More Than One Christian View

Many parents and pastors are wondering what to tell their children about creation and evolution. While Sunday school classes often cover Genesis 1 around kindergarten (with kids coloring pictures of what God created on each day), most curricula do not address science again before kids leave for college. Yet issues of creation and evolution can be addressed in age-appropriate ways throughout Sunday school. Elementary school children already learn about idol worship from other Old Testament stories, so teachers have an opportunity to contrast Genesis 1 with the idol-rich creation stories of other cultures. Middle school students can be given basic tools for considering creation and evolution such as the contrast between the “how” questions answered by their science lessons in school and the “who” and “why” questions answered in Scripture. Middle and high school students can find role models by reading the testimonies of scientist Christians.

Youth need to be encouraged to discuss their questions and doubts, while affirming core beliefs. When asked why they left the faith, scientists often mention that the church was not open to their questions and told them to “just believe.” Churches can demonstrate openness to questions by teaching youth about multiple Christian views on an issue. Students need to hear that some Christians accept the science of evolution and others do not, and have a conversation about the reasons why. Too many young people have struggled when they felt they had to choose between clear scientific evidence and the beliefs they grew up with. Even when parents and leaders are unsure about evolution, they can help students by saying, “While I have concerns about evolution, I’ve heard that some Christians accept the science of evolution while still believing in the God of the Bible.”

Difficult issues like origins cannot be addressed in a single event. People need time to ponder the issues, and spaces to talk it through. One church did a six-week sermon series, with parallel curricula for all ages in Sunday school, so that families could work through it together. Another church did a sermon series and discussion group for adults for four weeks, to prepare parents before a four-week series for the youth group. Other churches encourage small groups to read a book on science and faith and discuss a chapter a week. (Since all authors have their favorite view, I recommend discussing at least two books from different authors to learn about multiple Christian positions.)

More Than Evolution

In our science-saturated culture, evolution is not the only science topic the church should be considering, and not even the most important. With church members encountering the latest medical advances as patients and family members, a discussion on bioethics would be very relevant. Since young people are usually the first to use hot new gadgets, they should be considering the appropriate Christian use of technology . As the issue of climate change becomes more pressing every year, churches need to talk about it, and not avoid it because it is so political. The Evangelical Environmental Network offers many resources for churches, emphasizing ways that creation care benefits the poor and the unborn. One group of churches, with the help of Calvin College, joined together to clean up the local creek that drains the watershed in which the parishioners live, work, and worship. Many of the congregants were not even aware of the size of the watershed or the pollution level in their own creek. This was a hands-on opportunity for all ages, directly caring for their own corner of God’s green Earth.

More Than Controversy

With so many issues to discuss, Christians can easily get the feeling that science is always attacking the faith. It is essential to balance such conversations with positive responses to God’s creation. After all, the primary response to the natural world in the Bible is to praise the God who made it. The first time I led an adult Sunday school class on creation and evolution, I was amazed how much the participants appreciated simply ending each session with a Psalm reading or creation hymn. Thoughtful frowns turned into relaxed smiles as the group remembered our unity in Christ and the centrality of God as the Creator.

Creation themes can be incorporated throughout worship. One church asked the congregation to submit their favorite creation photos at the end of the summer (from backyard flowers to National Parks), then wove the images into a worship service with creation songs and readings from the Psalms. In addition to flowers and mountains, modern science has revealed incredible glories that can inspire our praise and reflection. Several contemporary Christian musicians have begun to artfully incorporate the wonders of the natural world into their music; Chris Rice sings of “cratered moon and Saturn’s rings,” and Third Day praises the “God of wonders beyond our galaxy.” In one church, an elder brought in modern science when leading the congregation in prayer with these words: “Creator God, out of nothing you created all that is. You hurled the galaxies through time and space. . . . The universe is your hourglass, the continental drift your minute hand, the Grand Canyon your second hand. You are infinite.”

Preachers can incorporate science in the same way they make references to movies, current events, or best-selling books in sermons. To notice these connections, take some time to encounter science: read the science section of the New York Times, visit a local science museum, or ask scientists in the congregation about their work. A visit to a planetarium might give a new appreciation for the vastness of the universe, which could illuminate a sermon on the vastness of God’s forgiveness in Psalm 103:11–12. Pastor John Van Sloten learned about the neural networks in the brain and incorporated it into a sermon on the vine and the branches of John 15.

Preachers are understandably concerned about avoiding scientific errors when preaching, but this should not prevent engagement with science. Some pastors do their own research to get the details right because they enjoy digging into a science topic. Other pastors bring in a scientist (live or by video) so that they do not have to explain the technical material themselves. Others play to their strengths by choosing topics with fewer technical details, such as the Christian motivation for doing science or exposition of Bible passages relevant for scientific questions. Many of the questions Christians have are really about biblical interpretation and Christian theology, areas where the pastor is an expert. Minor technical errors made in good faith are forgivable, but a sermon that argues that mainstream science is wrong on some point can be devastating for the faith life of teenagers who are learning the correct science in school.

Beyond Sunday morning worship and preaching, science can show up in many areas of church life. During a youth camping trip or church picnic, include a nature walk concluded with praise. After a winter evening worship service, invite a local amateur astronomer to set up a telescope in the parking lot to show people the moon and planets. Convert a vacant lot near church into a community garden, so kids can experience firsthand how God provides food from the Earth.

More Than Programs

In all these activities, remember that views on science are “caught” more than “taught.” Congregants will naturally pick up on the attitude of the pastor or ministry leader, whether skeptical of science or celebrating science as the study of God’s creation. Visitors will pick up on this too, so these attitudes are part of being a church that welcomes and ministers to scientist Christians . Recently I was invited to speak at a church on the expansion of the universe and the possibility of a multiverse. Several enthusiastic young people in attendance had clearly caught the love of science from the church leaders who planned the event. One girl came up afterward with her dad, both of them marveling at God’s creation. They were amazed not just with the particular things I had discussed, but with the way in which God has embedded wonders at every level of understanding. Everyone can marvel at the starry skies, school kids can learn about the planets and asteroids, and scientists with PhDs can study dark matter and string theory. No matter how deep we look, we keep discovering more and more ways that creation declares the glory of God.

For Further Reading

For more resources on a full range of science topics, visit the The Ministry Theorem collection at http://ministrytheorem.calvinseminary.edu/. You will find sample sermons, curricula for children and adults, worship resources, essays by a dozen scientist Christians, and much more.

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.

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.

By Luci Shaw

Blessed be God for thaw, for the clear drops
that fall, one by one, like clocks ticking, from
the icicles along the eaves. For shift and shrinkage,
including the soggy gray mess on the deck
like an abandoned mattress that has
lost its inner spring. For the gurgle
of gutters, for snow melting underfoot when I
step off the porch. For slush. For the glisten
on the sidewalk that only wets the foot sole
and doesn’t send me slithering. Everything
is alert to this melting, the slow flow of it,
the declaration of intent, the liquidation.

Glory be to God for changes. For bulbs
breaking the darkness with their green beaks.
For moles and moths and velvet green moss
waiting to fill the driveway cracks. For the way
the sun pierces the window minutes earlier each day.
For earthquakes and tectonic plates—earth’s bump
and grind—and new mountains pushing up
like teeth in a one-year-old. For melodrama—
lightning on the sky stage, and the burst of applause
that follows. Praise him for day and night, and light
switches by the door. For seasons, for cycles
and bicycles, for whales and waterspouts,
for watersheds and waterfalls and waking
and the letter W, for the waxing and waning
of weather so that we never get complacent. For all
the world, and for the way it twirls on its axis
like an exotic dancer. For the north pole and the
south pole and the equator and everything between.

Editor's Note: If you'd like to see other great posts like this, go to the BioLogos Navigator topic Worship & Arts.

We tend to think of creativity in terms of flashes of insight and brilliance, of novelty, and especially of unexpected things bursting upon the scene. But creativity is no less creative and no less remarkable when it proceeds step by step, according to discipline, according to rule. We notice significant ruptures in the flow of things and upheavals of the regularity and predictability of life, faith, or science, precisely because such revolutions happen against a background of the ordinary. Even when the rules are interrupted and disturbed, they are usually not obliterated but modified. We and the rest of creation begin again by applying them anew and continuing on in light of what has changed.

Artist Linnéa Spransy makes this paradoxical ‘rules and rupture’ quality of life the method, not just the subject of her art, bringing a fascination with the mathematical underpinnings of the natural world together with her commitment to the kind of renewal-through-brokenness that comes with following Christ. As she says, “the boundaries between art, worship and natural sciences are fluid. I go [to that place of intersection] to be more amazed by the strangeness of existence, to experience awe and wonder.”

Confronted with the scriptural assertion that “eternity is written in [our] hearts,” Spransy wondered how we even begin to understand what that means. What might visual corollaries for such a statement be? How do we represent the tension between freedom and constraint, that dynamic dance of continuity and change, of predictability and surprise, that exists at every level of our experience and study of the world—from quantum physics to genetics to geology—and that seems fundamental to the ways of the Lord with us, as well? Her answer began to form around the study of fractals, mathematical rules whose reiteration in nature leads to endlessly new things. In her own work, a similar fractal sensibility leads to visual representations of something eternal.

Spransy says that every painting she completes “is the manifestation of a predetermined scheme – a system of small limits, with a clear beginning and end. These scripted pieces of visual choreography are allowed to accrue to show me their beauties and surprises, allowing discovery in the midst of certainty.” In other words, images like Frenetic Sequence, 2011, above, are not pictures of natural systems or objects, but representations and results of the processes and relationships by which natural systems and objects come to be. They are built from the inside out, as it were.

To begin a piece, Spransy assembles a library of “research drawings” that play out the various rules and rule sets she intends to use—essentially a kind of preliminary modeling of the visual system she wants to explore. Sometimes these are based on fairly simple mathematical or geometric rules that tell her when a line or shape will turn or divide or end. Other times she uses several different sets of rules at the same time—whether mathematical or derived from biological relationships such as those between base pairs on the DNA strand, or the way bacteria will move towards available sources of food in a Petri dish. But though these rules are established at the outset of a new piece, when she begins a new large-scale work, the outcome is anything but mechanistically predetermined, for several reasons.

First, the physical context in which she’ll be exploring each basic “module” or set of rules is different from that of her research drawings, having moved from a sheet of paper onto large prepared canvases that are five or six feet on a side. She does not transfer the small drawing from the paper to canvas, but regards that earlier work as preparation and practice of the process out of which the final work will emerge. Second, because the works are hand-drawn, there is always the element of her own agency and engagement with both the materials and the rules. There is an inescapably subjective quality to the way she responds to both materials and means. There is also subjectivity to the way she engages with the lines and shapes she has already laid down. Put another way, the abstraction of the rules is always mediated by and expressed through specific, very concrete and physical circumstances.

Finally, Spransy’s process includes what she thinks of as cataclysmic events or moments of chaos: intentional ruptures of the emergent system by gestures that overwhelm and obliterate sections of what she’s already done. Often she will shield sections of the existing system from the coming trauma either by masking them off or by subtly manipulating the flood of color—tilting the canvas to preserve sections of what was there. Afterwards, she will continue scribing and painting lines from the original system on top of or adjacent to the new areas of color, but in ways that respond and adapt to the new visual ecosystem. In this way, layers of work are built up, obliterated, and built up again.

Again, there is an inescapable agency at work in what—from the imagined standpoint of the system itself—must seem a randomly destructive occurrence, but Spransy’s point in breaking into the system is to test the limits of its creative, integrative capacity. By creating “environmental pressure” in this way, then coaxing the fragments and remnant information to multiply and reassert their orderly identities again, she asks, “How flexible are the rules?” The finished paintings are not rote recitations of fractal or statistical formulae, then, but objects with both a physical and a relational history. They are records of a thoughtful, physically engaged, but also humble exploration of how the confluence of order and chaos creates meaning.

Though Spransy denies that there can be such a thing as a “perfect analogy,” her artistic practice has spiritual underpinnings and spiritual implications, as well as visual results. Like many working scientists, she is seeking a way of understanding how the creator engages with His creation, and a better grasp on how we creatures should make our way in response. On one hand, her attentiveness to the basic orderliness of the material creation has a corollary in the familiar disciplines of faith, including reading the scriptures, prayer, and responding with mercy to ruptures in human lives and communities. But on the other hand, her embrace of surprise and chaos is, as she says, an “invitation to the otherness of God,” and a recognition that radically “dissimilar things sometimes occupy the same space.” In combination, those divergent elements help Spransy’s works hover at the boundary between knowing and un-knowing, between control and accident, between freedom and determinism.

Spransy notes that “even in the aftermath of great destruction, life is given great opportunity. In science we’re actually happy and excited when there’s a break in the rules.” This insight, clarified and lived out in her life as well as her artistic practice, directs us to consider not only the necessity and goodness of diligent pursuit of the rules, but also to reconsider the goodness of what we are otherwise inclined to see as calamity and chaos. Indeed, Spransy’s work points us back to the central paradox of the Christian faith: that the most radical disruption of the natural systems of the world occurred two thousand years ago in Palestine with the coming of Christ—singular proof that rupture does not necessarily end in destruction, but may be our means to redemption.

Linnéa Gabriela Spransy grew up in rural Oregon in a community attentive to Christ’s call to live in community with one’s neighbors, but was herself equally aware of God’s presence in the natural world around her. She received her BFA in Drawing from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art. In the midst of exhibiting in solo and group shows in university and commercial galleries, she moved to Milwaukee to study the Bible and consider how it might re-frame her sense of self and her career as an artist. In 2005 she relocated to Kansas City to help found the Boiler Room, a prayer-focused intentional community where she lives and in which she is the artist in residence. She continues to show her work widely, has pieces in pubic and private collections, and was the subject of a recent film-making project: Linnéa: Freedom Through Limits. More of her art can be seen on her website.

Originally posted February 4, 2012

Photo credit: Jan Bacon

Singer/songwriter Andy Zipf’s “Stumble on the Line” is built around the image of a river flowing through a canyon it has sculpted—an image that can easily be played out as a picture of the way that the Lord has been at work preparing a path for us in the material world, complete with signposts to his former and present activity. Zipf’s imagery of flowing water as a powerful (even dangerous) but also refreshing force echoes the similarly-complicated place of springs and rivers and seas in the scriptures; his description of his own path through the canyon calls to mind the Psalmist’s affirmation that his help comes not from the idols erected on the heights, but from the maker who has crafted both heaven and earth. Here, the river has literally made the canyon, carving it through the “years and layers,” and leaving the evidence of that long work as a sign to all who journey through.

But though Zipf’s canyon provides shelter, a good measure of necessary constraint, and even encouragement to keep moving along the river-course, the thrust of the song is that seeking God is a complicated, sometimes difficult endeavor, whether we are looking for Him through what He has made or through what He has said. The lyrics suggest that walking with the Lord is a path of halting discovery and intrigue, of our learning to notice the way God’s actions in the past are written subtly into the world around us. But Zipf also implies that this is a path that requires obedience, since we are also confronted with the fact that He sometimes speaks to us directly and unequivocally, saying, “follow me.” The song does not take its name and refrain from the river itself, then, but from how we tend to navigate and respond to the terrain it has carved: we “stumble on the line.”

Though pursuing the text’s geologic conceit a bit further is possible, what is more poignant for all of us engaged in the science and faith dialogue is that “Stumble On the Line” is at its heart a love song addressed to the “you” that is the river—the one who has carved the path and along whose banks the singer and we pick our way. Our attentiveness to this terrain of faith does not come first from our desire to analyze and categorize the “evidence” of how it came to look as it does, or even to demystify the mechanism by which a message might be written “in a line of stones.” Rather, what leads us on is the desire to know how to relate to the water itself. The song describes not just a physical path, then, but one of the heart and will.

Indeed, the personal address of the song focuses our attention on the fact that the subtlety or obviousness of the signs along our way have much less to do with whether or not we heed them than does the basic dividedness of our hearts. As Zipf says, we alternate between “trying to reach” and “trying to leave” the One we love. Put another way, we do not reject how God has written his past activity into the layers and years of the earth, or spelled out his intentions for us in the future because they are not obvious, but for the same reason we reject any and all of His claims on us at one time or another: because we wish to be the ones who forge the path, write the story, and sing the song. Our pride—whether in our science or our righteousness—is what keeps us blind and deaf to His leading in our daily path. And yet, even—perhaps especially—in response to our pride, God makes a way for us to gain a better perspective, and leads us on towards Him through whatever means we need.

To return to the language of the song, there is a beautiful ambivalence to the word “stumble,” that contains reminders that following the Lord involves being ever surprised by His ways (we “stumble on” his truth as an unexpected discovery), and ever broken by our own ways (we “stumble on” our pride as an impediment to seeing and following). Yet in both cases, our stumbling leaves us in the same position: on our knees before the one who is both maker and guide. In the last few repeated lines of the piece Zipf affirms that we must and will continue to stumble on in this path of love, whether we come to each stumbling place through surprise and joy, or pride and brokenness. From that position of humility and worship we have the proper perspective to see and affirm that the God who creates is the God who speaks is the God who redeems—the Lord who meets us on our knees, lifts us up, and guides us into the steps of His righteousness.

“Stumble On the Line”

© 2009 by Andy Zipf

I walk a weathered canyon
you're the rapids, running through it
years and layers start to show
in the soil, there is a swelling, beating rhythm to it
earnest prayer I used to know

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you

came upon a message,
hidden in some shallow water,
written in a line of stones
telling me to go on down the canyon, follow after. . .
so I keep on. . .

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you

I walk a weathered canyon
you're the rapids, running through it
years and layers start to show
in the soil, there is a swelling, beating rhythm to it
earnest prayer I come to know

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you.

Though now based in Washington, DC, Andy Zipf began life in the Midwest (Indiana, Illinois, Iowa), but moved to Pennsylania and then New Jersey before his family settled in northern Virginia. He began his career as a professional singer and songwriter shortly after high school, and has performed over 400 times in the last four years—in living rooms, coffee houses, churches, concert halls, and bars. Though “Stumble on the Line” comes from Andy’s 2009 ep “Our Voice Is a Weapon,” his third full-length album and seventh studio release, “Jealous Hands,” became available in July, 2011. More details on Andy and downloads of his music may be found on his website.

One thing I ask from the LORD,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.

Psalm 27: 4

I belong in the ranks of those who have cultivated the beauty that is the distinctive feature of scientific research.

Marie Curie¹

All of the biologists I know are undeniable lovers of their objects of study...

Konrad Lorenz²

Beauty in Science

As a biologist, I am fascinated by the fluorescent-on-black images of cells, 3D rotations of protein structures, and cross-sections of colourful tissue samples that grace the covers of scientific journals. I have spent whole weeks staring down a microscope at the beautifully transparent bodies of developing fish embryos, and whenever possible I illustrate my written work with photographs of the natural world. I’m not alone. In the institute where I did my PhD we had a basement full of microscopes and imaging technology, and it was considered important to have beautiful images in your presentations—movies were even better. The journal Nature: Cell Biology always features striking images on its covers, and in an editorial these photographs were described as works of art in their own right. In fact, ‘scientific art’ has become a recognised genre, and displays of science-related images are increasingly popular in research institutes, museums, science festivals and other public spaces.

Indeed, a number of practicing scientists have devoted their time outside the lab to communicating the beauty and wonder of science to the general public. (See sidebar.) One of these is Dr. Lynne Quarmby, a cell biologist who’s passionate about explaining her work to people outside of the scientific community. She writes a regular column, a ‘nexus of mystery, art, literature, beauty and science,’ for the online literary magazine Numéro Cinq.

If we can recognize and acknowledge that our direct biological senses, as wonderful as they are, give us only a tightly pinched and cloudy view of the world, then we open ourselves to unimagined beauty.

Lynne Quarmby, Numero Cinq, 2011³

Biologists often label themselves according to the ‘model organism’ that they work on. I was a zebrafish person, and Quarmby is a Chlamydomonas person. Chlamydomonas is not an STD (you’re thinking of Chlamydia), but a gentle single-celled algae that is in all likelihood swimming around the standing water in your garden as you read. This microscopic creature is easy to grow in the lab (a jam jar on a sunny windowsill will do), its genome has been sequenced, and it is a surprisingly powerful tool for studying human disease.

Chlamydomonas was not an obvious choice for medical research, but the secret is in the cilia. Cilia are hair-thin appendages that wave around in a coordinated fashion to move their owner from A to B. But these algae don’t spend their whole lives swimming around. When they reproduce, their cilia are absorbed back into the cell body (scroll to the 4th video here). When conditions are stressful, the cilia simply drop off. Quarmby and her students studied Chlamydomonas mutants that hold on to their cilia, and discovered a family of proteins involved in the regulation of both cilia and cell division.

At the same time as Quarmby was studying the behaviour of cilia in Chlamydomonas, medical researchers were identifying genes that are mutated in humans. The same proteins involved in cilia and cell cycle control in Chlamydomonas were affected in some patients with polycystic kidney disease. What’s the connection? Cell biologists knew that most of our cells have cilia on them, but assumed that they were not important. Our cells generally do not swim around, unless they’re sperm. It turns out that these tiny appendages are involved in a whole range of vital cell functions. The cilia on kidney cells are important for sensing the flow of urine, and without these the kidney cannot function properly.

Perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to unicellular flagellates, but what I appreciate is the detail. To see the minutiae of cell structure is stunning, particularly when you know how difficult it is to achieve images like the ones in this article in the journal Cytoskeleton, or even the image of an adult rat head, below. And little Chlamydomonas, a microscopic pond dweller, has advanced our understanding of a devastating human disease. This combination of aesthetic experience and elegant scientific explanation is what I find beautiful. ⁴

Adult rat head MRI © Gavin Merrifield, University of Edinburgh.

It appears to be a universal experience for scientists to find beauty in their experimental systems. Perhaps this is because the daily discipline of examining anything in detail brings an appreciation of its finer points. Or maybe the process of choosing something to study and then spending the greater part of one’s waking hours staring at it provokes something akin to the loyalty of the mother who thinks her child is beautiful, despite the large pimple on its nose. But even bearing in mind the fascination and devotion of the true professional, there seems to be something more in the scientist’s experience of beauty.⁵ Most, I think, simply delight in the beauty of creation. For some, this gives a sense of the transcendent: a sort of natural spirituality. For a Christian, this encounter with beauty draws them nearer to God.

Christian Appreciation of Beauty in Science

One of the driving forces behind the work of many of the early scientists was their Christian faith. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) initially hoped to pursue theology, but was eventually satisfied that science was also a way to glorify God.⁶ Many others, including the famous naturalist John Ray (1627-1705), were ordained clergy in addition to their academic studies, so their science and theology were naturally interwoven. Others, like James Clark Maxwell (1831-1879), examined Christianity as rigorously as their scientific experiments.

These pioneering scientists (or ‘natural philosophers’, as they called themselves back then) were encouraged by a rich tradition of theology that wholeheartedly encouraged their exploration of creation. The Hebrew Scriptures tell how creation reveals the glory, generosity and faithfulness of God who created and sustains everything.⁷ The beauty of the land and everything in it is celebrated: mountains and trees, plants and animals, men and women.⁸ A number of the earliest Christian theologians, the Church Fathers, often expressed their delight in the details of animal and plant life, and what we now understand as ecosystems.

Diversity of beauty in sky and earth and sea…the dark shades of woods, the colour and fragrance of flowers; the countless different species of living creatures of all shapes and sizes…the mighty spectacle of the sea itself, putting on its changing colours like different garments, now green, with all the many varied shades, now purple, now blue.

Augustine, The City of God

Theologian Jame Schaefer has surveyed the writings of many of the Church Fathers and Medieval theologians, and found five broad themes in their contemplation of creation.⁹

• Affective appreciation: Simply delighting in what is seen.
• Affective-cognitive appreciation: A deeper, scientific study of creation leads to even greater joy for the beholder.
• Cognitive appreciation: Thinking in more abstract ways about the beauty of the interconnected universe. Each part plays its unique role for the greater good of the whole.
• Incomprehensibility: Being overwhelmed by the magnitude and complexity of the universe and everything in it.
• The sacramental quality of the physical world: The world God has created mediates something of God’s presence and character to us.

One of my favourites among the theologians covered in Schaefer’s work was an unnamed Cistercian who in the twelfth century wrote extensively about the grounds of the abbey in which he lived, and the surrounding countryside. He was obviously very happy with his vocation, and had a good understanding of the interconnectedness of the different factors: water, weather and crops - an early ecology. Basil of Caesarea (ca. 329-379) spent time observing animals and plants, noting similarities and differences, and encouraged others to do the same, giving glory to God for everything he saw. Hugh of Saint Victor (1096-1144) delighted in what his senses could tell him about creation, so enabling him to praise the Creator all the more, and lamented that others might pass such an opportunity by.

An important Medieval figure in the early development of science is Albert the Great (ca. 1200-1280), teacher of Aquinas, who wrote on “the importance of observation and experimentation in field and laboratory studies of animals, plants, metals, and inorganic elements”. He carried out field studies, and “legitimised the study of the natural world as a science within the Christian tradition.” For him, appreciation of creation had both cognitive and emotional aspects.

For all of these early scholars, to study creation and enjoy its beauty was an activity that everyone should engage in using their God-given intellect. Their detailed exploration of the wonders of the universe was fuelled by faith in a benevolent creator God, and this deep intellectual study led to heartfelt praise for the one who made it. Is this something we can share?

Protein structure model © Dr Neville Cobbe

The series continues tomorrow with Part 2: Understanding Beauty in Science.

Notes

1. Bersanelli, M. & Gargantini, M. Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of all Time. Templeton Press, Philadelphia, 2009. Page 9.
2.Ibid., Page 10.
3. I should highlight that as far as I know Lynn Quarmby is not religious and has not in any way endorsed this blog.
4. Further reading: http://quarmby.ca/, http://blog.quarmby.ca/, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Lynne%20Quarmby, http://www.ciliopathyalliance.org/
5. I try to avoid using the words ‘nature’ or ‘the natural world’ as much as possible because of the ambiguity of the word nature, which is often wrongly used to create a divide between natural and supernatural worlds. This is ancient Greek philosophy and has nothing to do with the God of the Bible. When addressing Christians I usually use the word ‘creation’ in its traditional theological sense, meaning ‘everything that exists apart from God’, without connection to any one particular interpretation of Genesis 1-3.
6. Frankenberry, N.K. The Faith of Scientists, Princeton University Press, 2008.
7. For example, Psalm 29, 104, 148; Job 38-41; Joel 2: 18-32, Isaiah 41:17-20, Hosea 14:5-8.
8. Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible.
9. Schaefer, J. Appreciating the Beauty of the Earth, Theological Studies 62 (2001), p23-52 & Schaefer, J. Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic & Medieval Concepts, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2009.

“The heavens,” wrote the psalmist “declare the glory of God.” (Ps 19:1 NIV)

The universe that inspired the psalmist three thousand years ago grows grander as each new generation of astronomers adds yet another layer of understanding. Each new discovery pushes back the boundary that separates the known universe from the vast terra incognita that beckons and teases us to keep going, to sail ever further from familiar shores.

A few centuries ago the great philosopher Immanuel Kant repeated the psalmist’s declaration: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steady reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence."

The night sky still beckons us, as it once did the psalmist. I spend time each summer at a rustic family cottage in the wilderness of my native New Brunswick, Canada. There, miles from electricity, the night sky does not compete with artificial light. Smog does not obscure it. Planes do not draw white trails on it. It does not compete with cable television or even cell phones, silenced by the absence of signals. The night sky is simply there, quietly declaring the glory of God. Its many lights reflect off the ripples of the lake, and are accompanied by the rustling of leaves and the voices of the many creatures that call this wilderness home. Only a jaded soul could sit by that lake and not wonder if there wasn’t some larger meaning to the experience.

I can see what the psalmist saw and rejoice as he did. But I watch the night sky through the eyes of a twenty-first century scientist. I have the benefit of centuries of scientific advancement and can see, in my mind’s eye, so much more. Those visible stars are just the advance guard of an almost infinite army of stars going back almost forever. The stars are not attached to a dome that one might reach with an ambitiously tall tower or puncture with a long-range missile. They are so far away that their light has been traveling at unimaginable speed for years, centuries, milennia and longer. The light from the stars in the Hyades Cluster began its journey to the earth at about the time that my ancestors—Loyalists from Pennsylvania—began their journey to this part of North America in the eighteenth century. The light from the closest stars, the trio that make up Alpha Centauri, takes over four years to reach earth. The most distant star ever detected from the earth is a “gamma ray burster” that launched its signal almost 13 billion years ago, when the universe was young. The powerful gamma ray signal from this star began its journey before our planet was even formed, reaching the earth in April 2009.

The psalmist did not know that the stars were made of hydrogen and helium. He did not know they generated their energy through nuclear fusion or that many of them explode at the end of their lives. He knew nothing of galaxies and the layers of structure in the cosmos. He did not understand how fast light travels or that the light from our sun powers photosynthesis and many other processes here on the earth.

The universe brought into view by science is like a collection of Russian matryoshka dolls nestled one inside the other. With the psalmist we can see the outer layer—and it is grand. But inside are additional layers, each one with a new type of grandeur. And at the very end of the unpacking lie the remarkable laws of physics that keep the earth orbiting about the sun, the sun shining reliably, and the sunlight providing energy to sustain life on our planet.

The universe as we understand it today inspires awe. And for those open to its message—from the psalmists of yesteryear to the believers and even the thoughtful skeptics of today—it speaks of a Creator. Our universe does not look like a cosmic accident, where lots of stuff just happened. It looks like the expression of a grand plan—a cosmic architecture capable of both supporting life such as ours and of inspiring observers like us to seek out the Creator.

This is why Antony Flew—“world’s most notorious atheist”—changed his mind and started believing in God.

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.)

Despite a common desire among Christians to find evidence for the activity of the creator God in the natural world, the Scriptures themselves more often give us images and analogies of God’s providence rather than “proof” that would be admissible in peer reviewed journals, much less in court. In his final climactic week in Jerusalem, Jesus used image after image, parable after parable to convey the urgency of his message that the Kingdom of God was coming to pass through his own coming Passion.

Though His disciples did not understand them at first, it was by new pictures (the lost coin, lost sheep and lost sons) and reinterpreted old ones (like the vineyard), that they came to understand the “facts” of His healing miracles and, ultimately, His death and resurrection. By reframing concrete happenings and material relationships, stories and images opened up possibilities rather than limiting them—and they still invite us to enter into them, rather than leaving us dispassionate and disconnected.

As we remember the narrative that takes us from Good Friday through Easter morning, the image of a buried grain of wheat invites us into the story rather than just describing what happens in it. Certainly this is an image for Christ Himself, but as I’ve written elsewhere, the seed isn’t just a symbol of His death and rebirth from the grave, but a promise of future abundance, lavish reproduction, and a pointer to the coming harvest: Jesus Himself is the “first fruits” of the new creation. We are called not only to be workers for that harvest, but to be, like Him, the harvested grains. As Christ entered into His glory through self-sacrifice, so we, too, give ourselves in order to share in and contribute to the shalom—the comprehensive flourishing—promised as the marker of God’s Kingdom now and in the future.

This combined image of death and renewal, single seed to field, is the heart of John Crumb’s hymn “Now the Green Blade Rises,” first published in 1928 in the Oxford Book of Carols and originally set to an old French Christmas carol (“Noel Nouvelet”). By clicking the image above you can hear a new version as revised and re-arranged by contemporary hymnist Alex Mejias. We offer it as a meditation on the sacrifice and victory of Jesus, the glorious promise of resurrection, and the call upon us all to join in God’s story of redemption and renewal.

“Now the Green Blade Riseth”

John MacLeod Campbell Crum (1872-1958),
© Oxford University Press
adapted and arranged by Alex Mejias

Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain.
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Alex Mejias is the founder and director of High Street Hymns, a non-profit music ministry that exists to spread the Gospel and worship the Triune God in spirit and truth through hymns, psalms and spiritual songs. Alex grew up in New Jersey and outside Washington, DC, receiving a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. For the past 15 years he has been leading worship for churches and ministries, writing and recording both new and old hymns, and touring the east coast as a singer-songwriter. Alex is also committed to the power of the creative arts to advance the Gospel and promote justice and healing in the name of Christ, serving, supporting, and collaborating with several other non-profit ministries. More details on these projects and music may be found at High Street Hymns.

My curiosity immediately led me to see what he had cut out. All of the miracles and the Resurrection passages were gone, and the Gospels were rearranged in a linear fashion, edited and pasted together as a single narrative. Then I looked particularly to see what Jefferson did with John 11.

Why John 11? For the past several seasons of Lent, I have been meditating upon this account of three siblings: Martha, Mary and Lazarus of Bethany. In particular, John 11:35 has become a central passage for me to consider in self-reflection, because an artist learns very early that creativity demands boundaries and limits to thrive. When I began on my recent journey to illuminate the Four Holy Gospels for Crossway publishing's celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, I needed to find a thematic boundary. I was so overwhelmed with the grand scale of the project that I chose this shortest passage in the Bible—“Jesus Wept”—and that decision has led to many discoveries along the way.

"Jesus Wept" is, to me, the most profound passage in the Bible. After I gave a recent lecture on this verse at Duke University, Richard Hays commented on my reflections: "The Incarnate Word of God stood wordless at Bethany." Indeed, Jesus' tears make no logical sense, as he came to Bethany with the specific mission to raise Lazarus from the grave. He told the disciples his mission (and why he intentionally delayed his arrival, knowing that Lazarus lay dying) and revealed to Martha that he was and is the "Resurrection and the Life." So why did he, upon seeing the tears of Mary, waste his time weeping, when he could have shown his power as the Son of God by wiping away every tear, telling people like her, "Ye of little faith, believe in me!"?

In my reflections, this "irrational," emotional response from Jesus became a central means to understand the role and even the necessity of art in the midst of suffering—what I have began to call our "Ground Zero" conditions. Art, like the tears of Christ, may seem useless, ephemeral and ultimately wasteful. But even though they evaporate into our atmosphere, the extravagant tears of God dropped on the hardened, dry soils of Bethany, or onto the ashes of our Ground Zero conditions, are still present with us. Because tears are ephemeral, they can be enduring and even permanent, as with “Jesus wept.” In the same way, perhaps our art can be so as well. What seems, at first, to be an irrational response to suffering may turn out, upon deep reflection, to be the most rational response of all.

Predictably, "Jesus Wept" did not make into the Jefferson Bible. John 11 was cut out entirely, falling onto the floor of his Monticello home and discarded, along with Martha's confession. Jefferson's rationalism allowed only a distant deity that made sense in reference to objective ‘scientific’ calibrations, not ephemeral marks of compassion. Yet, when this attitude is actually applied to the sciences, they also become, like Jefferson's Bible, a “cut and paste” product, based on a limited viewpoint.

Even with my rudimentary understanding of the early phonetic and acoustic research my father was part of at Bell Labs in the 1970s, I know that the optimism of many scientists there was based on reductionistic assumptions. I described my father’s wrestling with the basic theses of linguistic research in a previous essay:

In the 1980s, [while in his] early 50’s, my father began to send a series of notes to his colleagues questioning the basic tenets of acoustics research, as he found them flawed and inadequate for the goals pursued. . . .[W]hat the early research assumed was that by segmenting speech patterns, you could have enough data to rebuild speech. It would be a bit like dissecting a frog, and stitching it back together, only to expect it to jump again -- A typical reductionist/modernist assumption. (Refractions 24: "The Resonance of Being")

My father began to challenge these underlying but over-simplified assumptions and as a result, came under criticism for abandoning many of the positions held by his peers. I continue:

My father’s Converter/Distributor theory (C/ D theory) assumes that computer technology is now capable of anticipating contextual patterns of speech, and is able to simulate an architectural structure to account for the morphing of speech production. Rather than the segmental approach, he calls his new thinking prosodic, as it accounts for the complexity of speech and language. But it would take years of research to get to a point of presenting his new ideas to the linguistics/phonetics community.

My father, who had rarely had problems finding support for his research before, was in for a battle. . . . He could not find funding, and found himself fighting the establishment of the research world—the very establishment he had helped to build. After my father’s many futile attempts to secure funding for his new research, my brother, a successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, stepped in to fund a post for a graduate student at Ohio State, to help my father compile enough data to be able to begin his research.

To my father, the integrity of the scientific process demanded such a course. He never considered that his challenge to reductionism would be seen as a threat by many of his colleagues. He simply was seeking after Truth.

Even in the objective rigor of the research process, then, human factors intervene—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Our presuppositions surface eventually, and it becomes clear where we place our "faith. " My father's C/D theory is an intuitive leap, arising from his love for synthesis and beauty, but pulled up by hard data and a stubborn commitment to the truth of matter. It is an example of the way intuitive, subjective insight can connect the ephemeral with the rational, objective and concrete. Should we seek, then, to make the sciences a Jeffersonian cut-and-paste re-narration of our reality? Are we so inflexible in how we will understand the great mystery of our being? If so, the gap between that reduced ‘reality’ and what is truly human is the very gap into which Jesus' tears still fall.

Jesus wept for Lazarus, but also, perhaps, for Jefferson as he snipped out John 11 with his own hands; for to dismiss Jesus’ tears as irrational and unnecessary is to miss Jesus entirely. Jefferson sought to cut out the Deity, but also lost the Man. Without Jesus' full humanity, coupled with his Divinity, we do not have a Savior. Without this fullness of humanity—concrete and ephemeral, intuitive and objective—we lose perspective on why we are doing our research to begin with. If we assent to the fragmenting, segmental assumptions of modernity, we will have stitched the frog back together only to bury him anyway. If the dead are to live, we will require a Miracle Worker to show us that the world that is cohesive, and rational, but only when seen through a veil of tears.

When astrophysicist Dr. Jennifer Wiseman first published the following posts as a paper in the BioLogos Scholarly Essay series, the essay’s subtitle asked the question, “Can Recent Scientific Discovery Inform and Inspire Our Worship and Service?” Over the next few weeks, we will look at Dr. Wiseman's answer to that query—an emphatic “Yes!”. But in this first installment we begin by describing some of the reasons such a posture of worship through science is not more common in the contemporary church than it already is.

Oh Lord My God, when I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee; How great Thou art, how great Thou art

(Carl Boberg, 1885; Trans. Stuart Hine 1949)

The words of this great hymn convey the proper overwhelming sense in which the wondrous Creation of God should translate directly into a response of awe and praise from mind, body, and spirit. The writer sees and hears the wonders of nature with his body, considers with his mind what all this implies, and responds with songs from his soul.

But is this worshipful response happening in our Christian congregations today? I believe this kind of response to the Creation can and should happen within the hearts of God’s people and wherever congregations of believers are gathered. Such power can even unify believers who differ on lesser matters as we all look up outside of ourselves at the same wonders and respond with the same praise. As an astronomer, I have felt the sense of being “blown away” by seeing images of countless distant galaxies, or even by just looking up at the array of stars overhead on a dark moonless night and sensing something of the “big-ness” of God.

There are impediments to realizing the fullness of this kind of worship experience for many Christian congregations today. I believe four of the main culprits are ignorance, distraction, controversy, and uncertainty.

Let me start with the first, and clarify up front that by ignorance I am simply referring to being uninformed, rather than the sometimes more negative connotations of the word. How up-to-date is the scientific knowledge of average, educated, committed evangelical church members and pastors?Americans, both adults and schoolchildren, are not ranking favorably compared to the rest of the world’s developed nations in science knowledge these days. We enjoy our technological achievements and resulting gadgets, but true comprehension of scientific principles and recent discoveries is not a strong part of our culture and national conversation these days.

This is reflected directly in what kinds of things are (and are not) discussed in church. In my own generally very good church experience growing up in mainstream America, I can only remember science and nature being discussed in a general way (e.g., we should look at the beauty of flowers and mountains and animals and thank God), except for once in a specific way in a children’s sermon (where we were told we should not believe we came from monkeys!). That was a while ago, but how are science issues handled today? Do pastors speak about the evidence from cosmic background light for a spectacular beginning to the universe? Are the genetic codes being mapped out for animals and humans resulting in praise for God’s amazing “blueprint”? Are the advancements in nanotechnology and biotechnology and medicine subjects for discussion of good and poor uses of technology in church? The answer to these is, of course, “no”, for the most part, yet even issues seemingly more relevant to the daily lives of parishioners are often driven by current technology and scientific advancement, and an informed congregation can better understand how to praise, pray, discern, dialogue, and serve.

Related to being uninformed is the condition of distraction for many evangelical Christians today. The distractions of overloaded schedules, pressured jobs, divided families, and even church environments of entertainment-based worship and activities can impede a lifetime of quiet listening, learning, and contemplation. If there is no encouragement from church leaders to learn and incorporate nature and current scientific discovery into contemplation and praise and service, then there will be no space available in the lives and activities of congregants for what should be the resulting awe and praise.

But what does it mean to be informed about science in today’s evangelical congregations? Too often this has implied a direct relation to controversy, the third reason science is not often inspiring worship these days. There are many voices trying to “inform” Christians about science, and for the average evangelical congregant, discernment about which authority figure to believe can be difficult. Many times Christians are presented with a clear and strong implication that scientific conclusions, especially on issues related to origins of the universe and of life, are part of the secular “World” camp rather than the camp of “God’s Truth”. And Christians “know” that they must be on one side or the other of this stark line of worldliness. Often in more conservative churches a teaching will come from the pulpit that goes something like this: “Scientists tell us that *...+, but they cannot give a reason how *...+ happened; but WE know how: God is responsible!” Therefore any serious consideration of a scientific understanding of the development of the universe and life implies that one is “compromising” the teaching of the Word of God, rather than studying the details of how God works. In Scripture, however, never is the study and experience of nature seen as somehow antithetical to knowing and following the Lord; just the opposite in fact!

This often boils down to the correct interpretation of Scripture. Through sermons, radio spots, television shows, and literature, evangelical Christians are hearing adamant messages conflating the acceptance of modern scientific discovery with worldly compromise, or else providing alternative ideas that are not entirely satisfying. From Young-Earth Creationists, they hear that a literal reading of the Biblical creation account is the only correct one, so all scientific discovery must be reinterpreted to fit a recent Creation. But this robs them of the sense of awe we glean from the magnitude of space and time revealed by astronomy, geology, and fossils. From the Intelligent Design community, they hear the message that life (and perhaps the entire universe) is too complicated to develop through natural processes alone, and therefore that God’s work requires miraculous inputs of information into the natural world. This implies that somehow natural processes must not be fully God’s processes, or that God’s work through them is somehow inadequate. They also hear the message to “teach the controversy,” so that somehow by proclaiming that there is a controversy about natural processes as an adequate explanatory tool for natural history, the controversy will in fact become real. They are then surprised to find out from either advanced scientific study or from the Evolutionary Creation voices that in fact there is no great controversy in the scientific community about the basic structure and timeline of the natural history of the universe and life; that in fact there need be no theological debate about how God brought (and is bringing) the universe and life into being, rather, the issue is whether God is in fact real and responsible for all we know and are. And yet even this unifying message can sometimes seem to gloss over the central theological issues of suffering and death and fallen-ness in Creation. So every approach to origins and evolution evokes some difficulties and challenges with which the Christian congregant must grapple.

Next week, Part 2 concludes Dr. Wiseman's discussion of the stumbling blocks that can stand between the church and its appreciation of science as a means of worship, and turns to the ways that the pursuit of God through study of the created world can help overcome those difficulties by pointing us directly to the Lord.

Knowing your context, 12” x 16” Mixed media on panel, 2009. ©R. Sawan White.

The heavens declare the glory of God, 
and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
 Day to day pours out speech,
 and night to night reveals knowledge.
 There is no speech, nor are there words,
 whose voice is not heard.
 Their voice goes out through all the earth,
 and their words to the end of the world. (Psalm 19:1-4)

The Psalmist affirms that the created world speaks of its Creator, and that everywhere we look or listen there are words, speech pouring forth in abundance. But are we prepared to hear that speech? Will we listen to it on its own terms, in the context in which it occurs? Or will we hear only what we already ‘know,’ see only what we want to see? Psalm 19 affirms that the speech of the world is heard, but it does not say that speech is necessarily listened to, much less understood. For the speech of the world is as a foreign dialect to us, and if we want to hear what it has to say about the Creator (and overhear the praise it offers to the Creator), we need to learn to listen differently.

As Bible translators know, learning a language is much more than a matter of vocabulary. We may master a list of names or definitions, but still miss the heart of what a language is about, what its speakers are making known about themselves and the world. Just as important as the individual terms is the structure of the language—its grammar and syntax—the way it tells its stories more than the objects and characters that populate them. This may or may not be the way the hearer’s own language casts its narrative thread, so we must be aware of our own practices and patterns in order to recognize the sameness and difference of the foreign tongue. In other words, understanding another language is doubly relational: we must explore the relationships within a given dialect, but also the relationships between it and our own linguistic home.

An awareness of this relational, provisional quality of language is at the heart of R. Sawan White’s practice as an artist, rooted in her own experiences of being linguistically out-of-sync, notably during her art training as a printmaker in England. There, she mistakenly assumed she would be speaking the same tongue as those around her, only to discover that profound differences can be communicated (or lost) through inflection and cadence of speech, let alone vocabulary. Beginning by including old maps and encyclopedia pages in her prints, then by encasing others’ anonymously-deposited secrets in plaster, and later moving into an abstracted but personal exploration of graphic elements that stand in for words, White has been using paint and wax and her etching stylus to engage with the richness and limitations of “local knowledge.” Aware that each cultural context has its own way of framing the world—its own dialect—that must be taken on its own terms, she highlights the necessity of conversation between ‘locals’ across boundaries, and holds out the promise that piece by piece and layer by layer, we will approach a more wholly encompassing sense of who we are and how the world is.

White’s oil and wax painting, Knowing your context (2009), is a visual enactment of that process of negotiation between words and syntax, between medium and meaning—using forms and figures that struggle to find and dwell in their proper physical, relational context. While we are tempted to read it as a landscape, that overall pattern is a byproduct of White’s primary visual interest, the way those small graphic elements and lines—emblematic of words (and sometimes people)—relate to each other and to larger shapes and fields of color, built up in the layers of wax and oil paint that define the overall structure of the work. Thus, both small, oscillation-like squiggles and large, organic shapes arrange themselves across the surface of the panel, but also emerge from and disappear into the irregular strata.

The red-orange circular shape at the upper right, for instance, is not defined by the application of color onto the white surface, but by a final application of thick, matte strokes of white paint over the ruddy, under-layers; meanwhile, the white is itself bounded by curving lines previously inscribed into the wax. Below those layers, we can see a more directly-formed oval of blue, whose top half is now obscured, but whose bottom half influences the curvature of the lines in the lower section of the painting. Finally, the detail image of the lower right edge of the panel shows incised ciphers buried deep in the wax and paint, as well as some holding their own at the surface.

These small re-curving figures are what function most like words in White’s work, but perhaps a better way of describing them is as indeterminate or extremely flexible ideographs—a symbolic shorthand for exploring relationship without referencing specific things outside the painting itself. Her squiggles usually enjoy a kind of freedom within a painting—hovering, floating, sometimes dangling in a way that is “haphazardly self-contained, unconnected”—and seldom tied down or to each other as they are here at both the left and right lower edges. As White said of the now-marginalized characters, “They’re stuck but also foundational, they don’t get to go, but they’re crucial to this part [of the painting].” Comparing these shapes with the ones floating but isolated in the white area at the upper left, White continued, “the ones down here, though tethered down, are in a more dynamic space, their crossing is causing many things to happen with boundaries, overlaps, etc.” This is a dialogue, then, between the artist and her medium about what happens when things get confusing and we begin to notice novel relationships emerging—how a new sense of connection and order arises there, too, even if it seems unfamiliar and uncomfortable to all involved.

Again, what’s being abstracted in Knowing your context is language, not material objects—and not even specific words, but their role as place-holders and connectors between people, local places, whole worlds. White’s reference to the drawn characters as “discovering” their situation, learning to “know their context,” reminds us that her work is also a narrative: it is the trace of her negotiation with the piece itself about how words and ideas and images are situated in particular places and moments, about how slippage, misunderstanding and newness occur when ‘figures of speech’ are removed from their usual homes or asked to do work which they are unaccustomed to doing. Indeed, even her titles are part of that process, for they often find their genesis in phrases only partially heard and mis-understood; they, too, are artifacts that emerge from the process of engagement with words rather than descriptors added at the end.

So circling back now to the familiar psalm with which we began, how might this visual exercise about the complexity of speech in all its forms help us reflect on the relationship between science and Christian faith, between God’s word and his world? We are now very well accustomed to reminders that the first chapters of Genesis were not written to tell us the kinds of things we sometimes want to hear. But it is also easy to ask the material world to say things it is not equipped to say, as when we expect it to speak unambiguously about of God’s activity within it. If we truly wish to hear the speech that pours out day after day in praise of the Lord, we need to let the heavens speak in their own way and strain to listen to them in the voice God made them to have—not in the voice we wish they had. In taking hold of the difference between those ways of listening, we not only understand the world more truly, we unearth our own biases, our own deafness, our own unwillingness to hear God the way he wants to be heard.

We can’t force Scripture or the natural world to speak to us in our ordinary tongue. But by listening to them both on their own terms, and by creating and dwelling in imagery that enables them to speak to each other through us, guided by the Spirit, we may be privy to interactions that reveal unexpected and elegant truths about their dialects, but more importantly, about the God whose Word brought both into being.

R. Sawan White was a Provost Scholar at Virginia Commonwealth University before transferring to Loughborough University in England to complete her First Degree in Fine Art Printmaking with highest honors. Since returning to the US in 2000, she has exhibited her work regularly in group and solo shows, and taught and lectured at museums, art centers, colleges and middle schools. To see more of her work, please click here.

Vox Balaenae, or “Voice of the Whale,” was composed by American composer George Crumb (b. 1929) and was first performed by the New York Camerata in 1971. It was only four years before that, in 1967, that biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered that humpback whales “sing” and published recordings of the whales’ complex vocalizations, after which “whale song” quickly entered the popular consciousness and helped propel the “save the whales” environmental movement forward. (In 1970, Folk singer Judy Collins even put out a version of the traditional melody "Farewell To Tarwathie" over a background of recorded humpback whale songs.) For many, the fact that the massive creatures might share the human capacity and desire to engage in music as a social activity only made their wholesale destruction at our hands more egregious.

Though he was himself inspired by hearing those early whale song recordings, Crumb’s work does not utilize tapes of real whales or attempt merely to reproduce the effect in the context of an ordinary musical form. Instead, he asks three chamber musicians with modified and electrically amplified instruments (piano, flute and cello) to create sounds that evoke the entire natural history of the sea. The piano is played and strummed from inside the case and with a glass rod or plate on the strings, the cello part emphasizes a string’s abilities to produce high harmonic tones, and the flautist sings into her instrument as she plays. Many of these effects are intended to suggest natural sounds—as in the cello’s "seagull effect" (audible at 5:59 in the video linked blow), and the whale-like beginning cadenza by the flute—but not always in a direct way. In addition, all three players perform wearing half-masks, which, according to Crumb help “effac[e] the sense of human projection,” especially when they play under blue stage lighting as he envisioned. (Most of these features can be seen and heard in this April 2011 performance in Montreal by Philippe Prud'homme, piano; Stephane Tetreault, cello

; and Camille Lambert-Chan, flute, though it omits the blue stage lighting.)

In this multi-sensory impressionistic scene, the whales become representatives of a natural world that predates humanity, yet whose fate is inextricably bound up with the will of mankind. Indeed, the tension between the measured vastness of geologic time and the “Age of Man” is written into the score, as an opening prologue is followed by variations on the initial “Sea Theme” (beginning at 4:20), each named after geologic epochs: Archeozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and finally, the Cenozoic. It is in this last age—when mankind arrives on the scene—that the sometimes atonal and harsh combinations of sound reach a dissonant climax that the score indicates should be played as “dramatic, with a feeling of imminent destiny” (beginning at 11:26). Finally, the piece moves towards its conclusion with a haunting restatement and renewal of the Sea Theme (at just after 13:00), with the musicians gradually playing more and more quietly until ending with a pantomime, as if creating sounds beyond the limits of human hearing. Again, the sense of resolution in the music is named by Crumb in the score’s instructions to the players: “serene, pure, transfigured.”

So what do we make of this musical narrative and what Crumb seems to be saying about both whales (standing—or swimming—for the natural world) and humankind? Is it truly an anti-human statement, a “whales vs. people” image in response to environmental damage we were only really beginning to understand (via science) at the time the piece was written? There is certainly a skepticism here about human hubris, made explicit at the end of the prologue section by a “parody” of the opening phrase of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra (at 2:40). Contemporary listeners then and now will likely recognize that borrowed theme as the music from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but before that it was a musical homage to Nietzsche’s view of ascendant Man. In this ironic re-use of Strauss’ work, Crumb seems to say that against the span of geologic time and a vast (musical) world previously unknown to human ears, our claims of knowledge and technological mastery seem laughable.

Yet there are several clues that that sort of reading misses the mark, or that it is, at best, incomplete—beginning with the experience of playing and hearing it in person. I first heard Vox Balaenae in about 2002 with my then 6-year-old son. It was played in a small hall (under blue lights) at our local art museum by the Quadrivium Players, a group that included my friend Mary Boodell on the flute. While the masks were surprising at first, they did, indeed, de-emphasize the personality of the players as individuals, while emphasizing the atmospheric, world-creating power of art-forms, especially music.

Rather than a symbolic effacement of the human presence in the world (in keeping with the anti-Nietzschian not above), the effect was to move away from the ritualized performative aspect of modern chamber music and bridge the divide between players and observers, creating a more participatory community. Because of the piece’s distinctive, impressionistic kind of narrativity, one isn’t so much as “carried away by” the music as submerged and suspended in the world created by it, and Boodell describes the effect (especially at the end of the piece) of feeling like the audience is holding it’s breath to hear the silences Crumb has written into the score.

But Boodell also recounts the story of being drawn into the conceptual frame of the piece in a very physical, way when she found herself alone in a swimming pool in the weeks leading up to a performance. Though hesitantly at first, she couldn’t help but wonder how the sounds she made in Vox Balaenae would sound underwater, and so went under in the pool to find out. While the image makes one smile and probably reminds most of us of similar, less technically-proficient underwater experiments of our own, it also suggests how the piece helps hearers make a connection in addition to that between player and listener—that between humanity and the rest of the natural world. If the unexpected flow and soundscape created by Crumb helps audience and players achieve the kind of connection music scholar Jeff Warren has elsewhere on this site discussed as “entrainment,” it is also an invitation to a similarly compassionate state with the rest of creation, based on the new-found knowledge that other creatures have complex, even musical relationships with each other, and that we are privileged to discover and begin to understand them.

Clearly, then, Crumb’s Vox Balaenae touches on scientific knowledge of the world both in its genesis in recordings of whale songs and its structure keyed to geologic, evolutionary ages. But does it have more to say to us here than that we should avoid killing whales because they sing? While we can recognize that the biblical call to have dominion over the earth guides us towards cultivation and care for its creatures and remember that Jesus exemplified such a shepherding role, we should also remember his priestly one, and ours. For just as he remains the High Priest of heaven, holding our prayers in the presence of the Father, we have similar joy in being between heaven and earth, “a little lower than the angels.” Thus we can hold up the great whales (and their songs) as monuments to the depth of God’s creative activity in and through nature—and even revel in our musical, creaturely fellowship with them—without denying the special place of humanity. On the contrary, we affirm that special place when we humble ourselves to listen, seek to understand the native tongues of creation, and then, through Christ, present its songs before the throne of the Almighty Creator and King.

In last week’s post I framed Sørina Higgins’ poem on the gentle humpback whales by noting the near-universal mixture of fascination and fear with which we greet such awesome creatures, especially when we meet them in their own element rather than ours. This week’s artistic treatment of the great whales takes as its subject a more-storied and decidedly less-gentle member of the family, but returns to our fascination with and desire to know about whatever is dramatically not us: a 52-foot-long inflatable felt sperm whale on display most recently at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia.

Tristin Lowe’s Mocha Dick is a recreation and interpretation of the albino sperm whale that, in the early nineteenth century, attacked as many as twenty whaling ships near Chile’s Mocha Island in the South Pacific Ocean, sinking more than a few of the smaller vessels. In an 1839 article from The Knicker-bocker magazine, a New England sailor described him as “white as wool . . . as white as a snow drift . . . as white as the surf around him.” The whale was a source of inspiration for Herman Melville’s epic Moby Dick, and with this work, Lowe gives us an opportunity to consider the relationship between ourselves and creation in terms of human and divine making.

Lowe works in a variety of different media (including edible ones), but in recent years sculptural and installation works have been the main part of his practice. Often they are considerably less grand that Mocha Dick, tending instead towards absurd and occasionally somewhat vulgar “wry re-imaginings” of ordinary objects: chairs that spontaneously fall apart, beds that wet themselves, and—early in his experiments with industrial felt—an overturned trashcan. But there is also a sense of wonder, curiosity and even awe at the frailty of the human condition built into the seemingly-ironic works. And while the idea of human making is contrasted to natural creation in Mocha Dick, the trash-can and his large-scale felt model of the moon and Apollo lunar lander contrast the hands-on, personal side of creation with industrial and technological processes.

To create the life-size whale, Lowe first spent time in very science-like pursuits: incessantly watching video footage of sperm whales in the wild, studying and sketching their anatomy to understand the muscular structures underneath the smooth exterior as well as their movements through the water. Next, he developed an inflatable vinyl armature to serve as the supporting understructure, manufactured for him using the basic techniques and materials that go into the “bounce houses” or inflatable “moon walks” popular at fairs and children’s birthday parties. (Art and science should not devoid of fun, after all.) The sections of the armature were built to mimic the muscle groups Lowe had studied in the live whales, and the bundles of air-filled chambers are kept under tension by a network of ropes that criss-cross the hollow center.

Creating the exterior of Mocha Dick also required collaborative effort, as the entire armature is sheathed in sections of thick, white industrial felt held together with very long, large white zippers. Artisans at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop used skills borrowed from upholstery and dress-making to fit the skin of the whale to the structure underneath, again conforming it to the bundles of "muscles." Finally, the whale was given a wonderfully naturalistic finish in the form of a complex network of wrinkles, scars, and appliquéd barnacles like the ones that are found on seagoing whales, but all crafted from the same basic felt material and stitched thread. Again, Lowe paid close attention to the natural context and activities of sperm whales as well as the historic story of this particular whale, and the scarring includes carefully placed marks corresponding to the injuries such whales receive from battles with their chief natural adversaries and prey—giant squid—in addition to injuries from the harpoons and ship hulls that earned Mocha Dick notoriety and literary fame.

Seeing the whale in person is a marvelously fun experience—beginning with finding such an enormous “fish out of water” (pace marine biologists who will note that whales are mammals) in an institutional art setting, but continuing as one tries to figure out how it was made. A viewer can hardly help tracing the length of the zippers, peering into the barnacles, and imagining the giant white tentacles that must have wrapped around the whale’s face in its battle with the equally mythic giant (felt) squid. Indeed, the desire to touch the whale, pry open the seams a bit, and see if there might be even smaller felt creatures hiding in the barnacles on its giant prow is so common and compelling that the museum needed to add a small piece of the same felt on a wall nearby, so that children and adults alike would have something to touch, if not Mocha himself.

This drive to touch the giant felt whale is likely very much the same as Lowe’s own drive to build it in the first place, and is also analogous to the curiosity that leads scientists to investigate, take things apart, and then try to build them again. It speaks to the God-given longing all men and women have to touch the world around us, make sense of it, and know and understand the ultimate source of things—what Paul describes as having “eternity in [our] hearts.” Below the artist’s name and the work’s title on the wall of the museum was this quote from Lowe himself:

“The project was like the story of Moby-Dick—embarking on a journey, transfixed by the call of the sea. It is not about Ahab’s quest for revenge, and not even about the whale itself, but more about Ishmael’s search for the unattainable.”

That search and the longing from which it comes are not exhausted or cheapened by discovery of specific mechanisms or processes by which God created the great whales, any more than our fascination and delight in Lowe’s Mocha Dick is diminished when we see (or read) how it is put together. The last mystery is not to be found in the process of the making, after all, but in discovering that there is a Maker who would do such a thing for us to discover. And in contrast to Lowe’s suggestion that such meaning is “unattainable,” or the VMFA’s admonition that we should only touch the “stuff’ of reality and not the thing itself, the ancient witness of the Scriptures and of generations of believing scientists is that we can know something true about the world and its Maker by looking and touching. Even more, both Scripture and the witness of Christian scientists assures us that even as we reach out to touch the creation, the Creator has already and is even now reaching out to touch us.

Philadelphia resident Tristin Lowe studied at Parsons School of Design before earning a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. In addition to the exhibition of Mocha Dick at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Lowe has had solo exhibitions at New Langton Arts in San Francisco, the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, among others. A more complete list of work and record of his exhibition history can be found here.

Of all the earth’s creatures, few deserve the description of “awesome” as do whales. Counting among their kin the largest creatures that have ever lived, whales exist in a world that remains mysterious and remote, as most of the specifics of their comings and goings in the deep are fully known only to themselves. Furthermore, though both the history of their exploitation by humans and the contemporary attention to stewardship at the ecological scale reminds us of their vulnerability and need for protection, from Biblical times to the present, tales have been told of whales rising from the depths to upend the boats and expectations of men upon the sea. Indeed, even today, part of the thrill of whale watching is the implicit knowledge that the creatures’ sheer size and physical power carries the possibility of danger to those who dare get close to them in the whales’ own element. We know that despite their reputation for gentleness, they are not tame, or ultimately “safe.”

The “great whales” of the King James Bible then, are well-suited to be emblems of the complex way we engage with the created world and with its Maker—the way we desire to know both the world and the Lord, are fascinated by their mystery, are both drawn to and repulsed by the knowledge that there resides so near us power that is beyond our control. So over the next few weeks (not quite a BioLogos “Whale Month”) we’ll look at several different creative responses to whales as embodiments of the persistent mystery of Creation, beginning today with poet Sørina Higgins’ account of a few minutes of fleeting intimacy with feeding whales.

At first glance, Higgins’ poem “Humpback Whales” seems to give a straightforward story of the experience of whale watching from a small boat—of drawing close, but not too close, to a pod of humpbacks—in order to experience the mixture of fascination and fear that is ‘awe,’ rightly defined. But almost from the beginning, Higgins gives clues that her meditation is about the creatures not merely as things to look at, but as a kind of speech to hear, corporeal words bearing witness to their speaker. In the third line we begin to see the imagery of speech and language emerge—the whales becoming the very mouth of the sea, forming the circle of a “yawn” that makes “vowels” in the sea.

But what kind of language can this be? is it law, or instruction, or story? And is it the whales’ own story they’re telling, or something else? In the second stanza Higgins describes the spouting humpbacks as blowing off “spumes / in great inspired huffs.” In her choice of “inspired” she literalizes the root meaning of breathing in air, but also connects that meaning to the more mysterious and spiritual sense that “to be inspired” is to receive meaning and wisdom from outside oneself. In the next line the whales are arcing through the sea in “unconscious curves.” Together these words raise the question, if there is divine meaning in these creatures and the course they inscribe in the world, are they, themselves, aware of it? Do they see the meaning the poet (or biologist) sees in them, or is it the peculiar task of Adam’s race to listen intently and then to speak for the creation: interpreting its speech back to the creation itself, to our fellow men and women, and ultimately back to God whose language is written in the world?

There is no definitive answer given here as to what the whales “know” themselves, or whether such interpretation by us is possible. Instead, as Higgins moves into the last few lines of the poem, she collapses the word and the world into a single phrase: the whales become a “rhyme-and-meter topography of terror.” The “rhyme-and-meter” are the stuff of poetry, of course, and applied to a topography—a landscape whose contours are mapped out precisely because it is mute and does not tell its own story—we seem on the verge of an affirmation of the power of interpretive speech, but for that last word: “terror.” With that word and the following description of the creatures as “Sweet and menacing” come a reminder that the physical creation retains its ability to bring us up short, a recognition that we will not demystify the world merely by understanding its workings.

So how do we synthesize these two parallel lines of thought and imagery in Higgins’ “Humpback Whales”? Perhaps the poet is helping us see that the reason we are so drawn to what also makes us afraid—especially when awesome power is wrapped in a fearsome and fluid beauty—is that we innately recognize that there is One speaking to us through such moments of tension and delight, one who also defies easy categorization and refuses to be confined by our expectations. Perhaps, like poetry, the natural world as given to us by its Creator is not so much a declaration as it is an invitation to keep looking and keep listening. Perhaps the point is not the specific vowels that are uttered, but our growing trust in the One who speaks through all things, whose word goes out in all the earth.

“Humpback Whales”

by Sørina Higgins

Distant black snouts like mammoth mussel shells
loomed into view beneath a speckle flock of bright white gulls.
The pod drew ponderous circles, great vowel holes
in the yawn of gray bay-water under clouds.

They rose and blew off spumes
in great inspired huffs,
rolling their boat-long bulk in huge unconscious curves:
warm-blooded, deep-water, rhyme-and-meter topography
of terror. Sweet and menacing, in a single glide,
they ignored a little open tin can
packed with waving, shouting bipeds.

Having other messages to bring, they moved on.

From Higgins’ book Caduceus, ©2012. Photo also courtesy of Higgins.

Sørina Higgins is an adjunct faculty member in English at Lehigh Carbon Community College. She has published one poetry chapbook, The Significance of Swans (Finishing Line Press) and a the new, full-length collection entitled Caduceus (David Roberts Books). Her poetry and other writing has appeared in several journals, including Comment, Radix, Stillpoint, Relief, Studio, and Windhover. She is the Book Review Editor of Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal, a staff writer for Curator, and blogs about the arts and faith at www.iambicadmonit.com/blog. She holds an M.A. from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English. Sørina and her husband live in Kutztown, PA, in a home they built themselves.

“Oscillators for Singers”

It's the first day of the course I teach on the physics of music. The students are mostly from my college's music conservatory; many of them have never set foot in our science building, except perhaps to take a shortcut from a dorm to the dining hall. A few slump in their seats. Others look around the room anxiously, as if trying to brace themselves for some strange physics equipment that they might be forced to use.

Before class began, I set up a small microphone which is connected to a computer. Now I open by welcoming them to the course and asking, "Who wants to sing a few notes into the microphone for us?" Some eyes light up in surprise and delight. Neighbors look at each other, seeing if the student next to them is up to it. One eager soul, a soprano, jumps up to the front of the room.

I ask the student to sing a single note at a comfortable pitch for a few seconds. The software that connects to the microphone does a quick analysis of the sound. The students smile and laugh with delight in the singer's obvious talent. I direct their focus to the projection screen, which shows a graph of amplitude, or size of the sound signal, versus frequency, the number of oscillations of air pressure the sound makes in a unit of time.

Then we discuss the science of sound. I point out that what appears to us to be one pitch is actually made up of several components. I ask the student to sing another note on a different pitch. We watch the changes on the screen, and the students describe the changes they observe. I ask for another volunteer and this time a male student volunteers. He sings a note and we compare again the similarities and differences in the components of sound. Another student volunteers to sing a note with quite a bit of vibrato. At this point the students are excitedly thinking about what types of sounds they can produce and predicting what changes might be seen on the screen.

For many of my students, this first day of class is the first time they have thought of their art as having a scientific basis. We spend the following class periods learning about oscillations: their descriptors of position, velocity, acceleration, time, amplitude, and frequency; how sound is a longitudinal pressure wave that oscillates in its direction of propagation; how instruments and the human body manipulate different variables to produce the wonderful variety of sounds that we hear. We measure the speed of sound by snapping our fingers at the end of a tube and measuring the time it takes for the sound to reflect back over a known distance. We learn about the history of tuning systems and how humans have devised a wide variety of temperaments, each one unique in how the notes differ in oscillation of air pressure.

As they build up the skills to quantitatively describe the oscillations that make up music, I sense their combination of amazement and frustration. They are thinking, where does all of this fit in with the joy that I have in music? How is it that a precisely known series of frequencies at different amplitudes can evoke emotional responses in listeners? If I know too much about all this, will it affect my ability to produce beautiful music?

These are weighty questions, but delving into them is the heart of the liberal arts mission of our college. No discipline is an island. Music especially is a wondrous example of the interconnectedness of the human experience. It is connected to science, as is our goal to explore in the course, as well as mathematics, anthropology, history, psychology—even religion and faith—and many other fields. The students are learning and experiencing that music is much more than notes on a musical staff. It is a high calling for our all-too-brief half-semester course.

It is (mostly) true that there is nothing new under the sun. These thoughts that my students are processing have been considered before and will be for generations to come. In 1863, Hermann Helmholtz, a man who oscillated between posts as professor of physics and professor of physiology, published his thoughts on the topic in On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. He argued that the spatial and temporal reasoning in music evokes a sensory understanding of motion—and not just motion, but also emotion. Helmholtz considers music's origins in oscillations of variables in time and space and its extension to the rise and fall of notes, dynamics, and voices of a piece. He wrote, "It becomes possible for motion in music to imitate the peculiar characteristics of motive forces in space, that is, to form an image of the various impulses and forces which lie at the root of motion. And on this, as I believe, essentially depends the power of music to picture emotion."

Helmholtz later describes how the practice of learning the elements of music, both its theory and its physical basis, allow us to better understand the great works of others we experience. It enables us to see that "the artist is a man as we are, in whom work the same mental powers as in ourselves, only in their own peculiar direction, purer, brighter, steadier; and by the greater or less readiness and completeness with which we grasp the artist's language we measure our own share of those powers which produced the wonder." A careful study of music enhances our relationship to the art and its producers. We discover not only more about ourselves, but also more of what we are capable.

To my amazement, in a later class one student raises her hand and says that she has taught herself to sing two very different tones at one time as the Tuvan throat singers of Siberia do. She is somewhat hesitant to demonstrate her ability to the class, as the second, higher frequency at this point in her self-training is very faint. She holds the microphone and produces the sounds. The graph updates almost instantaneously and the class views it eagerly on the projection screen. There we see the quantification of the two sounds: the strong peak of the pedal note and the faint but measurable higher frequency note. The student smiles with great self-satisfaction; she and her classmates have connected with the skill, history, and culture of the Tuvan singers. And the science has quantified and enhanced how they understand the art.

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 sermon is from Pastor Mark Swarner of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, CA. You can hear the full sermon here.

Of all the blessings to be thankful for on Thanksgiving Day, none of them surpasses the riches of the eternal blessings which the Lord has bestowed on his sons and daughters in Christ Jesus. Pastor Mark Swarner of Menlo Park Presbyterian emphasizes this point as he looks at Psalm 103: 1-4 (NIV):

“Praise the LORD, my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
Praise the LORD, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion…”

The benefits are “life-changing” and “soul transforming.” Unlike most where there are exclusions and various requirements, these are freely given through Christ, and no one is disqualified based on pre-existing conditions. In fact, God desires that people come to him in all their imperfections that he might renew and heal them.

The first benefit deals with the major problem of the human heart: sin. In the Psalm, King David, who knew what it meant to be forgiven for deeply wrongful acts, boldly speaks of the love which God has for his people such that God does not deal with us according to our past actions. Rather, “as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” Regardless of a person’s past or future mistakes, God’s love is stronger still. We are, above all, forgiven people and with that "we enter his gates with Thanksgiving in our hearts.”

In his second point, Swarner examines the power of God available for healing. The verse is not claiming that one will never become sick, but it does indicate that God has the power to heal. The all-important assurance in this passage is that God will take our brokenness and weakness, and through him, ultimately, we will be whole. We are, above all, a people filled with hope, and with that "we enter his gates with Thanksgiving in our hearts and we come into his courts with praise.”

The third benefit the Psalmist declares is that the Lord “redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion.” There is a sense in which we all—like Joseph in Genesis 37—have experienced life’s pit of despair. We, like Joseph, emerge from the pit to a new life crowned with the confidence that we are loved, and with that we, ourselves, become agents of God’s love and channels for God’s compassion. We are, above all, a people redeemed by love, and with that "we enter his gates with Thanksgiving in our hearts and we come into his courts with praise.....This is the day that the Lord has made and we will rejoice for He has made us glad.¹”

1. See Psalm 100:4 and 118:24: