Progressive Christianity & The Politics of the Conservative Christian Faith

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The Fundamentalist Witch Hunt’s New Prey

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/21/the-fundamentalist-witch-hunt-s-new-prey.html

by Karl W. Giberson

April 21, 1955

Thomas Oord, former NNU Theologian

A beloved professor forced from a Nazarene university this month is the latest casualty in a war that’s being waged against thinking evangelical Christians.

Evangelicals have just voted another intellectual off their island.

On the eve of April Fools’ Day, while on vacation in Hawaii with his wife, Professor Tom Oord got an email from the president of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) notifying him that he was being terminated. NNU is one of eight schools sponsored by the evangelical denomination Church of the Nazarene.

Oord was a tenured full professor—the highest rank in academia—who had been on the NNU faculty for 13 years, after several years as my colleague at Eastern Nazarene College. Oord was the university’s leading scholar, with 20 books on his CV; by most measures he was also the denomination’s leading scholar and one of a tiny number of Nazarene theologians whose reputations reached beyond evangelicalism. Oord had won multiple teaching awards and was wildly popular with students and respected by his colleagues. He had brought over a million dollars of grant money to the university—a remarkable accomplishment for a professor at a small, unsung liberal arts college.

Oord, however, was controversial.

He strongly supported evolution and had long been a target of creationists in the denomination. He embraced “open theism,” the view that God does not know the future but responds in love—rather than [Calvinism's] coercive control—to events as they occur, rather than foreordaining everything. Fundamentalist critics called him a heretic and had been vying for his termination for years. But Oord was also gentle and pastoral, especially with students.

As I write these words hundreds of dismayed NNU students are wearing bright-red shirts on campus, emblazoned with Oord’s motto: “I choose to live a life of love.” Almost 2,000 people, many of them current and former students, have joined a Facebook group called “Support Tom Oord” (just renamed “Support Tom Oord & NNU) in the past two weeks.

“American evangelicalism’s failure to make peace with the progressive scholars within its ranks—or even keep the conversation going—has alienated it from a broad range of scholarship.”

Getting rid of tenured faculty requires administrative creativity. In Oord’s case a small downturn in graduate enrollment cracked open a legal door that allowed the president to declare a financial problem. Curiously, this financial problem required the termination of only one faculty member. Even more curious, this financial problem came in a year of record overall enrollment when NNU was celebrating its great financial health in press releases.

NNU’s president, David Alexander, has denied on several occasions that Oord was targeted. In an April 15 letter to “NNU alumni and supports” he “assured” readers that his wildly unpopular decision was “not focused on any single individual.”

Alexander and Oord, however, have been at odds for years. As recently as last year Alexander informed Oord that he would not be returning because a theological review board was investigating him and was about, in so many words, to declare him a heretic. Such a declaration would remove Oord’s status as an “Ordained Elder in the Church of the Nazarene” and make him unsuitable to serve as a professor of religion in a Nazarene college. Prior to that, Oord’s course load had been restricted by President Alexander to quiet the concerns of fundamentalists.

I asked on the “Support Tom Oord” Facebook page if anyone believed Alexander was telling the truth in his claims that he was not targeting Oord. No one does. Apparently on April 14 NNU faculty met and overwhelmingly voted “no-confidence” in the president. The trustees have now launched an investigation into the entire affair; the president has apologized in writing to the faculty for losing their trust; and Oord's termination is "on hold" although not rescinded.

Thomas Oord, Philosopher Theologian

The controversy at NNU is, tragically, just one of many related incidents that have plagued the Church of the Nazarene. In 2007 biologist Richard Colling was forced out of another Nazarene university for his book arguing that evolution was true and should be understood as God’s way of creating. In 2010 I left Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) after years of being attacked by fundamentalists as a heretic for my views on science.

A few years earlier a colleague had been forced out of ENC for refusing to condemn gay marriage in his social work classes. Two months ago the chaplain at another Nazarene university was demoted for a sermon questioning whether enthusiastic war-mongering was compatible with Jesus’ command to love our enemies. An entire college could be staffed with the victims of fundamentalist witch hunts in the Church of the Nazarene. And, if we add the victims of witch hunts in other evangelical traditions, we could staff a [new] major research university.

The controversy at NNU is one battle in the long war that is being waged—and slowly won—against thinking evangelical Christians. Battles at the various institutions are eerily similar and unfold along the following lines: Progressive, educated scholars push their [religious] traditions to make peace with new ideas, to be open to reconsidering historical positions on human origins, the nature of God, the morality of homosexuality, the meaning of Bible stories, the status of other religions. Such conversations have long been part of religious traditions that, in earlier centuries, managed to make peace with troubling notions like the motion of the Earth. 

Thomas Oord at peace with his thoughts.

Fundamentalists, threatened by new ideas, push back but they typically lose when the war is waged on the field of ideas. Evolution, alas, is true and most educated people understand that. So, the battles are fought instead with political and financial weapons. Fundamentalist pastors, youth ministers, and concerned lay leaders apply pressure to college presidents behind the scenes to get rid of progressive faculty. During my years at ENC, a few irate fundamentalist pastors withdrew their churches’ financial support of the college because of me. Youth pastors would tell the enrollment office not to send recruiters to their churches because they did not want their young people going to a college that taught evolution. This was exactly what happened at Olivet Nazarene University when Richard Colling was forced out. And few doubt that Oord’s termination is anything other than President Alexander’s surrender to similar pressures.

In the short run, silencing controversial voices does quiet things down and probably creates space for college administrators to think about other things. But this peace is an illusion.

American evangelicalism’s failure to make peace with the progressive scholars within its ranks—or even keep the conversation going—has alienated it from a broad range of scholarship. In The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, historian Randall Stephens and I lament that most evangelicals now get their science from young earth creationist Ken Ham, their history from the discredited revisionist David Barton, their social science from the homophobic James Dobson. 

Evangelicalism’s greatest scholar is probably historian Mark Noll who, ironically, now teaches at the University of Notre Dame. Noll coined the term “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” to describe the intellectual crisis of his religious tradition—a crisis created by that tradition’s inability to break free of the fundamentalism out of which it arose.

In a few weeks we will know if Professor Oord’s pastoral, controversial voice will still be heard in classrooms at Northwest Nazarene University, encouraging students to think and to follow evidence and reason wherever it leads. Many suspect it will not. And that, once again, the fundamentalists will have won.

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“Belong, Believe, Behave?” Or “Believe, Behave, Belong?”

Index to past articles on "Science & Religion"

Faith v. Logic: "Holding Creative Tensions Against A Binary Way of Thinking"

faith is messy–which is where God is found

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2014/08/faith-is-messy-which-is-where-god-is-found/

by Peter Enns

August 17, 2014

Comments

"As long as you can deal with life in universal abstractions, you can pretend that the usual binary way of thinking is true, but once you deal with a specific or concrete reality, it is always, without exception a mixture of darkness and light, death and life, good and bad, attractive and unattractive.

"We who are trained in philosophy and theology have all kinds of trouble with that, because our preferred position is to deal with life in terms of abstractions and universals. We want it to be true “on paper” whether it is totally true in concrete situations is less important or even denied.

"This is what the dualistic mind does because it does not know how to hold creative tensions. It actually confuses rigid thinking or black and white thinking with faith itself. In my opinion, faith is exactly the opposite—which is precisely why we call it “faith” and not logic.

"The universal divine incarnation must always show itself in the specific, the concrete, the particular (as in Jesus), and it always refuses to be a mere abstraction. No one says this better than Christian Wiman:

“If nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love

for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time ravaged self.”

"When we start with big universal ideas, at the level of concepts and –isms, we too often stay there—and forever argue about theory, and making more “crucial distinctions.” At that level, the mind is totally in charge. It is then easy to think that “I love people” (but not any individual people). We defend universal principles of justice but would not actually live fully just lives ourselves. The universal usually just gives us a way out. The concrete gives us a way in!"

Richard Rohr (from his Daily Meditations)

Adapted from A New Way of Seeing, a New Way of Being: Jesus and Paul (CD, MP3 download);

and Holding the Tension: The Power of Paradox, discs 1 and 3 (CD, MP3 download);

and Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi , pp. 71-72

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CHRISTIAN WIMAN:

Eight years ago, Christian Wiman, a well-known poet and the editor of Poetry magazine, wrote a now-famous essay about having faith in the face of death. My Bright Abyss, composed in the difficult years since and completed in the wake of a bone marrow transplant, is a moving meditation on what a viable contemporary faith—responsive not only to modern thought and science but also to religious tradition—might look like.

Joyful, sorrowful, and beautifully written, My Bright Abyss is destined to become a spiritual classic, useful not only to believers but to anyone whose experience of life and art seems at times to overbrim its boundaries. How do we answer this “burn of being”? Wiman asks. What might it mean for our lives—and for our deaths—if we acknowledge the “insistent, persistent ghost” that some of us call God?

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Religion Books of 2013

The "God of the Gaps" and ensuing Metaphysical Arguments

As a former Young Earth Creationist (YEC) I was quite familiar with the idea of the "God of the Gaps." Essentially it is the anti-evolutionary position that "biological gaps" exist between evolutionary transitionary forms that could not be explained. This position more-or-less argued for the biblical idea (found in the Genesis creation story) that God made animals and man in their "kinds" as versus the evolutionary idea that an evolutionary species transitioned from one evolutionary level to the next evolutionary level, branching as it goes through specialized biological adaptations in response to the evolutionary environment that it existed within, its needs as a living thing, and need for succession and survival.

For example, a YEC would say that a fish and a mammal are two separately created kinds (or life forms) with no evolutionary forbearance from one to the other. Whereas an evolutionary position would say that the eyes or the jaw bone of the fish persisted from the fish to the amphibian to the reptile and mammal that marks the human species today. So that rather than thinking in the YEC category of a "kind" one should think in the category of "developmental evolutionary transitions." Which is why the idea of a transitionary species (or kinds) becomes the next level of argument with the YEC position pertaining to evolutionary progression.

As the argument goes, if there were transitionary species than why don't we see them? Suffice it to say that this argument is better contextualized within the larger understanding of evolutionary development of which we have suggested several articles to this idea (see the science sections here at this blogsite. Or do a google search using Relevancy22+the topic you wish to find). Succinctly, in answer to the question, the type of transitionary forms that a YEC position is seeking are non-existent, making the YEC argument moot. Why? Because for a good mutation to exist it must survive otherwise it would die as a freak to its species level. Too, these transitionary forms are found everywhere about as pre-evolving forms moving from one level of adaptation to another, while all the while branching off into their own lines of specializing species. Some of which managed to survive major catastrophes like end-of-life volcanic eruptions, meteor bombardment, or large climatic change (depleted oxygenation stages, evolving sea water salination, or the more typical latter-stage glacial periods).

At this point, the "God of the Gaps" idea expanded from primarily one of biological argument to a more generalized form of metaphysical argument. That is, the YEC position would begin to make larger-than-life metaphysical observations based upon its belief system to more generalized (spiritual) principles about God, human history, life, and the basis for all things and where they are going. Basically, a summary logic or teleology of "positional-observations" arguing from an imagined YEC past to a preconceived YEC present with logical inferencing and deductional YEC conjectures towards future expectations and biblical surmise. Thus, a YEC-based Bible will see God differently than a non-YEC Bible with its resultant doctrines. The same will go with YEC-based church doctrine and dogma with their rules of "biblical" engagement with assumed "non-biblical" belief systems as a YEC person would project or hold towards any evolutionary subject portending towards the subject of evolutionary creationism.

Obviously, the error that began at the roots of the YEC argument now becomes even more pronounced as it expands into this next level of metaphysical (or, spiritual) argumentation. However, to be fair, the Christian evolutionist (I prefer the term evolutionary creationist over the older term of theistic evolutionist for reasons previously written about here on this blog) essentially does the same. However, it is hoped that this direction of thinking is based upon a much better foundation allowing for scientific observations than the speculative (and in my estimation, contrived) YEC position unhinged from the evolutionary sciences with its concurrent archaeological and anthropological discoveries both primitive and ancient.

My own YEC indoctrination began with the reading of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth and Henry M. Morris' The Genesis Record in my teen years. But it was also coupled with well-meaning biblical preaching from my churches, bible-school experiences, and my own set biases about God and His Word. Over time (and based upon my own concurrent studies in science and math) I became less apprehensive towards the subject of cosmologic, geologic, and biologic evolutionary formation, and more open to the idea that my initial youthful prejudices may have been ill-informed and naive. Now don't get me wrong, I willingly attended and participated in any YEC conference that was in my area... so I am well-acquainted with the early days of YEC argument against science and it's projected "manipulation" by evolutionary atheists and agnostics with an axe to grind against any-and-all things "God." The arguments I heard have been well-drilled into my mind and heart, but forgive me when I say that I began to find their arguments fabricated and baseless. And once they became suspect, they fell hard and fast, with no further personal need for their support, or my own personal need to cling to them any longer, when becoming more aware of the fallacy of their foundation and argument.

Even so, it took a long while for me to move past my early YEC indoctrination. Probably several decades to say the least while I began to read and explore Earth's evolutionary history (incredibly, Stephen Hawking helped here, though it was written from an implied non-God, mechanistic perspective). And it wasn't until wandering through the large display halls of the Royal Tyrell Dinosaur Museum in the badlands of Alberta that I began to understand the sublimity of the Lord's creational handiwork as I look upon the fossilized (and not precast) bones of ancient reptilian beasts. The force of the argument came home in the ancient seas beds of this most ancient of primeval of worlds. Consequently, the grandness of God's primeval design, and the majesty of His almighty council, demanded my past theological training to absorb and reflect upon the truths of both the process and the Creator of evolutionary creationism. In essence, I would need to re-think my whole approach to biblical studies, doctrines, and my faith in general because of this belated realization. Essentially, this effort was initiated but several years ago when I began developing this blogsite for a fuller, more post-evangelic depiction of biblical doctrine and dogma. And it has been my steady pleasure to re-write (or re-envisage) orthodox church doctrine from a non-YEC, evolutionary informed basis telling of God our Creator from every conceivable viewpoint and angle as I have had time to develop these ideas with so few resources as aide and guide. Though I would later discover those same resources were everywhere about in so simple a place as Wikipedia.com. It just required a different lens. A lens that would admit God into evolution and not withhold His presence from its topic.
 

To my further surprise I have found that I am not alone, and am presently in the forefront with a number of biblical scholars and theologians who have likewise been doing the same. Some I have followed here, whilst others I have not. Overall, the impact of this mindful research upon biblical doctrine has become immense. And as any long term reader to this site will tell you, it has been a fun and exciting time of discovery and re-examination of our Christian faith - it's wonders and the intricacies of how it all falls together in a nice and neat heap. But the greatest wonder of all was in discovering how amazing our God really is when uncoupled from my hardened lines of set theological boundaries and non-admits. Once those belief-barriers fell I soon rediscovered both God and His Word in a new and more fulfilling way. It has been a journey full of surprise and wonder. One that I do not regret and am quite passionate about.

In conclusion, what attracted me to Dr. Olson's article below is not his arguments about "God in the Gaps" vs. science (Dr. Olson comes from the old school of orthodoxy, and is himself, on a similar journey to mine but more along the lines of resurrecting the historical doctrines of the church according to contemporary theology and scholarship). It is his studied observation that a YEC-informed doctrinal position predisposes one towards YEC-based metaphysical arguments about God and His Word. Even as an Evolutionary Creationist would likewise hold a resultant doctrinal position influencing church doctrine and dogma. Hence, my real attraction to this topic today is the explanation of how one's epistemology affects, informs, and influences one's metaphysical positions.... Hence, the caution to be careful to investigate the path you trod (or inherited, as was my own personal background).

Not to mention that we do great error in thinking about God in the objective terms of syllogistic argument rather than in the subjective terms of an "I-Thou" relationship. To argue about God and His Word is perhaps necessary, but it will miss the central need of the Creator beheld in meaningful relationship with His creation (and yet, either position will tell you that!). That God is no less a thing, than we our things. That God is a living entity bound to His creation as living entities with all the sublime import that that means as relational beings in fellowship with one another. That we do harm to ourselves and to our fellowship in trying to capture God as an argument or principle when He most desires to capture us with His love, faithfulness, and presence. That was the real attractor here when reading Dr. Olson's ensuring chapter on the "God of the Gaps." That God desires us as persons - and not defenders or apologists to His existence (or creation). That He has created His creation in terms of communion, presence, relationship. And to this accord I think both the Young Earth Creationists and Evolutionary Creationist can agree and attest as brothers and sisters in the Lord, who is our great Creator-Redeemer. Peace.

R.E. Slater

March 4, 2014

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The “God of the Gaps”: Right Use, Wrong Use

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/02/the-god-of-the-gaps-right-use-wrong-use/

by Roger Olson

February 23, 2014

19 Comments

One recurring theme here and in other evangelical engagements with science is the idea of the “God of the gaps.” I’m not sure who coined the phrase; I’ve heard it attributed to Bonhoeffer (from Letters and Papers from Prison), but I don’t remember him specifically using that phrase. He certainly criticized the idea of a “deus ex machine” brought in to fill the gaps—holes in the natural order science cannot (so far) explain.

Generally speaking, “God of the gaps” is used by theologians to describe the use of God to explain the otherwise unexplainable in the natural order. One notable trend in modern, Western culture has been the gradual but steady closing of the gaps by science. The legitimate fear of many theologians is that insofar as people base their belief in God on such gaps, their belief in God will have less and less warrant. Eventually, possibly, so it is said, all the gaps will be closed so that God has no “job,” so to speak.

I would like to suggest that there are really two uses of the God of the gaps idea. One is wrong and one is right—from a biblical, evangelical theological perspective.

The wrong use is to make alleged gaps in the natural order the foundation of Christian belief in God. The problem here isn’t only that as the gaps are closed by science belief in God will have less foundation. It is also that true Christianity is not - and never has been - based only the rational necessity of God. As German theologian Eberhard Jüngel says in God as the Mystery of the World, God is (for Christians) “more than necessary.” By “necessary” he means “to explain the world and general human experience.” As Jüngel and his former colleague Jürgen Moltmann (both taught at Tübingen) both never tired of saying, Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics.

Another problem with the God of the gaps idea is that it objectifies God; it treats God as a thing more than as a person. As Emil Brunner always said, our knowledge of God is through I-Thou encounter, not finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object; the God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never object (in the sense of being “thingy”—a force or power or principle that can be manipulated).

All these are good reasons to avoid the wrong use of the God of the gaps idea. However, this is not the only use of it.

From a Christian life and world perspective there are gaps in reality unexplainable by science alone. One is the Christian’s I-Thou encounter with God! Another is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Another is why some things are objectively wrong in a sense more than “so decided by us.” I would argue that another is why we are here. Not how did we come to be here, but why are we here? Science cannot explain any of those parts of reality as understood through a classical Christian lens.

So what is the “use” of this God of the gaps idea? I would argue it is not to attempt to put Christianity (or religion) on a par with science in terms of “explaining things” so that skeptics must believe what we believe (or be fools). It is rather to explain to our own and inquiring and open minds the objective basis of these realities.

Now, does that make God an “object?” Not necessarily, although that is always a danger vigilantly to be avoided. That God exists objectively and not as a “necessary idea” or the “whence of our spiritual life” or “human self-transcendence” (etc.) is essential to Christianity.

In this second use of the God of the gaps idea there is no intention of encroaching on science’s territory insofar as science stays to its limits. A thoughtful, reflective Christian believes that there may come a day when science explains everything in the natural order. All the gaps there are then closed. Insofar as God’s very existence has been based on those gaps, God will be out of a job. Oh, except—the one “big gap” of (not in) the natural order will remain—why there is a natural order at all! Science cannot in principle address that issue. That is a metaphysical question and every knowledgeable, reflective person knows that. Much of the conflict between science and religion could dissolve if both religious people and scientists would stick to their boundaries. Still, using God as an explanation for why there is a natural order (rather than nothing or something else) does not amount to “Christian knowledge of God” by itself. And it’s not a sound beginning point or foundation for Christianity because it is always possible for a reasonable person to simply say “There is no reason or explanation for the natural order; it is ultimate.” Of course, as Hans Küng has shown in Does God Exist? An Answer for Today, that leads logically to nihilism. Still, a person may reasonably choose nihilism.

The right use of the God of the gaps idea has nothing to do with convincing skeptics that they must believe in God or be fools. It has to do with explaining to Christians and open, inquiring seekers, what our God does that science can never explain because it is beyond the scope of science. What does God do? God sends Jesus and appears as Jesus among us as one of us to redeem us. God raises Jesus from the dead and gives us life abundant and free (from guilt and shame). God encounters us in Jesus through the Holy Spirit and calls us to decision for or against him and his Kingdom. God gives us hope and courage to live optimistic lives in the face of death, decay and destruction. God enables us to love the unlovable.

All of these realities are unexplainable by science—from a Christian perspective. Science can try to explain them, but, from a Christian perspective, it never can precisely because they are supernatural (above the natural order as studied and explained by science). Our job as Christian intellectuals is not to defeat science or show why science does not explain “parts” of the natural order. Our job as Christian intellectuals is to affirm and embrace legitimate science (that stays within its limits) while pushing back against metaphysicians pretending to speak as scientists to “explain” what science cannot in principle explain.

Now, right here is where many people stumble because of a category confusion. They think that all religious talk about what science cannot explain is falling into the wrong God of the gaps mentality and into anti-science mentality. And they think that all talk of “the supernatural” excludes God from the natural order in deist fashion. Neither of those is necessary. One can value science while at the same time insisting it stay within its limits. One can affirm God as the author and immanent sustainer of the natural order while speaking of God’s activity “from outside” (a spatial metaphor) the natural order. The category confusion I speak of is that between speaking of what science cannot explain in principle and what science has not yet explained. There is a difference. In the right use of the God of the gaps one does not appeal to what science has not yet explained but could one day explain. There, instead, one appeals to what lies outside of science’s purview.

Science’s purview is natural cause and effect relationships that can be mathematically described and expressed. If a person chooses to believe that’s all there is (naturalism), no Christian can give a reason why he or she cannot do so without being a fool. All we can do with such a person is witness and ask questions that deal with meanings and values (which I would argue cannot be explained scientifically). However, if the person rejects objective (not humanly invented) meanings and values and if the person rejects my witness, there is nothing I can point to and say “That is God’s work! Believe or remain a fool!” That’s why we speak of faith and the work of the Holy Spirit and surrender to God’s will as necessary for true belief in the true God—the God we worship as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and ultimately Jesus.

The Royal Tyrell Museum of Palenontology

 

Faith v. Reason: A Preliminary Discussion

 

Embracing Creation–A Question of Faith
Guest Post by Bev Mitchell

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2014/02/embracing-creation-a-question-of-faith-guest-post-by-bev-mitchell/

 

by Roger Olson

February 19, 2014

Comments

 

There are many kinds of faith: faith in human ability; faith in our beliefs; faith in our faith (fideism); faith in our interpretation of Scripture; faith that our faith and reason combined will uncover purely human reasons to believe – and this by no means exhausts the possibilities.

 

Christianity has a different take on faith. It sees faith as a dynamic gift from God that comes through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. As such, none of the above, or others that could be listed, is true Christian faith. Some may think that fideism comes closest but it does not. The important insight of “Faith not works” does not negate the fact that faith works; it is dynamic. A tested faith, a faith that trusts the Holy Spirit to lead, guide, encourage etc. provides its own assurance, through continual use and the results it yields. This approach to faith contrasts sharply with the suggestion that human reason can somehow convince one to have faith. Contrary to expectations, such presuppositional or propositional approaches to faith have greater and greater difficulty as science continues its advance.

 

For example, many Christian denials of the materialist interpretation of the findings of the life sciences are founded on the idea that somewhere in creation there must be something materially tangible (the human eye, the first stages of the origins of life, some unexpected mutation) that science cannot ever explain. If we could just prove that such a thing exists, we could prove the existence of God. We would have captured faith and brought it under human management. For this reason, these apologetic approaches get very uneasy with the seemingly endless advance of scientific knowledge.

 

 

The kinds of faith listed in the first paragraph are often combined in various ways. Practitioners of some of these approaches are upset when science explains something that was thought inexplicable, as if God has been somehow lessened. The thinking behind this seems identical to that of the atheist believer in the ultimate triumph of science – this new fact will (finally) explain away the Creator.

 

Yet, seen through the eyes of a living, Spirit-gifted faith, all of the facts of the life sciences are simply further expressions of what God is doing or making possible. They bring us no closer to understanding exactly “how” God accomplishes all of this or, how he uses the freedom inherent in creation to do so. That is a question of exactly how Spirit interacts with, and works with, matter – the causal joint. We would love to know, but we don’t. Faith is required, and trusting faith can observe the results. Approaches based on other formulations of faith seem too quick to want concrete explanations where none are on offer. If our faith is in at least the ultimate possibility of such explanations in the material domain, it will be continually challenged by the advance of science. We will restrict ourselves by a continual search for certainty, when Christian life in the Spirit is based more on confidence and trust in the finished and ongoing work of Christ.

 

 

Related to this, perhaps just saying it differently, it sometimes seems that, for many, the gift of faith that comes solely from the Holy Spirit is too vague, too spiritual, too subjective – surely we can do better. A fierce attachment to our particular interpretation of Scripture must be an improvement we can offer. An unyielding defence of a particular theological system is surely another. And, it must be true that human expressions of faith combined with human reason will indeed uncover reasons enough for true faith that, for all intents and purposes, constitute proof.

 

Our role as members of the kingdom of God and Spirit-led followers of Christ is not to put the Holy Spirit out of a job. Apologetics, however well intentioned, will never come close to accomplishing the work of the Spirit. When our faith has its sole source in the Holy Spirit, the relentless advances of biology are a cause for celebration, not fear and defensive resistance. God’s fingerprints on his great works will not be erased, they are not even there in a way that science can see, remove or explain away – or that apologists can discover.

 

Bibliography

 

For an interesting analysis of the philosophical and political foundations of the problem of certainty vs confidence in faith of various kinds, consider the small volume from 1968 by Eric Voegelin entitled “Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays”. The evangelical authors that I read seldom, if ever, refer to this book. Perhaps it’s time to consider it.

 

For more on the ever elusive ‘causal joint’ see a relatively new volume by Amos Yong “The Spirit of Creation”. This book is probably not yet widely known and is admittedly a challenging read covering a variety of closely related subjects. But, on the big theme of knowing/observing exactly how the Spirit affects material reality, it may well be the best currently available. I’ve put a short review of the book up on Amazon.

 

 

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Beyond, well beyond, intelligent design

By Dr. BK Mitchell on February 2, 2014

Format: Paperback

 

This is an important book. Amos Yong is Dean of the School of Divinity and J. Rodman Williams Professor of Theology at Regent University. His well respected body of work spans several fields and always explores the essential role of the Holy Spirit in those fields. In "The Spirit of Creation" Yong develops his long and growing interest in ways that Christian theology and science (particularly biology) might fruitfully converse. His strong sense that we should expect and develop a complementary relationship between theology and the life sciences, rather than a convergence à la Intelligent Design theory, is as insightful as it is urgent.

 

This book is theology, philosophy, logic and speculative spiritual theology all presented as a coherent whole. Emergence, holism, non-reductionistic are three good descriptors of the book's ethos. It is a very challenging read and will raise eyebrows and stir the mind and the spirit. It is Pentecostal, or as the author prefers to say, it seeks to give a (much needed) pneumatological assist to our thinking in this important area of intellectual and spiritual interaction. Because of the wide ranging nature of the topics covered in "Spirit of Creation" any thorough critique would run on far too long. You will have to trust that it all holds together - the main ideas emerge in wholeness. I will only summarize my view on the central take-home message of the book.

 

nom·i·nal·ism

 /ˈnɒmə nl iz əm/ Show Spelled [nom-uh-nl-iz-uh m] Show IPA

noun
(in medieval philosophy) the doctrine that general or abstract words do not stand for objectively existing entities and that universals are no more than names assigned to them. Compare conceptualism, realism ( def 5a ) .

 

• The essential dynamic nature of creation is front and centre; the ever-present nominalism is addressed head on and not allowed;
• a balance between God and creatures as co-creators is established, yet the apartness of God is required;
• the idea of non-monolithic causality is important and should be helpful;
• and not only is the Spirit present throughout, he never stops working. 

 

Adoption of a model like this would solve many current problems.

 

 

Addendum

 

Four scholars' opinions of this and a related work can be found in Canadian Journal of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity 3 (2012). This book is much bigger than pentecostalism (though that itself is rather large) and it addresses issues that extend across the entire spectrum of evangelical thought and beyond. If you are not pentecostally inclined, that is no reason to avoid this book - in fact, it may well be a major reason to dive in. 





"Holding to epistemologies that are safe and comforting do not expand very well"