Undeception

My friend Cliff Martin has written one of the best, most concise descriptions of the nature and purpose of the Bible that I have ever had the privilege of reading. He also makes some interesting remarks about the usefulness and validity of orthodoxy, something I’ve discussed here and there on this blog.

I strongly suggest that you go over to Outside the Box and read it. But in case you’re too lazy, and because it so well expresses my own current thoughts, I’m going to reproduce a substantial part of it right here.

My friends who read the Bible as if it were the very inspired words of God see themselves as standing on the solid high ground of Fundamentalism, and see me as skidding down the slippery slope of that dreaded disease of Liberalism.

My detractors consider their beliefs to be orthodox, and mine to be aberrant. They are correct, of course, if by orthodox, they mean “traditionally accepted”. But orthodox (ortho = right, doxa = opinion) simply means “the correct view.” To claim that only a verbally inspired–inerrant–infallible–literalist view of Scripture is orthodox involves a good deal of presupposition. That is, it must be correct before it can be truly orthodox.

What if the correct view of Scripture is that it is not the inerrant, verbally inspired “Word of God”? What if the orthodox, correct view, is that it is an accurate journal of an historic people of faith, written by human beings, subject to their errors and misconceptions, but recording for our benefit their quest to know the Living God? If that is the case, then we should expect to find within its pages a rich heritage of growing, developing understandings about God; but we should also expect to find mistakes, discrepancies, contradictions, and a variety of other inaccuracies. And this is exactly what we do find!

Perhaps it is time for those of us with a less rigid view of the Bible to boldly declare our view to be orthodox! If my view is, in fact, more orthodox (as I believe it is!) then the less orthodox view of Inerrancy is both dangerous and misleading. This, I believe, is the case.

Inerrancy leads to distortions of the character of God. Sometimes, horrendous distortions. A few examples should suffice: In an inerrant Bible, God becomes one who endorses the practice of selling one’s daughters as sex-slaves (Exodus 21:7-11). The God of the Inerrantist commands that children who sass or stubbornly disobey their parents are to be killed for their transgressions (Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21). If God were speaking through Moses in the pages of Numbers 31:9-18, then God followed the pattern of many military conquerors, rewarding soldiers with virgins for their sexual indulgence (or please, Inerrantist, explain what else is going on in these verses!). The God of the Inerrantist was, on occasion, confused about biology, as when he identified rabbits as ruminants in Deuteronomy 14:7. Furthermore, an Inerrantist must view God as sometimes raging out-of-control, one who had to be talked out of venting his rage upon the Israelite nation by the cooler-headed Moses (Exodus 32:7-14). This list could be expanded. We haven’t even ventured beyond the first five books! But my point should be clear by now. Inerrancy is dangerous to a healthy view of God and his character. It leads to theological confusion and distortion.

On the other hand, if we understand these stories to be of human origin, expressing the views of Moses and his contemporaries, we understand these misconceptions to reflect an understanding of God in its infancy; we can excuse Moses as a human being who was in the process of getting to know his Creator, and who was inspired to record what he was learning, complete with theological misconceptions and factual errors.

There is much more in the original post, and he asks some good questions at the end. Do check it out!

Last Sunday night, our church hosted a Reformation Party for the kids. It was sort of a Halloweenish deal, with lots of games and candy, and the kids were encouraged to dress up in Reformation-era costumes. My son won the prize for his age group wearing a Martin Luther costume my mother made for him.

The reason the Reformation Party was scheduled for Halloween week is quite natural: October 31st is not only Halloween but also Reformation Day, the day in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences to the door of the Wittenburg church, launching the Reformation. When I found out about the party, I good-naturedly smiled and rolled my eyes that our proudly Protestant church would put this on. I am not near so proud of the Reformation as some, and haven’t held a particularly high regard for Luther since undergraduate school. He was a crass and divisive figure, and as such has set the tone for the fractious nature of Protestantism. Aside from disagreeing with Luther’s critiques of some of the Church’s doctrine and practices, the Church also feared that delivering the Scriptures into the hands of non-clergy would result in a myriad competing theologies based upon a plethora of interpretations of Sacred Scripture. In this, they were absolutely correct.

Indeed, I have said on many occasions that I have more sympathy for the Catholic perspective than a lot of my Protestant brothers and sisters do. But Sunday night as my blindfolded son groped around in an attempt to “pin the Ninety-Five Theses on the Wittenberg door”, I felt more of a kinship with Martin Luther than ever before.

As much as they look up to Martin Luther’s courage in standing against a stalwart establishment intent on preserving what it believed was the very truth of God, the affinity of evangelicals with the Church of Rome is striking. It is true that the list of things they require “good” Christians to be in lockstep about is a different, much smaller list than that of the Church. But Luther’s dissent sprang from his conviction that our theology must be based upon Scripture correctly interpreted, no matter whose interpretation might be ousted as a result.

This last week I have had more conversations than ever with friends concerned about my rejection of inerrancy and the reading of Genesis as literal history. Some of my friends’ comments have had an adversarial bent, and I have actually undergone something reminiscent of excommunication by one of them that I’ve known the longest. No, they don’t want to burn me at the stake, but their indignation at my rejection of their interpretation is not at all dissimilar at its source. When I look at the tight formation of the Reformed system within Calvin’s lifetime and the unwritten list of interpretations thought to be untouchable by the evangelical community now centuries later, it seems that Protestantism never did fully embrace the notion that ecclesiastical authority must be subject to an accurate reading of Scripture. Instead, they simply changed from Rome being the ecclesiastical authority to whatever is popular and commonly accepted by their church leadership and culture. Evangelicalism, not a board of authoritative bishops but an assembly of common assumptions, is no less wont to throw someone like me out for demanding an honest treatment of Scripture on its own terms than was Rome.

A famous slogan associated with the Reformation since before the beginning of the 18th century was Ecclesia reforma semper reformanda: “The Church reformed, always reforming (lit. ‘to be reformed’).” Hilariously, I’ve seen some of the Reformed up at arms against this slogan, to the effect of, “You can’t fix perfection.” But delusions aside, is this not a worthy goal for all of us? We don’t have to reevaluate every single thing we believe on a yearly basis, or even once every few decades. But anyone who claims to love the truth and is intellectually coherent enough to acknowledge that the Church has been wrong once or twice about even major issues should be humble enough to look into divisive issues without assuming those holding views other than his/her own is a compromiser in league with Satan.

I’m certainly not holding myself up as the True Heir of Martin Luther, nor, despite my newly recovered respect for him, am I sure I really want to be; I’m fairly confident he wouldn’t spare the rod on a lot of my own views. But I do think that those who won’t be cowed into submitting to the tyranny of the majority and insist upon carefully and humbly cultivating their theology with the best information available, no matter how it horrifies others in their tradition, are following more closely in Luther’s footsteps than those who obdurately defend their inherited interpretation of Scripture against Scripture itself.

Happy Reformation Day!

I have a friend in seminary at Asbury (Kentucky) named Matt Stout who draws comics. This one’s a classic in that it manages to lampoon more than one annoying aspect of popular evangelicalism. Enjoy! You might also like his regular web comic series Big Sandy Gilmore.

One of today’s posts on Science and the Sacred is called An Artist or An Engineer? The author argues that we shouldn’t expect the precision of an engineer in creation any more than we expect it in an artist. The article brings this out by raising the issue of what has elsewhere been called “unintelligent design”:

The problem of imperfect design in nature raises serious concerns for the idea of God as the divine engineer, the metaphor put forward by those associated with the Intelligent Design movement. After all, if God designed each detail in the blueprint of life, why would he create mammalian eyes which have a blind spot?

One of my friends who is critical of evolution responded to this article with a one line explanation for design imperfections: “A little thing called the Fall.” She was referring to the belief that the Fall of Man marred the entire physical creation.

Doesn’t it seem just a tad convenient to claim that God designed everything in creation as well as an omniscient engineer could, but that any weaknesses in this argument are attributable to the Fall? (Thank heavens Paul saw it fit to insert Romans 8.19-21 as the sole prooftext!)

The weakest part of the Falldidit argument is that the aspects of design mangled and obscured by the Fall were not just random vandalism here and there. They’re actually quite systematic: specifically they give the distinct impression of nested hierarchies, which end up corroborating common ancestry as predicted by evolution. Doesn’t sound like the work of an Intelligent Strategist to me, unless He also happens to be an Intelligent Deceiver.

I’ll stick with the theological problems inherent in my view of the Fall, thank you very much.

 As a follow up to a post of mine from June 2008, I thought I’d take this opportunity to point out the excellent blog from the BioLogos Foundation called ”Science and the Sacred“, which today featured an article on the same study I mentioned in my post from over a year ago. The fact that stuff is still slowly trickling out on this study highlights the commitment of true science to exhaustively vetting even potentially good news, instead of throwing stuff out there just to get it published and making their view look better.

Twenty-one years and 40,000 generations later, an experiment looking at the evolution of a population of single-celled E. coli bacteria has finally reached its conclusion. The results “beautifully emphasize the succession of mutational events that allowed these organisms to climb toward higher and higher efficiency in their environment,” says Dominique Schneider, a molecular geneticist and member of the research team…

…While Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been extensively tested and supported in various ways over the years, never before has it been studied for so many generations and in such enormous detail.

By the midpoint (20,000 generations), the team found 45 mutations in the surviving bacteria. Just as Darwin’s theory proposed, these mutations did indeed confer some advantage to the bacteria. Thanks to advances in genome sequencing since the project began 21 years ago, the team was able to precisely see which mutations were beneficial, and how they improved adaption to the cells of their environment. Says Michigan State University professor and team member Richard Lenski, “It’s extra nice now to be able to show precisely how selection has changed the genomes of these bacteria, step by step over tens of thousands of generations.”

source: Evolution in an Erlenmeyer Flask

The best part is that the article from Scientific American referred to in the S&tS post points out some promising practical results. “The findings might eventually help scientists better understand mutations in human diseases and infections. ’Cancer progression is a fundamentally similar evolutionary process…’ “

Here’s one to point people to when they cite the old creationist bromides about ”no beneficial mutations” or evolution never having been observed.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Humans beings, born in sin, have a problem: sin offends a holy God and all humanity stands on the verge of incurring His wrath. Yet God has a problem also: He is a God of love and wishes to show mercy. But since He cannot ignore His own law and just ignore our sins, there is a tension between God’s justice and His mercy. We each deserve an eternity of punishment. The price must be paid, but we are incapable of paying for it. But to our delight, Jesus sacrificed himself to meet the demands of our just God, receiving within his time on the cross the eternal punishment due to us for our sins. Thus Jesus received the wrath of God as a propitiation for our sin. Both His justice and His mercy was satisfied.

Sound familiar?

I recently expressed my disgust about all the minutiae of things to argue about systematic theology, summing up by saying “My love affair with theology is on the rocks.” Rather than swearing off discussing theological matters, I was mostly concerned about divisive intramural debates that do nothing for the faith. I do remain, as ever, interested in pursuing the truth and also in debating theological perspectives that needlessly undermine our faith’s credibility and reputation.

One example I used of a useless debate was the differing theories of the atonement, which I knew of mostly from one of my theology classes from the distant past. But I must confess that at the time I wrote that post I couldn’t have told you any other examples than the Penal Substitution view, summarized in the opening above. This view is the most common among Protestants, due to Calvin’s specific formulation of it.

The atonement is how Christ’s death/resurrection brings us salvation. I’ve assumed that it didn’t really matter all that much how Christ’s sacrifice effected salvation, only that it somehow does. Nevertheless, with a hunch that I was too hasty in my dismissal of that debate, I’ve been reading a lot about this over the last few days. I want to chronicle a bit of it, because I have become convinced that the specifics on how we’re atoned for are not so trivial, and may in fact play a crucial role in our apologetics if nothing else.

This all started with a quick scan of Wikipedia, reading summaries of the various theories about the atonement. None of these views deny that Christ’s work brought about reconciliation (at-one-ment) in some sense, but there are several views that differ on how it was accomplished.

Satisfaction (Anselm of Canterbury)

Catholics generally hold to Anselm’s version, called the Satisfaction view. In our sinfulness, we are incapable of giving God the honor due Him, and this effects our death. Jesus, as a perfect man, was able to satisfy God by giving Him the honor He was due. Jesus’ work of supererogation was more than sufficient to satisfy God, so we are the benificiaries of the overflow. Summary: Jesus’ perfect sacrifice satisfied God’s demand for glory from imperfect humanity.

Penal Substitution (John Calvin)

Calvin, with what has become known as Penal Substitution Theory (PST), modified this to emphasize not God’s stolen glory but His need to punishment sin. Jesus became the object of God’s destructive wrath and has thereby become the substitute for the elect. Summary: Jesus’ punishment satisfied God’s demand for each individual’s punishment.

Governmental (Hugo Grotius)

Wesleyans and some others in the Arminian tradition typically hold to a reworking of the Calvinist view that in some ways hearkens back to Anselm’s version. In Grotius’ Governmental view, Jesus was punished for sin (as in PST) but did not actually undergo the selfsame punishment we were due; rather, because of his headship, his individual suffering was sufficient as propitation for the entire world. Whereas our need for propitiation in Calvin’s view was calculated on an individual basis (Christ paid for the individual sins of each justified individual), both Anslem’s and Grotius’ versions have Jesus satisfying a more general divine dissatisfaction. (Notice how this parallels the differences between the classic view of universal atonement and Calvin’s limited atonement.) Summary: Jesus’ punishment stood in for the punishment of all humanity.

Moral Influence (Peter Abelard)

Another view that’s especially become popular among liberal theologians is the Moral Influence view: Christ’s obedience unto death accomplishes in us the same glorification through resurrection when we discover his work and follow his example. This view is traced back to the medieval theologian Peter Abelard. Summary: Jesus’ sacrifice is the official example for the sacrifice we must make.

Ransom / Christus Victor (Classic / Gustaf Aulén)

What I find to be the most interesting view is actually the orthodox view, held by virtually the entire early church until the medieval period; it is still the most commonly held view among the Eastern Orthodox. It focuses not on God paying His own debt of honor or punishment, but as bringing liberation from bondage. In the ransom view, God released humanity from bondage by Jesus’ death. Although the version that has God paying the ransom price to Satan has gained much attention, Gustaf Aulén argues in his 1931 book entitled Christus Victor (Christ the Victor) that the core of the so-called “classic view” actually focused more on liberation from death and sin than the person of Satan. The “ransom” Christ paid is an imagery found in Scripture that should be taken as a metaphor for war ransom than as an actual business transaction in the sense we think of it (actually, all these views are developed from metaphors actually found in Scripture).

While I do not deny that some of the rudiments of Calvin’s PST are found in Scripture (especially in Paul), there are too many difficulties both philosophically and exegetically for me to embrace this view anymore. As an important case in point, one helpful site I found contained a passage that refocuses our attention on what “justification” meant in biblical times, as opposed to its meaning within the legalistic framework that gained such traction due to the influence of the Romans. I want to cite the passage in full. [Please note that the author, Derek Flood, uses the term “Satisfaction-Doctrine” throughout to refer not only to the Satisfaction view proper, but to PST and Governmental. All of these are referred to sometimes as “substitutionary atonement”.]

Biblically to “bring justice” does not mean to bring punishment, but to bring healing and reconciliation. Justice means to make things right. All through the Prophets justice is associated with caring for others, as something that is not in conflict with mercy, but rather an expression of it. Biblically, justice is God’s saving action at work for all that are oppressed:

“Learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:17) “This is what the LORD says: ‘Administer justice every morning; rescue from the hand of his oppressor the one who has been robbed.’ ” (Jeremiah 21:12)

The way that we “administer justice”, the Prophets tell us, is by encouraging and helping the oppressed. In contrast to what the Satisfaction-Doctrine says, God’s justice is not in conflict with his mercy, they are inseparable. True justice can only come though mercy:

“This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘Administer true justice: show mercy and compassion to one another.’ ” (Zechariah 7:9) “Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice.” ( Isaiah 30:18)

If we want to understand the concept of justice as the writers of the Old Testament did, then we must see it as a “setting things right again”. Thus when Christ comes, the way that he brings about justice is through mercy and compassion. Notice how in this next verse Christ does not bring justice with a hammer, but with a tenderness that cares for the broken and the abused.

“I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations… A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he leads justice to victory.” (Matthew 12:18-21)

The way that God brings about justice and “leads it to victory” is through acts of compassion – sheltering the “smoldering wick”, and the “bruised reed”. And what does Christ “proclaim to the nations” to bring about this justice?

“He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

In other words, the supposed conflict between justice and mercy is based on a misunderstanding of what justice is. A large part of God’s wrathful judgement in the interest of justice is to stop those who oppress; this is itself an act of mercy on behalf of the oppressed. Jesus, as the Victor, underwent death and thereby shattered death’s hold on us. James McGrath makes the confident assertion that PST “is not found in the Bible”:

Sure, it can be read into it, but it cannot be found there unless one is already looking for it. For Paul, the key meaning of Jesus’ death is summed up well in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15: “one died for all, and therefore all died”. That’s almost the exact opposite of the popular Evangelical message, “one died instead of all, so that they might not have to die”. Even if we conclude that Paul’s language of “dying with Christ” is just another way of talking metaphorically about denying ourselves and self-sacrifice, it nevertheless makes clear that the Christian view of “salvation” expressed here is not about Jesus doing something instead of us, but of something that involves us and happens to us and in us. Ironically, while some feel they are glorifying God by making atonement something that involves no action or effort on our part, they’ve also radically departed from a central component of early Christian belief.

Finally, I wanted to describe exactly why I think this is one of the few doctrinal disputes that needs to be addressed. Substitutionary atonement, and PST in particular, is an apologetics nightmare. Number one, it impugns God’s character, unflatteringly (and inaccurately) painting Him as a Jekyll and Hyde schizophrenic (“Burn ‘em! No, forgive them! No, I’ve gotta burn ‘em! No, forgive them!”). Next, it gives the false impression that despite the glory we’re supposed to give Him for it, He seems to not be able to understand or accomplish forgiveness in any definable sense: we are to forgive one another magnanimously without any demands of punishment, yet God Himself can’t bring Himself to — and only because of some arbitrary rule He placed on Himself. Thirdly, punishment of an innocent on behalf of multiple guilty parties sounds romantic, but positing the necessity of this “miracle of divine bookkeeping” is in fact the outgrowth of a very unromantic, legalistic understanding of judgement. In point of fact, it’s arguably less just (I’d like to see you try the “switch the guilty” trick in a courtroom) than God simply acting like God and forgiving outright. The idea of stand-ins for punishment is actually disavowed over and over again in the OT (cf. Deut 24.16, Pro 17.15, Jer 31.30, and Eze 18.20). All these objections stack up: there are former believers who charge the incomprehensible PST for contributing to their loss of faith; in fact, some of the best info I found critiquing PST was on the site of a former fundamentalist with a PhD in theology who does just that. I encourage you to read his many posts on the subject.

In addition to the many links above, I leave you with a list of pages I’ve found in the course of my inquiry so far with interesting things to say, in case you’re interested in this subject. Note that most are framed in terms of attacking PST first (as did this post) and only later, if at all, arguing another view; this is by virtue of the fact that PST is the predominant Protestant view and therefore seemingly requires the least burden of proof among Protestants.

The Problem of the Atonement

The Fuzzy Math of Penal Substitution

The doctrine of “penal substitution”

Focus on the Family has responded to an anonymous blogging friend we call Thomas who wrote a letter in protest of their misrepresentations about evolution in the October 2009 issue of Clubhouse Jr. which I described in the post, The creation of anti-evolutionists. Timothy Masters from the “Office of the Chairman” (who until recently was Dr. James Dobson, now supposedly but uncomfirmably one Pat Caruana) wrote this response:

Yes, we understand that there are many Christians who consider themselves theistic evolutionists – among them Dr. Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, an eminent scientist and Christian apologist who has served as a guest on several past Focus on the Family radio broadcasts. We do not, however, feel obligated in any way to adopt these believers’ opinions or to endorse their point of view. On the contrary, we feel there is room for disagreement here. Though we love and respect those who share your perspective as brothers and sisters in Christ, we simply can’t come to terms with some of the implications of their position. As we understand it, the underlying philosophy of Darwinism – particularly the theory of natural selection – relies heavily upon the idea that life has come about purely through a process of random chance. It’s difficult to reconcile this concept of randomness with the Bible’s assertion in Genesis 1 that God made the world intentionally and intelligently, creating each and every species in its own kind. You are entitled to your own opinion, of course, but that’s the way we see it.

First I’d like to thank Mr. Masters for responding and for the respectfully conciliatory tone of the letter. But as Thomas noted when he posted this response on my blog, it sadly skates around the point. One of the worst issues was the article’s insistence that the only reason anyone would believe in evolution — not just “dysteleological evolution”, but “the theory of evolution” — was to deny God: “At its foundation, the theory of evolution starts with one basic premise: There is no God,” and “…by excluding God, evolution ultimately boils down to the religion of self-worship.” This is absolutely untrue, as would be obvious if they had simply asked any theistic evolutionist, and even most atheist scientists (atheistic blowhards will distort science for their ends as badly as creationist blowhards). Evolution wasn’t concocted in order to deny God or worship self. The first person to propose the theory of evolution as we know it was no atheist when he published On the Origin of Species. So although Mr. Masters makes a much appreciated point to affirm the Christianity of theistic evolutionists, he does not go so far as to qualify or back off of the opposite view implied in the article. My main problem with the article stands: Christian kids all over are being conditioned to accept the toxic “evolution=atheism” falsehood that even Mr. Masters rejects in his response.

You no doubt noticed that his comment, “…life has come about purely through a process of random chance,” like the original article, subtly blurs the line between origin of life and the development of life, the latter of which is what the theory of evolution is all about (this repeated motif suggests some genuine ignorance of these distinctions more than sloppiness). But beyond that, he says that FoF rejects evolutionary theory because random chance in natural selection cannot be reconciled with intentional creation as shown in Genesis 1. Anyone with an imagination can understand that “God being at the mercy of random chance to bring about humanity” and “God purposefully, sovereignly ordaining random chance to bring about humanity” are entirely different things! The first would certainly cause significant theological problems, but the second is the actual viewpoint of theistic evolutionists, which soundly contradicts the objection that evolution can be neither intentional nor intelligent. Their position comes into “focus” a little more clearly at the end of that sentence: we must reject evolution because God wants us to believe that He created “each and every species in its own kind.” Fine. But don’t pretend this is a scientific argument!

And as Thomas also pointed out, Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe are no friends to theistic evolution; their pseudoscientific version of special creation is called progressive creationism (God miraculously created each species over millions of years, without evolution), but at least they labor to get Christians to acknowledge the actual age of the universe. I think I’ll write back a letter informing them of a few actual evolutionary creationists/theistic evolutionists who are even more “eminent” and better placed to to be credible in their Christian apologetics than Ross. I’d encourage you to do so, as well!

Overall, I’d say I give them a C-. They get a passing grade for responding at all and for not denying that those who accept evolutionary theory are Christians (a modest concession, to be sure), but for the reasons outlined above they pass only by the skin of their teeth. For taking the sort of action in contacting them that I wish I had, Thomas gets an A+.