A good radio interview with Conor Cunningham on similarities between scientific creationists and ultra-Darwinists.
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Author: David Opderbeck
January 28 – February 3, 2011
Lectionary
Heb 12:18-19, 21-24
Brothers and sisters: You have not approached that which could be touched and a blazing fire and gloomy darkness
and storm and a trumpet blast and a voice speaking words such that those who heard begged that no message be further addressed to them. Indeed, so fearful was the spectacle that Moses said, “I am terrified and trembling.” No, you have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering,
and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect,
and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and the sprinkled Blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel.
Reflection
“God is invisible, inscrutable, incomprehensible, and so on . . . . Give up all such speculating, which is utterly unrelated to the word of God anyhow. God is saying to you, From the unrevealed God I shall become your own revealed God: I shall incarnate my own beloved Son. . . Behold his dath, his cross, his passion. See him hanging on his mother’s brest, and hanging on the cross. What Christ says and does, you may be sure of. ‘No man cometh to the Father but by me.’ ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.’ What God is saying to you is this: ‘Here in Christ you have me, here in Christ you will see me. . . . At all costs cling to the revealed God. Allow no one to take the child Jesus from you. Hold fast to Christ, and you will never be lost.'” — Martin Luther
Prayer
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity;
By invocation of the same.
The Three in One, and One in Three,
Of Whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.
(from St. Patrick’s Breastplate)
TG Darkly Podcast #5: Humanity as and In Creation
Here is the TG Darkly Podcast. You can download the file or listen using the controls below.
Here is the text of my most recent podcast.
The second chapter of Genesis offers an enduring image for the creation of humanity: “the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
What does it mean for humanity to be created “from the dust of the ground?”
In many ancient Mesopotamian creation stories, human beings were depicted as deriving from some physical part of the gods. Often this was the result of conflict: humans arose from the blood, flesh or tears of gods slain by other gods. Humans created in this fashion were supposed to serve the gods by performing menial work that the gods had tired of doing themselves. The lot of humanity, then, was one of violence and servitude.
In the Israelite creation stories reflected in Genesis 1 and 2, humans are made from the ordinary material of creation: “dust.” Humans are made of earth-stuff, not god-stuff.
At first glance, it may seem that this lowers the status of the human creature. We might ask the question raised by Eliphaz in the book of Job:
Can a mortal be more righteous than God?
Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?
If God places no trust in his servants,
if he charges his angels with error,
how much more those who live in houses of clay,
whose foundations are in the dust,who are crushed more readily than a moth! (Job 4:17-19)
Indeed, our humble origins ought to remind us of the fragility of our lives. As the Psalmist says,
You turn people back to dust,saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.”
A thousand years in your sight
are like a day that has just gone by,
or like a watch in the night.
Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death—
they are like the new grass of the morning:
In the morning it springs up new,
but by evening it is dry and withered.
The elements of which our bodies are made are ordinary and abundant. Science tells us that approximately ninety-three per cent of the mass in a living human body is comprised of elements first formed through nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars. Through almost unimaginably vast and ancient cycles of stellar formation and supernova explosions, this “stardust” of elements has been spread throughout the universe. It is as though God scattered the stars across space and time to seed the universe for life, including your life and mine. And we are thereby inseparably connected to each other, to the air we breathe, to the ground we tread, to all the creatures that fill the skies and crawl upon the earth and teem in the seas, to the depths of all the heavens. We are not transcendent of creation. We are creatures.
Yet we are creatures into which God breathed the “breath of life.” We are stardust and more than stardust. We are not reducible to our constituent chemicals. A “man” or a “woman” is not just a gooey sack of water, carbon and trace elements. Hydrogen, oxygen and carbon are not aware of their own existence. These elements cannot reason or pray or make love or write poems. Conjunctions of these elements cannot carry any persistent identity across time. They do not exercise will or intentionality or agency. They are not “selves.”
Most of the cells in a human body are in constant flux: aging, dividing, dying, being replaced. The surface layer of human skin is renewed completely about every two weeks. An adult’s skeleton is entirely remade over approximately ten year periods. It may be that only the neurons of the cerebral cortex and a few other types of cells persist throughout the lifetime of a human body. And eventually, it all does return to “dust.”
Yet we think of ourselves as persisting over time, as comprising an “identity,” a “self.” Perhaps the cerebral cortex provides the stable biological platform for identity and selfhood, but something new emerges from the chemical-electrical soup, new patterns of organization, a different level of causation. We can even make choices that reshape ourselves, both the physically and psychologically. The very wiring of our brains changes when we make conscious choices. Mind is both shaped by matter and supervenes on matter.
Materialists who wish to collapse all of human identity into brain chemistry overstep the bounds of “science.” A fundamental principle of scientific practice is testability: is it possible to demonstrate empirically whether a proposition is true or false? As Saint Augustine observed many centuries ago, the fact that I acknowledge I could be “wrong” about something means that I am a “self” who is capable of making real choices about things that are in fact true or false. “Si fallor, sum” Augustine said – if I can doubt, if I can be wrong, then I must exist. One who is a true materialist “all the way down” cannot test his or her materialism. There is no possibility of “being” right or wrong, indeed no possibility of “being” – there is nothing but chemistry.
Spiritualists who wish to degrade matter in favor of the soul or spirit likewise are not expressing a Christian anthropology. Indeed, one of the first heresies that encountered the early Christian church was Gnosticism. A core belief of Gnosticism was that matter, including the human body, was essentially evil. Salvation for the Gnostics involved the soul’s escape from the prison of embodiment and materiality. The Gnostics treated the body either with disdain – engaging in extreme ascetic practices – or with antinomian abandon – engaging in extreme sexual license. Either way, their practices were rooted in the belief that matter and the body were unimportant. It’s easy to see how this view continually creeps into both our popular culture and our Church cultures.
Christian theology asserts that humans are spiritual creatures, a unity of body and spirit or “soul,” integrated, not reducible downwards to mere matter or upwards to mere spirit. Perhaps there is no better way to bring these themes together than with a Psalm — here is Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of 139 in The Message:
God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand.
I’m an open book to you;
even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking.
You know when I leave and when I get back;
I’m never out of your sight.
You know everything I’m going to say
before I start the first sentence.
I look behind me and you’re there,
then up ahead and you’re there, too—
your reassuring presence, coming and going.
This is too much, too wonderful—
I can’t take it all in!Is there anyplace I can go to avoid your Spirit?
to be out of your sight?
If I climb to the sky, you’re there!
If I go underground, you’re there!
If I flew on morning’s wings
to the far western horizon,
You’d find me in a minute—
you’re already there waiting!
Then I said to myself, “Oh, he even sees me in the dark!
At night I’m immersed in the light!”
It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you;
night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!
Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I’d even lived one day.
Last week in Daniel Kirk’s virtual Barth reading group, we read through the first part of Barth’s chapter on “Church Proclamation as the Material of Dogmatics.” Here Barth begins to outline the source of dogmatics.
That source, for Barth, is “proclamation.” Proclamation “is human speech in and by which God Himself speaks like a king through the mouth of his herald, and which is meant to be heard and accepted as speech in and by which God Himself speaks….”
“Proclamation” is located in the Church and inheres in preaching and the sacrament. God may speak to us in many ways — for example, in “a flute conerto, a blossoming shrub, or a dead dog,” or in the daily ministry of the local church– and we should listen to this speech. However, this sort of speech is not “proclamation,” not a proper source of dogmatics, because the essential locus of the encounter between God and humanity is the preaching and sacrament of the Church: “preaching with the sacrament, with the visible act that confirms human speech as God’s act, is the constitutive element, the perspicuous centre of the Church’s life.”
For many of us from “low church” evangelical / dispensational or very conservative Reformed backgrounds, all this sounds odd. We are attuned to the Bible as the written, objective locus of dogmatics. Indeed, both the Westminster confessional tradition and the systematic theologies produced by many conservative evangelical scholars (for example, Wayne Grudem) take the Bible to be the source of a system of doctrine that can be deduced and distilled from its pages.
Barth’s approach might perhaps seems a bit less odd for those coming from a moderate Reformed or Wesleyan tradition. The moderate Reformed view emphasizes common grace and general revelation, whereas the Wesleyan traditions refer to the “quadrilateral” — scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. But a significant difference remains, because Barth refuses to locate any source of dogmatics outside the Church’s proclamation. Barth rejects appeals to “general revelation” or “reason” as norms for theology outside Church proclamation. Here seems to reside both a higher — or at least different — pneumatology and a higher — or at least different — ecclesiology than in the moderate Reformed or Wesleyan traditions.
In fact, at first glance, it may seem that Barth would be sympathetic to Roman Catholic views on theological authority. Not so. Indeed, in this section he roundly criticizes Catholicism for what he views as its generally weak approach to preaching, which for him is an essential element of proclamation.
In may ways, then, Barth’s normative posture can be seen as pre-modern and pre-scholastic. Reformed and conservative evangelical dogmatics after the 19th Century tended towards modernism — either in objectifying the written word as a rationalistic sourcebook or in objectifying reason as the sole norm of truth (in liberalism). Catholic dogmatics from about the time of Gregory the Great through the 19th Century tended towards scholasticism.
Barth’s view hearkens back to the Church Fathers, who understood scripture, reason, tradition, and experience all as one unified witness to the Christ uniquely proclaimed and celebrated by the Church. This remains, I think, a vital corrective for those of us in the West, particularly in America, who are the heirs of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy — either in traditions influenced by fundamentalism or traditions influenced by liberalism. But as I’ve hinted at in prior posts, to confront the challenges of Church proclamation in a post-scientific, pluralistic and post-Enlightenment age, we’ll need to think a bit more carefully about those things Barth categorically excludes as normative sources for theology — particularly reason and experience mediated through the scientific study of creation, and reason and experience as lived out in non-Western contexts.
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Daybook: January 27, 2011
January 27, 2011
Lectionary
Brothers and sisters: Since through the Blood of Jesus we have confidence of entrance into the sanctuary by the new and living way he opened for us through the veil, that is, his flesh, and since we have “a great priest over the house of God,” let us approach with a sincere heart and in absolute trust, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed in pure water. Let us hold unwaveringly to our confession that gives us hope, for he who made the promise is trustworthy. We must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works. We should not stay away from our assembly, as is the custom of some, but encourage one another, and this all the more as you see the day drawing near.
Reflection
“The deepest truth of the Passion is to know and understand who he was that suffered. And in this he allowed me to understand a part of the height and nobleness of the glorious Godhead, and also the worth and tenderness of the blessed body with which it is made one, and also the loathing our nature has for pain.
For as much as he was pure and loving, even so much was he strong and able to suffer — for it was the sin of every man that shall be saved which he suffered for. And he saw the sorrow and desolation of every one of us, and grieved over it for love because he shared our nature. For as greatly as our Lady grieved over his pain, he grieved for her grief just as much — and more — because the manhood he bore was of even greater worth.
For as long as he was capable of suffering, he suffered and sorrowed for us. And now that he is risen and can feel pain no more, yet still he suffers with us.
And I, seeing all this through his grace, saw that the love he has for our soul is so strong that he sought our soul with great longing, and willingly suffered for it and paid for it in full.
For a soul that looks on these things shall see, when it is touched by grace, that the pains of Christ’s passion go beyond all other pain and, true to tell, that these same pains shall be turned into endless joys through Christ’s Passion.” — Juilan of Norwich
Prayer
God of grace and peace,
Who gives every good and perfect gift,
Help us to see each other as the greatest gift you give
together with the gift of yourself.
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Daybook: January 23-26, 2011
January 23-26, 2011
Lectionary
2 Tm 1:1-8
Paul, an Apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God for the promise of life in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, my dear child: grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. I am grateful to God, whom I worship with a clear conscience as my ancestors did, as I remember you constantly in my prayers, night and day. I yearn to see you again, recalling your tears, so that I may be filled with joy, as I recall your sincere faith that first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and that I am confident lives also in you. For this reason, I remind you to stir into flame the gift of God that you have through the imposition of my hands. For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control. So do not be ashamed of your testimony to our Lord, nor of me, a prisoner for his sake; but bear your share of hardship for the Gospel with the strength that comes from God.
Reflection
“The way to judge whether a person is called by God to be Church leader is to look first at his moral qualities. Is he generous to those in need? Is he gentle toward those who are weaker than himself? Is he patient toward those less intelligent than himself? Is he a loyal and faithful friend?…. Second, look at his spiritual qualities. Does he pray regularly and diligently? Does he read the Scriptures with care? Does he sincerely try to hear God’s will and obey it? Of course, there are many people who truly love God, and yet are not called to be leaders. There is, however, one quality — or rather a combination of two qualities — which marks out the true Church leader. Is he humble about his own abilities, and at the same time can he discern the abilities of others? . . . Only a person who can discern the gifts of others and can humble rejoice at the flowering of those gifts is fit to lead the Church” — John Chrysostom
Prayer
God of grace and peace,
Who gives every good and perfect gift,
Help us to see each other as the greatest gift you give
together with the gift of yourself.
Categories
Daybook: January 20-22, 2011
January 20-22, 2011
Lectionary
Heb 9:2-3, 11-14
A tabernacle was constructed, the outer one, in which were the lampstand, the table, and the bread of offering; this is called the Holy Place. Behind the second veil was the tabernacle called the Holy of Holies. But when Christ came as high priest of the good things that have come to be, passing through the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by hands, that is, not belonging to this creation, he entered once for all into the sanctuary, not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own Blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of a heifer’s ashes can sanctify those who are defiled so that their flesh is cleansed, how much more will the Blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from dead works to worship the living God.
Reflection
“When God forgives, he forgets. To forget something does not imply ignorance of it, because one cannot forget what one has never known. Forgetting is in this sense not the opposite of remembering, but of fearing. When a sin is remembered, we fear the consequence; when a sin is forgotten, that fear disappears. Thus through forgetting, fear turns to hope — hope in God’s mercy and love. When God forgets our sin he puts the process of creation into reverse: we have created the sin; he turns the sin back into nothing. In the same way we must forgive one another, by forgetting each other’s sins, blotting them out, erasing them.” — Soren Kierkegaard
Prayer
God of justice and mercy,
Make our eyes bright in darkness,
Make our feet quick towards need,
Make our our hands strong for labor,
Make our hearts beat for peace.
Amen.
Categories
Daybook: January 19, 2011
January 19, 2011
Lectionary
Heb 7:1-3, 15-17
Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High, met Abraham as he returned from his defeat of the kings and blessed him. And Abraham apportioned to him a tenth of everything. His name first means righteous king, and he was also “king of Salem,” that is, king of peace. Without father, mother, or ancestry, without beginning of days or end of life, thus made to resemble the Son of God, he remains a priest forever. It is even more obvious if another priest is raised up after the likeness of Melchizedek, who has become so, not by a law expressed in a commandment concerning physical descent but by the power of a life that cannot be destroyed. For it is testified: You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.
Life
Today the Eastern Orthodox church celebrates St. Macarius the Great of Egypt. He was a noted desert ascetic to whom were attributed many miracles and mystical visions. Yet he did not welcome the fame that attended these events. As one summary of his life notes, “St Macarius worked many healings. People thronged to him from various places for help and for advice, asking his holy prayers. All this unsettled the quietude of the saint. He therefore dug out a deep cave under his cell, and hid there for prayer and meditation.”
Prayer
God of justice and mercy,
Make our eyes bright in darkness,
Make our feet quick towards need,
Make our our hands strong for labor,
Make our hearts beat for peace.
Amen.
Categories
Daybook: January 18, 2011
January 18, 2011
Lectionary
Brothers and sisters: God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love you have demonstrated for his name by having served and continuing to serve the holy ones. We earnestly desire each of you to demonstrate the same eagerness for the fulfillment of hope until the end, so that you may not become sluggish, but imitators of those who, through faith and patience, are inheriting the promises. When God made the promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, and said, I will indeed bless you and multiply you. And so, after patient waiting, Abraham obtained the promise. Now, men swear by someone greater than themselves; for them an oath serves as a guarantee and puts an end to all argument. So when God wanted to give the heirs of his promise an even clearer demonstration of the immutability of his purpose, he intervened with an oath, so that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge might be strongly encouraged to hold fast to the hope that lies before us. This we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm, which reaches into the interior behind the veil, where Jesus has entered on our behalf as forerunner, becoming high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.
Reflection
“The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness, but their patience. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and every other kind of power in every human conflict; the triumph of the right, although it is assured, is sure because of the power of the resurrection and not because of any calculation of causes and effects, nor because of the inherently greater strength of the good guys. The relationship between the obedience of God’s people and the triumph of God’s cause is not a relationship of cause and effect but one of cross and resurrection. — John Howard Yoder
Prayer
God of justice and mercy,
Make our eyes bright in darkness,
Make our feet quick towards need,
Make our our hands strong for labor,
Make our hearts beat for peace.
Amen.