My next post is up on BioLogos: Humanity as and in Creation.
Category: Science & Technology
On Science and the Sacred, John Wesley Wright has been reviewing Conor Cunningham’s book Darwin’s Pious Idea. Here is part of Wright’s excellent summary:
Cunningham argues that to remain science, science must remain empirical, not metaphysical. Science will not bear the weight of explaining all existence without collapsing in on itself in irrationality. Science must remain open to other, more basic realms of rationality; it cannot offer an account of all existence. If science attempts to become a theory of everything, it ironically loses the very matter that it seeks to investigate – and the reason for doing science and even the scientist herself! Here is where the paradox enters: such a reductive naturalism ultimately shows that in itself, matter is literally nothing. Therefore reductive naturalism points past itself to the Christian understanding of creation ex nihilo. Ironically, the new atheists point to God, the Creator of all that is from nothing.
Here is TG Darkly Podcast #3: God’s Immanence.
This podcast was prepared for my God in Creation class.
You can listen to the podcast using the link below or download the file.
Categories
The Human Microbiota
There’s an interesting article in Nature on the human microbiota — “the vast population of microorganisms that live in and on the human body.” I’m not sure I can think of a theological angle at the moment, but this description is oddly compelling:
An infant’s first exposure to microbes is at birth, as it slides out of the sterile womb, slurping up and smearing itself with its mother’s vaginal fluids and faeces. From then on, life is one long microbial onslaught. New bacteria, viruses and fungi colonize every exposed organ — skin, eyes, lungs, gastrointestinal (GI) tract.
Makes you think a bit differently about that face in the mirror: a walking, talking universe of germs. Yum!
In my Reading the New Testament Missionally class at Biblical Seminary, our final project was to write a paper on this topic: “Explain the mission of God in the Bible as you understand it on the basis of the New Testament. Who or what is sent by whom, as a result of what causes, and to achieve what ends? What are the main implications of this divine missional story for your life and for the life of the Christian church in the early 21st century?”
Here is Part II of my effort.
My statement of mission is this: The mission of God is to be God for the world God created. God is “God for the world God created” by the desire of the Father, the sending and suffering of the Son, and the ministry of the Spirit. The mission of the Church is to incarnate God’s life in the world in anticipation of the age to come, when God will be all in all.
II. The Fall; or, The Great Turning
In the five or six-act structure of recent narrative theology, the second act is the pathetic crisis of the Fall.[1] As the curtain rises on this second Act, God has created the world as “good,” and has installed human beings, the man and the woman, as his vice-regents over creation, in the “garden” of Eden.[2] The man and the woman appear to have everything they need for fellowship with each other and with God.[3] The man and the woman, however, rebel against God’s command and eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”[4] They are cast out of the garden, the ground and humanity are cursed, and the way back into the garden is barred by angelic beings “and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”[5]
The prefatory hymn of John 1 does not refer directly to this “Fall” event, but simply assumes the current state of “darkness.”[6] Paul, however, connects Adam’s sin to the “death” of all humanity and to the “groaning” of all creation.[7] For Paul, Adam, the sinner, is the prototypical “first” humanity, while Christ, the perfect redeemer, is the prototypical “second” humanity.
The Fall is the lynchpin of classical Augustinian theology. For much of Christian history, it was assumed that this was a “literal” event in human history – that the first two human beings, Adam and Eve, lived in a paradisiacal state from which they “fell.”[8] If the Western Patristic or Scholastic Catholic divines or Reformers were to speak in terms of the “mission of God,” they would have construed it as a mission to restore the paradise lost by Adam’s sin.[9]
By the nineteenth century, however, it had already begun to become evident that the Biblical story of the “Fall” cannot be simply and literally historical. Today, it has become clear beyond any reasonable doubt that the created world, including human beings, developed through an evolutionary process that involved billions of years of struggle and death.[10] Narrative theology, for all its merits, simply sidesteps this problem. What can we make of the dramatic hinge of the “Fall” in a post-scientific age? How should the information we are able to glean about the created world influence the story we tell?
This is an enormous question, which cannot be resolved within the scope of this paper, and probably cannot be definitively resolved at all.[11] I’d like to suggest, however, that the “Fall” cannot be understood as somehow temporarily thwarting God’s original purposes for creation. Rather, the “Fall” represents a misdirection of human will and desire that God had already taken account of when He created the universe, the consequences of which God Himself entered into through the cross.
God evidently designed a dynamic process of physical death and decay into the fabric of the created order as a means of producing life. There is no possibility of the creation we enjoy today without an unimaginably deep history of evolutionary change. And there is no evolutionary change – no possibility of “life” as we know it – without entropy and death. The physical constraints human beings face, therefore, are not the proximate result of “Adam’s” sin, but rather are a necessary function of the created world. In this sense, the creation itself, before humanity comes onto the scene, already bore a “cruciform” shape.[12]
But humans are more than physical beings.[13] Apparently we are the only creatures on the earth who possess the “spiritual” capacity to relate to God, to each other, and to the created world itself, in a manner somehow analogous to the relationality of God.[14] We alone are created in God’s image.[15] The primordial human rebellion against God – the “Fall” – represents our existential experience of the brokenness of this relationality as well as an ontological fissure that somehow transcends the empirically observable universe. We know that in some sense we are unique, that in some sense we are “free,” that in some sense we are made for union with God, each other, and the world. We sense that our lives should reflect the mutuality, coinherence and perichoretic fellowship of God’s Triune life, from which we were born. Yet we each experience the pain and loneliness of desires that are turned in on ourselves and away from God, others and the world. To be left to ourselves, alone, is the heart of what it means to be “fallen.”[16]
If the term “Fall” were not so entrenched, I might prefer a narrative header such as “The Great Turning.” In fact, I think this is consistent with some Eastern Patristic and contemporary Eastern Orthodox thought about sin and the Fall. In On the Incarnation, for example, Ireneaus envisioned pre-Fall Adam as inherently mortal, and Athanasius pictured Adam and the entire pre-lapsarian creation as an infant that needed to grow and develop. [17] Contemporary Orthodox theology likewise understands original sin less as an Augustinian inherited depravity and more as a continuing misdirection of the will.[18]
God created human beings with a capacity to orient their relational capacities towards God, the each other, and the creation. Humans were made to participate in the life of God. But we turned and turn, primordially and individually, in a different direction, inwards, into our selves, and away from God. The “mission” of God is to draw us back towards Himself, back into His life, and thereby to “complete” – in some sense with us and through us as well as in us and upon us – the work and mandate of creation.[19] God accomplishes this mission through His own suffering in the crucifixion of the incarnate Son, in His recreation of all things, begun with the Resurrection of the incarnate Son, and in his final victory over evil and injustice, revealed fully at the Son’s return.[20] In this way, the “mission” of God is a mission “for the world” – the second major phrase in my definition.
[1] See Craig G. Bartholomew and Michael Goheen, The Drama of Scripture (Baker Academic 2004), at p. 27.
[2] Gen. 1-2.
[3] This is symbolized beautifully in Gen. 2:25: “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
[4] Gen. 2:15-17.
[5] Gen. 3:22-24.
[6] John 1:5.
[7] Romans 5:12-20; 1 Corinthians 15:12-26.
[8] See, e.g., Milton’s classic allegory Paradise Lost.
[9] The Eastern tradition does not, in contrast, tend to speak in such terms. See James R. Payton, Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition (IVP Academic 2007). In many ways, the Eastern tradition’s notion that humanity has become misdirected and must be directed back towards union with God (“theosis”) informs the re-reading of the Western tradition that I am to some extent attempting in this paper.
[10] For a general discussion of the scientific evidence, see Darrell Falk, Coming to Peace With Science: Bridging the World Between Faith and Biology (InterVarsity Press 2004); Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press 2007).
[11] For a discussion of some of the issues, see R.J. Berry and T.A. Noble, Darwin, Creation and the Fall: Theological Challenges (InterVarsity Press 2009).
[12] See George L. Murphy, The Cosmos in Light of the Cross (Continuum 2003).
[13] For a discussion of theological anthropology and the problem of the “mind” or the “soul,” see David W. Opderbeck, A Critically Realist Theology of Law, Neurobiology and the Soul, Social Science Research Network Working Paper, available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1594907.
[14] Many animals possess significant capacities for empathy and relationality, but there seems to be something unique about human beings in this regard. See Wentzel Van Huyssteen, Alone in the World?: Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology (Eerdmans 2006).
[15] Gen. 1;2.
[16] I am obviously drawing here on the Barthian and “neo-orthodox” tradition concerning the human condition and the “fall.” See, e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man: A Christian Interpretation (Westminster John Knox 1996). At this point in my thinking about this question, however, I would depart from neo-orthodoxy by suggesting that the “Fall” must have been a “real” primordial event. My sense of hermeneutical consistency and the integrity of my broadly Reformed theological outlook seem to require a “historical” fall with ontological consequences of some sort. But perhaps the “flaming sword flashing back and forth” that guards the “garden” represents an epistemological as well as an existential barrier against recovering the history “behind” the Gen. 1-4 narratives. For a preliminary effort to sketch out a “realist” view of the fall that is also scientifically literate, see my essay A Historical Adam? on the BioLogos website, available at http://biologos.org/blog/a-historical-adam/.
[17] See supra Note 15.
[18] See supra Note 25.
[19] This description of the “mission” of God also obviously resonates with Eastern Orthodox theology, particularly with the notion of theosis. See supra Note 25.
[20] I am drawing here from Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Fortress Press 1993). Bryan Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat also draw heavily on the suffering of God in relation to the mission of God and the praxis of the Church in Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire (IVP Academic 2004). The possibility of Divine passibility and suffering, of course, is a controversial one in contemporary theology, as it seems to run afoul of orthodoxy with respect to Divine impassibility and simplicity. See, e.g., Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, at pp. 155-168. At this point in my own reflection and study, I confess that I am not yet fully able to navigate these difficult waters. I do agree with Hart that “[a] God who can become, who can acquire determinations, who has his future as potential and realizes his future through ‘dramatic self-transcendence,’ is not God but a god, a mere supreme being; and regarding the gods, Christianity has always quite properly been identified as atheism.” Ibid., at p. 166. I also like Hart’s manner of turning Divine impassibility into something of awe and beauty: “God’s impassibility is the utter fullness of an infinite dynamism, the absolutely complete and replete generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit from the Father, the infinite ‘drama’ of God’s joyous act of self-outpouring — which is his being as God.” Ibid. at p. 167. For this reason, I say that God’s “mission” is to “be” God, and not to “become” God.
Here is some material from a paper I had to write in my Reading the New Testament Missionally class. The subject of the paper is “How do you understand the mission of Jesus in his historical context and the relationship of Jesus’ mission to the mission of Paul and the early church?”
I. Introduction
The mission of Jesus, Paul, and the early church are about the same thing: God’s eschatological redemption of the world. Each of these actors play different, but complementary, roles in God’s mission.
II. Background: the Mission of God
Before we consider the specific mission of Jesus, Paul, and the early church, we must first briefly explore the missio Dei in which these actors participate.
Often we think of God’s mission in the world as one of rescue or repair. In this view, the original good creation was God’s “Plan A,” and human sin required a “Plan B,” the sending of Christ to save a few from judgment. This view of God’s plan for creation is profoundly mistaken. Jesus said that God loved him “before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24), and texts such as Ephesians 1:4 tell us that God “chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world. . . .” God’s redemptive mission in Christ and in the Church, then, was “Plan A.” Redemption was God’s plan from eternity past.
The story of God’s mission is ultimately the story of the eternal life of the Triune God.[1] As David Bosh notes, “[m]ission [is] understood as being derived from the very nature of God. It [is] thus put in the context of the doctrine of the Trinity, not of ecclesiology or soteriology.”[2] Creation results from the abundance and generosity of the perichoretic fellowship of Father, Son and Spirit.
The God who created knew beforehand that the creation would experience human sin and suffering, and that His act of creation therefore would also entail an act of sending and redemption. We cannot know for certain why God chose to create in light of this knowledge. Perhaps St. Augustine was right — perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds, and it is better for God to have created, with the result of some ultimate good, than not to have created at all.[3] Or perhaps Augustine’s classical theodicy should be tempered with the fact that God Himself enters into the suffering of creation through the cross.[4]
The problem of evil and the theodicy of creation remain mysteries.[5] A Trinitarian theology of creation and mission, however, provides a helpful glimpse into these often overwhelming existential questions. The immanent Trinity — the inner-Trinitarian relations of the Divine Persons — is also the economic Trinity — the actions of the Divine Persons with respect to creation and redemption.[6] God’s mission in creation is the extension of the shalom of the perichoretic Trinitarian dance to all of creation.
[1] In fact, if we were to follow the “Plan B” logic through the entire Biblical narrative, we would presently be in something like “Plan I,” which would encompass creation, fall, flood, Babel, Israel under Moses, Israel under the judges, Israel under the kings, and Israel in exile. It would seem that God continually engages in failed experiments, which would leave little hope for the success of the “Church Age” or even for the return of Christ.
[2] David Bosh, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Orbis 1991).
[3] See, e.g., Augustine’s exploration of this theme in The City of God.
[4] See Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: the Cross of Christ as the Foundation of Criticism and Christian Theology (Fortress Press 1993).
[5] For an excellent exploration of the problem of evil, see Nigel Goring Wright, A Theology of the Dark Side (InterVarsity 2003). Nigel Wright leans towards Karl Barth’s understanding of “evil” as “nothingness,” which seems fruitful to me.
[6] For a discussion of this formulation, referred to as “Rahner’s Rule” after Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, see Stanley Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God (Fortress Press 2004).
A new genetic study confirms that humans and Neanderthals interbred. This is fascinating in its own right, and truly intriguing with respect to the faith-and-science connection.
Last week we held the Religious Legal Theory: The State of the Field conference at the law school. I’m incredibly gratified at how the conference went. Organizing this conference was, in fact, one of the most satisfying projects of my professional career.
This was a unique conference in that we focused on legal theory from an ecumenically religious perspective. The keynote speakers included Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars, and presenters included Catholics, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, Mormons, Buddhists, and others. None of the speakers or presenters minimized their own faith distinctives — indeed, many of the presentations were explicitly theological — and yet we found common ground in the desire to develop legal theory that acknowledges, celebrates, and integrates religious distinctives. It was a thrill to see all these diverse scholars interacting with each other in peace. This mood was summarized nicely by a scripture I read at the start of the conference’s second day: And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah: “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.” (Zech. 7:8-10).
In our Intro to the Christian Tradition course at Biblical Seminary, we’re reading Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon’s lovely little book Lord Teach Us: the Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life. Following are some portions of the journal I’m required to keep for the course as we read this book.
It’s somehow embedded in my spiritual consciousness that the “Christian life” is primarily an exercise in avoiding dangers. My posture, unconsciously, often has been one of defensiveness and fear. “We” need to be on constant vigil against moral laxity, heresy, “liberalism,” “secular humanism,” and other threats. If there were something like the “Homeland Security Threat Meter” for spiritual things, in many of the settings in which I’ve lived, it would constantly have been on “Red.”
Hauerwas and Willimon present instead a faith that recognizes its own weaknesses. As they note at the start of the Introduction, “[b]ecause of the nature of the Christian faith, all of us, no matter how long we have been around Jesus, are always learning anew how to ask the right questions. No one of us ever becomes so faithful, so bold in our discipleship, that we become experts in being Christian.” They are able to make such a statement because they conceive of the faith “not primarily as a set of doctrines, a volunteer organization, or a list of appropriate behaviors.” It is rather “a journey of a people.” To be Christian, they say, “is to have been drafted to be part of an adventure, a journey called God’s kingdom. Being part of this adventure frees us from the terrors that would enslave our lives if were not part of the journey.”
Why is it that we often unconsciously or consciously think of the Christian faith as something that brings slavery to terror? My Christian commitment was in some important ways born of fear – the fear of Hell. As a young teenager, fire and brimstone preaching motivated me to think, do and say the right things. We lived under the cloud of the Great Tribulation, the scourge of Antichrist followed by eternal flames, from which only proper faith in Christ could rescue us. The vast majority of the human race was on a fast train to Hell, and only a small remnant of us who got things just right would escape.
Thankfully, there were other influences on my faith besides those fire and brimstone prophecy preachers. There were youth leaders, college professors, family members and friends who really did catch the “adventure” of Christian faith. And there was a kernel of truth in the pulpit thumping – Jesus himself, after all, was the source of the imagery of sheep and goats, good soil and rocky soil, Abraham’s bosom and Gehenna.
Yet, even now, it’s hard for me to fully assimilate the truth that the Christian faith is fundamentally “a prayer that [we] must learn to pray” rather than “a set of beliefs.” I’m baffled sometimes when I meet former Roman Catholics who have gotten “saved” and joined evangelical churches. Their testimonies uniformly concern freedom and security: they traded what they perceived as a rigid system of doctrines, good works, guilt and penances, for the blessed assurance of simple faith in God’s grace. I suppose they just haven’t realized that in many of our evangelical churches, particularly for those of us who have grown up in the church, the system of doctrines, works, guilt and penances is just as rigid as it is in any version of cultural Catholicism – and perhaps it’s more insidious because it’s under the surface. Scratch the skin of many life-long evangelicals and you’ll find the same iron blood as that which flows through the most traditional of Catholics.
So, when I read Haurewas and Willimon’s meditation on God as “Our Father,” it banishes some of those old demons and encourages the whisperings of better angels: “It is comforting to know that even though you don’t always feel like a Christian, though you do not always act like a Christian, much less believe like a Christian, your relationship as a friend of God is not based on what you have felt, done, or believed. Rather, you are a friend with God because of God’s choice of you in Jesus through the church.”
Indeed! Yet – “through the church” . . . . This is our fundamental weakness as “independent” evangelical churches. How do my Catholic friends who embrace and live their Catholic identities know they are accepted by God? Why don’t they suffer from the same guilt and fears as those ex-Catholics I know who left that faith for evangelicalism (or, more likely, for no faith at all)?
I think it’s because they’ve learned to receive the blessing of the Church. They’ve learned to recognize that their friendship with God is far bigger than their own personal strengths and weaknesses. Sure, they realize the need for a vibrantly personal faith, but it’s a faith that’s far more than “personal,” and that therefore is far stronger than their personal weaknesses. And here, they can more readily grasp the significance of Hauerwas and Willimon’s thoughts on the fact that “Our Father” is “in Heaven”:
“You may not be good with words. Don’t worry. George Herbert, St. Francis, and Teresa of Avila pray with you. You may not have your head straight on Christian doctrine. Go ahead and pray with confidence. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Georgia Harkness pray with you. You may find it difficult to make time to pray. Pray as often as you can. Your prayer joins those already in progress by Dietrcih Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day.”
We may demur for any number of reasons to the authority of Popes and Cardinals or Metropolitans. Maybe those reasons are good ones rooted in the Reformation, or maybe at this point they’re still born of the fear of change, or maybe there’s some of both at work. Regardless, it’s vital that our “personal relationship with Christ” be far more than “personal.” We thrive as we’re ingrafted onto the vine of Christ, rooted in soil that is thousands of years deep, in communion with branches spread across time, place and history.
In my “Intro to the Christian Tradition” class at Biblical Seminary, we’re discussing James Payton’s Light from the Christian East: An Introduction to the Orthodox Tradition. In Chapter 4, Payton describes how Eastern Orthodox Christianity historically has emphasized God’s ineffability to a greater degree than Western Christianity. As a result, Eastern Orthodox theology tends to stress “apophatic” or “negative” theology — speaking about God primarily by emphasizing what God is not like — over “cataphatic” or “positive” theology. Here was one of our classroom discussion questions and my response:
1. How do you respond to Orthodox theology’s understanding that speaking of God is “a hazardous enterprise,” and that language is unable to fully convey God’s nature? (p. 59)
This is a very helpful reminder for those of us raised in evangelical independent church traditions.
In some circles, I think our ways of speaking about God have become “scholastic.” We are very keen to make logical arguments brimming with “evidence that demands a verdict.” Our in-house arguments tend to focus on the precise meanings of terms in carefully drafted “Statements of Faith.” These arguments and Statements may have a place, but it’s helpful to remember that they don’t really begin to grasp or contain God. I believe God is concerned with our fidelity to Him, and that this involves the transformation of our minds and the ability to “teach sound doctrine.” However, God is so far beyond our ability to articulate who He is that I think we dishonor Him when we make doctrinal precision the sine qua non of the Christian life. In fact, I agree with John Franke’s book “Manifold Witness” that some degree of difference in doctrinal articulation is part of God’s design for the Church. This need not be disturbing when begin to realize that God truly is ineffable.
It’s also helpful to remember that we cannot fully explain God’s ways. Often, we display enormous confidence in our own ability to discern exactly what God is doing in the world. Perhaps we assume automatically that AIDS, or genocide, or a financial crisis or natural disaster, is a clear message from God about someone else’s sin. Perhaps we assume equally quickly that our own “success” is evidence of God’s blessing. It’s true, of course, that God does discipline and punish sin and that we do experience His blessing as we follow Him. Yet, it’s helpful to remember that our primary posture must be one of humble, kneeling humility and gratitude. In fact, one of the blessings of faith, I think, is the ability to leave such tangles in God’s hands. If His love, justice and grace ultimately are beyond us, it is not for us to circumscribe how and when He must act with regard to others. It is for us simply to seek to be faithful with what He has given to us.