A couple of years ago, Jeff Foxworthy hit the television with a show called “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” The premise of the show was familiar. Contestants answered questions to earn money. They decided when to keep what they had earned and when to risk their earnings in order to answer another question and earn even more money. The twist involved the nature of the questions. Questions for the show were gleaned from elementary school text books. In other word, they were things that all of us, once upon a time, probably knew but have now mostly forgotten.
As I comb my memory for factoids I remember from elementary school, the most enduring thing I can dredge up is “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
I’ve since learned that Columbus was probably not the first European to land in the Americas, and that he had no idea before he set out that there even were Americas. It’s become fashionable to trot these facts out at Columbus Day to sort of knock a bit of the luster off the story we learned in fifth grade. In spite of these little quibbles, though, what Columbus did was wildly remarkable.
Scientists in Europe had been speculating on the shape of the earth for some time, of course. Aristarchus is the first to have published the theory, back in the third century, only to have his ideas quashed by the prevailing Aristotelian school of philosophy. In Columbus’ day, astronomers found themselves at odds with the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the idea that the world was round and orbited around the Sun had gained traction in the thinking community, and most experienced sailors had quietly shifted from the old way of reading their navigational instruments to new procedures based on the new science that just plain worked better.
Within a decade or so of Columbus voyage, Copernicus would publish his famous paper which would launch further explorations by scientists like Galileo and Kepler. Galileo, in particular, would face sever persecution from the Church for his insistence on this new picture of the universe.
So what did Columbus do? He didn’t make the Earth round, of course. Neither was he the first to say that he thought that it was. He didn’t even succeed in proving that the Earth was round. The debate about the shape of the Earth continued for centuries after his famous voyages.
What he did: Columbus found himself living in a world with two very different ideas about the shape of reality. He chose one, and he set about the business of living as though it were true. For Columbus, the question of the shape of the world was not merely academic. It was a matter which shaped his actions and course he plotted through the world. He didn’t just say that the world was round, he lived it.
I think modern Christians are often far too preoccupied with polishing up the details of our belief system. We speak of “belief” in terms of the things we are willing to say are true, and we promote the idea of a salvation based solely our academic insistence on this particular set of facts. I’m not sure that this is what Paul had in mind when he used the word “faith.” Biblical faith appears to be a more dynamic and active sort of thing… not so much what we say is true as living as though we really believe it.
If the church at the turn of the sixteenth century had been watching, they would have witnessed a profound act of true faith being perpetrated by a heretic.
