Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 4

Finally, we come to our allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account. What does it teach us, if the “facts” aren’t scientific facts? What we are looking for is eternal truths. First and foremost, we learn that–whatever the time frame or process involved–God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Creation has a purpose and is not the result of chance.

If we refer to John 1:2, we learn that Christ (the Word) was with God in the beginning. And in John 1:3, it says, “Through him all things were made.” We see that God has accomplished his work through Christ from the beginning.

Now let us ask, if God did not create the measurements of days and years until the fourth day, why does he introduce a six day period? He does so in order to introduce the Sabbath. God did not make the Sabbath for himself; he made it for man.

What about Adam and Eve? There are a number of allegorical interpretations. One is that Adam and Eve are our first parents with a fully formed spiritual consciousness.

As for the fall of man, are we to maintain that there was a real tree in the midst of the garden whose fruit transmitted the knowledge of good and evil? Certainly we could, but the allegorical method concerns itself with the eternal message. Was there a real serpent and did the fall of man happen as a single act of disobedience over God’s command not to eat the fruit of a tree in the midst of the garden? Again, we need to inquire about the eternal message in the fall of man. About our fall.

The serpent said, “You will be like God.” (Genesis 3:4) It sounds like pride, but there is also something more fundamental about the nature of the fall. The “original sin,” as St. Augustine called it, lies in the attempt of humankind to pursue our own self-will and therefore to be outside the will of God.

The Garden of Eden is the symbol of humankind’s fellowship with God. The self-will of our primordial parents separated them from intimate fellowship with their Creator. Therefore, the eviction from the Garden of Eden simply means the loss of that intimate fellowship.. Similarly, our very existence recapitulates the original pursuit of self-will. “Oh see, in sin I was born.” (Psalm 51:5)

At some point in our lives we feel the unbearable loss of that intimate relationship with that very One who is closer to ourselves than our own soul. If we could only turn back the clock of history and return to the time of fellowship with God in the Garden of Eden.

We saw that, in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, Christ (the Word) was with God in the beginning; and all of God’s work is accomplished through Christ. It is therefore preordained that our journey home to the Garden of Innocence traverses through Christ.

For this reason, Christ was incarnated in the man Jesus, insofar as he was the perfect expression of God’s love. He gave himself to God on our behalf, surrendering his own will to that of God’s, even unto death on a cross.

He was crucified, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again from the dead, and he ascended into heaven at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.

Surrendering ourselves to that same cross, we die unto ourselves, insofar as we are no longer committed to our own self-will, but to God’s. And in him we are resurrected: our spirit is born again into that intimate fellowship which our original parent’s enjoyed with God.

And this is how the future evangelical church might absorb evolutionary theory into an evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.

Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 3

In order to absorb evolution theory into evangelical Christian theology, we need to explicate the Genesis creation account with more interpretive freedom than our current assumptions about Scripture allow. I have already stated that it is going to take several generations for evolution theory to be absorbed into the evangelical church. So we need to take a look into the future, if you will, and find out how that will take place.

Here in the future, we find there has been a complete reversal of the old evangelical view about evolution. Instead of being the nemesis on the other shore where science and humanism lay, evolution has been appropriated as the property of the church. How have we accomplished this? By claiming the process of evolution for the glory of the Creator God our Father. Now that we have appropriated evolution for God, we make our contribution to the theory.

That means we help people understand that evolution is a process with a purpose created by God, and which accomplishes His will in salvation history, as the Catholics call it, or the plan of salvation, as evangelical Christians call it.

We do not decry the scientist for doing his or her job. We don’t expect the scientist to prove the existence of God because God cannot become the subject of scientific investigation. God is not in the domain of science. It is our job in the evangelical church to provide a meaning for evolutionary theory by relating it to the sovereignty of God. We no longer refer to “creation vs evolution” but “creation and evolution.”

We assert that the theory of evolution does not discredit the Genesis creation account because we interpret that account in the light of evolution. We assert that the point of the story in terms of man’s creation is that God created man from the earth in a day; the process by which God created man was evolution and that “day” lasted a million years or whatever. We have released the Bible from that ill-placed shackle of “scientific accuracy.”

This is nothing new. As early as the second century, the Church father Origen said that the world could not have been created in six days as we know them because God did not create the sun–the means of measuring days–until the fourth day. Origen produced an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account.

Here in the future we find that an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account is perfectly consistent with evangelical theology. I will provide that interpretation later, but first I must explain the prescientific view of the world at the time that the Genesis creation account was recorded.

As I said earlier, the Bible teaches us about eternal truth concerning God and his relationship to humankind, and humankind’s relationship with his or her fellows. It is the eternal truths that are the unchanging truths of the Bible. It seems very reasonable to me that God would inspire the sacred author of the Genesis creation account to write in accordance with his own understanding.

The earth was believed to rest on giant pillars atop an abyss of waters. Above the abyss of waters the earth was surrounded by the seas. Underneath the earth there existed Shoel, a dark netherworld believed to be the abode of the dead. The sky was covered over by a giant dome.  The sun, moon, and stars traveled along the ceiling of the dome from one horizon to the other. The dome structure had giant gates placed at intervals. There were waters above the dome and it rained whenever the gates opened. God’s abode was believed to be above the waters atop the dome. A reading of the first chapter of Genesis, especially from the New American Bible will reveal how this worldview fits into the creation account.

In the fourth and final segment of this series, I will provide an allegorical interpretation of the Genesis creation account that is consistent with evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.

Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 2

It is now time to address the theological implications of evolution. Unfortunately, the whole controversy about evolution has been misframed into “evolution vs creation” or “evolution vs Christianity.” There are Christian fish symbols matched against Darwin fish (which have legs) on car bumper stickers. One fish is devouring the other. Some folks believe that evolution disproves God’s existence and discredits the Bible. Darwin himself was not an atheist and made no such implications. In Darwin’s own words,

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, “as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.” (The Origin of Species)

I rather think that taunting Christians is a favorite pastime of evolutionists. But I must say that, in the attempt to shore up the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith, fundamentalism has painted us into a corner by the introduction of its version of Biblical inerrancy. For background purposes, here is a quote from Wikpedia:

Fundamentalism is a movement that arose in the United States, starting among conservative Presbyterian academics and theologians at Princeton Theological Seminary in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. It soon spread to conservatives among the Baptists and other denominations during and immediately following the First World War. The movement’s purpose was to reaffirm orthodox Protestant Christianity and zealously defend it against the challenges of liberal theology, German higher criticism, Darwinism, and other “-isms” which it regarded as harmful to Christianity.

One of the five fundamentals were: The inspiration of the Bible by the Holy Spirit and the inerrancy of Scripture as a result of this.

Biblical inerrancy is the doctrinal position that in its original form, the Bible is totally without error, and free from all contradiction; “referring to the complete accuracy of Scripture, including the historical and scientific parts.”

This gave rise to the belief that Scripture was not simply inspired by God but was spoken by God word for word. The “complete accuracy” of its “scientific parts” forces the Bible, however well-meaningly, into a losing position because the Bible has no “scientific parts.” The Bible was written in a pre-scientific age, as I will demonstrate later. But first it is time to say a few words about divine inspiration and revelation.

It has been said that “everything is inspired, but not everything is revealed.” (Benoit) The sacred authors of Scripture were writing under divine inspiration about a revelation they received from God, but textual criticism reveals a process that was not dictated word for word as from an oracle.

It is incontrovertible that God allowed the sacred writers the freedom to form ideas according to their own understanding. The quality of writing, grammar, and style varied from one author to another. It should not be surprising that, like all humans, they committed errors. Some evangelical theologians propose the existence of original manuscripts that were “without error as originally written,” though none have ever been found.

But this is where the fundamentalist concept of inerrancy misses the point entirely. The Bible is not the revelation as the Koran claims to be. The Bible is a testimony to the revelation–i.e. Old Testament and New Testament. What, then, or who, is the revelation? The revelation is God in Jesus Christ.

I propose that it is misguided to expect the Bible to be scientifically accurate. We have no sound basis for expecting it to be. As we shall see, the sacred author of the Genesis creation account wrote in terms of an entirely different prescientific world view. But isn’t this reasonable? The Bible does not teach us scientific facts–although there is a lot of historical information in it that is increasingly verifiable by archeology–the Bible teaches us about eternal truths. We ought not to lose sight of the forest for the trees or mistake the map for the treasure.

Part 3 of this series will propose how to absorb evolution into an evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.

Evolution and Evangelical Christianity, Part 1

For the record, I am an evangelical Christian, and I affirm the Apostle’s Creed. I am a fundamentalist in the sense that I believe in the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith as handed down by the Apostles and attested to in the Bible. However, I often find that what the various denominations define as fundamental doctrines are not always so, but are additions to the fundamental doctrines. You will see shortly why it was necessary to say these things.

I am not a scientist, so I am not qualified to enter the conversation about evolution on that basis. What I seek to contribute here comes from the perspective of a student of religion and its history. The situation that the Church faces has happened before: there is a scientific theory that is a threat to the existing paradigm–which some see as a threat to the very foundations of Christianity itself–but it has the consensus of the overwhelming majority of scientists. I will say a brief word about Creation science momentarily. What I propose is that, from the standpoint of Church history, it is reasonable to assume that the Church will ultimately capitulate to that theory and absorb it into its theology.

As for Creation science, the vast majority of the world’s scientists have rejected its evidence on the grounds that it does not meet the rigorous standards of the methods of scientific investigation. One of the claims against scientists who accept evolution theory is that they are all part of a worldwide humanistic conspiracy. No doubt science has its politics like everything else, but I find the conspiracy theory to be highly unlikely.

In its history, the Church has reacted vehemently and even brutally against science. Because his discoveries about planetary motion supported the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, Galileo was told by the Church in 1616 to refrain from publically stating his views. Finally, in 1633, because Galileo continued to publish his findings, the Church Inquisition tried and convicted him for heresy, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In spite of the Church’s battle against the heliocentric theory, the Church ultimately had to acknowledge it.

As I look into the future of the evangelical church, I see a church that will ultimately have to acquiesce to evolution theory. When this will happen, I do not know, certainly not in my lifetime. Those who have invested so much time and energy into fighting evolution will not capitulate. It will fall to succeeding generations to absorb evolution theory of some form into evangelical Christian theology. They will have to because the time will come when the denials have exhausted their credibility. It will be comparable to a church today claiming that a flat earth is part of their essential doctrine.

In absorbing evolution theory into Christian theology, the evangelical church will have to find a new way to interpret the Genesis creation account. I will propose a new interpretation later in this article, but I must first explain the mechanism by which the evangelical church will come to this revolutionary change.

It is virtually impossible for the evangelical church to change its view on evolution any time soon. None of the existing evangelical leaders will be able to change their view. Even if they could, it would only ruin their careers in the church. The change will happen generationally, and so slowly that the process will remain undetected for a long period of time. Individually, one by one, educated young people of succeeding generations will quietly acquiesce to the theory, but those who remain evangelical Christians will work out the theology for themselves. One day it will be realized that the change is an established fact and pastors will begin to say, “If there were evolution–which there is not–but if there were, God is still the Creator of the universe.” And so on. This is, of course, scandalous today. The future is always scandalous in terms of the past.

In Part 2 I will address the theological implications of evolution and move towards that seemingly impossible task: describing how evolutionary theory will be absorbed into a living evangelical Christian theology.

God bless.