Month: January 2012

Categories
Historical Theology Patristics Science and Religion Theology

Behold, the Man

I have a new post up on the BioLogos blog.  Here it is:

Anyone interested in the faith and science conversation knows that there currently is considerable, heated debate over the problem of “Adam.” Genetic studies conclude that the modern human population could not have arisen from only one primal couple. Excellent Biblical scholars and theologians from various perspectives argue over whether “Adam” should be thought of as part of a population of early humans, or as an entirely non-historical figure. And of course, many Christians continue to insist that scientific data that appears to contradict a particular Biblical / theological interpretation of human origins should be rejected out of hand.

I’d like to suggest that this argument is in significant ways misplaced. The participants in this debate all seem to agree that what makes us “human” can be defined by genes and population studies. There is a pressing need for them to conform theology to population genetics, or to conform population genetics to theology, because the story of our genes is implicitly equated with the story of what it means to be “human.” The hypothesis that there was a “first human” – a capital-A “Adam” – can be tested in our genes.

But “genes” do not make us “human.” What makes us “human” is the irreducible phenomena of all of our material and immaterial being as persons.

Nothing we observe in the universe is flat. By “flat” I mean having only one aspect or “layer.” Consider, for example, an apple. What is it? Is it the fruit of an apple tree? The seed-carrier – the potentiality – of new apple trees? Beautiful and delicious? Skin, flesh, and core? Water and organic molecules? Caloric energy and roughage? Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon? Physical laws? All of these things comprise some of what we mean by “apple,” but none of them are what an “apple” is. The reality that is “apple” cannot be reduced to any one of its aspects or layers.

It is possible to think of these aspects or layers hierarchically, with “higher” layers that emerge from “lower” ones. Physical laws emerge from quantum probabilities; molecules emerge from physical laws; seeds, skin, flesh and core emerge from complex arrangements of molecules; beauty and delight emerge from the connection of skin, flesh and core to human sense perception;1 “apple” emerges from all of this (and more) combined with the human cultural experience of this thing we call “apple.”

Notice that some “layers” can impinge or “supervene” on lower ones – for example, human sense perception and cultural experience do something to this thing confronting the subject in order for it to become “apple.” But notice also that “apple” is not merely a cultural construction. The word or signifier “apple,” of course, could be arbitrary, but there is an objective reality to the thing signified. The layer of human sense perception and cultural experience supervenes upon, but does not create, the lower-order reality from which it emerges.

Sociologist Christian Smith draws these strands together in a critical realist framework in his excellent book What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. In a critically realist approach to culture and human personhood, Smith suggests, “[h]uman beings do have an identifiable nature that is rooted in the natural world, although the character of human nature is such that it gives rise to capacities to construct variable meanings and identities….” Culture is a social construction, but it is not merely a social construction. Human beings are social, but they are not subsumed by the social. The reality we inhabit is “stratified”: it includes both the reality of individual conscious human agents and the reality of the social structures that emerge from the cultures created by those agents. These “personal” and “cultural” layers of the world interact with each other dynamically, each continually informing and changing the other.

Smith’s approach is helpful, but perhaps it does not go far enough. For Smith, as for critical realists in general, the phenomena of human culture remain subject to some degree of granular disaggregation, at least analytically. A phenomenological approach suggests that no “thing” can be broken into components and still comprise that “thing” – the genes that encode for apple trees are not apple seeds, apple seeds are not apple trees, and apple trees are not apples. The critical realist framework of stratification, emergence, and supervenience functions as a very useful heuristic device, but to describe what an apple is, we must approach the phenomenon of “apple” in its fullness. To know whether something falls into the kind “apple,” we must hold an ideal of everything an apple is, and compare the subject to the ideal.

And because of the transcendence of the ideal concept of “apple,” we can begin to speak of the relative excellence of particular instantiations of apples. What is an “excellent” apple? What distinguishes the excellent apple from a poor one? We can only ask such questions if “apple” means something more than the particular physical specimen in hand, whether firm, sweet and tart, or bruised and sour.

The same is true of human “persons.” We can say almost nothing about a “person” merely by observing genes, because genes are not “persons.” Populations genetics studies can provide models of the dispersion of genes through groups of biological entities, but they can tell us nothing whatsoever about when the first “human person” emerged. Indeed, for population genetics qua population genetics, there simply are no “persons” – for this is a science of the movement of genes, not a philosophical, sociological, or theological description of “persons.”

So what of “Adam?” It is often suggested that in Romans 5:12 Adam is a type of Christ. But, in fact, in Paul’s thought, as well as for the early Church Fathers, Christ is the type, the typos, a notion derived from the “stamp” or “seal” on an official document. There is a hint in Romans 5 of a truth that would only become clarified later in Christian theology – that the pre-incarnate Christ, the second person of the Trinity, always was. Whereas Arius declared that “there was a time when he [Christ] was not,” Nicea established the orthodox Christology of Christ’s eternal sonship. Thus Christ is and was the Redeemer, the one for whom creation was made and in whose death and resurrection creation always finds its fulfillment. Adam’s failure was that he went against type – he did not conform to Christ but rather tried to become something else, and thereby the true nature of humanity was broken.

Is the typos of Christ reducible to a set of genes? Surely not. It resides not in genes or in any other created thing but rather in the Triune life of God Himself. We might speak, in a roughly analogical way, of ideas we hold in our minds – say, the idea of a perfect Bordeaux, ruby-red, silky, smoky, plummy, luxurious. We could labor to instantiate that idea, combining genes and terroir and water and light and care, and perhaps we might achieve it, to the point where upon taking a sip we exclaim, “this – this – is Bordeaux. Nothing else is worthy of that name.”

This is what God said of Adam, when he gave him breath and a name. It is not something that God said of any other creature, even apparently some creatures that a modern population geneticist or paleoanthropologist might designate as ancestrally human based on genes or bones. Yet that Adam, and each of us in that Adam, fail to participate fully and unreservedly in the true nature of the true human, the nature of Christ. And so Pontius Pilot, an unwitting prophet, said of Christ: “behold, the man” (John 19:5, KJV). And so also Paul invites us to see: the sinful man, the broken seal, the first created Adam; and the true type, the seal of humanity’s future, the perfect Adam, the Christ. None of this is about the definitions and categories of modern science, as helpful and important as they may be for the progress of scientific thought. It is, rather, about the fullness of what it means to be human.

Notes

1. Human sense perception, of course, is an emergent property of an even more complex set of relations that give rise to the human “person.”

 

Categories
Science and Religion Theology

Science and the Virgin Birth

RJS discusses John Polkinghorne’s take on the virgin birth over at Jesus Creed.  Polkinghorne seems to ground his belief in the virgin birth in its narratival coherence.  That’s not necessarily a bad reason, but it seems to me to highlight a problem in some ways of speaking about faith and science.  The problem is the reluctance to prioritize theology as our primary grammar of knowledge.

The basic reason to insist on the “literal” nature of the virgin birth is theological.  The virgin birth was important to early Christological debates through which the nature of the incarnate Christ as fully human and fully divine was clarified.  In particular, Christ is not merely a created being (Arianism) — he is the preexistent Son incarnate.  The virgin birth is also important particularly in Catholic theology in that Christ could be fully human and yet without inherited original sin.  Even without that latter point, however, it remains central to Chalcedonian (i.e. historically orthodox) Christology.

I understand the intellectual disaster “presuppositional” apologetic thinking has wrought on the ability to integrate Christian faith and the natural sciences.  “It all depends on your starting point” is the cornerstone of young earth creationism — if you start from the presupposition that the Bible is scientifically inerrant and literal, you end up (probably) with a young earth and so-on.

Nevertheless, there is the germ of a correct instinct here:  Christian thought is “faith seeking understanding.”  Faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ comes first, and all else follows from that — including how we think about things like scientific laws and divine action / miracles.

The fundamental problem with faith-science “warfare” postures such as YECism isn’t the priority of faith, it’s the adoption of bad theology that really belies faith — a theology that prioritizes science and rationalism and essentially demeans the incarnation.

But IMHO all Christians who are serious about thinking Christianly should hold Chalcedonian Christology (the shape of it at least, if not the actual letter), as well as a Nicene perspective on the Trinity, as the basic well from which all else flows.  The Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection comprise the historic center of our faith.  We are perfectly justified in holding to the “literal” nature of the virgin birth simply because it is basic to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Categories
Biblical Studies Science and Religion Theology

Enns, "The Evolution of Adam": A Preliminary Thought

I received Peter Enns’ book “The Evolution of Adam:  What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins” today, and read through the Introduction and the last few chapters. I admire Pete.  His work has helped me a great deal, and though I don’t know him well, I consider him one of my “theological friends.”

There is a great deal of wisdom in Pete’s book on this important and difficult subject.  His Biblical scholarship is clear and sensible.  It seems to me obvious, as Pete describes, that Paul’s use of “Adam” in the New Testament is quite different than what the “original author(s)” of the Genesis 1-4 narratives had in mind.  It also seems to me plain, as Pete describes, that Paul thought of “Adam” as a “literal” first man, and that Paul had no notion at all of a group of early hominids or something along those lines.  A proper hermeneutical appropriation of these texts for our understanding today — a “good reading” — requires us to recognize this and not to read our science into the texts.  At the same time, we cannot in good conscience ignore or rewrite well established empirical findings of the natural sciences.

But I’m going to differ with Pete on the conclusion he draws from this:  he thinks any effort to think of “Adam” as a literal person is ad hoc and doomed, and that the better approach is to think of Paul’s use of Adam merely as an instance of accommodation.  I think that this presents, probably inadvertently, an overly static understanding of “revelation” and an overly mechanical understanding of the relationship between scripture and doctrine.

It seems to me that, although Pete begins to move beyond Reformation polemics by incorporating the New Perspective on Paul, he’s still stuck in a “flat” Reformed conception of the correspondence between scripture and doctrine and the role of “tradition” in forming scriptural interpretation and doctrine.  He employs the category of “accommodation,” but he still seems to assume that “interpretation” is a matter of understanding “what Paul thought” — with necessary adjustments for “accommodation” — and that “doctrine” is just what falls immediately out of one-to-one correspondence with “interpretation.”

But that is not really “spiritual” or “theological” interpretation.  It isn’t just about “what Paul thought,” but how the Church has employed Paul’s texts as the Church lived out its experience in the world.  And it seems to me that we should hear the Church’s strong witness to the belief, as it has reflected on Paul’s texts, that “sin” and “death” are at first rooted in our commonality in the first man, “Adam.”  (This is true of both the Eastern and Western Churches, but of course with differing perspectives on what this means, and of course there are Catholic and Eastern Orthodox scholars today who don’t consider a “literal” Adam important.)  This isn’t “ad hoc”; it’s a recognition that “theology” is much more than just a “plain reading” of the Bible.

It is manifestly true that the Church’s ongoing hermeneutical task — it’s hearing of the texts “ever and again” (to sound like Barth) in light of new knowledge and new experience — requires us to describe the Church’s doctrine in a way that accounts for all such truth.  Doctrine develops in that we continually seek to better understand the fullness of that which has been revealed. And so Pete is right that we today cannot merely say “there was a first man, Adam,” as Paul probably would have said if asked a question about human origins (Paul does not, we should note, ever address such questions directly).

But our job in constructing doctrine and theology is never just to restate “what Paul (or John or Mark or Luke or Peter or Moses or Q or P….) said.”  Our job is to offer the best synthetic descriptions of the mysteries of creation, sin, and redemption that we can muster, without eliding anything we believe is true.

So, I am much more comfortable with synthetic descriptions that take “Adam” as all at once “real person” and “symbol.”  If the modern natural sciences suggest that this “Adam” must have been somehow connected with a larger population of evolving hominids (as it seems strongly to do), that is curious but on reflection not terribly troubling.  The claim is not that “Genesis teaches” or “Paul teaches” or the “Bible teaches” anything about evolving hominids, but neither does Genesis or Paul or the Bible exclude anything about them, because it suggests nothing about them at all. “Hominids” were not on the ancient writers’ and redactors’ radar screens.

What the Church has heard consistently as it has listened to scripture is that the history of “humanity” is marred at its very root, in “Adam.”  What the Church has developed as it has listened to scripture is a metaphysically thick conception of “humanity” that goes beyond yet is rooted in the text of scripture. The idea that we should think of “Adam” as the first “true human,” the first to participate in the Divine life and to enjoy all the faculties of the human “soul,” seems to me most fruitful.  True, this is not exactly what the authors and editors of Genesis 1-4, or Paul, probably had in mind, but it builds through centuries reason and experience with the voice of the Holy Spirit on what Genesis and Paul said.

That is how “theology,” as opposed to “Biblicism,” works.  Pete applies this deftly to inter-testamental hermeneutics and in particular to Paul’s creative appropriation of Genesis 1-4.  Pete is reaching for the same thing with respect to the Church’s theological hermeneutics, but it seems to me that he is always falling back into the box of older Reformed assumptions about scripture’s sufficiency and perspicuity, compounded perhaps by the divide between “Theology” and “Biblical Studies” about the shape and role of Biblical interpretation.  I suggest we need to get beyond those divides to practice “theological” interpretation.

Categories
Hermeneutics Patristics Theological Hermeneutics Theology

The Fathers on Scripture

I’m auditing a Themes in Patristic Theology class at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary with Dr. John Behr.  A good portion of the first class was a reading of Melito of Sarids’ homily On Pascha.  There is some controversy about whether Melito was anti-Semitic, but as Fr. Behr explained it, the references to “Israel” in this text are really references to us, the hearers, as we approach the table:  we are the reason Christ died.

Here are some notes on on the lecture about the Fathers’ approach to scripture:

1.  Scripture is cryptic.  “If it were not cryptic, it wouldn’t be scripture.”  “You don’t have to work at interpreting a shopping list.”

2.  Scripture is harmonious.  It all speaks about Christ.

3.  Scripture is contemporary — it wasn’t written primarily for the benefit of the original hearers, but primarily for our benefit.

4.  Scripture is inspired, and inspiration is inseparable from how Christ opens the book to us.  It requires an “inspired” reading which turns on an ongoing encounter with Christ.  Christ is not a “lens” through which we view scripture, but is already present in scripture.  Scripture is a sort of thesaurus or treasury of Christ.

My sensibility as a theological interpreter who wants to be conversant with Biblical Studies might lead me to place more emphasis on the text’s reception by the original hearing community.  But with the Fathers, and Barth, and all good theological interpreters, notice this sense that scripture’s power isn’t so much in its static content as in its life as the reader encounters Christ in and through the text.

Categories
Spirituality

Eulogy for Poppop

Today is a sad day.  We are saying goodby to my wife’s grandfather, “Poppop,” who died on Sunday.  He was 93.  It’s also a day filled with peace and gladness.  Poppop is with his savior, and with Nana once again.

I always enjoyed hanging out with Poppop at family gatherings.  He loved to talk about the Bible and about theology, even though we were men of different generations, with different sensibilities.  In his own story, he was a classic 1950’s Plymouth Brethren guy.  Years ago he gave me his copy of Dispensational Truth, an original 1918 edition, with its beautiful poster-length charts of history from creation to the end times.  I cherish that gift.  If we ever got into it, I think he would have been baffled by my reading of Daniel, Revelation, and eschatology.  I’m not sure he would have been prepared to discuss the history or hermeneutical methods of Dispensationalism.

But we never got much into that, because it wasn’t that important to the kind of relationship we enjoyed.  We mostly talked about bigger things — grace, the puzzle of suffering, the prefiguring of Christ in the Old Testament (a Brethren favorite!), the importance of studying scripture diligently, the need for young men who are able to take leadership in the local church as teachers.  (Yes, young “men” — debates about women’s roles also weren’t on the radar screen of our relationship.)  I know that, particularly as he got older, Poppop could be somewhat irascible, stubborn and grouchy.  But not with me.  Most of all, he always encouraged me to keep at it, to keep studying, to keep serving faithfully.

I don’t regret at all the things we didn’t discuss.  I regret that, as he became feeble, I didn’t make more effort to visit him outside holiday gatherings.  I thought of doing that many times — just stopping by for a cup of coffee — and I never did.  My great loss.

But now this reminiscence is in danger of becoming too serious, which isn’t really suitable, because Poppop was a master of the stupid joke.  I do mean “the” stupid joke — he told the same one over and over again.  Yet I always laughed, and now I find myself also repeating it (it involves a child named “Pooping Dog” — enough said).

Most of all, my memory is of Poppop at the table, surveying his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren:  “isn’t it nice that we can all be together as a family.”  So one of my favorite parts of the Psalms seems appropriate as an epitath:

As for man, his days are like grass,
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place is remembered no more.

But from everlasting to everlasting,
the Lord’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children —
with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts.  (Ps. 103:15-18).

Amen — it is so, let it be so.

 

 

Categories
Science and Religion Theology

The Unintended Reformation: Science

I’m enjoying Brad S. Gregory’s excellent new book The Unintended Reformation:  How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.  Gregory demonstrates how the metaphysical revolution of late scholasticism — nominalism, voluntarism, and the univocity of being — influenced the broader culture at the time of the Reformation, including through the Reformation itself.  With respect to religion and science, Gregory notes that

the alleged incompatibility of science and religion derives not from science but in the first instance from a seemingly arcane metaphysical presupposition of some medieval scholastic thinkers.  Yet it would be misleading to attribute it exclusively to the ideas of intellectual elites.  Their views reinforced what would seem to be the general influence of linguistic grammar on conceptions of God, regardless of the historical period in question.  Few things are as difficult as keeping clear about the distinction between God and creation as understood in traditional Christianity, and hence few things are as intuitive as unself-consciously regarding God as a quasi-spatial part within the whole of reality.  Despite their formal, grammatical similarity, ‘the book is on the table’ and ‘God is in heaven’ are not comparable statements in Christian metaphysics.  But beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, influential thinkers reinforced the default tendency in discourse about God and in effect made them comparable.

[T]he widespread acceptance of a new metaphysics set the stage for conceptions in modern science about the mutual exclusivity of natural causality and transcendent, divine presence.

Great stuff.

Categories
Biblical Studies Theological Hermeneutics Theology

Christian Smith and "The Bible Made Impossible": Comments on Some Reviews

The Englewood Review of Books today offers a good review by Michael Bowling of Christian Smith’s book The Bible Made Impossible.

When I first read Smith’s book, I thought he had nailed some important points, but that he had overlooked the important “theological interpretation” approach that animates a diverse group of contemporary readers (for example, the authors of the excellent Brazos Theological Commentary series). I was interested, then, to read Wheaton professor Daniel Treier’s summary in Books & Culture of the recent theological interpretation conference at Regent College, in which Treier briefly addresses Smith’s book.  Treier is a leading evangelical advocate of theological interpretation.

On the whole, I think Treier’s comments are good.  However, I think Treier is mistaken to attribute all the problems Smith observes to “sociological” factors. The issue is surely theological: the weak ecclesiology and nominalist / voluntarist God of much of Protestantism and particularly of modern evangelicalism.

Treier notes that Smith’s newly-adopted Catholic tradition also has its problems — a proposition no one could dispute.  But if, as Treier suggests, the celibate male Priesthood has caused problems (if Treier is referring here to the Clergy sex abuse scandals, the causal link in fact is unclear at best), then those are inherently theological as well.  (A pinched theology of sexuality?)

I believe Hans Boersma’s “Heavenly Participation” is on the right track.   (There is an excellent and friendly exchange between Treier and Boersma in the current Christian Scholars Review.)  Whatever the “Priesthood of all Believers” means, the individualistic heritage of the Reformation needs to be reformed and re-sourced.  And “sola scriptura,” practiced as it usually is as “sol_o_” scriptura, is neither theologically sound nor “Biblical” (see Acts 15) nor historically accurate nor — not surprisingly, as this always flows from theology — sociologically viable.