravity, published in 1687, that gave the conclusive supporting evidence for Copernicus’ theory. The church realized that it had to reinterpret the Bible based upon this new evidence. It was not until 1758, 71 years later, that books supporting heliocentrism were taken off the banned list by the Catholic church, and not until 1835, another 77 years, that the original works on the topic by Copernicus and Galileo were “unbanned.”
It had taken the church over 200 years to come to terms with Copernicus’ ideas.
The world is a lot smaller today, ideas fly faster, and technology is advancing at an exponential rate. In thirteen years the cost of sequencing a human genome has gone from $100,000,000 to $1,000. Which of course brings me my second topic. Evolution.
Darwin published his origin of the species in 1859. From Copernicus to Newton was 144 years. From Darwin to the completion of the human genome project in 2003 is 144 years. (I just made that connection now as I was writing this.) We are in what I would call the Newtonian age of Evolution. The point at which the streams of evidence have become irrefutable. How long will it take the church to accept this and change their interpretations to fit the science? The change has already started to happen. For most young people, Christian and non Christian alike, the matter has already been decided. Like heliocentrism, it will take a couple of generations for the science to be nearly universally accepted in the church, but its day is coming.
This brings me to my final thought. I have been reading a lot of Rachel Held Evans recently. What you have read here has come about though interacting with her material. In our sidebar we have linked to her post The Bible was ‘clear’. She writes:
It’s easy to look down our noses at the Christians who have come before us and discount them as unenlightened and uninformed. But to accept Galileo’s thesis, our 17th century forbearers would have had to reject 1600 years of traditional Christian interpretations of passages like Psalm 93:1, Ecclesiastes 1:5, and Joshua 10:12-14.
It was another post on slavery from a year ago that really caught my attention:
I think it’s important to remind ourselves now and then that we’ve been wrong before, and that sometimes it’s not about the number of proof texts we can line up or about the most simplistic reading of the text, but rather some deep, intrinsic sense of right and wrong, some movement of the Spirit, that points us toward truth and to a better understanding of what Scripture really says.
The clearest association I make, of course, is with the gender equality discussion within evangelicalism—not only because it’s an issue near to my heart, but also because we are dealing with many of the same biblical texts. But I wonder about other things too—about homosexuality, for example—and I confess I spend some nights lying awake, watching the lights from passing cars make strange shapes on my walls, wondering if we’ve done it again, if we’ve marginalized another group of people because we believed the Bible told us to.
That is what causes me to lie awake as well. When it comes to the churches attitude and beliefs about Homosexuality I can’t help but wonder if we are in another Copernicus moment. Science hasn’t completely settled the question yet, but it certainly seems to be pointing in a certain direction. I don’t think we have to wait for Newton this time. Perhaps Galileo will do.