Luke Timothy Johnson concludes his recent book Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation, with some pastoral advice – for pastors in particular. There are some great insights and ideas in this chapter.  The problem is a serious one. It goes beyond a belief in Scripture to accept divine agency as a very personal reality.

The challenge facing contemporary Christians in the matter of miracles is daunting. … Incarnation and resurrection alike evade strictly evade strictly historical categories. Because they speak of divine agency in the empirical realm, they demand the language of myth. The same believers, especially pastors and preachers, are profoundly shaped by the worldview of modernity. Secularism has no place for the miraculous. For many calling themselves Christians today are more than difficult: they are intellectually embarrassing. (p. 277)

The answer isn’t intellectual assent to a literal reading of Scripture. As though miraculous activity and divine agency was merely an ancient fact to be believed … on faith. The answer is a re-focused approach to the whole topic of our faith in God’s divine agency in the world. Johnson suggests “four places in the church’s life, or four ecclesial practices, that can work together to shape such a symbolic world, within which believers can expect, perceive, and celebrate the manifestations of God’s presence and power in creation:  teaching …, preaching, prayer, and pastoral care.” (p. 278) In these he speaks especially to those in leadership positions, with the responsibility to shape life together as a church.

Teaching should shape and form people – and this requires an immersion in the world of Scripture. “Through whatever specific avenue of approach, we want Christians to learn how to imagine the world that Scripture imagines, how to cultivate a robust theology of creation, how to hear and honor personal experience, and how to appreciate the truth-telling qualities of myth.” (p. 279)  Myth is not a synonym for fiction or falsehood – as though something is either historical or mythical. Rather myth is “language that seek to express what cannot be otherwise adequately expressed.“(p. 286)  Neither science nor simple reporting of facts are adequate to describe and convey the full range of human experience. We need stories – the personal stories of fellow Christians and the ancient stories contained in Scripture. Stories that must be more than matter-of-fact reports.

When was the last time someone shared their testimony in your church?

Or the last time there was corporate prayer for specific needs?

When was the last community sing, taking requests from the congregation?

Is worship a sterile performance or a community experience of life together?

Johnson argues that sterilized Christianity, divorced from the real world lives of the people in the congregation, will never fully appreciate the truth of miracles, or of God’s agency in the world.  “If the church, then, is to learn how to hear and appreciate the miracles in Scripture, it must learn how to hear and appreciate the miracles that occur in the lives of ordinary human beings both within and outside the church. … The church needs to recover the distinctive importance of personal witness, above all the witness to God’s working in human lives.” (p. 284)

Preaching and teaching are not the same – but they serve similar purposes in different ways. In a sermon he preached on the transfiguration and includes in this book, Johnson digs into the resonances between the experiences of Moses on Sinai and Jesus on Tabor. “The Gospel account of the transfiguration participates in revelation rather than simply reports it. The transfiguration story uses symbols of God’s presence and power to disclose deeper dimensions of the humanity of Christ.” (p. 291) The way we approach miraculous events in Scripture – as one-offs deep in the past, separated from the fuller story, and divorced from God’s agency in our world today – makes it hard to appreciate miracles for what they are, then and now.

My more important point is that God continues to reveal his presence and power just as truly in our world today. God is the ever-living God. The same God who created “in the beginning” continues to create at every moment and discloses his presence and power through what he brings into being. The same God who spoke through Moses also speaks through prophets and witnesses today. The same God who acted in Jesus Christ to heal and drive out demons continues to act in our world today to liberate and restore. (p. 292)

Prayer is an implicit and explicit acknowledgement of God’s divine agency today as in the past. “Prayer is more than a form of cognition: it is the activation of a relationship, moving the human person to the most explicit and naked stance possible before the mystery of existence, and calling out to the heart of that mystery, “God our Father!” (p. 296) Prayer makes it real … “Without the practice of prayer, the world imagined by Scripture is at best a fascinating construction of ancient minds; but with the practice of prayer, that world becomes an actual world in which to live.” (p. 298)

Pastoral care and counseling … getting into the messy lives of others when they need it most. When the preacher does not also participate in such pastoral care, the church is impoverished. Or so Johnson argues. Why? Because preaching isn’t simply a performance art and a preacher who is not engaged with the congregation cannot be fully aware of the power of God at work among the people. Miracles become extraordinary (past) events rather than the continuing reality of God at work today.

Miracles, as the title of Johnson’s book proclaims, are God’s presence and power in creation.

The church’s greatest gift and its mightiest challenge is to declare God’s self-revelation within the world that God brings into being, the One from whom creation derives, and the One to whom creation is ordered. Failure at this is utter failure. (p. 300)

Miracles, signs, and wonders are not just revelations in the deep past. God remains active today if we know where to look (and take the time and effort to do so). In our secular age we either discount miracles or attempt to explain them rationally. Ice floes in the Sea of Galilee might permit walking on water? Many Christian demand intellectual assent to the literal words of Scripture, but undervalue the power of God revealed in the story – and what it means for us today.

Johnson’s book is well worth reading. Miracles are a hard sell in our modern secular age. We know better – or so we are told. The approach of the fundamentalist – making assent to miraculous events in the deep past a litmus test for faith – doesn’t help matters. God’s divine agency is the heart and soul of Scripture. We need to tell the Story, not defend every detail. The incarnation is the pinnacle, the culmination of the Story in Scripture, but it isn’t the end of the story of God’s agency in the world. God continues to be active in his people. If we lose this, we’ve lost everything.

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

The link to the book above is a paid link. Go with this one if you prefer: Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation.

By Dennis Venema. Dennis and I are co-authors of Adam and the Genome, and in this post he responds to recent news about an original couple.

I’m not sure what gets your inbox pinging, but one of the things that lights up mine is folks claiming that humans can descend from just two people. Just this week saw another example of this, and it seems to be getting some press over at the Gospel Coalition:

(E)vangelicals have been told for many years now that they are being anti-intellectual and anti-scientific if they don’t recognize that, because science shows that humans evolved from a large population over a period of millions of years, therefore we must reject the idea that one human race could have descended from just two human beings. Why do you reject that claim regarding the science?

This latest attempt to explain the genetic data in light of just two progenitors comes from the Discovery Institute – the main organization that promotes Intelligent Design – though, as we shall see, the attempt here is more straight-up creationism than ID. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As I argued in Adam and the Genome, which Scot and I coauthored back in 2017, it is highly unlikely that that humans descend uniquely from just two people. As I put it in the book (after discussing the evidence that the human ancestral population size was never below a few thousand):

As our methodology becomes more sophisticated and more data are examined, we will likely revise our estimates in the future. That said, we can be confident that finding evidence that we were created separately from other animals or that we descend only from two people just isn’t going to happen. Some ideas in science are so well-supported that it is highly unlikely that new evidence will substantially modify them, and these are among them. The sun is at the center of our solar system, humans evolved, and we evolved as a population (Adam and the Genome, 55).

Not surprisingly, this particular quote became a flash point for those who desire for theological reasons, one presumes, to have our species descend from a single starting couple. One response came from a geneticist in the UK – Dr. Richard Buggs. His critique was focused on one of the techniques used to estimate ancestral population sizes from present-day genetic diversity that I discuss in the book, and that routinely gives estimates in the thousands. These techniques, Buggs argued, present only a long-term average of population sizes. Because of this, perhaps, hiding in these averages, is a particular event that can give us a single couple despite the average in the thousands. What Buggs had in mind was what population geneticists call a “bottleneck” – a reduction in population size. Now, the bottleneck that Buggs had in mind was a very unconventional one: a reduction from a standing population (a few thousand, say) to just two in a single generation. In other words, instantaneously.

Normally, a population bottleneck that severe would greatly reduce the genetic diversity of the population and show up in the sort of studies I describe in Adam and the Genome – mostly because such an event would force a small population size for a long time as the population slowly rebuilt itself. But Buggs proposed that immediately after the bottleneck, the population would grow, at an exponential rate. In this way, most of the genetic diversity in the founding pair would be preserved. Put another way, the effect of the bottleneck would be minimized as much as possible.

Buggs, myself, and some other biologists kicked the idea around for some time. I reached out to someone who did population genetics modeling of the sort I described in the book. Based on some new simulations and some other published studies that we drew on, our group came to an agreement – that if an event like this had happened, we would be able to detect it if it happened more recently than 500,000 years ago. That was surprising to me, to be sure – I thought beforehand that an event like that would show up even further back in time. But population genetics isn’t always intuitive, and we were torture-testing only one modeling approach. Now, hear me well – there is no positive evidence at all that such an event occurred. Moreover, there is no mechanism that I, nor Buggs, nor anyone else that I am aware of, has conceived of that could accomplish such an amazing feat. At 500,000 years ago, hominins are widespread over Africa and Asia. In order for this to work, one would have to propose that in one generation all of them were obliterated, save two. Moreover, immediately thereafter, conditions have to be just right for exponential population growth. I can’t think of a plausible mechanism for that, and no one else has proposed one.

Another thing to keep in mind is that at 500,000 years ago, there are no Homo sapiens on the planet. At that time Homo erectus is widespread, so, if we’re talking about a bottleneck at this time, then Adam is not Homo sapiens, but rather Homo erectus or a close relative. It should also go without saying that the Genesis narratives (with their agriculture, domesticated animals, advanced metallurgy, cities, and so on) look nothing like 500,000 years ago, when stone tools were the order of the day.

So, this discussion provided support for my conclusion in Adam and the Genome – humans (defined in the book as Homo sapiens, our own species[1]) are too diverse to have descended from one couple. If you want that, you have to go back before our species emerges, and you have to postulate that some very (very!) unlikely things happened – an instantaneous bottleneck to two across two continents that nonetheless leaves no trace in the geological record, immediately followed by exponential population growth.

From where I sit, that looks like special pleading. Would we be comfortable with apologists from other religions making similar moves to prop up a certain piece of their theology? Or would we call them out on it? I have my suspicions.

Gauger and Hossjer: a single-couple human origin?

With that context in hand, we can now explore this recent work by Gauger and Hossjer to try to find an Adam and Eve in our history that we uniquely descend from.

They propose two approaches. One, like the Buggs hypothesis, requires an instantaneous bottleneck followed by exponential growth. A second option is openly creationist – that Adam and Eve are created, de novo, as a starting couple, and they founded the human race. In both cases, they place the couple back at 500,000 years ago in order for enough time for genetic diversity, under the measures they use, to approximate present-day diversity levels. And interestingly, the measures they use are ones that do not use information derived from our shared ancestry with other primates.

The first option, that of a bottleneck, runs into the same concerns we noted for Buggs’s hypothesis. In order to have sole genetic progenitors, all other hominins that could interbreed with Adam and Eve’s offspring must be eliminated in some way, or Adam and Eve must be reproductively isolated. Gauger and Hossjer put it this way:

One can imagine this scenario in a world still populated by other hominids, but the pair was isolated in a valley or gorge; one can imagine a scenario more extreme where all hominids except those two were wiped out.

Nope – geographic isolation isn’t going to cut it – after all, eventually this pair will populate the whole globe, which requires not being isolated. So, we’re back to trying to find an event that wipes out every other hominin across Africa and Asia – and as before, a mechanism is not forthcoming.

The second option, that of fiat special creation of a first pair, avoids the problem of a bottleneck mechanism by positing a miracle. While that does solve one problem, it causes another. The human genome is replete with evidence that we share common ancestors with other species, such as chimpanzees and gorillas. I spend a significant amount of time in Adam and the Genome laying out that evidence, and even that discussion is merely a drop in the bucket. If Adam and Eve are created de novo, why does our genome look like we evolved? Gauger and Hossjer do not say – though it is clear from their published work that they, like many (but not all) ID proponents, do not accept common ancestry.

Because the evidence for humans and chimpanzees sharing a common ancestral population is so strong (and honestly, only folks with prior theological commitments argue against that, given the strength of the evidence) we can use the chimpanzee genome to help us understand mutations in the human genome. (As an aside, since many of the readers of Jesus Creed will be familiar with textual criticism, the principles here are exactly the same, just swapping DNA sequences for variant manuscripts). If we see a “variant text” in present-day humans – a place in the genome where we see differences between present-day people – we can use the chimpanzee genome as a reference to determine what the “original text” for that region most likely was (or the gorilla genome, or the orangutan genome, and so on. Comparing multiple “manuscripts” is often helpful).

When we do this analysis, we see patterns – patterns that arise because certain types of DNA changes (mutations) are more common than others. With DNA copying, our “scribes” – the enzymes that copy DNA chromosomes – have particular quirks that make certain types of mutations more common than others. They rarely make errors – human scribes would be thrilled to match their performance – but when they do, they have a distinctive pattern.

In Gauger and Hossjer’s de novo model, they propose that present-day human variation comes from two sources: the original created couple, with their created (and maxed-out) genetic diversity, and subsequent mutations that arise after that starting point. The original created variants go on to be a large proportion of present-day variation that is common – i.e. present in a lot of people. Rare genetic variants are explained as arising from new mutations after the original creation event. Now, as geneticist Steve Schaffner aptly points out, it’s reasonable to expect that the rare variants should have the distinctive pattern suggesting that they are copying errors that arose over time though the work of our “DNA scribes”, but there is no reason to expect that same distinctive pattern for the originally created DNA variants. But, of course, the same pattern applies to all variants – both rare and common. The variation that Gauger and Hossjer claim was created directly by God looks just like the variation produced slowly over time by DNA copying errors when one uses the chimpanzee genome as a reference.

So, the short answer (if you can call this short) is that this sort of thing is not convincing to scientists who understand the genetic evidence, and who understand what sort of events in our past are plausible. It also shows just how far one has to go to try to make sole genetic progenitorship work – you need to avoid evidence for common ancestry, pull back to species that predate our own by several hundred thousand years, and propose extinction events that span two continents but nonetheless are invisible (genetically or geologically). And note well – there is no evidence in favor of any of this – none at all.

To sum up, I can’t think of a better way to put this than I did in Adam and the Genome:

… we can be confident that finding evidence that we were created separately from other animals or that we descend only from two people just isn’t going to happen. Some ideas in science are so well-supported that it is highly unlikely that new evidence will substantially modify them, and these are among them. The sun is at the center of our solar system, humans evolved, and we evolved as a population.

If new evidence (and notice how important “evidence” is in that quote above) comes along that changes the landscape, I (and every other scientist out there) would of course take that into consideration. But that’s not what we’re dealing with here, alas. It looks to me like special pleading in service of a predetermined theological system.

[1] In the book I used the standard, non-specialist convention of referring to humans as Homo sapiens. In science, you will sometimes see “humans” used to refer to all species within Homo, including Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so on. But for a popular audience, equating Homo sapiens with human is more common, so I went with that approach. When Gauger claims that single-couple human origin is possible, she is using “human” in the broader, all-of-Homo sense – but many people will not understand that and hear “single-couple origin for Homo sapiens”.

Glenn Kreider is professor of theological studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He also serves as the editor of Bibliotheca Sacra. Among other things, he has written God with Us. Michael Svigel is the chair and professor of theological studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. Svigel has authored Retro Christianity.

The following interview revolves around A Practical Primer on Theological Method which Kreider and Svigel co-authored.

The interview was conducted by David George Moore. Some of Dave’s interviews and teaching videos can be accessed at www.mooreengaging.com.

Full Disclosure: Glenn and Michael asked for my input on their book. I was glad to offer it and obviously commend their work, thus this interview!

Moore: There are various books available on theological method. Why write another one?

Kreider and Svigel: In the past couple of decades, there has been increasing interest in theological method by evangelicals. But in our years of teaching systematic and historical theology we’ve noticed that our students need some specific and concrete discussion of how to do theology. They need a primer—something written at an introductory level that anybody could pick up and put to use right away. We also wanted to present what we call an “integrative theological method in the classic Christian tradition.” We didn’t want to just say in simpler words what others have been saying in more complicated jargon. While our primary concern was to introduce “newbies” to the task of theology, we also wanted to make a real contribution to the guild. So, even advanced students and professional theologians will get a lot out of this introduction.

Moore: When one hears “theological” and “method” juxtaposed it is easy to conclude it must be boring, irrelevant, and so who in the world should care? So, why should we care about theological method?

Kreider and Svigel: Theological method is not like the methods in so many other disciplines. We expect our medical practitioners to know what they are doing when the remove our wisdom teeth, prescribe medicine to treat an infection, or perform surgery, for example. But theology—discourse concerning God, his works, and his ways—is the purview of all Christians. In short, we believe everyone is a theologian; everyone thinks about God and responds in some way. Those whose lives have been changed by the gospel are drawn to know the God who saved us: faith seeking understanding. We envision a method where theology is done in community, illustrated in the book as a diverse group of people sitting around a table interacting with each other from their unique perspectives, focusing on the ways God has revealed himself. According to the Scripture, he has revealed himself in words, especially Scripture, the world created and sustained by the triune God, and supremely in the person and work of Jesus Christ. We call these three cords of revelation the Word to the World, the World of the Word, and the Word in the World.

Moore: I don’t want to suggest that co-authorship is like marriage, so I’ll say it is marriage-esque. Were there any particular challenges you found in doing this book together?

Kreider and Svigel: We wrote the book together, by which we mean that each of us worked on a single document, adding content, deleting some, editing each other’s words. When we read the final product, it’s sometimes hard for us to tell who wrote which words. In many cases, we literally completed each other’s sentences. After an initial first draft (which was completed very early in the life of the project), we sent it out for feedback from colleagues—men and women from various disciplines and theological traditions. Then we actually made substantive changes to the manuscript based on the invaluable input of over two dozen people. We’ve never done a book project quite like this. It wasn’t easy, but it was fun. The process of writing and revising the book was itself an exercise in the integrative, dialogical theological method we describe.

Moore: Would you give us an idea of how “theological method” finds differences across the three Christian traditions: Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox?

Kreider and Svigel: One key difference is the role of Scripture and authority. The Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura affirms that Scripture is the only inerrant, verbally inspired revelation that exists today. It is the norming norm, no external authority stands in judgment over it. Thus, neither the decrees of a magisterium nor the writings of the Fathers have final authority. Scripture does. While classic Protestant theological method certainly draws on a variety of sources and resources in the believer’s discourse concerning God, his works, and his ways, as conservative Protestants, we confess the centrality of Scripture in theological method. Scripture isn’t the only means God has chosen to graciously reveal himself to humanity. However, most doctrinal and practical questions that concern Christian theology are most directly addressed in Scripture. We believe this Protestant attention to the words of Scripture prevents harmful theological innovation and doctrinal deviation.

Moore: Should local churches be talking about and equipping folks on theological method or is this something that only finds its rightful domain in the seminary?

Kreider and Svigel: We are convinced that churches should not merely be more intentional about teaching biblical content, they should be teaching people how to read the Bible, how to understand the insights of the Christian tradition, how to respond and interact with the cultural concerns of the day, and to recognize the insights of other disciplines. Biblical and theology teaching has often been separated and isolated from the arts, ministry, science, history, life experience, etc. When faced with questions or quandaries not directly addressed in Scripture, many average church-going Christians lack the tools to engage in a careful, critical integration of the various sources of truth available to believers who want to submit to the Lordship of Christ in the twenty-first century. This means learning from Scripture itself how to think theologically. And it means drawing on 2000 years of believers who have engaged in the same pursuit. To face the challenges of the present day, we desperately need to know how to faithfully draw on the truth revealed in what God has said, what God has created, and what God has done—and continues to do—through the Lord Jesus Christ. This primer was written as a very simple, practical, and readable handbook for the church, not just the “theologian.”

Moore: Would you guys each share an unlikely figure that has taught you some significant things about theological method? Since “all truths are God’s truths,” I’m thinking of non-theological figures like Freud and Nietzsche or theological figures like Tillich and Schleiermacher.

Kreider and Svigel: Some of my (Kreider) most influential figures, which some might think unlikely, have been artists, especially songwriters. I love when reading the Bible changes the way I view God or his work in the world. That happens regularly. And also love when a songwriter helps me to see in the Scripture what I had not seen, or to see God’s activity in the world in a new way, or to find ways to express the truth in a metaphor I had not considered previously. Students have heard me say often, a good lyricist can say in a few words what it takes me paragraphs to say. My list of such songwriters is long but it includes Andrew Peterson, Derek Webb, Jon Foreman, Brandi Carlile, and Bono.

And I (Svigel) have been deeply influenced by figures from church history—particularly Irenaeus of Lyons, Athanasius of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin. Of course, these are all low-hanging fruit for theologians. It may surprise people that I’ve also been provoked and inspired by several non-theologians like the British Catholic novelist Graham Greene, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning artist Bob Dylan, and even secular sci-fi authors like Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, and Bradbury. But you asked for just one figure, so I’ll have to say Glenn Kreider probably provoked my thinking on theological method more than anybody else.

Moore: What are two or three things you hope your readers will take away from your book?

Kreider and Svigel: A renewed and growing love for Jesus Christ—that’s number one. Second, a confidence that they can join the conversation at the table of theological discourse concerning God, his works, and his ways, even if they begin by simply sitting and listening. Third, we want to ignite a passion to know God better, to serve him more faithfully, and to love others as Christ loves us.

How can you be a Christian?

In my experience there are three big subtexts to this question these days, science, women, and sexuality. Other questions are important as well … but these are the showstoppers.

How can you be a Christian when it is antiscience, oppresses women, and is homophobic?

Rebecca McLaughlin addresses these as seven, eight, and nine in her book Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World’s Largest Religion. Last week we looked at the first of these – hasn’t science disproved Christianity?

The short answer to the second question doesn’t Christianity denigrate women? is a resounding no. Christianity might not go as far as some in our culture today would like, but it certainly does not denigrate women. Women play important roles in many places throughout Scripture. I’ve highlighted a wide selection of these in several posts – most recently A Look at Biblical Womanhood and Women of the New Testament.

Rebecca emphasizes the way women are portrayed in the Gospels to make the point.

The portrayal of women in the Gospels – particularly in Luke’s Gospel – is stunningly countercultural. Luke constantly pairs men with women, and when he compares the two, it is almost always in the woman’s favor. Before Jesus’ birth, two people are visited by the angel Gabriel and told they are going to become parents. One is Zechariah who becomes John the Baptist’s father. The other is Jesus’ mother Mary. Both ask Gabriel how this can be. But while Zechariah is punished with months of dumbness for his unbelief, Mary is only commended. (p. 136)

The pairings continue – with Simeon and Anna, the lost coin and the lost sheep, the parable of the persistent widow followed by the pharisee and the tax collector. The Twelve were all male – but for the most part the segregation stops there. Women were with Jesus and involved in his ministry from beginning to end, at the cross, the first at the empty tomb. And turning to Acts, they were with the apostles in Jerusalem where … They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers. (1:14)

Many of the first converts in Acts or mentioned in Paul’s letters are women, important for the prominent roles they play … Junia, Lydia, Priscilla among them.

There is a reason why women are heavily represented in the church today and throughout history. For all the human failings that crop up from time to time, women acknowledged as equal before God. “Jesus’s valuing of women in unmistakable. In a culture in which women were devalues and often exploited, it underscores their equal status before God and his desire for personal relationship with them.” (p. 138)

Paul puts it succinctly in Gal. 3:26-29: So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.

This is powerful stuff.

But then we come to marriage. Here Rebecca and I part ways, slightly. This isn’t surprising in a book published by Crossway and TGC. She looks at Ephesians 5:21-33 (below) and focuses on the metaphor. “Ultimately, my marriage isn’t about me and my husband any more than Romeo and Juliet is about the actors playing the title roles.” (p. 140) and later “Ephesians 5 grounds our roles in marriage not on gendered psychology but on Christ-centered theology.” (p. 141) Here is the point as I paraphrase it – when we play our proper roles in marriage we are enacting the metaphor and mirroring God to the world. Women submit as to God and husbands love as Christ.

But read the passage below. Is this really about enacting a metaphor? I would suggest that the first line interprets the whole. It is about mutual submission in a partnership before God that revolutionizes relationships. Paul uses a metaphor that illustrates the truly revolutionary nature of our relationships in Christ. Throughout history, husbands have generally been the ones with power and have often exercised it for their own benefit and women have often resorted to nagging and subterfuge (a kind of revolt) to assert and strengthen their own positions. I rather expect that this was as true in the first century Greek and Roman world as at any other time in history. But in the Christian message this should all go out the window along with many other human failings. Positions of power should be exercised on behalf of the others involved, and this includes the husband’s role toward the wife. The socially acceptable practice of women gossiping about and undermining their husbands is no better than practice of autocratic authority.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her …. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. … However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

No mere human truly stands in the place of Christ. But we are all called to follow his lead. Marriage isn’t about authority and submission. When the topper question is “who gets the last word?” the focus is entirely wrong.

But on this Rebecca and I both agree. The command to follow Christ does not denigrate women, in fact it empowers and promotes women in ways that are more often than not revolutionary in the surrounding culture.

Much more could be said. Rebecca has a discussion of abortion and sexual freedom, both issues where Christianity is said to denigrate women. And she does not really touch on the questions surrounding women in ministry. But this is a good start.

Does Christianity denigrate women?

What do you think of the marriage metaphor?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

We begin with a brand new cohort next Monday at Northern Seminary — they’re already quite active on the cohort FB page and it looks like an energizing group of students. Can’t wait.

Bacteria-crushing ocean plastics:

The high pollution in the oceans is a big problem on the planet. According to recent research, it is likely that in the year 2050 we will find more plastic than fish in the waters of the seas, and for this reason there are many people working to generate solutions to this problem, some very imaginative to reverse this situation.

Currently the novelty is a bacterium , developed by students Jeanny Yao and Miranda Wang , who have been developing this project since their school years and today reap the fruits of it. They already have patents and have obtained a financing of 400 thousand dollars to start developing the product. All this with only 20 years old.

They have already won 5 prizes thanks to this project, they became popular as they were the youngest to win the Perlman science prize . All thanks to its tiny bacteria capable of transforming plastic into CO2 and water. The technology is used in two ways: To clean the beaches and also to produce raw materials for clothing.

“It is practically impossible to make people stop using plastic, we need technology to break the material, and everything becomes biodegradable, ” says Miranda Wang.

The development of this technology is divided into two parts: First the plastic is dissolved and the enzymes as catalyze whereby the plastic becomes highly malleable fractions. These components are placed in a biodigester station , where they behave as if they were leftovers of food. The project runs in just 24 hours, to move from plastic to water, really promising.

Lagos, Nigeria (CNN)Seated in a stylish living room of a home in a suburb of Nigeria’s commercial center, Lagos, Basil Okpara Jr. is tapping away on his laptop keyboard.

The 9-year-old is building a hide and seek game, using a free programming application called Scratch 2.

Scratch 2 allows users to create games, animations, and stories online or offline. So far, Basil has used it to generate more than 30 mobile games.

Today’s game involves a bat he has programmed to hide. The player gets a point every time he catches the bat when it emerges from its hiding place.

“I learned how to build games at a boot camp. Now, I build to keep me busy when I am bored,” Basil told CNN.

In March, his father signed him up for a five-day boot camp for children aged 5 to 15.

The camp, organized by Codefest International, was put in place to give children like Basil access to emerging technologies like robotics and virtual reality.

Growing up, Basil used to play a lot of mobile games says his father, Basil Okpara Sr.

“I bought him a tablet when he was 4 years old because I saw that he was always grabbing phones to play games with. He played Candy Crush and Temple Run a lot,” the father told CNN.

But Basil’s interest in creating his games grew at age 7 after he got scolded for spending all of his time playing.

“There was this day he was on the tablet, as usual, he was so carried away with the game he was playing that I got upset with him,” his father said.

“Out of annoyance, I said to him, ‘you are always playing games, can’t you think about building your own games so others can play yours too?’. I was angry when I said it, and I did not know he took it seriously,” he added.

Public education has a problem.

Illinois is facing a shortage of students – and a surplus of school district administrators.

From 2014 to 2018, student enrollment at Illinois K-12 public school districts fell by 2%, reflected by a nearly identical percentage drop in those districts’ total teachers during that time.

Despite Illinois school districts losing both students and teachers, their administrators grew 1.5% during the four-year period.

In other words, while school districts’ student and teacher populations are thinning, the bureaucratic layer at the top only gets thicker.

Illinois spends more than any neighboring state and nearly double the national average on “general administration” costs, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Meanwhile, Illinois students’ test scores trail those of many neighboring states, as too many education funding dollars get trapped in the bureaucracy before reaching the classroom.

Administrative bloat comes at no small cost to Illinois families: Illinois has 852 school districts, which together consume nearly two-thirds of property taxes collected in Illinois.

On average, school districts in Illinois spend $581 per pupil on school district administration, or more than 2.5 times the national average of $230 per student. If Illinois spent the same as the national average on district administration, it would save $708 million on unnecessary bureaucratic spending that could be reinvested in classrooms or returned to property taxpayers.

Instead of perpetuating the same cycle of mismanagement and excess spending, Illinois school districts need to rein in administrative costs and put their students’ needs first.

Good read, by John Hawthorne on the state of Christian higher ed.

Outing students about their faith, wow.

As a teacher, I find remarkable resistance to bringing religious ideas and experiences into class discussions. When I ask what a philosopher had in mind in writing about salvation, or the immortality of the soul, my normally talkative undergraduates suddenly stare down at their notes. If I ask them a factual theological question about the Protestant Reformation, they are ready with answers: predestination; “faith, not works”; and so on. But if I go on to ask students how one knows in one’s heart that one is saved, they turn back to their laptops. They look anywhere but at me—for fear that I might ask them about feeling the love of God or about having a heart filled with faith. In my cultural-history classes, we talk about sexuality and identity, violence and revolution, art and obscenity, and the students are generally eager to weigh in. But when I bring up the topic of religious feeling or practice, an awkward silence always ensues.

As a nonbeliever myself, I am not trying to convert any student to any religion. Yet how to discuss religious faith in class poses a major challenge for nonreligious colleges and universities. How can such an institution claim to educate students about ideas, culture, and ways of life if students, professors, or both are uncomfortable when talking about something that’s been central to humanity throughout recorded history?I teach my classes at Wesleyan University, where I am also the president. For most of its first century, the school was—as its name indicates—firmly in the tradition of the theologian John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. In 1831, Wesleyan’s first president, Wilbur Fisk, articulated the mission of the school as being for “the good of the individual and the good of the world,” drawing on Methodism’s synthesis of deeply personal spirituality and the pursuit of social reform. Indeed, the passion for reform often was energized by that spirituality. In the early 1900s, Wesleyan officially became a secular university, eventually prizing academic freedom and independent research rather than adhering to a set of religious teachings.Still, Fisk’s words have continued to ring true. Although few of our students today know much about John Wesley’s charismatic preaching or the core tenets of Methodism, many of them are still perfectly comfortable with the idea of finding one’s own good while also doing work in the world that promotes what they now call social justice. If they no longer have a principled spirituality, they need to think hard about what else sustains efforts aimed at justice—and about how politics, ethics, and the nature of knowledge have been intertwined with religious faith and practice.Yet classroom discussions of these very subjects often seem threatening to even students of faith, who tell me they don’t want to be “outed” on campus. These undergrads encounter mostly secular professors who sometimes treat religious believers as somehow intellectually deficient, or as morally compromised by their commitments to traditions that their teachers have left behind.

This is by one of our Northern (MA New Testament) students, Ben Davis, who leads a pastors group in Wichita KS.

Synopsis of A Secular Age

 Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age, is a sweeping narrative covering more than 500 years of philosophical, theological, political, and cultural history in an effort to answer this singular question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 [or 2019] many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” (25). By answering this critical question, Taylor’s narrative makes clear that secularism was not determined before the foundation of the universe. Rather, what gave rise to our secular age was a series of contingent historical events whose results could have been otherwise. To be clear: secularism is a matter of choice; not fate.

First, it is important to understand the nature of the secular as Taylor defines it. The thesis of his book is predicated on three aspects of the secular that are listed in turn:

• Secular: Like the sacred, the secular is a way of marking time. For example, Sunday’s Eucharist or morning and evening prayer mark sacred time; while work, eating meals, or going to festivals mark secular time.
• Secularism: Post Enlightenment, the secular becomes secularism. For the first time it means a lack of belief in God and religious practice. For instance, the nation-state becomes a secular (i.e. ‘neutral’) institution where religious belief and practice are severely limited if not prohibited entirely.
• Secularity: “The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.”

Second, it is important to remember that Taylor is telling a story. What follows, then, is a tenuous effort to sketch the broad contours of that narrative as Taylor tells it.

(1) Taylor contends that for most of human history the world was enchanted: “The natural world. . . testified to divine purpose and action; . . . storms, droughts, floods, plagues, as well as years of exceptional fertility and flourishing, we seen as acts of God. . .” (25). In this enchanted world, not only was God (or something like God) assumed, but personal identity was conferred, not created. Persons understood themselves to be one link in the chain of the great Order of Being, moving effortlessly between the borders of the natural and the supernatural realms. Accordingly, persons were porous – open and connected to the spiritual world surrounding them. Their social imaginary presumed that reality was saturated by meta-physical forces haunting creation, interacting with them in a dynamic matrix that was indisputable.

(2) Then something changed. Reform moved through western Europe with a blustering force, profoundly altering the religious and political landscape with dramatic effect. One consequence of Reform was the proliferation of confessional identities that (re)defined the borders of Europe. While the essence of the Reformation(s) was good and indispensable to righting the course of the Church’s history, it left some devastating if unintended consequences in its wake. For example, rival ecclesial bodies – Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Huguenot (Reformed), and Anabaptist – vied to solidify political power and violence inevitably ensued, resulting in what is known today as the “Wars of Religion.”

(3) Exhausted by interminable war(s) and unable to secure the grounds for truth among competing theological factions, a new movement came to birth primarily in France, Prussia (Germany), and England which sought to find a way forward beyond theological and ecclesial foundations. This movement is known as the Enlightenment. What is important to understand about the Enlightenment is that it was in part the product of theological motivations. Apostles of reason such as Immanuel Kant and John Locke were arguably serious Christians who espoused faith in the Christian God as a matter of first importance. Part of their Enlightenment project, however, was to ground claims of truth and knowledge – especially truth and knowledge about God — somewhere other than in religious sources, such as the Bible, which had become a touchstone of controversy. For the sake of peace and tolerance, they thought, society needed to find a more theologically ‘neutral’ means by which to adjudicate competing notions of truth and authority. This transition leads to what Taylor calls excarnation – the notion that, based on reason alone, religion is reducible to competing systems of belief that one merely comprehends rationally but does not know imaginatively, sacramentally, or practically (through embodied practice). Each system of belief is then measured according to its veracity vis-à-vis reason alone, isolated from any notion of history, tradition, or community of practice.

Thus: as the heart of Reformation doctrine came to be summed up in the five Solas, so the heart of Enlightenment doctrine came to be summed up in just one: sola ratio. Reason alone would be the fulcrum around which human understanding turned. Either religion is rational – justified by reason alone – or it is nothing more than superstition.

(4) But over time even reason proved to be too fragile a basis on which to secure peace and unity for an increasingly diverse, beleaguered society. With the rapid rise of natural science, economic industrialization, and the secular nation-state, the world became more disenchanted. As the crust of the immanent frame hardened over religious, political, and social order, many people eschewed the doctrine of sola ratio, looking for intimations of the sacred in places such as art, poetry, and nature. According to Taylor’s story, it’s the era of Romanticism that hastens the nova effect. The nova effect posits three distinct features:

• Secularism morphs into secularity. Disbelief becomes a viable force against Christian belief and practice, and public space is increasingly stripped of any overt religious symbolism.
• Alternative ways of being other than Christian multiply and challenge conventional belief and practice. Atheism becomes not merely disbelief in God but rather a comprehensive framework by which to understand reality.
• As new horizons of freedom open up, the age of authenticity is born.

Since one’s identity was no longer conferred by God, or located in the Order of Being, then one was free to (re)create it according to one’s will. On that score, individual autonomy, self-expression, and feeling become moral ideals. As Taylor aptly puts it: “the understanding of life which emerges with the Romanic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century, that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, but society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.” (475)

Under the cloud of Romanticism belief in God was not unthinkable; indeed, it is accurate to say that a majority of people in the West at the advent of the 19^th and 20^th centuries still maintained a semblance of belief in God if not a robust Christian faith. But for the first time in history disbelief in God was a viable option for people who sought meaning elsewhere. Two additional features also became significant at this time. (1) The self – once porous in a world of enchantment – was now buffered and enclosed. Reality could be solely understood in a natural, scientific register. (2) A captivating narrative emerges that Taylor calls the subtraction story. In short, the subtraction story suggests that as modernity progresses and solidifies in our social imaginary, religious belief is subtracted from our lives altogether. Thus:

TIME

______________________________>

religion < MODERNITY

(5) Today — after two World Wars, the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of globalization, and the rapid expansion of technology – the world is a profoundly different place than it was 500 years ago. Belief in God – or some kind of transcendence – still exists, to be sure. It is the conditions of belief that have changed, however. Now, even those who espouse strong, stable religious convictions are squeezed by what Taylor calls cross-pressures (e.g. science, technology, competing ‘life-styles’), dilemmas (e.g. evil, suffering, gratuitous violence) and alternative narratives of flourishing that contend for one’s allegiance and shape one’s understanding of God and the world.

In the immanent frame, seemingly everyone is aspiring toward some idea of fullness; but it can no longer be assumed that fullness is necessarily or primarily found in God. Many people are comfortable locating fullness in humanitarian relief, technological innovation, political progress, or theories of self-improvement. There are as many paths of meaning now available to choose from as there are flavors of ice cream. Yet the malaise of modernity persists. It is a palpable awareness that something is missing from our lives. This heavy sense of loss and equally deep sense of longing are opposite sides of the same reality in our fractured, secular age. Ironically, as modernity expands, its subtraction story turns out to be a myth; the search for the sacred remains inescapable. But the single path once set before our distant ancestors has now splintered in many disparate, irreconcilable directions.

To say it again: our secular age is not a permanent fixture of history. The next chapter in the story of human events could witness its collapse – or its stratification. We have every reason to think religious belief and practice will continue. But what form it will take is unknown.

I am on vacation this week in the Minnesota north woods. My parents have had a place on a lake since I was 3 (early 1960’s) and I’ve been spending time here ever since. When I was young  (i.e. until I left the state for graduate school) bald eagles and loons were unheard of on the lake (about due west of Duluth), although I did see loons further north in or near the Boundary Waters. Today loons are ubiquitous here (apparently an indication of improved water quality) and there are frequent eagle sightings. I was out on the lake this week and an eagle flew to a tree nearby looking for prey. The great outdoors really is great!

Douglas and Jonathon Moo have a new book and DVD set exploring Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World. The video lectures are fascinating and well done, I watched the first 12 of 14 episodes on our drive to Minnesota for vacation. Unfortunately a warning should be present in large print wherever it is sold. I purchased the DVD hoping to use it for an adult education class at church next year (at full price from Amazon rather than the cheaper price now advertised at Zondervan). Unlike many DVD’s sold by Zondervan, public use in a church is explicitly prohibited for Creation Care – although I had no intimation of this when it was purchased and only realized it because I usually do read the fine print. It turns out that these lectures are part of Zondervan Academic’s online or self-paced study courses and are for individual use only. This is unfortunate because we need to good resources to explore the topic in our churches and this set would be a great option. Suggestions anyone?

Now to the book and videos. The book is titled “Creation Care”  rather than “Nurture of Nature” or “Upkeep of Environment” for a reason. Using the word creation rather than nature or environment keeps the focus on theology rather than anthropology, on God rather than on humans (or plants and animals). The word nature “is sometimes used to refer to a semi-deified “mother nature,” with any idea of a personal God left to the side. … On the other hand, “nature” is often thought of in a purely mechanistic way, as something separate from God and open to manipulation at human whim. Both of these views depart rather significantly from the biblical view of the world as God’s creation.” (p. 25)

Environmentalism and environmentalist can conjure up images of radical movements and political positions. Daek green “religion” that view a world without human participation as very good. But Doug and Jonathan suggest that this is only a minor concern. “The biggest downside for the word is that it tends to make human beings the focus of attention.” (p. 25)  While the earth is a good environment for humans it is also valuable in its own right.

Our cosmos is not merely the accidental by-product of chemical and physical processes. It is something our God called into being, something he created for a purpose, which is nothing less than to bring glory to the One who created it. Speaking of “creation care” – rather than for example environmentalism or “nurture of nature” – rightly anchors our topic in a Christian worldview, appropriately privileging theo – logy over anthro-pology. (p. 26)

Why is creation care important?  Doug Moo gives three reason in this teaser for the video series:

Care for the environment is an important issue in today’s culture.  Doug points out that evangelicals were “on board” with concern for the environment early on. Francis Schaeffer’s book Pollution and the Death of Man  first published in 1970 provides an example. Schaeffer tried to bring a Christian perspective to the topic of care for the environment.

Environmental science is a going concern. New tools, new models, increase in computing power, advances in physical, chemical, and biological sciences. We have much more information and a better understanding of cause and effect than in the past. We need to address the issues of climate change to consider carefully natural changes and human caused changes. Are there changes caused by humans that oppose God’s ideal for his creation?

DDT was a miracle of chemistry … until the unintended side effects became apparent. The regulation and restriction of harmful pesticides has led in part to the rebound in the eagle population. The picture to the right is one I took when the eagle spotted its prey and took off from its treetop perch. Controlling mosquitoes is good. But we need to take care … not all effective methods are good.

Environmental changes are affecting humans … sometimes dramatically and negatively. As Christians we should be concerned with this impact and the people who are hurt by climate change, by pollution and waste. As Christians we have a unique and important perspective. All humans are created in the image of God and of value. God’s creation is also good in its own right and should be tended not destroyed. Creation is part of God’s revelation.

To keep the focus on creation we next turn to the Bible. But that is for the next post.

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

The book of Revelation also known as the Apocalypse of John can be rather hard to understand. It is, after all, apocalyptic literature – a form a bit ‘interesting’ in the Old Testament prophets and every bit as ‘interesting’ here. I don’t usually worry too much about the book, or try too hard to make sense of it. This isn’t to say it should be ignored or bypassed (I’ve listened to it several times through over the last couple of years along with the rest of the Bible) – just to say that the appropriate interpretation seems somewhat obscure for the most part. But it is a book worth some consideration, so I turned with interest to the chapter in Let Creation Rejoice: Biblical Hope and Ecological Crisis by Jonathan Moo and Robert White where they look at John’s vision.

The view that shapes their interpretation is that the vision of John describes a redemption and renewal of creation rather than a destruction of all things. This vision starts with the song of praise to the Lion of Judah, the root of David, the Lamb who was slain and is able to open the scroll.

“You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.
You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
and they will reign on the earth.” (5:9-10)

Here as elsewhere in John’s vision, Christ’s atonement does not serve to open “escape hatches” for the redeemed to ascend to heaven; rather Christ ransoms for God a people, a “priestly kingdom,” who will reign on earth. … In the light of the death, life, resurrection, and future return of the incarnate Christ, readers of John’s Apocalypse are enabled to see this world through new eyes and to go about the work to which God calls us: to be here, As Wendell Berry’s poem at the head of this chapter suggests,

As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not. (p. 147)

The book of Revelation is a book of hope, and John’s vision with its upheaval, chaos, and judgment is “the inevitable consequences of the encounter between God’s righteousness and the forces of evil and injustice.” The victory has been won, but we await the final restoration.

Babylon the Great. Chapter 17-19 of the Apocalypse deals with the fall of Babylon the Great – that is Rome. Rome was the empire, it was the power of this world for of John and his original audience. The references within the book are many and they wouldn’t be missed by the ancient reader. It was Rome who destroyed the temple leading to the death of thousands. It was the Roman emperor who was venerated and worshiped as a god. It was Domitian who referred to himself as “our Lord and God.” The prostitute Babylon the Great of chapter 17 rides a beast with seven heads … which are seven hills. Rome was built on seven hills … the connection isn’t explicit, but it isn’t actually hidden either.

According to Moo and White, “John’s vision challenges the readers to resist the siren calls of our culture that would invite us to worship money, power, and empire.” (p. 149) This theme is present, but sometimes hard to pick up in chapters 6-16 (hard for the modern reader anyway) but is driven home in 17-19. And this should make us squirm. “We may not live in Rome, but our consumerist societies can look an awful lot like Babylon.” (p. 152)

The seductive nature of the power and wealth of Babylon (Rome) is revealed in Chapter 17 when John wondered to marveled when he saw the prostitute, and the list of goods traded by her merchants in chapter 18 provide some insight into why. The angel asks why John marvels and proceeds to explain the mystery to him. “If John recognizes in himself the temptation to buy into the lie that is Babylon, he knows that his readers face the same temptation.” (p. 153)

God’s people do not live somewhere other than Babylon; in this age it is the place of their exile. But they are challenged nonetheless to “come out” from all that Babylon represents, to demonstrate that there citizenship is elsewhere. God’s people are not immune to Babylon’s charms: like anyone else they are at risk of finding themselves enmeshed in the worship of power, wealth, and luxury that defines the culture and society in which they live. The challenge for John’s readers is the same as it was for those who heard Jeremiah when he issued the same call to the exiles in the original Babylon (Jer 51:45): to refuse to worship the idols of empire and keep from participating in her sins and falling under the judgment that must surely befall her. (p. 153-154)

Our call today is no different. It is to examine the orientation of our lives, our tendency to invest our lives in the pursuit of wealth and power, and to refuse to worship the idols of empire. Moo and White suggest that the emphasis on consumption that is leading us toward an ecological crisis is the idol of empire today. “[T]he earth continues to be polluted and destroyed to sustain our way of life.” (p. 154)

A New Earth. Revelation describes not the abandonment and destruction of God’s creation, but a reordering of creation around its proper center. There is a regime change, a change that has begun but it not yet complete. The proclamation of this regime change began in Revelation 11:15-18 and it is described in greater detail in chapters 21-22. John echoes Isaiah and Ezekiel with his own overwhelming imagery and the new understanding of the reconciling work of the blood of the lamb. God isn’t making new things, but is making all things new (Rev 21:5).

Moo and White move on to look at the things that are no longer (p. 158) …

the sea (21:1)

death (21:4)

mourning (21:4)

crying (21:4)

pain (21:4)

curse (22:3)

night (22:5)

The central three things on this list, mourning, crying and pain, are all marks of a world held hostage to death and plagued by its curse. They are no more when death itself is swallowed up and “any curse” is removed. … In new creation, the curse and death that mark life in this age are gone and the conditions that were meant to apply in the Garden of Eden are restored. Yet John’s vision of a new creation is not merely of a world in which the clock is turned back to its beginning; it is rather of a world taken forward to the future God always intended for it. (p. 158-159)

But the sea and the night were not problems in Genesis. Rather they were a part of God’s good creation, and the sea is still a part of God’s good creation earlier in Revelation. This is one of the conundrums of the text and an issue that points us to the future and away from overly literalistic interpretations (always dangerous in apocalyptic literature anyway). The sea represents chaos and judgment in many parts of the Old Testament. Night is also a time of chaos and danger. Doing away with sea and night meant “for John’s readers the removal of all threat of judgment, all potential for evil to arise in the new creation.” (p. 160)

The future is described on the basis of what is now known, and what is wrong with the present. What is wrong (chaos, evil, death) will be removed when God’s kingdom is fully realized, when the regime change has come to completion. But the other important point is that the future kingdom is not only future, it is beginning to be realized even now … in the time of John and up to the present. It breaks through in the people of God who come out from all that Babylon represents.

So what does this mean? I find the image that Moo and White portray of the broad sweep of the message of the Apocalypse of John compelling. It makes a great deal more sense than the end-of-the-world scenario often portrayed.

We need to recognize the centrality of Rome and empire worship in the message being delivered. I am not convinced that we should see a reaction to empire worship throughout the New Testament, but it certainly is present in Revelation.

It probably isn’t coincidence that the form of the vision of John resembles the visions of the prophets during the exile in Babylon. (Why would it be?) The connection was powerful for the original audience, although often lost in more recent readings. For one thing, I’ve never heard a sermon that emphasized the similarity of apocalyptic visions in the Old and New Testament, yet this is one of the many things that have impressed me in my recent commitment to be immersed in the whole of scripture from Genesis through Revelation. We can’t understand John without knowing Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel (and perhaps some others I am forgetting just now).

I am not convinced that it has any specific bearing on the Christian response to ecological crisis or environmental concerns – except perhaps to remove the excuse that the world will be destroyed anyway. The Scripture isn’t speaking directly to the concerns of a 21st century industrial society, although there are certainly take-home messages for us today.

The final chapter of Let Creation Rejoice may bring us forward on the specific topic of biblical hope and ecological crisis. That will be the subject of the next, and final, post on the book.

What is the take-home message of Revelation for us today?

Should we be looking for the end of the world or the consummation of God’s kingdom?

What will change when God’s kingdom is realized on earth?

If you would like to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net.

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.

Walter Moberly, The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith, explains why he finds the Bible and the Christian faith both plausible and convincing. Although the Bible is important, it doesn’t work in a vacuum. In chapter 3 he “suggested that people are most likely to take seriously the Christian privileging of the Bible and Jesus if they encounter the lives of Christians as plausibility structures that moves them towards the Christian way of life and thought, with a possible view towards making it their own.” (p. 130) This is developed further in Chapter 4. The church isn’t simply another social club providing a context for pleasant life together.  Moberly continues “more needs to be said about what the persuasive force of Christian witness in the world requires if a person is to become, not just in name, but in reality, someone who believes the biblical witness, and supremely its witness to Jesus – and why such belief should be a good thing.” (pp. 130-131)

What does the Bible teach and why should such a belief be a good thing?

Throughout his book Moberly has used passages from Aeneid 1 and Daniel 7 as case studies to discuss the privileging of the Bible. In the Aeneid, Jupiter bestows on Rome unending dominion over the world, “On them I set no limits, space or time: I have granted them power, empire without end” and establishes a descendant of Aeneas to rule the Roman empire and establish peace.

Daniel 7 describes a vision where one like a “son of man” comes before the Ancient of Days and is given dominion and glory and kingship – an everlasting dominion that shall never be destroyed. The Ancient of Days is understood to be Israel’s God. On the surface Aenied 1 and Daniel 7 are similar accounts.

Moberly asks: “If the Bible is not to go the same way as Virgil, and is to be more than interesting religious thought and/or a collection of memorable stories from the past, then on what basis is the case for it to be made?” (p. 144)

To make his case for Daniel as Scripture rather than an interesting, but merely human, ancient text, Moberly turns to Matthew 28:18-20.

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

This passage has clear echoes of Daniel 7, “this resurrection appearance of Jesus is appropriately read in relation to – indeed, as a realization of – the Daniel vision.” (p. 145) Of course, the mere reference to Daniel 7 in the Gospel of Matthew isn’t enough to make it Scripture. To make such a claim we would have to begin with the assertion of Matthew as Scripture – a claim as fraught with uncertainty in the modern disenchanted age as any similar claim about Daniel. Matthew 28, however, does indicate the significance of Daniel 7 in the early (Jewish) church. Jesus is not merely a contemporary teacher and example, but the very one who stood before the Ancient of Days (and also the promised Davidic King).

So now we ask, what is the nature and content of Jesus’ authority?

In Matthew 4 we read the well known story of the temptation of Jesus. The devil offers Jesus dominion if he will only worship him and Jesus replies  “Away with you, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only’.” Power and authority is not given by Satan or for the good of the one to whom it is given. We see this again on the cross and in the events leading up to it. Moberly highlights two passages. Matthew 16 where Peter recognizes Jesus as the Messiah, but then rebukes Jesus for saying that he, as God’s Messiah, must suffer. Peter’s response is very human “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” Jesus turns to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”  But he has a word for the disciples (and us) from this interchange: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.“

Later, on the cross Jesus declines to rescue himself in the face of taunts and mocking.

“You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!” … “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” (Matthew 27:40-43)

This gives us insight into the authority of Jesus – its purpose and content. Authority is not given for self-preservation and aggrandizement. It is not for the one to whom it is given at all.

It is the Jesus who lives and dies thus – who consistently refuses to use his divine power to make things easier for himself or to save himself – who is raised from the tomb and appears to his disciples saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” That which he refused to take is given to him. … The fact that Jesus does not use his sonship to his own advantage but rather is willing to undergo suffering and death while being mocked and misunderstood, and yet is then raised from death to receive sovereign and universal authority, gives meaning to this authority. (p. 151)

As Paul makes clear in his letter to the Philippians ch. 2, it is this shape of authority that the disciples and all Christians (especially leaders) are called to follow. A Christian reading of Daniel 7 cannot be considered separate from Matthew 28 and Philippians 2 in the context of the entire New Testament.

Persistence and Community. While the continued reception of texts in the people of God – Israel and Church – is not a sufficient reason for privileging the Bible as Scripture, it is a necessary condition.

We assume and expect, because countless others have assumed and expected before us and found these assumptions and expectations to be fruitful. Thus, questions about privileging the portrayal of the deity and the human-like figure in Daniel 7 are inseparable from the evaluation of those continuing patterns of life and thought that are a constituent part of that privileging: who, for people today, are the significant others whose perspectives are considered desirable? (p. 157)

How does the “supernatural” become “natural” in our world today?  That is, how does it become believable and relevant? The answer isn’t signs and wonders, but in the lives of God’s people.

The answer is surely when human lives are so receptive to, so graced by, God that they display God’s own qualities. As a famous passage in Jeremiah says:

Thus says the Lord: Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord. (Jer. 9:23-25 [Hebrew 9:22-23])

When human lives display steadfast love, justice, and righteousness, they display what matters more than things that people customarily value (intelligence, strength, money) for they display God’s own qualities. (p. 161)

There is much more in Moberly’s chapter worth considering, but this post is already long. This is a very thought provoking book – both in points of agreement and points of disagreement. Perhaps the best place to end the post is with Moberly’s conclusion to the chapter.

In short, the purpose of privileging the Bible for faith in God is not to say, “Here is truth and elsewhere is error.” Rather, it is a matter of being willing to learn, in light of the sovereignty of the crucified and risen Christ, ways of recognizing and responding to what is and is not of true value in God’s world, wherever one may encounter it. (p. 166)

God is not the answer to that which cannot be otherwise explained – some kind of physical mechanism active in the world. We will not find proof of God in a scientific sense. Moberly considers Bertrand Russel and Richard Dawkins among those who err by expecting God to be an empirical “scientific” explanation for features we observe in the world. This is a flawed approach. Nor is the Bible some kind of self-evidently “magic” book through which we find propositions ruling our lives as God followers. Rather it is a book that leads to wisdom. Certainly we look to the age to come. Resurrection is a foundational Christian hope. But we also look to live as the people of God today.

Frankly, and this is my point, not explicitly Moberly’s, the biggest issue in our disenchanted age is not the defense of the Bible as a privileged book, but the regular failure of Christians to live up to the vision of God we find in the Bible and especially revealed in Jesus and the New Testament. Sexual harassment and abuse, power mongering, focus on the accumulation of wealth, preservation of institutions rather than discipleship and shepherding of God’s people, greed and self-centeredness rather than generosity and servanthood … we could go on.

There are plenty of devout and dedicated Christians – they don’t make the news very often. But we need to make the case for Christian faith and the value of the Bible as Scripture first and foremost through the way we live. Receptiveness to the gospel begins with the work of the Spirit in and through the church.

The authority given to, assumed and modeled by Jesus has the power to transform the ways of the world.

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail [at] att.net.

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I am reading through Walter Moberly’s recent book,  The Bible in a Disenchanted Age: The Enduring Possibility of Christian Faith. Chapter 3 presents the bulk of his argument for the Bible as a privileged set of writings, through the Spirit and about God and his engagement with his creation and creatures. The chapter deserves more than one post and I will only dabble into the beginning here. Moberly uses Charles Darwin and his well known (although less well understood) loss of faith. Although much has been made in recent biographies of the effect that the death of Darwin’s daughter at age 10 had on his faith, Moberly suggests that this was not a root cause. Rather, two related ideas played a major role.

First, Darwin’s view of the Bible did not encourage much nuanced thinking about the texts. In his autobiography he wrote that when contemplating a clerical career he “did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible.”

Darwin’s grasp of theology was markedly different from his grasp of biology. …With the benefit of hindsight, it is not difficult to see Darwin’s “orthodoxy” as representing an attitude towards the Bible that unsurprisingly led to his rejection of it in due course. Even if an absence of doubt in “the strict and literal truth of every word” in principle represents a positive attitude, it also surely suggests a wooden and unreflective approach to a compilation of ancient sacred texts. Such an unreflective attitude would by no means encourage the exercise of his intellect in any of the subtle, patient, and probing ways in which he exercised it in his biological work. Rather, it would easily encourage an “all or nothing” or “either it’s true or it’s false” attitude, such that the encountering of problems could more readily lead to a wholesale rejection rather than to digging deeper. (p. 89)

Second, Darwin was “deeply indebted to the work of William Paley.” The argument from design formed a foundation for at least part of his faith. In this context, his careful study of biology raised serious questions. If the diversity of life was meticulously designed, what are we to make of examples like the ichneumon wasp. (The following is from the Wikipedia article on the wasp, although I’ve seen in in a number of sources). In an 1860 letter to the American naturalist Asa Gray, Darwin wrote:

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is significant as well.

Darwin’s subsequent rejection of Paley and rejection of faith were related. In the context of telling how he “was very unwilling to give up [his] belief,” and yet “disbelief crept over [him] at a very slow rate,” he says, “The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. (p. 89)

An unreflective commitment to a particular “strict and literal” reading of scripture combined with a reliance on Paley’s argument from design set up a true crisis of faith. The question for us becomes one of foundations. Is our faith founded on such claims as those Darwin came to discard, or is it founded on something stronger than these? Is it possible to read the Bible faithfully, but also open to a subtle and patient probing of the text and our understanding of it? The answer is yes – but it will not conform to the ideal of “the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible” still clung to by many Christians. Intelligent Design also provides a shaky foundation for faith. Both of these prove to be foundations of sand rather than rock. But back to Moberly.

The Bible is privileged – but it need not be approached in a wooden and unreflective fashion. Moberly writes:

For one of the things that characterizes a Christian believer is a privileging of the Bible (albeit often selectively) for understanding God and the nature of the world. … This is because the Bible offers an overall vision of the world, and of the role of humanity in the world, in the light of God. The world is God’s world, to which He gives the gift of life. God unceasingly engages with His world, especially in His initiative in the call of Israel, an initiative that climaxes with the coming of Jesus. (p. 91)

The biblical canon provides us with the tools – including the Gospels with their accounts of Jesus – to make sense of the world. But we need the whole canon for this – not merely the New Testament, the Gospels, or Paul. We need the law and the prophets and the writings. “Jesus represents the privileged focus in a believer’s vision because of the confidence that in and through Jesus, especially as framed and interpreted by the whole biblical canon, what matters most in life can be rightly understood.” (p. 92)

Why do we read and privilege the Bible?

What is the foundation of faith?

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

If interested you can subscribe to a full text feed of my posts at Musings on Science and Theology.