This continues my conversation with Daniel Harrell, author of “Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith.” Daniel is a long-time Pastor at Park Street Church in Boston, MA. Park Street is an historic evangelical church.
Dave: Concerning the image of God, you mention Wolfhart Pannenberg. I notice that in the book you make a few references to Jourgen Moltmann. Most evangelical readers will be unfamiliar with these names. I suspect that the few who have heard of them will associate them with theological liberalism, and worse, with panentheism and process theology. But anyone who serioiusly studies Christian faith and the natural sciences will need to grapple with Pannenberg and Moltmann. So:
Do you see any dangers in Pannenberg’s and/or Moltmann’s concepts of God and creation? How (if at all) would you distinguish your understanding of God and His relation to creation from their views? Or, maybe a better way to put this: do you think Pannenberg and Moltmann’s views of God and creation are consistent with Nicene orthodoxy, or is some version of patripassionism required for a Christian understanding of evolution?
Daniel: You might want to elucidate which views of Pannenberg and Moltmann you mean (they write pretty extensively on God and creation!). As for patripassionism, its rejection, I think, presumes too strong a categorical understanding of the Trinity than is demanded. In other words, that Jesus is God who dies on the cross while the Father is God who receives his prayer and expends his wrath is nevertheless both God who atones and God who satisfies. Moltmann, to my recollection, does not suggest that God the Father is crucified, but rather God the Son who is one with the Father is crucified. (If this isn’t Moltmann’s position then it is mine and one that squares with Nicene orthodoxy . “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5.19). ). This is an important distinction as well as one of those Trinitarian realities that defy logic.
That this is necessary for embracing evolution entails recognizing that death has been part of organic life from the beginning (whether you believe in six-days or six billion years). And thus nature as characteristic of God entails a God for whom death is part of his character. I think Moltmann’s “crucified God” (albeit in the ways I interpret above) would provide for such a God.
Dave: Specifically on the image of God in humanity, Pannenberg says in his Systematic Theology that “[i]n the story of the human race, then, the image of God was not achieved fully at the outset. It was still in process. . . . If we think of the divine likeness as being already achieved in Adam’s first estate, we cannot view it as our final destiny in a process of history.” Can you explain a little more how you apply this sort of theory from Pannenberg to your theology of human nature?
Daniel: Not having Pannenberg in front of me, I nevertheless read the quotation as emphasizing that the image of God cannot be attained as a process of history because it is an act of God. “New creation” can never be a product of evolution. I assert that our ultimate “image of God” is attained by the redemptive work of Jesus, which was part of the original plan (Rev 13:8–KJV). Evolution points to a very good but incomplete creation that groans as it awaits its redemption, even from the beginning. God created a free process creation that resulted in free willed creatures who freely rejected God’s overtures and thus made redemption necessary. As a God who loves sacrificially, he always had redemption in mind, even at creation. (Just don’t ask me why. Although it does help explain how it is that Adam could have ever sinned in the first place.)