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.

Evolution and the Problem of Evil

Let me begin by expressing appreciation for the commitment and intent of BioLogos. Francis Collins was speaking at nearby Tulane University a couple of years ago when my son was a senior in high school, and I brought him along to hear this noted Christian biologist’s presentation to help prepare him for challenges he would experience (as he is now) in college. This is a tremendously valuable ministry. However, as a philosopher and a theologian I do have concerns about some of the theological implications of the BioLogos theistic evolution view, particularly regarding the problem of evil.

The problem of evil is one of the most persistent and intuitive challenges to the Christian faith and the existence of God. The classic defenses or theodicies that have been used to answer this challenge include the Freewill Defense (God is not responsible for much of evil because it is caused by the free actions of humans), the Soul Making Defense (God allows or sends some evils or suffering in order to build human character in overcoming adversity), and the Eschatological Defense (although the cause of some suffering may be beyond our understanding, whatever suffering we may experience in this life cannot compare with an eternity of blessing in heaven).

These theodicies or defenses to the problem of evil, however, normally presuppose the standard view of divine creation. Were one to propose creation by means of theistic evolution, some of the presuppositions for these responses to the problem of evil no longer function. Therefore, advocating some form of theistic evolution poses problems for standard explanations of the problem of evil.

Cornelius Hunter has recently published Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil,¹ an excellently researched book which re-examines Darwin’s motives for developing the theory of evolution. Hunter’s main thesis is that Darwin’s intent was not to undermine belief in the existence of God, but to afford a defense of God’s moral nature. The viciousness of nature caused Darwin and some of his contemporaries to desire to disconnect God’s role in creation from this viciousness in nature, and the blind process of natural selection is the vehicle for disassociating God from the vulgarities of nature. In essence, then, Hunter’s argument is that Darwin’s theory was a form of theodicy – sheltering God’s goodness against the accusation that He is the author of the evil in nature.

Hunter’s thesis sounds hauntingly similar to that of the early Gnostics, who sought to insulate God from the evil material world. They therefore proposed intermediary aeons, archetypes, or a demiurge to isolate the purity of God from the evil of nature. The Darwinian account sharply differs from the biblical account in at least three crucial ways:

• The Darwinian account removes God from being directly involved in much of creation by utilizing natural processes instead, while the biblical account presents God as directly involved in the details of creation, both in the beginning and throughout history through his providential care.
• The Darwinian account blurs the distinction between humans and other animals, while in Scripture humans are a distinctive and special creation.
• The Darwinian account presents God as apathetic and disinterested in the moral status of animals, while the scriptural account presents God (though giving primary focus to humans) as vitally interested in the moral status of animals, and indeed for the redemption of the entire created world.

Another problem with Hunter’s thesis is that whatever Darwin’s original motivation might have been, the novelty of Hunter’s thesis underscores the fact that this is not how Darwin’s ideas predominantly have been used and understood. No one (including contemporary evolutionary biologists) seriously believes Darwin’s ideas as he presented them. Darwin’s ideas about evolution have themselves evolved. ( see Falk, Part 2) So even if Hunter’s thesis were correct about Darwin’s original motivation for the problem of natural selection, this has little relevance to contemporary evolutionary biology.

Any such Darwinian evolutionary biology also undermines classical defenses for God’s goodness. For example, the Christian group BioLogos has presented the perspective that God created all living organisms, including humans, through a gradual process that includes natural selection, group selection, genetic drift or other such physical processes, with God possibly intervening at some undefined points. While this BioLogos approach (which might be labeled a variety of “gradualism” with regard to creation) includes a role for God in creation (as opposed to pure Darwinian evolution), some of the same problems involved with the problem of evil pertain to the BioLogos view as well. In fact, the specific role that God plays in evolution remains somewhat vague and ill-defined. (see Falk, Part 1) Without BioLogos providing a clearer and more precise differentiation between itself and Darwinian evolution – and thus building a clear “Chinese wall” between their view and that of Darwinian evolution -- these views appear to be very close, and the problems that pertain to one view pertain to the other view (at least in part) as well. The following problems arise with regard to the problem of evil in relation to forms of creation by gradualism.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

First of all, it is incumbent upon a good God to produce an optimally good world. We could not necessarily expect an evil or morally mixed God to produce a good world, but we have every reason to expect a good and beneficent God (Matt. 5:48; 1 John 1:5, 4:7-8) to produce the “best of all possible worlds” (given human freewill). In the biblical account, therefore, the evil and suffering we witness in nature and in human experience is not accountable to God because of a defective process in creation, but rather it is a result of the moral Fall of the first humans and subsequent sin by their descendents. However, gradualism has no such vehicle to defend God against the accusation of being responsible for natural and physical evil and suffering. (see Applegate, Falk, and Haarsma, Part 2).

Human Distinctiveness

Second, if God created all living species, including humans, through a gradual evolutionary process that includes common descent from nonhuman primates, there is no clear line to draw a moral or spiritual distinction between humans and other living beings. (see Falk, Part 2).. Yet fundamental to any view of a moral universe is the belief that humans are created in the image of God in a way that is uniquely above all other sensate species (Ps. 8:4-8), and included in this image is our soul and our moral capacity. It is difficult to imagine how humans could receive the image of God through some sort of physical process. Instead, the Bible describes God as being directly and personally involved in creating the human soul by breathing it into mankind (Gen. 2:7). (see O’Connor, Part 1). In the specific language of the biblical account (if not to be discounted, allegorized, or completely ignored), God created human souls directly, not indirectly through some impersonal process. Gradualism offers no clear answer as to how a human soul reflecting the image of God could come about; in fact, such a unique thing in all of creation is everything but gradual or natural. (see Bishop, Part 2).

Whence Cometh Freedom?

Thirdly, even if God intervened at various points in theistic evolution to create new forms from which other species evolve, this does not afford a satisfactory account of human freewill. If humans are not a unique and distinct creation (as the biblical account makes quite clear), but are with other apes the product of a single ancestor, from whence did freewill arise? How can we account for some mutations having freewill and others not having it?

Some quasi-materialists propose some form of epiphenomenalism in which the mind emerges somewhat magically from material cells. This proposal is devoid of any convincing scientific evidence, but it is the only alternative left for materialists to espouse in order to account for some of the most basic human intuitions – that our minds are more than merely a physical organ, that our choices are genuine expressions of freewill, and that we are free moral agents who are responsible for our actions.

Evolutionary biology has no scientific evidence to respond to these basic human intuitions other than to assert that “there is no ghost in the machine” and that any apparent choices are actually mechanical outworking of hard determinism predetermined by prior physical causes. (see O’Connor, Part 2). Therefore, if human choices are merely illusions, humans cannot be held morally accountable, all blame and responsibility reverts back to the God who created this world.

The Problem of Pain

Fourth, gradualism has no moral explanation for animal pain. If humans are the product of an earlier ancestor, it may have taken thousands or millions of years for life to evolve to that point, or for humans to evolve from an earlier primate ancestor. How can the pain of these creatures (some of them quasi-human or proto-human) be justified? (see Schloss, Part 2) This is specifically the issue that worries many Christian ethicists about cloning. Each experiment in animal cloning has produced hundreds of “monsters” before the clone is successful. What if we were cloning humans? What would be the moral implications of creating hundreds of “monsters” just to develop one clone?

The unanimous view is that this would be morally unjustifiable, but this is uncannily similar to the notion of creating animals who suffer for millions of years before evolution finally produced humans. (see Schloss, Part 3) In the biblical creation accounts, pain and suffering comes into the world after the Fall and as a result of the Fall of the earliest humans, and thus God is absolved of direct responsibility for this pain. In this gradualist account, pain and suffering precede the Fall. Millions of generations of sensate beings would have suffered and died before the Garden of Eden. Why would God allow this suffering of innocents for millions of years? (see Schloss, Part 3)

Ironically, Hunter’s Darwinian explanation in Darwin’s God doesn’t work for the BioLogos perspective at this point, because God is somewhat more directly involved at several steps in creation than in the purely Darwinian perspective, so it is God who must shoulder the blame for this undeserved pain. (see Schloss, Part 2)

Another attempt to affirm a gradualist view of creation in which pain preceded the creation of humans was by William Dembski, who in his book The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World² proposed that the animal world existed in pain for millennia before the creation of humans, and thus the pain of these animals was applied retroactively from the later Fall (pp. 9-10). This proposal was not well received by many in the evangelical world because it depicts God causing pain to sensate beings even before the cause of the pain took place, and Dembski ultimately felt compelled to post a clarification of his views.³ So, the reality of animal pain before the Fall in the gradualist account of creation heightens the problem of evil rather than resolving it.

Death and the Nature of God

Fifth, in orthodox Christian theology, death is seen as the ultimate punishment for the Fall of Adam and Eve. There was a time of created goodness from when humankind has fallen. All human suffering, animal suffering, natural disasters, and death was ultimately the result of the God’s punishment for human sin, the curse after the Fall as described in Genesis 3. (see Schloss, Part 1)

However, in the gradualist evolutionary account, there is no Fall.(see Applegate, Falk, and Haarsma, Part 2). If anything, there is a “rise,” as human beings “come of age” and become morally responsible at some point in the process of evolution from prehuman primates. There are multiple problems with this proposal from a theological perspective:

• It is one thing to apply symbolic interpretations to the first three chapters of Genesis; it is another to eliminate the historical reality of the Fall altogether.(see Applegate, Falk, and Haarsma, Part 2). .
• In the biblical view of creation, God creates humans in a paradisical Eden, and humans are ejected from Eden after their sin. In the gradualist view,(see Applegate, Falk, and Haarsma, Part 2). there never was an Eden, and humans never enjoyed the kind of original created goodness described in Scripture.
• In the biblical view of creation, separation from God and death are the punishments for human sin. In the gradualist view, there never was an Edenic paradise, and persons were created to die. Sin has no real causal connection with physical death. (see Schloss, Part 1)

As Jeff Schloss reminds us in Part 1 of his paper, "Although commentators differ over whether the Pauline description of death in Romans 5 refers to spiritual and/or physical death, the passage clearly focuses on humans. It identifies humanity as the subject of infection, instigated and promulgated by initial and ongoing human sin: “in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12)."

• In the biblical view of creation, humans were created “a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5). In the gradualist view, humans emerged from previously created nonhuman primates. This is a profound re-envisioning and diminishment of the Christian anthropology found in the Bible. (see Falk, Part 2)

Darrel Falk put it this way: ”Christians recognize that our material ordinariness is radically transformed by the presence and promises of God. Exactly as with the people of Israel among the nations, so humans among the animals: our special identity rests in the free choice of the Creator to give us his himself and his name. If we recognize that human specialness rests on God’s fellowship with and call upon us, and that we—alone of all creatures—are enabled by God to bear his image in the world, then anything Darwin said about the physical continuity between humans and animals is irrelevant."

We think this last significant issue raised by Dr. Lemke shows just how important this Southern Baptist Voices Series has been, because it highlights the fact that many of the theological concerns raised here do not emerge from the scientific data about life's origins or the discipline of evolutionary biology. There are surely theologians who look at creation this way, but to the extent they do so, their views emerge from their own theological considerations; they are not obligatory extrapolations which emerge from the science itself.

• The Bible describes God creating a beautiful paradisicial Eden with sinless humans, which was lost only because of human rebellion and sin. The gradualist account posits God creating a substandard world that had to evolve to reach even the sad levels of contemporary life. This imperfect creation reflects on the nature of God. Why would a perfectly good God create such an imperfect world? Why or how could a moral God create humans to be already fallen? Orthodox Christian theology affirms that God is already perfect in all His attributes, and does not evolve or change in His essence. The theology more apposite to the gradualist account is Process Theology, in which evolution in creation mirrors evolution within God himself, as he moves from a powerful but imperfect being toward a more perfect being. In fact, Process Theology was designed with a view to harmonizing Christian theology with evolutionary presuppositions. But Process Theology is not held to be orthodox by most evangelical Christians, particularly with regard the nature and perfection of God.

At the core of the Christian worldview is the biblical metanarrative of creation, fall, and redemption. The evolutionary gradualist perspective radically rewrites this standard Christian account by essentially merging the creation and fall into a single event. Humans were created as finite and fallen, not placed in a paradise with created righteousness. This gradualist approach squares well with an evolutionary account, but it does not square well with the biblical creation accounts in Scripture.

Notes

1. Cornelius Hunter, Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Waco: Brazos Press, 2001).
2. William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009).
3. Tom Nettles, review of The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World, by William Dembski, in Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 13.4 (2009): 80–85. A partial defense and Dembski’s clarification are found in David Allen, “A Reply to Tom Nettles’ Review of William A. Dembski’s The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World,” a white paper at the Center for Theological Research (February 2010), available online (PDF).

My valiant helper, a small-sized tiger
Sleeps sweetly on my desk, by the computer,
Unaware that you insult his tribe.

Cats play with a mouse or
with a half-dead mole.
You are wrong, though: it’s not out of cruelty.
They simply like a thing that moves.

For, after all, we know that only consciousness
Can for a moment move into the Other,
Empathize with the pain and panic of a mouse.

And such as cats are, all of Nature is.
Indifferent, alas, to the good and the evil.
Quite a problem for us, I am afraid.

Natural history has its museums,
But why should our children learn about monsters,
An earth of snakes and reptiles for millions of years?

Nature devouring, nature devoured,
Butchery day and night smoking with blood.

And who created it? Was it the good Lord?

Yes, undoubtedly, they are innocent,
Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons.

We are the only ones who say: cruelty.

Our consciousness and our conscience
Alone in the pale anthill of galaxies
Put their hope in a humane God.

Who cannot but feel and think,

Who is kindred to us by his warmth and movement,

For we are, as he told us, similar to Him.

Yet if it is so, then He takes pity
On every mauled mouse, every wounded bird.
Then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion.

Such is the outcome of your attack on the cat:
A theological, Augustinian grimace,
Which makes difficult our walking on this earth.

–Czeslaw Milosz,¹
 translated by the author and Robert Hass

The Problem

The poem above communicates in a very poignant and profound way the essence of the theological problem of death, pain, and suffering in the natural world—what has been referred to as “natural evil.” As we will see, it may also point to at least one aspect of a Christian response.

I have become convinced that one of the fundamental issues underlying much of the resistance of many Christians to an ancient, evolving creation is that of the problem of “natural evil.” “Natural evil” is also very often a primary focus of those who reject a personal and compassionate God, as it was for Darwin himself. The issue of theodicy thus seems not only to drive many people of Christian faith away from an acceptance of the conclusions of modern science, but also to drive members of the scientific community away from a serious consideration of the claims of the Christian faith. The topic is important, then not because its solution is central to the validity of the Christian faith, but because it often serves as an unnecessary stumbling block to a productive engagement of both science and faith.

The tension generated by our understanding of God’s character, as revealed in the Bible, and by the reality of the natural world around us has been the focus of much theological and philosophical debate within the Christian church since the first century. This article sets out to examine critically several of the proposed solutions to this problem, viewing them from the perspective of a geologist, paleontologist, and orthodox evangelical Christian.

The theological problem of death and pain emerges from the following propositional statements:

1. Scripture consistently declares the absolute goodness of God and the very goodness of his creation. Furthermore, Scripture declares God’s love and care for creation, and the glory and praise it returns to him.
2. Scripture also confesses a transcendent God who is omnipotent in power, yet immanent in creation as well. God’s creative activity is not described as being confined to some past event at the beginning of time, but as a present and continuing reality. God upholds creation in its being from moment to moment, and is creatively active in its history. This understanding of God’s relationship to creation has been well articulated by Jürgen Moltmann.²
3. In seeming conflict with these confessions of God’s character, we observe death, pain, and suffering as ubiquitous, even integral, aspects of the creation around us.

The apparent conflict between God’s goodness and the presence of pain and suffering is made especially acute when we consider the nonhuman creation.³ How can we accommodate the death and suffering of animals within a theology that declares both God’s omnipotence and goodness? C. S. Lewis forcefully puts the issue before us in his book The Problem of Pain:

The problem of animal suffering is appalling; not because the animals are so numerous ... but because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it.⁴

Because the issue of animal pain so directly impacts our understanding of the goodness of creation, I will focus particularly on solutions to the problem as posed by Lewis.

How do we then reconcile the goodness of God who is immanent and active in his creation with the death, pain, and suffering we see embedded within it? There seem to be two basic alternative approaches to this dilemma.⁵

1. Natural evil can be attributed to something independent of God and acting against his will. This position threatens to limit God’s power and freedom.
2. Natural evil can be considered a part of God’s good purpose for creation, and either directly willed or permitted by him. Such a view would seem to bring into question God’s goodness and love for his creatures.

The tension between these alternatives—and efforts to avoid their negative theological consequences—surface in many of the proposed solutions to this problem.

In part 2, we start to look at some of the proposed solutions, beginning with the idea that a perfect creation was corrupted by a fall.

Notes

1. This poem was included in a collection of poems that was one of two works by Czeslaw Milosz mentioned in a review article by Michael Ignatieff, “The Art of Witness,” New York Review of Books (March 23, 1995). I thank Carol Regehr for bringing my attention to this work.
2. Moltmann refers to this aspect of God’s creative activity in history as “continuous creation.” Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 206–14.
3. I will not address here arguments concerning the degree to which animals experience pain. This issue is considered by Robert Wennberg in “Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil,” Christian Scholar’s Review 21 (1991): 120–40. It is obvious to me that, for many animals at least, pain and suffering are a very real conscious experience.
4. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1962), 129.
5. As stated by John Hick, in Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1977): “For every position that maintains the perfect goodness of God is bound either to let go the absolute divine power and freedom, or else to hold that evil exists ultimately within God’s good purpose” (pp. 149–50).

Some implications and conclusions of Theistic Evolution--continued

(4) Several leading TEs have advanced a strongly Christocentric theology of creation—stressing the idea (from the prologue of John’s gospel) that the Maker of heaven and earth is the crucified and resurrected second person of the Trinity. Especially when theodicy is the topic, they like to speak about “the crucified God,” or “the theology of the cross,” or “divine kenosis.”

On first glance, some readers might be a bit perplexed: isn’t this column supposed to be about evolution, not the crucifixion? What could those topics possibly have in common? The answer lies in theodicy, or the problem of evil and suffering in the world. As I stressed in my column about the YEC view, creationism is ultimately about theodicy—it’s not only about theodicy, to be sure, but the belief that animals must not have suffered and died before Adam and Eve committed the first sin is crucial to the “young” in Young Earth Creationism. To a significant degree, Theistic Evolution is also about theodicy. In one of the best books on science and religion that I could name, Catholic theologian John Haught explains the atheist’s view of theodicy (which he does not share) as follows:

“Evolution is incompatible with any and all religious interpretations of the cosmos, not just with Christian fundamentalism. The prevalence of chance variations, which today are called genetic ‘mutations,’ definitively refutes the idea of any ordering deity. The fact of struggle and waste in evolution decisively demonstrates that the cosmos is not cared for by a loving God. And the fact of natural selection is a clear signal of the loveless impersonality of the universe.” (Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation, p. 52)

Proponents of TE have responded to the issues raised in the latter two sentences in a variety of ways. I agree with Christopher Southgate’s analysis of the overall situation. Like several of the writers I mention this week, Southgate is a theologian with a doctorate in science; he’s also an accomplished poet. The text he wrote with many others, God, Humanity and the Cosmos: A Textbook in Science and Religion, is really much more than a textbook. I recommend it for anyone seeking a wide-ranging introduction to the principal issues.

Southgate and his collaborators see just two “possible theologies of divine action in respect of evolution,” considering that “the problems of theodicy are severe.” Option ONE: “to posit God merely as the passive, suffering companion of every creature, a view self-consistent but dubiously faithful to the Christian tradition.” Option TWO: “to mount a defence of teleological creation using a combination of [certain] theological resources,” namely these three—

• “we must adopt a very high doctrine of humanity and suppose that indeed humans are of very particular concern to God.” This is linked with the Incarnation.
• “we must take very seriously the cross as costly to God, as part of God’s hugely costly way of taking responsibility for the creative process.”
• “we must give some account of the redemption of the non-human creation …” This is linked with the Trinity. (p. 279 in first edition, 1999)

Given limited space, I’ll focus almost exclusively on the second idea, though we may want to discuss all of them below.

The Crucified God

View of the entrance to the main camp of Auschwitz (May 1945). The gate bears the motto, "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes one free). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Source).

We start with something that arose in a context entirely unrelated to evolution, Jürgen Moltmann’s (read more here and here) notion of The Crucified God. The theological point and the emotional impact of Moltmann’s conception is aptly captured in this stark passage, written in response to Elie Wiesel’s dark story of a child who was publicly hanged at Auschwitz: “like the cross of Christ, even Auschwitz is in God himself. Even Auschwitz is taken up into the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son and the power of the Spirit.” (p. 278) A recent sermon by Matt Bates, pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Richmond, fleshes this out for us in a very accessible way; please read the whole sermon before going any further.

Repeat: please read the sermon. It’s a vital part of what I’m trying to say.

Now that you see more clearly what the “Crucified God” is about, let’s see what John Polkinghorne says about it:

“This profound and difficult thought meets the problem of suffering at [the] level which its deep challenge demands. The insight of the Crucified God lies at the very heart of my own Christian belief, indeed of the possibility of such belief in the face of the way the world is. But this can only really be so if God is indeed truly present in that twisted figure on the tree of Calvary. Only an ontological Christology is adequate to the defence of God in the face of human suffering. God must really be there in that darkness.” (Belief in God in an Age of Science, p. 44)

Be sure to notice two things in this passage. First, Polkinghorne confesses that his own Christian faith depends on such a conception of God, but there are only two very brief references to evolution in the entire eloquent chapter from which I’ve quoted. There’s plenty of science there, but almost all of it is modern physics, not biology. (I’ll leave it as an exercise to “students” to get a copy of this excellent little book and fill in the blanks.) In other words, evolution doesn’t shape Polkinghorne’s theology nearly as much as his theology shapes his view of evolution.

The second thing to notice is that in the last three sentences Polkinghorne is doing something subtle, but extremely important—something that I don’t want anyone to miss. Contrary to some of the most influential voices in the science and religion “dialogue” (some examples would be Haught, Ian Barbour, and the late Arthur Peacocke), Polkinghorne affirms the full divinity and humanity of Christ, in a classical Chalcedonian sense. Read those sentences again a couple of times, and you should see what I’m driving at. As he says a bit later on, “Unless there really is a God who really was ‘in Christ reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor. 5:19), then the cross is no answer to the bitter problem of the suffering of the world.” (p. 45) In other words, one can only take this approach to theodicy unless one actually believes in the reality of the Incarnation; only an orthodox Christian can speak meaningfully of the “Crucified God.” In the final part of this column, when I’ll present Polkinghorne as a contemporary exemplar of a theologically “orthodox” TE, it’s partly this aspect of his thought that I will have in mind.

Lucas Cranach the Elder

Finally, I should note that the term “crucified God” is not actually modern. Although Moltmann wrote an influential book about it, the language comes from Martin Luther. Another physicist-theologian, George Murphy, writes in a highly Lutheran way about The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross, advancing the view that a “theology of the cross” in which God sets aside power to become a participant in the universe, even to the point of death, takes priority over a “theology of glory,” in which we seek God first in the power behind nature, not in the powerlessness of the cross. For a short version of Murphy’s ideas, go here.

Once again, we need to stop mid-stream. These ideas are deep and perhaps too new for many readers, and it’s best to reflect on them before we go further and even deeper.

In his thoughtful, gracious, and fair-minded essay, Professor John Laing focuses on what many believers and non-believers alike recognize as perhaps the most significant challenge to faith in an all-good, -knowing, and -powerful Creator God: the problem of natural evil, and in particular, the acrid sting of death. While the issue is an ancient one, Laing—and many other contemporary commentators who range from sympathetic to antagonistic toward biblical theism—view evolution as exacerbating the problem to the point that one must choose between the good God of scripture and the truth of evolution. Although the general issue of “evolution and evil” is manifold and beyond the scope of a single essay, John (if I may), zeros in on two ways in which evolution seems to aggravate the particular theological challenge of death. First, in the view of scripture, death is “an invader, disturber of the peace, and a force of evil”; therefore its primordial (as opposed to post hoc) place in the world described by evolution seems incommensurate with an originally good creation. Second, it is not just the primordial place but also the functional role of death that appears to constitute a problem: evolution by natural selection is widely viewed as being driven by death, and more generally by fierce competition, in a way that seems hard to reconcile as a mode of creation that a wise and good God would employ.

I agree with John that these are serious issues. Little is accomplished either by glibly dismissing their prima facie legitimacy or by responding with theological concessions that relinquish core claims of the gospel. In his words: “a fundamental aspect of the good news in the Gospel is the defeat of death – this negative, destroying force – in the resurrection of Christ.” Amen! In what follows I hope to engage sequentially both issues he raises in a way that takes them seriously while avoiding compromised hope.

The Primordial Place of Death

I need to start by acknowledging that these are not just arid intellectual issues but also profoundly personal ones. I have just returned from keeping vigil at the deathbed of my father, and the sting of death is especially acute. The fact that every son sees his father die (or worse, that a parent may see a child die) –that in some sense, universal human death is part of the current “natural order” we all experience – offers no solace for the tearful remonstration of what an awful violation it is. It is a violation not just of our deepest desires, but also of what we construe to be God’s purposes, for the God of scripture is not a mere field of energy or prime mover or initial organizing principle, but is wondrously and clearly portrayed as “the living God” whose explicit purpose is that we “have life, and have it in abundance.” Indeed, in the most extensive section of his essay John cites over 40 scripture passages that affirm life as God’s intention for humanity and death as an intrusive, subverting consequence of sin. I could not be in stronger concord.

Although all Christians have traditionally affirmed resurrection (for both the redeemed and unredeemed), there have been longstanding debates about whether the life that is redemptively restored in Christ and the death that is brought about by sin is “spiritual” (involving the vitality or disruption of communion with God) or “physical” (involving the viability or dissolution of biotic function). Of course these are not mutually exclusive, and perhaps they are not even ultimately distinguishable. But however one understands death to be an incursion upon human telos, it does not answer or even clearly bear upon the evolution-related question of whether other living beings beyond and before humans were created to be immortal. “Violence” in western thought has often been understood as a disruption of natural ends: but do we assume that all creatures share the same “natural end”? For instance, is the nature or telos of worms immortality? Is death a violation of all creaturely natures that was therefore absent from earth prior to initial human intimacy with and subsequent estrangement from God? Significantly, not a single one of the scriptures John cites explicitly refers or even vaguely alludes to the general place of death in the natural order: virtually every one emphatically focuses on death as a consequence of sin for uniquely human moral agents, and—correspondingly—on eternal life as God’s special purpose for supernaturally redeemed humanity.¹ Indeed, I am at a loss to find in the entire Bible a scripture that clearly teaches death across the entire biotic realm postdates and is a consequence of human sin.² Neither is this point affirmed or even mentioned in the most prominent historic creeds of Christian orthodoxy.

Davis Young & Ralph Stearley’s The Bible, Rocks, and Time (2008, Inter Varsity Press) provides an expansive historical survey.

Yet none of this means that there is not an issue here. The view that death in all creation is not endemic but followed from a recent human fall was—with the exception of Aquinas and a few others—the dominant perspective of the church fathers, key reformers, and most Christians through the 17th Century (see sidebar). However, by the same token, so was geocentrism and so was the doctrine of human exceptionalism. Virtually all Christians have relinquished geocentrism in light of utterly compelling scientific evidence along with the recognition—in part motivated but not dictated by findings of science—that no clear and persistent scriptural teaching or core theological doctrine is compromised by this view.³ On the other hand, the claim of exceptionalism continues to be affirmed by many Christians – including myself – in light of important theological commitments and ongoing scientific discussion.

So is the primordial nature of death more like geocentrism, or more like human exceptionalism? Scientifically, there is little question that it is more akin to geocentrism. Over the last three centuries the empirical evidence for and the explanatory fruitfulness of the view that earth’s biota and death’s existence vastly predate the origin of humans have increased explosively—arguably to an extent beyond any other finding of science. Amongst tens of thousands of natural scientists, there is virtually unanimous agreement on this point.⁴ I should be clear that this is not an ad hominem argument: to say the evidential and demographic situation is similar to geocentrism is not in itself to claim that the “recent death” position is wrong. Nor is it an ad populum argument: neither John nor I have space to assess scientific evidence for this claim, and the fact that the overwhelming majority of Christian and non-Christian scientists have for several centuries shared the “primordial death” view does not make it true. But it does mean that if that view is to be rejected for the kinds of theological reasons that John raises, it seems there should be unambiguous scriptural warrant for that rejection. Failing that, then there needs to be a compelling theological rationale and a decided lack of plausible alternatives posited by fellow orthodox Christians.

I have already agreed with John that the Bible persistently presents death as an enemy of God’s purposes for humanity. But I have suggested (perhaps altogether wrongly!) that he does not provide clear scriptural evidence for death being a comparable enemy to and intrusion upon God’s purposes for all creatures. A faithful reading of the Bible does not seem to be incompatible with seeing death as part of the magisterial history of life as depicted by evolution and other natural sciences.

With these considerations of the biblical text as background, tomorrow I’ll describe why I do not believe that John or those with kindred perspectives provide a compelling theological mandate for this view of death, either.

Notes

1. There are a few scriptures not cited by John, which deal with the absence of carnivory (though not death itself) in images of idyllic creation. Genesis 1:30 portrays a world in which every creature with the breath of life had plants for food. And the images of the new earth in Isaiah 11 and 65 paint a renewal of this order in redeemed creation. Interestingly however, they do not portray an elimination of death for animals, or even for humanity. According to Is 65, the passage which presents the beautiful image of the lion and lamb: “ ‘Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people… The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,’ says the LORD.” This and other eschatological passages in scripture have a history of widely varying interpretations, but taken most literally, it describes a world with prolonged life in which there is still death (he who dies a centenarian will be like a child, and most people will live as long as trees), and in which death, however, is not inflicted by one creature upon another.
2. Although commentators differ over whether the Pauline description of death in Romans 5 refers to spiritual and/or physical death, the passage clearly focuses on humans. It identifies humanity as the subject of infection, instigated and promulgated by initial and ongoing human sin: “in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).
3. Not all Christians have relinquished geocentrism. For example, a well-known public advocate is Dr. Gerardus Bouw, who has a Ph.D. in astronomy and until recently taught at Baldwin-Wallace Christian College. He founded the Association for Biblical Astronomy and authored an apologetic monograph for a stationary earth: Geocentricity (1992, Association for Biblical Astronomy). A crucial commitment of Dr. Bouw is that he “assumes that whenever the two [the Bible and astronomy] are at variance, it is always astronomy—that is, our ‘reading’ of the ‘Book of Nature,’ not our reading of the Holy Bible—that is wrong.” (http://www.geocentricity.com/ accessed 8/1/2012). Note that this epistemic framework asserts not just that the Bible is a more perfect witness to theological truth than nature, but that human understanding – “our reading” – of the Bible is somehow more immune to error than our reading of nature. The Bible itself does not clearly teach that humans, in our frailty, are less vulnerable to misunderstanding special than general revelation. The difference between faith in the scriptures and faith in our understanding of the scriptures is important though not always recognized, and underlies much tension in faith-science issues.
4. To his credit, even the most prominent critic of primordial death cited by John acknowledges this evidential and demographic claim. In a moving autobiographical essay, Kurt Wise acknowledges “I accepted the Word of God and rejected all that would ever counter it, including evolution. With that, in great sorrow, I tossed into the fire all my dreams and hopes in science.” Although he believes in the viability of searching for a scientific rationale, he affirms “I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turned against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate.” [Kurt Wise, in John F. Ashton (ed)., In Just Six Days. 2001. Master Books. Page 355.]

When scientists investigate God’s creation, they find that humans appear very late in the history of life. The fossil record shows that many creatures died long before humans appeared. In fact, many entire species went extinct millions of years ago (the dinosaurs are the most famous example), long before humans lived or sinned.

See “What does the Fossil Record Show?” and “How are the ages of the Earth and universe calculated?”

Yet God’s revelation in scripture paints a different picture. Several key scripture passages teach that death is a consequence of sin, including Genesis 2:16-17, Genesis 3:19,22, Romans 5:12-21, and 1 Corinthians 15. How should we think about these passages in light of the scientific evidence? Could animals have died before human sin? Does “death” in these passages refer to physical death, or spiritual death, or sometimes one and sometimes the other? To ponder these questions, we need to consider God’s revelation in scripture and God’s revelation in nature. The scientific evidence is discussed in other Questions, as are the topics of the fall and sin (see sidebars). Here we consider what scripture says about death and how the two revelations might be reconciled.

See “How does original sin fit with evolutionary history?”

Animal Death

The Bible passages that teach about sin and death are clearly referring to the death of humans. Do these passages also refer to animals? Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) didn’t think so. He believed that God’s original creation included animals that killed each other, writing that “the nature of animals was not changed by man’s sin.”¹ Pastor Daniel Harrell makes a logical argument for animal death, writing that “there had to be death in the Garden, otherwise Adam would have been overrun by bugs and bacteria long before he took that forbidden bite of fruit.”² Animal death is also necessary to maintain population levels in a balanced ecosystem (see below for more). Some Bible passages portray predatory animals as part of God’s original plan for creation (Job 38:39-41, 39:29-30, Psalm 104:21,29). Other passages speak of the “lion laying down with the lamb” instead of killing the lamb (Isaiah 11:6-7, Isaiah 65:25), but these verses refer to the future kingdom of God, not the original creation. While animal death and suffering raises other theological questions (see Sidebar), it does not contradict Biblical teaching about death as a consequence of sin.

See “How does the evil and suffering in the world align with the idea of a loving God?”

Human death: physical or spiritual?

One traditional interpretation of Genesis 2-3 is that sin results in physical death. Humans would have been immortal without sin. In Genesis 2:17, God warns Adam and Eve, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat you shall die.” In Genesis 3:19, God carries out this punishment, cursing Adam with labor and death, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul contrasts and compares Christ and Adam, highlighting Adam’s fall as the cause of physical death for the whole human race.

John Calvin, however, suggested that Adam’s sin caused the abrupt painful death that we experience today, a wrenching apart of the physical and spiritual aspects of humans. Calvin seems to have thought that if Adam had not sinned, a more gentle kind of physical death or “passing” from life into life would have occurred: “Truly the first man would have passed to a better life, had he remained upright; but there would have been no separation of the soul from the body, no corruption, no kind of destruction, and, in short, no violent change.”³ In this view, humans were created mortal, but intended for long healthy lives and graceful deaths, such as described in Isaiah 65:20-25. The Old Testament speaks of death at the end of a long life in purely positive terms, such as 1 Chronicles 29:28 where King David “died at a god old age, having enjoyed long life, wealth, and honor.”

Another interpretation of these passages is that the consequence of sin is spiritual death, not physical death. If Adam had not sinned, humans would still have died like we do today, but without “the sense of loss, uncertainty about an afterlife, … and regret for unfinished work” that comes with spiritual death.⁴ Agemir de Carvalho Dias, Presbyterian pastor and teacher of the Evangelical College of Parana, Brazil, writes that “the death that entered the world with Adam is understood as something that takes man apart from God, a spiritual death, in the sense that the access to God is now closed and can be restored only through faith.”⁵ Of course some sins still bring about physical death, such as Abel’s death at Cain’s hand, and the death of King David’s infant son after the king’s adultery (2 Samuel 12:13-14).

The text of Genesis 2-3 can support an interpretation of the curse as spiritual death. In the curse of Genesis 3:19, God tells Adam “for dust you are and to dust you will return,” implying that Adam was created mortal from the dust. God warned Adam and Eve that they would die in the day they ate from the tree, and yet Adam lived to the age of 930 (Genesis 5:5). What did happen on the day they ate from the tree? Adam and Eve felt shame and were expelled from the Garden, breaking their fellowship with God – spiritual death.

Weren’t Adam and Eve immortal, created as perfect ideal human beings? This is a popular idea, but not clear in the Biblical text. The first humans are described as “very good” and pleasing to God (Genesis 1:30-31), but not as perfect or with superhuman abilities. Also, consider the Tree of Life. God planted this tree in the garden before the fall (Genesis 2:9) and it gives immortality to the one who eats it (Genesis 3:22). If God created humans as immortal, what was the purpose of the Tree of Life? It would only be needed if humans were mortal to begin with.⁶

Pastor Stephen Rodeheaver reflects on the two trees of Genesis 2-3 and the implications for us today (blog series)

In the New Testament, Paul writes much on the relationship between sin and death. Sometimes Paul was clearly referring to spiritual death (Romans 6:1-14, 7:11), and other times clearly to physical death (1 Corinthians 15:35-42). Yet even in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes of the eternal life in Christ as something much more than the mere earthly life we experience now, implying that “death” also refers to much more than mere physical death. This is more explicit in Romans 5:12-21 where death is contrasted with the gifts of grace, justification, and righteousness, i.e. the new spiritual life provided by Jesus’ victory.

See “Were Adam and Eve Historical Figures?” which discusses the issue of death and the identity of Adam and Eve

For more, be sure to read the full FAQ "Did death occur before the Fall?" in our Questions section!

Notes

1. Saint Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica, Part 1, Question 93, Article 1 (web article)
2. Daniel Harrell. “Death’s Resurrection”, BioLogos Forum, December 18, 2009 (blog)
3. John Calvin. Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, called Genesis, trans. by John King. ch3 v19 (p. 97).
4. George Murphy “Human Evolution in Theological Context” BioLogos scholarly essay which includes a discussion of human and animal death (PDF), p. 6
5. Quoted by Marcio Antonio Campos in “Did peace and love reign in the world before the original sin?” BioLogos Forum, March 7, 2011 (blog)
6. See Deborah and Loren Haarsma, “Three interpretations of the Tree of Life”, supplemental material to Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids, MI: Faith Alive Christian Resources) 2011 (PDF)
]]> Wed, 08 Aug 12 05:00:49 -0700 http://biologos.org/blog/series/asa-gray-and-charles-darwin-discuss-evolution-and-design?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/asa-gray-and-charles-darwin-discuss-evolution-and-design?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Many Christians believe that they face a painful choice-- either life was designed by God or it is an evolutionary product of natural selection. Charles Darwin himself believed in this dichotomy, and people ever since have felt the need to "choose sides". However, looking back at history, we find that one of Darwin's chief scientific colleagues, Asa Gray, did not share this perspective. In this three-part essay, part 1 charts the relationship of Asa Gray and Charles Darwin. Part 2 describes Darwin's struggle with the problem of natural evil and design in nature, and part 3 explores how Asa Gray was able to embrace evolution without rejecting the idea of design.

Evangelical Christians in the nineteenth century were generally not biblical literalists, nor did they believe in a young earth. In other words, the religious opposition to Darwin did not arise from perceived problems between Darwin's theory and a literal reading of Genesis. Rather, following the publication of Origin of Species, it centered on what seemed to be the randomness of natural selection, the appearance of new organisms by chance, and therefore the exclusion of divine purpose or design in Nature.⁷ It was the teleological question that Gray addressed in his review and about which he and Darwin corresponded over many years.

Darwin responds to Gray's review of Origin of Species

Darwin's response to Gray's review, a copy of which he received prior to its publication, was very positive. Darwin even hoped that it could become a preface in a second American edition of On the Origin of Species on which Gray worked. In a letter later in the year to James Dwight Dana, Darwin said: "No one person understands my views & has defended them so well as A. Gray;--though he does not by any means go all the way with me."⁸ The "all the way" included teleology, and Darwin wrote this to Gray concerning his attempt to retain design:

It has always seemed to me that for an Omnipotent & Omniscient Creator to foresee is the same as to preordain; but then when I come to think over this I get into an uncomfortable puzzle something analogous with "necessity & Free-will" or the "Origin of evil," or other subject quite beyond the scope of the human intellect.⁹

Three months later he picked up the discussion with these comments:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.--I am bewildered.--I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I should wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me .... But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.¹⁰


"I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." - Charles Darwin

Darwin invokes William Paley

Shortly after this letter to Gray, Darwin wrote Charles Lyell on the same subject and said:

I have said that natural selection is to the structure of organised beings, what the human architect is to a building. The very existence of the human architect shows the existence of more general laws; but no one in giving credit for a building to the human architect, thinks it necessary to refer to the laws by which man has appeared. No astronomer in showing how movements of Planets are due to gravity, thinks it necessary to say that the law of gravity was designed that the planets should pursue the courses which they pursue.--I cannot believe that there is a bit more interference by the Creator in the construction of each species, than in the course of the planets.--It is only owing to Paley & Co, as I believe, that this more special interference is thought necessary with living bodies.¹¹

In mentioning "Paley & Co," Darwin was referring to William Paley and other natural theologians, who had argued that nature--through the organization and adaptations of living organisms--demonstrated the existence of an intelligent creator. Darwin had studied Paley while in university, and Gray had also been influenced by the work of Paley, whose eighteenth-century opus Natural Theology was an important component of nineteenth-century American philosophy and was still used as a text at Harvard when Gray began teaching there in 1842.


William Paley

Paley's Argument from Design ultimately boiled down to this:

Premise 1: God's will is for us to be happy in this life and the next.

Premise 2: We can discover God's will either by consulting Scripture or by consulting "the light of nature." Both ways will lead to the same conclusion.

Premise 3: The will of God with regard to any action can be found by inquiring into its "tendency to promote or diminish the general happiness."

Conclusion 1: God creates to promote the general happiness of all creatures.

Conclusion 2: Organisms are perfectly adapted to their environment by the Creator.

The corollary of this last conclusion was that perfect design, from the structure and functioning of an organ to the structure of the universe, is evidence for God.

Confronting the reality of suffering and death in nature

For Paley, Nature provided the evidence for the existence of God, but Darwin had difficulty with this argument. His difficulty centered on what might best be referred to as issues surrounding theodicy, i.e., are natural selection and its results consistent with design by a benevolent God or do they imply that, if designed, God is capable of malevolent intent. In a July 3, 1860, letter to Gray, Darwin explicitly raises the issue. He writes:

One word more on "designed laws" & "undesigned results." I see a bird which I want for food, take my gun & kill it, I do this designedly.--An innocent & good man stands under tree & is killed by flash of lightning. Do you believe (& I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most person do believe this; I can't & don't.--If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that particular instant? I believe that the man & the gnat are in same predicament.--If the death of neither man or gnat are designed, I see no good reason to believe that their first birth or production should be necessarily designed. Yet, as I said before, I cannot persuade myself that electricity acts, that the tree grows, that man aspires to loftiest conceptions all from blind, brute force.¹²

What Darwin wanted was Design without suffering, teleology without agony, purpose without pain.

Darwin and Gray discuss Design

This issue becomes the focus of discussion following the third article of a series that Gray published in The Atlantic Monthly in July, August, and October of 1860. When these articles were reprinted as a chapter in Gray's Darwiniana, the chapter was titled "Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology." The passage that focused the discussion for Darwin was this: "We should advise Mr. Darwin to assume, in the philosophy of his hypothesis, that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines."¹³

After stating that the article was "admirable," Darwin responded to Gray in these words:

But I grieve to say that I cannot honestly go as far as you do about Design .... [Y]ou lead me to infer that you believe "that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines."--I cannot believe this; & I think you would have to believe, that the tail of the fan-tail was led to vary in the number & direction of its feathers in order to gratify the caprice of a few men.¹⁴

In September, Darwin responded to a question from Gray and informed him of his correspondence with Lyell on the subject of Design. In a lengthy passage, he wrote:

Your question of what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, & I was convinced, from others seeing him, that I was not mad, I should believe in design. If I could be convinced thoroughly that life & mind was in an unknown way a function of other imponderable forces, I should be convinced.... I have lately been corresponding with Lyell, who, I think, adopts your idea of the stream of variation having been led or designed. I have asked him (& he says he will hereafter reflect & answer me) whether he believes that the shape of my nose was designed. If he does, I have nothing more to say. If not, seeing what Fanciers have done by selecting individual differences in the nasal bones of Pigeons, I must think that it is illogical to suppose that the variations, which Nat. Selection preserves for the good of any being, have been designed. But I know that I am in the same sort of muddle (as I have said before) as all the world seems to be in with respect to free will, yet with every supposed to have been foreseen or preordained.¹⁵

Finally, in December, Darwin sent up the white flag, conceding that "if anything is designed, certainly Man must be; one's 'inner consciousness' (though a false guide) tells one so; yet I cannot admit that man's rudimentary mammae ... & pug-nose were designed .... I am in thick mud;--the orthodox would say in fetid abominable mud."¹⁶ From this point on, the topic is not as central in their correspondence.

Following the publication of Darwin's book on orchids, however, he asked Gray to look at the last chapter, since Darwin believed that it bore on the design question. Gray's response was found in both his review of the book and in a letter to Darwin. In his review, he praised Darwin for having "brought back teleological considerations into botany." He concluded:

We faithfully believe that both natural science and natural theology will richly gain, and equally gain, whether we view each varied form as original, or whether we come to conclude, with Mr. Darwin, that they are derived:--the grand and most important inference of design in nature being drawn from the same data, subject to similar difficulties, and enforced by nearly the same considerations, in the one case as in the other.¹⁷

Gray may have believed that Darwin "brought back teleological considerations into botany," and Darwin may have swung that way in his book on orchids, but by 1867 Darwin had definitely swung back to the other side. In his concluding remarks for The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, he wrote:

However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief that "variation has been led along certain beneficial lines," like a stream "along definite and useful lines of irrigation." If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, then that plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination.¹⁸

In Part 3, the final post in this series, Dr. Miles will explore how Asa Gray was able to embrace evolution without rejecting the idea of design in nature.

Notes

7. Following the publication of Descent of Man, a second problem arose for evangelicals, centered on how humans could be moral beings, created in the Image of God, if they were continuous with the animal kingdom. I will not be addressing that issue in this paper.
8. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 8, 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 303.
9. Ibid., 106.
10. Ibid., 224.
11. Ibid., 258.
12. Ibid., 275.
13. Asa Gray, "Natural Selection not Inconsistent with Natural Theology" in Darwiniana (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963), 121-2.
14. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 8, 496.
15. Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 267-8.
16. Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, 369.
17. Cited in Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin 9, note 11, 430.
18. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), 428.

]]> Sat, 04 Aug 12 07:21:11 -0700 Sara Joan Miles http://biologos.org/blog/series/scripture-and-the-authority-of-god?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/scripture-and-the-authority-of-god?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication N.T. Wright explores the context and manner in which Scripture is authoritative. He does so by questioning the meaning of an authoritative book as well as the application of such authority. Wright encourages us to flee from the controlling “list” mentalities that belittle the richness of God’s Word, and rather to understand it as a narrative inspired by God and recorded by ancient persons. Ultimately, God “organizes” his people through his Son Jesus and by the Holy Spirit, and not through extracted rules from the Bible. The six-part series that begins today is adapted from a paper Dr. Wright presented for his colleagues at St. Andrews and an earlier paper published in Vox Evangelica. It considers some of the topics he discusses at length in his book Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. In the first installment, Wright notes the different ways that biblical authority has been understood by Christians through the centuries. Then he begins to examine how our popular conceptions of authority shape (and sometimes distort) our understanding of biblical authority.

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.)

]]> Fri, 13 Apr 12 05:39:52 -0700 N.T. Wright http://biologos.org/blog/beauty-from-the-bleak?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/beauty-from-the-bleak?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Physical death is a necessary and, perhaps, disconcerting element of the evolutionary process for many Christians. It is difficult to imagine a perfect and loving God designing such a universe where forces such as natural death and entropy operate.

Though some may believe that moving the science/faith dialogue forward is best left to scientists, scholars, and theologians, we at BioLogos recognize that our pastors play an invaluable role in the conversation. Across the globe, pastors are helping their congregations work through difficult issues of science and faith with honesty, insight, and a gentle spirit. To this end we present an ongoing series recognizing sermons (and the pastors who give them) that are helping to promote the harmony of science and faith. Today's sermon comes from Michael Gungor, a musician, founder of the musical group Gungor, and a pastor at the Bloom Church in Denver, Colorado.

Gungor’s song “Beautiful Things” emphasizes the liberating truth that God has wonderfully made beautiful things “out of the dust,” just as God makes beautiful things out of a life fully surrendered to him and buried in his love.

Beautiful Things

All this pain
I wonder if I’ll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change at all
All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found
Could a garden come up from this ground at all

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

All around
Hope is springing up from this old ground
Out of chaos life is being found in You

You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of the dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us

Physical death is a necessary and, perhaps, disconcerting element of the evolutionary process for many Christians. It is difficult to imagine a perfect and loving God designing such a universe where forces such as natural death and entropy operated. Michael Gungor of Bloom Church in Colorado addresses this idea and offers wisdom on such a complex issue.

He highlights the words of Jesus in John 12:24 (NIV): “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” In other words, death precedes true life. This statement appears self-contradictory, but there is evidence of this truth in the world around us. Gungor points to the death of cells in a human body. The death of worn-out cells makes room for new cells, keeping the body healthy. In fact, humans necessarily consume plants and animals in their diet to bring nourishment and support life. He also discusses the second law of thermodynamics: entropy. In accordance with this law, the sun continually burns itself out as it produces light and energy that supports life on earth. Thus, there is a place for natural death on this earth as it allows for the continuation of life.

In light of the New Testament and the testament of science, Gungor proposes that perhaps God is not as afraid of physical death as humans are. God is not fearful of death, knowing full well that it will not remain. It allows for growth in the present, but God has spoken of the day when all death will be destroyed forever. Revelation 21:4(NIV) affirms this truth: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” Chapter eight of Romans also speaks about the time when all things will be brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God—that is all things will be made new. Ultimately, life will swallow up death forever, but the current “messiness” of the process of becoming is part of God’s plan too.

(To hear the entire sermon go to this link and scroll to the sermon —“What Can We Learn About Jesus from Science? Part 2”)

]]> Sat, 04 Feb 12 07:00:37 -0800 Michael Gungor http://biologos.org/blog/a-lively-god?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/a-lively-god?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication 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.

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.

]]> Wed, 11 Jan 12 09:40:23 -0800 Lincoln Harvey http://biologos.org/blog/driscoll-darwin-and-doctrine-part-1-science-or-sola-scriptura?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/driscoll-darwin-and-doctrine-part-1-science-or-sola-scriptura?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication 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”. The church I attend is currently working through a series of video sermons by Mark Driscoll, the well-known pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. The series is entitled Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe, and my church is offering these videos as part of a adult Sunday-school type course on the basics of Christianity. (For those interested, the series is posted for free viewing on the Mars Hill website here).

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.

]]> Fri, 02 Dec 11 09:51:22 -0800 Dennis Venema http://biologos.org/blog/the-truthfulness-of-scripture-inerrancy-part-1?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/the-truthfulness-of-scripture-inerrancy-part-1?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Against the repeated claim that the doctrine of inerrancy arose first with Protestant orthodoxy, we could cite numerous examples from the ancient and medieval church. It was Augustine who first coined the term "inerrant," and Luther and Calvin can speak of Scripture as free from error. This is the first of a two-part series, taken from an article by Michael Horton which appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of Modern Reformation. Horton begins by pointing out that the concept of inerrancy goes back to the ancient church but was most clearly developed by Princeton theologians A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield in their 1881 book, Inspiration. Contrary to what many people imagine today, these heroes of the Reformed tradition emphasized that the Holy Spirit worked through limited human authors in a centuries-long process to produce the Bible: “’The Scriptures have been generated, as the plan of redemption has been evolved, through an historic process,’ which is divine in its origin and intent, but ‘largely natural in its method.’” Warfield and Hodge affirm the importance of historical criticism, face textual problems and errors head-on, and caution against thinking of the authors of Scripture as being omniscient or infallible.

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

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

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

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

The Princeton Formulation of Inerrancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

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

]]> Mon, 19 Sep 11 05:00:16 -0700 Michael Horton http://biologos.org/blog/weekend-sermon-a-tales-of-two-cities?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/weekend-sermon-a-tales-of-two-cities?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication This sermon is a clear reminder that we each have a choice. We can work to build cities that celebrate God’s love for us (the lineage of Seth), or we can live in the destructive lineage of Cain. May the spirit of prayer, humility, and love characterize the world’s cities on this the tenth anniversary of America’s most stark example of “The Tale of Two Cities.”

The opening chapters in Genesis omit seemingly important details, leaving one with an incomplete understanding of the situation at hand. Dr. Keller explains that ancient Biblical writers sought to convey certain truths, and, therefore, would only include facts relevant to the point of the narrative. This is true of Cain’s exile in Genesis 4: 11-26. As he explores this story, he highlights the crucial insights that the passage means to offer.

Foremost, he exposes the cause of Cain’s ruin. When Cain murders Abel, God questions him saying “Where is Abel your brother?” and “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” God is not seeking information, but rather creating an opportunity for Cain to repent of his sin. Why is this so? Dr. Keller explains that sin results when one is self-focused, rather than God- focused. Repentance, however, goes to the root of this problem by turning one’s attention to God and others once again. It is the action of removing oneself from the center that heals the hardness and pride of the heart.

However, Cain does not repent. Instead, he complains to God that his “punishment is more than he can bear.” In other words, he is sorry for the consequences of his sin, not the sin itself. This leads to his exile from the presence of God, which is the ultimate downfall of Cain.

Next, there is evidence that Cain’s city is a “culture of death.” From the line of Cain comes a civilization marked by animal husbandry, technology, and music. In these “gardening” activities, the people indeed reflect God’s image as they creatively order the surrounding materials. However, rather than a Garden of Eden through love and service, it becomes a place marked by oppression and violence. For example, one descendant of Cain called Lamech is polygamous, having two wives. Furthermore, this man boasts saying, “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me—If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.” Their culture is now about power and exploitation. In spite of the death cultivated in this city, Dr. Keller clarifies that cities are not the issue. It is human sin alone that corrupts the city.

Finally, the scriptures point to a coming city of grace. When Cain establishes his city, he names it after himself. Without God’s presence and love, his work becomes a means of making a name for himself. However, cities are supposed to be a place where people selflessly give to one another in response to the Lord. This text shows the beginning of one such city that comes through the line of Seth, Eve’s third son. The passage states that this city is filled with a people who “call on the name of the Lord.” Thus, it is a place where people lift high the name of God. Dr. Keller explains that the Body of Christ is called to be this city of grace within the city of death. Ultimately, this power comes through the Lord Jesus Christ alone, who has poured out endless love and forgiveness and grace upon all who believe in his name.

Exactly one decade ago today, the September Eleventh terrorist attacks shocked Americans beyond belief as they watched airplanes crash into the mighty Twin Towers and Pentagon. The hearts of the people filled with grief at the aftermath of the tragedy. The Twin Towers were reduced to rubble, thousands of dearly loved individuals died, and all were crushed with heartache. In the midst of this death arose a beautiful sight and sound: millions bowing their heads in prayer, speaking words of comfort, and coming to the aid of one another. In spite of the physical deaths, New York City and the U.S. as a whole were transformed from death to life as people joined hand in hand to mourn the loss and move forward into the healing process. The pain of the losses was raw and real, but so was the love and grace that swept through, causing our divided nation to unite in unbelievable strength.

This sermon is a clear reminder that we each have a choice. We can work to build cities that celebrate God’s love for us (the lineage of Seth), or we can live in the destructive lineage of Cain. May the spirit of prayer, humility, and love characterize the world’s cities on this the tenth anniversary of America’s most stark example of “The Tale of Two Cities.”

]]> Sun, 11 Sep 11 07:54:51 -0700 Tim Keller http://biologos.org/blog/one-voice-relating-science-and-nature-in-todays-world-part-3?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/one-voice-relating-science-and-nature-in-todays-world-part-3?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication During the late 19th century when critical views of Scripture came to prevail in American universities, Warfield was responsible for refurbishing the conviction that the Bible communicates revelation from God entirely without error. Yet while he defended biblical inerrancy, Warfield was also a cautious, discriminating, but entirely candid proponent of the possibility of evolution. This post is drawn from Mark Noll's book Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. In this excerpt, Noll describes the legacy of the American theologian B.B. Warfield. Warfield developed a powerful and enduring legacy in American evangelicalism for his belief that the Bible communicates revelation from God entirely without error. Yet while he defended biblical inerrancy, Warfield was also a cautious proponent of the possibility that God could have brought about life through evolution. His basic stance was a doctrine of providence that saw God working in and with the processes of nature, rather than completely replacing them. In Warfield’s mind, a high view of biblical authority was fully compatible with a divinely guided process of evolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

]]> Mon, 22 Aug 11 04:00:08 -0700 Mark Noll http://biologos.org/blog/understanding-the-human-dimension-of-scripture?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/understanding-the-human-dimension-of-scripture?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Old Princeton and the Dutch Calvinists understood that the human dimension of Scripture—which pervades Scripture thoroughly—is not merely tolerable of a divine book, but a necessary component of what inspiration means. This post was originally published as part of Pete Enns' series on Calvinism.

Introduction

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

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

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

An “Organic” View of Scripture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bible and the Incarnation

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

The following from Bavinck illustrates the point beautifully:

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

Several pages later, Bavinck puts it this way:

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

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

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

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

And the point is…

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

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

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

Notes

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

]]> Fri, 29 Apr 11 05:00:21 -0700 Pete Enns http://biologos.org/blog/b.-b.-warfield-and-the-human-side-of-the-bible?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/b.-b.-warfield-and-the-human-side-of-the-bible?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication With Christ, his humanity is essential to who he is. Likewise, the Bible’s “human side” is an essential part of what Scripture is, and recognizing this has practical implications. Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than an Abstract Idea

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

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

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

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

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

One example of Warfield’s attention to extrabiblical data is his treatment of the second century pseudepigraphic Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (”The Apologetical Value of the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs,” The Presbyterian Review [1880]: 1.57-84). Warfield’s focus is not hermeneutical, however, but restricted to the systematic theological question of how this pseudepigraphic work does or does not affect traditional notions of the formation of the New Testament canon.

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

Notes

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

]]> Tue, 26 Apr 11 08:01:12 -0700 Pete Enns http://biologos.org/essays/preliminary-observations-on-an-incarnational-model-of-scripture-its-viabili?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/essays/preliminary-observations-on-an-incarnational-model-of-scripture-its-viabili?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The Bible is no more a book dropped out of the sky than Jesus is some superman who flew down from heaven. Instead, just as Jesus is “God incarnate,” both divine and human, the Bible is a book that speaks God’s word and reflects the thoughts, ideas, and worldviews of the human authors. and reflects the thoughts, ideas, and worldviews of the human authors.]]> Mon, 25 Apr 11 17:15:29 -0700 Pete Enns http://biologos.org/blog/science-and-faith-at-the-movies-creation-part-2?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/science-and-faith-at-the-movies-creation-part-2?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Darwin’s descent into agnosticism was fueled by a legitimate personal experience with the problem of evil, specifically in the suffering and death of his daughter. This is part two in the latest installment of filmmaker Brian Godawa's series "Science and Faith at the Movies." The full paper on Creation can be found here. Godawa, together with filmmaker, Michael Corwin produced the BioLogos video, "Are Science and Faith in Conflict?"

Creation and the Problem of Evil

Creation depicts the intrinsic opposition between God and evolution that 19th century scientists reflexively assumed, as well as the warfare metaphor that supported it. Huxley claims in the movie that if everything evolved over millions of years, then God didn’t create it all in 6 days, as if the literal interpretation of that text was the only option. Even Darwin himself is shown laboring under the presupposition that evolution cannot be guided or providentially ordained, that a system of life based upon massive amounts of death cannot be a part of God’s created “good” order. Perhaps it would be too much for the film to raise these questions in that original context. And perhaps that is where the weakness lies in an otherwise gripping and personal drama about the origins of The Origin.

The issues raised by this movie are of critical concern for evangelical Christians and their understanding of Darwinian evolution. It is far too simplistic for Christians to write off Darwin as an infidel bent on destroying the faith. The historical evidence seems to indicate that this movie’s suggestion is true: Darwin’s descent into agnosticism was fueled by a legitimate personal experience with the theological problem of evil both in the broader reality and more specifically in the suffering and death of his daughter. Whatever may be said of Darwin’s theological failings, his struggle with reconciling suffering with a good God is a journey for every person who has any shred of humanity or compassion in their soul. It is not just that there is death and suffering in the world that troubles him, but that death and suffering is a necessary part of the biological system to make it run.

Within his internal struggle, Darwin acknowledged the possibility of a theistic presence behind the laws of evolution. William E. Phipps points out in his book, Darwin’s Religious Odyssey, Darwin’s own words in a letter:

“With respect to the theological view of the question: this is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world.... On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force… I can see no reason why a man, or other animals, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws, and that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event and consequence.¹"

This notion of a God behind the laws of evolution seems to be the last refuge for Darwin’s agnosticism. The God who created the universe and sustains it (Col 1:15-17) could easily have put into place exactly those laws that he could foresee would result in the evolutionary fruit of human beings created in His image. Another possibility is that God himself is directly behind the regularity of physical law, including the process of evolution. Whether through indirect allowance or direct mediation, whether through foreknowledge or foreordination, Darwin certainly acknowledged that God is using evolutionary change to accomplish His purposes. That would have to mean that death and suffering must be part of God’s loving plan. And Scripture seems to declare this all over the place.

The litany of God’s actions proclaimed to Job include both natural law and animal predation. God not only claims to be the active agent behind natural forces like snow (37:6), rain and lightning (37:11-12), and astronomical planetary forces (38:31), but God also claims to actively take a hand in the predation of wild animals (38:39-41), as well as predation of evil human nations upon others (Isa 10), and to raise up and destroy nations (Job 12:23). “He causes it to happen” (37:13). Even taking into consideration the primitive non-scientific Mesopotamian cosmology of the Bible, Scriptural theology still has no problem accepting God’s causal activity behind the destructive forces of nature (Psa 104) and of human evil. God does not merely “allow” evil to exist in the Hebrew worldview, He somehow actively ordains it.

I form light and create darkness,
I make well-being and create calamity,
I am the LORD, who does all these things.
Is. 45:7

Who has spoken and it came to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it?
Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and evil come?
Lam. 3:37-38

Let us not forget that God’s speaking forth is the common expression of his active creation as in Genesis One. God’s hand, a metaphor for his active causal participation, is even described in the New Testament as being involved in the the murder of God’s own Son.

For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. Acts 4:27-28

But this is not to make God evil or the Bible contradictory. For the Christian, this is first and foremost an exegetical issue. Regardless of what philosophical problems Christians may have with the notion of God’s sovereignty and evil, our first commitment is to discover what the Bible says about the issue, not to presuppose what can and cannot be proposed philosophically. Clearly, the Bible claims that God somehow ordains natural disasters and both good and evil in such a way that man’s responsibility is not diminished, nor is God himself engaged in evil. Just how this is so is not explained to us. But this is why Joseph can accept the evil actions of his brothers as having two causal agents behind them: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen 50:20 – one action, two actors – human freedom and God’s sovereignty). It is not that humans have no freedom and that God is a puppeteer, but rather that there is a mysterious consilience between the two, best expressed in the proposition that God foreordains the free acts of men.

And herein lies the fundamental flaw in assuming that death and suffering is contradictory to a loving God’s providential care of creation: it begs the question. Who says God cannot have a morally sufficient reason for why he uses death and suffering to accomplish his purposes?

]]> Mon, 04 Apr 11 08:00:52 -0700 Brian Godawa http://biologos.org/blog/a-pastors-perspective-on-death-and-evolution?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/a-pastors-perspective-on-death-and-evolution?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication If death did not exist before Adam and Eve, how could God have used evolution to create man? And what about predators and natural catastrophes such as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs? In an essay for The BioLogos Forum, guest writer Marcio Antonio Campos looks at the apparent contradiction between death entering the world through the Fall and the role of death in the process of evolution. If death did not exist before Adam and Eve, how could God have used evolution to create man? And what about predators and natural catastrophes such as the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, which both imply the existence of physical death before the Fall?

For those who didn’t get a chance to read the three responses presented in Campos’ wonderful piece, we certainly encourage you to do so. Today, however, we’d like to look at two videos from Daniel Harrell, Senior Minister of Colonial Church in Edina, Minnesota.

In the first video Harrell addresses the way that we view death. As we see in Paul’s letters, there is a judicial idea that physical death is the punishment for sin. According to Harrell, however, this is not the whole story. Death has a redemptive aspect as well.

Biologically speaking, the pastor reminds us, you cannot have life without death. New life is always accompanied by death. In spite of our belief that death is in some sense a punishment for sin, there is also the reality that Christ died for our sins yet we continue to die. The reason for this is difficult to explain if death truly is nothing but a punishment. A question continues to linger in the air: “If Jesus died to save me from dying then why do I still die?”

Harrell suggests, however, that the reason we continue to die is that death is not altogether bad. In fact, according to our understanding of biology, Harrell says, Adam would have died even if he had never sinned at all. There are two sides to death. On one hand, the broken relationship that comes from sin is a kind of death. On the other hand, physical death is a necessary part of biological life. As living organisms we all have a lifespan. Had Adam never sinned, Harrell believes he would still have passed at some point from this life to the next just as we will one day do through our faith in Jesus Christ.

In the second video, Harrell engages us in a speculation over why God may have chosen to create life through the evolutionary process. Christians often struggle to accept that God created through evolution because it is a process that requires a great deal of death and waste. They doubt that God would have chosen to create in a way that was not linear and beautiful.

Harrell, however, proposes that as Christians we can accept the idea of evolution in spite of these difficulties. He comes to this conclusion by realizing that death is part of the character of God. God’s supreme expression of love, in fact, was an act of death; Christ gave himself fully for the ones he loves.

Evolution is, in a sense, an analogy to this act of love we see in Jesus’ death. The many organisms that have lived and died throughout the course of evolution are God’s gift to his beloved children. All of this was “spent by God for the sake of life”.

As human beings, we expect God to do things the way we would do them: in an efficient, linear, and tidy manner. In reality, Harrell reminds us, God functions in ways that don’t make sense to us at all. After all, who would expect the God of the universe to become human and die? Likewise, it doesn’t make sense to us that God would create a world that exists through dying. However, God’s actions are not constrained by whether they “make sense” to mankind, for his ways are above ours.

]]> Wed, 09 Mar 11 09:00:41 -0800 Daniel Harrell