Preface

More than ten years ago, Professor James Hanson of the Cleveland State University wrote a column for The Biblical Astronomer, a quarterly magazine dedicated to the Bible and astronomy topics. The column was entitled "The Bible and Geocentricity." This book is composed of those articles, revised and corrected.

It is Prof. Hanson"s conviction that the issue of geocentricity is the central issue confronting the authority of the Bible today. The question of the motion of the earth was the first, and still the only, point on which science and the Bible come into conflict. Without the church's surrender to the Copernican notion that the earth rotates on is axis and orbits the sun, there would have been no theory of evolution, there would have been no Marxism or Communism. The Copernican Revolution removed the authority of the Bible from the realm of science. "The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go," said Galileo. "The Bible is not a textbook on science," said Augustine of Hippo, as if it meant that on those matters where Scripture touches on scientific issues, the Bible is not to be believed.

Without the Copernican Revolution, we would not have Bible criticism in its present form. A man comes to Christ believing that the Bible he holds in his hand, the book that saved him, is the very word of God - consisting one hundred percent of the words of God - nothing more and nothing less. Soon, someone will try to talk the young man out of his simple faith in the Bible and try to subordinate that faith to human authority; the authority of the scholar and the Bible critic. "You can't understand the Bible unless you know the originals," they claim, even though they have never seen an "original manuscript" in their lives. They do not believe that the Lord God can and does preserve his word, consisting only of his words, which God has magnified above all his name (Psalm 138:2). A Christian who exchanges his faith in the Bible for faith in man's scholarship, soon finds himself in a famine, hungering for the words of God and running from coast ot coast looking not for the inerrant, preserved word of God, but for the best translation, the best version, the version "closest" to the non-existent "original manuscripts". These can never satisfy for they are the words of man, not of God. In the twenty-first century, this is the fruit of the Copernican Revolution.

It is hoped for that this book will enlighten the reader to the pervasiveness, yea, even the necessity of the geocentric universe to the Christian faith. Though the old geocentric model is judged guilty of egotistical chauvinism for its thinking that man is at the center of God's creation and placed there to glorify God, the modern view is worse. Today the center of man's universe is the mind and imaginations of man, which the Lord said is only evil continually (Genesis 6:5). Once God was the measure of all things, now man is the measure of all things. May the Savior of the world, the Lord Jesus Christ, be praised and glorified by this work.

Gerardus D. Bouw, Ph.D.
Cleveland, Ohio
16 December 2004

I am also convinced... convinced that this is a must-read book. The Bible and Geocentricity typifies our need to reread the Scriptures, to read them for what they really say and not for what we think they say. Geocentricity demonstrates just how far we have believed our earthly fathers more than out heavenly Father.

Abraham Rempel

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