My editorial policy for these excerpts is explained at the bottom of this post.

Motivated Belief (part 3)

Jesus had a comparatively short public ministry, but it had enormous local impact, drawing crowds who were anxious to hear his words and who often sought the healing ministry that he exercised. Then, on a last visit to Jerusalem, it all seemed to fall apart. The authorities, civil (Roman) and religious (Jewish) acting together, moved in to avoid trouble. Jesus was arrested and hastily executed, suffering the painful and shameful fate of crucifixion, the kind of death reserved for slaves and rebels and seen by pious Jews as being a sign of God’s rejection (“any one hung on a tree is under God’s curse,” Deuteronomy 21:23). Except for a few staunch women, his followers ran away, overcome by despair and disappointment. From the place of execution there came the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34).

Giotto di Bondone, The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas)
(ca. 1304-06), fresco, Cappella Scrovegni, Padua

On the face of it, Jesus’s death seems a moment of pathetic failure, the final disillusionment of the followers of a rejected man whose grand pretensions had suddenly and definitively been found wanting. If that really was the end of the story of Jesus, I believe that most of us would never have heard of him. At best he would have seemed to be no better than other first-century messianic pretenders whose causes also finally failed. So the first remarkable thing about Jesus is that he is known to all of us. We need to look closer into the New Testament to find out why, against all reasonable expectation, his story continued beyond his death.

Amid the variety of its component writings, there are certain common themes that recur in the New Testament. Three of the most important themes are:

(1) All the [biblical] writers believe that the story of Jesus continued because God raised him from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion. We shall have to pay further attention to this extraordinary claim, but the existence of the New Testament, and the character of its contents, are unintelligible without the recognition that this is what its writers are affirming.

(2) In wrestling with what they believe to be their experience of the risen Christ, the writers are driven, in their different ways, to speak of Jesus in a quite extraordinary manner. They know that he was a man living in Palestine in their own times, yet in the accounts they give they often seem driven to employ not only obvious human categories, but also to use language that is only appropriate to deity. The Pauline epistles are probably of the earliest Christian writings known to us, certainly antedating the gospels. Already Jesus of Nazareth is being referred to in remarkable terms. Paul begins almost all his letters with some such phrase as “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:3; and so on). Not only is Jesus being bracketed with God in a manner that would, for example, have been inappropriate for a pious Jew to use in relation to Moses, the servant of God, but he is also accorded the title “Lord.” While this word (kyrios) had a widespread secular usage amounting to no more than politeness of address, its Hebrew counterpart, adonai, also had a special Jewish religious usage as an acceptable circumlocution in place of the unutterable divine name, YHWH, a particular significance which the religious context of Paul’s greeting could scarcely fail to invoke. The gospel of John portrays Jesus as claiming unity with God (John 10:30, words uttered in a situation where the hostile crowd are shown as having no difficulty in detecting what they see as the blasphemous implication), and it assigns to Jesus the use of images (the bread of life, the true vine, and so on) which carry implications of more than human status. The Writer to the Hebrews proclaims that “in these last days [God] has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things and through whom he also created the worlds” (Hebrews 1:2). Examples could easily be multiplied.

It is clear that when it comes to Jesus, the New Testament writers cannot rest content with the standard Jewish repertoire for speaking of people with special gifts from God—the categories of prophet, teacher, healer—but, against all their instincts as monotheistic Jews, they are driven to use divine-sounding language about him. Remember that they are referring to a near contemporary, and not to some shadowy figure of a legendary past. The New Testament very seldom out and out calls Jesus God (the confession of Thomas in John 20:28 is perhaps the clearest example), but its pages manifest a continual tension between the use of human and divine manners of speaking about him. The problem thus posed is unresolved in the New Testament itself, but succeeding Christian generations had to address it and eventually the Church was led to the distinctive and extraordinary doctrinal concept of the incarnation, the affirmation of the presence of deity in the life of this first-century Jew, who truly was the Son of God.

(3) Coupled with this recourse to divine language, and fuelling its fire, was a firm conviction among those first-generation Christians that the risen Christ had brought into their lives a new and transforming experience of saving power. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). I believe that an adequate Christology (a true understanding of the nature of Jesus) must satisfy the criterion of affording an adequate soteriology (a true understanding of the power of Christ in human lives, to which the Church has continued to give its testimony down through the centuries). The doctrine of the incarnation implies that in the Word made flesh a unique bridge was established between the created life of humanity and the uncreated life of God, and in this meeting of divine power and human nature there lies a way of understanding the fulfillment of the soteriological criterion.

​
Giotto di Bondone, Resurrection (Do not Touch Me) (ca. 1304-06), fresco, Cappella Scrovegni, Padua

These three lines of testimony need to be presented for consideration by anyone seeking to understand the significance that Jesus of Nazareth holds for Christian belief. In the context of science the discussion of the persuasiveness of that belief cannot be conducted satisfactorily without a detailed engagement with these claims. The task is indispensable to honest enquiry and it is made all the more important today by the fact that many people seem to have so little knowledge of what the New Testament actually says.

The pivot on which the claim of a unique and transcendent significance for Jesus must turn is clearly the resurrection. If in fact he was raised from the dead to a new and unending life of glory, then it is indeed credible that he has an altogether unique status and role in salvation history. If, sadly, his life ended in failure and his body was left to molder in the grave, then he seems at best little different from many other prophetic figures who have suffered martyrdom for holding fast to the integrity of their beliefs. The quest for motivated Christian faith has to begin by focusing on the question of the resurrection. I believe that it would be a serious apologetic mistake if Christian theology thought that operating in the context of science should somehow discourage it from laying proper emphasis on the essential centrality of Christ’s resurrection, however counterintuitive that belief may seem in the light of mundane expectation.

As a preliminary one must first face the general issue of miracle. It was as clear in the first century as it is today, that it is wholly contrary to any reasonable natural expectation that a man should be resurrected within history. While there were parties in first-century Judaism which expected a general resurrection at the end of history [for example, the Pharisees], none expected the resurrection of a specific person to take place within history, even if there was some hope that a prophetic figure, such as Elijah, might have been stored up in heaven in order to be returned for a further spell of earthly life at some critical juncture in Jewish history. It is important here to recognize the distinction between resuscitation and resurrection. The former applies to someone like Lazarus, who is portrayed in John’s gospel as being called out of the tomb after an apparent death (John 11), but who was undoubtedly expected by all to die again in due course. Resuscitation is only a temporary reprieve from mortality. Resurrection, on the other hand, implies a transition from this mortal life to a new form of glorified life, lived without end in the presence of God. Resurrection is a permanent victory over mortality. The possibility of resurrection lies wholly outside the context of scientific explanation. If the resurrection of Jesus happened, it could only have been through a special exercise of divine power. In short, resurrection is, in the strict sense of the word, a miracle.

The real problem of belief in miracle is properly a theological issue, not a scientific one, since claims of unique historical occurrences lie outside science’s competence to adjudicate. All it can do is reinforce the commonsense recognition that something like a resurrection does not usually happen. The real challenge to belief in miracle lies elsewhere. It is theologically inconceivable that God should act capriciously as a kind of celestial conjurer, doing a turn today that God did not think of doing yesterday and won’t be bothered to do tomorrow. The theological problem of miracle is that of discerning divine consistency in the face of a claim of radically novel action. How that consistency is understood depends upon a proper understanding of what is involved in speaking of God in personal terms. I have already said that divine action is not to be assimilated to a kind of impersonal and unchanging process, similar to that which characterizes the law of gravity. If personal language is to mean anything when used about God, it must imply a divine freedom to respond in particular and different ways to particular and different situations, including even the rational possibility of unprecedented action in unprecedented circumstances.

Once again we encounter the unavoidable necessity of hermeneutic circularity. Of course, persons are not normally resurrected in history, but if there is something truly unique about Jesus (the Son of God), then his story could conceivably have included unique events. Equally, if he was resurrected, this was surely a sign that he indeed did have an altogether unique status. However, if he was just another prophet, then the story of his resurrection is likely to be no more than a touching legend. Both possibilities have to be considered. To believe in the resurrection rightly requires significant motivating evidence, a question to which we shall turn shortly, but its possibility should not be ruled out absolutely from the beginning, before even considering what evidence there might be for this counterintuitive belief. Moreover, it is important to note that the Christian understanding of Christ’s resurrection is that it occurred within history as the unique seed event from which a resurrected destiny for all people will come about beyond history (“for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ”; 1 Corinthians 15:22). In this sense, what Christian theology sees as unique about the resurrection is its timing, rather than its occurrence. Further consideration will be given to this point in the succeeding chapter.

​Giotto di Bondone, The Last Judgment (detail, ca. 1304-06),
fresco, Cappella Scrovegni, Padua

[The succeeding chapter, which will not be part of this series, deals with eschatology. Polkinghorne’s reference in the penultimate sentence to the unique timing of the resurrection can be fleshed out by quoting from the chapter on eschatology: “The eschatological destinies of human beings and of the whole universe lie together in the world of God’s new creation. <SNIP> In Christian thinking, the seed event from which this new creation has already begun to grow is the resurrection of Christ. His tomb was empty because the matter of his corpse had been transmuted into the ‘matter’ of the new creation, to become his risen and glorified body in which he appeared to the first witnesses.” In other words, the resurrected Jesus is “the first fruits of them that sleep,” in the glorious words of 1 Corinthians 15:20.]

Looking Ahead

In about two weeks, we will see how Polkinghorne brings his search for “motivated belief” to bear on the biblical narratives about the Resurrection.

References and Credits

Excerpts from John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science (2009), copyright Yale University Press, are reproduced by permission of Yale University Press. We gratefully acknowledge their cooperation in bringing this material to our readers.

Editorial Policy

Most of the editing for these excerpts involves breaking longer paragraphs into multiple parts, altering the spelling and punctuation from British to American, removing the odd sentence or two—which I indicate by putting [SNIP] at the appropriate point(s)—and sometimes inserting annotations where warranted [also enclosed in square brackets] to provide background information. Polkinghorne uses footnotes a bit sparingly, and I usually find another way to include that information if it’s important for our readers.

"Anyone approaching the Resurrection accounts in the belief that he knows what rising from the dead means will inevitably misunderstand those accounts and will then dismiss them as meaningless" (p. 243).

In fact, if Jesus' Resurrection were "merely" coming back to life in any way that we might comprehend, then it would be of little significance.

"Now it must be acknowledged that if in Jesus' Resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse, it would ultimately be of no concern to us" (p. 243).

So what then does Resurrection mean? For Benedict it represents a new dimension of reality breaking through into human experience. It is not a violation of the old; it is the manifestation of something new.

"Jesus had not returned to a normal human life in this world like Lazarus and the others whom Jesus raised from the dead. He has entered upon a different life, a new life -- he has entered the vast breadth of God himself..." (p. 244).

Because it is something entirely new, it cannot represent a violation of natural law as understood by science.

"Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data. The Resurrection accounts certainly speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented -- a new dimension of reality that is revealed. What already exists is not called into question. Rather we are told that there is a further dimension, beyond what was previously known. Does that contradict science? Can there really only ever be what there has always been? Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new? If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of reality altogether?" (p. 246-7)

Thus, in this view, Resurrection (as with all true miracles) is not contrary to science, but an indicator that science does not (yet?) describe the full expanse of reality. Indeed, some may argue that science itself contains similar "indicators." The 11 (or so) dimensional universe required by some versions of string theory, the multiverse theory of the universe where ours is but one of an infinite array of universes with variable physical laws, quantum entanglements, "spooky" action at a distance, the mysterious emergence of consciousness from inorganic matter -- all push the limits of human reason and imagination, suggesting to some that reality may be far more complex than the human mind can grasp.

For a moment, let us entertain the possibility that Resurrection is as Benedict interprets it: not a violation of natural law but an indicator of something beyond our scientific understanding of the universe. This has interesting implications for understanding how believers and skeptics approach the issue. If Resurrection does not violate science, then science does not necessarily constitute an impediment to accepting the reality of Resurrection. If the difference between the skeptic and believer is not science, then is it just a matter of imagination? The believer imagines greater possibilities for the universe than the non-believer. While this is possible, it seems questionable. To my knowledge, no research has found differences in imaginative abilities between religious and non-religious people. Moreover, contrarian examples easily come to mind: Isaac Asimov was an atheist but hardly lacking in imagination when it came to science fiction. I tend to think that both believers and non-believers can imagine (with varying degrees of effort, I'm sure) the new possibilities implied by Resurrection.

Thus, if it is neither imagination nor science that prompts skepticism about Resurrection, then what is left? I suggest that it comes down to a question of authority: At what point does one allow imaginative possibilities to have authority over how one lives? To the believer, Resurrection has an authority that science fiction does not. Resurrection is not thought-provoking entertainment. It requires far more than just imagining greater possibilities for the universe. It requires a change of life, here and now. Unlike the microscopic hidden dimensions of string theory, the new dimension implied by Resurrection has "broken though" into everyday reality and demands a response -- even if that response is to actively ignore it.

Now, what convinces the believer that Resurrection merits such authority when other imaginative possibilities such as extraterrestrial life or time-travel do not? The answer here appears to be historical commitment. There's no record of people committing themselves to the point of martyrdom to other imaginative possibilities as they have to Resurrection. The earliest example of such commitment being found, of course, in the dramatic post-crucifixion turn-around of the Apostles. Such an astounding change of heart, followed by an unwavering commitment capable of altering human history demands a categorically unique explanation: Resurrection.

The believer's argument, however, remains unconvincing to the skeptic. However impressive they might be, a change of heart and steadfast commitment do not necessarily add up to a new dimension of reality. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Fair enough. So a key question regarding the interpretation of Resurrection is this: Is the post-crucifixion history of Christianity extraordinary? Does it compel the dispassionate observer to concede that a categorically unique event could plausibly be its best explanation?

It ought to be upon questions such as those above that skeptics and believers respectfully engage one another, rather than the simplistic and often acrimonious sloganeering that has increasingly become the norm.

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).

Tonight and tomorrow, Christians around the world stop to remember and celebrate the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem just over two thousand years ago. The familiar narrative of Joseph leading Mary to the stable to give birth to the Messiah, of the angels telling the shepherds in the fields of the great event that was happening nearby, and of the three men from the east who came to pay homage to the new King of Israel is re-told or acted out in countless churches, schools and homes. And from countless pulpits, the message goes out that those events are not just a quaint story and an excuse to give gifts, but the central mystery of our faith—that God himself became one of us in order to redeem us and the cosmos from our bondage to sin and death. That mystery—that the Creator God is also the Redeemer Christ—has been to focus of our worship since the first days of the church, and is the subject of the 7th-century Latin hymn Conditor alme siderum, presented here in a new setting from Alex Mejias and High Street Hymns.

While this recording includes only verses one and three from the original text (given in full below), it adds a refrain that catches the spirit of the whole hymn and emphasizes the longing we still feel even in our Christmas joy—the “already, but not yet” state in which we find ourselves today, living between that first Advent and the second Advent yet to be: “Come, O come to us!” For while we know that God has come to us in Jesus—that his death and resurrection have redeemed us and the universe—we are still waiting for that final consummation, depending on the Spirit to be working out our salvation even now. Until the time when, as the hymn says, “all hearts must bow,” the entire BioLogos community invites you to join us in the blessed work of declaring, celebrating, and following the Christ who is both Creator and Savior.

Creator of the Stars at Night

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

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale. The sky vanished like a scroll that is being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. (Revelation 6:12–14)

The non-concordist view of science and Scripture argues that Biblical texts about creation were never intended to concord with modern scientific theories. Thus, Genesis 1 is not cryptically describing the Big Bang or instant fiat, a young earth or old earth, special creation or evolutionary creation. It is not “literal” language describing the physics of the universe; it is “literary” genre describing God’s sovereignty over creation and most likely his covenantal relationship with his people.

But the argument against literalism of language of the creation of the heavens and the earth is also applicable to the language of the destruction of the heavens and the earth, or what the Bible calls, “the last days,” “the end of the age,” “the end of days,” or “the Day of the Lord.” Christians often refer to this as “the end times,” but the technical theological term is eschatology, which means “the study of end things.”

Regarding the end times, the modern Evangelical popular imagination has been deeply influenced and at times dominated by a theological construct that is best reflected in the 1970s bestselling The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and the newer bestselling fictional phenomenon Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

This view believes that the Bible foretells an as-yet future scenario on the earth of a rapture of Christians, followed by the rise of an “Anti-Christ,” a world dictator who initiates a Great Tribulation on the earth, requires a “Mark of the Beast,” and assembles global forces for a battle of Armageddon against Israel, resulting in the Second Coming of Christ who replaces the universe with a new heavens and earth to rule forever. The technical theological term for this view is futurism, the belief that prophecies about the end times are yet to be fulfilled in the future.¹

In this article, I will address the hermeneutic or interpretive approach used by this futurist perspective and apply it to the particular aspect of creation language, or in this case, decreation language -- the collapsing universe and the destruction of the heavens and the earth.

In short, the language of cosmic catastrophe often interpreted literally as referring to the end of the space-time universe is actually used by Biblical authors to figuratively express the cosmic significance of the covenantal relationship between God and humanity.

The tendency of modern literalism is to interpret descriptions of signs in the heavens and earth as being quite literal events of the heavens and earth shaking, stars falling from the sky, the moon turning blood red, and the sky rolling up like a scroll. The problem with this hermeneutic is that it assumes the priority of modernity over the ancient world. Rather than seeking to understand the origins of symbols and images used by the writers within their ancient context, this literalism often suggests the writer was seeing events that would occur in our modern day but did not understand them, so he used his ancient “primitive” language to describe it.

So for instance when the apostle John saw modern day tools of war in his revelation, such as battle helicopters, he did not know what they were so he described them in ancient terms that he did understand such as locusts with the sting of scorpions, breastplates of iron, a crown of gold and human faces, whose chopper blades made the “noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle” (Rev 9:3-9).

I was taught this modernist interpretation and lived by it for many years. When I read about Jesus explaining the “end of the age” I would assume he meant the “end of the space-time universe” because that’s the kind of language I, a post-Enlightened modern scientific mind, would use to describe such an event. When he spoke of the moon turning blood red and the sun being darkened, I assumed such events were easy miracles for God, so if you considered them figurative, you were falling down the slippery slope of neo-orthodoxy. When Jesus said stars would fall from the sky, you had better bet stars would literally fall from the sky (a primitive description of meteors²) or else you’re a liberal who doesn’t believe in the literal accuracy of the Bible.

But all that changed when I sought to understand the prophetic discourse on its own terms within its ancient cultural context instead of from my own cultural bias. I now propose that the ancient writers did understand what they were seeing, but were using symbols and images they were culturally steeped in, symbols and images with a history of usage from the Old Testament, their cultural context – not mine.

In this essay, I will argue that the decreation language of a collapsing universe with falling stars and signs in the heavens was actually symbolic discourse about world-changing events and powers related to the end of the old covenant and the coming of the new covenant as God’s “new world order.” In this interpretation, predictions of the collapsing universe were figuratively fulfilled in the historic past of the first century. The technical theological term for this view is preterism, the belief that most or all prophecies about the end times have been fulfilled in the past.³

Notes

1. The Left Behind series is a particular version of futurism called Dispensational Premillennialism. For a more in depth presentation of these varieties of eschatology see Bock, Darrell L. ed., Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1999.
2. Interestingly, as soon as the interpreter thinks falling stars are meteors, he has just engaged in figurative speculation, which is not literal.
3. Some examples of orthodox scholars who hold to this view are Sproul, R.C. The Last Days According to Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1998; and Gentry, Kenneth L. Jr. Navigating the Book of Revelation. Fountain Inn: SC, Goodbirth Ministries, 2009.

Introduction

One of the reasons that some of us are hesitant to accept evolutionary creation is that it seems to make God responsible for the suffering and death of innumerable creatures over millions of years—before humans ever existed or sinned against their creator. Since we believe in and worship a God who is loving, benevolent, and all-powerful, it sounds quite implausible that our God would have created a world like that; therefore, any scientific evidence for evolution must be incorrect.

Other people look at the scientific evidence for evolution and find a compelling case that it has taken place during our earth's history. On this basis they may conclude that if evolution is true, then the belief in an all-powerful, perfectly good God must be false!

The trouble with both of these views is that they tend to invoke a completely abstract, philosophical god, not the living God of the Bible—the God who became a human being, experienced unimaginable suffering, and died in a grotesque and humiliating public display. The death of Jesus completely defied the expectations (and common sense) of his followers, as well as the expectations of any “rational” understanding of the way the Creator of the universe should act in the world. On the cross, in the person of Jesus, God took upon himself far more suffering than any creature has ever experienced.

If God himself is willing to die, particularly in such a gruesome way, then perhaps we should at least consider the possibility of God allowing the death of other creatures, too. But would this really be compatible with what we know of God through Scripture? In this essay, we will explore this quandary through a “theology of the cross”, a concept articulated by pastor George Murphy in his book Cosmos in the Light of the Cross.¹

Theology of the cross

Before we jump into the theological problems associated with evolution, let’s take a look at how we understand Christian theology itself. For the reformer Martin Luther, any theology (or science) that tries to reach knowledge of God apart from the cross is bad theology.² Instead, Luther pointed to a theologia crucis, in which the true God is seen first and foremost “through suffering and the cross”. To make his point even clearer, Luther insisted that “the CROSS alone is our theology”.³ It is the lens through which we view everything.

Of course Martin Luther, having lived in the 16th century, was not aware of the vast history of life on our planet (or any other aspect of modern science, for that matter), but George Murphy draws from Luther’s teachings the foundation that all human knowledge begins with the Word made flesh and crucified.⁴ With the cross of Christ as the ultimate framework through which we view reality, we are bound to view the processes of nature quite differently. As Murphy explains it,

A theology of the cross is an explication of belief in a God who becomes a participant in the history of the universe and thereby shares in the suffering, loss, and death that are part of worldly experience.⁵

God does not sit idly by and watch unaffected as his creatures suffer, but neither does he swoop in and make everything completely effortless and easy. Instead he chose another way, the crucifixion of Jesus—certainly not the approach that we would have preferred! The apostle Peter went so far as to try to talk Jesus out of it, but he was met with a stern rebuke (Matthew 16:21-23).

Why is evolution so disconcerting to Christians?

The problem of suffering throughout all of human history is troubling enough for us to reconcile with a loving, personal God. But in addition to that, the discovery of vast numbers of fossils reveals that death has taken place on a far greater scale than we had ever imagined. Both the wide variety of extinct creatures and their sheer numbers is quite staggering, and it raises questions about our Creator:

The picture of a God who is immune from suffering and death but who forces organisms through millions of generations and extinction is disturbing to those who believe in a God of love.⁷

The mass extinction of life on earth was already well established by the early 19th century—decades before Darwin’s research—and extinction can be empirically verified independent of any theory of evolution.⁸ The fact that the earth’s crust is a veritable graveyard of long-lost creatures is deeply troubling, and as late as the 1790’s, distinguished intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson denied the very possibility of extinction.⁹

But in addition to the reality of species extinction, the theory of evolution by natural selection proposes that new species also arise in an environment containing widespread pain and death. Both the creatures that are now living and those that are gone are tainted by an “acrid smell of death”.¹⁰ It makes us wonder, if our Creator is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Mk. 12:27), where is God’s presence in the evolutionary picture?

In all honesty, creation through evolution is not what we would expect from God, but Scripture is full of examples in which God acts in unexpected ways. After all, God’s choosing to undergo an agonizing death on a cross is not what we would expect from the all-powerful Creator of the universe, either. In both cases, new life comes about through pain, suffering, and death. As George Murphy puts it,

A priori ideas about God have to be overcome, and God's character has to be learned from God's self-revelation.¹¹

God’s fullest self-expression is in Jesus Christ himself, one who is intimately familiar with and personally endured creaturely pain and death. The theology of the cross reveals that God's self-revelation takes place in situations of suffering, loss, and apparent hopelessness, much like situations that occur through natural selection.¹²

The crucifixion is disconcerting too

Not only is creation through evolution an unexpected and unsettling process, but so is the crucifixion of Jesus! Killing someone by hanging them on a cross is an unbearably painful, prolonged, humiliating form of death. It was such a horrific type of public execution that it wasn't until after the Roman Empire stopped the practice of crucifixion—and people no longer witnessed it personally—did the cross become a visual object of devotion.¹³ Our culture is sufficiently removed from crucifixion that we are desensitized to its original significance, but to connect it to our current context, imagine the reaction you would get by wearing jewelry designed to look like an electric chair.¹⁴

Once we are more attuned to the brutality of crucifixion, it seems all the more striking that the cross is the sign of God’s work, what George Murphy calls “the trademark of God”.¹⁵ The suffering and death of Jesus is featured prominently in the Gospels, but the crucifixion-resurrection pattern is strongly resonant within the Old Testament, too. Israel suffered and toiled as slaves in Egypt for centuries before they were rescued in the Exodus, bringing life to a people who were spiritually dead. Centuries later, the nation of Israel would experience death again when the Babylonians destroyed the Davidic monarchy, burned their Temple, killed their people, and sent many into exile.¹⁶ Neither Israel (God’s chosen people) nor Jesus (God’s own son) were spared from death and suffering; rather, suffering seems to have been the way in which God re-forms and renews humanity to fully bear His own image.

Redemption extends to all of creation

Fortunately, God’s story does not end with death. God gives new life after his creatures have been subjected to terrible circumstances. Redemption was promised to Israel itself—Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones describes how God would renew His chosen people (Ezek 37:1-14). Later, the astonishing resurrection of Jesus made salvation possible not only for Jews, but for all people in Christ (Gal 3:26-29). Ultimately, the New Testament makes it clear that God’s renewal will encompass the entire Creation:

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. (Ephesians 1:8-10)

Christians are accustomed to thinking of the death of Christ in regard to humans, but our culture rarely acknowledges God plan for the redemption of His entire creation. This is partly attributable to the fact that discussions of creation and origins are often separated from the topic of salvation.¹⁷ In doing so we tend to marginalize Jesus as we argue about Genesis. Rather than fall into this trap, if we view nature through a theology of the cross, we will see Christ as both the alpha and the omega point in discussions of life’s history and life’s future. With this perspective, we are more apt to sense our solidarity with the rest of creation as we wait in eager anticipation of a glorious future:

The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-21)

Conclusion

As part of the Church’s conversation about the problem of natural evil, this essay is meant to be a brief introduction to a “theology of the cross”. One can explore this concept in greater detail in Murphy’s book The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. While there is a lot more to be said, let me conclude with the following observation: though evolution may not be compatible with some interpretations of Christianity, evolutionary creation is certainly compatible with the crucified Christ and the theology of the cross. In the person of Jesus, God suffers with the world and ultimately redeems it. As George Murphy puts in, “The world's pains are God's stigmata.”¹⁸

Explore this Topic Further

• Miller, Keith. “And God saw that it was good”: Death and Pain in the Created Order. BioLogos series
• Murphy, George L. The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2003.
• Murphy, George L. “Cross, Evolution, and Theodicy: Telling It Like It Is”. In The Evolution of Evil. Edited by G. Bennett, M.J. Hewlett, T. Peters, and R.J. Russell. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008.
• Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 2008.

Notes

1. Murphy, George L. The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2003.
2. Murphy, p34
3. “CRUX Sola Est Nostra Theologia,” in D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Boehlau, 1892), 5:172. The captitalization is in the original. Cited in Murphy, p26.
4. Murphy, p108
5. Murphy, p4
6. Murphy, p43
7. Murphy, p3
8. Some Christians ascribe animal death to some combination of Adam’s fall and Noah’s flood, but this does not resolve the problem that the animals are still suffering and dying through no fault of their own. See Keith Miller’s BioLogos series Death and Pain in the Created Order for the limitations inherent in a fall-based theodicy.
9. Rudwick, Martin. The meaning of fossils: Episodes in the history of paleontology. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
10. See Jeff Schloss’ BioLogos essay Evolution, Creation, and the Sting of Death
11. Murphy, p63
12. Murphy, p122
13. Murphy, p27
14. This example is drawn from an evangelical outreach event held by a Christian student group in Innsbruck, Austria. On campus one day, they started conversations with their classmates by asking the question, “Would you wear an electric chair on your neck?”
15. Murphy, George L. The Trademark of God: A Christian Course in Creation, Evolution, and Salvation. Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1986.
16. Murphy, Cosmos in the Light of the Cross, p 31-32.
17. Murphy, p35
18. Murphy, p87

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).

[T]he purpose of Jesus’ “art” was to give verbal, visual, and dramatic forms to those complicated and confounding relationships and symmetries and harmonies between Himself (and the Father and Spirit) and the world, ourselves included in the latter. Such creative expressions did and do not make everything clear, but rather resist simple clarity, forcing their hearers to come at the whole complicated, opaque truth from a position of intellectual and spiritual humility.

Speaking in parables is indeed similar to an artist’s craft. Neither are systematic, logical arguments aimed at intellectual persuasion. Rather, they create impressions, whole new worlds of meaning intended to turn old worlds on their heads. Further, they do not always clarify, but actually can by design obscure a deeper reality. To apprehend that deeper reality, one must—like a patron facing a timeless painting—continue to seek, ponder, and meditate on what is being said.

Parables are radical pieces of communication meant to disorient the hearers and then reorient them to an entirely new way of thinking. The reason Jesus does so much story telling is because stories—not debate or other “proofs”—are best suited for such a whole scale reorientation. Jesus’ preaching, after all, was about the kingdom of heaven (or of God). This kingdom was not about where one goes after death, but a here-and-now transformation of how people thought about God and their relationship to him.

Jesus “explains” this new kingdom in several ways, one of which is the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), where Jesus lays out the types of behaviors that should now characterize the people of God. These new behaviors contrast again and again with the old and are fully at odds with what the religious leaders of the time were teaching the people. Jesus’ kingdom is counter-cultural.

But Jesus more often “shows” the people what this kingdom looks like by telling a good story, which regularly begins, “The kingdom of heaven is like….” Sometimes the best way to get an idea across is to paint a verbal picture, which is precisely what Jesus does in the parables.

Jesus’ stories are not like Aesop’s Fables (as interesting as they are), where there is a moral to the story. The parables are not about playing nice with each other. They actually plant you in a different world where things are running according to a wholly different set of rules of the kingdom of heaven.

We can see this by looking at one of Jesus’ favorite topics in the parables: how Jews related to Gentiles. Jewish identity was an extremely important and touchy issue in Jesus’ day. Even though the Jews had returned to their land after the exile (539 BC), they had been guests in their own land—first of the Persians, then Greeks, and now the Romans. How Jews could maintain their ethnic and religious identity in such a pressure cooker of pagan Greek and Roman ideas, not to mention the embarrassment of pagan rulers telling them what to do, was a sore point.

So, one can understand why Jewish attitudes towards tax collectors, for example, are a repeated concern in the Gospels. Tax collectors were fellow Jews who were traitors to their own people by collecting taxes for the Romans. They were even spoken of in the same breath as prostitutes (e.g., Matthew 21:31-32).

No “good Jew” committed to maintaining his or her identity amid a pagan world would lower themselves to work alongside the Romans. Yet, what does Jesus do? He associates with these (and other) “sinners” on a regular basis, and even calls a tax collector (Matthew) to be among his select group of followers. By his actions Jesus demonstrates that his kingdom operates by different, counter-intuitive, counter-cultural rules.

These types of concrete actions were supported again and again by Jesus’ parables. Such a radical change in how Jews viewed God, the world, and their place in it—where sinners and other outsiders were welcome—required a communication strategy that was up for the task.

Stories are that communication strategy. Parables were Jesus’ canvas for “painting” a new vision for what life in his kingdom should look like. And in Jesus’ kingdom, there was no longer any place for maintaining those fundamental ethnic and religious distinctions by which the Jews had been operating.

We can go to virtually any parable to make this point, but the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan works as well as any (Luke 10:30-37). We recall that what drove Jesus to tell this story was the question asked by the “expert in the law” (v. 25): “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ answer was this parable, and it carries a double punch.

First, the Jewish leaders step around the beaten man on the road—certainly a non-Jew—feeling no obligation to come to his aid. The point is that the leaders of Israel, of all people, should know enough of God’s character to stop and help him. They shouldn’t ask whether he is “one of us,” an insider. All one needs to know is that this human being needs help. In Jesus’ kingdom, carefully drawn lines of ethnic and religious separation are a thing of the past.

But second, on a deeper level, Jesus’ point is far more threatening. By calling upon a Samaritan as the “good guy” in this story—with all of the backdrop of cultural hostility—Jesus is making a more pressing point than “be good to everyone” (which is where the Sunday School lesson typically ends). The hated Samaritan sees the man lying there, and without asking questions about who he is—whether Jew, Samaritan, Greek, Roman, or anything else for that matter—helps him. The Samaritan, of all people, acts like a neighbor toward the man who needed help, the very thing the Jewish leaders failed to do.

By telling Jewish leaders that they have something to learn about their own God from, of all people, Samaritans, is not a suggestion to be more open-minded and tolerant. It is nothing less than a rewriting of the Jewish narrative or religious and ethnic identity. Jesus uses a story to paint a vivid mental and emotional picture for his hearers. No other medium would do.

It is sometimes thought that Jesus told stories because he wanted to persuade the masses, the common people who are not used to debating fine points of theology like the scribes and priests. This is partially true, but it is also true that the radical message of the kingdom of heaven required a means of communication that was best suited for it. Like any work of art, stories “create” new ways of seeing the world—and it is, after all, a new world that Jesus means to create.

Let me put this another way: Jesus himself communicated the deep mysteries of a new way of being through the use of such things as vivid imagery, symbolism, metaphors, and other devices common to artistic expression. In fact, the incarnation, God in human flesh, is not a debate or argument about the nature of God that appeals primarily to the intellect. It is a vivid—and true—demonstration, a portrait, of a radically new and mysterious way of thinking about God, the world, and our place in it.

If this is how God chooses to communicate at the incarnation—the very climax and epicenter of his story—we should not be surprised to see God painting vivid portraits elsewhere in Scripture. This is especially true of Genesis and creation. Something so fundamental to God’s story may need to be told in a way that transcends the limitations of purely intellectual engagement. Genesis may be written more to show us—by grabbing us with its images than laying out a timeline of cause and effect events—that God is the central figure on the biblical drama.

Originally posted February 1, 2011.

A Christology for Science

The theologian Robert Barron has nicely clarified much of what lies behind recent conflicts over human origins that feature supposedly biblical truths contending against supposedly scientific conclusions.

In his words, “recent debates concerning evolutionist and ‘creationist’ accounts of the origins of nature are marked through and through by modern assumptions about a distant, competitive, and occasionally intervening God, whether the existence of such a God is affirmed or denied.”¹ Barron’s response to these modern debates is a sophisticated exposition of classical Christology aimed at his theological peers. My effort is much simpler and is aimed at academics in general, but it comes from the same christological perspective.

Christ as Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer

Classical Christian orthodoxy as expressed in the creeds that summarize the Scriptures begins at the beginning: nature owes its existence to and is sustained by Jesus Christ. From this starting point several important ramifications follow naturally.

One is the implication that the best way of finding out about nature is to look at nature. This implication comes directly from the christological principle of contingency. As described in the Gospels, individuals who wanted to learn the truth about Jesus had to “come and see.” Likewise, to find out what might be true in nature, it is necessary to “come and see.”

The process of “coming and seeing” does not lead to infallible truth about the physical world since there is no special inspiration from the Holy Spirit for the Book of Nature as there is for the Book of Scripture. But “coming and seeing” is still the method that belief in Christ as Savior privileges for learning about all other objects, including nature. This privileging means that scientific results coming from thoughtful, organized, and carefully checked investigations of natural phenomena must, for Christ-centered reasons, be taken seriously.

From this perspective, the successes of modern science in recent centuries testify implicitly to the existence of a creating and redeeming God. To once again quote Robert Barron, scientific activity by its very nature “implies . . . an unavoidable correspondence between the activity of the mind and the structure of being: intelligence will find its fulfillment in this universal and inescapable intelligibility.” But how can this implication be justified? According to Barron,

The universality of objective intelligibility (assumed by any honest scientist) can be explained only through recourse to a transcendent subjective intelligence that has thought the world into being, so that every act of knowing a worldly object or event is, literally, a recognition, a thinking again of what has already been thought by a primordial divine knower.²

In lay language, the “transcendent subjective intelligence” and the “primordial divine knower” guarantee the possibility that a researcher’s mind can grasp something real about the world beyond the mind. The Scriptures—in John 1, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1 — provide a name for that “intelligence” and that “knower.” In these terms, the existence of nature and the possibility of understanding nature presuppose Jesus Christ.

A second implication arising from the centrality of Christ in creation concerns the interpretation of Scripture. Classic biblical texts about the purpose of the Bible reinforce the foundational principle that the believers’ confidence in Scripture rests on its message of salvation in Jesus Christ. Thus, in John 20, the Gospel story has been written down so “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (20:31). In 2 Timothy 3, the inspired or God-breathed “holy scriptures” have as their main purpose instruction “for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (3:15). And in 2 Peter 1, “the word of the prophets made more certain” as these prophets were “carried along by the Holy Spirit” (1:19, 21) deals preeminently with “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:16).

As these passages suggest, salvation in Christ anchors the believer’s confidence that all of Scripture is trustworthy.³ But because of that supreme fact, the effort to understand how Scripture is trustworthy for questions like the ordering of nature should never stray far from consideration of Christ and his work. Yet as we have seen, “Christ and his work” includes, as an object, the material world of creation, and as a method, “come and see.” In other words, following the Christ revealed in Scripture as Redeemer means following the Christ who made it possible for humans to understand the physical world and offered a means (“come and see”) for gaining that understanding.

Final and ultimate disharmony between what “come and see” demonstrates about Christ and what “come and see” reveals about the world of nature is impossible. This Christ is the same one through whom God has worked “to reconcile to himself all things . . . making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col. 1:20) and in whom “all things were created” and in whom “all things hold together” (1:16-17).

Yet it is indisputable that on some science-theology questions, trust in Christ (and therefore trust in Scripture) has seemed to conflict with trusting in what Christ-authorized procedure (“come and see”) reveals about a Christ-created and Christ-sustained world. The parade of difficult questions arising from the effort to bring together standard interpretations of Scripture and standard interpretations of the natural world is a long one. Trying to answer these questions has been a consistent feature of the modern scientific age.

• In the nineteenth century, many earnest believers were wondering, if “coming and seeing” in geology and astronomy led to the conclusion that material existence has a very long history, should the “days” of Genesis 1 be understood as long periods of time or should a new interpretation of Genesis 1:1 be adopted that posits a “gap” between “in the beginning” and “God created”?

• More recent advances in both historical understanding (the ancient Near East) and empirical science (genetics, biology, astronomy) have prompted questions about the creation accounts of early Genesis. Well-trained scientists with strong Christian convictions have followed the Christ-rooted procedure of “coming and seeing” in their study of physical evidence for the origin of the universe and have concluded that much of standard evolutionary theory seems well grounded.⁴ Similarly, well-trained biblical scholars with strong Christian convictions have followed the Christ-rooted procedure of “coming and seeing” in their study of ancient Near Eastern cultures and have concluded that the early chapters of Genesis seem to be directly concerned about attacking idol-worship that substituted the sun or the moon for God.⁵ Given the combination of these two streams of testimony, should it be thought that early Genesis is not concerned with modern scientific questions but is very much concerned about encouraging worship of the one true God who is the originator and sustainer of all things?

• Even more recently, the rough consensus on evolutionary change assembled from many scientific disciplines makes for even more complex questions: for example, if human evolution seems indicated by a wide range of responsible scientific procedures (“come and see”), how might responsible biblical interpretation understand the New Testament stress on Christ (very definitely in historical time and historical space) as overcoming the sinfulness inherited from Adam and Eve, whom Scripture, at least on a surface level, also represents as individuals in historical time and historical space?

All such questions caused understandable consternation when they were first raised, since they challenged specific interpretations of Scripture that had been tightly interwoven with basic interpretations of the entire Bible. Even after long and hard thought, such questions continue to pose definite challenges.

Answering such questions responsibly requires sophistication in scientific knowledge and sophistication in biblical interpretation — exercised humbly, teachably, and nondefensively. Unfortunately, these traits and capacities have not always predominated when such questions are addressed. But the difficult questions will almost certainly only continue to multiply because of two ongoing realities: the Holy Spirit continues to bestow new life in Christ through the message of the cross found in Scripture, and responsible investigations lead plausibly to further evolutionary conclusions from the relevant scientific disciplines.

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, click here. First posted August 30, 2011.

Notes

1. Robert Barron, The Priority of Christ: Toward a Postliberal Catholicism (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2007), 221. For convenience, I return several times in the following paragraphs to this book by Robert Barron. But there are other parallel efforts, for example from the physicist and Anglican theologian John C. Polkinghorne, in books like Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), and Science and the Trinity; The Christian Encounter with Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
2. Barron, Priority of Christ, 154.
3. See above on providence.
4. Barron, Priority of Christ, 13.
5. A Summa of the Summa, ed. Peter Kreeft (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 174 (from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, 22, 4).

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/still-citizen-sparrow?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/still-citizen-sparrow?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication A combination of observation and interpretation can help us better appreciate the way the whole world speaks of the glory of its Creator, including those parts we are inclined to find supremely inglorious. We are used to claims that discoveries and insights from the physical and biological sciences put hard limits on the truthfulness of the Bible, and even to strident assertions that they actually disprove its narrative. But careful and scientific study of the natural world—God’s second book of revelation—can also bring out aspects of the Bible’s story and imagery that we would have missed, especially when seen through the synthesizing lens of a poet. A combination of observation and interpretation can help us better appreciate the way the whole world speaks of the glory of its Creator, including those parts we are inclined to find supremely inglorious.

An example of the way poetry helps re-make our interpretive framework is Richard Wilbur’s poem, Still, Citizen Sparrow. Directly addressing our “natural” revulsion for death and those contaminated with it, the poem contrasts the small “darting” sparrow with the vulture—an unwelcome visitor in the sparrow’s space. Surely, the vulture must seem an awkward and ungainly abomination in the fruitful orderliness the smaller bird inhabits, for those “orchard aisles” hint at both a garden and a church. Yet the poem also presents a two-fold defense of this most un-clean of birds, beginning with the difference between how it seems on the ground and how it is in its own element, at the “tip of the sky.” “[N]o more beautiful bird is in heaven's height “, Wilbur tells us, “No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight.” But more than just his aeronautic skills are at issue. It is the vulture’s “rotten office”—the very thing that makes it so repulsive to our sensibilities—that Wilbur names as its saving grace.

The “naked-headed one. . . Devours death, mocks mutability, / Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.” This description of the vulture could be a purely naturalistic assessment of the importance of biological recycling, but a turn at the poem’s fourth stanza takes its imagery in an explicitly scriptural direction. From here on, it connects the vulture with Noah, and the sparrows (and implicitly us) as those “who would have died / Gladly with all [they] knew” rather than put up with the tedium and apparent foolishness of Noah’s incessant sawing and hammering. At last, Wilbur implores the sparrows to consider how “high and lonely” was Noah’s time on the waters as “He rocked his only world, and everyone's.”

The vulture here is more than just “the hero” of the poem, as Wilbur puts it, but exactly what he stands for is not immediately clear. In terms of the great narrative of the Bible, we are used to thinking of ourselves and all humanity as “Adam’s sons,” and even as the “sons of Abraham”; in Christ, both of those images are completed and fulfilled, and all of us redeemed. But Still, Citizen Sparrow ends not with a claim of kinship with Adam or Abraham, but with this: “all men are Noah's sons.” Might Noah also be a type of Christ? How does the all-too-natural vulture connect with it, deepening our understanding the role and experience of Jesus as the Messiah?

Following Wilbur’s account of the nobility of the vulture, we can make the connection between it and Jesus’ role of overcoming death. But what unites them more subtly (and perhaps even more poignantly in this season of Lent) is shame and rejection, even exile. These terms are not at all unrelated to death, for touching the dead was one of the things that made an Israelite ceremonially unclean, and vultures’ ordinary habits might account for their similarly-rejected status in the Jewish bestiary. Elsewhere in the Bible, the characteristic baldness of the vulture provides imagery of shame, despair and humiliation, as in Micah 1:16: Make yourselves bald and cut off your hair, for the children of your delight; make yourselves as bald as the vulture, for they shall go from you into exile.

But personal ridicule and rejection are also part of the package. Noah’s plan for saving his race seemed foolishness to his contemporaries, all the more because they rejected the idea that they were in need of salvation at all. No less did the Jewish leaders laugh at Jesus’ announcement that he would rebuild the Temple in three days, and his own disciple rebuke him for his plan to go to Jerusalem and die. But surely in the passion of Holy Week, Jesus’ shame was complete, coming both from his own people and from the gentiles to whom he was turned over. He was mocked, rejected, and killed. By his death—especially on the cross—he seemed to confirm to the people of Israel that he was not the savior, after all. Rather, he appeared as one accursed, tainted by the means as much as the fact of his death, though the very humiliation and rejection was the path by which he brought renewal.


Surely the vulture is an unlikely symbol for Christ, especially when wrapped up with the character of Noah. But the key insight of the poem and the image actually lies in the relationship between the vulture and the sparrow, the latter of which serves as our stand-in. We are too often like that small bird in Wilbur’s account, wanting a more noble and glorious emblem than this of how the Kingdom bears on our world, wishing ever still to banish the unclean from our presence and keep our own lives neat and tidy. The cause of Christ is not neat or tidy, though, and brings ridicule and rejection from our peers more often than it brings honor. As we draw close to Jerusalem with Jesus, may we be willing to accept the “rotten office” ourselves, and to take his (and the vulture’s) perspective on rejection—in his story, and in our own.

“Still, Citizen Sparrow”

by Richard Wilbur

Still, citizen sparrow, this vulture which you call
Unnatural, let him but lumber again to air
Over the rotten office, let him bear
The carrion ballast up, and at the tall

Tip of the sky lie cruising. Then you'll see
That no more beautiful bird is in heaven's height,
No wider more placid wings, no watchfuller flight;
He shoulders nature there, the frightfully free,

The naked-headed one. Pardon him, you
Who dart in the orchard aisles, for it is he
Devours death, mocks mutability,
Has heart to make an end, keeps nature new.

Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget
How for so many bedlam hours his saw
Soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw,
And the slam of his hammer all the day beset

The people's ears. Forget that he could bear
To see the towns like coral under the keel,
And the fields so dismal deep. Try rather to feel
How high and weary it was, on the waters where

He rocked his only world, and everyone's.
Forgive the hero, you who would have died
Gladly with all you knew; he rode that tide
To Ararat; all men are Noah's sons.

From Richard Wilbur: New and Collected Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988: p. 318. ©Richard Wilbur.

Richard Wilbur is a poet, translator, and playwright, and was appointed as the second Poet Laureate of the United States in 1987. Please read the poem aloud, then click here to buy your own copy of Wilbur’s latest work, Anterooms: New Poems and Translations.

]]> Sun, 25 Mar 12 06:14:47 -0700 Mark Sprinkle 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/series/a-quest-for-god?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/a-quest-for-god?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In this five part series, two young men, Josh and Aron, engage each other through e-mail letters. Their conversation oscillates between the seemingly suspicious elements of God and the gospel (raised by Josh) as well as responses that offer meaningful insight into these questions (answered by Aron). Ideas such as prayer, judgment, and the concealed nature of God are among the many points in this truth-seeking exchange. Recently, we became aware of an email conversation between two young persons: one a young physicist and a deeply committed Christian named Aron and the other, Josh, a person who at least at the time the conversation began was a skeptic. The exchange is so rich that we’ve asked for permission to post it here. We hope you find it as informative and intriguing as we have.

Josh wrote:

Hi Aron,

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this. I am still skeptical. Please consider the following:

Suppose:

1. The evangelical Christian God exists, is omnipotent, omniscient, loves people and wants them to believe in him so that they can join him in heaven.
2. There are sincere truth-seeking people who have not seen evidence that convinces them that this God exists, but if they just saw Jesus walk on water, feed thousands with a few fish and loaves, rise from the dead, have vivid and non-contradictory dreams about heaven, etc, they would believe. It does not have to be one single awesome event. It can be many different signs to different people. If God employed a multitude of miracles and awesome ways to reach people, people will not idolize one single manifestation. They would understand that these diverse awesome signs are just different ways that God is using to show his presence and not God himself.
3. God has no other agenda more important than the agenda of loving people and having people believe in him that would prevent him from showing evidence like the ones above.

Then, I believe God would show himself more clearly to these people, but he isn't doing so, so one of the above statements must be false.

The first step in communicating yourself is to signal your presence. 'Creation' may or may not convincingly point to the existence of a Creator, but I don't see how it points to the Christian Creator and not some unknown Creator that is not the Christian God. To many people, the Bible is just a religious book, and not special compared to other religious books of other religions. Just because it is claimed to be true and to have had its accuracy preserved doesn't mean that claim is true. A non-believer who requires more substantial evidence in order to be convinced should not be required to just accept the Bible, because he has no prior reason to believe in it.

In essence, God is letting these people go to Hell because they fail to believe as a result of his failure to provide convincing evidence. In this situation, humility doesn't really matter.

Aron wrote:

Dear Josh,

In my last email, I was discussing only of this life, and what reasons God might have for partially concealing himself for the sake of our spiritual development here. The issue you raise in this email regards the final judgement and Hell. Any discussion of this must necessarily be more tentative than discussions of life on earth, because the final judgement hasn't happened yet, so we don't know right now exactly what it will be like. If the life of Jesus reveals what God is like, then God is very merciful (even though he is also very severe towards hypocrisy and unforgiveness). If Christianity is true, then Jesus will be the one doing the judging. If he was merciful when he was on earth, then he will also be merciful when he comes again.

Your objection to Christianity is this: How could a loving God possibly arrange things so that a sincere truth-seeking nonchristian, (an atheist, polytheist etc.) goes to Hell through no fault of his own?

In order to check to see if this is a problem, we should first check to see whether there are any sincere truth-seeking non-Christians who go to Hell. One could imagine two different kinds: 1) people who have never been exposed to Christianity, and therefore have no opportunity to know it is true, and 2) people who have been exposed to Christianity but claim there is not enough evidence to believe it.

With respect to the people in the category (1), how do you know that the Christian God would send them to Hell just for not being Christians? I think the Bible teaches quite explicitly that God does NOT do this. In Acts 17, Paul is trying to convince the Athenians not to worship idols. He says, "In the past God winked at this ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent." In other words, Paul explicitly says that God did not hold the idol worship of the pagans against them before they had an opportunity to hear the gospel and repent. Furthermore, it says in the book of Revelation that people are redeemed from every "nation, tribe, people, and language". Since many groups went extinct before having an opportunity to hear the gospel, it is clear that at least some people are saved without having explicitly heard the gospel in their lifetimes. Finally, Peter seems to suggest that there is some opportunity for people to believe the gospel even after they have died, when he says:

"For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit. After being made alive, he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built....the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit." (1 Peter 3:18-20 and 4:5-6).

This text goes against the standard evangelical view that there is no chance to be saved after death. On the other hand, evangelicals also say you're supposed to go with the Bible rather than what any particular church says, so I think I'll go with the Bible. :-)

Now let's turn to category (2), the case of a person who has been exposed to Christianity but doesn't believe it because they claim not to have enough evidence. I think there are several different possible things that might be going on here:

First of all, just because they claim to be seeking the truth doesn't mean they really are:

(A) They might actually have enough evidence to believe in God, but dishonestly refuse to admit it to themselves, because they don't want it to be true. In this case, they are not actually sincere, and have rejected God not because of inadequacy of the evidence, but because of stubborn rebellion. In this case, there is no reason to think that they would accept God even if they did have more evidence. So it is not God's fault that they do not believe. It should be pointed out that many of the people who saw Christ multiply the loaves, heal people, raise the dead etc. nevertheless refused to believe. It is naive to think that if everyone saw miracles, everyone would believe. Rather the people who don't want to believe become more firm in their rejection of God.

(B) Or, although they don't have enough evidence to believe, they choose not to investigate to see whether it is true or not. In this case, it is their own fault that they don't have enough evidence. If people claim to base their decisions on evidence and reason, it is hypocritical if they reject Christianity without carefully considering whether there is sufficient evidence for Christ's Resurrection and other miracles to show that Christianity is true. In particular, it is utterly irrational to insist on seeing a miracle personally in order to believe if there is lots of evidence that other people have seen miracles. People don't refuse to believe in scientific results unless they personally witness the experiments, so long as multiple reliable people say they have done the experiments, that is enough. Why should religion be different?

I never assume that anybody is intellectually dishonest until I have some specific reason to think they are dishonest. But I've talked to enough atheists to know that most of them do fall into categories (A) or (B), at least to some extent. However, I'm sure that there do exist cases in which atheists are sincere. In this case:

(C) It might be that although right now they do not have enough evidence to believe, later God will give them enough evidence to believe and they will become Christians. This might happen either before or after death, for all we know.

(D) Or, although they will die without explicitly believing in Jesus, it may be that through caring for the needy, Jesus will regard them as having accepted him without knowing it. (See Matt 25:31-36)

(E) Or, although they do not have enough evidence to believe, they live wicked lives without love. Since God is love, this means that what little they do know about God, they hate (even though they do not know it is God that they are hating). If people hate God, there is no reason to think they will stop hating God if God reveals himself more clearly. Why should God reveal himself to someone who would not benefit from it?

Given all of the possibilities A-E, it is not at all obvious that there ARE any sincere, truth-seeking atheists who are going to Hell. I think that most of them aren't really sincere or truth-seeking, and also that many of them aren't going to go to Hell.

Jesus says "Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or the age to come." In other words, when people reject Jesus without knowing his divinity, God forgives them and does not hold it against them. But when someone by the influence of the Spirit receives the insight necessary to understand that God is working through Jesus, and then rejects him, this is a sin that cannot be forgiven. (God forgives everyone if they repent, but the point is that people who persist in this attitude won't repent.)

It should also be made explicit that no one deserves to go to heaven; God saves people by his mercy. But God will not overrule people who insist at every opportunity that they want nothing to do with his mercy. If people would hate God if they knew him, God is being merciful by not revealing himself to them yet. It gives them a chance to grow and develop, so that maybe later they would be prepared to accept him.

]]> Thu, 26 Jan 12 04:27:22 -0800 http://biologos.org/blog/jesus-history-and-mount-darwin-an-academic-excursion-part-10?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/jesus-history-and-mount-darwin-an-academic-excursion-part-10?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The life of Jesus is noisy. A cacophony of information reaches through two thousand years to communicate with us. In the Bible alone we have four organized biographical sketches, Luke’s history of the first decades after Jesus, and a bunch of letters. Written in the genre of Henry David Thoreaus travel-thinking essays, Rick Kennedy's Jesus, History, and Mount Darwin: An Academic Excursion is the story of a three-day climb into the Evolution Range of the High Sierra mountains of California (click here to see a map of the mountains). Mount Darwin stands among other near-14,000-foot-high mountains that are named after promoters of religious versions of evolutionary thinking. Using the trek as its framing narrative, this series branches off to explore the complex and at times even murky spaces at the intersection of Christian faith, ancient and natural history, and observational science.

The Noisy Life of Jesus

Dave as a backpacking buddy is always an out-front kind-of-guy. Scrambling up, over, and around the large boulders at the base of Mount Darwin, he was out front. Dave once led me on a road-trip study of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Indians of the Southwest. Dave, at the time, was student president of our Phi Alpha Theta history honor society. Cliff dwellings came up in class, and Dave organized a road trip to see as many Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi ruins as can be done in an October four-day weekend.

Elbows in the breeze, my boys in the way back, a car-full of students following, we drove east from San Diego to Casa Grande and Montezuma’s Castle near Phoenix. Approaching Mesa Verde we hit snow. Our last night, we camped at Canyon de Chelly, east of Flagstaff. At every site, we were frustrated by the silence of the ruins. We could imagine life in these impressive buildings and speculate on why they were built and abandoned. However, we learned no specific names, nothing of political innovations, next to nothing about major events. Unrelenting mystery engulfed every site.

The cliff dwellings are, in many ways, as impressive as the ruins of Athens and Corinth, but we know so much more about genius of the latter’s citizens. The Greeks tell us about themselves, their leaders, the heroes, their gods, their acts. We listen and learn. In the Southwest we knew we were in the presence of genius, but there we could only listen to a frustrating silence.

The life of Jesus is noisy. A cacophony of information reaches through two thousand years to communicate with us. In the Bible alone we have four organized biographical sketches, Luke’s history of the first decades after Jesus, and a bunch of letters. Intersecting Jesus and the New Testament is an amazing amount of Roman literature dealing with Syria and Palestine, which were important and unruly parts of the empire. A Jewish/Greek historian, Josephus, wrote books about Israel that contribute to our knowledge of Jesus’ time. From the Bible and Josephus, historians have much more information about Jesus and the social and political issues of Jerusalem than any person or place in Europe at the same time. On top of all of the noise of good information in the Bible and Josephus, a large library of books, called the “Dead Sea Scrolls,” were discovered in the middle of the twentieth century. We have much more information about Jesus to fight about than we have for almost any other person you read about in ancient history. Our sources are strong and diverse. We have multiple testimonies from highly credible sources, sources willing to live and die by the truth of their testimony.

Ironically, we have so much information that is essentially consistent and reliable, that we historians nitpick fights about all sorts of little things. Historians are frustrated when they don’t have information, but they become hypercritical when they have lots of information. We harmonize, then criticize, then revise, then harmonize again. We chase our tails. Many are so overwhelmed by so much information that they turn their back on the information. They declare that we can’t expect to ever know the real “historical” Jesus.

There is some truth in what they say. The discipline of history is a blunt instrument—in the university pocketknife, we are the awkward can-opener tool. Historians don’t have the knife-blade precision of controlled, repeatable experiments or the screwdriver leverage of geometrical demonstrations. By high standards of scientific precision or by high standards of philosophy, we don’t “know” historical people—be they Jesus or Caesar Augustus—really. However, by the practical standards of history, we know about Jesus as much, probably more, than we know about most ancient people, even Caesar Augustus. Those who proclaim that we can’t know the “historical” Jesus are usually folks who don’t want to listen to the noise of so many good sources. Instead of listening to hear about Jesus, they want to create a Jesus. They want to create a more modern Jesus, a rational Jesus.

Giving up on the historical—traditional—Jesus is the first step to giving up on a Christianity strong enough to withstand any overblown Darwinian claims. Darwinism’s greatest threat to Christianity depends on the bait-and-switch of substituting a rationalized Jesus for the biblical Jesus. When we get to the top of Mount Darwin, we will be able to see Mount Fiske to the south. John Fiske can remind us of the danger in substituting a rational Jesus for the real one reported in history.

The Jesus People Wish For

John Fiske was a modern-minded young man from the start. He was born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1842 with the name Edmund Fisk Green. In college he changed his name to John Fisk, and then when he became an author he added an “e” to the end. Before leaving home for college, his concerned grandmother asked after his religious belief:

“In her sore perplexity, grandma asked whether I believed in the Bible, meaning whether I believed everything in it; of course I said no. I couldn’t lie even to save her feelings. She felt bad about it. She asked me if I didn’t believe Christ was God, and of course, again I had to say no. How can a man have two natures without having two medulla oblongatas? A double ego, a double center of innervation is something to which I cannot yet subscribe.”

Fiske was a smart kid wanting to be on the intellectual cutting edge. In his junior year at Harvard, he was caught reading Auguste Compte in chapel. Much like young Solomons, Fiske wanted to be a writer. When he got famous enough, he become a traveling intellectual, publishing his lectures and reviews as they accumulated.

Like many nineteenth-century historians, Fiske wrote history largely to prove that modern people are smarter than ancient people. Such historians don’t love history for a larger sense of community and experience; they find it self-justifying and gratifyingly isolating. History, for them, is the story of progress. The historian becomes magisterial and dispenses praise and blame, honor and pity at will. Listen to Fiske’s magisterial tone when talking about the past as childlike:

“No religious creed that man has ever devised can be made to harmonize in all its features with modern knowledge. All such creeds were constructed with reference to theories of the universe which are now utterly and hopelessly discarded. How, then, it is asked, amid the general wreck of old beliefs, can we hope that the religious attitude in which from time immemorial we have been wont to contemplate the universe can any longer be maintained? Is not the belief in God perhaps a dream of the childhood of our race, like the belief in elves and bogarts which once were no less universal? and is not modern science fast destroying the one as it has already destroyed the other?”

God, elves, and the bogeyman versus modern science. The reader is shamed into joining the writer’s triumphal modernity. Biblical accounts of Jesus, of course, must be rationalized so as to fit our adult/modern minds. Many biblical reports of events and statements have to be jettisoned so that the “real” Jesus can be found.

In a review article entitled “The Jesus of History” (1870), Fiske declared that we have “but few facts resting upon trustworthy evidence” for Jesus. The words of Jesus are “preserved by hearsay tradition through the generation immediately succeeding his death,” and that generation cannot be trusted to distinguish the “authentic utterances of the great teacher from the later interpolations suggested by the dogmatic necessities of the narrators.” The early church was duped into a history of Jesus by its own “uncritical spirit,” its own lack of a rational historical method that could have preserved a genuine history. Fiske then offered a quick survey of an appropriate “method of inquiry which, in the hands of the so-called Tubingen School, has led to such striking and valuable conclusions concerning the age and character of all the New Testament literature.” Fiske particularly praises David Friedrich Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835–36) and praises early nineteenth-century German biblical scholarship. This new German scholarship supported the French tradition evident in the book that Fiske was reviewing: an anonymous work published in 1869 derived from the internationally popular French Life of Jesus written by J. D. Renan in 1863.

Renan’s book was reprinted and translated many times. In it, Renan declared his desire to get at a genuine history of Jesus. He criticized his German predecessors for their overemphasis on philosophy and wrote in a simplified critical spirit that discarded impossibilities and discounted the given narratives while offering conjectures about what really happened and what really was said. Of course, there was no actual historical resurrection. Renan’s Jesus was the Son of God because he taught that true worship is not tied to earthly places and rituals. Given the popularity of his book, we can assume that Renan struck a deep chord in lots of people who wanted a vaguely rational Jesus who was anti-clerical and might even be a liberal Protestant. Renan’s Jesus was a guy who would fit well in a faculty meeting. It was the disciples who embarrass us with pseudo-historical stories of the transfiguration, walking on water, and the resurrection.

Fiske supported books that supported the search for the rational Jesus. The Bible obfuscates more than illuminates. To find the truth, the scholar must go behind what is reported in the Bible to find the bits and pieces of the “true” Jesus that poke from underneath. This “true” Jesus unearthed by modern scholarship is the Jesus of the bait and switch. Once a rational Jesus is established, then a rational guy like Fiske can knock him down. The abstraction of Jesus can’t win against the stronger abstractions of natural history. My GPS is bigger than your GPS.

This is the central problem with the common claim of scientists. Stephen Gould, in Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999), insisted that science is about facts, experimental results, and natural reality, while Christianity is about values, ethics, and things taught in literature classes. Christianity can’t breathe in the realm of abstractions. If Christianity is about values, then I would rather be Confucian. Christianity has to be about facts, facts about a teacher who not only messed with the laws of nature, but rose from the dead, confirming his own claims, reported to us in ancient history.



]]> Tue, 17 Jan 12 03:59:49 -0800 Rick Kennedy http://biologos.org/blog/appointment?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/appointment?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Like Christmas, each New Year’s Day is symbolized by a baby, but one destined to grow old and be replaced only 365 days later as the next year supercedes the one before. Only a week after celebrating the Incarnation at Christmas—the singular mystery of God entering into His own creation as a human child—we come to another holiday that marks beginnings: New Year’s Day. Like Christmas, each New Year’s Day is symbolized by a baby, but one destined to grow old and be replaced only 365 days later as the next year supercedes the one before. As any of us who have ever made resolutions know, there is really not that much “new” to the turning of the year, and the way we find ourselves making the same resolutions over and over again suggests that most of what passes for novelty in the world actually has a well-rehearsed and cyclic character more than a feeling of radical departure from the past.

Indeed, despite our technological advancement, our yearly calendars remain tied to the movements of celestial bodies, whether to the course of the moon around the earth or to the course of the earth around the sun. And putting the point above in a slightly more positive way, such naturalistic calendars serve to assure us of the dependability of the background rhythms of the physical world, against a foreground that often seems disconcertingly unpredictable and chaotic. But looking only to the material, such calendars can only give shape to the tension between our competing experiences of earthly time as something that is relentlessly marching forward, but also as something that is ever the same and ultimately futile, devoid now of the sense of wonder and mystery that the sun, moon and stars evoked in our forebears.

Yet attention to the natural rhythms and processes of the material world does not necessitate a belief that the sun and moon (or oscillating crystals) are, in fact, the only measures by which we can mark time, nor does it mean the material world really has been disenchanted by our inspection of it at scales both large and small. Unlike each imaginary “Baby New Year,” the babe born in Bethlehem does not cede His place each year, much less only a week after Christmas, but lays claim to all of time and the world as His own, forever, insisting that mystery and paradox remain at the heart of what is true about the cosmos: this includes that the material world is good and speaks of Him who made it, and that humanity occupies a peculiar place at the intersection of the material and the spiritual. Rather than demystify or “explain” who we are in strictly material terms, the past year’s worth of essays, papers, paintings and poems on this site demonstrates that looking deep into the fabric of the universe and our own human bodies via science, yet through the lens of Christ, heightens our awareness of the mystery of being human. Our accounting of human identity, of what it means to be made in the image of God, need not avoid attention to the sometimes-ordinary aspects of the material “how,” so long as we resolutely keep our eyes fixed on the “why” and “who,” as well.

Continuing this link between images of babies, childbirth and beginnings, and the problem of seeing the world in disenchanted terms, Suzanne Rhodes’s poem “Appointment” makes explicit the tension between the “ordinary” scientific and medical aspects of human pregnancy and birth and the intrinsically extraordinary fact that what is being knit together is a human person—a being capable of knowing itself and its Creator, and of being known and cherished, itself. Rhodes models a faithful tension between the material and the spiritual by first establishing a running point/counterpoint between the medical information she hears from her doctors (“facts”) and her own sense of the wisdom and meaning of the life taking shape within her (“mystery”). Despite our extensive clinical knowledge of what is happening at each stage of an average pregnancy, and even our ability (illustrated by a first snapshot of my own third son, above) to peer inside “so dark a place,” Rhodes insists that what is happening has cosmic significance, that the process moves to “music steep as stars.”

Yet notice, too, that the poet is not removing the earthy truth from the human experience—not seeking to distance the miraculous from the ordinary context in which it comes to be. Rather, it is the very physicality, the specificity, the sacrificial quality of what bringing about a new life entails that makes that life a treasured “pearl” (as we’ve discussed elsewhere, an emblem of the coming Kingdom). Technical knowledge need not, cannot, replace wonder, nor erase the import of what we can now recognize as an echo of the incarnation in each birth. Like Mary’s answer to the angel at the Annunciation of Christ, Rhodes’ last lines are an acquiescence to and affirmation of the outworking of God’s plans through the most ordinary of means, a recognition that He speaks when we are rendered mute. And finally (and perhaps most apropos a discussion of calendars and beginnings and new years), throughout Rhodes’ poem is the implication that what we can see and measure and claim as the start of something new, God has already been working on in advance of our knowledge, much less participation.

If we see only mindless futility in the natural world and its cycles, or even more in its relentless march forward, we have little choice but to despair that all our beginnings will amount to nothing. But if we understand our task as joining into what has already begun and trust that the Lord intends renewal for us and creation rather than merely novelty (or stasis, for that matter), then we can look back over the past and forward to the future with renewed hope. Further, we can commit to continuing our exploration of the world with confidence that our concerns over “how” will always be allayed by our knowledge of the “who,” that what is “new” to us is no surprise to the Creator of heaven and earth, and that even things that seem like the “quake of birth” will, in the end, leave us speaking poems of praise and thanksgiving for what the Lord has done and will yet do.

“Appointment”

by Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

Tomorrow they will tell me what I know.
After tools and taps they will talk in facts
of mystery, of the flame in so dark
a place you want to look and see God
shaping the hands and face.

They will call it by other names
but I will be hearing
blood and bones sliding in place
to music steep as stars.

I'm dreaming
while the doctor feels clay
and schedules birth on a chart unreal.
As the earthen womb sings,
making its pearl,
I allow everything:

quake of birth that will leave
the poem of dust in my mouth.

This poem first appeared in Sow's Ear Poetry Review.

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes received an M.A. in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has served on several boards and committees of poetry organizations and is a co-founder of the Appalachian Center for Poets and Writers. Her latest book, A Welcome Shore, is a sequel to her earlier collection of prose meditations, Sketches of Home. She has also published two volumes of poetry, What a Light Thing, This Stone and Weather of the House, in addition to a poetry textbook, The Roar on the Other Side. Her work has been featured in journals from Georgia to Alaska, and been nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize. Besides her literary activities, she works full-time as the director of public affairs for a charitable organization, Mercy Medical Airlift. Suzanne and her husband, Wayne, a professional photographer, have five grown children. More on Suzanne and her work may be found here, and she may be contacted here.

]]> Sat, 31 Dec 11 05:43:36 -0800 Mark Sprinkle http://biologos.org/blog/theotokos?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/theotokos?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The Incarnation is a revelation of who we are. It is a retelling of Genesis chapter 3 and that is why, in this season of retelling this story, we enter a dangerous time. In considering images that help us think about the intersection of Christian faith and scientific thinking in a way that is particularly appropriate for Christmas, it seemed right to focus on the central miracle and mystery of the incarnation. After all, that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ is not only a defining tenet of Christian belief, but also a stumbling block to many who can not account for such a thing happening in a world they recognize as largely described (or “governed”) by materialistic laws. Can not the miracle of Christ’s birth—specifically the claim that He was born of a virgin mother—be accounted for in several other ways, none of which require the suspension of those ordinary rules of nature? Is not the miracle of Christmas only a fairy tale that conveniently covers the shame of an un-wed teenage mother? And why do Christians persist in talking about this or any “miracle” when simpler, more earthly explanations (or denials) are at hand?

Part of the “answer” to the mystery of the incarnation lies in realizing that those three are not really the right questions to be asking, for they focus merely on means rather than meaning. Rather, we should recognize that the miracles of Jesus’ life—beginning with His conception and birth through Mary—are not only or most miraculous in their physical, material aspects, but as demonstrations of His identity and calling, and ultimately of our own as those who bear His image. In contrast to the manger scene familiar to most Western Christian eyes, the image pictured above is an Orthodox icon of Mary as the Theotokos, the birth-giver of God, and it offers to us an alternate way of picturing the central mystery of Christmas that Orthodox priest, curator and art historian David Goa has described as “the Church’s great image of the human vocation and call to us to claim that vocation—who we are and how we are to then live all in one simple image of our common human experience.” For, without setting aside or attempting to explain the material aspects of the virgin birth, the continuing miracle of the incarnation is that it is as much a present reality in the lives of Christians today as it was for Mary or for those in the early Church.

In a sermon dedicating another Theotokos icon, Goa warned of the danger of living in a time when Christmas imagery has become too-familiar, "that we make a fetish of virginity and the birth of a Palestinian baby; his mother and would be father; that we fill the emptiness with the glamour offered from all quarters; that we turn this feast into a family occasion: freeze frame our familial affection.” Against those temptations, this icon does not “naturalize” Christ as a perfect human baby born in a manger, but reminds us that even within Mary’s body—and though setting aside his power for a time as a fully human infant—Christ remained the Lord of all; thus, He is shown seated on the throne of the heavens and with a scroll in His hand, emblems of both arenas of His revelation of Himself. Yet far from minimizing Mary’s role, this iconography of the fullness of God emphasizes her as a model of the way every Christian can and does make a place and a way for the Lord, as well.

In speaking of the icon, Goa reminds us that, “the Incarnation is a revelation of who we are. It is a retelling of Genesis chapter 3 and that is why, in this season of retelling this story, we enter a dangerous time.” It is dangerous not just because we might miss the meaning of it, but because with every re-telling of our commissioning as image-bearers, sent to cultivate and create in God’s name, we are tempted to exert our own desires, to exercise dominion for our own sake, in our own names. Goa continues, “The mystery of the Incarnation of God in Christ is our mystery, a revelation of our created nature and a call to its fullness, . . . [thus] the Icon of the Virgin and Child is . . . the Icon of the Human Vocation. It reveals to us our capacity as persons, as women, men and children.” That vocation certainly includes seeking to understand the created world and its ways via careful and faithful study, just as it includes seeking the Lord through the scriptures and traditions of the Church; but it is most fully expressed when we use both of those resources to ease the pain and injustice we find (and have even caused, ourselves) in the world around us.

Finally, Goa notes that, “When Orthodox Christians around the world enter the church, they bring a candle to this icon and, bowing in a prayer of gratitude to God who clothed them in flesh, ask that they, too, like the Theotokos, may be open to be a birth giver of divine love in a fractured and suffering world.” Motivated by confidence that the Lord who created the cosmos is the same Lord who was born of Mary in Bethlehem, may all of us who struggle to understand the way God continues to reveal Himself in creation and in the scriptures remember that the most vital and present revelation of His love occurs by the Spirit within us, for the benefit of others. May we recognize that the miracle of Christmas was not that God chose to break the rules of biology, but that He makes a way for all of us “who were far off” to join in His reconciling, redemptive work by likewise bringing—being—the Body of Christ unto the world. May we, then, join with Mary Theotokos in her song of praise and thanksgiving that we have been called to share in the mystery of the incarnation of our God and Savior.

Dr. David J. Goa is the Director of the Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion & Public Life at the University of Alberta. All quotes were taken from Goa’s “Our Common Calling: The Icon of the Human Vocation,” given at Bethel Lutheran Church in December 2007. More on the iconography of the Theotokos and this image may be found here.

]]> Sat, 24 Dec 11 10:04:00 -0800 Mark Sprinkle http://biologos.org/blog/christ-the-apple-tree?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/christ-the-apple-tree?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication This traditional American carol turns to Song of Songs 2:3 for inspiration; it uses the familiar apple as a emblem of the very tree of life, emphasizing that the promise we have in Jesus goes beyond the merely material to encompass our complete shelter, nourishment, and passionate joy.

In last Sunday’s consideration of the “root” image for the coming Christ, I noted that the text of Isaiah 1:11 helps us understand Jesus to be not only the source of creation and salvation (the literal “root” of both), but also the means of their flourishing (as the growing “branch” or “shoot”) and their culmination (their “fruit”). The traditional American carol linked above goes even farther afield than the prophets for its image of Christ, turning to Song of Songs 2:3 for inspiration and a more specific tree image: it uses the familiar apple as a emblem of the very tree of life, emphasizing that the promise we have in Jesus goes beyond the merely material to encompass our complete shelter, nourishment, and passionate joy.

The text of the song (included below) was collected in New England or the Appalachians in the late 18th century, and was then set to an American Revolutionary War-era marching tune by Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838) of Newbury, Vt. According to early music scholar, performer and popularizer Thomas B. Malone, “Jeremiah Ingalls had a particularly successful run as a tavern keeper and church musician in Newbury between the years of 1709 and 1810, during which he published a book of fasola music called The Christian Harmony. This book contained not only the familiar fuging-tunes and anthems . . . but something rather new, folk-melodies with sacred texts, as well as call-and-response spirituals, and camp-meeting revival choruses.”

But though the lyrics’ narrative of individual spiritual weariness relieved by communion with Jesus is itself praise, and though the central drawn-from-cultivated-nature image of the apple tree reminds us of the inextricable linkage between the material world and its creator, it is the way the music is sung in this particular recording that has the most to tell us about how we might find our way forward though the overlapping contemporary cultures of science and Christian faith. This abridged version of the entire carol was recorded by Malone at the Weathersfield Meeting House in Vermont in June, 2005 during a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Ingalls’ book—an event that brought together new and seasoned practitioners of the traditional American form of congregational music known as “shape note” or “fa-so-la” singing.

Also called “Sacred Harp” music (for the instrument that God has provided to every individual and, hence, to every gathering of worshippers), shape note singing requires participants to have only limited technical knowledge in order to join voices and hearts in praise and celebration of the works of the Lord in creation and in human lives. The resulting music is much more about the act of making music together in community—perhaps especially in community with those you may have just met—as it is about making music to be listened to. There are other available versions of this tune (for instance, here you can listen to a snippet of a considerably more precise and “professional” version of the song from the album Carols from the Old and New World, sung by Theatre of Voices as directed by Paul Hillier), and the song text has been set to new music several other times this century (including the most well-known version by Englishwoman Elizabeth Poston and another by Stanford Scriven), but this version preserves the original song’s feel of a common struggle to find our way in the world as well as the specific words of the text. And though even the setting published by Ingalls can be sung by highly-trained musicians, a simple repertoire of harmonic rules, a specific notational style, and a basic commitment to the underlying goodness and truth of the music itself is sufficient to link groups of amateur singers across centuries as well as across miles; it is doubtful that the versions recorded in more formal settings are “better” or more true to the heart of the music and its message than are un-recorded, “come as you are” shape-note versions sung in the myriad church congregations where they are still (or are newly) being sung.

That tension between getting every note right, on one hand, and, on the other hand, understanding music as a means of expressing and deepening both human and divine relationships in sometimes motley company, is suggestive for thinking about the tension that exists between technical and popular understanding of science, among other fields where there is a divide between amateurs and professionals. Especially in a culture so enamored of specialization and compartmentalization as is ours, experts in whatever field perennially run the risk of missing the forest for the trees (apple or otherwise), of forgetting that knowledge and expertise are fulfilled when integrated into the context of the greater human community—made part of that wider conversation on meaning.

This does not mean, of course, that the depth and subtlety of knowledge gained by years of study, research and practice by professionals (scientists included) should or can be discarded by non-experts, either. Instead, it is a reminder that—especially for believers instructed by Paul to think of ourselves as co-equal and interdependent parts of Christ’s Body—the authority of knowledge must be both given and received in humility for the good of the whole church and, through the church and by its example, for the good of all. Those who understand, study, and contribute to music or any other great tradition of knowledge have a gift to offer non-experts, even if they hear the results of their gifts rendered as a “joyful noise,” rather than a “studio-quality” recording. For both sides of the amateur/expert divide, keeping one version in mind while listening to (or singing) the other gives the richest, most fruitful sense of the music (or science) as both worship and art, precisely because such an attitude and demeanor of self-giving emulates the life lived and given by Jesus, himself.

“Jesus Christ, The Apple Tree”

traditional, collected by Joshua Smith/arranged by Jeremiah Ingalls
(verses omitted in this recording given in italics)

The tree of life my soul hath seen
Laden with fruit and always green;
The trees of nature fruitless be,
Compar’d with Christ the appletree.

This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the appletree.

For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought;
I miss’d of all, but now I see
‘Tis found in Christ the appletree.
[refrain]

I’m weary’d with my former toil,
Here I shall set and rest awhile;
Under the shadow I will be
Of Jesus Christ the appletree.
[refrain]

I’ll sit and eat the fruit divine,
It cheers my heart like spir’tual wine
And now this fruit is sweet to me,
That grows on Christ the appletree.

This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the appletree.

This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying soul alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the appletree.

This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
This beauty doth all things excel,
By faith I know, but ne’er can tell,
The glory which I now can see,
In Jesus Christ the appletree.

This copyrighted recording was made available by Thomas B. Malone via a Creative Commons license on his website. The site is devoted to Ingalls' music and life, features similar recordings of many of his and others’ shape note arrangements and provides information on joining an annual singing event in Vermont, about which Malone says: “No experience is necessary, and books are provided.” Malone’s own page on the Apple Tree Carol is here, and the direct link to this mp3 is here.

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