From Breeze readers
Article Launched: 12/27/2007 10:13:58 PM PST
As a college professor of biblical studies and an ordained minister, I am often dismayed by the lack of critical thought in matters religious. Nowhere is this more apparent than at Christmastime. Case in point: On last Saturday’s religion page, the Daily Breeze ran a story about a Notre Dame astrophysicist who claims that the Bethlehem star of Matthew’s Gospel was likely an unusual planetary alignment.

The article pointed out three questions that the professor asks himself anytime he considers an astronomical event: When did it occur? What were its characteristics? Did anyone else see it? Perhaps the professor should ask himself another, more basic, question: Is it literal? Matthew speaks of a star that “went before” the magi and stood “over” the place (the house) where the child was (Matthew 2:9). Matthew’s “star” is mobile and capable of navigating with pinpoint accuracy like a celestial GPS, hardly the stuff of modern science! Whatever else Matthew may have had in mind, he is certainly not describing something that can be explained by modern astronomy since, if a literal star really did come that close to earth, Matthew and his contemporaries would not have lived another day to tell about it. All attempts to correlate Matthew’s “star” with some real astronomical event are misguided, ill-grounded and, most importantly, disregard Matthew’s poetic genre. Perhaps the professor should pay a visit to his Notre Dame colleague (and recognized scriptural authority on the Gospel of Matthew), John P. Meier, and realize that Matthew’s birth narrative may be more theology than history, more story than science. For the Christian, scripture does not always have to be understood literally, but should always be taken seriously. And taking scripture seriously in this case means paying attention to the kind of literature we are reading.- DAVID L. MATSON, Ph.D. Torrance