Bones in the Mountains - The Rocks Don't Lie - page 36

could not agree among themselves about how to read the story of Noah's Flood. Protestants
introduced both more literal and liberal interpretations as they taught all people to interpret
the Bible for themselves.
Unlike their contemporaries in the sixteenth-century Catholic church, Martin Luther and
John Calvin ignored the implications of New World discoveries. They were religious re-
formers, not explorers faced with conundrums manifest in the flesh of exotic animals and
peoples. But here again we find more debate than uniformity of thought. The two great
minds that laid the intellectual foundation of the Protestant church, and all its denomina-
tional offspring, offered opposing interpretations of Noah's Flood. In their commentaries
we can recognize a resemblance to scientific rivals hashing out how to interpret puzzling
data.
Published in 1545, Luther's Lectures on Genesis devoted more than a hundred pages to
commentary on Noah's Flood. He declared that Moses “spoke properly and plainly, and
neither allegorically nor figuratively.” 4 He held that the Flood annihilated the earthly para-
dise and left no trace of Earth's original surface in its wake. Petrified wood and fossils dug
out of mines, the buried ruins of the former world, were all that was left to testify to the
destruction of humanity's cradle. Generating the Flood was no problem because God held
the continents above the seas through divine buoyancy He could rescind on command.
And then, like the coat of a dog shaking off after a bath, the surface of the world went
from flat to wrinkled. A quick dunk and shake sums up how Luther's Flood reshaped the
world to create modern topography. Some areas rose to become mountains. Others sank
beneath the seas. The Flood destroyed Earth's original soil that had produced incredible
bounty with little labor. “Before the Flood turnips were better than melons, oranges, or
pomegranates were afterwards.” 5 Luther even asserted that the Flood began in springtime
to maximize the terror for a populace “full of the expectation of a new year.” 6 Clearly, such
opinions expand upon a literal interpretation of Genesis, if only because, like dinosaurs,
turnips are not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Given his propensity to supply details
of his own, even Luther, someone generally considered a strict biblical literalist, struggled
with biblical interpretation.