{"id":2353,"date":"2012-01-27T12:01:04","date_gmt":"2012-01-27T19:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2353"},"modified":"2012-01-27T12:01:04","modified_gmt":"2012-01-27T19:01:04","slug":"science-and-the-virgin-birth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2012\/01\/27\/science-and-the-virgin-birth\/","title":{"rendered":"Science and the Virgin Birth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>RJS discusses John Polkinghorne’s take on the virgin birth over at Jesus Creed<\/a>.\u00a0 Polkinghorne seems to ground his belief in the virgin birth in its narratival coherence.\u00a0 That’s not necessarily a bad reason, but it seems to me to highlight a problem in some ways of speaking about faith and science.\u00a0 The problem is the reluctance to prioritize theology as our primary grammar of knowledge.<\/p>\n

The basic reason to insist on the \u201cliteral\u201d nature of the virgin birth is theological.\u00a0 The virgin birth was important to early Christological debates through which the nature of the incarnate Christ as fully human and fully divine was clarified.\u00a0 In particular, Christ is not merely a created being (Arianism) \u2014 he is the preexistent Son incarnate.\u00a0 The virgin birth is also important particularly in Catholic theology in that Christ could be fully human and yet without inherited original sin.\u00a0 Even without that latter point, however, it remains central to Chalcedonian (i.e. historically orthodox) Christology.<\/p>\n

I understand the intellectual disaster “presuppositional” apologetic thinking has wrought on the ability to integrate Christian faith and the natural sciences.\u00a0 “It all depends on your starting point” is the cornerstone of young earth creationism — if you start from the presupposition that the Bible is scientifically inerrant and literal, you end up (probably) with a young earth and so-on.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, there is the germ of a correct instinct here:\u00a0 Christian thought is “faith seeking understanding.”\u00a0 Faith in the God revealed in Jesus Christ comes first, and all else follows from that — including how we think about things like scientific laws and divine action \/ miracles.<\/p>\n

The fundamental problem with faith-science “warfare” postures such as YECism isn’t the priority of faith, it’s the adoption of bad theology that really belies faith — a theology that prioritizes science and rationalism and essentially demeans the incarnation.<\/p>\n

But IMHO all Christians who are serious about thinking Christianly should hold Chalcedonian Christology (the shape of it at least, if not the actual letter), as well as a Nicene perspective on the Trinity, as the basic well from which all else flows.\u00a0 The Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection comprise the historic center of our faith.\u00a0 We are perfectly justified in holding to the “literal” nature of the virgin birth simply because it is basic to the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RJS discusses John Polkinghorne’s take on the virgin birth over at Jesus Creed.\u00a0 Polkinghorne seems to ground his belief in the virgin birth in its narratival coherence.\u00a0 That’s not necessarily a bad reason, but it seems to me to highlight a problem in some ways of speaking about faith and science.\u00a0 The problem is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[50,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-and-religion","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-BX","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}