That may seem strange. Many people wouldn’t start with the Bible when talking about a scientific theory. But I’m a theologian, and I take the Bible with utmost seriousness. Talking about the Bible is a natural place for me to begin, both because the Bible was principally important in my youth, and because it remains so for me today.

I don’t mean to snub science. Science is important too. I read a lot in the sciences, and I think the evidence supporting the theory of evolution is strong. I try to take this and other evidence with great seriousness.

But the real story – for me – starts with the Bible.

Centrality of Scripture

Fortunately, my parents were committed Christians. Our family was one of those “attend-church-three-times-a-week-and-more” families. My parents were significant leaders in our local congregation, and I began following their footsteps early in life.

I doubt I missed more than a handful of Sunday school classes before I was twenty years old. And I always attended Vacation Bible School – even winning Bible memorizing competitions on occasion. (John 11:35 was my friend!) I participated on youth Bible quizzing team for a while too.

While growing up, I don’t recall anyone telling me that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. But my passion for Scripture and my Evangelical community inclined me toward that position. Scripture was central in my life.

Besides, I wanted a failsafe foundation for my beliefs. And how could I convince my Mormon friends to become Christians if the Bible was not true in every sense, including literally true about what it said about the natural world? Witnessing to God’s truth seemed to require that I believe the Bible was without error on all matters, including matters related to science.

An Inerrant Bible?

My view of the Bible began to change when I went to college. It wasn’t that a liberal Bible professor brainwashed me away from the positions of my youth. Instead, I started reading the Bible carefully and the work of biblical scholars. I began to think it important to love God with my mind in a more consistent way.

And then I took a class in koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. In this course, I discovered several things. First, we have differing English translations of the New Testament, because the biblical text allows for a number of valid translation options. (When I later took Hebrew class, I found the diversity of valid translations even greater!) Second, we do not have access to the original biblical manuscripts/autographs. Our Bibles come from later manuscripts, the earliest of which are not complete. And, third, the oldest texts we have differ in many ways – although most differences are minor.

I also discovered discrepancies in the Bible. For instance, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus curses a fig tree and it withers immediately (21:18-20). But in Mark’s version of the same story, the fig tree does not wither immediately and the disciples find it withered the next morning (11:12-14; 20-21). Mark says that Jesus heals one demon-possessed man at Gerasenes (5:1-20), while Matthew says there were two demon-possessed men involved in that same miracle (8:28-34). Jesus tells the disciples to take a staff on their journey as recorded in Mark 6:8, but Matthew says Jesus told the disciples not to take a staff (10:9-10). Jesus says Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly. Then, making an analogy with his own death, he says the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Mt 12:40). But Jesus was not dead three days and three nights!

I mention only a few of the many internal discrepancies. Once I discovered a few, I noticed more. This, of course, made me question whether I should say the Bible is inerrant in all ways.

What’s the Bible For?

I’m persistent. I don’t settle for easy answers, ignore problems, or appeal to mystery at the drop of a hat. I want to give a plausible account of the hope within me.

My quest for better ways to think about the Bible prompted me to read theologians and Bible scholars from the past and present. What I found surprised me! I had assumed believing the Bible is inerrant in all ways was the traditional position of Christians throughout the ages. I assumed it was the position of my own Christian tradition. I was wrong.

Few if any great theologians argued the Bible was absolutely inerrant. Augustine did not affirm inerrancy in this way. Thomas Aquinas didn’t. Neither did Martin Luther or John Wesley – a least in a consistent way. And I discovered through reading and conversations that those considered the leading biblical scholars and theologians today also reject absolute biblical inerrancy.

I did find a few teachers who said the Bible was inerrant. But when I read their explanations of the Bible’s discrepancies and their views about the differences between the oldest manuscripts, I found they stretched the word “inerrant” beyond recognition. Their meaning of “inerrant” was nothing like the usual meaning. And it was certainly not what most Evangelicals meant when they called the Bible the inerrant Word of God.

Perhaps even more important was my discovery that great theologians and biblical scholars of yesteryear believed the Bible’s basic purpose was to reveal God’s desire for our salvation. Many giants of the Christian faith could agree with John Wesley who said, “The Scriptures are a complete rule of faith and practice; and they are clear in all necessary points.”

The necessary points of Scripture refer to instruction for our salvation. They indicate that, as the Apostle Paul puts it, Scripture is inspired and “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The purpose of the Bible is our salvation!

I also discovered Christian leaders over the centuries did not feel required to search the Bible for truths about science. In fact, they sometimes used allegorical interpretations that seem silly to me now. The vast majority of Evangelical scholars with whom I talked also didn’t think the Bible has to be inerrant about scientific matters.

After my studies, I came to believe that the Bible tells us how to find abundant life. But it does not provide the science for how life became abundant.

Tomorrow, Tom will discuss what his evolving view of the Bible has to do with evolution.

One of the more outspoken proponents of this view is Sam Harris, a leading figure among the New Atheists, and a fierce antitheist. Harris has written a book and given talks on the idea that morality—broadly, the act of discerning good from bad—can be derived from science.

On the face of it, this seems strange, since the scientific consensus, especially in evolutionary biology, has always been that nature is morally neutral. We know, as scientists, that sharks are not “bad” any more than dolphins are “good.” The true evolutionary view (I always thought) was that fitness is related to success, not goodness.

The problem is that as human beings, we know that goodness exists, so it must be accounted for, and if one is a staunch believer in scientism, it must be accounted for scientifically. In some situations, this accounting seems to be possible. There is a large literature on kin selection as the basis for some kinds of altruism, and Dawkins has made the case that what he calls “misfiring of genes” for kin altruism are responsible for human goodness.

Harris claims that moral values can be based on scientific principles, and that no kind of cultural context, especially faith-based context, is necessary for humans to have a code of morals. He bases this argument on the idea that moral values are based on facts, and that these facts can be tested for their truthfulness. To some extent, this is an old idea. Murder, adultery, theft and lying—some of the best-recognized universal moral prohibitions, all tend to destabilize the coherence of social groups and would therefore be selected against in all societies.

But Harris goes much further, using arguments and examples that are anything but scientific. Since Harris is a leader of the antitheistic movement, and is interested in finding examples of religious practices that he believes can be scientifically proven to be immoral. He cites the abusive treatment of women in Islamic societies as a main example, and he mentions corporal punishment of children as a slap at Christianity.

So how does Harris prove scientifically that forcing women to cover their bodies, and hitting school children with rulers are morally wrong? He doesn’t. Here is what he actually says:

But we can ask the obvious question: Is it a good idea, generally speaking, to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior? Is there any doubt that this question has an answer, and that it matters?

Harris clearly believes the answer to that question is no, and I agree with him. But where is the science here? Has he data to show that children who were subjected to corporal punishment had worse emotional development and behavior than children who did not undergo such punishment? No. He has no such data, and in fact while he considers the wrongness of corporal punishment to be an obvious fact, there are millions of people who consider it to be just the reverse. There is no science here; there is simply a basic underlying moral idea, which Harris shares with others.

Harris touts the evils of Islamic fundamentalism as morally indefensible from a scientific point of view. But what kind of fact is it to say that making women cover their bodies is wrong, other than the “fact” that Harris thinks it is? Is there a science for determining the optimal way to treat women? If there is, it isn’t mentioned by Harris. 

While it may seem obvious that the oppression of women is morally wrong, proving scientifically that its disadvantageous to the thriving of our species is more tricky. In fact, the moral values of Harris, which are typical Western Judeo-Christian values, are largely counter-evolutionary. What we see when we look at history or sociology, is a background of true selection-positive behavior—indiscriminate killing of enemies, sexual aggression, concentration of power in a dominant faction—on which has been superimposed a moral code, followed and enforced despite its anti-evolutionary tendency. The real question to ask is: How is it that humans obey any of these moral codes that do not help them survive as individuals or as members of a culture?

In truth, there is no science at all behind Harris’s grand claim of factual moral values, (beyond such obvious things as it isn’t a good idea to add cholera germs to the water supply). He even admits this by stating:

Now the irony, from my perspective, is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another.

Of course that is correct, because both Harris, and the people whom he calls “religious demagogues,” have formulated moral codes that they hold to in the absence of any “scientific” data. 

The argument that morality is outside the scope of science is not a hard one to make, but it isn’t only morality that must be excluded from the domain of science. The more important argument is that very few of the ideas of evolutionism are based on anything remotely scientific. This is because the evolutionism paradigm includes many distortions of Darwin’s great theory, and too many of these distortions have become accepted by an antitheistic academic culture without proper rigorous analysis. 

Like Steven Jay Gould, I see no evidence that the biological mechanisms of evolution by natural selection can be extrapolated beyond the bounds of biology. Gould devotes several chapters in The Richness of Life to attacking the “adaptationist paradigm,” which is a central part of evolutionism. In responding to Daniel Dennet’s assertion that adaptation and selection explain just about everything, Gould says:

The fallacy of Dennet’s argument undermines his other imperialist hope that the universal acid of natural selection might reduce human cultural change to the Darwinian algorithm as well … The chief strategy proposed by evolutionary psychologists for identifying adaptation is untestable and therefore unscientific.

Cunningham has also explored this issue in Darwin’s Pious Idea. Social Darwinism, eugenics, evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, mimetics and other nonbiological applications of Darwin’s theory are not rationally consistent with the fundamental properties of evolution by natural selection. 

Evolutionism has been used to “explain” all sorts of dynamics in culture, using evolutionary concepts. But, while the evolution of devices that play music (as an example) might bear a resemblance to the evolution of carnivores, it is a superficial resemblance. Devices do not replicate themselves, so they cannot be the target of selection. 

Scientism is a failed philosophical approach to the pursuit of universal truth. Its failure should be evident especially to scientists who, more than most, understand the limits of their fields of study, as well as the enormous effort it takes to wrest nuggets of pure truth from nature. We must, as previous generations of enlightened thinkers have done, admit that issues of morality, beauty, thought, love, art, and culture are not approachable by scientific methodology or tools, or we risk losing a huge part of our human endowment of special (if not divine) genius.

Genesis 8:1: But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; 2 the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed, the rain from the heavens was restrained, 3 and the waters gradually receded from the earth.

The Flood narrative of Genesis 7-9 has played a prominent role in science and religion debates for over three hundred years and gave rise in earlier centuries to geological theories such as old earth catastrophism. While literary studies have uncovered the chiastic structure of the Flood story (see Gordon Wenham, “The Coherence of the Flood Narrative” Vetus Testamentum 28 (1978):336-48) and with it the theological pivot point of the entire narrative (Gen. 8:1 – “And God remembered Noah…), much of the popular attention remains on the questions regarding details (Is there THAT much water in the world to cover ALL the mountains to a depth of 15 cubits? Could you really fit two or seven of every animal species in an ark that size?)

Looking at a smaller matter, we find at the beginning and the middle of the narrative indications of an ancient Near Eastern worldview. As the story is told, the flood was not merely the result of excessive rain, but actually the convergence of the waters above the earth with the waters below the earth. It is, as one translation puts it, as if the sluice gates at the deep and of the heavens were thrown open and water poured in from above and below. This is a consistent picture from the Old Testament of a three-tiered universe—a dome above the earth holding back the heavenly waters, a flat earth with water on its surface, and water under an earth which is held up by pillars.

That the story is told using the cosmology of its time should not be unduly unsettling, nor that the story is reinterpreted as new understandings of the universe come into favor. By way of example, consider John Calvin and his understanding of the structure of the universe. Although committed to the principle of sola Scriptura, Calvin recognized that the Bible would have been written in terms its original recipients would have understood.

Calvin inherited the medieval cosmology of his time, a way of viewing the world heavily influenced by Greek thought and one which was about to receive shocks from astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo. But not just yet. Calvin still subscribed to the common conception of his day in which the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—comprised the earthly sphere and possessed unique characteristics. The nature of air and fire was to rise, while the nature of earth and water is to sink. Earth, being heavier than water, should sink to the center of the cosmos and water should compose the next layer. Both earth and water are spherical, i.e., naturally form spherically around the cosmic center. Thus the heavier spherical element of earth should be encased entirely within the lighter spherical element of water.

Notice what this does to the flood story. For Calvin, the amazing thing is that the world isn’t constantly under water and subject to flooding. In the cosmology of Calvin’s day, it does not take an act of God to cause a universal flood, but rather an actively present and restraining hand of God to keep the waters back in everyday circumstances and make inundation by water something other than universal.

Obviously, Calvin was wrong. Or perhaps we should say that medieval cosmology was flawed and justifiably gave way to new conceptions of the universe. The answer is not to return to an ancient Near Eastern cosmology, but to reinterpret cautiously within new and better cosmologies and to pay closest attention to the text and the theology of scripture.

The geological and planetary sciences bring their own unique contributions and are of more interest than the latest expedition to discover the ark on Mt. Ararat. Is the flood story a universalization of a catastrophic regional event that burned itself into the psyche of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean basin? Various theories regarding a Black Sea venue for a catastrophic flood event are still in process of being sorted out. It’s intriguing. Or the question where the water on Planet Earth comes from? Was it always here as an emanation of vapors from the earth’s crust in its early formation, or has it accumulated over eons through the steady bombardment of earth by small, icy comets? It’s an intriguing scientific question that is in the midst of determination through testing.

Preaching Suggestions

When preaching on the story of the Flood, it is easy to get lost in the debates over particulars. As mentioned elsewhere, to tackle all the peripheral issues threatens to turn a sermon into a geology lecture. Other settings are better suited to addressing those questions, and those are best addressed open-endedly.

A brief explanation of ancient Near Eastern cosmology can be helpful to contextualize the story. If there are those who are tempted to think that a cosmology embedded in the Bible must be inspired and definitive, one can note that cosmology has changed by the New Testament. The Bible itself isn’t wed to a particular structure of the universe.

What is important is to keep the theology of the text front and center, and in that theology there are at least three non-negotiables from the flood narrative. First, human sin and violence threatens to undo a good creation (the flood is a de-creation event, a return of the waters mentioned in Genesis 1:2). Second, God remembers Noah, and never forgets his promises. Third, the end of the flood is a covenant with the whole earth regarding the stability and endurance of the natural order.

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive end.

Important scientific theories invite philosophical and theological reflection. Dawkins, Ruse, and Wilson, have described their conclusions. But scientific theories are often compatible with multiple philosophical and religious interpretations. For example, Newton's laws of motion and gravity allow several competing theistic and atheistic interpretations.

To avoid Ruse and Wilson's philosophical conclusion, we need not dispute their scientific hypothesis about how morality evolved. We need only dispute their philosophical extrapolation as to why morality exists. Even if we restrict ourselves to an atheistic worldview, this extrapolation is questionable. Donald MacKay (1965) would call this an example of "the fallacy of nothing but-tery". This is the assertion that a description of something at one level renders other levels of description meaningless. From our everyday experience, we know that a successful description on one level does not invalidate other levels of description. For example. one might assert that a Shakespeare sonnet is "nothing but" ink blots on a page (MacKay 1965). True, one way to describe a sonnet is to precisely specify the page coordinates of every ink blot. This description is valid and complete on its own level; however, one could also analyze the sonnet linguistically, emotionally, socially, historically, and on other levels. If one is programming an inkjet printer, the most important description is in terms of ink blot coordinates. For almost every other purpose in life, however, that is an unimportant level of description. In the same way, a complete evolutionary description of the existence of morality does not necessarily invalidate the truth, utility, or significance of other levels of description of morality.

If we do not restrict ourselves to atheism and instead allow for the existence of a creator, the extrapolation from how morality evolved to why morality exists fails further. Consider an analogy. Suppose an inventor builds a robot which could do a variety of useful things-- mow the lawn, clean the house, grade homework, write book chapters, and so on. One thing this robot can do, given a complete set of spare parts, is build a replica of itself. Whenever the inventor needs another robot, she gives one robot a set of spare parts and has it build a replica of itself. Amongst all the software subroutines within this robot, there is a set of subroutines that govern the robot's self-replication, including the replication of those self-replication subroutines. Would it be correct to say that the purpose of the robot's existence is merely to reproduce those particular self-replication subroutines? Do all of the other software and hardware of the robot--which allow it to mow the lawn, and so on-- merely further the reproductive ends of those self-replication subroutines? At one level, the robot's hardware and software do serve to reproduce those self-replication software routines. At another level of analysis, however, those self-replication software routines serve the robot to produce more copies of itself. At still another level, those self-replication software routines serve the robot's creator. The creator of the robot should get the last world as to which of those levels of description is most important.

In humans, does morality exist to further the reproduction of certain genes, or do those genes exist in order to allow for the production of new human beings who can behave morally? If human beings have a creator, the creator gets the final word on the question of purpose. The mechanism which the creator used to make those genes-- whether de novo or via evolution-- is secondary. The creator's purpose in creating those genes decides the issue.

References

• Dawkins, Richard. 1976. Pp. 1-11 in The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• MacKay, Donald. 1965. Christianity in a Mechanistic Universe. Chicago: InterVarsity.
• Ruse, Michael, and Edward O. Wilson. 1993. The approach of sociobiology: The evolution of ethics. In Religion and the Natural Sciences, ed. James E. Huchingson. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Javonovich.

Today, as I write, I am no longer in the desert of southern California, nor in the beech-maple forest of New Hampshire, but on a glacial drumlin in Waubesa Wetlands—a large marsh four miles south of Madison, Wisconsin. Here Ruth and I have our home, and here I study creatures whose watery habitats my neighbors and I have worked to save from eventual destruction. While my desert study site now is covered by a city where people live alone in the land—absent the desert creatures—my wetland study site remains occupied by all kinds of native plants and animals. Embracing it is the Town of Dunn, whose land stewardship plan helps people understand, serve, and maintain this and the other ecosystems. Our town stewardship plan encourages restoration of the landscape, protects agricultural lands, and strives to transmit an intergenerational heritage of secure and wholesome homes, livelihoods, and habitats for the animals, plants, and people that live here. We live largely in harmony and accord.

House-building on slabs poured onto desert sands first alerted me to the question of praxis, the third point on the napkin. But it was later, in my work as organizer of the Waubesa Wetlands Scientific and Agricultural Preserve, and as supervisor and later as chair of the Town of Dunn, that I came to realize that science and ethics do no earthly good unless put into practice. In serving my town, I came to apply what I had learned in the desert: praxis uninformed by science and ethics usually creates more problems than are solved.

“How do you put it all together?” those students in New Hampshire wanted to know. For me, it was building a framework for stewardship that simultaneously considered the questions “How does the world work?” “What is right?” and “What then must we do?” This science-ethics-praxis triad is a framework for living, for learning, for teaching, and most importantly for acting. It is a framework for stewardship.

In order to live and act rightly in the world, we need to know how the world works. We need to know how the systems that sustain us work, and how we interact with them. Without such knowledge we could drown in a flash flood, have our homes undercut by desert winds, cross the street in the path of an oncoming car, or get sick from consuming foods with toxic ingredients. As human beings develop more and more of the world, and as the reach of human actions extends regionally and globally, our knowledge must increase accordingly. This knowledge is not limited to what we acquire from a formal education; it also includes the knowledge we gain from family and friends, and from experience and experiment. In order to live and act rightly in the world, we need to know how the world works.

In order to live and act rightly in the world, we need to know what we ought to do. A century ago, this question was addressed in many colleges across America in a course for graduating seniors on moral philosophy. The purpose of this course was to convict students that they should apply their knowledge for the pursuit of good instead of pursuing self at others’ expense. At my university, this aspect of college education is expressed in a quotation from Abraham Lincoln carved in stone on a bench behind Lincoln’s statue at the top of Bascom Hill: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, dare to do our duty.” The question “What is right?” is represented by the ethics corner of our triad. Moving directly from the Science corner to the praxis corner, or from the ethics corner to the praxis corner, proves problematic, even disastrous. Consider the result of going from knowledge of nuclear fission (science) directly to producing and dropping an atomic bomb (praxis), or moving from the belief that death is bad (ethics) to removing dead wood from forests (praxis); both are examples of these disastrous shortcuts.

But knowing the science and observing the ethics of this stewardship framework does absolutely no good if it is not put into practice—placed into service. By themselves, the very best science and the most substantial ethics are no substitutes for action. We need to act appropriately and deliberately in the light of scientific and ethical knowledge. Praxis by itself, without being grounded in science and ethics, results in mere activism—activism that is unlikely to do good and that may produce harm. All three corners of the triad are essential—but not by themselves. Taken together and working interactively, they provide a framework for stewardship.

But will these three operate in dynamic interaction? Will they interact in ways that preserve and achieve the integrity of human life and the environment? The answer depends on what we know and understand about ourselves and the world (science), what we believe we should do (ethics), and what we in fact do, and how we respond to our successes and failures (praxis). It depends on our will, our motivation, our determination, and our dedication to strive for a harmonious world of creatures before their Creator. What might make us strive for such a world?

Part 3 explores the challenge of translating ideals into concrete actions.

A careful study of this chapter is important because it gives us a beautiful picture of the proper relationships we should have with God, the natural world, and each other. Numerous posts could be written on each of these relationships, but in this post I’d like to focus on how Genesis 2 describes our relationship to the rest of creation. These relationships are given deeper significance when we recognize that the garden is being described as a temple-like “sacred space,” not just an ordinary garden. There are numerous clues in the passage that this is the case. John Walton writes that the Garden/temple parallels “are givens that are simply assumed by the author and audience” ¹ of Genesis, but we completely miss them if we take fail to read the text the way the ancient author and audience would have.

Temples and Gardens

In the Ancient Near East (ANE), all sacred space was conceived of as something like a temple; it was a place where humans would serve God and experience their closest access to Him. Thus in ANE cultures, a temple complex was seen as being the apex and a microcosm of creation and the earthly abode of the god(s). Descriptions of temples often pictured a river flowing from under the temple and flowing out through an adjacent garden, symbolizing the fertile extravagance of the divine provision. A temple garden would be no mere backyard vegetable patch, but rather an elaborate, beautifully landscaped botanical park.

The same temple/river picture can be seen in the description of the eschatological temple in Ezekiel (ch. 47) and Revelation (chs. 21-22, where the final temple is God Himself). Sound familiar? In Genesis 2 we also have a river flowing “from Eden [‘Abundance’] to water the garden” (v. 10).² Not only is the Garden filled with “every beautiful tree with edible fruit” (v. 9), but the area itself is rich with gold, resins, and gemstones (sometimes translated “bdellium and onyx”), the same materials later used to decorate Israel’s tabernacle, temple, and priestly garments. Furthermore, many scholars are convinced that the design of temple’s Menorah (candlestick) deliberately echoes the Garden’s Tree of Life, and some also think that the Ark of the Covenant in the temple parallels the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.³

Made for Sacred Service

As inhabitants of this temple-garden, it comes as no surprise that Adam and Eve enjoyed a special closeness to God’s presence (Gen. 3:8 pictures God taking an evening walk through the Garden). But as inhabitants of the Garden, they had special responsibilities as well; they were told “to farm it and take care of it” (v. 15). The two Hebrew words used here have a broader range of meaning than their English translations suggest. As John Walton writes, the broader meaning of the word here translated “to farm” (particularly when used in a sacred context) “is often connected to religious service deemed as worship (e.g., Ex. 3:12) or of priestly functionaries serving in the temple precinct (e.g., Num. 3:7-10).” ⁴

The usage in Genesis 2 seems to have two layers of meaning: “farm/cultivate the Garden” (since it is an agricultural space) and “serve/worship God” (since the Garden is also a sacred space). The dual meanings are as intertwined in Hebrew grammar as they are intended to be in practice. The second Hebrew word (translated “take care of”) has a deeper religious meaning as well. The word can refer to protecting farmland from external threats, but in a danger-free sacred space like the Garden, the word more generally refers to “performing duties on the [temple] grounds,” that is, to “sacred service.”⁵

Walton therefore translates these two Hebrew words as “serve and preserve.” These same words appear again together several times in Numbers to describe the priest’s duties in the temple. Because of all this, Gordon Wenham describes Adam as “perhaps…an archetypal Levite” with a “quasi-priestly” role in the garden.⁸ Eve was created as Adam’s companion and “helper” in his work, a word which nowhere in the OT refers to a subordinate assistant, but rather to one who is at least equal to the one being helped.⁹

Genesis 2 should banish from our minds any idea that creation care is somehow “secular” work for a Christian, or that it is not even our responsibility. This was the first task given to humanity, to serve and worship God by cultivating and protecting the natural world. The centrality of our responsibility in this regard is even clearer when we back up to the beginning of the chapter. We know there was a river “flow[ing] from Eden to water the garden” (v. 10), symbolizing that “all fertility emanates from the presence of God.” ¹⁰ Nonetheless there could be no cultivated plants in the garden because “there was still no human being to farm the fertile land” (v. 5). With no gardener and no rain, the ground was watered indiscriminately; a human was needed to irrigate the waters and support a garden.¹¹ Therefore, God “formed the human from the topsoil” (Hebrew wordplay equivalent to “human from the humus”) before planting the garden. God certainly could have watered it another way without needing us, but He chose not to, and the resulting collaborative picture here is a beautiful one. All provision flows from God, but He has chosen to give us an essential part in further channeling his provisions in the natural world. Far from countering God’s creative work by destroying nature, we are intended to work with Him to preserve and further it.

Of course, though created primarily to glorify God, the world was also made to provide us abundantly with the food and resources that we need to live (Gen. 2:16). Yet we don’t need to look far to see that we have often failed in our responsibility to properly care for creation. We live in a fallen world, and sin has fractured the intended harmony of our relationships with God, creation, and each other (as described in Genesis 3:14-24).

I recently heard a striking crystallization of this fallen perspective in Spencer Tracy’s narration in the opening scene of the sprawling 1962 western film “How the West Was Won.” As the camera flies over majestic Western fields and mountains, the narrator tells us that “This land has a name today, and is marked on maps. But the names and the maps all had to be won, won from nature and from primitive man.” This is the fallen perspective – advancing our human purpose on earth is done through defeating nature and other people (derogatively labeled “primitive,” as well) apart from God. This perspective perfectly illustrates the conflict-based relationships that sin brings about, already described for us back in the first chapters of the Bible.

Are we doomed, then, to live helplessly in this way? If this is just the way the world is and the way we are, shouldn’t we just accept that? Apart from Christ the answer would be “yes,” but the New Testament makes it clear that though we are still fallen, the saving work of Christ has brought about a profound change in us. As N.T. Wright makes clear in his book Surprised by Hope, Jesus taught (and the Resurrection vindicated) that the Kingdom of God “was and is breaking in to the present world, to earth.” ¹² Christ’s Resurrection was the first act of the future new creation. If we are truly “born again” into this new reality, this new way of living, we must strive (in the Spirit’s power) to live lives of wholeness and right relationships, putting our sinful nature to death (Colossians 3). In doing so, we would be wise to include Genesis 2 as we seek to follow God’s will and God’s Kingdom, “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).

In part 2 of this series, David describes how Genesis 1, Genesis 2, and modern scientific accounts offer complementary and mutually enriching perspectives in our understanding of God's creation.

Notes

1. John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 125.
2. Biblical quotations are from the Common English Bible unless otherwise noted.
3. Both symbolized divine wisdom that humans had to receive from God obediently, with the proper “fear of God” that the Old Testament wisdom literature stresses as a prerequisite. Disobediently eating the Tree’s fruit would lead to death and disobeying God would lead to expulsion from the Garden. Similarly, disobediently touching the Ark brought death (Num. 4:15, 2 Sam. 6:1-7) and disobeying God’s instruction led to Israel’s exile from their Eden, the land of Canaan.
4. John H. Walton, Genesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001), 172.
5. Ibid., 173.
6. Ibid., 192.
7. See Numbers 3:7-8, 8:26, 18:5-6.
8. Gordon J. Wenham, “Sanctuary Symbolism in the Garden of Eden Story,” in “I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11, ed. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 401.
9. Walton, Genesis, 176.
10. Ibid., 170.
11. This follows Walton’s illuminating exegesis of this passage in Genesis, 164-65.
12. N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 201.

Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today

My title reflects the book that I published six years ago as The Last Word, which has recently reappeared as Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. In this new edition I have included two substantial new chapters explaining more fully how the model I propose works out in practice. Both versions of the book and the paper I wrote some years before that (from which this series of posts is adapted) cast light on a puzzle which became clearer to me in the early years of the century. At that time I was involved in many discussions within the Anglican Communion on the one hand, and in dialogue with Roman Catholic theologians on the other, in which reference to scripture and its authority was ubiquitous but frequently opaque. That is, everybody says that scripture is authoritative, but few stop to explain what that means in practice. My book gets off to its start by pointing out that in scripture itself, it is God who is authoritative. This may be obvious, but when you chase through the ramifications it becomes less so.

The Christian tradition has assumed, of course, that what scripture says, God says. But even those who were most concerned to make this point – specifically the Protestant reformers – were often, from our perspective, somewhat cavalier in how they applied this. Some reformers were eager to draw on Old Testament narratives and prophecies in order to instruct the princes of their day – I think of Latimer preaching before Edward VI – while others, notably Martin Luther, could say such things as ‘Moses knows nothing of Christ’. What’s more, the idea of the authority of scripture was used as a limiting statute in the sixteenth century (i.e. one should only insist on that which could be plainly shown from scripture, and not insist, on pain of damnation, upon dogmas that did not have scriptural warrant). But in more recent western church life the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ has been used in a maximal sense, especially of course within fundamentalism. And yet the underlying problems of a Christian ‘authoritative’ reading of scripture have not gone away, but only been parked.

The question before us, then, is: how can the Bible be authoritative? This way of putting it carries two different though related meanings, and I shall look at them in turn. First, how can there be such a thing as an authoritative book? What sort of a claim are we making about a book when we say that it is ‘authoritative’? Second, by what means can the Bible actually exercise its authority? How is it to be used so that its authority becomes effective? The first question subdivides further, and I want to argue two things as we look at it:

(1) I shall argue that usual views of the Bible—including usual evangelical views of the Bible—are actually too low, and do not give it the sufficient weight that it ought to have.

(2) I shall then suggest a different way of envisioning authority from that which I think most Christians normally take.

Authority?

Our generation has a problem about authority. In church and in state we use the word ‘authority’ in different ways, some positive and some negative. We use it in secular senses. We say of a great footballer that he stamped his authority on the game. Or we say of a great musician that he or she gave an authoritative performance of a particular concerto. Within more structured social gatherings the question ‘Who’s in charge?’ has particular function. For instance, if someone came into a lecture-room and asked ‘Who’s in charge?’ the answer would presumably be either the lecturer or the chairman, if any. If, however, a group of people went out to dinner at a restaurant and somebody suddenly came in and said, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ the question might not actually make any sense. We might be a bit puzzled as to what authority might mean in that structure. Within a more definite structure, however, such as a law court or a college or a business, the question ‘Who’s in charge?’ or ‘What does authority mean here?’ would have a very definite meaning, and could expect a fairly clear answer. The meaning of ‘authority’, then, varies considerably according to the context within which the discourse is taking place. It is important to realize this from the start, not least because one of my central contentions is going to be that we have tended to let the word ‘authority’ be the fixed point and have adjusted ‘scripture’ to meet it, instead of the other way round.

Authority in the Church

Within the church, the question of what we mean by authority has had particular focal points. It has had practical questions attached to it. How are things to be organized within church life? What are the boundaries of allowable behavior and doctrine? In particular, to use the sixteenth-century formulation, what are those things ‘necessary to be believed upon pain of damnation’? But it has also had theoretical sides to it. What are we looking for when we are looking for authority in the church? Where would we find it? How would we know when we had found it? What would we do with authoritative documents, people or whatever, if we had them? It is within that context that the familiar debates have taken place, advocating the relative weight to be given to scripture, tradition and reason, or (if you like, and again in sixteenth-century terms) to Bible, Pope and Scholar. Within the last century or so we have seen a fourth, to rival those three, namely emotion or feeling. Various attempts are still being made to draw up satisfactory formulations of how these things fit together in some sort of a hierarchy.

Evangelical Views

Most heirs of the Reformation, not least evangelicals, take it for granted that we are to give scripture the primary place and that everything else has to be lined up in relation to scripture. There is, indeed, an evangelical assumption, common in some circles, that evangelicals do not have any tradition. We simply open the scripture, read what it says, and take it as applying to ourselves: there the matter ends, and we do not have any ‘tradition’. This is rather like the frequent Anglican assumption (being an Anglican myself I rather cherish this) that Anglicans have no doctrine peculiar to themselves: it is merely that if something is true the Church of England believes it. This, though not itself a refutation of the claim not to have any ‘tradition’, is for the moment sufficient indication of the inherent unlikeliness of the claim’s truth, and I am confident that most people, facing the question explicitly, will not wish that the claim be pressed.

But I still find two things to be the case, both of which give me some cause for concern. First, there is an implied, and quite unwarranted, positivism: we imagine that we are ‘reading the text, straight’, and that if somebody disagrees with us it must be because they, unlike we ourselves, are secretly using ‘presuppositions’ of this or that sort. This is simply naïve, and actually astonishingly arrogant and dangerous. It fuels the second point, which is that evangelicals often use the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ when they mean the authority of evangelical, or Protestant, theology. The assumption is made that we (evangelicals, or Protestants) are the ones who know and believe what the Bible is saying. And, though there is more than a grain of truth in such claims, they are by no means the whole truth, and to imagine that they are is to move from theology to ideology. If we are not careful, the phrase ‘authority of scripture’ can, by such routes, come to mean simply ‘the authority of evangelical tradition.


The next part of our series explores whether we are unwittingly “belittling the Bible” by appealing to the wrong kind of authority.

(Originally published in Vox Evangelica, 1991, 21, 7–32. Reproduced by permission of the author.)

Today's video features theologian Rev. Lincoln Harvey and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Rev. Lincoln Harvey discusses our desire to "domesticate" the liveliness and abundance of God. Harvey notes that the Trinity highlights both the manyness and oneness of God, which can be hard to Christians to fully understand. While this lack of understanding can be unsettling, Harvey encourages Christians not too force God into too neat of a box. Often, this desire to domesticate can be found in our interaction with Scripture. The Scriptures can be understood, but there is still something lively, mysterious, and beautiful in them that resists our desire to tame them. We should instead approach Scripture, as we approach God, with a spirit of humility and openness.

Having had only very limited prior exposure to Driscoll’s work, I was interested in attending the course to see how he handled certain issues (such as the doctrine of Creation, the nature of Scripture as it relates to science, and so on). Part of the reason for my interest was the fact that our church had explored some of these ideas previously in a similar setting by offering the Truth Project lecture series featuring several prominent advocates of Intelligent Design. That experience led me to request an opportunity to explain the mainstream science position on evolution to the members of that class. This request was denied by my church leadership despite interest within the group – at which point an interested friend hosted an unofficial evening session in his own home (that was recorded and eventually found its way on to YouTube, generating an audience far larger than I had anticipated.) So, given the announcement that the church was offering Driscoll’s series, I signed up. A little online research suggested that Driscoll’s series would indeed generate interesting conversation. I also found that the series has been adapted in book form, so I picked up a copy as well.

Science and sola Scriptura

It wasn’t long before material relevant to the science / faith conversation arose. In the second lecture of the series (Revelation: God Speaks) Driscoll sets forth his views on the nature and roles of general and special revelation in Christian life. For Driscoll, the guiding principle is the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura, which he interprets in the following way:

Now, some also called this Prima Scriptura, but the point is that there are lesser courts of authority. Let me distinguish Sola Scriptura from Solo Scriptura. Solo Scriptura is that Scripture alone is our authority. We don’t believe that. We believe that Scripture alone is our highest authority. The Scriptures, for example, don’t tell us how to perform open heart surgery. The Scriptures don’t tell us how to repair a carburetor on an old vehicle. The Scriptures don’t tell us how to turn a double play. If we want to learn any of those things we need to find that information elsewhere. All of the time we go to science, we go to medicine, we go to sociology, psychology, we go to history, we go to all kinds of disciplines and we learn. And that’s all the result of general revelation, okay?

Back to one of my first points. The sciences, the social sciences, other means of learning all falls under the rubric of God’s image bearers working with general revelation. Some people know things about technology and about the environment and about the human body and about medicine and about diet and nutrition and all these kind of things. And we believe in Sola Scriptura, and that is we have lesser courts of lower authority. You can go to college, go to the doctor, read a philosopher, study medicine, science – whatever it is, that’s wonderful and good. That’s enjoying general revelation in its full, and then testing general revelation by special revelation. That whatever we’re learning there we have to check by Scripture and to see that it agrees with Scripture. If it doesn’t disagree with Scripture, then we have freedom.

Recently, Driscoll has applied this approach to the genomics evidence that indicates humans derive from an ancestral population, rather than one individual couple. This allows us to examine how he applies his view of sola Scriptura to a specific, current scientific issue he feels is of pressing concern for believers to address:

Problems arise, however, when we find truths that seemingly contradict the truths of Scripture and, rather than subject those truths to the authority of Scripture, instead consider those truths to invalidate the truths of Scripture. Such is the case today when it comes to the biblical account of Adam and Eve and some modern scientists’ disbelief of the scriptural account in favor of the scientific account. Believers who are scientists bear the primary responsibility for affirming scriptural truths over scientific ones and figuring out how the truths of science affirm the truths of Scripture—not the other way around. It’s impossible to serve two masters.

So, what are we to do in the face of seemingly contradictory truth between science and Scripture? We have two choices: exchange the truths of Scripture for the truths of science and wash our hands clean (Paul is clear in Romans 1:18 and 1:22–23 that many people choose just this option), or we take the truths of science and place them within the context of the truths of Scripture as the highest authority.

So, for Driscoll, the choice is a simple dichotomy: Scripture or science. Scripture is the highest court of authority in all matters, and the role of believing scientists is to affirm Scripture. To fail to do so is to “exchange the truths of Scripture for the truths of science” and to fall into the grievous, idolatrous error Paul describes in Romans 1:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth…

22 Claiming to be wise they became fools; 23 and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. (NRSV)

Even if one chooses not to question the assumptions that might undergird such a view of sola Scriptura (for example, that Scripture and science are “courts of authority” potentially in conflict with one another, or that one’s interpretation of Scripture might possibly be incomplete or even in error), the fact remains that Driscoll’s view sits somewhat in tension with how one notable leader of the Reformation, John Calvin, approached the science / faith issues of his day.

Learning from history: Calvin and science

One issue of potential concern during Calvin’s time was the growing understanding of the relative sizes of the various heavenly bodies. For example, astronomers had determined that Saturn was in fact much larger than our own moon. While this comes as no surprise to us now, nor of any theological importance, at that time this discovery was seen by some in the church to contradict the Genesis proclamation that the sun and moon were the “greater” and “lesser” lights created by God. If indeed Saturn was larger than the moon, would not it be named as the “lesser” light instead? While it might be tempting in the present to dismiss this discussion as trivial, we must remember that for its day, this was a significant concern for some. Which was correct? Science, or Scripture? Could the Bible really be trusted when it spoke about things in the natural world?

Calvin’s approach to this topic may be surprising for some: he advocated for the view that Genesis was accommodated to a scientifically unlearned audience, and not necessarily written with the intent to provide scientific accuracy. As Davis Young recounts in his excellent book John Calvin and the Natural World:

He reminded his readers that … Moses did not treat the stars in a scientific manner, as a philosopher would do. On the contrary, he described the heavenly bodies, “in a popular manner, according to their appearance to the uneducated, rather than according to truth, two great lights.”

This last quotation may be jarring to contemporary Christians who place great emphasis on the idea of the inerrancy of Scripture… Calvin, however, maintained that Genesis 1 is not speaking “according to truth” when referring to the Sun and the Moon. In effect, he said that the Bible does not represent to us the actual reality about the heavenly bodies by providing an accurate picture of their true size. (p. 181)

So, for one of the key leaders of the Reformation a simple science-or-Scripture approach was not seen to be a defining mark of sola Scriptura. Rather, Calvin readily interacted with the scientific findings of his day, even if they posed apparent theological challenges. He was also willing to consider how God may have used inspiration to accomplish His purposes in Genesis in light of what (then) modern science was indicating.

Accordingly, it follows that one can hold a robust view of Scripture and yet explore how general revelation (science) and special revelation (Scripture) work together: not as competing authorities, but as complementary forms of revelation with the same Author. If Calvin can engage the discussion, we are free to do so as well.

In the next post in this series, we’ll examine the third sermon in the Doctrine series: Creation: God Makes.

For further reading:

Mark Driscoll and Gerry Breshears: Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe. Crossway, Wheaton Illinois, 2010.

Davis A. Young: John Calvin and the Natural World. University Press of America, Lanham Maryland, 2007.

Today's video is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In this video, physicist Ard Louis discusses the misconceptions about evolution and what it says about our purpose. A lot of the young earth arguments against evolution, says Louis, can be beneficial to those promoting atheism. According to Louis, both sides are attempting to extract theology from the natural world and wrongly accept the premise that where we come from determines who we are and how we should live. However, that’s not what the Bible tells us; rather, our value comes from God, and God determines who we are and how we should live.

Many understand evolution as a theory underlined by the idea that our existence is purposelessness. But our value and purpose do not come from whether or not we were created by an evolutionary mechanism. Evolution may tell us something about how we were created, but it is not the source of our worth. That worth comes from God.

For more from Ard Louis, be sure to read his white paper for BioLogos.

Against the repeated claim that the doctrine of inerrancy, unknown to the church, arose first with Protestant orthodoxy, we could cite numerous examples from the ancient and medieval church.¹ It was Augustine who first coined the term "inerrant," and Luther and Calvin can speak of Scripture as free from error.²

Down to the Second Vatican Council, Rome has attributed inerrancy to Scripture as the common view of the church throughout its history. According to the First Vatican Council (1869-70), the Old and New Testaments, "whole and entire," are "sacred and canonical." In fact, contrary to the tendency of some Protestants (including some evangelicals) to lodge the nature of inspiration in the church's authority, this council added,

And the church holds them as sacred and canonical not because, having been composed by human industry, they were afterwards approved by her authority; nor only because they contain revelation without errors, but because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God for their Author.³

Successive popes during the twentieth century condemned the view that limited inerrancy to that which is necessary for salvation, and Pope Leo XIII went even further than the inerrancy position by espousing the dictation theory of inspiration. Undoubtedly, this mechanical theory of inspiration is what most critics have in mind when they encounter the term "inerrancy." Nevertheless, it does demonstrate that inerrancy is not an invention of Protestant fundamentalists. Quoting the Second Vatican Council, the most recent Catholic catechism states, "Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures."⁴

The Princeton Formulation of Inerrancy

Although inerrancy was taken for granted in church history until the Enlightenment, it was especially at Princeton Seminary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that it became a full-blown formulation. This view is articulated most completely in Inspiration, a book coauthored by A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield and published by the Presbyterian Church in 1881. Their argument deserves an extended summary especially because it remains, in my view, the best formulation of inerrancy just as it anticipates and challenges caricatures.

First, they point out that a sound doctrine of inspiration requires a specifically Christian ontology or view of reality: "The only really dangerous opposition to the church doctrine of inspiration comes either directly or indirectly, but always ultimately, from some false view of God's relation to the world, of his methods of working, and of the possibility of a supernatural agency penetrating and altering the course of a natural process."⁵ Just as the divine element pervades the whole of Scripture, so too does the human aspect. Not only "the untrammeled play of all [the author's] faculties, but the very substance of what they write is evidently for the most part the product of their own mental and spiritual activities."⁶ Even more than the Reformers, the Protestant orthodox were sensitive to the diverse means used by God to produce the Bible's diverse literature. This awareness has only grown, Hodge and Warfield observe, and should be fully appreciated. God's "superintendence" did not compromise creaturely freedom. In fact, "It interfered with no spontaneous natural agencies, which were, in themselves, producing results conformable to the mind of the Holy Spirit."⁷ Just as the divine element pervades the whole of Scripture, so too does the human aspect.

Far from reducing all instances of biblical revelation to the prophetic paradigm, as critics often allege, Hodge and Warfield recognize that the prophetic form, "Thus says the Lord," is a "comparatively small element of the whole body of sacred writing." In the majority of cases, the writers drew from their own existing knowledge, including general revelation, and each "gave evidence of his own special limitations of knowledge and mental power, and of his personal defects as well as of his powers....The Scriptures have been generated, as the plan of redemption has been evolved, through an historic process," which is divine in its origin and intent, but "largely natural in its method."⁸ "The Scriptures were generated through sixteen centuries of this divinely regulated concurrence of God and man, of the natural and the supernatural, of reason and revelation, of providence and grace."⁹

Second, Warfield and Hodge underscore the redemptive-historical unfolding of biblical revelation, defending an organic view of inspiration over a mechanical theory. They note that many reject verbal inspiration because of its association with the erroneous theory of verbal dictation, which is an "extremely mechanical" view.¹⁰ Therefore, theories concerning "authors, dates, sources and modes of composition" that "are not plainly inconsistent with the testimony of Christ or his apostles as to the Old Testament or with the apostolic origin of the books of the New Testament...cannot in the least invalidate" the Bible's inspiration and inerrancy.¹¹ While higher criticism proceeds on the basis of anti-supernatural and rationalistic presuppositions, historical criticism is a valid and crucial discipline.

Third, the Princeton theologians faced squarely the question of contradictions and errors, noting problems in great detail. Some discrepancies are due to imperfect copies, which textual criticism properly considers. In other cases, an original reading may be lost, or we may simply fail to have adequate data or be blinded by our presuppositions from understanding a given text. Sometimes we are "destitute of the circumstantial knowledge which would fill up and harmonize the record," as is true in any historical record. We must also remember that our own methods of testing the accuracy of Scripture "are themselves subject to error."¹²

Fourth, because it is the communication that is inspired rather than the persons themselves, we should not imagine that the authors were omniscient or infallible. In fact, the authors themselves seem conscious enough of their limitations. "The record itself furnishes evidence that the writers were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, and that their personal knowledge and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even wrong."¹³ Yet Scripture is seen to be inerrant "when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense."¹⁴ Inerrancy is not attributed to copies, much less to our vernacular translations, but to "the original autographic text."¹⁵

Notes:

1. See Robert D. Preus, "The View of the Bible Held by the Church: The Early Church through Luther," and John H. Gerstner, "The View of the Bible Held by the Church: Calvin and the Westminster Divines," in Inerrancy, ed. Norman Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980); John A. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); G. W. Bromiley, "The Church Fathers and Holy Scripture," in Scripture and Truth, eds. D. A. Carson and John A. Woodbridge (Leicester: IVP, 1983).
2. Klaas Runia, "The Hermeneutics of the Reformers," Calvin Theological Journal 19 (1984), 129-32.
3. See Alfred Duran, "Inspiration of the Bible," in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910).
4. Dei Verbum (Constitution on Divine Revelation), Art. 11, quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, MO: Liguori, 1994), 31.
5. A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, Inspiration (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 9.
6. Hodge and Warfield, 12.
7. Hodge and Warfield, 6.
8. Hodge and Warfield, 12-13.
9. Hodge and Warfield, 14.
10. Hodge and Warfield, 19.
11. Hodge and Warfield, 25.
12. Hodge and Warfield, 27.
13. Hodge and Warfield, 27-28.
14. Hodge and Warfield, 27-28.
15. Hodge and Warfield, 42.

A Case Study: B.B. Warfield, Concursis, and Evolution

A case study that shows how profitable it can be to approach scientific issues with Christological principles is provided by the career of Benjamin B. Warfield. In chapter 3 [of Noll's book], when discussing the doubleness of classical Christology, we saw how Warfield forcefully affirmed “this conjoint humanity and divinity [of Christ], within the limits of a single personality.” It was precisely this regard for the Chalcedonian definition of Christ’s person and work that enabled Warfield to handle with relative ease the knotty questions about evolution that arose during his lifetime.

From his position at Princeton Theological Seminary, Warfield wrote steadily from the 1880s until shortly before his death in 1921 about many aspects of his era’s developing evolutionary theories.¹ These writings included major essays devoted to Darwin’s biography (“Charles Darwin’s Religious Life” in 1888 and “Darwin’s Arguments against Christianity” the next year); several substantial articles directly on evolution or related scientific issues (“The Present Day Conception of Evolution” in 1895, “Creation versus Evolution” in 1901, “On the Antiquity and Unity of the Human Race” in 1911, and “Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation” in 1915); and many reviews of relevant books, some of them mini-essays in their own right.

In these works, Warfield repeatedly insisted on distinguishing among Darwin as a person, Darwinism as a cosmological theory, and evolution as a series of explanations about natural development. Of key importance was his willingness throughout a long career to accept the possibility (or even the probability) of evolution, while also denying Darwinism as a cosmological theory. In his mind, these discriminations were necessary in order properly to evaluate both the results of disciplined observation (science) and large-scale conclusions drawn from that science (theology or cosmology). Crucially, a Christological perspective was prominent when he applied these discriminations to evolutionary theory.

For positioning Warfield properly on these subjects, it is also vital to stress a conjunction of his convictions that has been much less common since his day. Besides his openness toward evolution, that is, Warfield was also the ablest modern defender of the theologically conservative belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.

During the late nineteenth century when critical views of Scripture came to prevail in American universities,Warfield was as responsible as any other American for refurbishing the conviction that the Bible communicates revelation from God entirely without error. Warfield’s formulation of biblical inerrancy, in fact, has even been a theological mainstay for recent “creationist” convictions about the origin of the earth.² Yet while he defended biblical inerrancy, Warfield was also a cautious, discriminating, but entirely candid proponent of the possibility that evolution might offer the best way to understand the natural history of the earth and of humankind. On this score his views place him with more recent thinkers who maintain ancient trust in the Bible while also affirming the modern scientific enterprise and mainstream scientific conclusions.³ Warfield did not simply assert these two views randomly, but he sustained them learnedly, as coordinate arguments.

In the course of his career, both Warfield’s positions and his vocabulary did shift on the question of evolution. But they shifted only within a fairly narrow range. What remained constant was his adherence to a broad Calvinistic conception of the natural world — of a world that, even in its most physical aspects, reflected the wisdom and glory of God—and his commitment to the goal of harmonizing a sophisticated conservative theology and the most securely verified conclusions of modern science. To state once again his combination of positions, Warfield consistently rejected materialist or dysteleological explanations for natural phenomena (explanations that he usually associated with “Darwinism”), even as he just as consistently entertained the possibility that other kinds of evolutionary explanations, which avoided Darwin’s rejection of divine agency, could satisfactorily explain the physical world.

In several of his writings, Warfield carefully distinguished three ways in which God worked in and through the physical world. The most important thing about these three ways is that Warfield felt each of them was compatible with the theology he found in an inerrant Bible, if each was applied properly to natural history and to the history of salvation. “Evolution” meant developments arising out of forces that God had placed inside matter at the original creation of the world-stuff, but that God also directed to predetermined ends by his providential superintendence of the world. At least in writings toward the end of his life, Warfield held that evolution in this sense was fully compatible with biblical understandings of the production of the human body. “Mediate creation” meant the action of God upon matter to bring something new into existence that could not have been produced by forces or energy latent in matter itself. He did not apply the notion of “mediate creation” directly in his last, most mature writings on evolution, but it may be that he expounded the concept as much to deal with miracles or other biblical events as for developments in the natural world.⁴ The last means of God’s action was “creation ex nihilo,” which Warfield consistently maintained was the way that God made the original stuff of the world.

On questions relating to evolution, orthodox Christology became relevant when Warfield invoked the concept of concursus. By this term he meant the coexistence of two usually contrary conditions or realities. In speaking of the person of Christ he had used a closely related term, “conjoined.” For broader intellectual purposes, the key was to apply the same sense of harmoniously conjoined spheres to other domains.

As we will see with somewhat more detail when taking up Christology in relation to Scripture, Warfield held that the biblical authors were completely human as they wrote the Scriptures, even as they enjoyed the full inspiration of the Holy Spirit.⁵ This principle, grounded in Christology and exemplified in the Bible, was also his guide for positing an (evolutionary) approach to nature where all living creatures were thought to develop fully (with the exception of the original creation and the human soul) through “natural” means. Warfield’s basic stance, expressed first about Christ and then extrapolated for Scripture, was a doctrine of providence that saw God working in and with, instead of as a replacement for, the processes of nature. Late in his career, this same stance also grounded Warfield’s opposition to “faith healing.” In his eyes, physical healing through medicine and the agency of physicians was as much a result of God’s action (if through secondary causes) as the cures claimed as a direct result of divine intervention.⁶ Concursus was as important and as fruitful for his views on evolution as it was for his theology as a whole. It was a principle he felt the Scriptures offered to enable humans both to approach the world fearlessly and to do so for the greater glory of God.

Warfield’s strongest statement on evolution came in 1915 when he published a lengthy article on John Calvin’s view of creation.⁷ Although he never stated it in so many words, it is clear that the convictions he ascribed to Calvin were also his own. He summarizes what he read in Calvin: “It should scarcely be passed without remark that Calvin’s doctrine of creation is, if we have understood it aright, for all except the souls of men, an evolutionary one.” God had called the “indigested mass” into existence ex nihilo, with a full “promise and potency” of what was to develop from that mass. Yet, according to Warfield’s summary of Calvin, “all that has come into being since — except the souls of men alone — has arisen as a modification of this original world-stuff by means of the interaction of its intrinsic forces.” Warfield went on to affirm a robust doctrine of providence, whereby “all the modifications of the world-stuff have taken place under the directly upholding and governing hand of God, and find their account ultimately in His will.” Critically, however, he saw these later modifications taking place through “secondary causes.” And once “secondary causes” were viewed as the means by which the original creation was modified, we have, according to Warfield, “not only evolutionism but pure evolutionism.”

Warfield makes clear that Calvin did not himself explicitly embrace evolutionary theory since Calvin “had no conception” of “the interaction of forces by which the actual production of forms was accomplished.” Thus, lacking the information provided by modern students of nature, Calvin did not advocate a “theory” of evolution. But, Warfield insists, he did teach “a doctrine of evolution” that pictures God as producing the material stuff of the world “out of nothing,” but then “all that is not immediately produced out of nothing is therefore not created — but evolved.” Warfield then translates Calvin’s notion of “secondary causes” into what he defines as “intrinsic forces.”Warfield’s summary repeats a second time: “And this, we say, is a very pure evolutionary scheme.”

The point where Christology enters is where Warfield explains the deeper theology at work. In his summary, “Calvin’s ontology of second causes was, briefly stated, a very pure and complete doctrine of concursus, by virtue of which he ascribed all that comes to pass to God’s purpose and directive government.” For readers of Warfield in the twenty-first century, it is frustrating that he did not go further in expounding on this theological basis. He does say that the “account” of how “secondary causes” work is “a matter of ontology; how we account for their existence, their persistence, their action—the relation we conceive them to stand in to God, the upholder and director as well as creator of them.” But for his purposes with this essay, Warfield does not explore those ontological issues. The regret now is that, if he had taken up these ontological questions, he may have considered the Western tradition of univocity that had, in effect, dispensed with concursus in explaining the physical world.

As it is, we still have a most intriguing contribution to theology, science, and science considered in connection with theology. Warfield’s discussion of Calvin on evolution certainly indicated that he thought his very high view of biblical inspiration was fully compatible with comprehensive forms of evolutionary science (as distinct from evolutionary cosmology). Whether Warfield interpreted Calvin correctly or not, whether Warfield understood correctly his era’s scientific discoveries (in which he was well read for an amateur), or whether his own efforts at bringing together his era’s scientific knowledge and his interpretation of the biblical record were correct — these are all important but secondary issues. The main point lies elsewhere. The Scriptures that Warfield trusted implicitly revealed a God to him who created the world, providentially superintended the world, and gave human beings the capacity to explain the world naturally (in terms of “secondary causes”). The key theological principle that enabled Warfield to draw these conclusions was his belief in the classical Christology of Nicea and Chalcedon.

Warfield’s writings on evolution, the last of which appeared in the year of his death, 1921, cannot, of course, pronounce definitively on theological-scientific questions at the start of the twenty-first century. They can, however, show that sophisticated theology, nuanced argument, and careful sifting of scientific research are able to produce a much more satisfactory working relationship between science and theology than the heated strife that has dominated public debate on this subject since the time of Warfield’s passing.

This excerpt was drawn from chapter 3 of Mark Noll's book Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. If you would like to read the whole chapter, entitled "Come and See: A Christological Invitation for Science", click here.

Notes

1. Most of these works are reprinted, with editorial introductions, in B. B. Warfield, Evolution, Science, and Scripture: Selected Writings, ed. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000).
2. For the direct use of Warfield on the inerrancy of Scripture, see John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1961), xx.
3. For example, Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954); Russell L. Mixter, ed., Evolution and Christian Thought Today (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959); D. C. Spanner, Creation and Evolution: Some Preliminary Considerations (London: Falcon Books, 1966); Malcolm A. Jeeves, ed., The Scientific Enterprise and Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1969); Donald M. MacKay, The Clockwork Image: A Christian Perspective on Science (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1974); Thomas F. Torrance, Christian Theology and Scientific Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Davis A. Young, Christianity and the Age of the Earth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982); Charles E. Hummel, The Galileo Connection: Resolving Conflicts between Science and the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986); J. C. Polkinghorne, OneWorld: The Interaction of Science and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Howard J. Van Till, The Fourth Day: What the Bible and the Heavens Are Telling Us about the Creation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); John Houghton, Does God Play Dice? A Look at the Story of the Universe (Leicester, England: Inter Varsity Press, 1988); Philip Duce, Reading the Mind of God: Interpretation in Science and Theology (Leicester, England: Apollos, 1998); Alister McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue in Science and Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2007); Denis O. Lamoureux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008); and Karl W. Giberson, Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (New York: HarperOne, 2008).
4. Warfield deployed a similar vocabulary in a discussion of miracles that he published at about the same time; see “The Question of Miracles,” in The Bible Student (March-June 1903), as reprinted in The Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol. 2, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1973), 167-204.
5. See below, 130-32.
6. See Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (New York: Scribner, 1918).
7. ForWarfield’s complete essay, see “Calvin’s Doctrine of the Creation,” in The Works of Benjamin B.Warfield, vol. 5, Calvin and Calvinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), 287-349. The quotations that follow are taken from Warfield, Evolution, Science, and Scripture, 308-9.

Introduction

In my last post we looked at Old Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield and his understanding of the “human side” of the Bible. That may not be the best way of putting it, but it reflects Warfield’s view that the Bible is fully a divine/human product. Neither can be seen as less important than the other. This has practical implications for Warfield, for it allows—better, it demands—that the implications of Scripture’s “humanity” be taken with utmost seriousness.

All biblical authors wrote from the vantage point of their particular historical contexts, and their writings throughout reflect that reality. The inspiration of Scripture is not true despite this human side. Rather, the human side is an invariable part of what “inspiration” means. The “human side” is not a problem that inspiration needs to overcome. It is God’s chosen means of speaking.

Old Princeton represented one major arm of Calvinism—the British tradition. The other arm, the Dutch Calvinist tradition, expressed (in my opinion) an even clearer idea of the theological importance of the human side of Scripture.

An “Organic” View of Scripture

In fact, when we turn to these Dutch Calvinists, we see that they were actually critical of their own tradition for failure to develop an “organic” doctrine of Scripture, i.e., one that takes account of its humanness as well as its divine authority.

We see this in the writings of two guiding lights of Dutch Calvinism, Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) and Herman Bavinck (1854-1921).

Abraham Kuyper appreciated the defenses of divine authorship that characterized his Calvinist predecessors, but added:

It can scarcely be denied that they had established themselves too firmly in the idea of a logical theory of inspiration, to allow the animated organism of the Scripture to fully assert itself.¹

Kuyper felt that philosophical arguments for inspiration ignored the human dimension which is an irreducible part of Scripture. In a similar vein, Herman Bavinck noted the overall failure of his Calvinist predecessors to develop an organic view of inspiration:

The Reformed confessions [e.g., the 1646 Westminster Confession of Faith] almost all have an article on Scripture and clearly express its divine authority; and all the Reformed theologians without exception take the same position. Occasionally one can discern a feeble attempt at developing a more organic view of Scripture.²

The development of a more organic view awaited the rise of modernity, as Bavinck noted:

In general, it can be said without fear of contradiction that insight into the historical and psychological mediation of revelation … only came to full clarity in modern times and that the mechanical view of inspiration, to the extent that it existed in the past, has increasingly made way for the organic (Ibid.,431).

There is a lot to unpack in these three quotes, but let me focus on the last point. Kuyper and Bavinck were hardly liberal renegades looking to destroy people’s faith. In fact, they were quite open about warning people of liberal extremes. Nevertheless, the rise of modern biblical scholarship, whatever downside there might be to it, served the purpose of alerting us to the thoroughly human product that Scripture is—not exclusively human, but nevertheless, thoroughly human.

The Bible and the Incarnation

Furthermore, in their development of the doctrine of organic inspiration, both Bavinck and Kuyper made bold use of the incarnational analogy of Scripture (as Christ is both divine/human, so too does Scripture reflect divine and human authorship). They argued that inspiration despised no cultural form, but wove itself fully into the fabric of human life at the time.

The following from Bavinck illustrates the point beautifully:

The theory of organic inspiration alone does justice to Scripture. In the doctrine of Scripture, it is the working out and application of the central fact of revelation: the incarnation of the Word. The Word (logos) has become flesh (sarx), and the word has become Scripture; these two facts do not only run parallel but are most intimately connected. Christ became flesh, a servant, without form or comeliness, the most despised of human beings; he descended to the nethermost parts of the earth and became obedient even to death on the cross. So also the word, the revelation of God, entered the world of creatureliness, the life and history of humanity, in all the human forms of dream and vision, of investigation and reflection, right down into that which is humanly weak and despised and ignoble…. All this took place in order that the excellency of the power…of Scripture, may be God’s and not ours.³

Several pages later, Bavinck puts it this way:

The organic nature of Scripture…implies the idea that the Holy Spirit, in the inscripturation of the word of God, did not spurn anything human to serve as an organ of the divine. The revelation of God is not abstractly supernatural but has entered into the human fabric, into persons and states of beings, into forms and usages, into history and life. It does not fly high above us but descends into our situation; it has become flesh and blood, like us in all things except sin. Divine revelation is now an ineradicable constituent of this cosmos in which we live and, effecting renewal and restoration, continues its operation. The human has become an instrument of the divine; the natural has become a revelation of the supernatural; the visible has become a sign and seal of the invisible. In the process of inspiration, use has been made of all the gifts and forces resident in human nature” ("Reformed Dogmatics" 1.442–43; my emphasis).

What I find so refreshing in Bavinck is his eloquent—almost poetic—enthusiasm for the irreducible theological value of the humanity of Scripture. There is a reason why Scripture looks the way it does, with all its bumps and bruises, peaks and valleys, gaps and gashes. As counterintuitive as it might sound to, the “humiliation” of Scripture is there to exalt God’s power, not ours.

Accenting the Bible’s humanity does not mean ignoring or marginalizing the divine authorship of Scripture. Rather, to acknowledge the historical contexts in which Scripture was produced is to proclaim as good and powerful what that divine author has actually, by his wisdom, produced. The Spirit’s primary authorship is not questioned, nor does Scripture’s humiliation imply error. Bavinck’s point is simply that the “creatureliness” of Scripture is not an obstacle to be overcome, but the very means by which Scripture’s divinity can be seen.

In fact, Scripture’s divinity can only be seen because of its humanity—God’s chosen means of communication—not by looking past it. And it is not just humanity as a safe theoretical construct. It is a humanity that is “weak and despised and ignoble.” That is what points us to the divine, just as Christ does in his state of humiliation. To marginalize, or minimize, or somehow get behind the Bible’s “creatureliness” to the “real” word of God is, for Bavinck, to strip God of his glory.

And the point is…

Old Princeton and the Dutch Calvinists understood that the human dimension of Scripture—which pervades Scripture thoroughly—is not merely tolerable of a divine book, but a necessary component of what inspiration means.

These traditions have had a marked influence on contemporary Evangelicalism, and applying their general approach to Scripture to current challenges such as science and faith seems like a continuation of that trajectory.

In my next post I want to look at one example from New Testament scholarship that illustrates this “embrace of the human” in Scripture.

Notes

1. Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology: Its Principles (trans. J. Hendrik deVries; New York: Scribners, 1898), 480-81
2. Reformed Dogmatics, vol 1, Prolegomena (ed. J. Bolt; trans. J. Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 415.
3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Volume 1: Prolegomena (trans. J. Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003) 434–35; my emphasis.

Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield (1851-1921) accepted evolution as giving the proper scientific account of human origins, but he also believed that hearing God’s voice in scripture and the findings of solid scientific work were not at odds. As historians Mark Noll and David Livingston put it,

B. B. Warfield, the ablest modern defender of the theologically conservative doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible, was also an evolutionist.¹

Warfield, however, did not address the matter in as much theological and hermeneutical depth as is needed today, given our growing scientific and archaeological knowledge. In fact, Warfield did not address the latter (to my knowledge) at all. Thus, we should not call upon Warfield, or any other of his contemporaries, to settle the evolution question for us today. The question is whether we see in Warfield (and others) a hermeneutical trajectory for having the needed “Bible in context” discussion today.

In my opinion, there are valuable lessons to be learned here for contemporary Evangelicals.

B. B. Warfield and the “Human Side” of the Bible

The theological reason why Warfield and the other Old Princeton theologians were so open to looking at the Bible in its historical context was because they understood the Bible to be analogous to Christ himself. As Christ was both divine and human, Scripture also has divine and human sides.

Of course, this is only an analogy. No one—least of all Warfield—is claiming that the Bible is “God incarnate” like Christ is. But he is saying that Christ the Word and Scripture the word are both evidence of “God with us” and both have a divine and human “dimension” (if you will forgive the imprecise language here).

The divine and human cannot be separated, either in Christ or in the Bible. Both are what they are. In fact, with Christ, his humanity is essential to who he is. Likewise, the Bible’s “human side” is an essential part of what Scripture is, and recognizing this has practical implications.

In an 1894 essay Warfield put it this way, saying it is fundamental,

that the whole of Scripture is the product of the divine activities which enter it, not by superseding the activities of the human authors, but by working confluently with them, so that the Scriptures are the joint product of divine and human activities, both of which penetrate them at every point, working harmoniously together to the production of a writing which is not divine here and human there, but at once divine and human in every part, every word and every particular.²

Warfield calls this relationship between the divine and human in the Bible “concursus.” He goes on to say:

On this conception, therefore, for the first time full justice is done to both elements of Scripture [human and divine]. Neither is denied because the other is recognized. And neither is limited to certain portions of Scripture so that place may be made for the other. As full justice is done to the human element as is done by those who deny that there is any divine element in the Bible, for of every word in the Bible, it is asserted that it has been conceived in a human mind and written by a human hand. As full justice is done to the divine element as is done by those who deny that there is any human element in the Bible, for of every word in the Bible it is asserted that it is inspired by God, and has been written under the direct and immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit.³

These words were written for a fairly popular readership, not for scholars. Here Warfield had a wonderful opportunity to perhaps mend a fence to protect the sheep against things that were new and might not be understood. But rather he affirmed, positively, and in no uncertain terms, the integral role of the “human element” (as he puts it) of Scripture.

As I said above, Warfield may not have applied this idea as much as we today might have hoped, but he was also keenly aware that concursus has clear practical implications for how we read our Bibles, especially in view of developments in biblical scholarship at his time.

More than an Abstract Idea

In his article cited above, Warfield is clear about the questions he was attempting to answer: “How are the two factors, the divine and the human, to be conceived as related to each other in the act of inspiration? And, how is the Scriptural relationship between the two consequent elements in the product, the divine and human, to be conceived?”

These “how” questions were prompted, according to Warfield, by the reality that,

[r]ecent discussion of the authenticity, authorship, integrity, structure of the several Biblical books, has called men's attention, as possibly it has never before been called, to the human element in the Bible. Even those who were accustomed to look upon their Bible as simply divine, never once thinking of the human agents through whom the divine Spirit spoke, have had their eyes opened to the fact that the Scriptures are human writings, written by men, and bearing the traces of their human origin on their very face. In many minds the [“how”] questions have become quite pressing...

Warfield goes on to say that it is not enough to be content with the “effects of inspiration.” We must also strive to understand how inspiration works (a divine/human concursus). This is not an issue that could be left to the side in Warfield’s day, and certainly not in ours.

One cannot simply appeal to the fact of inspiration to settle disputes about the Bible. One must engage the “nature and mode” of inspiration (as Warfield put it), the fact that Scripture is a divine/human entity. To put this in plain English, according to Warfield, inspiration means the divine and human are working together to produce a product that is of divine authority and bears the indelible marks of its historical context. A proper understanding of inspiration does not marginalize the “human side” but respects it.

Putting it this way does not settle the big interpretive questions, and, as I said, Warfield did not apply this principle as much as we need to today. The principle, however, is not only sound but powerful. What remains for us is honest conversation about how this principle applies to our present challenges concerning evolution.

Notes

1. On Warfield and evolution, see Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingston, eds., B. B. Warfield: Evolution, Science, and Scripture (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 14.
2. B. B. Warfield, “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” in Evolution, Scripture, and Science: Selected Writings (ed. M. A. Noll and D. N. Livingstone; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000) 57. The essay was originally published in the Presbyterian Journal, May 3, 1894.
3. B. B. Warfield, “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield (ed. John E . Meeter; Presbyterian and Reformed, 1970), 57.

The men, women and children we met were using teachings of faith as directives to care for the environment, and they were courageously confronting the central questions of what it means to be human in the midst of a culture of profligacy and consumption: What is our relationship and responsibility to all life on this planet, and to our Creator? How can we become better stewards of the environment and build a sustainable future?

RENEWAL presents eight grassroots stories about people who have been spiritually called to environmental action. Each story is set in a different faith tradition, addressing a different environmental concern. The film includes several Christian stories with one focusing on Evangelicals bearing witness to the sin of mountaintop removal coal mining that is decimating Appalachia and has been denounced in formal resolutions by the Lutheran, United Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches. While the entire film runs 90-minutes, each story on the RENEWAL DVD is easily accessible as a short stand-alone film.

The emerging religious-environmental movement has been thrilling to document for its potential to bring about deep and lasting changes that can impact the earth. Addressing issues of consumption, pollution and stewardship, the religious movement promises to make a difference and motivate action in ways that the secular environmental movement has not yet been able to do.

One of RENEWAL’s stories, about the Reformed Church of Highland Park, NJ, portrays church members motivated by their faith to make changes at every level, to reduce their waste and become more low-impact stewards of the earth. This is typical of what is happening now in many houses of worship across America as people are becoming part of the religious-environmental movement.

It makes an enormous difference once you look at environmental protection in more than political, economic or scientific terms – once you understand it’s essentially a personal moral, ethical and spiritual issue. Today many people are discovering that caring for the environment is not only about endangered fish or imperiled birds or wilderness areas that most of us will never see. It’s about our deepest connection with the entire web of life, and with our Creator. And it’s about the choices that each of us makes, day to day.

In our early days of filming, the most striking thing we discovered was the lack of communication among groups who profoundly understood the deep bond between human beings and the earth – and who were already doing faith-inspired work to protect the environment. Most people assumed they were alone in taking action and that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish much – but they were acting anyway, out of a sense of spiritual calling to create a more mutually enhancing way of living with the planet. When we told them about others like them whom we'd met, they were usually surprised and delighted; the news provided a sense of strength and solidarity. We hoped the film would do that on a larger scale: offering a mirror to others whose faith inspired them to creation care across the country, showing them an image of their own good work and assuring them that they were not alone.

It’s been gratifying to watch the growth of this movement and to see the expanding role that Evangelicals are now playing in it. More and more are stepping forward to say that their faith in God has compelled them to find new ways of living with the planet, God’s gift to us. They’re doing it at home, in their churches and in the arena of public policy. Motivated by faith and by Scripture, Evangelicals are taking an active stand to strive for environmental awareness and build a more sustainable future.

Today, the religious-environmental movement – known as creation care to some – is emerging on the map of American consciousness, thanks in part to the continuing growth of Evangelical organizations and individuals who have discovered a calling in their biblical faith tradition to be stewards of the earth.

These include Allen Johnson and Christians for the Mountains (working to save Appalachia from the devastation of mountaintop removal coal mining); Peter Illyn and Restoring Eden (helping Christians, especially youth, rediscover the biblical call to environmental stewardship); the Evangelical Environmental Network (offering biblically inspired education and advocacy that relates to the moral aspects of public policies on energy and the environment); the Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies (integrating environmental studies with biblical principles to bring the Christian community and the general public a better understanding of the stewardship of God’s creation); Matthew Sleeth, MD (author of Serve God, Save the Planet: A Christian Call to Action, a personal account of how Christian faith inspired significant changes in the way he and his family were living); Susan Emmerich, environmental activist / filmmaker (When Heaven Meets Earth, telling the story about the positive work-practices impact her faith-based stewardship approach has had in several Christian communities) and many others.

These exemplary Christian individuals and organizations have turned their faith into action, heeding the words that The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it (Ps. 24:1), that we have a responsibility to Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves (Prov. 31:8) and that the sanctity of nature comes from God, for There is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. (I Cor. 8:6b)

Today, as our nation faces the most daunting ecological challenges of human history, it is increasingly evident that religious communities have a critical leadership role to play by raising their voices to speak out for peace and better stewardship of the earth. Christians have a brilliant opportunity to lead the way at the personal, community and political level.

As filmmakers, we’re proud that RENEWAL has become a positive and powerful influence in the growth of creation care throughout the nation. As a recent article explained, RENEWAL aims to help people “recognize they’re part of a moral and spiritual movement to save the earth and discover a new relationship with the planet.”

The inspiring stories in RENEWAL (which you can learn more about here) are typical of many stories that are now multiplying in religious communities across the nation. These are not only stories about renewal of the earth; they are stories about renewal of the soul and the experience of reinforced faith for those who become engaged in this great work of our time.

Perhaps, then, it is fitting that Earth Day, a day celebrating environmental renewal, falls so close to Easter, the season of spiritual renewal, this year. It is a perfect time to spread the word and celebrate that creation care, the religious-environmental movement, is truly here!

In this video “Conversation,” Daniel Harrell, Senior Minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota, discusses what often gets in the way of getting Christians to consider evolutionary science.

Christians immediately see it [evolutionary science] as a challenge to the biblical authority because it upsets a literal interpretation of the creation narrative found in Genesis. They might say, “If I can’t read six days as twenty-four hour periods, then how do I know what to believe?” In cases like these, there is just some education that needs to occur, says Harrell. For example, if Christians are shown that there is not just one definition for “day” in the Bible, or if they are given some analogies to common experience this could be helpful.

It is also important to “draw a distinction between scientific data and its interpretation,” notes Harrell, because the science has nothing to say about Genesis 1 and how it should be read. Problems arise when Christians try to take on the scientific data itself.

If indeed the world is the handiwork of God, says Harrell, then this [evolutionary science] is the handiwork of God—and to challenge that “is just not necessary.”

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In this video Conversation, Joel Hunter addresses the “slippery slope” argument supported by many evangelicals and suggests that not only is this perspective flawed, but it also may prevent believers from appreciating the fullness of God’s creation.

Hunter explains that when evangelicals argue that to accept science is to reject God (and biblical inerrancy), what is really being protected is a singular way to interpret scripture. Many evangelical parents are guarding the only type of literalistic interpretation that they themselves were taught because they fear that supporting scientific thought would negate the messages they have learned from scripture—when in fact, we can believe in the inerrancy in scripture without discarding scientific truths.

Hunter points out that sometimes we may be approaching biblical texts from an analytic or historical perspective when instead they are meant to be read as metaphor or poetry. By limiting biblical interpretations to a literalistic approach, we are missing pieces of the puzzle; the same is true if we ignore discoveries of the natural world. Thus, if believers are really raising children to know God, they will understand that allowing them to see more of God in nature (through science) will in turn allow them to see more of the creator in scripture.

In this video Conversation, Joel Hunter explains why it is important that we decouple the view of scripture from the “either or” mentality, which stems from the culture’s polarization and politicization of the interpretation of scripture.

Hunter suggests that a view of scripture as the “inerrant Word of God” does not mean that the Bible should be read literally, but rather, it means that God is inerrant. Further, while scripture itself is revelatory, that does not imply that the person interpreting it is inerrant. The disconnect between the view of inerrancy and the liberal low view of scripture is a spectrum rather than a choice.

One can have both the highest view of scripture and a humble understanding of people searching for the best way to interpret the depths of what that scripture actually says more than the literal or “one plane” understanding of that scripture, says Hunter.

The same superintendent spirit of the writers of scripture should be in us when we learn more about how to best interpret the text—only then can God make those same words reveal even more to us. Once we have a more complete sense of the context in which scripture was produced and the context in which we should understand the text today, it will allow us to speak greater truths because the inerrancy will grow with our interpretation.

I’m not sure it’s possible to be unaware of environmental issues in 2010. After all, a Nobel Peace Prize helped bring attention to the issues of human impact on climate; recycling efforts are now ubiquitous in many areas of the country; and large corporations have invested billions in “greening” their products and production.

Why, then, do the roles of government and individuals in our stewardship of the earth seem so contentious? Sure, it’s tough to weigh uncertain scientific projections with economic impacts, tougher still to create precautionary environmental standards, particularly in a global economic crisis. And the widely publicized errors in the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change don’t help; neither does the news of e-mail exchanges between top scientists working on climate research. Each has added fresh energy to debates about the environment from the halls of Congress to Facebook posts.

But this April as we mark the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we’d do well to remember it as a day that, since its inception, was successful because of its remarkable grassroots response. Ever since, we’ve all become aware of the daily choices we encounter where there really should be no debate, situations where we could all do our part.

My young sons, for instance, have incredible enthusiasm for recycling, probably because they imagine the recycling truck magically rejuvenating their exhausted juice can for them. When I realized they didn’t quite understand the process, my initial leaning was to correct it; but then I wondered what might happen if we all adopted a similar zeal.

Perhaps their understanding is closer to the big picture on which we need to focus. How can we tackle the major issues facing our world if we do not enthusiastically surmount the ordinary?

Aluminum, for instance, is the most abundant metal on earth. Its abundance, though, was not always recognized, hence the crowning point of the Washington Monument being made of such a “rare and precious metal.” But it’s not a pure element in nature; it’s combined with others such as oxygen. Removing these other elements to produce pure aluminum is one of the most energetically costly processes taking place daily on our planet. So recycling aluminum not only prevents unnecessary volume in landfills but provides an estimated 95 percent energy savings over new production.

And although water covers the majority of our planet, only about three percent of the world’s water is fresh with only a third of that in liquid form. Yet we can’t live without it. Some estimate that within the next 15 years, 1.8 billion people will live in regions where water is scarce.

As New Englanders pump the spring rains from our basements, it may be hard to appreciate the value of this resource. Nevertheless, perhaps the best explanation for relatively limited media focus on global water issues is that there simply is no viable alternative. We cannot substitute another chemical for H2O.

So although heavy rains or shortages create challenges, maintaining water purity is crucial. Many pollutants are dangerous even in minute quantities – parts-per-million and lower levels. The destructive environmental and human health impact of water pollution from such sources as improper recycling of electronics in developing nations requires our attention and action. We can’t afford to under-appreciate this vital resource.

Which might be why the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society, held its conference last month with the theme “Chemistry for a Sustainable World.” Thankfully, the focus was due to strong interest in the scientific community and particularly in the younger generation of scientists. Along with colleagues and students, I attended the ACS meeting to participate in presentations, collaborate with other scientists, and help with green chemistry workshops. And I was encouraged by what I saw. Each interaction reinforced what we’ve already been teaching and observing: that the next generation of scientists and stewards—today’s students—are quick to embrace a ‘green’ vision.

That’s good news for the Earth, and of course, for those who see caring for it as an extension of their faith. Though some might want to separate the spiritual from the material, the mandate from our Creator is clear: he saw what he’d made and it was very good.

So apart from all the debates, one thing we can all agree on, especially as we enjoy the beauty of nature’s rebirth with spring’s arrival, is that the resources of our world matter. And this Earth Day can only be happy if we continue to value and invest in that which we’ve been given.