Undeception

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.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: devout evangelicals will never be able to come to terms with evolution as long as they believe that it denies the existence of an historical Adam with an historical Fall. As goes creationism, so goes Christianity. Some will cling to their Christianity so tightly that they will never entertain any beliefs that contradict it; others cannot live with the cognitive dissonance and will eventually call it quits on Christianity once they recognize that universal common descent is, for all intents and purposes, indisputable.

The issue is why Jesus had to die if there were no original sin. Why do we need the second Adam if there was no first Adam? What did Jesus do if he didn’t undo the sin that came in because of Adam? At various times and places on this blog I have offered my answers to those thoughts, which include understanding the nature of the Bible and alternative views of the atonement, most especially. But I have often felt and occasionally expressed exasperation that there were no high profile Christians grappling with this problem, which is surely on the short of list of the most problematic issues in Christian theology.

The BioLogos Foundation has done a good job of turning that around, especially since bringing on Dr. Peter Enns as senior fellow. But he has really outdone himself this time. The next time I have someone ask me about the Adam problem for evolution, I will ask that person to carve out 50 minutes to watch the following presentation. In it, Pete Enns manages to lay out the finest explication of the narrative motivations behind Genesis and Paul’s use of the Adam story that I’ve heard in quite some time. Enjoy, and spread it around.

Hard link

H/T I Think I Believe

He begins with a starkly stated proposition: 

The factual contradictions within Scripture or between Scripture and extrabiblical sources cited in my previous blog are not, in my view, the most serious difficulties that Christians face in the Bible. More troublesome are those cases where a biblical text espouses ethical values that not only contradict other biblical texts but strike us as down-right sinister or evil. 

He then goes on to highlight the clear incongruence between Mat 5.43-45 and Deu 20.16-18. 

Says Sparks, “These words from the lips of Jesus and the Law of Moses are profoundly different. How can one biblical text admonish us to love our enemies and another command Israel to commit genocide against ethnic groups because they have a different religion?” 

I am quite familiar with most of the involved justifications for the ritual act of consecration-by-destruction, or “ban” as it used to be called, known as ḥerem. In my undergraduate Apologetics class (or was it Deuteronomy?) I devoted a paper to arguing how truly ethical and even merciful it was for God to want those men, women, children, and babies murdered. 

Sparks notes that many apologists, such as myself in that paper long ago, have argued that the shock we feel when reading about the ḥerem is merely a clash between modern ethics and older sensibilities. However, it’s important to note that the clash with the ethics of the Hexateuch begins not with us in (post-)modernity but occurred with the very onset of Christianity. It is clearly Jesus’ ethic that clashes with ethics that justify ḥerem. Sparks reminds us that even the early church struggled to justify the ritual slaughter of human beings; he specifically notes Gregory of Nyssa, but I’d also like to point out that the kernel of Marcionism was popped in the heat of that friction long before.

Sparks points out how important it is for evangelicalism to admit and come to grips with these tensions: 

Even if conservative Evangelicals can create eccentric scenarios that seem to preserve the doctrine of Biblicistic inerrancy, the straightforward evidence against this doctrine is so palpable that the doctrine should never be granted any kind of fundamental status in the Christian faith.

I hope you read the whole post.

I have really enjoyed Pete Enns‘s contribution to BioLogos of late. His latest frames the Adam/Eve question in an interesting and honest way. Here’s an excerpt related to my last post:

What if we affirm that Paul’s view of human origins does not settle the matter for us today? Of course, this leaves us with a pressing question: how do we think about Adam today?

This is where the conversation begins for those wishing to maintain a biblical faith in a modern world. And whatever way forward is chosen, we must be clear on one thing: we have all left “Paul’s Adam.” We are all “creating Adam,” as it were, in an effort to reconcile Scripture and the modern understanding of human origins.
….
[O]nce you move to [the above affirmation], you have left Paul’s Adam and are now working with an Adam that is partially and even largely shaped by your own understanding and worldview. You are in an entirely different discussion.

It sounds bleak, but I have hope that efforts like the BioLogos Foundation, if they continue on their current trajectory, will begin to push through.

Not that I have all the answers, of course.

I thought I’d reproduce a summary of my current thoughts on the issue that I formulated in an interesting comment exchange under a post on another site.

I asked what sort of question the authors of Genesis 1 etiology intended to answer:

[1] why the world exists,
[2] how it got made, or
[3] both.

One commenter (whose opinion I highly respect) essentially agreed with me that the answer is [3], but added that Genesis 1 only answered [1] by implication of its primary goal of answering who is responsible, namely YHWH. I have sympathy for this, but I explained why I wrote [1] as I did.

I think Genesis 1 primarily attempts to answer the question of why everything is here as it is by instructing the Israelites/Jews that YHWH tamed chaos in order to subjugate and commission creation for His purposes. Things work as they do (=are “functional” in Walton’s terms) because it was He who intended the sun to shine, the fish to inhabit the ocean, man to hold dominion over nature, etc. The reason the world works as it does is because it was intended to work that way (“God saw that it was good”). There is certainly a strong element of the “who” answer intimately integrated into this, but I think another key aspect of Genesis 1 is a worldview shift toward the common Judeo-Christian belief that the chaos we see in our world is somewhat apparent rather than real.

What I mean is that God is in control of all creation and does not have to periodically journey to Jotunheim to grapple with his mortal enemies the frost giants—the frost giants are well under His jurisdiction. As I explained before, the gods of the ANE are typically not supreme rulers (although they are sometimes called this): they are simply the forces who are in a unique position to keep order in the universe, a responsibility they frequently shirk and indeed often circumvent by their own or other gods’ reckless actions. In contrast with the dualism of gods vs. forces of chaos (often including other gods) seen in so many other world cultures, Genesis 1 describes a deity who is supreme over nature and not in eternal competition with it. YHWH is pictured elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible in continuing contention with chaos and other insurgents, but He settles these incidents from a position of authority rather than as a merely marginally stronger force.

Dr. Enns has recently reminded us that the Ancient Near East conceptualized the beginning of creation as a battle between order and disorder, the gods vs. chaos. We see the chaos of the natural world represented as an antagonist in the Genesis cosmogony. The forces of chaos are never quite given the dignity of a name, but the functionless void upon which the curtain opens in Genesis 1.2 and God’s actions of appropriating already existing material in that chapter clearly demonstrate that He is not tasked with creating a world from scratch but with the more typically king-like duty of bringing order out of disorder, as John Walton has been arguing.

But this “cosmic battle” between order and chaos is by no means a peculiarly ANE leitmotif. Although separated by hundreds of years from the ANE, Germanic mythology as it shows up in the Scandinavian stories is characterized by the same dualism. As fitting for a people thriving in a harsh environment, the mythology of the Scandinavians as represented in Old Icelandic (“Old Norse”) literature shows this motif in the form of the continuous struggle between the gods and the ancient, formidable, grotesque giants, the frost giants in particular for obvious reasons. The world itself was born of chaos: from the gap between the realm of fire and the realm of ice a mountainous frost giant Ymir was formed, the father of all giants from whose body the earth was made after being slain by the gods (there is good evidence that many of these motifs go back to common Indo-European mythology). The delicate balance of power between the cruel and pitiless forces of nature and the order maintained by the gods is evident in Snorri’s highly entertaining rendition of “Thor and Utgard -Loki” (also called “Thor’s visit to Jotunheim”): while the two gods and accompanying human are clearly somewhat at the mercy of the giants in Jotunheim (“Giantland”), the prospect of encountering the wrath of Thor’s hammer keeps the giants from exploiting their better position.

As J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out long ago in his monumental lecture/essay, “Beowulf: the Monsters, and the Critics,” the Germanic outlook was thoroughly grim, for they anticipated that order as championed by the gods was fighting a losing battle against chaos and its monsters, and that valor was a matter of playing one’s part in a game that everyone knew could never be won.

“The Northern Gods”, Ker said [in The Dark Ages], “have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason” – mythologically, the monsters – “but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.” And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this “absolute resistance, perfect because without hope.”

Tolkien notes that the eschatological conception of “the doom of the gods” indicates that the Germanic outlook was much bleaker than the Mediterranean mythologies in predicting that chaos would triumph. But surely in accepting this fate they were but extrapolating a macro view of world history from their most reliable source: each individual’s experience. Human life is born in travail, then thrives and pushes back against all odds; defying death in early years, maturing to fear and avoid it, growing more and more aware that an entire lifetime’s work of survival is but delaying the inexorable fate of all. Each of us must succumb to the destructive power of nature, so why shouldn’t the entire world work that way?

Polytheistic cultures generally envisage gods as beings of a different sort altogether from the Judeo-Christian conception of God: rather than ultimate beings supreme over the natural world, they are merely beings whose great power was essential for maintaining some control over the natural world — and not always successfully. Despite depicting YHWH in standard ANE terms as a king, Genesis 1 describes Him as in full command of all the chaotic forces of nature.

Acknowledging Genesis’ ANE pedigree does not by any means strip it of special meaning. Rather, studying commonalities among cross-cultural cosmologies highlights the sort of meaning the original audience of Genesis would have been wanting and allows us to appreciate the accounts for what they were intended to be.

All Christians generally agree that the Bible was written down by humans, and most agree that in some way their writings are reflective of their individuality; the question comes in with the nature of divine influence.  Where do we draw the line between the human and the divine in Scripture?

Proponents of inerrancy posit that all information in Scripture was directly contributed by God; the specific form of the information as presented is normally regarded as reflective of the personalities and writing styles. A softened version of this view, which I myself held until fairly recently, was of theological concordism, the belief that despite errors in the authors’ understanding of peripheral matters, all pertinent information in Scripture was (directly or indirectly) contributed by God.

More along the lines of the latter is an analogy for understanding the nature of Scripture known as the incarnational model. Popularized by Peter Enns, the incarnational model regards the Bible as fully human and fully divine in a way analogous to the way trinitarian orthodoxy views Jesus. Saying that the Bible is both divine and human as Jesus was naturally leads to an attribution of the aspect of “divinity” to the Bible in a surprising way for a modern monotheist, and despite his denial of such an explicit divine ontology to Scripture in my interaction with him here, it is a weakness of the analogy that in its articulation it tends to force even Dr. Enns himself to sound like he’s contradicting this denial (p. 228 of this article).

The strength of this model as described by Enns is that it encourages exploration of the “human” characteristics of the Bible; to my knowledge, it just hasn’t gone much beyond suggesting that the “humanity” of the text is somehow of a piece with its “divinity”. This view’s proponents are happy enough to bask in the same mystery that exists with the Trinity, and for this reason I have not found it useful for answering the question at hand about where divine influence of the Bible comes in, which it does with a firm but useless “Yes.” To his credit, Dr. Enns has acknowledged that the sources of this model (Hodge, Warfield, Bavinck, et al.) never properly came to grips with what it really means to see that even errors are inspired by the Holy Spirit in the sense of “divine”; nor, to my knowledge, have its proponents progressed much further in this area despite his encouragement.

My discomfort with the analogy behind the model stems from its claim of the “divinity” in the text, which even in its least literal sense is an extraordinary claim for which he offers no compelling (much less extraordinary) evidence. Enns emphasizes that an affirmation of the divine nature of Scripture is warranted primarily by faith: “The ‘divinity’ of Scripture is a confession of faith, not a end product of proof or demonstration.”  He offers no compelling motivation for this faith assumption beyond its effectiveness in the lives of students of Scripture. Yet to acknowledge that the Bible has been used of God mightily is an entirely inadequate basis for affirming its “fully divine” nature. As I remarked to him, “If we claim it’s ‘divine’ just because God has used it effectively to testify to Him and bring others to a full knowledge of His plan of salvation, I know a few pastors and lay people who would be gratified to know that they qualify for this distinction!” In actuality, this model treats the Bible as fully human but tags on the label of “fully divine” without ever really defining what this means. So what we’re left with is a model encouraging exploration of the humanity of the texts with only a vague sense that in doing so, the divine intention behind the whole thing will be apprehended.

Despite these criticisms, and indeed, precisely because of the just described failure of one of its central claims, I find very little practical difference between his view and my own. My biggest problem is that using the incarnational analogy is, I suspect, primarily a way of retaining a mystical component to the Bible that’s regularly assumed among mainstream evangelicals. I don’t know how to justify positing such mysticalness and have seen it as chiefly responsible for hermenutics that over-spiritualize the Bible in harmful ways. “Would it not be a more modest and defensible claim,” I asked Dr. Enns, ”to say simply that Scripture is a tool God ordained as a minister that He has shown an uncommon (even ‘paramount’) preference for and used with uncommon effectiveness as He has seen fit?”

My position is that there definitely was divine intentionality behind the text and divine influence upon it, and that this influence was at times more direct than others (e.g., in certain prophecies and “thus saith the Lord” scenarios), but I ultimately reject the idea of “divinity” intrinsic to the text. I find it most compelling to work within the proposition that the Bible is the direct result of humans interacting with divinity. The best analogy that springs to mind is that Scripture is how the rock shatters when it receives the blow of a hammer: the points of fracture are not individually selected and created by the one wielding the hammer, although his decision to strike, the rock he selects, the location of the blow, and the force with which he strikes it are deliberated and consciously predetermined. (Incidentally, I find this to be in striking harmony with my understanding of His creation of the universe through natural processes.)

I have a hunch that God’s interaction with the modern reader of these ancient Scriptures is more a matter of pneumatology than of bibliology: there’s a crucial difference between affirming that the Spirit of God uses Scripture for certain purposes and claiming that Scripture itself must therefore be “spiritual” in nature and must be interpreted in a special “spiritual” way. What I mean is that a recognition of the Bible’s origination as the interaction of human and divine doesn’t provide new information about its nature that is helpful for determining interpretation. In order to know what it means, we are primarily dependent on treating the Bible as literature, viz. through understanding its authors and their intents, perceptions, prejudices, etc. Practically speaking, it is quite incidental to our interpretation that God is the subject of the Bible. This is related to the profound observation that although the Gallic Wars exercised an influence on Julius Caesar’s writing about that subject, it was Julius Caesar and not the Gallic Wars who authored Commentarii de Bello Gallico. That Julius Ceasar was in fact involved in wars with the Gauls is known through outside corroboration (none of which is infallible, of course); that the authors of Scripture interacted with God is supported by outside corroboration, particularly the kinds of things Enns offers as evidences of its “divinity”, things like its life-changing qualities (again, not infallible witnesses).

I go looking for a moniker or designation for the view of Scripture I have described that presents itself as another model in contradistinction to inerrancy, theological concordism, and the incarnational model (certainly one more modest than “the right view”), but suspect that my view would likeliest be, as ambiguously as dismissively, classified simply as a “liberal approach” to Scripture. It’s not “my” view, since I did not create it and have not contributed significant new insights about it, so I don’t expect to definitively name it. However, as I know of no better alternatives and will find it convenient to summarize this view within my own writings under a specific term, I am leaning toward referring to the view I have described in this post as a ministerial model, in reference to my comment to Dr. Enns quoted above.

Can you identify any weaknesses in the idea of Scripture as “minister” or as “tool of choice”? Can you suggest a better analogy than “tool”, “minister”, or “Incarnation”?