Organ Reverberations, in the Chapel
Three silver strands braid a chord
Stretched out along the floor
Twined about the pews
Draped over the pulpit
Looping up the buttresses
Strung across the vault
Hanging in the nave
Wrapped around my body
Suspending me above the Earth.
Playground Basketball, Durham
Black arms unfold
sinews taught with glistening skin.
The man strains for the globe, draws breath
and flies.
The woman, waiting to be seen
in painted jeans and gold-braid hair,
She is a queen, a mighty queen.
This is her court,
someday she’ll judge the Seraphim.
But today the Angels’ flaming swords and unfurled wings
flash above the rim of Earth;
the man falls to the ground, and dies
the woman feels the pain of birth.
I’m doing a writing workshop at the Duke Reconciliation Institute this week with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. As an exercise, today we had fifteen minutes to write what we would say if someone found us lying in a ditch with 10 minutes to live. Here’s what I came up with. Interesting to see what floats up in a snap exercise like this.
In the end it is all about grace.
This birth was a grace. You don’t ask for it. Maybe you don’t want it. But it was given and it was a gift, it was very good.
It hurts to be born but you don’t remember it. Your mother remembers, but she doesn’t remember the pain. The pain of birth is a grace. Forgetting the pain of birth is a grace.
Learning, gaining knowledge and wisdom, is a grace. One thing you learn is that you have to fight to learn, you have to wrestle to become wise. The people who want to teach you, they mean well, maybe some of them teach well, maybe some of them, maybe all of them, want to make you them. So you have to grow up, to see your teachers as human beings, like you, to appreciate them, to become a teacher yourself. And then you have to learn to repent of what you’ve presumed to know, the knowledge of good and evil you thought you owned, and learn unknowing.
Time is a grace. What is time but space God makes for creatures like us? It flies away like dry grass in the breeze. There is no past — it is gone; there is no future — it is not yet; there is no present: look, and it is past. There are only nows proceeding in succession, windows onto the timeless source, catchlights in the eye of God.
Death is a grace. “Except a seed be planted in the ground and die, it will not bear fruit.” This birth and death of mine may be the one thing I do that no other person in the history of the universe will do. Yes, Death, the big-D of Death, is a curse, the curse. It’s no-thing, that big-D of Death, it’s absurd. So this death we die must produce life. This is the meaning of the Resurrection. Life from death, new creation from formless void.
Let grace be all in all.
I was asked by some folks at Regent College to give some thoughts on the Pastoral Science cohort I was blessed to participate in at Regent. Below are the questions they sent me, and my responses.
1. What drew you to the program in the first place? How did you feel about science before the program?
I’ve always loved the elegance of good scientific work. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer, and my parents gave me a subscription to Astronomy magazine. Unfortunately, I stink at math, so I ended up focusing on work involving words — law and theology! But to look up at the night sky out in the country, and to have a sense of what the contemporary natural and physical sciences have taught us about the vastness of the universe, has always enchanted me.
Yet, even with this sense of wonder, I was struggling to reconcile what that natural sciences say about life and evolution with my faith tradition and what I thought the Bible said. In fact, I was in the midst of a really difficult period in which these questions were at the forefront of my mind. For a time, I thought “intelligent design” theory was the answer, but I quickly realized that much of what the loudest ID advocates were saying was just unconvincing culture war noise. I had never really bought into young earth creationism, and this (among other things) became a significant point of tension for me with some of my fellow church members and spiritual leaders. I was drawn to the program at Regent because I trusted the faculty involved to offer Biblically and theologically grounded insights incorporating all truth wherever it is found, and because I hoped to connect with other people seeking to develop informed and faithful perspectives.
2. How has this cohort experience impacted your work in ministry after the program?
It has been a deeply formative experience that has shaped my work and studies. Most significantly, it allowed me to connect with some wonderful people who continue to support me as a writer, teacher and scholar. These folks prayed for me and supported me as I developed an adult education class for my local church, which I titled “God in Creation” (here is the class website: http://tgdarkly.com/godincreation/). That class had the potential to become contentious, even though I had the full support of my church’s leadership (another gift!), because I did not shy away from looking at the questions from all angles. During one class session I specifically discussed different models for thinking about origins issues, and a group of very strongly young earth creationist folks showed up, loaded for bear. It was nerve wracking, but resulted in good and respectful conversation rather than strife or division. I couldn’t have been at the center of this sort of thing without my cohort’s support. Today I continue to work with some members and leaders of my cohort on faith-and-science projects — including working on my doctorate in theology!
3. How has this opportunity to develop your scientific knowledge impacted your own faith?
I am finally able — and it has taken a long time — to relax and simply enjoy and delight in and marvel at any truth the sciences are able to learn about the creation. At the moment, I’m particularly interested in paleo-anthropology (the study of human origins). This of course remains one of the more difficult places at which the natural sciences and Christian theology intersect, because it raises the question “who (if anyone) was ‘Adam’?” But since I’ve developed and continue to develop a more robust theological and philosophical framework, I don’t need to fear any empirical observations about humanity’s physical origins. These observations are simply part of the fascinating and ultimately beautiful story of God’s creative grace.
4. How do you see the science-faith dialogue being transformed as a result of this program or others like it?
“Transformed” is a difficult word! Let’s be honest — at the grassroots level, particularly in evangelical churches, confusion, fear and even hostility abound towards the observations of the natural sciences about the age of the earth and the evolutionary development of life. It’s hard to compete with the animatronics at the so-called “Creation Museum.” But things are changing, and many mustard seeds of truth have been planted. A program like this one, which emphasized community, support, and ongoing participation, helps create patches of new growth. Over time, those patches will bloom and change the landscape.
5. What has hampered or hindered the dialogue around science thus far in the Christian context?
In the context of American evangelicalism, the context with which I’m most familiar, I think we are still trying to find a way past the opposite shoals of fundamentalism and modernism. Young earth creationism, with its fundamentalist theology and populist message, plays to a century’s-worth of fears about the modernist threat. There is just no possibility of “dialogue” in that framework.
On the other hand, the “mainstream” faith-and-science dialogue too often quickly becomes theologically vapid, if not sub-Christian. I heard a talk a few weeks ago from a theologian from Georgetown University, for example, who was a devotee of process theology. His “solution” tensions arising from the faith-and-science relation seemed to involve a wholesale rejection of Christian theology in favor of a god-being that evolves along with the physical universe as a sort of world-consciousness. Obviously, that wont do. And, there’s also no real “dialogue” in that framework.
I believe we need carefully worked out theologies that are able to absorb any empirical truth within the framework of historic Christian thought about the Triune creator-God and the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. In other words — the traditional Christian model of “faith seeking understanding,” undertaken with patience, charity, and depth.
6. One of the program goals is to address fears on this topic of faith and science; what fears did or do you have surrounding it? Or what fears have you encountered in others? How does this fear manifest itself?
I think there are two basic fears, which many people are even afraid to express: (1) Am I losing my faith? and (2) Does this mean Christianity isn’t true after all?
Like any fear, these fears can manifest themselves in defensiveness, hostility, posturing, evasiveness, denial, and all sorts of other unhealthy and antisocial feelings and behaviors.
7. Why is it important to be able to talk about science in a productive manner as Christians?
For me, this is a “Great Commission” issue. It is part of the “discipleship of the mind” — “taking every thought captive” to Christ and “offering an account” of the coherent truth of our faith. The modern sciences possess extraordinary explanatory power. The institutions of the modern sciences possess extraordinary cultural power. If the Church can’t explain how the Gospel coheres with what the modern sciences disclose, why should people take the Church seriously? In fact, I think this is a significant aspect of the secularization of Western society.
8. Can you give an example of any gaps between knowledge and practice of the integration of science teaching in a ministry context which you have observed? How do you address that now after participating in the program?
In my experience, people in the pews often have no idea that there are meaningful alternatives to hostility between faith and science. I’ve seen people respond with joy and relief simply because a teacher has modeled an open, non-combative posture.
9. John Templeton predicted that “Scientific revelations may be a goldmine for revitalizing religion in the 21st century.” Do you think he’s right and why so?
Honestly, I’m cautious about this statement. When you read through some of the articles in a publication like Zygon (one of the leading mainstream religion-and-science journals), the trend often seems to be to prioritize “science” in a way that defines “religion” away from any sort of historic tradition. You hear lots about an “emerging omega point” and so-on, but not much about the God disclosed in scripture and in Christ! And (to channel my inner Barth), I’m not so sure I’m interested in seeing a revitalization of “religion.” What I would like to see is the robustness of small-c catholic Christian faith — which alone, I think, is capable of giving a robust account of “science” in the first instance.
10. Most memorable quotation, phrase, or nugget of insight you took away from the program?
Something Prof. Ross Hastings said: “Theology is worship, and after that, silence.”
I have a new post up on Regent College’s “Cosmos” site: “Two Books Redux.” It deals with the “two books” metaphor for reading both creation and scripture. Here is a key theme I try to develop: “Creation and scripture are not so much “two” free-standing “books” as complementary redactional lines in one grand story.”
Head over there and check it out!
Here’s a clip from liberation theologian Miguel De La Torre’s “Belief” Commentary on Genesis. I’m not a liberation theologian, but I appreciate many of the insights liberation theology brings to the table, even if at times liberationists seem to wander off the ranch. I think it’s important to read theology diversely and widely, particularly the theologies of folks who look and think differently than myself.
In any event, I think De La Torre strikes an important chord here:
In spite of the sensational 1925 Scopes trial, the attempt to make the teaching of creationism normative continues to this day. Those advocating a fundamentalist agenda want to reconcile the Bible with science in order to create a harmonious worldview, an endeavor undertaken by a small minority of scholars within academia. For them the earth, contrary to the fossil evidence, is only six to ten thousand years old. To render the biblical text as a science book is problematic, for in the final analysis it leads to bad science, bad theology, and bad hermeneutics…. Frankly, those on the margins of society do not seem to care.
The dominant culture usually looks for answers to questions that are simply unimportant to the social location of those living under oppressive structures. It is rare to find any biblical and theological scholars of color participating in the creationism debate. When people live under repressive structures, they turn to the Bible for the strength to survive another day, not to figure how long a day lasted in Genesis…. Debates over the scientific validity of the Bible become a luxurious privilege for those who do not endure discriminatory structures. For many in the dominant culture the objective in reading the Bible is to answer such questions, usually simplistically….
‘Does God exist?’ becomes the overall quest of those residing within the dominant culture. In contrast, from the margins of society the question becomes, ‘What is the character of this God who we claim exists?’ While the evangelistic mission of many Euro-Americans is to convince the nonbeliever to believe, those who reside on the underside of society see their evangelistic venture to be that of convincing the undervalued (nonperson) of his or her humanity based on the image of God that dwells within all humans.
Alvin Plantinga’s review in Books & Culture of Karl Giberson and Francis Collins book The Language of Science and Faith is both insightful and frustrating — much like Plantinga’s own work on issues of faith and science.
It is insightful in that Plantinga identifies a key failing of theistic evolutionists of Giberson and Collins’ stripe: they seem to lack metaphysical and theological sophistication, particularly concerning causation and agency, theological anthropology, and the problem of “natural evil.” These are, indeed, difficult problems. Giberson and Collins are right to argue that we can’t make the problems go away by ignoring or rewriting the empirical observations of the natural sciences, which establish the framework of biological evolution for all life on earth, including humans, beyond any reasonable doubt. But it isn’t enough — indeed, it is major failing — to make passing references to open theism and process thought in order to resolve theological tensions. This is precisely, I think, what Giberson and Collins are doing when they refer to the “freedom” of creation to evolve and talk about God taking “risks.” It’s a popular way to think about the science and faith relation — perhaps a dominant way to think about it in the mainstream science and faith academic literature — but it is bad theology.
Plantinga’s review (and his broader work in this area), however, is also frustrating — deeply frustrating — because of his epistemological assumptions. He casts oblique aspersions on both the processes and conclusions of the natural sciences. He implicity does the same, oddly enough, to the classical Christian intellectual tradition. Some of these assumptions lead to his embrace, though perhaps in his recent work a more cautious embrace, of the warmed-over Paley-ite watchmaker theology of intelligent design theory. In his review of Giberson and Collins, this comes out in his musing over whether “evolution” by definition is an “unguided” process. This is a tired and tiresome trope of young earth creationist quacks, intelligent design flacks, and new atheist hacks alike. All of them share rationalistic foundations that owe more to a god who is univocal with “nature,” an onto-theological “being” or non-being, than to the transcendent Triune creator God of Christian faith.
The way to move beyond the question whether “evolution” means “unguided” is to retrieve the Christian theological tradition’s two thousand year conversation over causation and metaphysics. Have any of these folks read Plato, the Church Fathers, or Aquinas (I’m certainPlantinga has read them)? The problem of how to relate agency and freedom in the created order to God’s providence is not a new problem. It was not first prompted by Darwin. There is no final and perfectly comprehensible “solution” to this problem that will satisfy the grammatical rules of analytic philosophy, of course, and the effort to impose such rules on a God who is unknowable in esse is the fundamental failure (and indeed basic a-theism) of modern analytic philosophical theology. But the long Christian conversation about this question supplies rich resources for speaking well about it, even if it can’t be fully grasped. Nor are the final and perfectly comprehensible “solutions” to the problem of “natural evil” or to the mysteries of the imago Dei and human fallenness — and again, these are not questions that first pop up after Darwin, and again, there are rich historical resources for thinking and speaking well about them even though they can’t be “solved” (have any of these folks read Athanasius?).
The “solutions” to supposed “problems” with evolution reside in the traditional doctrines of creation and Christology. The Church has always believed that creation is the gift of the Triune God’s generosity. The Church has always believed that creation participates in God’s perichoretic life and thus is granted a freedom and integrity that in no way violates His loving providence, in a fashion that finally transcends human comprehension. The Church has always believed that God’s creation is “good” and that “evil” is an inexplicable sort of de-creation that finally cannot be rationally explained. The Church has always believed that human beings are uniquely related to God in a way that transcends the material world, and that this relation is broken by the surd of human sin. The Church has always believed that the creating Logos is the same incarnate Christ who took on the suffering of all creation on the cross, rose victorious over the void of evil, and through his self-emptying love is actively reconciling all things. The empirical realities of biological evolution prompt us to think more deeply about these truths, but in no way undermine them. How could they? “Reality” ultimately is the Triune God revealed in Christ, who both transcends the material world and is immanent within it. It is finally that basic.
I’ve been collecting the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series for some time. I’ve found it to be an excellent resource for theological reading of Scripture. I started working my way through the commentary on Jonah by Philip Carey.
The Brazos Theological Commentaries are not meant to be “technical” books. Their purpose is to provide “theological” commentary — that is, to read the texts as uniquely documents for the Church, the community called out by Christ. This sort of “theological hermeneutic” is what the Church Fathers practiced. Scripture, for them, was the testimony of and to the living Christ.
Theological reading is a practice that at various times has been muffled by historical noise. The riches of scripture often took a back seat, for example, to the stuffiness of high Scholasticism, the astringency of scholastic Calvinism, the supposedly neutral posture of modern Biblical criticism, and the wooden literalism of evangelical fundamentalism. But the word of the Lord, of course, never returns void (Is. 55:11), and so the Spirit has ever remained living and active wherever scripture has been read in and by and through the Church.
A great benefit of theological interpretation in our times is its ability to absorb the insights of contemporary knowledge and scholarship without losing the theological and spiritual meaning — the truth — of the text. Indeed, from the perspective of a Christological theological hermeneutic, a greater understanding of a text’s historical and cultural provenance often leads to deeper insights into how the Spirit has given and is giving the text to the Church.
Such is the case, as Phillip Cary shows in his commentary, with the text of Jonah. Evangelical fundamentalist readings of Jonah inevitably focus in the “historicity” of the narrative. Contemporary scholars outside evangelical fundamentalist circles have long recognized that the Biblical text of Jonah almost certainly is a sort of parable and not a “historical” narrative in any modern sense of the word “history.”
True, this is in part because of incredulity at the possibility of a giant fish swallowing a human being and then vomiting him up alive days later. Let’s be honest: with respect to any fish or whale or other sea creature known to modern science, this is simply impossible as a matter of basic anatomy and physiology. At the very least, then, this aspect of the text discloses a miracle. For Christians, of course, miracles can happen: Exhibit A is the Resurrection. If this were the only basis for wondering about what sort of genre Jonah represents, we’d do well to suspend judgment.
There are, however, other reasons. What we know historically and archaeologically of Nineveh during the period during which Jonah prophesied (see 2 Kings 14:25-27) doesn’t at all match the description of Nineveh’s size, influence, it’s “king” and other details in the text of Jonah. There is no historical or archaeological evidence of a mass repentance and turning to the God of Israel in Nineveh at any time (Jonah 3:1-10). The text of Jonah itself likely was composed during the postexilic period and not contemporaneously with the events described. Taken together with the mytho-poetic elements (the giant fish, the gourd and worm (Jonah 4:1-11)), the text seems to present us with something other than “simple” history.
Of course, none of this “proves” the genre is some sort of parable. Some argue that Jesus’ references to Jonah in the Gospels of Matthew (12:40, 16:4) and Luke (11:30, 32) require that the entire book of Jonah be essentially “literal” and “historical.” Perhaps, but this sort of inter-textual hermeneutic is tricky. Certainly Jesus is not making general propositional statements about “historicity,” which is a uniquely modern concern. The references in Matthew are simply citing a commonly known and shared Jewish text. The eschatological statements in Luke 11 are interesting and may give us pause, but only if those sayings are read as “literal” blueprints of what will happen at the Last Judgment — a very dubious hermeneutical move when it comes to Jesus’ frequent use of metaphors and parables for events that, scripturally and in the tradition, finally remain a mystery yet to be fully revealed.
Yet to recognize the genre of “parable” is not necessarily to make a comprehensive judgment about the “historicity” of the parable’s characters and events. For example, consider the “I cannot tell a lie” parable of George Washington and the cherry tree. Historians agree that the event described never happened. Nevertheless, George Washington was a real person who was known for his strength of character and integrity, and so the parable conveys truth (not lies, and not “errors”) about Washington and about how we too should live.
We could think of a text like Jonah in a similar way. There was a real prophet named Jonah son of Amittai (again, cf. 2 Kings 14), and he may well have preached to non-Jews associated with the city of Nineveh and its environs, and his preaching may indeed have been accompanied by marvelous or miraculous signs, and some of those people may in fact have repented, and perhaps we’ll meet some of those people at the Last Judgment. These underlying truths are conveyed to us in the form of a parable, the Biblical text of Jonah, first created for the Jews returning from Babylonian exile, intended by its creators not as a “literal history” of Nineveh, but as an encouragement and challenge for the returnees. And here is where Cary’s commentary picks up:
Nineveh would be instantly recognizable to the original readers of this story as the capital of Assyria. Although a great and and ancient empire, Assyria was relatively weak in the first half of the eighth century, when Jonah son of Amittai was active during the reign of Jeroboam II of Israel. It underwent a resurgence under Tiglath-pileser III, who began to regin over Assyria a year or so after Jeroboam’s death. Within a quarter-century Samaria had fallen to Assyria, which carried off the people of Israel into exile, from which they never returned. It is after this, near the beginning of the next century, that Nineveh becomes becomes the capital of Assyria under Sennacherib. It remained the capital throughout the seventh century, until it was destroyed by Medes and the Babylonians in612 BC. It was never rebuilt. It’s demise marks the beginning of the new Babylonian Empire, which becomes the nemesis of the southern kingdom, eventually conquering Jerusalem at the beginning of the sixth century, assaulting it again and destroying it in 587 BC, and carrying off the Judeans into exile, from which they eventually returned about half a century later, beginning in 539 BC.
The book of Jonah is almost certainly written with these returning exiles in mind, for whom the destruction of both Israel and Nineveh is old news but the future of Judah and Babylon is still an open question. Anachronistically, Nineveh is the city to which the prophet is sent in the book of Jonah, even though the time of Johnah it is not yet the capital of Assyria. The important point is that it is the capital known to the book’s original readers, who may have been hazy about which city was the capital of Assyria uring the reign of Jeroboam II in the early eighth century but who knew all about Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire when it was destroyed for good near the end of the seventh century.
Thus the book of Jonah is not a historical report about the activity of the prophet in the time of Jeroboam to the parable written for returning Judean exiles about what might have been – and indeed out what could still happen, depending on how the original readers, the Judeans coming back to their homeland in the sixth century, handle their equivalent of Jonah’s situation at the end of the book. To turn the story into a historical account of the prophet being sent to the city that is not yet the capital of Assyria would disrupt the parallel on which the whole book is based. For what the book of Jonah aims to get us thinking about is the situation faced by the Judeans with respect to Babylon, the capital of the empire that has swallowed up Judah, as it is illuminated by the situation of Johnah with respect to Nineveh, the capital of the empire that swallowed up Israel. It is a book about the suffering of the chosen people and what that has to do with the salvation of the Gentiles.
And this also is a central point we are to take from reading Jonah today — as well as the use to which Jesus put the text in his teachings in Matthew and Luke. As the Church, we claim to be followers of Jesus, the people of God, engaged in God’s mission of reconciliation and redemption. Why then are we often suffering? Can the Church, marked by the cross, really make a difference against the powerful “city” of this world? How are we to relate to people outside our walls? Will the readiness of “heathens” to repent and follow God’s way of faith and love judge us and reveal us to be stingy and self-righteous? Or are we ready and willing to participate fully in God’s generous initiative of redemption?
I’ve been collecting the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series for some time. I’ve found it to be an excellent resource for theological reading of Scripture. I started working my way through the commentary on Jonah by Philip Carey.
Jonah is a fascinating text, both for historical reasons and on its own terms. I love Carey’s introduction to the text, which he acknowledges is indebted to Karl Barth’s theology of the word and of election.
Jonah 1:1 says “And the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai….” As Carey notes “the whole story [of Jonah] is initiated and moved along and shaped by the word of the Lord, without which there would be no story, no movement, no tension, no flight, and no rescue.” “The problem of the book,” Carey says, is
not how we are to know God but how God is to deal with us and our more or less persistent efforts not to know him. Only a fool is capable of not knowing God — of hearing the word of the Lord and not believing it — and the Lord must deal with such fools somehow. From this book [Jonah] we can be learn how graciously the Lord deals with fool such as us.
Excellent.
I’m teaching a class on New Testament Ethics at church, and this week we’re studying the Sermon on the Mount. I came up with this matrix for various ways the Sermon has been read. How might you combine the cells on this matrix?