Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Charles Jencks - An Architect's View of Postmodernism

The postmodern architect Charles Jencks gives to us his perspective of early postmodernism as he understood it from the 1980s to the present, based upon his past building and landscape designs, projects, and many books.

Moreover, the Evolutionary map (found below) that he provides in Architectural Review (July 2000) reminds us of the fluidity of "isms" that have washed over our past century of mankind - helping us to re-visualize the ebbs-and-flows that have washed over our souls and across our culturally-bound lives. It tells us of our larger-narratives, our grander-stories, that each of us have had a small part in the making, the creating or the undoing: to those lives around us, to our environment, and to our sense of being, time and place.

For the longer we have lived the more we have found ourselves personally (or impersonally) involved with the many events charted on this map having witnessed those events within our life; some of which we may have had a small part in its construction or de-construction; many others that we didn't. Events that didn't make sense to us at the time but in hindsight fall into place within our mental and communal (corporate) landscapes as we digested, and picked-through, an assortment of ideas, fashions, constructs, and debacles that have embroiled, or enmeshed, us through our lifetimes.

And in many ways, I suspect this blog (along with my poetic writings) have been a small attempt to piece together what I have seen and witnessed through the past decades of my life. And as the map below suggests, it seems that we have been through a lot. Each event or movement affecting us in one way or another, some directly, and others simply glancing off of us. To leave us dangling like a loose-end of thread trying to piece together the larger tapestry of our lives within an intermix of movements and duties that have driven us from morning to evening, sunrise to sunset, searching for solidarity with God, society, family and self. Waking only to hear again a continual garble of symphonies and cacophonous noises unintelligible until collected much later in life to be reviewed in the broader lights of interplay between significant speakers both personally and impersonally by a literary author, a musician, an historian, theologian, or philosopher. As each speaker/presentation interacts with, or intersects, our past-and-present world/era/timelines through the spoken or written word, a sound of music, a convocation, a play or even an authored work itself.

That said, Charles Jencks reviews his life's convocations and vocation revisualizing with us what he has seen and witness within our percolating 20th Century global societies, attempting to capture and build those many separate stories into a variegated set of pluralistic, many-faceted structures and environments that tell the story of our human societies at once complex, unending, restless, searching, evolving. It is the story of us. It is the story of me. It is our grander meta-narratives, our turbulent cultural symphonies and cacophonous noises, our alters of sacrifice and worship, our corporate works of industry and largesse, attributed to the magnificence, the disquiet, even the horror of mankind seeking relevance upon the footlights of life's multitudinous stages and melodramatic operas.

R.E. Slater
October 2011 

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"The Century is Over"
Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture
with its attractor basins, by Charles Jencks

Scanned from Architectural Review, July 2000, p. 77


"The Century is Over" - Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture with its attractor basins,
by Charles Jencks, Architectural Review, July 2000, p. 77 - http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/10/charles-jencks-look-at-modernism.html


Post-Modernism has become an integral part of the cultural landscape after developing for thirty years as a movement in the arts, after being disputed and celebrated. In this witty overview, Charles Jencks, the first to write a book defining the subject, argues that the movement is one more reaction from within modernism critical of its shortcomings. The unintended consequences of modernisation, such as the terrorist debacle and global warming, are typical issues motivating a Critical Modern response today.

In a unique analysis, using many explanatory diagrams and graphs, Jencks reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation. Critical Modernism emerges at two levels. As an underground movement, it is the fact that many modernisms compete, quarrel and criticise each other as they seek to become dominant. Secondly, when so many of these movements follow each other today in quick succession, they may reach a ‘critical mass,’ a Modernism, and become a conscious tradition.


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Critical Modernism: Where is Post-Modernism Going What is Post-ModernismCritical Modernism:
Where is Post-Modernism Going
[Paperback]

by Charles Jencks, Academy Press; 5 edition (June 12, 2007)

More books by Charles Jencks -





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What is Post-Modernism?

by Charles Jencks, Academy Press; 4 edition (June 13, 1996)

Provides a lucid exposition of Post-Modernism in art and architecture.


From the Back Cover

What is Post-Modernism (What Isà?)'What is Post-Modernism?' Is it a new world view,or an outgrowth of the Post-Industrial Society? Is it a shift in philosophy, the arts and architecture? In this fourth, entirely revised edition,   shows it is all these things plus many other forces that have exploded since the early 1960s. In a unique analysis, Charles Jencks using analysis and diagrams designed especially for this edition, reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation.

But why has post-modern culture arrived? In an ironic parable, 'the Protestant Crusade'. Jencks uncovers some hitherto hidden origins: the Modernists' abhorrence for all things sensuous and natural, and their zeal for all things orderly and mechanistic. This pseudo-religion led in the 1920s to the famous 'vacuum-cleaning' period, the purgation of values, metaphysics and emotion. In the 1970s it led on to the 'Protestant Inquisition' which inadvertently created the very enemy Modernists feared - Post-Modernism; a Counter-Reformation, the reassertion of worldliness, fecundity, humour and pluralism.

However, more than one tradition emerged and Jencks, distinguishing two types of Post-Modernism (deconstructive and reconstructive) demonstrates that the former is often a disguised form of Late-Modernism. This takes the de-creation and nihilism of its parent to extremes. The main engine that drives global culture today - post-modernisation, the electronic economy and instant communications network - is analysed in its close relation to other 'posts': Post-Fordism, Post-Socialism and the post-national world of trading blocs and unstable nations. Jencks argues that this may result in catastrophe and global governance, or a web of transnational institutions and obligations.

The most radical idea of this challenging book is the conclusion: the notion that the post-modern world does not mean the end of meta-narratives, but something quite different. Belief systems are flourishing as never before and, Jencks argues, "a new meta-narrative, based on the story of the universe and its generative qualities, will soon create a new world view that will affect all areas. It is a story which grows directly out of the post-modern sciences of complexity and is thus both true and mythic."

Jencks other What is...? titles include What is Abstraction?, What is Deconstruction?

An Amazon Book Review
by mlbasquiat 

I have great respect for Charles Jencks as an architect, and as a critic of art relating to such. Therefore the book should be retitled, What is Postmodern Architecture? Or what is everything about Post-Modernism except the art? The main focus seems to be on the industrial world which created the art, rather then the [postmodernistic] art itself. Seems hardly revolutionary or even relevant since everyone and their brother and sister has written on that subject since 1820. I was hoping for something which would address the art, but I was sorely disappointed. The constant focus on the world around the buildings of postmodernism dragged and was inebriatingly dull (It got to the point where the author was forced to contradict himself to make the book interesting).

The focus of Postmoderism was once architecture, however, now the focus has shifted, it seems everyone except the academics know this. [Jencks sections on art and literature are light and misinformed] and I expected more from Jencks, being the great mind of the century that he was. If you want to know anything helpful and relevant pretaining to Post Modernism today, do not read this book. But hey if you want to know about your father's post modernism, read this book!


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2000 July: Jencks' Theory of Evolution,
an Overview of 20th Century Architecture

AR 2000 July − Jencks' Theory of Evolution Diagram














At the start of the twenty-first century, Charles Jencks gives a personal, perceptive and provocative summary of the architecture of the twentieth. Now that the century is over it is time to ask what it meant for architecture. This is a harder question than it first appears. Did Modern architecture, as its apologists claim, triumph over other contenders? What was the relationship of commercial practice to quality - did the best architects lead or only influence the profession? Did good architecture trickle-down or was it dumbed-down? Or did a hundred mini-movements tell the real story of the century; or was it like that of the past, one of spec builders, the DIY industry and self-build?

In terms of sheer numbers the century has been claimed for the shed building, the factory, warehouse and its cousin, the office. In terms of cost airports have won, in terms of prestige museums, in terms of kitsch it has been shopping and mega-malls, but building-counts like body-counts only tell the background story.

The main narrative does not belong to any building type, movement, individual or sector. Rather, it belongs to a competitive drama, a dynamic and turbulent flow of ideas, social movements, technical forces and individuals all jockeying for position. Sometimes, a movement or an individual may be momentarily in the public eye and enjoy media power, but such notoriety rarely lasts for more than five years and usually for not more than two.


AR 2000 July − Jencks' Theory of Evolution (Pages 1 and 2)


It is true that certain architects of the previous century - how strange those words ring for Modernists - were creative forces that lasted for longer. Mies was a power to be reckoned with in the ’20s and ’60s. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Aalto, who with Mies made up the big four, were seminal at more times and Kahn, Stirling, Eisenman and Gehry, the little four, each had two small periods of influence. But even these protean characters, in order to stay relevant and on top, had to reinvent themselves about every 10 years.

The notion that there is a ‘10-year rule’ of reinvention for the creative genius in the twentieth century has been well argued by the Harvard cognitive scientist Howard Gardner in his book Creating Minds, 1993. Subtitled An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi, it is a detailed study of these, the big seven Modernists, and it shows how they often made breakthroughs or underwent creative shifts every 10 years.

In a recently finished book, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, I have found the same pattern in this the Proteus of design. As the Hayward Gallery put it, polemically, in the title of a 1987 retrospective Le Corbusier was ‘The Architect of the Century’. Well, could this be possible - even before the century was over and Frank Gehry given a shot at the title? I think the answer is ‘yes’, as I argue at length and as the accompanying evolutionary tree, or diagram, shows.

One will find Corbu’s presence on this chart at five different points:
  • as the leader of ‘the Heroic Period’ of the 1920s;
  • as a leading thinker of a new (and rather unfortunate) urbanism;
  • as the leader of ClAM and mass housing after the war;
  • as a harbinger of Post-Modernism with Ronchamp and the symbolic architecture of Chandigarh; and,
  • just at the end of his life, with his Brussels and Zurich pavilions, the forerunner of the High-Tech movement.
No other architect was as creative in different traditions; not for nothing was he seen as ‘the Picasso of architecture’.

But the point of my argument is slightly different than Howard Gardner’s. While agreeing with his analysis, I think one of the important reasons for the demonic creativity of these seven ‘geniuses’ is that the last century was uncommonly turbulent. My diagram, and its tortuous blobs, captures this continual revolution. At any one time the twentieth century architect has had to face three or four competing movements of architecture, respond to changes in technology, social forces, style and ideology - not to mention world wars and such large impersonal forces as the Internet. It was an exhausting century. As the Chinese say: ‘may you be condemned to live in interesting times’.


AR 2000 July − Jencks' Theory of Evolution (Pages 3 and 4)


However beneficent this may be for architectural creativity this has not been healthy or good for the environment. For one thing it has been Gardner’s message - the revolutionary period has been dominated by men, there are very few women among the 400 protean creators I have gathered from other writers. An urbanism both more feminine and coherent would have been far superior to the over- rationalized and badly related boxes that have formed our cities.

For another thing continual revolution, or the constant change of fashion, business cycles, technical innovation and social transformation has meant that architecture, like the other arts, lacks depth and perfection. It is hard to master an art when surfing a waterfall. Nonetheless, that is what the old century has been, a turbulent motion of whirls and eddies; sometime even the whirlpool of Fascist and Nazi architecture going nowhere but down. There are about 100 trends and technical forces shown, and 60 movements, many of them ‘isms’ - Futurism, Expressionism, Brutalism or Metabolism - that became ‘wasms’. Riding these waves as a leader is exhilarating, until the Neo-follower surfs on by.

I don’t mean to be disparaging so much as realistic. The twentieth century produced great architecture but, as Lewis Mumford often noted, with great faults. A critical Modernism, or Post-Modern perspective, must acknowledge these deep problems and face the horrors of the century as much as the triumphs.

The evolutionary tree and its surprising conclusions

Usually when historians look at the recent past they do so with the eyes and taste that rigidly exclude the variety, contradictions, mess and creative wealth of a period, and we applaud them for so doing. All history writing is selective and based on theories of what really matters, and there is no way around this limitation. But there are ways to compensate for perspectival distortion and over the last 30 years I have devised a method, the evolutionary tree, which if it is not completely inclusive is at least balanced in its selective effects.

As can be seen in the classifiers to the extreme left of the diagram, it is based on the assumption that there are coherent traditions that tend to self-organize around underlying structures. These deep structures, often opposed to each other psychologically and culturally, act like what are called, in the esoteric science of nonlinear dynamics, ‘attractor basins’: they attract architects to one line of development rather than another. Why? Not only because of taste, training, education and friendships, but because of type-casting and the way the market forces architects to have an identifiable style and skill. In a word, specialization.

Of course, architects dislike being pigeon-holed as much as do politicians and writers - they too like to claim universality, freedom and openness. But it is the rare architect, such as Le Corbusier or Gehry, who can be found in several different traditions and often they are pilloried for leaving one fold for another. Enough forces conspire to keep the architect ‘on message’, even when they seek, like Post-Modernists, to be pluralists.

What stories does this turbulent blob-diagram tell? In crude terms it reveals some surprises. Most architecture - 80 per cent? - is by non-architects, or at least the result of larger processes that are, artistically speaking, unselfconscious: building regulations, governmental acts, the vernacular, planning laws, mass housing, the mallification of the suburbs, and inventions in the technical/industrial sphere. Le Corbusier in the 1920s, Russian disurbanists in the 1930s and Richard Rogers today try to affect this inchoate area, but like globalization it is mostly beyond anyone’s control.

This high proportion of non-architectural creativity is likely to lessen in the future as more and more of the environment is forced into governmental and planning control, the result of economic and ecological forces. But the ironic truth remains that, in terms of control and mega-planning, the Disney corporation has been more effective than the former Soviet Union and, architecturally-speaking, its results are unselfconscious vernacular pastiche (all-too-consciously applied.)

Another surprise is that a polemical movement may not be the preserve of just one tradition. One would have thought the ecological imperative might have been monopolized by the Activist tradition, but it has been taken up by all of them in different ways. For instance, the Classicists, following Leon Krier, have created an ecological movement known as the New Urbanism. It is based on the tight village planning of a previous area, and it is mostly Classical and Vernacular in style; its green credentials are presented with historicist wrappers.

Then there are Post-Modern versions of green architecture, with SITE, Ralph Erskine and Lucien Kroll; High-Tech versions usually called Eco-Tech (or Organi-Tech); the Biomorphic versions of Ken Yeang. And there is the madly optimistic corporate-governmental version of the Sustainability Movement let by Amory Lovins. His notion is summarized in the oxymoron ‘Natural Capitalism’. Nature and capitalism can walk together in the twenty-first century. He argues, counter to stereotypes, that so many efficiencies and savings can be made that economic and ecological growth can occur at the same time - at four times their current rate! - if only we can think through all systems at the start.

As Oscar Wilde put it: ‘being natural is such a difficult pose to keep up’- and reconciling these heretofore opposed forces is going to take more than a pose, that is, a raft of tax incentives. In any case, the point is that green architectures, in the plural, are coming from everywhere while we might have thought the ecological issue would be taken over by just one or two movements.

AR 2000 July - Jencks' Theory of Evolution (Picture 2)
The south porch of the Templo de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
A third surprise is that we can see the strange alliances within the self-conscious tradition, usually the mainstream, or what Sigfried Giedion called the ‘ruling style’ of architecture. Up through the 1940s this was mostly a version of Classicism: Edwardian Baroque, Beaux-Arts Classicism, monumental stripped Classicism, or the fundamental Classicism of Gunnar Asplund.

When the Fascists in Italy and Spain, and the leaders of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia self-consciously imposed their version as a state style it squeezed out contending approaches. The diaspora of Modern architects and the waning of other approaches are clear from the diagram: like evolutionary species whose habitat is destroyed they went virtually extinct (or emigrated from Europe and the USSR).

Following sociologists such a David Harvey and David Herf, there is another surprise: I have called these Classical or monumental folk architects ‘Reactionary Modernists’. Like Albert Speer they were just as wedded to technology, economic progress, instrumental reason and the Zeitgeist as Mies, Le Corbusier and Gropius. The fact that they persecuted Functionalists and creative Modernists and adopted reactionary styles and attitudes has obscured the deeper point that they all shared some common assumptions about power, mass culture and mass production.

They were, in effect, disputing some common territory, a point that the diagram reveals especially when Modernism triumphs after the Second World War. The true inheritors of the mainstream were the big corporate Modernists, and they have been so ever since. They only appear small in my diagram because their creativity and influence has not been excessive. In terms of volume of work they have overshadowed the four other traditions.

The evolutionary tree also shows a minor surprise: the way this dominant is constantly attracted back to stripped Classicism, or degree-zero Modernism. Although they are very different, Lincoln Center in New York, and 20 other cultural scenes in America during the ’60s, are in this blood line, as is the Modern Classicism of Robert Stern and Demetri Porphyrios. The Corporate Modernism of Berlin, and even Richard Meier, is not too far away from this ‘strange attractor’. Why? The corporate forces of production and patronage favour an impersonal, abstract, semi-Classical sobriety. Giedion’s notion of the ‘ruling taste’ is usually pulled towards this attractor basin.

But mainstream culture is not always located on this axis. Several important exceptions were when Expressionism, the Bauhaus, and the Heroic Period dominated for a few years in the ’20s, or Post-Modernism did in the early ’80s, or Art Nouveau and National Romanticism did at the start of the century. Hector Guimard in Paris, Horta in Belgium, Mackintosh in Glasgow, Eliel Saarinen and Lars Sonck in Helsinki, and my favourite architect, Antonio Gaudi, in Barcelona - all became momentary leaders of a major public architecture, if only for three of four years.

Gaudi a standard

Here is a point where my bias shows through the evolutionary tree. Nikolaus Pevsner dismissed most of these movements as ‘transitory fashions’ and for Giedion, except for the Heroic Period, they were not ‘constituent facts’. One remembers how Modernist historians, like revisionist Communists air-brushing Trotsky out of photographs, liked to clean up uncomfortable facts. Interpretation and judgment obviously distort all historical selection.

My argument for placing Antonio Gaudi the best architect of the century, even ahead of Le Corbusier, does not rest on his influence, city planning or theoretical contribution. Rather, it concerns his creative brilliance at turning city building and structure into a high art. No other architect managed to get craftsmen, artists and even patrons working together on such a large and complete scale. His works remain the standard of integrating all the arts at the highest creative and symbolic level.

The reason his work has such creative depth is that he took a long time - which other twentieth-century architects did not allow themselves - to innovate at all levels. His architecture exploits all sorts of new structural types - such as the hyperbolic paraboloid - if not for the very first time, then for the most seminal time. He makes such form-types his own by giving them a forceful and poetic expression. Moreover he bends structural rationalism to expressive ends. For instance, where the Italian engineer Nervi makes an ordered art from showing the isostatic lines of force in his concrete ceiling, Gaudi takes the same forces and makes them dynamic - like the straining muscles of an athlete - pushing against each other. Concrete becomes animated, humorous, related to our body and moods.

Beyond this, in buildings such as the Casa Batllo, he uses technological and structural innovations for symbolic, and political, ends - to present the sufferings of the Catalans under the dragon of Castile. Structural and material invention are always means to a larger intention, and it is this overall meaning that gives his work the greatest symbolic depth. It communicates up and down the scales, from the everyday and local to the cosmic. By comparison the work of Mies and Aalto is too abstract, Le Corbusier and Wright too cut off from the language of the street, Eisenman too cerebral, Gehry too formalist.


AR 2000 July - Jencks' Theory of Evolution (Picture 1)
Left. The lodge and turret of the Parc Guell.Right.
The interior of the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia

To say Gaudi was the architect of the century, however, reveals my partiality towards artistic and symbolic architecture, values that other critics, such as Ken Frampton, do not necessarily share. In an Art Net lecture in London of 1974, I was shocked to hear him dismiss Gaudi as ‘kitsch’ - but Philip Johnson used to dismiss Frank Lloyd Wright as the ‘greatest architect of the nineteenth century’. The evolutionary tree is meant to make such egregious dismissals, as Pevsner, Giedion, Frampton and Johnson are happy to commit, more difficult. Or at least make them feel uncomfortable.

I realize, however, the high placement of Gaudi is a contentious claim that needs more defence than I can offer here. Those who value the perfecting of architectural technique might proffer Mies, Kahn or Norman Foster as the architect of the century. Those who value theory and education might favour Gropius at the Bauhaus or Eisenman because of his design and writing; those who prefer an understated humanism might put Aalto in this role. Many contenders for the top positions re apparent in the weighting I have given the 400 ‘best’ architects.

But my idiosyncrasy of proffering Gaudi actually raises another surprise. In spite of a few disagreements over ‘transitory facts’, most critics and historians of twentieth-century architecture would accept this lift of the 400 and most of the relative weighting. They would argue over the details but, because it is constructed as a composite portrait of what they have written, it is not very contentious.

Perhaps I have exaggerated the recent Biomorphic School (because I think it will be important) but a provocative aspect of this diagram is how conventional is it. We are surprised to find such a tumultuous century so full of stereotype and consensus. Was Modernism really invented to mass-produce opinion and culture on a global scale - what ever happened to its creativity and individuality?

When we look back at he nineteenth century, with superiority, we laugh at the Salon and the conformity of an Academy of taste that could elevate Bougereau and Lord Leighton to such heights. Will the twenty-first century be kinder to the Brit Pack of Damien Hirst and other sensations sanctioned by the Royal Academy; or the 10 000 followers of Andy Warhol? One of the more pleasant aspects of a change in century, and millennium, is that it forces such thoughts of quality and perspective into view. On 1 January 2000 all the most avant-garde artists and Modernists became old hat. The twentieth century is over; interpretation begins!


From the AR Archives

Charles Jencks discusses revivalism in relation to the Getty Museum and asks if we should still indulge in historical simulation from 1978’s February edition of The Architectural Review.



A Leap of Truth, Part 8: Requiring Certainty

 
August 31, 2011

This week we feature the next clip from the upcoming documentary “A Leap of Truth”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. As Ryan wrote in his accompanying post for the film’s first clip, our goal for the film is to put something proactive on the table to help motivate an elevated conversation above the unnecessary “war” between science and faith. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion.

As Christians, we live by faith. Faith isn’t fanciful or ungrounded; rather the Bible describes it as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Heb 11:1). The purpose of today’s film clip is not to call into question our confidence in the revelation of Scripture, but to remind us of the importance of recognizing our biases and limitations. We need not live in fear that the Gospel will erode or we will slide into faithless liberalism if we ask questions. Nor should we hang our faith on the Bible somehow being scientifically validated.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to "pull up" this page and watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). It is best to think about this in groups. You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.


A Leap of Truth - Requiring Certainty


Click link above to view video


Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “In our contemporary society, people want black and white answers. They want absolute certainty about things. Fundamentalisms, whether the fundamentalism of atheism or fundamentalism of creationism, does offer you the prospect—I think it is a false prospect—of certainty on those terms.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “And you don’t handle ambiguity very well; you need crystal clarity on things. That invites a hyper-literalist mentality that I think has been sort of a partner of Protestant Christianity, particularly in the west in America.

Rabbi Steve Cohen: “The impulse to try to reduce the Scripture to a single meaning comes out of a discomfort with complexity.”

Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “Boiling complexity down to something we can hold on to—we by default, I think, do this unconsciously. We can’t just have everything being chaotic and complex. We have to generalize and bring things down, and I think sometimes that what we fail to recognize is that we have done that…we have generalized from the complex to get something that we can then hold on to, and then we think that that is an absolute —‘it is that way; it has to be that way’—not recognizing that we have generalized to bring it down to that way.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “We want this sense of coherence where our lives make some sense and we are all after that in different kinds of ways, and we use our faith sometimes to make those things happen.”

Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “It leads to the assumptions that everyone thinks this way, and there are these simple answers to things, and we have always thought this way, and any thought that might move away or question some of those things, you know, we can tag it as liberal or tag it as atheistic. It kind of sets up a culture of warfare, if you will.”

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “That sort of fundamentalism is a very brittle position—the slightest crack and the whole thing shatters."

Dr. Ard Louis: “Really what happens is that people have fear. They are afraid that if they let go of this really tight way of looking at things, then the only alternative is going to be irrationality and lack of control, but that is not true. I think that actually you can let go of this really tight hold, and step forward into richer things, and think about things, and the alternative isn’t just quicksand where you disappear.”

Dr. Chris Tilling: “The Christian gospel does want to give us a sense of confidence in the truth, and that is a very legitimate yearning and desire. But, the earliest Christian writers have always linked that with the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is ultimately a faith statement—it is a truth bound to belief, believing that Jesus rose from the dead—rather than from a scientific description of a certain reality that we can objectify. Then, that becomes not a matter of faith and commitment in truth, but of certainty.”

Rabbi Steve Cohen: “Certainty is where we end up when we lose faith because we are too scared of what we think we know being wrong, and to me, that is the ultimate, that is death. The people here get sick of me saying this, but you haven’t heard me say it so I will say it again, but I say over and over again that I will always prefer a good question to a good answer because a good answer stops the conversation, but a good question gets us talking— that, to me, is a stance of faith.”






A Leap of Truth, Part 7: Expanding the Paradigm


August 24, 2011

This week we feature the next clip from the upcoming documentary “A Leap of Truth”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. As Ryan wrote in his accompanying post for the film’s first clip, our goal for the film is to put something proactive on the table to help motivate an elevated conversation above the unnecessary “war” between science and faith. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to "pull up" this page and watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). It is best to think about this in groups. You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.


A Leap of Truth - Expanding the Paradigm


Click link above to view video


Dr. Alister McGrath: “I think that one of the questions that arises when thinking about faith and science is whether theology is being forcibly changed simply to accommodate to scientific development. As I look at the long history of Biblical interpretation, I see Christian theologians wrestling with scripture, wanting to make sense of it—sometimes going off in this direction, sometimes in that, but always correcting themselves when they realize, ‘We have gone wrong.’ It is not about forcible revision. Sometimes we have gone wrong, and we need to reexamine questions. Maybe the way we always thought things were isn’t quite right. That is why challenges to our way of thinking actually are to be welcomed. They force us to rethink.”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “Changing a worldview or indeed expanding it significantly is quite a painful process. It seems to put a question mark against everything we have previously thought, believed, acted on, felt, and found to be important. Particularly this is true, obviously, of our concept of God.”

Michael Ramsden: “This is difficult for anyone who holds any kind of belief, regardless of its nature, to be willing to be challenged on it. We normally become very defensive. Now, it is inevitable that the paradigm you bring is going to affect how you begin to interpret and arrange certain things. But then, the question that has to come for any person who wants to try to think clearly is the reality of what I am observing and studying has to be able to challenge my paradigm. Either I am going to make everything fit into this paradigm of mine, or I am going to allow the reality of this to inform the way I think about something.”

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “You have to commit yourself to what you believe to be a point of view, but you have to also recognize that you may be mistaken in that point of view—and you have to be open to correction. And people who are seeking to serve the God of truth should welcome truth in whatever sort it comes.”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “I don’t think change is about necessarily being better or worse; it is about being appropriate to the situation. Love in the presence of pain takes the form of compassion. Love in the presence of injustice takes the form of anger. Love in the presence of love takes the form of delight. There isn’t a change there…it is all love; it is all consistent, but it takes a different form.”

Reverend Dr. Lincoln Harvey: “God is lively. God is undomesticated. There is wildness to God, and that is unsettling because that says, ‘I am not finished.’”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “Every concept of God is inadequate. Every view of God is too small. Every theology is idolatrous, in one sense—that it is an inadequate presentation of who God is—and therefore, periodically, you have to get a bigger one.”

Reverend Dr. David Wenham: “New generations raise new questions which may actually help our understanding to increase. If thinking about modern science is helping us to actually understand the Bible better, I think that is a real possibility and I suspect that is a real gain—and I don’t think that is us giving way to culture, I think that is us understanding what God has given us in God’s revelation better.”






A Leap of Truth, Part 6: History of a Worldview


August 3, 2011

This week we feature the next clip from the upcoming documentary “A Leap of Truth”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. As Ryan wrote in his accompanying post for the film’s first clip, our goal for the film is to put something proactive on the table to help motivate an elevated conversation above the unnecessary “war” between science and faith. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to "pull up" this page and watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). It is best to think about this in groups. You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.



Click link above to view video


Bishop N.T. Wright: “The debate such as has happened between so-called science and so-called faith, has a lot of quite murky roots. In the 18th century in my country, for instance, one person I happen to know a little bit about is Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, because I once lived in Litchfield, which is where he lived. Litchfield, in the eighteenth century was one of the small, buzzy, intellectual centers of Britain, and those guys were already exploring their scientific experiments within basically, what I have called, an Epicurean universe and it says in Epicureanism, ‘God and the world or the gods and the world are a long way apart, God is not involved in the world—if there is a God—and so we just have to explore the world as it is.’ That goes with the philosophy called Deism where you have an absentee landlord God.

The 18th century was a way of simplifying certain questions: ‘Alright, God is out of the mix, now we can just do our experiments…but, as we do our experiments, if God is out of the mix, then when we observe change going on in the world, it must be a change which has happened from within the processes of the world. When Charles Darwin went on his boat off to the Galapagos and studied these things and those things and finches and turtles and goodness knows what, that was fantastic and extraordinary and mind blowing, but the philosophical framework within which he interpreted that was one that his grandfather had been working on two generations before (and so had lots of other people): the idea that God was out of the picture and that what you had was evolution [and] development of an explicitly godless kind, a God-out-of-the-picture kind. The problem is that in America even more than Britain—and it was quite true in Britain as well in the 19th century—the Deism of people like Thomas Jefferson, had split off God from the world for political reasons because once God is out of the picture, then we are free to develop whatever sort of empire, whatever sort of power we want. Sadly, the church colluded with this because the church basically treated Christianity as a sort of escape from this world off to this distant God, and you have that in spirituality which is not anchored and earthed in social reality…

And you have it in a soteriology, a theory of how you get saved, which is that you leave this world, and you go off to be with that God; neither of those is actually Biblical. In the Bible, God and the world, heaven and earth kind of mesh together, and you find Jesus in the middle of that, and the Bible in the middle of that, and you should find yourself in the middle of that. Part of the point of being a Christian is that we are meant to be living at those strange, overlap points of heaven and earth—that is what prayer is all about, that is what the sacraments are all about, that is actually what ministering to the poor in Jesus’ name is all about. As Jesus himself said, ‘If you do it to the least of these, you do it to me.’ There is a sense of overlap and that actually makes life much more complicated.

It seems to me you need to unpick all of that, you need to understand how we got where we got before you even get to Scopes and monkeys and, you know, court cases, and so on, because those court cases are just misunderstood before they even start because of all that worldview baggage that is coming to us from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. We need to relocate the question as between devout Christians here and eager scientists there. We need to relocate that question within this much larger understanding of where our culture has been [and] where it might now be going. Otherwise, it will become a dialogue of the deaf or a battle in the dark, as it were.”






A Leap of Truth, Part 5: Framing the Debate


July 27, 2011

This week we feature the next clip from the upcoming documentary “A Leap of Truth”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. As Ryan wrote in his accompanying post for the film’s first clip, our goal for the film is to put something proactive on the table to help motivate an elevated conversation above the unnecessary “war” between science and faith. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to "pull up" this page and watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). It is best to think about this in groups. You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward. 


A Leap of Truth - Framing the Debate


Click link above to view video


Jeff Schloss: “So why are Christians nervous about evolution and why do we even use a phrase like the ‘e’ word. The word itself has a negative connotation in many groups.”

Alister McGrath: “I think in the States you have a culture war between forces of religion and secularism, and what has happened is that some people in that debate have seen science as a weapon to be used against religion. So, the first casualty in this culture war, I am afraid, has been a proper understanding of what science is and then how it relates to religion.”

Nancey Murphy: “One of the concerns that evolutionary biology raises for some Christians is the view that because evolution is a long drawn out process and because the evolutionary biologists themselves say that evolution is not toward anything—it is just from origins and it is not directed—that that somehow removes God’s purposes from the universe.”

Alister McGrath: “I think we find atheists arguing that evolution is fundamentally a random, directionless, purposeless development, and therefore, that means that there is no intrinsic meaning to human existence. We are simply the random outcome of an essentially random process.”

Jeff Schloss: “Are those, in fact, genuine entailments of evolutionary theory or does that involve philosophical moves that are arguable on the grounds of philosophy, and not on the grounds of the evidence for evolutionary theory? That is a conversation, I regret, that Christians haven’t had very deeply.”

Ard Louis: “Christians are hearing what non-Christians are telling them about what evolution means, and they are believing it. Underlying it are, in fact, often a worldview or philosophical assumptions that say it is all purposeless.”

Alister McGrath: “The point I would like to make in response to that is that that is a very superficial reading of things—that is simply saying, ‘Look, we can’t scientifically discern purpose or meaning, so we draw the conclusion that there is none.’ It is extremely important to make the point that the idea of meaning or purpose is not an empirical notion. It is not something that you observe; it is something you infer.”

Nancey Murphy: “The science is, by design, unable to talk about purposes. Evolutionary Biology is a science that only looks at the question of how one life form develops from another life form. It doesn’t have the sort of perspective you would need in order to see whether there is or is not purpose there. Science by its very definition cannot make pronouncements either for or against religious truths.”

Alister McGrath: “And that is why it is extremely important to emphasize that the scientific method, when properly applied, is neither theistic nor anti-theistic. It is simply about trying to offer explanations for what we find in the world—proximate explanations, not ultimate explanations. Ultimate explanations begin to ask deeper questions like, ‘Why is the universe as it is?’ That is where we can start to talk about God.”

Michael Ramsden: “I think what has happened in the last couple decades is that we have lost sight of the overall history the context of this debate, and then that has then fueled a continued misunderstanding about the contemporary debate, and it instilled this sense of war between Christianity and science—that these two things are battling each other, they are fighting each other, and they are at odds with each other. So, the options are look—be pre-modern, go live in a cave, and believe in God or embrace reality, welcome the new world, and be an atheist. Whereas actually what the facts, what the figures, what everything else shows is that that is not actually correct.”

John Polkinghorne: “There is a sort of myth in modern society that when Charles Darwin published his great book The Origin of Species in 1859 that all the scientific people shouted ‘yes’ and all the religious people shouted ‘no.’ That is not true on either side, and in particular, there were religious people who from the start welcomed Darwin’s ideas. Charles Kingsley, who was a clergyman friend of Darwin’s, said, ‘Darwin has shown us that God had done something clever. Rather than producing a ready-made world with the snap of divine fingers, God had brought into being a world so full of fruitfulness and potentiality that creatures could be allowed to be themselves and to make themselves. We have to recognize that God acts as much through natural processes as in any other way. The idea that somehow the creator of the world, who ordains the character of nature, does not work through natural processes is really a silly idea.

Alister McGrath: “In light of the deeper Christian narrative, everything makes sense if we assume there is a purposeful God, who in some way is directing his creation towards the outcomes that we now see.”

Ard Louis: “One of the really big difficulties in looking at all this stuff about creation and science is that we take a lot of our own feelings about ourselves and put them in. We think that where we come from determines who we are and how we should live. I think that is the reason why a lot of Christians intuitively would prefer man to be made in an instant because somehow they feel that where we come from determines who we are. Therefore, if we were made in an instant that would be more glorious than if God made us over time. But I think that is wrong, the Bible tells us that are value comes from what God thinks about us, not by the details of how we are made.”

Chris Tilling: “Humans are explicitly stated to have come from the dust of the earth. So, in terms of our constitution, we are no different from the animal kingdom. What is different according to the Genesis account is that God enters into relationship with humans. It shifts the focus away from who we are, to who God is, and it seems to me that that is more faithful to the Christian gospel.”

John Polkinghorne: “I think that Christian people are genuinely seeking to serve the God of truth. That means that they have a very important investment in truth, and they need to welcome truth and not be afraid of truth in whatever sort it comes. Now, not all truth comes through science, but some of it does, and it is very sad to see people serving the God of truth who are turning their backs on certain types of truth.”






A Leap of Truth, Part 4: Paul's Adam


July 21, 2011

This week we feature the third clip from the upcoming documentary “A Leap of Truth”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. As Ryan wrote in his accompanying post for the film’s first clip, our goal for the film is to put something proactive on the table to help motivate an elevated conversation above the unnecessary “war” between science and faith. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to "pull up" this page and watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). It is best to think about this in groups. You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.


A Leap of Truth - Paul's Adam

http://biologos.org/blog/a-leap-of-truth-pauls-adam

Click link above to view video


 
N.T. Wright: “The message to the Romans has many, many things going on in it. It is an amazing masterpiece, and at the heart of the first half in chapter five, Paul draws together what he has been saying with kind of a big picture summary. He has been talking about Abraham and Abraham’s family and the way in which the death and resurrection of Jesus constitutes Abraham’s family as a worldwide forgiven family, and that enables him to stand back from that and say now, ‘Look—as in Adam, so in the Messiah.”

Chris Tilling: “Paul contrasts Christ and Adam. Scholars call this the Adam-Christ typology. Paul’s point seems to be that both figures—Adam and Christ—are significant for the destiny of all creation. To understand what Paul meant when he was speaking of Adam in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, we have to read the Adam tradition in light of the story of Israel—the significance that Adam played in the story of Israel, the way Adam was interpreted by contemporary Jews in the time of Paul.”

N.T. Wright: “And so Paul is taking us right back to the big picture of Genesis, and saying that that whole problem which started way back, has now been addressed and more than addressed. God has actually got the project of Genesis one and two back on track at last, after it had been derailed.”

Alister McGrath: “Paul is seeing Adam and Christ as representative figures. Adam is the representative, the figurehead—whatever you would like to say—for humanity in general. What went wrong in Adam was rectified in Christ. Basically, what I see here is Paul saying that salvation is in effect a putting right of what has gone wrong with humanity.”

N.T. Wright: “That is the inner logic of Romans chapter three, Israel was unfaithful—is God then going to say, ‘Okay, let’s forget the idea of an Israel and do something different…?’ No! God is committed to saving the world through Israel. What he needs is a faithful Israelite. In Romans 3:22, this is precisely what you have got. God’s covenant faithfulness is revealed through the faithfulness of the Messiah for the benefit of all those who believe. Paul says this is how the Adam problem gets dealt with.”


David Wenham: “What was Paul’s view exactly about how the world was created? What was his scientific point of view? Now, Paul was somebody who lived in the first century, and Paul did not understand modern science. When he thought about creation, he wasn’t thinking in terms of modern science. It wasn’t the question he was asking. I suspect that Paul would have shared many of the views of his day. He may well have believed in a flat earth. But, his theology does not depend on his science. His theology of Adam has mainly, I think, to do with his understanding of humanity and how it was created, rather than in any way being a scientific statement. I do think we mustn’t underestimate the sophistication of people like Paul. He was highly trained. He will have known and did know aspects of Greek philosophy where they discussed questions of creation and so on. He will have understood the Old Testament with a very sharp eye, and I think he will have understood that the stories of creation are not scientific descriptions, but are theological affirmations about God’s truth and about how God created the world.”

Chris Tilling: “If we try and understand Paul’s Adam talk in terms of later scientific terms relating to creation and evolution, then we are actually putting the Adam talk into a different story, and we will ultimately end up misunderstanding Paul. So it is actually quite vital if we want to understand what Paul is saying to put it firmly in the Jewish story and the Jewish narrative.”

Alister McGrath: “I think we can say that, fundamentally, whatever Christ did is about the rectification of the natural state of humanity.”Michael Lloyd: “And, therefore, it seems to me just natural that Paul would refer to Jesus as the new Adam because here at last is a human being doing what Adam was called to do, but didn’t.”

N.T. Wright: “It is Jesus who is the truly human one and anyone who is in Jesus the Messiah is truly human.”






A Leap of Truth, Part 3: The Fall


July 13, 2011

This week we feature the third clip from the upcoming documentary “A Leap of Truth”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. As Ryan wrote in his accompanying post for the film’s first clip, our goal for the film is to put something proactive on the table to help motivate an elevated conversation above the unnecessary “war” between science and faith. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion, and we feel that this week’s topic, the Fall, is of particular importance for Christians as we think through the ramifications of creation by evolutionary mechanisms.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to "pull up" this page and watch this video with your friends, your churches , your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). It is best to think about this in groups. You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.

The provided questions are just a few of the discussion questions that go with this transcript, and we'd be happy to send them to you to foster further conversation within your church or small group setting. If you’d like to see the questions, or if you have stories from your own small group discussions about the clip, we would love to hear from you at info@biologos.org.


A Leap of Truth - The Fall



Dr. Jeff Schloss: “My friends and colleagues, who have concerns about evolutionary theory for theological reasons, are onto something, and one of them involves the Fall, the nature of the Fall, what it is. Even if it is a metaphor, it is a metaphor for something, and what is that something? And how would we make sense of that something in light of evolutionary theory? The other issue on this has been probably the most serious issue that not only Christians, but all theists who believe in a good and providential God have wrestled with, it is the problem of natural evil.

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “The problem of evil is a real problem to religious faith. It was certainly the thing for Darwin himself. That is what made him question his faith, and I think rightly so. It does not look like the sort of system that a good and loving and benevolent God would have set up. Now, obviously that raises huge questions because we don’t see any evidence of a world that was harmonious. We only see evidence of a world that was at war with itself, and that obviously is the problem that Christian theologians face. For a long time I used to believe that the Genesis narratives paint a picture of a world completely at peace, completely harmonious until the human fall, and then something goes wrong. When I began to look at it more closely, I began to think that there is more to it than that. There is evidence from the text that things are already dislocated, already out of joint. For one thing, there is the serpent, and however you interpret the serpent, here is a bit of the created order that is actively talking against God, working against God—so there is already something that has gone wrong. Secondly, there is the command to fill the earth and subdue it. There is the suggestion that something needs to be subdued, something is not quite right that needs to be put right and humans beings are called to do that—to put it right. And thirdly, it is a garden. It is almost as if God has said, ‘Here is a little bit I have done for you, here is a little bit of order and harmony that I have done for you. Now you go and spread that order and that harmony throughout the rest of creation.’ The tragedy is, of course, that human beings don’t do that. Rather than put that right, they make it worse.”

Dr. Alister McGrath: “Clearly Scripture distinguishes humanity from the rest of creation by this idea of the image of God. And that is understood in a number of ways—one of which is relational. Human beings have this God-given capacity to be able to relate to God, which is simply not there for the rest of creation. How do we understand that phrase: the image of God? If we accept the narrative of biological evolution, we have to say that at some point humanity became sufficiently distinguished from the rest of the natural world to be able to have this relationship with God.”

Reverend Dr. Michael Lloyd: “If you have a very finely graded gas tap and you begin to turn it on, initially, there is not enough gas in the air for the gas to ignite. So, you turn it up some more, still nothing, a bit more, still nothing, and a bit more, still nothing. At a particular point, there will be enough gas to air ratio for the thing to ignite. So, you can have a completely smooth, upward development, and yet, you can have something decisive happening at a particular moment. You get an increase in that moral capacity and moral awareness; you get an increase in their relational ability, in their social ability. You get an increase in their tool-making ability. You get an increase in their language. At a particular point there is enough of all that. There is enough relational capacity; there is enough social capacity and moral awareness and spiritual awareness for God to deal with us in a new way: ‘They have enough creativity to reflect the fact that I am the creator. They have enough relational capacity to reflect the fact that I am love. This in some way reflects who I am, and I will stamp my image upon them.’”

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “As hominids evolved and became more complex, then self-consciousness, in the sense of projecting our minds into the remote future or past began to dawn in them. And that didn’t bring biological death into the world, because obviously it had been there for millions of years beforehand, but it brought into the world what you might call mortality. Because our ancestors were self-conscious, they knew they were going to die. Because they had turned away from God, they had alienated themselves to the only one who was the ground for the hope of a destiny beyond death. And so, mortality, meaning the sadness, the human sadness at transiency and decay dawned in human life. Another very subtle feature of the Genesis 3 story is that it is a fall upwards as people would sometimes say. It is the gaining of some knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, the story says. And so, the dawning of self-consciousness is also the gaining of something that wasn’t there before. What the serpent whispers in Eve’s ear is, ‘eat this fruit, and you will be like God. You won’t need God anymore. You can do it yourself.’ That is the fundamental sin, the fundamental mistake in human life is believing that we can do it on our own, doing it my way, and spiritual death is to deliberately and persistently cut yourself off from that. It doesn’t occur as an angry God giving you a punishment for not falling into line. It is simply that you have punished yourself. You know, preachers sometimes say that the gates of hell are locked from the inside not to keep the creatures in, but to keep God out. And that, I think in the end, is what spiritual death is if you persist in it. But God is always, I am sure, at work, seeking to draw people back into the divine love. I think that is the work that is necessary to understand what Paul is getting at in Romans 5 when he says that death came into the world through one man. The cost of development is a degree of precariousness. The people need the grace of God if we truly are to live fulfilling lives.”