Undeception

…and why the Church in the East never did.

Listening to most Evangelical first-string leaders, you’d get the impression that apart from an historical Fall of Man that marred the souls of all the descendants of the ones who fell, you’d have no need for Jesus, and Christianity sails right out the window. So much more than inerrancy hangs on the question: original sin and total depravity hang on some sort of historical Fall, don’t they?

Perhaps they do (though not necessarily) — but the massive blind spot we have is that a rather large, ancient, and revered segment of the Christian Church rejected both of those teachings long before science came along and refuted the possibility of an historical first pair of human progenitors. And yet these believers still maintain that the work of Christ in atonement is absolutely necessary for every individual regardless.

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo explains:

The Schism between the West and the East is great indeed, so much so that Protestants rarely ever hear that perspective. These sorts of surprises are why I have begun to love glancing at Christian theology through the lens of the Orthodox.

NPR has a rather good article up called “Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve” (sic — what the heck is up with the indiscriminate capitalization?). It vividly showcases how the tide is (finally) starting to turn in this culture war for/against evolutionary theory. Peppered with quotes from several key people, including Dennis Venema, Karl Giberson, Al Mohler, and Reasons to Believe’s Fazale Rana, the article points out that more and more self-described Evangelicals are coming to grips with the fact that the scientific evidence against a literal Adam and Eve is overwhelming.

Image via Wikipedia

Calvin College’s Dan Harlow underscores the importance of this discussion to the vitality of Evangelical Christianity when he says, “This stuff is unavoidable. Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have.” Respectability notwithstanding, conservative standard bearers like Al Mohler see nothing in Christianity worth holding onto sans a literal Adam and Eve. Despite Venema’s confident insistence that there’s nothing to be afraid of in accepting mainstream evolution (which decisively refutes two original progenitors), obviously there are some theological implications that remain in need of explanation. And although that end is not out of sight anymore, it’s still going to take a lot more work.

This reminded me of something I learned back in my linguistics program several years ago. (This isn’t a tangent: it’ll come back around!)

When two people groups speaking mutually unintelligible native languages come into contact and have need for communication, especially in a trade situation, they are likely to come up with some sort of compromise that will allow them to interact. Often they will form a sort of hybrid communication system taking elements from each of their languages. This communication system is called a “pidgin”: the vocabulary comes almost completely from the visitors who are seeking trade (historically, usually English or French) and the grammar (morphology, syntax) is taken predominantly from the native language. This system works well enough for trade, but pidgins are not classified by linguists as languages because they lack a number of grammatical features of natural human language. Because of its limitations, the pidgin is often spoken between the two language groups strictly in order to conduct business; the grammatical holes hinder much communication beyond such practical matters.

Yet in cases such as colonization in which the language of the traders makes an established presence, a pidgin may be spoken around young children who naturally adopt it as a native language rather than a limited communication system. In these cases, something very interesting happens: as part of the language acquisition process that comes so naturally to the young of our species, children fill in the pidgin’s holes. When children speak the pidgin to others, they unconsciously and effortlessly begin inserting new parts of speech, formulating verb tenses, bringing in missing vocabulary, and creating any other necessary language features that the pidgin lacked, so that the result is a robust, full-fledged language. This nativized pidgin is what is referred to as a “creole”.

Processes analogous to creolization recur outside language: quite commonly it’s in our children that thesis and antithesis are synthesized and for whom conflicts are likeliest to be resolved or otherwise fall away. Most of my peers in my generation grew up oblivious to and often incredulous of the traumatic struggle for racial equality that our parents and grandparents had to fight so hard for; I anticipate the same for my grandchildren in regard to the currently contentious issue of homosexuality.

I hope and expect this to happen also in the area of evolution and biblical literalism.

As a case in point, I had a conversation about woodenly literalistic interpretations of Scripture and evolution with my young daughter, a science nerd; at first, as a good Sunday School pupil (and my mother’s granddaughter), she was horrified to think about the possibility that what she’d heard wasn’t God’s truth (“But God doesn’t lie!” she once whispered desperately), but it was not too difficult to explain to her that the opinions of her creationist teachers hadn’t been taking all the important information into account. So in a relatively short conversation I was able to assuage her concerns and free her of some latent fears about her beloved science books so that she’ll be a part of the first generation of American Christians that tolerates some variation in the list of acceptable “vocabulary” for the origins question; in turn, theology/philosophy nerds (my son is already heading this direction) will nativize the “grammar” of how it all works and what it all means when taken together. Most importantly, they’ll now be able to look sympathetically at believers on both side of the question to an extent much more difficult for my generation and older.

I’m suggesting that we who have struggled in our exodus from conservative Christian theologies should not despair too quickly or fear too much for our children’s ability to retain and adapt Christian theology: this transition will not be nearly as difficult as it was for us who were more inculcated in our own native tongues before we made contact with those foreigners with their bizarre, barbarian languages. My hope is that, so long as we continue to stand by and tinker at the puzzle we’ve begun and teach our children to lay down their arms when dealing with those who disagree, we can trust that they will come in behind us and, relatively effortlessly, fill in the holes.

‘Is God then not my Father,’ cries the heart of the child, ‘that I need to be adopted by him? Adoption! that can never satisfy me. Who is my father? Am I not his to begin with? Is God not my very own Father? Is he my Father only in a sort or fashion—by a legal contrivance? Truly, much love may lie in adoption, but if I accept it from any one, I allow myself the child of another! The adoption of God would indeed be a blessed thing if another than he had given me being! but if he gave me being, then it means no reception, but a repudiation.—”O Father, am I not your child?”‘

‘No; but he will adopt you. He will not acknowledge you his child, but he will call you his child, and be a father to you.’

‘Alas!’ cries the child, ‘if he be not my father, he cannot become my father. A father is a father from the beginning. A primary relation cannot be superinduced. The consequence might be small where earthly fatherhood was concerned, but the very origin of my being—alas, if he be only a maker and not a father! Then am I only a machine, and not a child—not a man! It is false to say I was created in his image!

‘It avails nothing to answer that we lost our birthright by the fall. I do not care to argue that I did not fall when Adam fell; for I have fallen many a time, and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another may call a curse; I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes between my heart and the blue of every sky. But it avails nothing, either for my heart or their argument, to say I have fallen and been cast out: can any repudiation, even that of God, undo the facts of an existent origin? Nor is it merely that he made me: by whose power do I go on living? When he cast me out, as you say, did I then begin to draw my being from myself—or from the devil? In whom do I live and move and have my being?

by George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 2, “Abba, Father!”

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.

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

The fireworks continue between BioLogos and the esteemed Joseph Emerson Brown Professor of Christian Theology and President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, God’s chosen Arbiter of Faithful Readings of the Scriptures, and official representative of the spirit of biblical interpretation on earth, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. The latter has responded to Karl Giberson’s own response to an unreadably ignorant lecture recently given by The Great Baptist Paraclete.

A lot of the specific furor has been over Mohler’s original charge (it was no bland statement) that Darwin’s important trip aboard the Beagle was undertaken in search for evidence for an already assumed evolution. Giberson’s objection to this mischaracterization of history and Darwin’s motives is duly noted, but I myself am not so sure that Giberson’s stance that Darwin was still consciously nursing his “childhood faith” when he left aboard the Beagle is quite right, either.

Still, to acknowledge that Darwin’s faith was already somewhat cultural and never particularly personal as Mohler is intent to do is not at all to grant the demonstrably and consciously false implication of Mohler (and his fellow rotten teeth in Fundagelicalism) that Darwin was intent to find ways to bolster a rejection of a “literal” reading of Genesis — still less of faith in God’s creative role in general. The Beagle naturalist Darwin was a man who struggled more with problematic tenets of Christianity and organized religion in general, and not until his heart-breaking family crisis much later in life did his doubts orbit the question of the basic existence of God.

For Mohler, though, this would make no difference: the fact that he would even question Mohler’s understanding of “orthodox Christianity” at all would make any compatible beliefs he held highly suspect at best. This is where the best part of Giberson’s latest response picks up:

Let me conclude by responding to your charge that what I “have actually succeeded in doing is to show how much doctrine Christianity has to surrender in order to accommodate itself to evolution.” As a theological layperson, I hesitate to engage a trained theologian on this question, but let me rush in where angels fear to tread and offer that “doctrines” are human constructs, much like “theories” are in science. They are not facts—they are explanations or interpretations of facts.

You seem to equate your understanding of how the Bible should be read with plain-fact Christian orthodoxy. There we must part ways, and I suspect that at the end of the day, this may be the real point of contention. I do not think that I am showing how much doctrine Christianity has to surrender, but how problematic fundamentalist literalism is for engaging science. [my emphasis]

You’re darned right that this is “the real point of contention”! As Mohler stated categorically, “The theory of evolution is incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ even as it is in direct conflict with any faithful reading of the Scriptures.” The poor guy’s fear is explicitly the “costs” of accepting evolution “in terms of theological concessions.” Concessions? Would the decision to consider another piece of (rock solid) evidence in order to help us in our interpretation of Scripture mean that we’d actually have to reevaluate something we had already believed without examining? Might one honestly approaching the scientific evidence in order to help better understand Christianity as it actually exists, which to varying degrees it always does independently of our perceptions of that reality, be forced to “concede” that an earlier perception was incomplete, inadequate, or even just plain wrong?

If that’s so unthinkable, Dr. Al, you’re right: you better run from evolution like the plague.

Since childhood, my personality has been marked by an undercurrent of a haunting yearning sometimes referred to in its extreme forms as “melancholy”, very much like what C. S. Lewis called “joy”. I have always chalked it up to my Scottish heritage, but I imagine a lot of other ethnicities (I’m thinking particularly of Russians) can claim the same. I’m not prone to depression or anything, but I’ve always been attracted to haunting music, mystical stories — anything that might be referred to as sad beauty.

It’s something I’d love to stir up in whichever of my children are like me. To that end, when I tuck my children in each night, I’ve begun to complement “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” and “Seek Ye First” with some old Scottish folk songs/ballads I know, such as “Loch Lomond” (stay with me — this is going somewhere):

By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomon’
Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’
Oh! ye’ll tak’ the high road and I’ll tak’ the low road
And I’ll be in Scotland afore ye
For me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomon’.

The allusion to death is oblique enough there, isn’t it? But the sadness that’s there is made more potent by combination with such a beautiful Gaelic melody.

Another song whose melody I find absolutely mesmerizing is “Lowlands” (the version in a minor mode), an old sea shanty that evidently originated in the foreboding dreams of sailors long away at sea that they took as ill omens concerning their loved ones at home. “I dreamed a dream the other night/Lowlands! Lowlands away, my John/. . ./And then I knew my love was dead/My lowlands away.”

Then there’s Bonnie George Campbell:

Hie upon highlands and laigh upon tay
Bonnie George Campbell rode out on a day
He sadled, he bridled, and gallant rode he
And hame [i.e. home] cam his guid horse
But never cam he.

Of course, I won’t be singing any of the later verses that speak of the bloody saddle — at least not at bedtime! But the thought of doing so does remind me that people in older cultures gained an awareness of the gruesome nature of war much earlier and more vividly than we do with our sanitized and cartoonized versions.

I got to thinking about my early attraction to the bittersweet, my acknowledgement of the inevitability of hardship, and my love for humanity’s attempts to cope with sorrow through expression as in these songs, and not through suppression or denial. Indeed, in bygone days it was much harder to deny sorrow than it is in modern day America, where a broken arm is sometimes about the worst thing a child can imagine happening to someone. But when I compare myself with so many others in my religious tradition, I see a definite contrast.

The broad community of evangelical faith with which I am most familiar does not duly acknowledge sorrow and suffering. They regularly deny it and suppress it: this is evident in their contemporary Christian music stations advertising their wares as  ”positive, encouraging” music. I understand that they offer this as an alternative to hopeless, purposeless music that they find destructive; without hope, suffering can indeed be devastating, and wallowing in it is not going to help anyone. But what I find is that they actually miss out on engaging negative topics by offering stock slogans as their solution. Another evidence is that they’re suspicious of down-to-earth efforts at meeting needs, spurning social concern because they think that the black in this world is challengeable only by their white: the gospel.

Now, I do think there is relief for our personal struggles to be found in turning to God, but the impression given by so many of these believers – which they themselves seem to accept – is of a dramatic “before Jesus” and “after Jesus” photo that is not commonly fulfilled in a way relevant to most people’s life experiences. Many if not most of these believers end up in practice denying the potency of problems such as uncertainty, fear, and suffering rather than acknowledging them as mainstays of our existence with which we need help and for which we need to offer help beyond the formulae and platitudes. When they chalk up everything unpleasant to a Fall long eons ago it has the effect of filing it all away for a fix long eons away. Just “praise the Lord” and get on with it (where “it” means praising the Lord and trying to get others to.) The Ned Flanders stereotype came from somewhere, you know.

But the denial of problems doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s typified most obviously in the blind trust they place in the Bible and in their tradition’s interpretation of it. They steadfastly renounce all who would peel back the veneer for just a moment to admit that, by any reasonable definition, there are problems with their inerrant answer book; to do so would mean that they’d have to live in a world that’s not black and white. This is clearly intolerable.

This leads me to consider that there’s no coincidental correlation among those of us most mesmerized by haunting beauty and precious sorrow, those who truly come to grips with difficulties, suffering, and hardship as integral to the human experience and make the best of them, and those of us who are willing to grapple with a living faith as it exists in a grayscale world, with no hope for certainty, no inerrant guide to the world, and only a mystical inkling that, at bottom, things might really make sense after all.

All of this is closely intertwined with what Keats called “Negative Capability.” As Keats described it, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” he might be described as having negative capability. He associated it with great poets, for whom a deep-seated sense of beauty permeates all they do, such that beauty is evident, or even most evident, where there is pain. Negative capability is often used these days to explain someone who is content to find value in life even while embracing uncertainty in the most fundamental aspects of our existence, and who will be satisfied to enjoy the journey even when guaranteed no safe arrival.

Here I think we see another commonality between the atheists who suffer no exception to their rationalistic epistemology and conservative Christians who will countenance no challenge to their epistemology founded upon the divine perfection of Scripture. I could never be comfortable either place.

My thoughts turn yet again toward Abraham (regardless of questions of his historicity), whose patriarchy I claim. He was called out by a mysterious deity and followed Him with implicit trust from a familiar land to a strange land. God’s test of faith during the Mount Moriah incident should scandalize the conservative Christian because it consisted of challenging Abraham to trust Him even when it contradicted systematic theology. Keats described the great poets as the exemplars of negative capability for whom “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” The faith of Abraham was this: he never let Beauty leave his sight despite the changing scenery, uncertainty, doubts, and conflicting information he was given. I gladly call him Father Abraham.

I wonder what other correlations that can be drawn. For instance, I’ll bet that many of us who continue on our religious journey even after having our systematic faith exposed as a paper mâché bulwark are likely to be the type most enamored of fantasy and science fiction. Thoughts?