Undeception

I realize this is a week old, which in the blogosophere can make something quite stale, but I had some thoughts on James K. A. Smith’s surprisingly negative review of Peter Enns’ recent The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins.

Smith’s criticism focuses on Enns’ methodology, which is based on the reasonable belief that we can’t decide what God may have meant by a passage until we know the immediate, contextual meaning of that passage.

On the contrary, says Smith, “The church has always staked its reading of the Bible on the conviction that Scripture’s meaning exceeds what the original human authors could have intended.” Smith expects the Church to derive the most appropriate and relevant interpretations of Scripture by basing our interpretation in “worship”, whatever that means, “which will generate meanings…that could never have been intended by [the] human authors,” meanings that are “intended as meanings to be unfolded ‘in front of the text’ by the divine Author.”

The notion that there may be meaning in Scripture above and beyond the original meaning may be a conceivably defensible position (a position I once espoused on this site), but he doesn’t stop there: Smith insists that Enns is wrong to try to recover the meaning of the authors for the original audiences because of the danger of it hindering us from extracting a more appropriate, divinely intended meaning for us. So in reading Genesis, Enns should not expend so much effort in recovering the Ancient Near Eastern context, including relevant literary and archaeological backgrounding. That sort of research is well and good, Smith allows, but it doesn’t tell us what the Bible really means now, because it doesn’t take into account the meaning intended for us as contextualized within the Christian canon:

First of all, the Christian church is not a recipient of the book of Genesis as a discrete unit; we receive the book of Genesis within the Bible and that Bible is received as a whole—as a “canon” of Scripture.  Second, internal to the canon is the conviction that meanings God intends are not constrained by what human authors intended.

Although he puts his preferred hermeneutic in terms of “recontextualizing” Scripture, in essence Smith is wanting to theologize the text before situating it in history, because we are apparently not allowed to come to any conclusions by examining individual texts like Genesis and Romans that make it hard for this recontextualization (which in practice looks like front-loading) to occur.

Because Jamie Smith is no fundamentalist, or even a Chicago style inerrantist, he concedes, “Enns is exactly right to push back on ‘conservative’ or ‘literal’ readings of the Bible that anachronistically impose a ‘journalistic’ sense of ‘history’ on ancient texts.” But in this review specifically he seems uncomfortable with Enns’ claim that Paul and the author Genesis might not have intended the same meaning in their passages on Adam and Eve: “In fact, if it becomes a contest between ‘the authors of Genesis’ [note the scare quotes, presumably to flag Enns' avoidance of "Moses"] and Paul, Enns sides with ‘the original meaning’ of Genesis as the determinative meaning.” Not having read the book but broadly being aware of Enns’ perspective, I doubt that Enns would actually say either is determinative to the subjugation of the other; instead, it is Smith who wants to subjugate the intended message of both “Moses” and Paul to the meaning of the “divine Author”…whatever that might be. (I presume by Smith’s objection to letting Genesis carry its own meaning that he expects that God’s intended meaning happens to correspond more closely to Paul’s.)

But what of Smith’s “divine Author”? Should we put so much energy into finding the original meaning that we miss the message God intended for the Church to receive? My understanding is that Enns would affirm divine authorship in some capacity, although he rightly cautions us to avoid the “priority of the divine” that Smith here advocates.

To put it bluntly, I am no longer of the opinion that Scripture is layered with a special coating of “what God meant” sauce; neither do I believe that the Bible is composed of the flesh of human words attached to a divinely crafted backbone. Nor am I enamored with Peter Enns’ incarnational model of Scripture as I understand it, which is built off of the belief that divine and human authorship overlaps. In short, I have seen no compelling, non-circular reason to maintain the belief that God should in any meaningful sense be considered the author of the Bible. To believe in God’s providential intentions for the Church in the production and canonization of the Bible is one thing; I can affirm as much myself. To credit Him as the publisher might even work. I have sometimes drawn the analogy of God’s purposing of Scripture to that of King James commissioning the translation of the Bible. It occurs to me now that my view of Scripture as the response of humans to divine revelation and inspiration strikes me as fairly well analogous to a Festschrift. But God as author? Hardly. And the contention that He was the kind of author who overlaid the glaringly human text with some esoteric meaning recoverable independently of the meaning it had to the original audiences and available only to subsequent theologians reminds me quite a lot of the infamous “Bible Codes” from a couple years back. It sounds even more like Gnosticism.

But even if God did ordain a higher meaning upon the text, surely we can only hope to find it by first contextualizing and resituating each passage back in its original habitat and going from there. Otherwise the original meaning becomes completely incidental, despite the fact that something much closer to the original meaning than Smith’s canonical reading was the only one actually available to those who canonized it! They canonized the texts for what they were, not for some divine meaning that would override what they were after their canonization.

For these reasons, Jamie Smith’s canonical approach falls far short, and Enns’ approach – by no means uniquely his – of putting the effort into letting the original authors speak for themselves so that we can attempt to interact with each of them on a case-by-case basis handily continues to carry the day.

I was recently warned about the danger and “arrogance” of judging certain portions of Scripture to be erroneous, particularly in regard to a theological claim made in the Old Testament (the death of Uzzah in 2 Sam 6.7 and 1 Chron 13.10): “In so doing,” said my conversant, “we set ourselves above the Bible and make ourselves the judge.” I agree that we should treat Scripture respectfully. This doesn’t mean that we can’t argue with it, but we should treat it with all due reverence.

The truly frustrating thing that I’ve been trying to point out (for it seems like forever) is that people don’t stop to properly analyze why it deserves this respect.

Those of us who come from Protestant traditions somehow acquire the assumption that we must respect the Bible, and that it is arrogant and dangerous to disagree with it, for the reason that it is perfect, untouchable, the very words of God, etc. But again, why?

I have heard it said, “Christ did not give us a book; he gave us a Church.” That is, the primary reason we give the Bible such high respect is because the Church, the community of believers that composed and compiled the Bible, has passed it down to us as something worthy of respect and honor. Here again, Protestant traditions have undermined that rationale by teaching us to distrust the fallible Church (which Catholics seem to view as more infallible than it actually is) and trust only in the infallible Bible (which most Catholics do not affirm as altogether infallible) — the same Bible that was written and canonized by that fallible Church! Protestants will typically respond that God especially sanctified the efforts of the Church, making sure everything was ship-shape, error-free, and all/only the right books were included because…again, why exactly are they convinced of that?

Is it just because we think the Bible says that we need to uphold it as inerrant? That’s entirely circular. Does something outside the Bible tell us to? That’s self-defeating, because holding that criterion as inviolable is by nature upholding something extra-biblical as your guiding principle. Is it because we find it really, really handy, indispensable even, to have an authoritative constitution to evaluate everything by? As I have quoted Lewis before:

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form—something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church. But there is one argument which we should beware of using for either position: God must have done what is best, this is best, therefore God has done this.

If we non-inerrantists believed that God Himself wrote the Bible, guaranteed its full accuracy, and made it exactly how we wanted Him to make it and for the same reasons, it might indeed be arrogant and dangerous to place ourselves above God by saying “I reject that.” But we don’t believe that: actually, many of us are dismayed by the ill-founded presumption of attributing everything in Scripture (or worse, everything we read into Scripture as interpreters) to God indiscriminately.

I have been accused of trying to dismantle the bedrock of people’s faith and denigrating the Bible just for the thrill of proving that I’m right. If that were the case, I’d spend a lot more time pointing out biblical errors and disproving the attempted reconciliations of apologists. But ferreting out and proclaiming the Bible’s shortcomings is not really how I want to spend my time, mostly because I actually care very much about the faith of others. And I don’t wish to see their house come down on a poor foundation: I know far too many people who have made an inerrant Bible the bedrock of their faith, and when the winds and storms of evidence beat against this assumption they’ve been told is non-negotiable, they lost their faith altogether. Building your faith on a Bible with unimpeachable “authority” is building your faith on the sand. I don’t want to see that happening. Another danger for inerrantists that motivates me to speak out is crazy Francis-Chan-esque affirmations of hollow, unconvincing, or outright loathsome understandings of God’s character and ways.

I certainly am not arguing that there is no warrant for caution in indicting Scripture as containing error. As a rule, we should always give our brothers and sisters in Christ, including the authors of Scripture, the benefit of the doubt and not cast aspersion on their hard-won opinions without fear and trembling. But when we are told that in reckoning some Scripture as erroneous there is the danger that we exalt ourselves as the final authority, I must respond that the danger of refusing to acknowledge that we must judge Scripture is that we will not be able to recognize it when we are doing it. Instead, we exalt our interpretations as the authority and claim that we are just following what God says through the Bible. Because the Bible does not come with a divine commentary,  we all interpret the Bible, and we are all responsible for determining what makes the most sense using whatever means we have at our disposal. We do not have the option of just “going with what Scripture says” — we can only go with what we think Scripture says.

What this means is that if God truly gave us the Bible, in so doing He gave us a medium that requires human judgment, faulty as that usually is. Since He didn’t provide us direct access to the Truth without need for an interface, He could not have expected that we could just trust whatever it is we think we read in the Bible. He had to have known we’d be judging Scripture. Bearing this out, the Gospels show Jesus himself judging Scripture, and occasionally finding it wanting.

My problem is not that people want to give Scripture a unique and extremely important place in our walk with God: my problem is with the accusation that refusing to treat the Bible as an authority of a completely different and superior nature than our other authorities, which include Church tradition and personal conviction, requires a “dangerous” degree of personal judgment from which inerrantists are blissfully exempt.

Please consider how much you might be putting in God’s mouth by maintaining the “authority of Scripture” before accusing people of being arrogant/dangerous for not trusting that this or that biblical author author got it right all the time every time.

Over a year ago I started a closed, hidden Facebook group for a few of my friends and me so that we could share links and discuss issues swirling around our rejection of inerrancy. It was an experience of much empathy and encouragement that most all of us really appreciated.

Then around the time my blogging slacked off in the late summer of last year, I also began frequenting the group less and less. I was recently asked by a dear friend from the group to explain what was going on with me. He was specifically referring to my less frequent interaction with the group, but as it’s related to my coincident lull in blogging, I thought I’d put more words into explaining what I think lies behind it all.

I do often miss the “good Christian fellowship” of those days. At times I also miss the probing discussions we had, but to a markedly lesser extent. This isn’t because they weren’t good discussions: it’s just that I’m not as much in that stage of my journey right now. I don’t know…I suppose I’m just tired of all the over-thinking, the second-guessing. After studying and reading and hashing and rehashing, the simple fact is that when it comes to the most fundamental questions (regarding the existence of God, the problem of evil, soteriology, etc.), one of two situations obtain: I know what I believe on the subject and I know enough about why I should and shouldn’t believe it to last me for some time, or at least I am content to abide in hopeful uncertainty. My faith is a choice, a step out into the unknown, not because, as Evangelicals do, I’ve convinced myself that I’m sure I’m headed the right way or that what I’m stepping onto is secure, but because my deepest hunches and most profound philosophical speculations lie in that direction alone. But I don’t pretend to know it’s true. So I stand here shrouded in uncertainty where I have ventured. The fruitless effort of obsessing about these questions about which we can never have full certainty has once again brought me into a forced humility. My consequent unwillingness to trumpet my tenuous conclusions around as the solution to everyone else’s searches is one part of the equation that has led to my being much quieter of late.

Another part of disentangling myself from the world of biblio- and theoblogging is something I’ve just finally worked out in my mind. Although I had managed to avoid these feelings for quite some time, in the last year I finally succumbed to a constant state of annoyance and even disgust at the constant self-justification, drummed-up confidence, and especially the rarely restrained personal vitriol and arrogance on the part of one group of people I had long counted among my closest allies: atheists. Not all of them are like this, I’m obliged by fairness to qualify, but these attitudes generally correlate directly with the degree of satisfaction they get in proclaiming their unbelief; sad to say, the distribution of atheists on the Internet is a rather lopsided (and I hope, unrepresentative) ratio in favor of this genus of atheist. It’s gotten to the point that if I find out someone’s an atheist within five or ten minutes of encountering him, I can depend on his being obnoxious on the subject.

Around the time I started recognizing that the New Atheist “civility” was spreading among even more mainstream non-theists, I noticed the disease showing up among many of those even closer to my ilk, i.e. post-Evangelical and otherwise “liberal” Christians: the ones who seem to take every opportunity to belittle and shame conservative Evangelicals, a group of believers whom I also consider to be sorely in need of correction. By all appearances, it’s not enough to be convinced that Evangelicals and other theologically conservative Christians are wrong: they’re obviously [blankety-blank] morons, due no more attempts at civil, intellectual interaction than the clinically insane. Ridicule is the medicine prescribed to those who believe that the Bible is inerrant, the world was created in 6 days, and that conservative American politics are the direct reflex of biblical morality. Frankly, the eternal obsession with bawling about the idiotic, hypocritical foibles of Evangelical Christianity has gotten really, really old.

But on further reflection, this exposed in me something I didn’t like: God forgive me, I also had been letting my disgust for things like inerrancy, creationism, and penal substitution displace my loving concern for those who believed those things.

My dissatisfaction with this state of affairs led to a number of posts on my blog (this one included) targeting a different audience than was originally intended for it. I had always focused on “challeng[ing] unquestioned Evangelical assumptions about Scripture, theology, the creation/evolution debate, and biblical studies.” My efforts were for them, but in reality it was no less for me as well, as I hammered out the wrong things I thought important not to believe. But at the bottom of the slippery slope, having stripped away many if not most of the beliefs that conservative Christians hold as sine qua non‘s of Christianity, the loss of which were the last straws for ex-Christians I have encountered in my journeys, somehow I found my faith afresh. The tide turned from finding thing after thing to disbelieve towards finding new ways to act on things I found worth believing. I’m sure I’ll never really stop thinking about these things and finding new things to question and/or critique, but at some point you’ve just got to live it and hope for the best.

Look, I know it’s hard dealing with some of these conservative Christians when it comes to theology. OK, most of them. And I know there are some pretty harmful consequences to some of their beliefs that we need to stand up and counter. I’m certainly not calling for détente, or for burying our heads in the sand while the victims of bad theology pile up. And I realize that sometimes there’s no better way to show someone an idea is wrong than to show them how silly the idea is. But trying to force people to laugh at themselves as hard as you’re laughing at them is simply not realistic. Yes, in many cases we’ve got to shake them, raise our voices, and tell them to snap out of it — but always after examining our motives and our methods to ensure we are speaking the truth in love.

The temptation of Internet exchanges to be entirely immune to the checks of face-to-face interaction has fairly well saturated the church, I fear. I’ve gotten much further convincing my Evangelical friends to soberly reanalyze the harmful behavior driven by their bad theology by engaging them in confrontational yet personal conversation than I have with exasperated, sarcastic, snarky retorts thrown at them in disembodied e-text. I’m ready for these people to come around, and I don’t think shaming and gleefully castigating them is cutting it; in fact, it alienates them yet further by giving them a martyr complex as they understandably suspect that their positions are more righteous due to the manifest unrighteousness of the anger being hurled at them in response.

Although we might like to think of our diatribes as humorous constructive criticism, by examining my own heart I can see that much of what is passed off as well-intentioned criticism serves another, ulterior purpose: like a teenage girl desperately trying to be popular by disowning her annoying, dorky brother in front of her friends, we want to show everyone that we’re not as unreasonable as those other people so no one lumps us in together. My friends, Jesus didn’t seem to suffer from this form of pride.

We all want to battle dangerous forms of ignorance and lessen its influence in those groups (such as many conservative forms of Christianity) that seem to defend it the most confidently. And I don’t doubt that you can lampoon, mock, and marginalize a group of people into oblivion. But it’s wrong: we have to remember that conservative Christians are not just perpetrators but also victims of bad theology, and my religion tells me not to hope for the physical, spiritual, or emotional destruction of those who are wrong but their deliverance. Granted, if you’re one who doesn’t believe there’s anything transcendent that stands as the basis for ethics or morality, I can understand wishing for the former, even as I shrink back in horror from such a world as yours. But I should be able to count on other (theologically) progressive Christians to show more patience, sympathy, and love for others — in short, living in the way the founders of our faith told us should be our hallmark. The authors of the New Testament consistently advised believers to nurture one another and shore up unity within their community of faith, so much so that many scholars have expressed doubt that the first Christians cared for anyone outside of their community at all. Rather, I think the sensible plan was always “Jerusalem first, then Judea, then the uttermost parts of the earth,” a strong, healthy core with influence rippling outwards in concentric rings. Make sure your own house is in order first — and that means tidying up the messy rooms rather than demolishing them. One of the many sound critiques of Evangelical culture is that they tend to “shoot their wounded,” which is something sensitive and responsible “progressive” Christians have disavowed. Yeah, well, I’m just not seeing it, folks, and neither is the watching world: liberals hardly less than conservatives round up the ones who we think hold us back and/or make us look stupid, bind them to piles of sticks and dry grass, light the match, and hold a public spectacle of the whole affair.

I realize I’m laying it down pretty hard on my own allies here; I don’t really mean to bust anyone’s chops – how hypocritical would that be! – and as I alluded earlier, I think this problem is in large part attributable and endemic to the medium of online interactions, which tends to desiccate interpersonal exchanges into impersonal ones. It’s just that I care for everyone involved in these debates and want to insist that tough love can be shown without it looking indistinguishable from a drive-by shooting. I emphatically agree that we need to make taking care of the oppressed, marginalized, and suffering in this world our chief priority as Christians, and that Evangelicalism doesn’t seem to have the tools or even the motivation to help us, but it’s really not too much to ask to insist that we treat them with concern as well. In actuality, we are harming our world if we let our disgust poison the portion of it that sits in conservative churches. “Love your enemies” applies even if those enemies are family. And honestly it looks a lot different than what I’ve been seeing.

I expect to be dismissed by many as preaching sentimentalism and maybe even, despite my protestations above, a non-violence that enables more violence: “Easy for you to say, Steve: you’ve never suffered gender discrimination for church office or been kicked out of Christianity for being gay.” But I’m not saying we shouldn’t address those issues: I’m reevaluating how we’re going about it. If you haven’t noticed, our results in getting these people to both a) change their minds and b) not become disillusioned, bitter atheists are pretty abysmal.

I write this for those in whom the all-inclusive heart of God is being cultivated. It’s not easy to show patience and speak the truth in love in this environment, and those of us earnestly attempting it really need all the help we can get. I’m just asking that you consider how inadvertently destructive your publicly posted incendiary content might be. Meanwhile, if I decide that I can be of some use by continuing to keep up this blog, I’ll try to refocus on exemplifying the kind of engagement that I have advocated above. Engage them, get to know them and love them, bring them alongside. As we tell the Calvinists who insist that God’s “justice” trumps His love, there is no justice without love.

From no dark came I, but the depths of light;
From the sun-heart I came, of love a spark;
What should I do but love with all my might?
To die of love severe and pure and stark,
Were scarcely loss; to lord a loveless height–
That were a living death, damnation’s positive night.

- G. MacDonald

The Southern Baptists have done it again.

Despite taking a surprisingly progressive stand in favor of “a just and compassionate path to legal status…for those undocumented immigrants already living in our country” at their convention in Arizona this week, Southern Baptists have also “unanimously or near-unanimously” passed other resolutions that affirm or re-affirm some of their trademark old-time-religion stances.

• They lodged a complaint to the Obama Administration to revive flagging support for the Defense of Marriage Act.
• Calling out Rob Bell’s book by name, they affirmed their belief in “the biblical teaching on eternal conscience punishment of the unregenerate in Hell.” Note, not just hell, but eternal conscious “punishment” (known less euphemistically as “torment”).
• The gender-neutral and therefore “inaccurate” NIV 2011 was rejected, and pastors were encouraged to teach their congregations about the dangers of translating “men” as “people”, “sons” as “sons and daughters,” etc. Because that’s what the world needs now, apparently.

Regardless of your stance on each of those issues, I’m wondering how much influence large Evangelical and/or Fundamentalist bodies like the Southern Baptist Convention have on Christian culture. I’ve no doubt that there are plenty who try to follow what they have to say, but it becomes increasingly apparent that these bodies primarily serve the function of attempting top-down reform — or, as with the immigration and DOMA issues, attempting to use some high-profile influence to catalyze that quintessentially top-down reform known as “public policy”.

Don’t roll your eyes about that last remark, political progressives. You do it, too. The question these days doesn’t seem to be whether we should use the government to legislate our religious values: it’s which religious values you’re going to try to legislate.

I’m not just pointing all this out as an excuse to bag on “those loony Southern Baptists.” I wanted to suggest that resolutions and legislation from authoritative bodies, both ecclesiastical and governmental, may be as fine and dandy as they are inevitable, but the best reform comes from the ground up. And it seems to me that the Southern Baptists are losing that battle.

What in the world am I trying to do with this site? Who am I writing for? Who do I expect to come away with something of value?

I ask myself these questions periodically. Am I a “faith” blogger or a “skeptic” blogger? The posts I write criticizing aspects of evangelicalism are the most popular, and are quite common given that those beliefs are most often the object of my own undeception; on the other hand, I make no bones about my own abiding faith. Yet in observing those who encounter difficulties with the Bible, especially in the blogosphere, it seems things too often go in two diametrically opposed directions:

• The Disillusioned: The Bible is acknowledged to have deep flaws. Discussion develops around criticizing the Bible’s flaws and sneering at the inanities of Christians who deny them.
• The Defenders: The Bible is perfect. Any discussion of alleged flaws in it is stolidly defensive; more often, it is outsourced to apologists.

From there both camps trudge along their separate, well-worn paths. Typically the more bitter of the Disillusioned become the Deconverted. I come across many deconversion blogs, which isn’t surprising considering that disillusionment and deconversion are so emotionally repercussive. Their communities and survivors’ groups form very easily, commenting and linking to one another as a form of mutual support.

There are plenty of blogs by those militantly confident in their Christianity as well; the Defenders remain happy where they are…at all costs, seemingly.

Comparing the content of the blogs from those groups to mine, you’d see many more affinities between me and the Disillusioned. Indeed, because I spend so much time discussing the deep flaws in the Bible and in the forms of Christianity championed by the Defenders, my blog attracts mostly the Disillusioned and the Deconverted. But I do not count myself among either group. Rather, I am a part of an increasing number of believers no longer confident in either the pat answers of the apologists or the knee-jerk reactions of the self-styled enemies of Christianity. Even upon realization that our pursuit of God and His truth does not terminate in Scripture or systematic theologies, we do not find enough grounds to repudiate that pursuit.

I know that both the Defenders and the Disillusioned/Deconverted would consider me and the growing numbers of people like me to be living in an untenable state of cognitive dissonance. They would say I am the unreasonable, illusioned defender, denying the fruits of the doubts and disbelief I have uncovered and at times trumpeted. Their premise is that without an inerrant Bible that tells us exactly what to believe we have no good reason to believe in anything resembling the God of the Bible. I reject this premise as reactionary as I rest hopeful in a conviction that a good God, and one that bears more than a coincidental and passing resemblance to the God the Christians have always worshiped, actually exists. Why is this?

Please do not think that I offer the following as any sort of philosophical treatise, but as a statement of my current stance given my own analysis, based on my own experience, constantly and repeatedly judged against the various philosophical ideas I encounter in my reading. Crucially, none of it is proof: in a universe in which proof is impossible, we are all, to a person, left choosing what to believe.

I believe in God because I believe in goodness; I believe in God because I believe in beauty; I believe in God because I believe in justice; I believe in God because I believe in non-arbitrary meaning. I choose to believe in these absolutes not because of proof, of which there is none, or because of overwhelming evidence, of which there is precious little; I realize that it could just as well be that there is evil, ugliness, injustice, and/or chaos at the bottom of the universe. But I will not worship those things, even as far as to grant their absolute existence or entertain the notion that they will have the final victory. I will worship what is good and right and lovely, and grant it all the honor of believing in and even worshiping its absolute existence as the Ultimate. We are disappointed to have seen those ideal virtues violated or at least imperfectly modeled in other people; it makes sense that this is in part because there is actually a Person in whom those virtues are embodied perfectly. I find that the God of Christianity coincides with these expectations to my satisfaction.

I cannot help being convinced that certain absolute ideal principles exist regardless of any prevailing cultural sensibilities. Loving concern for a child: always right. Torturing a child: always wrong. Looking out for the interests of women: always right. Raping a woman: always wrong. Showing honor to an honest man: always right. Slandering an honest man: always wrong. These evaluations are grounded in the existence and primacy of Goodness. Evil – what shouldn’t be – doesn’t have an independent existence, but is an often quite palpable negation of what is good – what should be. The question inevitably comes: why is there any negation of should-be? Isn’t that reason enough to doubt such a thing as a should-be?

Another attribute of the Ultimate that I did not mention is also responsible for my continuing faith: it is mystery, the consort of the Ultimate’s transcendence. It is that which does not allow me to declare with as much certainty as I would like that those ideals I place my hope in truly exist; it is what does not allow me to conclude that the existence of evil, ugliness, injustice, and chaos in this world is a defeater of my hope in goodness, beauty, justice, and meaning; worst of all, it necessitates the humility that we as humans resist to the bitter end. But unlike those other attributes, mystery is not eternal: my Christian hope is in the eventual resolution of this mystery/transcendence, the closing of the gap between heaven and earth, the eventual elimination of shouldn’t-be from the midst of should-be. And it is this hope that I lay down before the perfect object of my worship, the one of whom I have been fathered from a young age and who has given me peace and joy to spare, but more importantly, a deep-seated concern and empathy for others.

There are many who imagine that they are caught up somewhere above the mystery into the very certainty of God. Doubt, which may be thought of as an intentional filling of one’s lungs with the air of mystery, is thought by these to be a denial of the God whom they have experienced. This is how certainty is achieved for the Defenders.

There are also many who can no longer pretend that they are experiencing the certainties promised them beyond that yawning gap of mystery; these are often troubled, hurting, and angry by this revelation. It seems only natural that those in the painful throes of the transcendence of God, mistaking it for His absence, cling to the firm ground and renounce all else. This is how certainty is achieved for the Disillusioned.

And then there are some of us who seek to keep our feet planted in reality, unflinchingly seeking out truths that the Defenders disavow, but who, inhaling the mystery, strain to reach that transcendent-yet-imminent Goodness of which we catch vivid glimpses. We deny that certainty is anything but an illusion. Our faith is not about maintaining beliefs, but about fervently striving to bring the Goodness we have known closer to the waiting world. While valuing the insights into the human and divine natures the biblical authors have to offer us, and while humbly and thoroughly subjecting those insights to all of the reconstructions and deconstructions suggested by critical inquiry, we do not lean on either understanding. We trust instead in the God for whom our souls yearn and without whom all the truths on the earth would be nothing more than clanging cymbals. Our faith is realized in an ethic intended to make those virtues manifest in our own lives, for the sake of others: we demonstrate our hope for the victory of love by acting faithfully, seeking to embody goodness, beauty, justice, meaning, and above all, Love. This is what we call serving God. We are Christians because we were – and are – taught these things by Jesus.

I’m not trying to pigeon-hole every human into these few categories. There are many others: most people are happily oblivious to all these debates; others are well aware of the debates, but have become fatigued and battle-weary, wanting to hope but struggling to find the will to wade through the divide between the different dogmatic positions. I hope to have something useful to say to those in both of those categories without becoming an obnoxious crusader. Although at times my temper has no doubt flared against certain egregious examples of problematic thinking among the groups I’ve described, I do not want to demonize anyone. I write this blog to offer another way of dealing with doubts, one which has the potential to heal the often bitter and vitriolic gash separating the Defenders and the bitter Disillusioned, for the sake especially of those caught in the middle. My hope is that by sharing my search for truth on this blog, stripping away what is false and shoring up what is true, I will eventually help motivate all, whether Christian, heretic, or apostate, who share the ethic of an overcoming goodness that I call Christianity in action.

I just finally got around to reading the post from BioLogos from May 31, “BioLogos and the June 2011 ‘Christianity Today’ Cover Story“. Within it, president Darrel Falk makes note that they’ve had trouble identifying theologians who affirm both the historicity of Adam and Eve and evolution. While the scientific data cannot alone rule anything out, the stance that accepts God’s selecting one man and one woman out of an early population of Homo is something Falk flags as having had little serious theological effort placed into explaining it:

The “Federal Headship” model that accepts the scientific findings while at the same time holding to the historicity of a real first couple has not yet been carefully worked out by theologians. The reason that we haven’t had many articles of that sort is because we haven’t been able to identify theologians who are looking at the question from that perspective. In general, our experience has been that theologians are in one of two camps. Either they work within the framework of a non-historical Adam and Eve or they believe the scientific conclusions will eventually prove to be deeply flawed and humans were not created through an evolutionary process after all.

That divide is something I’ve certainly witnessed, and no doubt it’s used by the latter group to demonstrate the “slippery slope”. And in this case, I think they’re right: most who go all the way to say that so many aspects of Genesis 1 and 2 are not historical or literal have a hard time drawing the line at the historicity of the first pair. The divide comes over how we deal with the NT’s treatment of Adam, who Paul especially seems to use as a key figure in his theology (I would argue that Adam is not any more key to Paul than Melchizedek is to Hebrews, used typologically). In short, it’s not nearly as much about the historicity of Adam and Eve as it is the historicity of the Fall.

Although people like Tim Keller and Denis Alexander will continue to try arguing for a first pair of souled individuals, a position that was assumed by C. S. Lewis and has recently been affirmed by Vatican theologians, my guess is that the next generation of Christians who grow up accepting evolution as a “first language” will never seriously consider it, in the same way that teens growing up today rarely crack open their parents’ books on how to install software or run basic functions of Microsoft Office. Federal headship, like most other models of the Fall, may well be a moribund theological construct.

Falk urges “caution” with the federal headship view of the Fall because there are a number of theological questions that have yet to be teased out satisfactorily. Did God only impart His life-giving spirit to two of them, who promptly turned around and “fell” in a way we might have expected from the rest of their still-animal tribespeople? How did their divinely imparted souls that separated them from their peers and ancestors get passed on to their descendants? How did their fallenness get passed on?

Given questions like these and the available alternative of understanding that the “fallenness” of humanity and its solution in Christ don’t depend on an historical Fall from an historical pair, I’m fairly confident that a denial of the historicity of Adam and Eve will become the dominant paradigm within the next couple of decades.

This prediction will lead to the question, “But what about those who hang onto inerrancy? How will they simply reject the Bible’s teachings about Adam and Eve?” Well, for one thing, I think most Christians (and in honesty, people in general) tolerate enough cognitive dissonance to the effect that this will not invariably be noticed as a conflict with an assumption of evolution. Another factor is the attempt to salvage a semblance of inerrancy by arguing for figurative language and other literary devices to account for Paul’s treatment of Adam and Eve (this was the path I took several years ago). But even more so, I think that the inevitable acceptance of evolution by the younger generations will in fact pull a modified or abandonment inerrancy along with it. As Cliff Martin likes to point out, the Church will accept evolution; it must.

Parchment and Pen has a post up that seeks to classify  the different Christian views on origins. C. Michael Patton is usually pretty good at describing different points of view sympathetically, and things were going along pretty uncontroversially as he described different types of special creation, that is, views of creation that envisage miraculous intervention of one sort or another. Then he gets to “Deistic Evolution”, whose advocates, he asserts…

Believe, as Darwinian Evolutionists, that God created the universe over billions of years, using naturalistic evolutionary processes to create humanity without intervention.

Wait…that sounds a lot like “theistic evolution” (or  ”evolutionary creation”), doesn’t it?

I call this ”deistic evolution” due to the “hands-off” approach God takes to the development of man in the evolutionary process. Darwinian evolution, through the process of natural selection, is accepted. While there is across the board agreement that God did not/does not intervene in the process of evolution, DEers are divided as to whether God directly caused the first life to begin or whether he let life come into being naturalistically (abiogenisis).

Among those he describes as “Deistic Evolutionists” who apparently believe that God was “hands off” in creation, he cites Pete Enns, who just happens to be a Reformed Christian who has recently posted part 13 of a series that outlines the relationship between evolution and God’s sovereignty from a Calvinistic perspective. For any Calvinist, the notion that God would be laissez faire about such a thing as the creation of the universe is unthinkable; deism is a four-letter word among the Reformed. Patton, a Calvinist, knows this, which I take to be an obvious backhand. It’s not as though that were the only adjective he could possibly find (I would argue that no adjective is needed for “evolutionist”), and that particularly adjective is laden with a view of God’s nature that is eschewed by most Christians, including most who accept the findings of mainstream science. I must say that this choice was unbecoming of him and his reputation as a straight-shooter.

The fact is, God can be at work in and through creation whether or not He feels the need to tweak this or that during its development. My favorite analogy is of a competent software engineer who is able to develop a program that, once executed, will perform her desired goals without requiring her intermittent input. She is no less responsible or “hands on” about how it performs, since she wrote every piece of code responsible for how it operates; in fact, the more of an expert she is, the less of her interference in its execution is necessary. This analogy is of course limited, and I’ve heard others who modified it to say that God in a sense wrote Himself into the code (which I quite like the sound of, even if I don’t fully understand all of its implications).

The last category in Patton’s list is Intelligent Design (ID). He notes that one can be both an ID advocate and a special creationist of any sort: it simply requires acknowledging that the possible influence of miracles must not be excluded from one’s laboratory research. What’s interesting here is that he subcategorizes “Deistic Evolution” and evolution-friendly Intelligent Design alike under a category called “Theistic Evolution” (TE)! Although most ID advocates (at higher levels, not so much in churches) acknowledge significant evolutionary activity, sometimes including universal common descent, the views of TE and ID have usually been placed in contradistinction to one another.

As I said above, I don’t think accepters of mainstream science need a special label, whether they’re believers or not. But for the purposes of lists like this in which the theological component is a criterion for classification, I usually prefer “theistic evolutionist” – with no ID, thankyouverymuch – (not so keen on “evolutionary creationist”).

I would suggest, however, that as long as we’re classifying these origins positions by theological commitment, perhaps my own position is best characterized not specifically by the origins component, but by the hermeneutical component responsible for it. My hermeneutic is characterized by a firm conviction that the Bible is first and foremost a literary work and a product of the times in which its constituent content was written. Further, I am convinced that an examination of the genre of early Genesis will confirm it as a work of ANE literature and that consequently we need bring no expectations of a theological nature to the table when asking questions about origins. Almost incidentally, since I do not expect Genesis to answer the question of how the heavens and the earth and all that are in them originated (its authors seemed to be more interested in why), I look to mainstream science to answer that question — as most Christians do unquestioningly for questions of weather, embryology, etc. regardless of their view on origins. Perhaps this doesn’t give me a neat, tidy two-word descriptor, unless you like (as I confess I do) a term I coined a few years back: literary-genericist.

I would be remiss in not pointing out and appreciating Patton’s fair-minded ecumenicism on the origins issue:

I believe that one can be a legitimate Christian and hold to any one of these views….While I believe that this is an issue that we should continue to discuss with excitement and hope, this is not an issue, in my opinion, that should fracture Christian fellowship.