I just love Emmylou Harris’ voice and songwriting — and her website is fabulous.
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Month: June 2008
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"Good Morning!"
Early this morning I was walking my dog. It was a beautiful morning, brightening skies, soft warm breezes, but I was deep in thought about some set of personal issues. I must have been frowning. A guy I’ve never seen before comes walking the other way, apparently out for his morning smoke. I pull up on the dog’s leash, step to the side, and nod a curt “good morning.” He stops, steps in front of me, spreads out his arms, smiles widely and shouts, “Goood morning!!” I laughed out loud. What a gift! He must have noticed how wound up I looked, and in that wacky gesture, he reminded me that this blue-sky day is a gift of grace, not a problem to be solved.
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The Evil-lution of Google's Motto
Google’s corporate motto is “don’t be evil.” I leave the theological issues relating to this aside and just note that this review of the evolution of how Google views its motto is very funny.
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Youth
This is one of my brother’s photos on the JPG Magazine site:
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Thinking?
“Thinking too little about things and thinking too much makes us obstinate and fanatical.”
— Blaise Pascal, Pensees #21.
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The Belhar Confession
I think this Confession of the Reformed Church in America is beautiful.
For a short while, I fancied myself a theistic evolutionist. I realize now that I can’t really carry that label. First, I hate labels. Second, the one label I do want to carry is “Christian.” I don’t think being a Christian necessarily commits a person to a particular view about “evolution,” if that means simply that organisms change gradually over deep time and all of life shares a common genetic heritage. Those facts, it seems to me, are irrefutable. But I do think being a Christin commits a person to a particular view of humanity, and particularly of humanity in relation to God. We surely don’t know all the details of exactly what it means that God formed man “out of the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:7) or exactly in what ways the Biblical references to “Adam” and the “Garden” are literary stylizations. But, fundamentally, I think being a Christian entails a theology that asserts (a) humans are in some way unique among the creatures of the earth; (b) humans at their root, in their first representatives created by God, had a special relationship of fellowship with God and each other; and (c) the first human representatives broke that relationship and this has affected all of us in relation to God, each other, and the rest of creation, ever since. This is what sets the stage for God’s relationship with Israel and for the cross of Christ.
In this regard, I’m really troubled by Karl Giberson’s summary on Steve Martin’s blog of his forrthcoming book, “Saving Darwin.” Now, I want to be careful here, because I haven’t read Giberson’s entire book yet. The book was blurbed, with some reservations, by John Wilson, Editor of Books & Culture, whose judgment usually is sensible. Maybe some context will help, but, in his guest post, Giberson says this:
I suggest in Saving Darwin that we must abandon the historicity of the Genesis creation account. Adam and Eve must not be thought of as real people or even surrogates for groups of real people; likewise the Fall must disappear from history as an event and become, instead, a partial insight into the morally ambiguous character with which evolution endowed our species. Human uniqueness is called into question and we must consider extending the imago dei, in some sense, beyond our species. These are not simple theological tasks but, if we can embrace them, I think we may be able to finally make peace with Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.
To me, this is an important place at which Christian theology has to “push back” at science in dialectical tension. It seems to me that Giberson here advocates that we concede a central motif of the Christian story. I don’t think this is an “evangelical” issue; it seems to me to be a “Christian” issue.
If this is what it means to be a theistic evolutionist, I am not one. I’m not sure what that makes me — I respectfully reject young earth creationism, I think old earth day-age creationism isn’t fair either to the Biblical or scientific records, and I think much of the contemporary “intelligent design” debate — much, not all — just recycles William Paley’s theologically and scientifically discredited watchmaker arguments. Maybe a real synthesis and “peace” between “faith” and “science” in some respects simply is not achievable in this life. I don’t like it, but maybe a humble, respectful, but firm patience here is part of the “not yet” walk of faith.
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One More From Stackhouse on Faith…
This is great:
The earliest and most fundamental Christian confession was this: “Jesus is Lord.” And one of the Apostle Paul’s earliest and most influential letters makes the following bold epistemological claim: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3).
I fundamentally believe, as Blaise Pascal did, that there are plenty of good reasons to believe in the Christian faith–plenty, and sufficient. I also believe with Pascal, however, that there are reasons adequate also to disbelieve.
Those latter reasons, however, do not exonerate anyone. Why? Because faith is a gift, yes, not an accomplishment or natural outcome of reasoning. But it is a gift that God stands ready to give to anyone who wants it.
Those that do not want it, therefore, do not get it. And they cannot therefore justify their disbelief even by pointing to the impossibility of proving Christian doctrine to be true by the light of natural human reason. For the offer stands–to Richard Dawkins, to Christopher Hitchens, to you, and to me: faith is a gift (a “grace”) God is ready to give to anyone who asks (Ephesians 2:4-10).
Faith is always the exercise of trust beyond what we think we know, beyond what we think we’re sure of. Does that mean we have to choose between our brains and our beliefs? No, but it means we must not let our brains circumscribe our beliefs. We don’t understand electricity, but we use it. We don’t understand light (wave? particle? both? how does that work?), but we are glad for it. We don’t know everything about our business partners or surgeons or spouses, but we trust them with our livelihoods and lives. Likewise, we have good reasons to believe Christian teaching, so we should.
But we can’t believe that Christian teaching–it’s just too strange, and huge, and demanding!–unless God grants us that power to believe. And for that reason, at the last, I am not unsympathetic with Dawkins, Hitchens, and the rest.
Quite the contrary:
I pray for them, and hope they will eventually receive the gift of faith as well…
…as I pray God will strengthen my faith, too.
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A Definition of "Faith"
From John Stackhouse’s blog: “Faith is what we do when we cantilever our lives out over what we do not and cannot know, while anchoring our lives upon what we think we do know. Faith relies on knowledge even as it moves out from knowledge into the unknown.”
An older, but equally excellent, Stackhouse post that mirrors much of my own thinking:
First this:
There are only two respects, then, in which “creation versus evolution” makes sense: first, when certain Christians insist that “creation” must mean “creation science” and thus rule out any divine use of evolution; and, second, when certain evolutionists insist that “evolution” must mean only what Darwin thought it meant, namely naturalistic or atheistic evolution. For then, of course, “creation versus evolution” really amounts to “theism versus atheism.” Put this way, however, we should recognize that we are dealing now with a religious and philosophical issue, not a scientific one. Science cannot, in the nature of the case, rule out God as somehow supervising evolutionary processes.
.. and then this:
Maybe evolution, theistic or otherwise, can explain all these things–as Christian Francis Collins believes just as firmly as atheist Richard Dawkins believes. But we must allow that evolution has not yet done so.
And that’s a pretty important set of allowances to make—as the ID proponents, as well as the creation science people, rightly insist. Indeed, the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould himself agreed, sufficiently so that he and Niles Eldredge postulated “punctuated equilibrium” as a theory to explain the last problem on that list. The creation science and ID people simply aren’t wrong about everything—and their opponents would do well to heed their criticisms, even if they hate their alternative theories.
All of this is right on, IMHO, and it echoes on of Stackhouse’s themes about epistemology and apologetics, which I greatly appreciate: it’s ok to say “I don’t know” sometimes.
The fact, which we evangelicals need to face, is that the basic outlines of contemporary evolutionary theory seem to be sound. All of life does indeed seem to be genetically linked, the amazing and beautiful facts of how genetics operate show that organisms can and do change over time, and contemporary evolutionary theory seems to provide sound explanations for what we find in the record of life on earth.
However, the grand narrative of evolution with a capital-E is inferential and does not in itself account for some important beliefs and affirmations that Christian theology brings to the epistemic table. The evolution-with-a-capital-E metanarrative raises very important questions about “chance,” God’s action in the natural world, and, probably most importantly, about human nature and sin, in ways that seem to require some “push back” or dialectical tension / conversation with theology. So, it seems to me, we have an obligation not to dismiss or ignore basic and well-established principles of how life on earth ordinarily works, but at the same time we do not have an obligation to accept the entire evolutionary meta-narrative. Did God “intervene” at some key points in life’s development? How exactly do Christian affirmations about the uniqueness of humanity, sin, and “the Fall” relate to the ordinary development of life on earth? We don’t know exactly — and that’s ok — we’re not obligated to resolve either end of this tension or to state what we hold and affirm about all aspects of it in stark “either-or” terms. All we really have to admit is that we’re limited in what we can say for sure about how this all works together.