Category: Science and Religion

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Philosophical Theology Political Theology Science and Religion

Book Review: Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

This is a book review I wrote of Francis Beckwith’s book Taking Rites Seriously:  Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith, for the journal Science & Christian Belief.

This book is a curious amalgam of philosophical theology, liberal political theory, and American Constitutional Law.  It succeeds reasonably well on the first count and less well on the third.  The space in the middle – liberal political theory – is the bridge that would connect the two but that ultimately betrays the author’s philosophical and theological presuppositions.

In many ways the value of this book to any reader likely will depend on his or her view of the importance of America’s culture wars.  Beckwith, who teaches at Baylor University, is well known as a scholarly participant in those culture wars.  At one time the President of the Evangelical Theological Society, in 2007 he returned in much-discussed fashion to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth.  The dedication of this book to Robert P. George, a leading proponent of the new natural law theory, reflects Beckwith’s orbit within a constellation of Catholic and Evangelical intellectuals who seek to advance philosophical arguments for traditional values in the public square, including opposition to abortion, rejection of same sex marriage, and strong views of religious liberty.  The arguments offered in this book ably present the kinds of views advanced by this school of conservative social thought, although they have been presented at length elsewhere.  If there were nothing else to the book it would not seem of much unique interest to readers of this journal.

In his discussion of philosophical theology, however, Beckwith presents some material of interest to the theology-and-science conversation.  First, Beckwith addresses an approach to public discourse he labels “Secular Rationalism” (SR), exemplified in the thought of legal theorists such as Brian Leiter, evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker, and various New Atheist public intellectuals.  As Beckwith defines it, SR is essentially a form of logical positivism, scientism, and/or narrow foundationalism.  Beckwith dismantles SR along the familiar lines that it is circular, self-defeating, and fundamentally undermined by its own need to presuppose some truths about reality without the kind of evidence it purports to require.  Some of the sources in Beckwith’s footnotes, such as Alvin Plantinga, David Bentley Hart, and N.T. Wright, have done the same work in far more winsome fashion; some of Beckwith’s sources, such as J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, are apologists of a certain narrow stripe whose work might be of more dubious value; and other important sources, including anyone from a critical realist perspective (say, John Polkinghorne or Alister McGrath), a process perspective (say, John Haught), or other strands of religious epistemology (say, Conor Cunningham’s take from Radical Orthodoxy) are absent entirely.  Nevertheless, Beckwith’s contribution to the literature showing the intellectual bankruptcy of “SR” is welcome, particularly in taking on the extension of “SR” to secularist fundamentalists in the legal academy such as Brian Leiter.

Of further direct interest to readers of this journal, Beckwith’s past defense of Intelligent Design (ID) theory and association with the Discovery Institute stand in stark contrast to his arguments against ID in this volume.  Beckwith now argues, from a Thomistic perspective, that ID undermines the orthodox Christian doctrine of creation because ID theory subverts creation’s causal integrity.  He shows that the Thomistic arguments for God’s existence do not imagine God as a huge, physical “finger” within creation, pushing things into motion and perhaps giving things a special poke here and there where “design” might be detected, but rather that God is the formal and final cause of the material and efficient causes within creation.  The overall beauty and order of creation in its material and efficient causes, viewed holistically, point towards formal and final causes outside of themselves.  If, as ID theory suggests, creation lacks an organic integrity, with “irreducibly complex” gaps that suggest a need for constant direct Divine intervention, this would undermine the classical Christian account of creation.  It is gratifying to see an erstwhile defender of ID theory recognize these problems.

Notwithstanding his theological and philosophical criticism of ID theory, Beckwith persists in arguing that the “ID case” in the United States, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, was wrongly decided.  He criticizes the federal trial judge in the case for adopting a legal test under which a “reasonable, objective observer” (ROO) must assess whether the challenged policy had an improper religious motivation under the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  There is something trenchant about Beckwith’s critique on this point, because, as he points out, notions of “reason” and “objectivity” require reference to metaphysical perfections that would seem ruled out of court by SR.  But this highlights the major structural problem with the book:  Beckwith wants to defend his socially conservative policies on the grounds of a kind of reason that would be accessible to anyone in society and amenable to adjudication within a Constitutional framework by the Supreme Court.  This simply does not work, because classical liberalism and the American Constitutional framework embed Enlightenment epistemology and values, not Christian epistemology and values.

A good example of this fundamental problem arises in Beckwith’s qualified approval of the result in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, upholding a business’ ability to exclude itself from a legal mandate to provide insurance coverage for certain contraceptives.  Like most “religious liberty” advocates, Beckwith skates over the question whether a corporation should have standing to assert “religious liberty” rights under the U.S. Constitution.  There is plenty of case law about Constitutional rights that are afforded (such as the right to freedom of speech) and not afforded (such as the right to vote) to corporations, so from the perspective of U.S. legal doctrine, the question of how the First Amendment’s religion clauses might apply to corporations is not by any means out of bounds.  From the perspective of philosophical theology, however, it is far from clear whether business corporations should have any personal “rights” at all, or what, if anything, a business corporation is — never mind whether Christian owners of a business corporation that employs non-Christians ought to have, or ought to exercise, a “right” to excuse themselves from a generally applicable social program if they otherwise choose to receive benefits the state provides to business corporations.  From a Christian theological and praxis perspective, the Hobby Lobby case is a mess.

Another example surfaces in Beckwith’s discussion of same sex marriage.  He offers the familiar refrain that the legalization of same sex marriage will invoke a parade of horribles for non-conforming religious institutions, which for the most part has not materialized, and he unconvincingly tries to distinguish the same sex marriage issue from the history of miscegenation laws and practices, which Bob Jones University fought in the Supreme Court only a generation ago.  He even suggests that same sex marriage was never really “banned” or “illegal,” unless sacramental Catholic marriage also was banned or illegal, because the state has never explicitly sanctioned all the religious elements of Catholic sacramental marriage.  It is difficult to tease out the overly-clever logic here, but it seems to be a variant on the argument that withholding a government benefit, such as a marital tax deduction, from one group (same sex couples) while providing it to another (opposite sex couples) is not a “prohibition.”  That may be true, but then one wonders what all the fuss has been about.  Let everyone have the public benefits, or take the public benefits away from everyone, and let private associations such as churches define the terms however they want.  Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.

The fuss, as Beckwith goes on to argue, is that “marriage” relates to deeper metaphysical concepts about the human person.  People care about the same sex marriage issue on both sides not because it is about an arcane tax benefit but because it has something to do with human dignity.  Either same sex marriage undermines human dignity because it denies something basic about human biology and difference, or disapproval of same sex marriage undermines human dignity because gay relationships are not intrinsically disordered, or at least the question is uncertain enough that dignity demands that each person have the liberty to decide the question without state coercion.  Beckwith and the new natural law thinkers with which he is associated think there are forms of rational argument apart from specifically religious claims that can establish their case decisively in the liberal institutions of modern legislatures and courts, if only the underbrush of scientism / SR can be cleared away.  Ultimately, however, clearing away that underbrush must involve a theological critique of modernity’s epistemological pretensions and metaphysical vacuity.  It seems that Beckwith and his compatriots do not wish to venture that critique, but believe instead that the modern liberal state can and should advance their goals.  The irony is that this move immediately surrenders the metaphysical and epistemological ground, ensuring not only that their culture war will be lost, but also that plenty of collateral damage will occur along the way.

 

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Ezekiel Luther Science and Religion

Jenson on Secondary Causes and Divine Hiddenness

Continuing in my reading of Ezekiel with Robert Jenson, I come to his commentary on Ezekiel 30:20-26.  This pericope is unremarkable, in that it is part of series of judgments against Gentile nations found in this part of the overall text.  Here, God pronounces judgment against Egypt:  “Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I put my sword into the hand of the king of Babylon and he brandishes it against Egypt.”  (Ezekiel 30:25).  Jenson’s interest in his theological commentary is about how God acts through agents within the created order, like the King of Babylon.  I’m going to set out Jenson’s commentary at length because I think he states the problem correctly, with one qualification I mention at the end of this post.  I don’t think his proposed approach, rooted in a Lutheran sense of God’s hiddenness, however, is really all that fruitful.  Here is how Jenson describes the problem.  (Quotes below are from Jenson, 237-239.)

[T]he theologically most striking feature of this prophecy is its drastic identification of the Lord himself as the one who determines and indeed fights the battles waged by created armies. An actual pharaoh is or will be made militarily incapable; it is the Lord who breaks his arms. Nebuchadnezzar has been or will be victorious; the sword that wins victory is the Lord’s own, put into Nebuchad­nezzar’s hand. Leaving aside at this point the question of God’s involvement in violence (7 7:10- 27), how are we to understand the relation between God’s act and creatures’ act, when the event itself is but one?

The question has been posed and debated throughout theological history. Traditional scholastic theology, Catholic and Protestant, has said that God is the “primary cause” of created events, which within creation have also created “secondary causes.” Thus God is here the primary cause of Egypt’s disaster, and Nebuchadnezzar the secondary cause. The doctrine is descriptively correct, but it is doubtful that it does much more than restate the problem. Through the latter part of the previous century, several movements attempted to place the scheme within a more substantive theory-in my judgment, without great success.

Jenson then describes contemporary efforts to solve the problem (and I love here his reference to the fact that Christian philosophers really are doing theology — the presumptions of Christian analytic philosophy of religion irritate me to no end):

Thus some Christian members of philosophy departments have taken to doing what is in fact theology. They are especially occupied with the question: How is an eternal God’s agency within time possible? In my view they pose the question in a way that makes a faithful answer impossible, for they tend to use words like “eternal” or “agency” or “time” so uncritically within an Aristotelian frame that the notion of an eternal reality’s agency in time becomes a simple oxymoron. If to be “eternal” is simply to be “not temporal;” than an eternal entity cannot do a temporal act, and  there is little more to be said.

Some other recent movements have taken an opposite, drastically revisionary path. Process theology among liberal theologians and open theism among evangelicals have produced metaphysically more or less coherent accounts of primary divine agency and secondary temporal agency. But they have done so only by revising Christian language about God past all biblical recognition. A God who is one pole of a universal process is not the God of Ezekiel or any other prophet.

So far, I think Jenson has rightly diagnosed the problem, and that he has rightly suggested that process theology and open theism are not viable alternatives.  He then makes another move I think is vital, which is to note that in the classical theological tradition God is not an entity within the universe, so any talk of God’s causality, whether “primary” or otherwise, can only be analogical:

I have a diagnosis and suggestion. At least since the advent of modernity, West­ern thought has tended to see the universe as a system, a self-contained process determined by immanent regularities; much modern theology has-sometimes subliminally-accepted this vision. When the world is envisioned in this fashion, God is willy-nilly envisioned as a second something external to the world. Then the question necessarily becomes: How does the eternal God intervene in the temporal system, without wrecking it? And the obvious answer  is that he cannot: either it is simply closed to him, or his entry will compromise its constitutive laws.

But scripture does not envision the creation as a system at all, but rather-as Ezekiel and this commentary have all along construed the matter-as a history.

This vision poses quite a different question: How does God  present himself as an actor in the drama of history?

After this useful diagnosis and suggestion, however, I think Jenson’s proposal relies too heavily on a Lutheran theology of God’s hiddenness:

In ancient drama, the actors brought the gods and heroes into the theater by and as masks behind which the actors hid and through which they spoke; within the ceremony  the masks were the dramatis personae. Martin Luther adduced this phenomenon, but reversed the relation of actors and masks. God brings the created heroes and villains of the temporal drama onto history’s stage as masks that hide him-for were he to appear barefaced creation would perish. Thus Nebuchadnez­zar and his like are larva dei, God’s masks-as indeed are all creatures in one way or another. And we masks truly are the personae  of the drama; we are not puppets manipulated by someone distant from us. Yet behind us hides the Creator.

Calling the created carriers of history masks of God may at first sight seem to be a figure, not to be taken with ontological seriousness. But we should remember that the great metaphysical categories are always created by drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty. To instance Scholasticism’s language for our present matter, God is of course not  a “cause” within any such cluster of cause and effect as quotidian language presumes; thus when the tradition calls him the primary cause of created events it drafts “cause” to serve in an alien discourse. And when Luther and I propose instead to draft “mask” for metaphysical duty, we perform the same move-but, just possibly, more appropriately.

Although I do think there are some important insights in this perspective, I’m not sure how it advances the ball over the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories of primary and secondary causality.  In particular, I think Jenson’s view of causality here tends to eliminate the genuine agency and freedom of creatures that the Thomistic-Aristotelian categories seek to preserve within the domain of secondary causation.

And here is my qualification about how Jenson states the problem:  I think the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework does much more than merely “restate the problem” and that contemporary philosophers of religion have mostly abandoned the “Aristotelian frame” in favor of a materialist-naturalist frame.  Much of the work in philosophical theology on these problems of causality, along with much of the modern philosophy of science, rejects formal and final causality and focuses on on what an Aristotelian frame would consider material and efficient causes.  This makes sense if the material universe is all there is, because the rules of energy and matter tell us that physical causation is a closed system.  But Christian theology insists that the material universe is not all there is, and that in fact the material universe was created by God, who is by definition transcendent of creation and not material.  The question, then, is how to speak of God’s transcendent causality while retaining the contingent freedom and reality of causality within the universe.

Of course, as Jenson notes, anything we say here is bound to involve “drafting ordinary language for heavy ontological duty” — that is, to require analogical reasoning.  But the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework is a way of expressing God’s transcendent causality as the source and goal of the acts of creatures within their appropriate sphere of creaturely freedom.  This brings a bit more clarity and sharpness to our thinking, which is of course not an “explanation,” but is more than a mere restatement.

In addition, concerning creaturely freedom, the Thomistic-Aristotelian synthesis emphasizes that no creature has the absolute freedom God enjoys, but rather creatures have certain limited range of powers, dispositions, and capacities of action given to them by God.  Nebuchadnezzar, then, was created with the power and capacity to act as God’s agent of judgment, and he was capable of various dispositions to act or not act.  That God gave Nebuchadnezzar these created powers and capacities, and that God may have influenced (though not determined) Nebuchadnezzar’s disposition to exercise them on a particular occasion, involves both God’s “action” and Nebuchadnezzar’s free agency, and seems consistent with the Biblical text.  I’m not sure why the rubric of Lutheran “hiddenness” is better on these fronts — or even if it is really much different.

 

Categories
Science and Religion

Nagel on Materialism

I mentioned Thomas Nagel in my previous post about Dennett, which reminded me that I had published a review of Nagel’s book Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press 2012) in the Englewood Review of Books a while back.  Here’s my review of Nagel.

It has become fashionable in recent years to assume that all human behaviors, including all concepts of the human “mind,” finally are reducible to biochemistry.  This presents a conundrum for governance, law and policy.  As Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Neuroscience and Society puts it, “[t]he idea that behaviour is determined by physical causes is hard to reconcile with the intuitive notions of free will and moral agency on which our legal systems are based.”[2]  Some “neuroLaw” scholars, such as David Eagleman, Director of the Initiative for Neuroscience and the Law at the Baylor College of Medicine, argue that the legal system should abandon concepts of intentionality and fault, and that the justice system should replace traditional punishments with “prefontal workouts” designed to recondition the brains of lawbreakers.[3]  These neuroLaw scholars represent a species of Darwinist / materialist reductionism that seeks to subsume all notions of morality and ethics within an evolutionary paradigm.[4]

Thomas Nagel, Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University, steps boldly into this fray with his book Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.[5]  Mind & Cosmos is at once a convincing refutation of Darwinian reductionism and a frustrating misstatement of religious / theological alternatives to such reductionism.

On the convincing side, Nagel ably argues that consciousness, cognition and value cannot be adequately accounted for by reductionistic materialism.  Nagel’s basic argument is familiar:  reductive materialism eliminates the epistemic basis for the phenomena of consciousness, cognition and value.  If human beings are nothing but complex gene replicators, there is no reason to think that we possess any capacity to get outside of ourselves and understand the world, beyond what is immediately required for survival.  This would mean, among other things, that the practice of a science that could establish the objective truth of reductive materialism itself would be impossible.[6]  Belief in reductive materialism requires a kind of epistemic realism that, for reductive materialism, must represent merely an epiphenomenal delusion.  And this uncomfortable fact further implies that “[f]rom a Darwinian perspective, our impressions of value, if construed realistically, are completely groundless.”[7]  The “entire elaborate structure of value and morality that is built up … by practical reflection and cultural development” would represent mere adaptations and not necessary truths about the world.[8]

For those versed in the debates between reductive materialists and their interlocutors, these arguments are likely to seem persuasive or unpersuasive depending on prior inclinations.  I find the epistemic argument compelling:  natural selection cares only about survival, not truth.  The retort that an organism with an inaccurate perception of its environment is unlikely to survive is demonstrably false, at least if we understand “accurate” to involve a capacity to see beyond immediate circumstances and to take in the bigger picture.  The fly on my window has no idea that it is sitting on a “window” in a “building” filled with “people” writing “book reviews” and other things on “computers.”  Nor does the fly possess any capacities that would enable it to conduct investigations into these phenomena.  The fly can, of course, sense the surface under its feet, and it can feel the oncoming pressure wave in time to zip off before my copy of Nagel’s book smashes it into mush – that much, and only that much, is required for its survival.  More than that would be inefficient and wasteful, and natural selection abhors wasted energy.  Nevertheless, it is possible to construct just-so stories to explain how perceptual capacities evolved by our hominid predecessors in the crucible of the ancient African savannah have since been exapted for the purpose of higher-order reasoning.  This likely is a debate that can never be resolved without resort to prior assumptions about what is and is not possible – that is, without first assuming the truth or implausibility of materialism.  Still, Nagel does a fine job of presenting the anti-reductionist arguments clearly and concisely.[9]

The most frustrating part of Nagel’s book is his lack of comprehension of traditional theological conceptions of God in relation to creation.  Nagel suggests that “[a]t the outer boundaries of the world, encompassing everything in it, including the law-governed natural order revealed by science, theism places some kind of mind or intention, which is responsible for the physical and the mental character of the universe.”[10]  He argues that for this “theistic” view to work, “the existence and properties of God and therefore of his creation, cannot conceivably be other than they are,” and claims that theists “tend to believe” in this view of God and creation.[11]  Nagel finds this approach unsatisfactory because, among other things, “[i]t amounts to the hypothesis that the highest-order explanation of how things hangs together is of a certain type, namely, intentional or purposive, without having anything more to say about how that intention operates except what is found in the results to be explained.”[12]  Nagel further assumes that theistic accounts of creation must involve Divine “intervention,” for example by “assembling the genetic material that would result eventually in conscious life.”[13]

Nagel’s description of “theism” might apply to some contemporary analytic philosophers and “intelligent design” advocates who try to defend an abstract, deracinated, generic “Designer” apart from the particulars of a Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other traditioned understanding of “God.”  It is not, however, a description of what “God” means in any of the great theological traditions.  God is not the “mind” or “intelligence” at the end of a long string of temporal / physical causes, for God is neither temporal nor physical.  By definition, God is transcendent of creation, not merely another being-in-creation.  To render God as if Godself were just a “first cause” within creation, in fact, would constitute heresy.  Nor does the traditional doctrine of creation require Divine “intervention” to “assemble” the building blocks of life.[14]

It is true that the Abrahamic faiths traditionally understand God to have created the universe ex nihilo.  But it is not as though God were floating in outer space and suddenly decided to flick the pre-big-bang singularity with a finger in order to get things rolling.  Properly understood, creation ex nihilo means that at every moment, the universe’s existence is contingent on God’s loving power and will – it does not even, technically, require a temporal “beginning.”  When classical theologians such as Thomas Aquinas speak of a “first mover,” they mean an a-temporal, eternal source towards which the universe is drawn, not a force in the temporal past that overcame the inertia of static matter.  In fact, the notion of pre-existing static matter contradicts creation ex nihilo.  “The love that fires the Sun,” for Augustine, was a love that ever draws creation into God.[15]

Nor would the Abrahamic faith traditions conceive of God as having “properties” that are concomitant with properties of the physical universe, as Nagel suggests.  In classical Christian theology, God is “simple,” meaning without parts or divisions.  God does not “have” goodness; He is good.  God does not “have” love; He is love.  God does not “have” intelligence and wisdom; He is the Logos.  And God’s goodness, love, wisdom, and will are inseparable and unbreakable.  “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord,” says the shema.[16]  It is therefore improper to speak of the “properties” of God.  It is because God is one and because God transcends all physical “properties” that He can be the creator-God of the Bible and the Qur’an, and not just the Very Powerful Designer of Enlightenment Deism.[17]

Finally, Nagel is only partly correct when he claims that there is “nothing more to say” about God’s intentions for creation except by observing what creation is.  For Christians, Jews and Muslims, observation of creation does tell us some things about God, in particular that He is creative, beautiful, powerful and glorious.[18]  But all of the Abrahamic faiths rely on revelation – on their scriptures, and on God’s actions through his messengers and prophets (and for Christians, in the incarnate Jesus) – to discern more fully God’s purposes for His creation.  The possibility of “revelation,” of course, is one of the big sticking points between materialism and these religious views.

Nagel’s personal preference, as an atheist, is for a sort of process theology of human emergence.  He suggests that human cognition “was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well.  Each of our lives is part of a lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”[19]  This is also a familiar refrain in debates about theology, science, and transcendence, which in contemporary discourse are often heavily influenced by process thought and process theology.[20]  “God” no longer is the transcendent creator of the universe, but rather Godself or God-consciousness or human consciousness is an emergent property within the universe.[21]  Perhaps process thought and process theology represent improvements over the sort of God-of-the-gaps interventionism that Nagel thinks represents the only option for “theists.”  It is less clear, however, whether process models offer a better account than an option that Nagel ignores:  the traditional theological belief that God is the eternal transcendent source and goal of a creation graced with its own integrity – an integrity that makes scientific investigation possible – as a gift of Divine love.

[1] Cf. my article The Problem With NeuroLaw, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2214601.

[2]Martha Farah, “Responsibility and Brain Function,” available at  http://neuroethics.upenn.edu/index.php/penn-neuroethics-briefing/responsibility-a-brain-function

[3] See Daivd Eagleman, Incognito:  The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon 2011).

[4] See, e.g., David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone:  How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Ourselves (Delacorte Press 2007); Michael Graziano, God Soul Mind Brain:  A Scientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World (Leapfrog Press 2010); Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape:  How Science Can Determine Human Values (Free Press 2010).

[5] Thomas Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford University Press 2012).

[6] Id., Chapters 3 and 4.

[7] Id. at 109.

[8] Id.

[9] Even this presentation, however, is marred by Nagel’s sympathy for “intelligent design” theories that posit gaps in natural processes represented by “irreducible complexity” in certain chemical pathways or physical systems.  See id. at 10.  The epistemic argument against reductionist materialism does not require any such Design-in-the-gaps claims, since “consciousness” might transcend the physical without gaps in the physical.

[10] Mind & Cosmos, at 21.

[11] Id. at 21-22.

[12] Id. at 25.

[13] Id. at 59; see also id. at 94 (“for theists there is the intentional alternative:  divine intervention to create life out of the basic material of the world, and perhaps also to guide the process of evolution by natural selection, through the intentional production and preservation of some of the mutations on which natural selection operates along the way.”).

[14] For good discussions of these distinctions, see, e.g., David Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Univ. Notre Dame Press 1993); David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdman’s 2004); Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea:  Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong (Eerdman’s 2010);

[15] See Augustine, Confessions (Oxford Univ. Press 2009); see also Bruce Cockburn, “Lord of the Starfields,” on In the Falling Dark (Remastered, Rounder Records 2009).

[16] Deut. 3:23.

[17] See supra Note 13.

[18] See Psalm 19 (“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”).

[19] Id. at 85.

[20] See, e.g., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy, “Process Thought,” available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/ (last visited February 12, 2013) and “Process Theism,” available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-theism/ (last visited February 12, 2013); The Center for Process Studies website, available at http://www.ctr4process.org/ (last visited February 12, 2013).

[21] See id.

Categories
Science and Religion

Dennett on Bristling

I’ve been reading Daniel Dennett’s latest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back:  The Evolution of Minds.  At the start of the book, Dennett acknowledges that some of his ideas about the mind — in particular, that consciousness is an illusion — are disturbing.  He seeks to disarm what he calls a “bristling” response to these threatening ideas.  A bristling response, he suggests, is a conditioned response rooted in evolution that produces cognitive distortions.  He implies that we should recognize and defuse the bristling response so that we can calmly and rationally evaluate his ideas.

There’s no doubt that immediate emotional reactions such as “bristling” in response to threats are rooted in our evolutionary history.  There’s also no doubt that Dennett’s strategy of pointing out this response among readers who feel threatened by the notion that human consciousness is an illusion reflects a powerful rhetorical strategy.  But Dennett’s suggestion that a person interested in the truth ought to recognize this response and set it aside makes no sense within the framework of his overarching claims.

“Bristling” is pervasive in nature because it works.  Creatures in nature face real threats every day.  A response that puts an organism on high alert and that deters the threat helps the organism survive.  Far from always representing a cognitive distortion, in nature, bristling often is a truthful, adaptive response to real threats.

The notion that consciousness is an illusion —  including, for Dennett, all of our sense of will, intentionality, and moral reasoning — seems like a real threat to human existence.  If everyone truly believed and acted on the belief that there is no truth content to consciousness nothing would prevent power and violence from having the final say.  Basic structures of law and society might fall away.  Bristling here seems like an appropriate response.

But Dennett seems to imply that “bristling” presents cognitive distortions because the response is overdetermined to real threats.  That is certainly correct.  This overdetermination itself likely is adaptive.  Let’s say, for example, that for every twenty “knee-jerk” reactions you have, only one of them responds to a danger of serious injury to your knee.  It seems like you’ve expended wasted energy on nineteen useless knee-jerks.  But the injury to your knee on that one occasion would have been serious, meaning that the injury would have cost you as much or more, perhaps far more, than the energy you spent on the nineteen “false positive” knee-jerks.  On balance, the overdetermination of knee-jerks was relatively efficient because the abundance of caution avoided a serious injury.

No doubt, then, that “bristling” behavior is overdetermined to threats.  The next step in Dennett’s rhetorical move is a suggestion that we sometimes need to exercise a higher level of control over our immediate threat reaction in order to assess the situation rationally.  This kind of rational control allows us to calibrate our knee-jerks and move to a higher level of efficiency.  If we can recognize and avoid the bristling response, we can use our calm, scientific rationality to acknowledge that, in fact, consciousness is an illusion.  Further, if we use that same calm, scientific reasoning, we can show why basic structures of law and society that limit power and violence need not fall away and might even be improved.

The obvious problem here is that Dennett’s metaphysical project precludes any such higher level of rational control.  Rationality is part of consciousness, so in Dennett’s universe “rationality” cannot exist.  You might think you’re exercising rational control over your bristling response, but that, too, is an illusion.  Indeed, your “rational” response to your bristling reaction is merely another adaptive response.  And Dennett’s own rhetorical move of seeking to appease the bristling response through a “friendly” gesture of appealing to reason likewise is yet another merely adaptive response.  It’s either “nothing buttery” all the way down, or something else is going on.

As Thomas Nagel suggests in his review of Dennett’s book,

[t]here is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of science. . . . To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgment that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain.

I’d go further than Nagel here and suggest that there are plenty of truths that science simply cannot explain because the natural sciences are not the only, nor even the most basic, way of understanding truth.  Understanding truth always, necessarily, begins with metaphysics — and, therefore, with theology — whether acknowledged or not.  Dennett assumes a materialist metaphysic with a corresponding (though ultimately incoherent) epistemology and an attendant a-theology, and that, finally, is the rub.

IMG SRC = National Geographic Video; NY Times

Categories
Origen Science and Religion

Origen on Adam: Conclusion

800px-origen-768x911This the final post in my series on Origen and Adam.

Adam and the Rule of Faith

In my first post in this series, I suggested that Origen could help us work through some of the philosophical, theological, and scientific problems associated with traditional Christian theological anthropology’s emphasis on “Adam.”  In a prior post I discussed the philosophical claim.  My second claim about how to read the Biblical creation stories relates closely to the Christological emphasis in my discussion of the first claim.

Origen read all of scripture through the lens of a Rule of Faith centered on Christ.  This is particularly evident in Origen’s treatment of the texts from the creation narratives that we examined above.  In applying this method, Origen correctly relativized the “historical” dimension of the text’s literal sense without denying “historicity” altogether.  Origen suggested that interpreters should examine the text carefully to determine if it contains “impossible” elements that we can conclude are not literally historical.  With the knowledge the modern natural sciences has provided us concerning the natural history of the cosmos and human evolution, together with what we have learned from Biblical scholarship about the construction of these texts, we can continue to make such judgments, which can help us better understand what God intends to communicate to us in and through the text.

Matter Still Matters, But So Does the Ideal

My third claim about the natural sciences also relates to the first two claims.  On the one hand, Origen acknowledges the necessity and reality of “matter.”  If we wish to engage fruitfully with the natural sciences, we must do the same.  That is, we must adopt some form of metaphysical “realism.”[1]  The material world we inhabit is real and it possesses an inherent rationality, stability and order that allows us to investigate its operations and causes and to draw conclusions with reasonable degrees of confidence about subjects such as the evolution of the cosmos and of the creatures of the Earth, including humans.  Yet, contrary to the actual or at least methodological posture of the modern natural sciences, Origen understood that “matter” is a created thing and therefore is not all there is.

In many respects, ironically (and contrary to the claims of some naïve modern Christian apologetics about the Big Bang and creation ex nihilo) the modern natural sciences are agnostic about the eternity of matter.  While mainstream “big bang” cosmology does assert that our universe has a beginning, it also posits a singularity beyond which the concept of “time” is meaningless.[2]  In some respects this is similar to Christian ideas about God’s relationship to time and creation, but the singularity “before” the Big Bang is not a personal being, or any kind of being at all.  The result is that “matter” is all there is, and all there ever “was.” Although there is no Aristotelian unmoved mover causing its eternal motions, there is simply nothing “before” matter, or at least nothing that can be known. Other increasingly popular modern cosmologies entail multiverses and repeat “big bangs” that echo Greek opponents of Aristotle who thought matter and the universe were destroyed and recreated in endlessly recurring cycles. [3]  In contrast, the Christian doctrine of creation, as understood by Origen, insists that matter has a transcendent source in God.  Thus, while this ontology is metaphysically realist, it also draws on idealism, to insist that what is in a sense most real is the transcendent, that is, God.

Indeed, the relationship between the ideal and the actual, or the one and the many, concerning human nature, helps us understand why there could have been an “Adam” of history was neither a perfect superman nor the literal biological progenitor of all anatomically modern humans.  The ideal of Adam preexisted the historical first Adam in the Logos, the person of the Son.  In the incarnate Son, Christ, we see the actualization of the ideal Adam.  Looking back from Christ, we see how the first Adam – whoever that representative person may have been in the flow of human biological evolution and early human history – was broken and flawed and therefore how humanity apart from Christ is broken and flawed.  Looking forward from Christ, we see how humanity can be, is becoming, and will one day be healed.

____________________

[1] For a good discussion of the issues here, see Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology, Vol. 2:  Reality (London:  Bloomsbury T&T Clark 2007).

[2] See “Foundations of Big Bang Cosmology,” NASA, Universe 101, available at http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_concepts.html.  This excellent summary provided by NASA notes that “[i]It is beyond the realm of the Big Bang Model to say what gave rise to the Big Bang. There are a number of speculative theories about this topic, but none of them make realistically testable predictions as of yet.”

[3] See Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End:  The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 2014).

____________________

Series Bibliography

Acts of the Second Council of Constantinople.

Aquinas, Thomas On Kingship, Book 1, trans. Gerald B. Phelan and I.T. Eschmann (Toronto:  The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 1949).

Aristotle, On the Heavens, trans. J.L. Stocks (Oxford:  Clarendon Press 1927), Books I and II.

Balaguer, Mark, “Platonism in Metaphysics“, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition).

Bammel, Caroline P. Hammond, “Adam in Origen,’ in Rowan Williams, ed., The Making of Orthodoxy:  Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, 62-93 (Cambridge:  CUP 1989).

Behr, John, The Mystery of Christ:  Life in Death (Crestwood:  St. Valdimir’s Seminary Press 2006), 90.

Bouteneff, Peter Beginnings:  Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids:  Baker Academic 2008).

— “Christ and Salvation,” in Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokrotoff, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology (Cambridge:  CUP 2008), 94; Timothy

Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene:  40th Anniversary Edition (Oxford:  OUP 2016)

Genetic Jewish Disease Consortium Website, available at http://www.jewishgeneticdiseases.org/jewish-genetic-diseases/.

Graziano, Michael S., God, Soul, Mind, Brain:  A Neuroscientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World (Freedonia:  Leapfrog Press 2010).

Greek text file of Origen from Migne

Jones, Steve, Martin, Robert and Pilbeam, David, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge:  CUP 1996)

Karkainnen, Veli Matti, Creation and Humanity:  A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2015).

Kelsey, David, Eccentric Existence:  A Theological Anthropology, Vol. 1 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox 2009)

McFadyen, Alistair, Bound to Sin:  Abuse, Holocaust and the Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge:  CUP 2000).

McFarland, Ian, “The Fall and Sin,” in John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (Oxford:  OUP 2007)

McGrath, Alister, A Scientific Theology, Vol. 2:  Reality (London:  Bloomsbury T&T Clark 2007).

Migne, Jaques-Paul, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca (Parise:  Imprimerie Catholique  1857), Vol. 11.

NASA, “Foundations of Big Bang Cosmology,” Universe 101.

O’Donovan, Oliver, Finding and Seeking:  Ethics as Theology:  Volume 2 (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2014).

— Self, World and Time:  Volume 1:  Ethics as Theology:  An Introduction (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2013).

— with O’Donovan, Joan Lockwood, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius:  A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 1999).

Origen, Contra Celsus, trans. Frederick Crombie (Buffalo:  Christian Literature Publishing 1884).

—  On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (Notre Dame:  Ave Maria Press 2013).

—  “Homilies on Genesis and Exodus,” in The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation, Vol. 71, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, D.C.:  The Catholic University of America Press (1982).

Philo, On the Eternity of the World, in The Works of Philo, trans. Charles Duke Yonge (London: H.G. Bohn 1854-1890).

Pope Benedict XVI, Great Christian Thinkers:  From the Early Church Through the Middle Ages (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press 2011).

Press, Gerald A., “Plato” and Lloyd P. Gerson, “Plotinus and Neo-Platonism” in Richard H. Popkin, ed., The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York:  Columbia Univ. Press 1999).

Rubenstein, Mary-Jane, Worlds Without End:  The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia Univ. Press 2014).

Runia, David T., Philo and the Church Fathers:  A Collection of Papers, Chapter Six (New York:  E.J. Brill 1995).

Sandel, Michael J., Justice:  What’s the Right Thing to Do (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010).

The Mayo Clinic, “Sickle Cell Anemia,” Causes.

Trigg Wilson, Joseph, Origen (London:  Routledge 2002).

United Nations, Consolidated United Nations Security Council Sanctions List.

Venema, Denis, BioLogos Forum, “Letters to the Duchess.”

von Balthasar, Hans Urs, Origen:  Spirit and Fire, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Washington D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press 1984)

Ware, Timothy, The Orthodox Church (New York:  Penguin Books 1997)

Wolfson, Harry A., “Patristic Arguments Against the Eternity of the World,” Harvard Theological Review 59:4 (Oct. 1966).

 

Categories
Early Christianity Origen Science and Religion

Origen on Adam, Part 4: A Postmodern Christian Platonism?

800px-origen-768x911This is the fourth post in my series about Origen and “Adam.”

A Postmodern Christian Platonism?

In the Introduction to this series I noted the philosophical, critical, and scientific problems with an “Augustinian” view of Adam, the Fall and original sin.  Origen’s approach to the problem can help us navigate through these treacherous shoals.  Philosophically, the ontological idealism suggested by Origen’s selective use of Greek thought can help us articulate how the universal of “human nature” is to some extent corrupted by the sin of the “one man,” Adam.  In response to modern historical criticism, Origen’s hermeneutic centered on the Rule of Faith can help us understand how Paul, and the later Patristic tradition, “read backward” into the Hebrew Scriptures and saw the sign both of universal human depravity and universal human redemption in the “one man,” Adam.  And, scientifically, Origen’s affirmation of “matter” as the created temporal substrate of higher levels of reality located ultimately in the Divine Ideas can help us affirm the scientific evidence concerning development of the human body and genome from our hominid ancestors while refusing the reductionism entailed by modern materialism.

Before unpacking these three claims, it is important to note that there is no suggestion here of a return to the actual details of Origen’s Platonic-Christian synthesis.  The Tradition was right to reject the Gnostic speculations of later Origenism concerning the preexistence of souls, the diversification of souls into humans, angels, demons, and other beings, and the necessary apokatastasis in which all souls return to their original source (different, it should be noted, from the hopeful notion of apokatastasis generally), whether or not Origen actually held those views firmly himself.  The Biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption is vastly different from the neo-Platonic and Gnostic ideas that were at issue in the fourth century debates over Origin’s legacy.  Nevertheless, Origen correctly saw that the Biblical texts that outline this grand narrative extend outward from themselves, out from the gritty history in which they are grounded, and point toward transcendent truths, without losing their grounding in the literal sense, precisely because they are both human and divine texts.  The same is true, Origen saw, in human nature:  what makes us “human” is the donation of matter-with-Logos by the eternal wisdom of the transcendent God, that the fall is a turn away from this transcendent Logos and a dissolution into mere matter, and that our redemption entails our return to participate in God’s transcendent life and to receive his Logos again.

Anthropology, Christology, and Justice

In more contemporary terms, Origen rightly concluded that theological anthropology is really Christology.  Indeed, the link between the theology of creation, anthropology, and Christology is particularly evident in Origen’s first Homily on Genesis.[1]  There Origen linked the “in the beginning” of Genesis 1:1 with the “in the beginning” of John 1 and suggests that “[s]cripture is not speaking here of any temporal beginning, but it says that the heaven and the earth and all things which were made were made ‘in the beginning,” that is, in the Savior.”[2]  Concerning the “image of God” in humanity, he asked rhetorically, “what other image of God is there according to the likeness of whose image man is made, except our Savior who is ‘the firstborn of every creature’ . . . .”[3]

The link between anthropology and Christology helps mediate the philosophical tensions within the doctrine of Adam’s fall and original sin.  Western theology after Augustine and prior to modernity generally drew on juridical and political categories to explain why it is just for God to hold all of humanity to account for Adam’s sin.  At a time when political authority was understood to inhere in the absolute rule of Kings, it made sense to suggest that the King directs the commonweal, for good or ill.[4]  For Western people today who reside in Constitutionally ordered nation states, this kind of analogy does not resonate so deeply.  Nevertheless, we still recognize the justice of some kinds of collective political responsibility even if a sanction produces injustice in individual cases.  For example, if the leader of a modern nation-state engages in acts of genocide, we might expect the United Nations to enact sanctions and perhaps to authorize military intervention, and most people likely would think such action in general is just, even though we know some innocent civilians will be negatively impacted.[5]  But even if we can understand the broader justice of upholding the international rule of law and stopping a genocidal leader, we usually do not think justice has truly been served in the individual circumstance of a civilian who loses his livelihood or life as a result of the sanctions.  The individual innocent civilian did not deserve this fate, even if it was unavoidable to stop the genocide.[6]

At the same time, in our globalized, post-modern context, we have once again become more sensitive to the things that bind us together as human beings beyond juridical categories.  As the Rio Olympics recently reminded us, we can speak of a universal “human spirit” that brings people together in a celebration of excellence that exceeds political, tribal and racial boundaries.  And as terrible events like the mass shooting in Orlando likewise recently reminded us, we can experience depths of grief and loss together that exceed even our hottest culture war issues.  Notwithstanding the claims of “new atheist” leaders like Richard Dawkins and Michael Graziano, who claim (ultimately, in contradiction with each other) that we are nothing but genes or brain chemicals, most people know there is something transcendent and universal about human nature.[7]

Classical Christian theology, including Origen’s theology, reading from the Biblical concepts of the “image of God” and of the universal efficacy of Christ’s death and resurrection, understood this universal to reside ultimately in God’s own “mind.”  Of course, classical Christian theology also emphasized God’s simplicity, so that the use of a term like “mind” here was analogical.  The point is that the source of human nature transcends materiality and indeed that materiality itself derives from this transcendent source.  This is why Christian anthropology ultimately is Christology:  only in Christ, the incarnate Son, do we really see the meaning of “Adam.”  As Orthodox theologian and Patristic scholar John Behr reminds us, “[t]heologically speaking, creation and its history begins with the Passion of the Christ and from this ‘once for all’ work looks backwards and forwards to see everything in this light, making everything new.”[8]

This approach can help us see that the implications of Adam’s sin for universal human nature are not so much about juridical categories of “justice” as they are about ontology.  If Adam’s sin distorts the relationship between the particulars of human experience and the universal ideal form of human nature, and if we each take some of that distortion as derived from Adam, it is easier to see why Adam’s sin impacts us all.  We could even use here an Augustinian-sounding analogy from modern genetics, though we must be careful to emphasize that the “transmission” of original sin is not “biological.”  The human genetic code must conform to certain forms, certain sequences of amino acids, if it is to produce a properly functioning human being.  If the form is disrupted through a mutation, such as a missing or changed amino acid, a disease can result, and that disrupted form can be passed down through generations and affect an entire community of people.  Such is the case, for example, with sickle cell anemia among some people of African ancestry or with “Fragile X Syndrome” and other genetic conditions among people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.[9]  In a roughly analogical way, Adam’s original disruption of human participation in the Divine life distorts the “moral field” of the human life in which we all subsequently find ourselves as the community of humanity.[10]  And Christ, the second Adam, repairs that field and reunites human nature with God.

__________________________

[1] See The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation, Vol. 71, Origen:  Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, D.C.:  The Catholic University of America Press (1982), 47-71.

[2] Ibid., 47

[3] Ibid., 65.

[4] See, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, On Kingship, Book 1, trans. Gerald B. Phelan and I.T. Eschmann (Toronto:  The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 1949), available at http://dhspriory.org/thomas/DeRegno.htm. This statement is admittedly a significant oversimplification of long and complex historical trajectories in both the Christian East and West about the relative authority of Emperors, Princes, and Popes.  See generally Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius:  A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 1999).

[5] For a list of current U.N. sanctions, see Consolidated United Nations Security Council Sanctions List, available at https://www.un.org/sc/suborg/en/sanctions/un-sc-consolidated-list.

[6] For a general discussion of contemporary notions of justice, see Michael J. Sandel, Justice:  What’s the Right Thing to Do (New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010).

[7] See, e.g., Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene:  40th Anniversary Edition (Oxford:  OUP 2016); Michael S. Graziano, God, Soul, Mind, Brain:  A Neuroscientist’s Reflections on the Spirit World (Freedonia:  Leapfrog Press 2010).

[8] Cf. John Behr, The Mystery of Christ:  Life in Death (Crestwood:  St. Valdimir’s Seminary Press 2006), 90.

[9] See The Mayo Clinic, “Sickle Cell Anemia,” Causes, available at http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/sickle-cell-anemia/basics/definition/con-20019348; Genetic Jewish Disease Consortium Website, available at http://www.jewishgeneticdiseases.org/jewish-genetic-diseases/.

[10] For a compelling use of the “moral field” metaphor, see Oliver O’Donovan, Self, World and Time:  Volume 1:  Ethics as Theology:  An Introduction (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2013) and Finding and Seeking:  Ethics as Theology:  Volume 2 (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2014).

Categories
Early Christianity Historical Theology Origen Science and Religion

Origen on Adam, Part 3: Origen on the Bible and Adam

800px-OrigenThis is the third post in my series about Origen and “Adam.”

Origen’s Interpretive Strategies: Impossibilities and “Stumbling Blocks”

Any discussion of Origen’s view of Adam and the Fall must begin with Origen’s strategies for interpreting the Biblical creation narratives.  Origen is often cited, and faulted, for an excessive reliance on fanciful allegorical Biblical interpretation.  But Origen’s method was crafted in significant part because of the challenges the Hebrew scriptures presented to any highly educated Greek Christian in the Second or Third Centuries.  Origen read the Biblical texts carefully and knew, well before modern historical criticism or Darwinian science, that many of the narratives could not constitute literal history.  At the same time, Origen did not simply write off those narratives as merely non-historical.[1]  Instead, Origen suggested that elements of the narratives should be taken as essentially historically accurate, while other elements should be understood as “stumbling blocks” intentionally included by the Holy Spirit.

In On First Principles, for example, Origen states that

If the usefulness of the law and the sequence and case of the narrative were at first sight clearly discernible throughout, we should be unaware that there was anything beyond the obvious meaning for us to understand in the scriptures.  Consequently, the Word of God has arranged for certain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities to be inserted in the midst of the law and the history, in order that we may not be completely drawn away by the sheer attractiveness of the language, and so either reject the true doctrines absolute, on the ground that we learn from the scriptures nothing worthy of God or else by never moving away from the letter fail to learn anything of the more divine element.[2]

These “stumbling-blocks,” Origen said, included things “which did not happen, occasionally something which could not happen, and occasionally something which might have happened but in fact did not.”[3]  In particular, Origen argued that parts of the creation narratives obviously were not literal:  “who is so silly,” he asked, “as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, ‘planted a paradise eastward in Eden,’ and set in it a visible and palpable ‘tree of life,’ of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life; and again that one could partake of ‘good and evil’ by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name?”[4]  Nevertheless, he thought parts of the narratives might still be historically true:  “[s]ometimes a few words are inserted which in the bodily sense are not true, and at other times a greater number.”[5]  Origen never fully articulated a method for separating the historical from the non-historical other than to “carefully investigate how far the literal meaning is true and how far it is impossible” and then to “trace out from the use of similar expressions the meaning, scattered everywhere through the scriptures of that which when taken literally is impossible.”[6]

Adam and Eve as Historical, Or Not?

Although Origen did not regard the “Trees” in the “Garden” as literal things, in On First Principles he did seem to suggest that Adam and Eve were both real individuals and symbolic of larger dimensions of humanity.  For example, in DP IV.III.7, in a complex passage commenting on Paul’s distinction between physical and “spiritual” Israel in 1 Corinthians 15, Origen traces the historical lineage of the Israelites and says Jacob was “born of Isaac, and Isaac descended from Abraham, while all go back to Adam, who the apostle says is Christ . . . .”  Origen then noted that “the origin of all families that are in touch with the God of the whole world began lower down with Christ, who comes next after the God and Father of the whole world and thus is the father of every soul, as Adam is the father of all men.”[7]  Further, Origen suggested, “Eve is interpreted by Paul as referring to the Church [and] it is not surprising (seeing that Cain was born of Eve and all that come after him carry back their descent to Eve that these two should be figures of the Church; for in the higher sense all men take their beginnings from the Church.”[8]  In texts such as these Origen seemed to assume that Adam and Eve were real people even as they symbolize larger truths.

Yet it is unclear whether in these texts Origen was simply reading off the literal sense of the Biblical text without commenting on its historicity.  In other texts, Origen seemeed to limit the historical content of the Biblical references to Adam.  Most notably, in his major apologetic work, Against Celsus, Origen responded to an early philosophical objection against what would seem a forerunner of Augustine’s biologistic view of original sin by noting that the Hebrew term “Adam” is used generically for all of humanity.[9]  Here Origen said that “the subjects of Adam and his son will be philosophically dealt with by those who are aware that in the Hebrew language Adam signifies man; and that in those parts of the narrative which appear to refer to Adam as an individual, Moses is discoursing upon the nature of man in general.”[10]   He concluded that “[f]or in Adam (as the Scripture says) all die, and were condemned in the likeness of Adam’s transgression, the word of God asserting this not so much of one particular individual as of the whole human race.”[11]

Even here, Origen seemed to hedge his bets about the historicity of Adam.  The apparent qualification in the translation quoted above from Contra Celsus that scripture asserts the universality of sin “not so much of one particular individual as of the whole human race” is interesting. This could suggest that the historical reference is real, or probably real, but of secondary importance.  In Migne’s Greek version text, this phrase reads “οὐχ οὕτως περὶ ἑνός τινος ὡς περὶ ὅλου τοῦ γένους” – “truly in this way about anything belonging to the former as about the entire race” (my literal translation).[12]  Whether Origen meant here that the reference to Adam signifies primarily the entire human race and only incidentally a historical man, or that the reference is “truly” only symbolic of the entire human race, is unclear. In any event, as Bouteneff notes, Origen could on different occasions speak of “Adam” both as a generic term for humanity and as an actual person in the genealogical line of Israel.[13]  It is probably best to conclude that Origen saw no reason to think a historical Adam was “impossible” and that therefore that the literal sense should be taken as historical.

A Dual Fall, Or Not

At the same time, in this passage in Contra Celsus Origen also hints at a notion of the human fall that extends beyond the “historical”:

And the expulsion of the man and woman from paradise, and their being clothed with tunics of skins (which God, because of the transgression of men, made for those who had sinned), contain a certain secret and mystical doctrine (far transcending that of Plato) of the souls losing its wings, and being borne downwards to earth, until it can lay hold of some stable resting-place.[14]

References such as this one led many ancient critics, and still convince many modern scholars, to conclude that Origen believed in a two-stage Fall:  a first fall of preexistent souls from paradise and “into” physical bodies, and a second fall of physical “Adam.”[15]  Bouteneff, however, sides with another line of scholarship that views these apparent “stages” of the human fall simply as different modes of discourse through which Origen seeks to explain the spiritual meaning of the diverse Biblical texts.[16]

A full effort at resolving this interpretive disagreement is beyond the scope of this post, but there are passages in On First Principles that could support either or both views.  For example, at one point Origen seems to understand the cycle of fall and return as an allegory of every person’s spiritual journey: “when each one, through participation in Christ in his character of wisdom and knowledge and sanctification, advances and comes to higher degrees of perfection,” God is glorified. [17]   Because God always offers forgiveness, “[a] fall does not therefore involve utter ruin, but a man may retrace his steps and return to his former state and once more set his mind on that which through negligence had slipped from his grasp.”[18]  In other places, though, Origen’s text seems to echo the Platonic mythology more literally.  For example:  “All rational creatures who are incorporeal and invisible, if they become negligent, gradually sink to a lower level and take to themselves bodies suitable to the regions into which they descend; that is to say, first, ethereal bodies, and then aeriel.”[19]

The Importance of “Matter”

One hint at a constructive resolution of the ambiguities in Origen’s views about the Fall might lie in Origen’s lengthy discourse on “matter” in Book IV, Chapter IV of On First Principles, which serves as a summary of the entire treatise.  Origen understood “matter” to be “that substance which is said to underlie bodies.”[20] Origen noted that humans exist bodily in various states, such as “awake or asleep, speaking or silent,” that do not comprise a human person’s “underlying substance.”[21]  The philosophical problem Origen was confronting here is the relationship between the “one” and the “many” (or the “universal” and the “particular”), which is so central Greek thought, and his division between substance and particulars was classically Platonic.[22]  However, in this part of his treatise, Origen also was attempting to show how the Christian doctrine of creation differed from the Aristotelian idea, which may also be present in Plato’s Timaeus, of the eternity of the cosmos.[23]  Origen, like other early Christian writers, sought to counter this reasoning in light of the Biblical revelation about the temporality of the immaterial creation.[24]

Although Origen wanted to deny the eternity of the material cosmos, he recognized that a radical disjunction between God’s eternal being and the purposes of creation – as though at some defined point in time God suddenly decided to create matter – would compromise God’s eternity and simplicity by introducing a temporal sequence into God’s own life.  Origen therefore borrowed another move from Platonism that would become a classically Christian – indeed, eventually an Augustinian – move:  he located the unchangeable substance, the “one,” in the eternal mind of God, and separated it from the created matter that will receive its form.  Here is how Origen summarized his conclusion:

since, then, as we have said, rational nature is changeable and convertible, so of necessity God had foreknowledge of the differences that were to arise among souls or spiritual powers, in order to arrange that each in proportion to its merits might wear a different bodily covering of this or that quality; and so, too, was it necessary for God to make a bodily nature, capable of changing at the Creator’s will, by an alteration of qualities, into everything that circumstances might require.  This nature must needs endure so long as those endure who need it for a covering; and there will always be rational natures who need this bodily covering.[25]

Concerning Adam, in other words, from eternity past God knew Adam would fall, and therefore God created a material body for Adam appropriate to a fallen creature.  While “Adam” is a changeable and imperfect being, God’s intellect and foreknowledge are perfect and unchanging.  Consistent with the “two-stage fall” reading of Origen, then, it is probably true that Origen envisioned the pre-material fall of Adam as an actual event in the ontology of creation, but there is also a sense in which that pre-material ontology of creation for Origen is an ideal in God’s eternal mind rather than a series of events in the “historical” timeline of creation.  The “pre-material” fall therefore was not so much part of a sequence of “historical” events as a trans-historical reality that is manifested in history.  As discussed in my next post, this ontological connection between the trans-historical and the historical ties directly into the relationship between Christology and theological anthropology.

______________________________________

[1] See Bouteneff, Beginnings, 103-107.

[2] Origen, On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (Notre Dame:  Ave Maria Press 2013), IV.II.9.  Following scholarly convention, this text will be referred to hereafter as DP, the initials for the Latin title of the text, De Principiis.  The Section, Chapter and Paragraph numbers to the standard scholarly division of the text will be provided.  Unless otherwise indicated, Butterworth’s translation is from a Greek version of the text.

[3] DP IV.II.9.

[4] DP IV.IV.1.

[5] DP IV.II.9.

[6] DP IV.III.4.

[7] DP IV.III.7.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Origen, Contra Celsus, trans. Frederick Crombie (Buffalo:  Christian Literature Publishing 1884), available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0416.htm, 4:40.  Citations to this text will use the standard scholarly abbreviation C. Cels. and will refer to the standard scholarly section and paragraph divisions.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Jaques-Paul Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca (Parise:  Imprimerie Catholique  1857), Vol. 11, available on Google Books athttps://books.google.com/books?id=qAkRAAAAYAAJ.  A Greek text file from Migne, from which I made my translation, is available at http://khazarzar.skeptik.net/pgm/PG_Migne/Origenes_PG%2011-17/Contra%20Celsum.pdf.  A good article describing Migne’s collection is available on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrologia_Graeca.

[13] Bouteneff, Beginnings, 111.

[14] C. Cels. 4:40.

[15] See Bammel, Caroline P. Hammond, “Adam in Origen,’ in Rowan Williams, ed., The Making of Orthodoxy:  Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, 62-93 (Cambridge:  CUP 1989).

[16] Bouteneff, Beginnings, 108.

[17] DP I.III.8.

[18] Ibid.

[19] DP I.IV.1.  He continues:  “And when they reach the neighborhood of the earth they are enclosed in grosser bodies, and last of all are tied to human flesh.”  Ibid.

[20] DP IV.IV.6.

[21] DP IV.IV.7.

[22] For a discussion of this problem in Platonism generally, see Gerald A. Press, “Plato” and Lloyd P. Gerson, “Plotinus and Neo-Platonism” in Richard H. Popkin, ed., The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York:  Columbia Univ. Press 1999).  For a discussion of the problem of particulars and universals in Platonism, see Balaguer, Mark, “Platonism in Metaphysics”, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition, Sec. 3 (“The One Over Many Argument”), available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism/#3.

[23] See ibid. (noting that “we absolute deny that matter should be called unbegotten or uncreated”).  For Aristotle’s discussion of the eternity of the cosmos see Aristotle, On the Heavens, trans. J.L. Stocks (Oxford:  Clarendon Press 1927), Books I and II, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/heavens.2.ii.html.  The Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, with whose work Origen was well-acquainted, was also very concerned about this question.  See Philo, On the Eternity of the World, in The Works of Philo, trans Charles Duke Yonge (London: H.G. Bohn 1854-1890), available at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book35.html.  For a discussion of the relationship between Origen’s thought and Philo’s, see David T. Runia, Philo and the Church Fathers:  A Collection of Papers, Chapter Six (New York:  E.J. Brill 1995).

[24] See, e.g., Harry A. Wolfson, Patristic Arguments Against the Eternity of the World, Harvard Theological Review 59:4 (Oct. 1966), 351-367.

[25] DP IV.IV.8.

 

 

Categories
Early Christianity Origen Patristics Science and Religion

Origen on Adam, Part 2: Locating Origen’s Views

800px-origen-768x911This is the second post in my series about Origen and “Adam.”

Today Origen is widely recognized in both the Western and Eastern branches of the Church as one of Christianity’s great early thinkers, even if some of the details of his protology and eschatology remain suspect, or at least subject to historical dispute.[1]  However, several problems confront anyone who seeks to understand “Origen’s view” of Adam, sin, and the Fall.

First, like all of the early Church Fathers, Origen did not produce a definitive “systematic theology” treatise.[2]  Origen is, of course, recognized as one of the first “systematic” Christian thinkers because of his effort to produce a sustained, philosophically and Biblically integrated argument in his treatise On First Principles, from which these posts will draw heavily.  Much of what we know today about Origen’s thought, however, is derived from more occasional, less systematic sources, in particular his extensive Biblical commentaries and homilies.  As Peter Bouteneff has argued, Origen’s theology primarily was an exercise in Biblical exegesis in conversation with the Church’s experience with Christ and the Rule of Faith.[3]

A second problem is that the textual tradition for some of Origen’s key writings sometimes is ambiguous.  For some key writings, such as his Commentary on Genesis, only isolated fragments survive.  For other key writings, such as On First Principles, there is a Latin translation by Rufinus that might gloss some potentially heterodox passages, and some Greek fragments preserved in the Philocalia that may or may not always be faithful to the lost original Greek text.[4]

A third problem is a significant reason for the textual issues:  some of Origen’s ideas, which were controversial even in his lifetime, were seemingly anathematized by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 C.E. upon the urging of the Emperor Justinian, about three hundred years after Origen’s death.[5]  The circumstances leading up to the anathemas included numerous intellectual and political disputes and intrigues between “Origenist” and “anti-Origenist” schools that developed after Origen’s death.  There is considerable question today about whether the concepts condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople could really be fairly traceable unalloyed to Origen himself.[6]  The result is that Origen’s intellectual legacy is somewhat obscured.

These three problems suggest that we cannot truly claim to know “what Origen thought” about Adam, sin and the Fall.  We cannot cite Origen as some sort of counter-authority to Augustine, even if an argument from authority in this context could otherwise be valid.  What we can do is peek into the workings of this great early Christian mind for insights that might help us make sense of these questions today.  We’ll start to do that in the next post.

________________

[1] See, e.g., Hans Urs von Balthasar, Origen:  Spirit and Fire, trans. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Washington D.C.: Catholic Univ. of America Press 1984), 1 (stating that “[i]t is all but impossible to overestimate Origen and his importance for the history of Christian thought”); Pope Benedict XVI, Great Christian Thinkers:  From the Early Church Through the Middle Ages (Minneapolis:  Fortress Press 2011), 19-25 (stating that Origen was one of the most “remarkable” and “crucial” figures in the history of Christian thought).

[2] For a good discussion of the nature and sources of Origen’s corpus, see von Balthasar, Origen:  Spirit and Fire, 1-23.

[3] Bouteneff, Beginnings, 94-96.  For a good discussion on debates in contemporary Origen scholarship about how to read Origen, see Wilson, Origen.

[4] von Balthasar, Spirit and Fire, 21-22; Bouteneff, Beginnings, 95.

[5] An English translation of the Acts of the Second Council of Constantinople is available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3812.htm.

[6] For a discussion of this history, see Wilson, Origen, 64-66.

Categories
Historical Theology Origen Patristics Science and Religion

Origen on Adam

800px-origen-768x911This will begin a series of posts on how the 3rd Century theologian Origen might help us think about “Adam.”  The question “who was Adam” presents difficult issues for Christian theology.  Following the lead of St. Augustine, “Western” Christian theology historically has emphasized the implication of each human being in the primordial sin of Adam – that is, Western theological traditions tend toward robust versions of the doctrine of “original sin.”[1]  There are significant philosophical, critical, and scientific problems with this approach.[2]  Philosophically, it is unclear why it is just for God to hold the rest of humanity accountable for Adam’s actions. [3]  Critically, it is unclear that the Hebrew scriptures ever meant to suggest any doctrine of “original sin” or whether the locus classicus for the doctrine in the Pauline New Testament literature was properly translated and understood by Augustine.[4]  Scientifically, it is now clear from various lines of evidence that the population of anatomically modern humans evolved gradually over millions of years from a common ancestor shared with the great apes, and that the present human population could not have genetically derived from a single common ancestral pair.[5]  In other words, a flatly literal “Adam and Eve,” which seems to be required by the Augustinian view, is scientifically impossible.

In response to these concerns, many contemporary theologians suggest that “Eastern” traditions, which are less connected to the “Western” / Augustinian view of original sin, can more easily manage these tensions.[6]  Some of these writers seek to bring Eastern views into conversation with modern liberal or neo-orthodox theology, which tends to emphasize the metaphorical nature of the Biblical creation accounts, and with the trend in recent theology towards social Trinitarianism, which can map onto a social (rather than Western “individualistic”) ontology of what it means to be “human.”[7]

These gestures towards “Eastern” thought are helpful in the sense that they do highlight the “mythic” dimensions of the Biblical creation narratives and the irreducibly social construction of human identity.  They tend, however, towards broad generalizations that often do not account for the more nuanced and complex philosophical matrix that informed many of the Eastern Church Fathers as they thought about creation, humanity, and the Fall.  In this regard, Origen is an interesting figure to study because of the historic anathemas against his supposedly aberrant neo-Platonic views about the pre-existence of souls.[8]  As we shall see, Origen did indeed draw heavily on Platonism, but his views about Adam and the Fall were far more subtle than is often supposed.  Indeed, I will argue that elements of Origen’s views could be useful to a contemporary Christian theology of Adam and original sin.

In my next post, I’ll examine some threshold problems in locating “Origen’s views” about Adam.

____________________________________________

[1] For a good summary of the doctrine and its Augustinian roots, see Ian McFarland, “The Fall and Sin,” in John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology (Oxford:  OUP 2007), 140-157.

[2] For a general discussion of contemporary objections to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin, see Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin:  Abuse, Holocaust and the Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge:  CUP 2000), at pp. 40-41.

[3] Concerning objections to the Augustinian doctrine, see McFarland, “The Fall and Sin.”  For a more in-depth discussion, see David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence:  A Theological Anthropology, Vol. 1 (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox 2009); Veli Matti Karkainnen, Creation and Humanity:  A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Vol. 3 (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans 2015), Chapter 15.

[4] See, e.g., Peter Bouteneff, Beginnings:  Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids:  Baker Academic 2008).

[5] For a general overview of the evidences for human evolution, see Steve Jones, Robert Martin, and David Pilbeam, eds., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge:  CUP 1996).  For a series of articles on why population genetics precludes a single genetic ancestor of all modern humanity, See Dennis Venema, BioLogos Forum,” Letters to the Duchess,” available at http://biologos.org/blogs/dennis-venema-letters-to-the-duchess/series/adam-eve-and-human-population-genetics.

[6] For a general discussion of the “Eastern” view, see Peter Bouteneff, “Christ and Salvation,” in Mary B. Cunningham and Elizabeth Theokrotoff, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology (Cambridge:  CUP 2008), 94; Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York:  Penguin Books 1997), 222-225.

[7] See, e.g., Kelsey, Eccentric Existence; Karkainnen, Creation and Humanity, Chapter 15.

[8] For a discussion of the historical disputes over Origenism, see Joseph Trigg Wilson, Origen (London:  Routledge 2002).

 

Categories
Cosmos Science and Religion Theology

Methodology in Theology and Science: Radical Orthodoxy, Part III

IMG SRC = NASA
But now was turning my desire and will, Even as a wheel that equally is moved, The Love which moves the sun and the other stars. — Dante, Divine Comedy

This is a continuation of my discussion of methodology in theology and science.  Here is Part III of my consideration of Radical Orthodoxy’s contribution to the question.

Cunningham’s reading is powerful and his use of Patristic sources to narrate the Christian vision as it is both protologically and eschatologically centered in Christ is compelling.  There is some ambiguity, however, in the shape Cunningham provides that narrative.  Most of his Patristic sources of Biblical interpretation are Eastern, and most of the contemporary interpreters of those sources upon whom he draws are Eastern Orthodox.[1]  Indeed, he quotes Orthodox scholar Peter Bouteneff, who argues (along with many contemporary historical-critical exegetes of all theological stripes) that “[n]either in Paul nor in the rest of the Bible is there a doctrine of original guilt, wherein all are proleptically guilty in Adam.”[2]  This seems a bit tendentious, as the understanding of “original sin” – and the reception of Augustine, notably in regard to “original sin” – remains one of the key sticking points between the Christian East and West. 

Cunningham makes an oblique reference to this difference in a footnote:  “Yes, in the West, Fathers such as Augustine seem to emphasize the Fall, the advent of evil, and so on.”[3]  However, says Cunningham, “it is important to realize that Augustine, for example, developed his notion of original sin in a very particular context, namely, the Donatist controversy, and the Pelagian one.  So it was to this degree polemical.”[4]  But it is unclear whether this contextualization of Augustine can do all the work Cunningham assigns to it.  As late as 1950, Pope Pius XII’s Encyclical Humani Generis responded to the developing science of human evolution with an insistence on a literal individual Adam, tied to an Augustinian doctrine of original sin:

For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[5]

 Pope Pius seemed to tie this conclusion to what sounds like a fundamentalist-creationist reading of scripture:

To return, however, to the new opinions mentioned above, a number of things are proposed or suggested by some even against the divine authorship of Sacred Scripture. For some go so far as to pervert the sense of the Vatican Council’s definition that God is the author of Holy Scripture, and they put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters. They even wrongly speak of a human sense of the Scriptures, beneath which a divine sense, which they say is the only infallible meaning, lies hidden….. 

Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church’s vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By means of this new exegesis of the Old Testament, which today in the Church is a sealed book, would finally be thrown open to all the faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish, difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning of the Scriptures.[6]

To be sure, the Catholic Catechism after the Second Vatican Council seems to sound a more cautious note concerning the different senses of scripture and its interpretation.[7]  Pope Benedict XVI, in a set of homilies on the Biblical creation texts, agrees with the Patristic sources cited by Cunningham that “the biblical creation narratives represent another way of speaking about reality than that with which we are familiar from physics and biology.”[8]  These texts, Pope Benedict says, “do not depict the process of becoming or the mathematical structure of matter; instead, they say in different ways that there is only one God and that the universe is not the scene of a struggle among dark forces but rather the creation of his Word.”[9]  Concerning “original sin,” Benedict takes a “relational” approach to the doctrine.[10]  For Benedict,

[t]o be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and be for.  But sin means the damaging or destruction of relationality.  Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the human being a god.  Sin is loss of relationship, disturbance of relationship, and therefore it is not restricted to the individual.  When I destroy a relationship then this event – sin – touches the other person involved in the relationship.  Consequently sin is always an offense that touches others, that alters the world and damages it.  To the extent that is true, when the network of human relationships is damaged from the very beginning, then every human being enters into a world that is marked by relational damage.[11]

 This approach to original sin seems a far cry from the seeming Biblical fundamentalism and Augustinian realism of Humani Generis.  Nevertheless, the Catechism continues to affirm that the Fall and original sin have a historical referent in time:  “The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.”[12]  The Catechism further refers to the transmission of original sin by propagation: 

the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.  It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” – a state and not an act.[13]

Thus, it is unclear whether Cunningham’s implicit methodology of out-narrating both the ultra-Darwinists and the creationists succeeds.  Perhaps it succeeds if one opts for an Eastern Orthodox account of the Fall and original sin that draws primarily on some of the Eastern Fathers.  But, it seems, the scientific understanding of biological evolution does, in fact, seem to stand in considerable tension with the Western-Augustinian Christian tradition, as evidenced in documents such as Humani Generis and the Catholic Catechism.

Perhaps, however, another of Cunningham’s comments towards the end of the final chapter of DPI hints at a solution, or at least at a way of managing some of these tensions:  “We all stand before the law; such is the lot of man.”[14]  As Cunningham notes, “even if we know of laws, we don’t think they are the Law but are rather somewhat arbitrary – cultural products, or fruits of evolution, and therefore relative.”[15]  Indeed, “in the Judeo-Christian tradition there was a time before the Law of Moses, a time before the Decalogue.”[16]   Yet, he continues, “from the time of Adam, there was prohibition.”[17]  Perhaps “the Law” is the “missing link” between Origen, Nyssa, and Augustine, the methodological basis for narrating the true harmony of “faith” and “science.”  As Pope Benedict suggests, perhaps the loss of relational friendship occasioned by the Fall is precisely the loss of the Law; and perhaps Christ’s fulfillment of the Law is what enables us to overcome the ban of exclusion from our humanity and recover our participation in the law of love.  “Law” might be the thread by which Christian theology “out-narrates” reductive naturalism in a rich tapestry of human culture that participates in God’s gracious gift of creation and redemption.

 

[1] In particular, Peter Bouteneff, Beginnings:  Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Baker Academic 2008); John Behr, The Mystery of Christ:  Life in Death (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2006); David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdman’s 2004).

[2] Id., at p. 383, quoting Bouteneff, Beginnings, at p. 41.

[3] Id., at p. 513, Note 38.

[4] Id.

[5] Encyclical Humani Generis of the Holy Father Pius XII, August 12, 1950, 37, available at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html.

[6] Id., ¶¶22-23.

[7] See Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶¶101-141. 

[8] Pope Benedict XVI, ‘In the Beginning:’  A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Eerdmans 1990), at p. 25.

[9] Id.

[10] Id., at p. 73.

[11] Id., at p. 73.

[12] Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶390.

[13] Id., ¶404.

[14] DPI, at p. 414.

[15] Id.

[16] Id.

[17] Id.