Finding Beauty and Hope in the Process

Many Christians wonder how we can call the Bible God’s word if we can’t pinpoint a moment of inspiration when the author wrote it. The conversation doesn’t get any easier when you look at the canonization process and realize that what we call “God’s word” today, the collection of texts that make up the Christian Bible, is not synonymous with what is referred to as “God’s word” in Scripture, and the definitive list of canonical texts isn’t even agreed upon by different Christian traditions. You simply can’t pinpoint a moment in time when God gave us his inspired word, the Bible.

Some of the most compelling and beautiful testimonies of redemption I’ve heard from other Christians have involved a long and sometimes messy process of saving that doesn’t fit neatly into a prescribed timeline of before and after moments.

It can also be hard for many Christians to learn that scientists don’t see evidence for the diversity of life on Earth coming into being in an instantaneous moment, but rather it was a process that took millions of years. When we consider the Genesis account of creation, it can often be read literally as a story of precise moments in time. With definitive moments like when Adam was formed from dust and Eve taken from his side, or when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and sin entered the world, the creationist interpretation can be comforting in its simplicity and clarity—perhaps because there is a clear before and after to anchor theological claims. But if you accept the scientific claim that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors as a population, then the discussion of when, where, and how God created humans in his image and when, where, and how humans fell from grace becomes much messier and more speculative. You lose the security and neatness of precise moments on the theological timeline of creation history, but I would argue that you gain something beautiful in its place.

Affirming that God creates through processes like evolution has made it easier for me to face the messiness inherent in discussions of textual criticism and the inspiration of Scripture. Seeing salvation and redemption as a lifelong process instead of a moment on a timeline has also helped me encourage friends who find themselves in painful periods of renegotiating their faith, wondering what label fits their evolving identity and where the boundaries are between belief and unbelief. Knowing that God is still forming his church over time and that his Bride is a population, not an individual, makes it easier for me to cope when specific Christians disappoint me during these increasingly fractured and divisive times. When I contemplate the New Creation that is breaking into our world, it helps me to remember that God’s creative process in nature can involve evolutionary dead ends, extinctions, adaptations, and multiple paths that converge on a desired trait. Maybe our Christian hope that God is making and will make all things new involves spiritual parallels to these natural phenomena.

We find that Scripture repeatedly draws on metaphors from the natural world to help us understand spiritual things. For example, John 15 gives us the picture of vines and fruit so we can understand better what it means to live spiritually united with Jesus. In 1 Corinthians 12 God gives us a picture of a healthy body made of interdependent parts so we can understand what it means to work together and serve one another in the spiritual work of the Church.