Jesus Creed Admin: April 2009 Archives

At the Following Christ Conference this last December Francis Collins announced his coming BioLogos website and foundation.  I was not at the conference, but several who were  mentioned it in comments on various posts on this blog, so I've been watching for it.  Yesterday the long anticipated site launched and can be found at The BioLogos Foundation. The site is worth a good and careful look. It is well designed with much information and more to come I'm sure.

But that is not all ... Collins and his associates have also launched a beliefnet blog Science and the Sacred - with a cool masthead (although not quite as nice as the Jesus Creed).

And this leads us to the important question for the day:

Have I been put out of business? Is there any need to continue the science and faith discussion here on the Jesus Creed?

The fourth chapter of Darwin and the Bible: The Cultural Confrontation is a contribution by Martinez Hewlett and Ted Peters entitled The Science of Evolution and the Theology of Creation. Peters is a Lutheran theologian who has written on science and faith while Hewlett is a molecular biologist by training. This chapter rambles though a number of topics providing background that should prove useful to a student who is new to the idea of thinking through these issues.

Hewlett and Peters take a position generally described as theistic evolution.  God as primary cause - the creator - uses secondary causes as his tools of creation. Science investigates and illuminates these secondary causes. Evolutionary theory describes one such secondary cause.

This is a position held with some subtle variations by many, likely most, active Christian scientists, and many Christian theologians - NT Wright among others. Tim Keller is somewhat reserved in his statements - but as far as I can tell his arguments are not against the scientific evidence, but against some expressions of theistic evolution that border on deism. This criticism - that theistic evolution borders on deism, with a god who starts things going and steps aside - is a criticism that must be considered carefully. So the first question to consider is this:

How does theistic evolution or evolutionary creation differ from deism?

Another criticism of evolutionary creation is that it comes close to saying that the world God created was inherently evil, that sin and fallness are part of the natural order.  So a second important question arises.

How does a Christian view of theistic evolution or evolutionary creation differ from the Gnostic view of an inherently evil creation from which we must escape?

A couple of months ago Peter Enns posted on his blog part one of a review and discussion of Kenton Sparks' recent book God's Word in Human Words (GWHW).  Although in writing part one Enns expressed hoped that part two would soon follow, that hope proved vain.  Two months of anticipation followed.  Yesterday however the long awaited post appeared - so today I would like to renew discussion of Sparks book.

God's Word in Human Words is a rather blunt no holds barred discussion of the problems of evangelical biblical scholarship and the need to embrace what is good and true in critical biblical scholarship without fear (no this is not everything - but it is a large fraction).  I read this book within a few days last summer. It is well written and held my interest the whole way.

Kenton Sparks starts with a discussion of epistemology and hermeneutics and then puts before the reader a good selection of the  issues and questions raised by both historical and biblical criticism.  I found these chapters fascinating, but it is not my area of expertise, so I am interested to see how scholars, evangelical or otherwise, might respond to his points.

The remainder of the book describes the problem with traditional evangelical responses to Biblical criticism and lays forth a proposal for a constructive use of scholarship in the context of faith.  Sparks uses the issue of women in ministry to help flesh out some of the details of his approach (Ch. 10 pp. 339-356).  One of the keys to the approach advocated by Sparks is "accommodation."  Read the book - it is a good read, and I expect that we will come back to many of the issues that he raises in future posts.  You can also find audio of a series of lectures given by Sparks at Taylor University in Canada in 2007 here (scroll down the page to find all four lectures). 

The key question of Sparks book is a good one for us to ponder.

What use should evangelical scholars make of critical biblical scholarship - and how should it filter down to the church?

Science and faith - Darwin and the Bible; these topics have excited a great deal of interest in our culture of late - and the spate of books on the topic shows little sign of abating. Several resources have appeared to facilitate discussion in college classrooms.  These books try to look at the issues  objectively - with varying degrees of success.

One recent such book is Darwin and the Bible: The Cultural Confrontation by Richard Robbins and Mark Cohen. This book contains a series of chapters by authors ranging from Steven Jay Gould to Phillip E. Johnson. and aims to structure discussion around the historical, theological,  social, and political aspects of the confrontation between science and religion.

The first chapter of the book, written by Mark Cohen, sets the foundation - describing the need for science; the need for faith - separately (his title).  But before we can discuss science and faith we need to agree on the meaning of the terms. According to Cohen "real science is defined by two central properties. If these conditions aren't met there is no science."

What constitutes science? What makes one theory scientific and another pseudoscience?

With the fourth chapter of Peter Bouteneff's book Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives we come to a rather controversial character, Origen of Alexandria, (ca.185-254) Origen was a prolific Christian writer, thinker, and scholar.  He is purported to have written some 2000-6000 works  (depending how one counts) from commentaries on Genesis and John to his well known texts On First Principles and Against Celsus. His Hexapla contained a comparison of six versions of the Old Testament. Most of his work is lost, and even with that which has survived, the mode of transmission is something of the problem. 

Origen was a thinker and a scholar who wrote from a Christ-centered perspective.  Nonetheless some of his ideas (such as reincarnation) were controversial and he was later found to be heretical. Article XI from the Second Council of Constantinople AD 553 reads: If anyone does not anathematize Arius,... and Origen, together with their impious, godless writings, ... let him be anathema. The history is complicated and the controversy surrounding Origen continued well beyond this Council. Certainly the decree of heresy was not and is not universally affirmed. But because of this controversy many of his works were destroyed or simply not preserved.  Those that were preserved and transmitted may have been altered by supporters or by detractors. This is especially true of his text On First Principles. Nonetheless there is much we can learn from his surviving work.

We discussed the creation narratives in Genesis 1-3 in a series of posts earlier this year.  The questions on the proper interpretation of Genesis don't stop with Genesis 3 however, and I received an e-mail last week with the following...

For many Christians the creation narratives in Genesis 1-2 and the fall in Genesis 3 are key passages in conversations concerning science and faith. The significance of our knowledge of the age of the earth and the theory of...

Several years ago  John B. Cobb Jr. Professor Emeritus of the Claremont School of Theology organized a conference on evolution and religion. This conference eventually gave rise to a book of essays exploring various scientific and philosophical questions: Back...

One of the topics Scot has emphasized of late has been the future of our church and the importance of youth ministry - defined to cover anyone from 12 to 30 or so.  We have been discussing an aspect of...