In this video Conversation, senior biblical fellow Peter Enns asks Rev. N.T. Wright to respond to a common question of readers regarding the disconnect between science and religion. Specifically, he asks Wright why he thinks there is such controversy in evangelicalism about evolution. Is this a “culture war” issue?

Wright responds by noting that this is a very America-specific issue. In England, very few people have these same hang-ups about evolution, except where education and movements have come over from America and have gotten into British subculture —much to the dismay of many who think otherwise.

As a possible explanation for this issue, Wright points to the American conservative/liberal split which happened a century ago with the modernist/fundamentalist controversy. The divide was expanded with the Scopes trials and, he points out, has echoes of some of the old civil war mindset—that is, that people in the south are ill-informed and fundamentalist while people in the north are too liberal and doctrinally soft. Though these are only stereotypes, Wright notes, there are still enough examples of them that the caricatures stick.

People then project those divisions onto issues of science and faith and cast those that believe in science as secularists and those that believe in God as being anti-science. These characterizations are flawed, however, since modern science emerged from people of deep faith that wanted to explain the natural world.

Peter Enns wonders if one way past a combat mentality would be for Americans to have a better cultural awareness as to how we have come to this place and Wright agrees that this would be a good thing. “We all see the world distorted,” he says, “and that’s why we need one another, to be honest.”

• Get Embed Code
  
  <iframe class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="560" height="340" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EPz5zSrzjvM" frameborder="0"></iframe>

In the first clip, Walton discusses the problem of trying to integrate ancient scripture with our modern worldview. He notes that while people come to scripture thinking that they need to integrate it with the way we view the world now, it is not appropriate to read science out of the Bible or into the Bible. This makes the text say things that it never meant to an ancient audience.

In the second clip, Walton continues on the topic and points out that while modern people are inclined to think of creation in terms of material origins—as that is the way we view the rest of the world—ancient people did not think this way. Instead of being concerned about the precise methodology God used for the creation of matter, ancients were more interested in God’s role as the figure in charge of all matter.

In order to arrive at a better understanding of the text, we need to more fully consider its audience (ancient peoples who lacked scientific knowledge) and its purpose (to explain the role and significance of humans in the universe, not to provide scientific information).

In this video conversation, N.T. Wright talks about the story presented in Genesis 2 and 3 and offers some important insights on the functionality of the text that in many ways transcends its literal narrative.

Wright begins by noting that while there are divergent views on the date of authorship of Genesis—with some scholars attributing its authorship to Moses, thus dating it c. 1500 B.C., and others dating it around the third century B.C.. Regardless of its actual date of composition, however, Wright is most interested in the way in which Jesus’ antecedents would have read the text in the period right before the New Testament.

He asserts that any Jew from the period of the Babylonian exile to the life of Jesus reading the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden—and their ultimate expulsion after violating the terms of their covenant with God—would have identified with the story on a deep level. These readers would have thought “this is our story” because Israel had repeated this experience.

In the Adam and Eve narrative, humankind was given a gift—a wonderful identity and a wonderful place in which to exist. Their failure to uphold the terms of their agreement with God results in their exile from the Garden. In kind, through Israel, God offers an opportunity to remake that human project. He gives them their land and identity—and in return, they are to follow his commandments. When they fail, like Adam and Eve, they are exiled from the land.

Readers of Genesis who focus simply on the smaller, literal picture—that is, the number of days of creation and whether there is evidence in the text pointing to an old or new earth—are in effect not reading the complete text. To fully appreciate the richness of the text, we should think about the functionality and reception of the text as opposed to solely the words on the page.

As you watch this, listen especially closely to the section beginning at 2:25. Here, Genesis 2 and 3 are placed in the context of not just the exile ("we blew it again"), but in the context of the answer to this problem as described in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the Acts, and by Paul. Has the unity of the Scriptural message ever been put more succinctly? This, perhaps, is N.T. Wright at his very best.

For a related discussion, see our recent entry by Pete Enns: "Adam is Israel".