Methodology for Faith and Science: Radical Orthodoxy, Part II

This continues my series on “method” in theology and science.  This is Part II of the discussion of Radical Orthodoxy.

A more sustained effort to address the natural sciences from a theologian associated with Radical Orthodoxy is Conor Cunningham’s Darwin’s Pious Idea (“DPI”).[1] 

Cunningham does not offer an explicit methodology for “faith and science” in DPI.   DPI is primarily a critique of materialism and the extreme naturalism of contemporary ultra-Darwinists, blended with a critique of scientific creationism and Intelligent Design theory.[2]  Cunningham seeks to demonstrate that each of these positions – materialism, extreme naturalism, scientific creationism and ID theory – encode common philosophical presumptions that undermine belief not only in the God of traditional Christian theology, but also in the ability of human beings to conduct an enterprise such as “science.”[3]  In fact, Cunningham argues, materialism and extreme naturalism make it impossible to believe in “human beings” or even in “evolution” itself.[4]  In contrast, Cunningham argues, “orthodox Christianity can offer an account of life and of nature that avoids such contemporary nihilism, and in so doing restore our commonsense world, and thus with it the possibility of beauty, truth, goodness, and lastly, our belief in evolution.”[5]  Thus Cunningham’s implicit method is similar to Milbank’s:  he offers a genealogy of reductive natural science which shows it to be a descendant of twisted theologies, particularly nominalism; and he adopts a narratival and phenomenological stance that seeks to demonstrate how Christianity “out narrates” materialism and naturalism even with respect to the nature and meaning of biological evolution.[6]

Cunningham’s argument in DPI is “theological” throughout, but in the book’s final chapter he makes a sustained move towards what the mainstream theology and science literature might call “integration.”[7]  In that chapter, he tackles what many consider to be the central challenge proposed by biological evolution to Christianity:  the meaning of “Adam” and the Fall.  For Christian scholars interested in relating some account of Adam and the Fall to evolutionary biology, the most common approach is towards a neo-orthodox reading of the Biblical text:  the Biblical story of Adam has no referent in natural history and is rather a story of “everyman.”[8] 

Cunningham seems to make a similar move at the outset of this chapter:  he notes that “[m]any people believe there has been a cosmic Fall as a result of the ‘sin’ of the first humans, and death was a consequence of this supposed Fall.”[9]  Cunningham refers to Patristic exegesis of the Genesis creation accounts, which was far more sophisticated than contemporary “creationist” readings, and which emphasized the typological and allegorical senses of the text.[10]  In this reading, the Biblical story of Adam and the Fall is in fact the story not of a discrete moment in time that concerned a historical ancient human being who sinned, but rather it is the story of Christ.[11]  The account of the “Garden” is not of a literal ideal state existing in the past, but rather is a form of eschatology as protology:  human beings are made for union with God, yet we each experience disunion in our concrete circumstances.  As Cunningham argues,

Salvation is therefore true hominization, and thus real humanism:  man becomes man only in Christ.

A logical but sometimes overlooked consequence of this is that there is, in truth, only one Adam.  By contrast, the entire idea of the Fall (original sin, etc.) is premised by the assumption that there could be more than one Adam.  Yet Christ himself is the two trees in the Garden of Eden, while our sin and fallenness consist in every attempt, even as a possibility, to be human outside Christ.  Genesis, we contend, is nothing less than a prophecy of the incarnation and passion of the Christ.[12]

The Fall, then, is felix culpa:  “[y]es, creation was intended to be perfect, and this eternal intention is its true nature; but God’s foreknowledge of man’s sin eschatologically ordered creation toward Christ and thus to perfection.”[13]

Although this reading sounds neo-orthodox on the surface, Cunningham resists that kind of dualism that would render “Adam” and “the Fall” merely in nominalist or Pelagian terms for a passing emotion that might be overcome through education or effort.  The problem with such nominalist or Pelagian renderings is that they posit a stark dualism between “nature” and “grace” that cannot be maintained.[14]  Following Henri de Lubac, Cunningham argues that there is no pure nature (natura pura), no space in which “nature” is not also already given as “grace.”[15]  Thus each “natural” human being also already participates in grace, in the “supernatural.”  And thus the participation of the entire human family in the sin of Adam, as well as the universal efficacy of the salvation made possible in Christ, are not merely individual instances of isolated experience, but involve the transcendence of human nature, which is given in creation.[16]  And the apex of creation, the concrete realization of nature-and-grace and natural-and-supernatural is Christ.[17]  It is only, then, in Christ that we are even capable of seeing “Adam.”[18]