Hugh Ross provides a clear description of his view of old-earth progressive creation in Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. He has a high regard for the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, but this takes him in a direction quite different from that described by Ken Ham in the opening chapter. Ken Ham’s understanding of Scripture is shaped by his view of creation (perfect creation), fall, redemption and new creation. The manner in which he views this narrative and his emphasis on a young earth interpretation are internally coherent for the most part. There are some inconsistencies in Scripture (internal “problems” to be resolved), but the biggest challenge comes from modern science – physics, geology, archaeology, chemistry, biology, cosmology and linguistics for starters.

Hugh Ross’s view of the biblical narrative is slightly different … he sees the overarching narrative as one of preparation. God is preparing his people for the age to come. Human beings with free will, including the freedom to choose to follow God are the pinnacle and purpose of this creation. This view finds ample support in the New Testament.  For example:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. (Eph. 1:3-4)

He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. (2 Tim. 1:9-10)

Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ to further the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness— in the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time. Titus 1:1-2

Ross explains:

This message implies God created the universe and all it contains for the express purpose of providing for the eternal redemption of billions of humans. Consequently day-age creationists interpret all the Bible’s creation content in the context of God’s salvific goal. We also interpret science in the context of this goal. We see every component of the universe, Earth, and life as a contributor to making possible the salvation of billions of humans. (p. 93)

There are several key points to Ross’s view.

First, the earth is old because God progressively created a universe, galaxies, the sun and the earth appropriately designed for his purpose. From the creation of elements in stars to the preparation of an oxygen atmosphere on earth … think of God as a creative artist shaping the world he desired. God didn’t simply start the process and let it go, he was intimately involved at every stage.

Second, God’s creative work ceased in the sixth “day” (actually a long period of time) with the creation of humans in his image. At this point the world was ideal for population by humans, created with a free will, to be shaped into the people God desires … not puppets but willing disciples.  Each “kind” – form of life – was progressively created by God for his purposes. Ross suggests that today we see a gradual loss in diversity of life because  God’s creative work has ended and progression toward maximum entropy will lead to disorder and decay. Ross also rejects the idea of common descent, taking hold of the claim in Genesis 1 that God created creature according to its kind.

Third, Adam and Eve were unique individuals – the progenitors of the entire human race – but some perhaps 135000 years ago or so early in the last ice age rather than 6000 years ago. Humans are a special creation in every sense of the word.

Fourth, Noah’s flood was a real “worldwide” event, but one that only needed to cover the area populated by humans. At this time humans were not dispersed around the globe in the Genesis narrative or in Ross’s view.

Ross suggests that both young earth creationists and evolutionary creationists leave too much to so-called “natural” processes. In particular he questions the reliance of Ham and others on the flood in shaping the earth and the manner in which rapid diversification of life post-flood is used.  The old-earth progressive creation model is both more consistent with observation and emphasizes the role of God as engaged and active creator. He also suggests that evolutionary creationists err on the side of deism – with God starting the process and then stepping back and letting it go. He does acknowledge that this is not the claim of many … but the absence of a mechanism for God’s involvement he still finds troubling.

The world God created is governed by physical laws that restrain and control evil (especially natural evil) while still providing the necessary freedom for the development of humans into the people God intends for New Creation. Here it is useful to turn to the discussion in a recent post Is “Natural Evil” Evil? on the book Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation?. Ross is more explicit in the chapter on Death, Predation and Suffering in this book where the questions are more focused and there is space for more detailed development.

While so-called natural evil is not the direct result of the fall, in creating the universe God foreknew that moral evil would enter his good creation. Consequently, he designed his creation in advance with the features to optimally deal with moral evil once it arose. The creation design had, as a necessary byproduct, the occasional occurrence of natural disasters and disease. … To summarize, in the context of God’s strategy to completely and permanently eliminate evil and suffering from his creation while enhancing the free-will capacity of redeemed humans, everything that God created is very good. (p. 83-84)

In the next post on this book we will look at the responses from Ken Ham, Deborah Haarsma, and Stephen Meyer.

What do you think of Ross’s view of the overarching narrative of scripture?

What is the overarching narrative and how does it influence our understanding of God’s creation?

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.

Not a few times I have recommended friends to read her but the come back, after reading one or two items, with a common sort of response: “Too dark, too weird, too violent. I don’t get the point. How can this be seen as Christian literature? Where’s the grace?”

I’m speaking of Flannery O’Connor, whose short stories can never be absorbed in one reading. After a first reading, the response might be “Weird.” The second, “Weird but interesting.” After a third or fourth, “Wow, profound, but still weird.” I agree. It took me three readings of “Parker’s Back” until the story starting coming together, and it was Jill Baumgaertner’s A Proper Scaring that pointed me to seeing grace run straight through Flannery.

Like those who need several attempts to enjoy a proper espresso straight or a whisky neat or sushi, it takes a few attempts to come to enjoyable terms with Flannery.

What Flannery does is turn conventions inside out by letting each event become a gospel event. In other words, Flannery writes up a “subversive gospel,” which is the title of the wonderful new book by professor Michael Mears Bruner: A Subversive Gospel.

This is one of the favorite books I discovered at the annual meetings for SBL in Boston.

Today some main themes from Bruner’s fine and important study of Flannery. As I was reading Bruner I kept saying to myself, “Go get Wise Blood or The Violent Bear It Away and read Flannery herself.” Such is the sign of the mediational ability of a good writer. The good ones lead you to the sources.

If they take you to the heart of the gospel they will subvert common perceptions. Bruner gets it.

By subverting conventional notions of beauty, goodness, and truth, O’Connor is not extolling their opposites—ugliness, evil, and dissemblance. It isn’t as if what is ugly is actually beautiful, or what is true suddenly appears as a lie, or what is evil is actually divine goodness. She is instead suggesting, by creative implication through her fiction, that our conventional categories be baptized, as it were, to include their divine extensions, so that what is beautiful is also sometimes terrible, and what is true is also sometimes foolish, and what is good is also sometimes violent. Seen in this way, the conventional notions of the transcendentals are not wrong so much as they simply do not exhaust the category.

I like the expression Bruner uses in italics next, and it reminds of Gorman’s cruciformity which I have myself made use of when speaking of Bonhoeffer’s cruciform hermeneutics.

In order to understand O’Connor’s subversion, I am suggesting that we apply a kind of crucifix hermeneutic to her fiction—a kind of crosshairs reading that alerts us to the fact that when something violent happens in her stories, or someone is or says or does something foolish, or something terrible or awful appears, there is a decent chance that O’Connor is actually trying to show us something good, true, or beautiful, respectively. We look to the example of Jesus on the cross, whose death was violent even by Roman standards, whose cry of dereliction was ridiculed as he was left hanging on the tree for dead, and whose form was marred beyond recognition. In that cosmic and very local moment, goodness, truth, and beauty reached their divine apex, thus not merely extending but exhausting—even exploding—the categories of the Greeks and thenceforth establishing a new order of things, a new way of seeing.

She does this so well and so artistically that we are repulsed by her stories, and repulsed was exactly what so many were when they encountered Jesus’ own words about the cross and the apostolic preaching of the cross. There is something ugly to the core in the beauty of God’s grace in the cross. Flannery’s entire work exposes us to that very gospel. She subverts us by using the subversive gospel.

… through the medium of her art, Flannery O’Connor showed her readers how following Christ is a commitment to follow in his shadow, which becomes a subversive act aesthetically (“bleeding”), ethically (“stinking”), and intellectually (“mad”). But to understand how and why she does this, one must take seriously both her theological and artistic commitments.

Her Southern grotesque, perhaps a bit on the side of William Faulkner, is Christian, is Catholic, and is gospel shaped. What Bruner says is right:

When O’Connor writes she is performing surgery on the soul, without anesthesia, and yet she leaves her readers wanting more.

Everything about her and everything about her stories and everything about her craft … it’s a package: take her or leave her, but you can’t have parts of her.

O’Connor’s aesthetic and theological approaches, her artistic and moral vision, her vocation and her life, were woven together into a unified whole that ineluctably led, through the medium of her craft, to a depiction of the terrible beauty, violent goodness, and foolish truth of God.

What Bruner summarizes about her is something I believe is true. I’ve read some potent stuff over the years, Cormac MacCarthy, William Faulkner, even Dante but no one is like Flannery:

No one else wrote like she did, certainly no other Christian writer did, with that bizarre mix of provincial colloquialisms and circus sideshow freaks with a medieval religious sensibility.

For those of us who grew up in an Augustinian narrative of who we are, our identity is bad, sinful, corrupt, evil and rebellious. James Bryan Smith, in his new book The Magnificent Story, does not deny original sin but instead contends there’s a narrative at work that is bigger that we need to embrace.

He begins the chp with a story about Rich Mullins, the Christian musician, and how Rich confessed to Jim his own story of sinfulness, both before his conversion and after his conversion. Smith’s own little narrative was challenged. That narrative — God works only through the righteous — was challenged by another narrative.

The point of this chapter is this: sin is not our essence; it is a willful act of separation that mars our likeness to God. …Surrender is not natural to us. Sin seems like a way to meet our needs. So we fight God for something we ultimately do not want, rather than take what God wants to give, which is actually what we need. We struggle because we are made in God’s image. We long for good, to be good, and to do good. When we find we are not and have not, all is not lost. We can discover what causes us to sin and why, as Rich found. And we find our freedom not in hiding our brokenness but in disclosing it.

What narrative runs through our head is what matters immensely to our health — in all its facets. What is your narrative? I think Smith is right in this:

Put simply, the dominant Christian narrative about our identity is this: “We are rotten sinners, we love to sin, and all we do is sin.

The shaming story begins with this point: “Realize you are a sinner.” It is a shame-based, shame-driven story.

It is easy to flip flop on this: from a totally sinner story to a totally good story. It’s not that simple. Smith puts it this way:

… I am not rejecting the notion of original sin or that sin brought death and affects everyone. But there is more to the story of who we are, and more to the story of why we sin than “I was born that way. I can’t help it. It is what I do.” How we understand original sin is crucial.

He brings us back to the big theme of his book — beauty.

Beauty makes us say “wow.” This narrative makes us say “woe.”

A narrative of the good and beautiful and true goes deeper and beyond:

The true narrative says,”We are made in God’s image, with original goodness, which cannot be marred by our sin. But we are also made in God’s likeness, which we distort every time we choose to sin.

Smith is right: the first word about us is not original sin or sinfulness but original goodness (Gen 1:31). Everything God created was and is good. Smith thinks there’s a difference, like many in the early church, between image and likeness. Image remains; likeness is distorted. Here is his big idea:

When I realize I am made in God’s image, I understand I am sacred and valuable. When I understand that I cannot alter this image by my foolish, sinful ways, I am grateful
to God. When I accept that by my actions I am either moving closer to or further from God’s likeness, I take sin seriously. The shaming story does not say much about sin, other than it separates us from God. In truth, our sin separates us not only from God but from ourselves and others. It was not what we were designed for.

In Embracing Grace I first developed for myself an idea like this and I call us “Eikons of God” and that we are cracked Eikons. Smith’s point is this: we are always goodness in the image but we can corrupt the likeness. This fits with how many in the Eastern church discussed image of God and, even if one is not convinced the two terms are that distinguishable, the substance is the same: We are made Good, we sin and corrupt ourselves in all directions, but God is at work in us to restore us.

N.T. Wright’s big book on Jesus called Jesus and the Victory of God was turned into a more accessible book when he wrote The Challenge of Jesus and then later Simply Jesus, so when he wrote Paul and the Faithfulness of God many of us expected something similar: The Challenge of Paul or a Simply Paul. But that’s not what he’s done. His newest (and soon to be released) book is called Paul: A Biography and it is not an accessible version of Paul and the Faithfulness of God but something altogether different: a biography.

Here we go again with another adventure through the mind of NT Wright about the mind of Paul in the world of Paul.

Here’s an opener:

An energetic and talkative man, not much to look at and from a despised race, went about from city to city talking about the One God and his “son’* Jesus, setting up small communities of people who accepted what he said and then writing letters to them, letters whose explosive charge is as fresh today as when they were first dictated. Paul might dispute the suggestion that he himself changed the world; Jesus, he would have said, had already done that. But what he said about Jesus, and about God, the world, and what it meant to be genuinely human, was creative and compelling—and controversial, in his own day and ever after. Nothing would ever be quite the same again.

Tom is always asking the bigger questions, the central questions, and these are two of them:

This raises a set of questions for any historian or would-be biographer. How did it happen? What did this busy little man have that other people didn’t? What did he think he was doing, and why was he doing it?

Why did all that change? What exactly happened on the road to Damascus?

Wright gets personal in this introduction, about his early years of learning to read Paul while still in school:

His letters existed for us in a kind of holy bubble, unaffected by the rough-and-tumble of everyday first-century life. This enabled us blithely to assume that when Paul said “justification,” he was talking about what theologians in the sixteenth century and preachers in the twentieth had been referring to by that term. It gave us license to suppose that when he called Jesus “son of God, he meant the “second person of the Trinity.” But once you say you’re looking for original meanings, you will always find surprises. History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves. And ancient history in particular introduces us to some ways of thinking very different from those of the sixteenth or the twentieth century.

And what he now still believes, but it’s all the same and different:

I hasten to add that I still see Paul’s letters as part of “holy scripture.” I still think that prayer and faith are vital, nonnegotiable parts of the attempt to understand them, just as I think that learning to play the piano for oneself is an important part of trying to understand Schubert’s Impromptus. But sooner or later, as the arguments go on and people try out this or that theory, as they start reading Paul in Greek and ask what this or that Greek term meant in the first century, they discover that the greatest commentators were standing on the shoulders of ancient historians and particularly lexicographers, and they come, by whatever route, to the questions of this book: who Paul really was, what he thought he was doing, why it “worked,” and, within that, what the nature of the transformation he underwent on the road to Damascus was.

As always, Wright’s concern is history and a historical perspective, a Paul in his own time:

Once we get clear about this, we gain a “historical” perspective in three different senses. First, we begin to see that it matters to try to find out what the first-century Paul was actually talking about over against what later theologians and preachers have assumed he was talking about….

Second, when we start to appreciate “what Paul was really talking about,” we find that he was himself talking about “history” in the sense of “what happens in the real world,” the world of space, time, and matter.

Third, therefore, as far as Paul was concerned, his own “historical” context and setting mattered. The world he lived in was the world into which the gospel had burst, the world that the gospel was challenging, the world it would transform.

This will become a standard textbook on the life of Paul, mark my word.

The final three scientists interviewed in Tim Stafford’s book The Adam Quest are British. Despite the conservative evangelical and fundamentalist stereotype of English Christianity as theologically bankrupt, there is an environment that allows sophisticated and serious Christian thinking to flourish. N.T. Wright, John Stott, and C.S. Lewis top the list for many of us. Beyond this we find Malcolm Jeeves, Alister McGrath, Tom McLeish (we will come back to his book Faith and Wisdom in Science soon), Mark Harris, and the final three in Stafford’s book, Denis Alexander, Simon Conway Morris and John Polkinghorne.

Denis Alexander’s story is fascinating. Born into a Christian home and family active in the Brethren, he felt a strong missionary call while taking a “gap” year in Canada before beginning his undergraduate work at Oxford. He studied biochemistry at Oxford eventually obtaining a Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London (a Christian professor convinced him that this wasn’t a waste of time). He took a teaching position in Turkey feeling a call to be a Christian witness in that officially secular country. Nine years in Turkey were followed by six years at the American University in Beirut Lebanon. Bullets and occasional artillery colored his experience in these countries.

He returned to Great Britain with his wife and family after 15 years abroad. Although a non-traditional career track to be sure, he finally settled into a position at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge becoming chair of the Molecular Immunology Programme. Eventually he, along with “close Christian colleague Bob White, a professor of geophysics at Cambridge” and initial funding from the Templeton Foundation launched the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge. A multitude of resources are available online – including archived lectures on science and faith by a wide range of Christian speakers. He had a new mission field – to convey “the Christian message in an academically coherent manner.” (p. 164)

Our ambition is to change the culture of the discussion between science and religion in the academic world through good scholarship and good publications. We want to critique the presumption that the conflict thesis is the only story in town. … We want to educate people about the religious roots of science and explain what religion is claiming and what it is not claiming. We want to encourage an academically solid discourse that doesn’t have people shouting at each other.”
(p. 166)

Although Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design have less influence in Great Britain than in the USA, the questions at the intersection of science and faith are significant. Denis Alexander has published a number of books on science and faith including Creation or Evolution, Do We Have to Choose? and most recently Genes, Determinism and God – a book I hope to dig into soon.

In contrast to Denis Alexander, Simon Conway Morris found found Christian faith in adulthood through reading C.S. Lewis and his friends Dorothy Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and from a generation earlier, G. K. Chesterton. “These writers led Conway Morris to Christ. … “They opened completely new worlds. They allow[ed] us to step outside of ourselves, ask what it means to be human, why we are not animals anymore while clearly of animal derivation.” ” (p. 175)

Simon Conway Morris is a paleontologist, a professor at the University of Cambridge, an expert in the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion. Although this explosion has been pointed to as evidence for the contingent random purposelessness of evolution (Stephen Jay Gould in a variety of writings) or Intelligent Design (Stephen Meyer in Darwin’s Doubt) Conway Morris has a different take. Evolution is constrained by necessity and efficient solutions to practical problems are found multiple times. He works through this in his book Life’s Solution. “Conway Morris’s challenge spoke directly to a key metaphysical claim often made about evolution: that it is pointless and meaningless, utterly random and therefore strips life of transcendent meaning.” (p. 177)  Evolutionary science doesn’t really speak to meaning and evolution “may be random in the details, but not in the outcome.” (p. 177) Meaningless materialism is not a scientific conclusion – and Conway Morris suggests that it may not even be the view most consistent with the natural world around us.

Near the end of the Boyle lecture, Conway Morris concluded that science, for all its value, comes in behind other ways of knowing truth: “Science when it treats creation as a true Creation, and thereby faces up to its responsibilities, may well be important. I expect [Robert] Boyle [founder of the lecture series] would have agreed. It seems ultimately, however, that it is the knowledge and experience of the Incarnation, the wisdom and warnings given by Jesus in the Gospels, and not least the Resurrection that in the final analysis are all that matters.” (p. 181)

Stafford finishes his survey of Christians with John Polkinghorne. Another interesting story. The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne was born into a Christian home, regular attenders in the Anglican church. Although from a humble background, he was clearly talented in mathematics and provided with the opportunity to cultivate his ability. He studied mathematics at Trinity College in Cambridge, then pursued a Ph.D. in Physics – theoretical particle physics. He was very successful in his field. But it wasn’t enough. In his forties he left academic science (he was now a Professor at Cambridge) and went into the ministry becoming ordained in the Anglican Church. After a brief time in a rural parish he returned to Cambridge, first as dean of the chapel at Trinity Hall Cambridge and then as president of Queens. His views matured and developed during this time as did his sense of calling.

He had come to see his true vocation clearly. He was to be a hybrid, a “two-eyed” creature living in the university, who could see into and speak between realms that were hardly visible to each other, let alone on speaking terms – the realms of science and faith. (p. 190)

So much of science is what Polkinghorne calls “one-eyed.”  It is focused on part of the world, not the whole world. Science is fascinating, and well worth studying, but there are many questions it cannot answer. But there is nothing unchristian about evolution. Understanding scientific truths can help us understand God. Stafford summarizes:

If evolution is the way in which God created the diversity of life, then Polkinghorne looks to see what evolution says about God himself. Evolution suggests a God working less like an engineer than a gardener. God’s creation is dynamic. It tends, over vast stretches of time, to extend into ever-greater articulation, variety, and beauty. Does this vision of God diminish his power and majesty? Not according to Polkinghorne. (p. 196)

Polkinghorne also advises caution. He “knows that scientists are apt to get carried away with the overarching significance of their discoveries – to overinflate their universality.” (p. 196) This doesn’t mean that science is untrustworthy, but it can be wise to take grand pronouncements with a grain of salt. Current evolutionary explanations of phenomena such as consciousness and art – creative imagination, hardly seem adequate.

Evolution isn’t a threat to the faith of any of these scientists. It is simply a mechanism within God’s creation, used for his purposes. All three take their faith quite seriously. Both John Polkinghorne and Denis Alexander have allowed their faith to shape their careers in ways that raise eyebrows in the scientific establishment. Simon Conway Morris has also stepped out in some of his more recent work, especially his  book Life’s Solution.

Francis Collins isn’t included in Stafford’s book – the nature of his position as Director of the National Institutes of Health prevents him from contributing to such projects these days – but his book The Language of God tells a story quite similar to the profiles of Schweitzer, Falk, Louis, Alexander, Conway Morris, and Polkinghorne. A robust faith and a conviction that science is providing insights truthful into God’s creation and thus insights (however much we yet see through a glass darkly) into the nature of God. This isn’t a tale of conflict but of coherence.

I’ll wrap up in the next post with Stafford’s conclusions and some thoughts of my own.

What do you think of Polkinghorne’s suggestion that science is “one-eyed”?

What does faith offer to a coherent and unified view of the world?

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.

His claim is that Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith is a species of indulgences and is, in fact, the most extreme form of indulgence. Everything for nothing. Salvation for doing nothing. So Richard Rex in his new book, The Making of Martin Luther.

I’m no fan of faux-Alte Schrift design for letters on Reformation books, but I suppose one gets an ancient feel from the Alte Schrift. In part it is because I learned to read Alte Schrift and considered it a mark of distinction to read old German books. Anyways, as a friend of mine used to say, who cares?! Or as another says, It is what it is.

On to Luther and indulgences and Rex’s (seemingly) preposterous claim.

Here’s how Rex works out his theory of Luther’s indulgences-on-steroids:

Yet the most interesting feature of his [Luther’s] original critique of indulgences is the vast gap it reveals between his theological standpoint in autumn 1517 and his new position in spring 1518. For, within a year, he was offering Christians salvation on the cheapest terms ever.

When Luther first began he had not yet worked out his theory of justification by faith alone — grace alone. So, Rex has made here an important point. His original theory against indulgences had more to do with the minimalistic approach: all they had to do was get the indulgence, largely through donations, and not attend to repentance and obedience.

Rex, however, and he admits this is not a cheap shot, and his book proves he’s not taking cheap shots. But his point is nonetheless a zinger and stinger. Rex contends there is a direct correlation between indulgences and justification by faith.

From one point of view, the doctrine of justification by faith alone was simply the proclamation of a universal, plenary indulgence, available at absolutely no cost or effort. This is no mere cheap shot. For a start, Luther himself was perfectly clear about the parallel. He himself announced that the only indulgence of any value to Christians was the one issued by God.

In his day Luther was criticized for just this point. He required nothing but faith.

The critique of moral hazard which he had been willing to deploy against the traditional doctrine of indulgences was therefore, inevitably, deployed still more readily against his new doctrine by his opponents. Luther’s superindulgence required absolutely nothing of its beneficiaries, not even a token donation or a perfunctory prayer, let alone the inconvenience and embarrassment of confession to an all too human priest (though Luther left plenty of room for such confession, which he continued to regard as a salutary moral discipline, if conducted in the right way). The very slogan “faith without works” said it all.

I have not read the whole book but it seems to me as I read this that this might be the precise point of Luther: no one got an indulgence for doing nothing but believing. Justification was had for nothing but faith in Christ alone. It is not, then, anything like an indulgence. (Perhaps I misunderstand.)

Luther’s problem was the impact of his theology on the morality of those in his churches. Were they changed? Were they transformed?

Luther sought to mitigate the risk by insisting that those people who were genuinely justified by faith necessarily and almost naturally brought forth the fruit of good works in their lovingly Christian lives. But the moral hazard was undeniable, and is evidenced in the extent to which Protestant Reformers throughout the sixteenth century felt the need to counter the intellectual challenge posed by what they described as “antinomianism” or “libertinism.”

So Rex poses the irony of Luther creating justification by faith, superindulgence theory, as a contrast to indulgences, but his theory ended up being a kind of indulgence.

It is not merely that there is an ironic coincidence between Luther’s doctrine of justification and the scholastic doctrine of the indulgence. It is not even that there is an adventitious historical connection between the doctrine of the indulgence and the origins of his new doctrine. [Shown above.]

Rex contends that Luther’s justification by faith was formed because indulgences were a viable theological category in the air.

It is on reflection plain that Luther s doctrine of justification could not have been conceived, could not have been imagined, could not have been developed if the scholastic doctrine of the indulgence had not previously been worked out by the theologians of the Middle Ages. By a much deeper irony, Luther’s understanding of justification is conditioned by the scholastic theory of indulgences.

Even more.

It might almost be regarded as the logical consequence of that theory, and can certainly be seen as its most extreme formulation. The conception of the infinite superabundance of Christ’s merits which underpinned the theory of indulgences was fundamental to the rhetoric of the “passion and merits” of Christ that ran through sixteenth-century Protestant preaching and devotion.

Rex pushes harder in his rhetoric.

Luther’s doctrine of justification was not so much a reaction against the theory of indulgences as its culmination. This may be why Luther did not formulate his own theology of justification until, thanks to the furore over indulgences, he had not only started, unknown to himself, to cut his ties with the authority of the Church, but had somehow loosed his imagination from the constraints of medieval understandings of how Christian salvation worked.

Here is Rex’s strongest stinger.

He had at first thought that the doctrine of indulgences went too far. What he realized later was that it did not go far enough.

I contend that in going farther than indulgences, Luther abandoned indulgence theology to create a different kind of theology: one rooted in faith alone, grace alone, in Christ alone.

The issue, of course, is if Paul too offered this so-called ironic superindulgence.

Is this theory of Rex preposterous or not?

It is how people think, respond, react and outline a case that often marks them out as either Christian or sub-Christian and at times even non-Christian. When an idea provokes response the marks of a consistently Christian mind becomes manifest.

I see this at times when three different words come into play, three words that are profoundly Christian but which can be loaded up with MY convictions so much the words no longer have profoundly Christian meanings. These three words are grace, love, and justice. Sometimes grace is so large there is no repentance or holiness or transformation. Sometimes love is so fuzzy that it means tolerance of well-nigh everything, except a progressive’s pet peeves or a fundamentalist’s deep concerns. Sometimes justice is so central the church and evangelism are shelved and the gospel becomes anti-abortion or anti-whatever-the-GOP believes.

In our day, when everything important to Christians has become politicized, both on the Left and the Right, the manifestation of a Christian mind becomes A#1 Christian Virtue. Rich Mouw, in Uncommon Decency and Adventures in Christian Civility, speaks of civility and this essay today supports his valiant summons.

What then are the marks of a Christian’s mind, and what I mean What does the Christian mind look like when it is as consistent as it can be with the gospel itself?

First, it is capable of being challenged and confronted by the gospel itself. That is, whatever issue arises and no matter how long someone has held firmly to a conviction, that conviction must be challenge-able and confront-able by the gospel itself.

New issues demand such. Those who think, for instance, that Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch or science and faith or political platform postures or which denomination gets baptism right or the gifts of the Spirit or church order — I could go on but I’m done listing — those who think these issues are settled may simply be revealing that their minds are no longer challengeable.

There are issues that we may have worked on, say, in our twenties and resolved for ourselves. I get that and have that as part of my own approach to some issues. But a Christian’s mind is open to being challenged by truths, by new discoveries, and by fresh examinations by other thinkers. If you despise a challenge you may well be closed to the truth of the gospel’s challenges to your convictions.

Second, a Christian’s mind does not turn disagreements into a situation where those who disagree with you have become your enemies or you demonize them. We all have some thinkers who get under our skin or on our nerves. (Let me tell you something: if you don’t believe that you’re not honest or you’re just very very filled with goodness.) I want to assume the accuracy of my claim so we can get to this:

It’s how we respond to such persons that matters. I disagree with Tim Keller on some matters that are important to me, but I try to read each of his books because I learn from him each time. I agree with lots of what NT Wright and JDG Dunn and L Hurtado write so I read them, too. I disagree with Douglas Campbell and Beverly Gaventa on some central ways of framing Paul’s theology but I’ve never read a paragraph of either that isn’t informed, judicious and worthy of attention.

When we think all of our enemies are God’s enemies — didn’t Anne Lamott say something like this? — then we’ve demonized others.

So the Christian’s mind says, “She’s my sister, he’s my brother, we disagree, but siblings we are. Siblings grant one another the leniency of genuine listening.”

Third, I contend that a Christian’s mind is always ready for adjustments to one’s convictions. My contention, and I say this on the basis of how a wisdom culture works, is that adjustments are organically connected to the rock solid convictions of the sages of our Christian theological tradition.

Revolution is neither humble nor wise. Revolution throws aside the hard-fought wisdom of our sages, the faith of our fathers, and asks, when it is ready to render revolutionary judgments on intellectual topics of substance, “What would Grandma and Grandpa Sage think and what will our grandchildren think?”

Revolution is arrogance. It assumes everybody got it wrong. Wisdom permits organic developments.

But wisdom is ready for adjustments, for discernments, and for change. It just knows there are good ways to change and bad ways to change. My friend Ben Witherington wrote about the coming storm among Methodists, and he points his finger at progressives who are ready to chuck the guidelines for pastors. Ben sees this as a revolution, not a wise adjustment. Ben’s right.

Wisdom can adjust and adapt and adopt. Why? Because it is honest before truth and humble enough to admit it may be wrong and humble enough to say those before us got it right.

Fourth, and finally — and you may have others to add and please do so in the Comment Box, a Christian’s mind is transparent about the Bible. What does this mean?

A Christian mind is soaked in Scripture and its Story has engulfed the Christian and her mind. Consequently, a Christian’s mind openly confesses a window on the mind, and through that window we see a Christian studying the Bible, the whole Bible, contemplating what the Bible says and what the whole Bible says.

I like Greg Boyd’s book because I think the man tells us exactly what he thinks and how he explains all that nasty stuff about the warrior God. I don’t trust those who think they can explain some of that stuff away, and some of the references Greg cites are references one does not find in his opponents.

I despise political answers to tough Christian topics. I’ve seen it in emergers, in the Reformed, in the holiness crowd, in the Arminians… there’s enough politics to spread all around. Tell us what you think, I say to them, tell the truth. OK, you’re afraid of getting in trouble. Why?

Four marks, and surely there are more, but these are my four for today: A Christian’s mind is capable of being confronted by the gospel, does not turn disagreements into enemies, is capable of adjustment and eschews revolution, and is transparent about the Bible.

From CBE’s Arise

By John Frye

This will be our final post on Eugene H. Peterson’s Reversed Thunder. Fittingly, we will end with his “The Last Word on Heaven.” I admit it: I am a fan of Eugene Peterson. Not because he’s a rock star, like Bono; not because he’s a megachurch phenomenon like some in the USAmerican evangelical church. Peterson is a thoroughly down-to-earth, thoughtful, serious, winsome, biblically-informed, theologically astute pastor/author. It is his down-to-earthiness that shines through in his chapter about heaven. I’m tempted to bullet point snippets of his writing about heaven because he compresses so much reality into flimsy symbols (words) on the written page. Consider these Peterson teachings:

Heaven is a metaphor. Bracketing his thoughts with the heavens opening at Jesus’s baptism in Matthew 3:16-17 and the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven in Revelation 21:2, Peterson writes, “Heaven, in the gospels and the Apocalypse (and throughout scripture) is the metaphor that tells us that there is far more here than meets the eye. … Calling the word heaven a metaphor does not make it less real; it simply recognizes that it is a reality inaccessible at this point to our five senses” (168-169). Peterson notes that both the Hebrew and Greek use the same word for heaven and for sky. The biblical words do “double duty” for the visible and the invisible.

Heaven is not an ending, but a beginning. We have in Scripture logically a Genesis beginning and in Revelation, “not quite logically,” a new beginning. “The sin-ruined creation of Genesis is restored with the sacrifice-renewed creation of Revelation” (169).

Considering heaven, “[w]e are immersed in materiality from start to finish. … The gospel is the enemy of all forms of gnosticism. The gospel does not begin with matter and then gradually get refined into spirit. … Heaven and earth, which is to say, materiality, are the inclusive context in which we exist. … Creation, heaven and earth, is God’s workplace. … Our unregenerate nature has a way of slipping the leash of the physical and running away like a disobedient dog into all kinds of lush spiritualities. But dematerialized spiritualities are vacant lots” (170-171).

Heaven is immediate, not remote in either time or space. “Heaven is not what we wait for until the rapture or where we go when we die, but what is, barely out of range of our senses, but brought to our senses by St. John’s visions. … The vision of heaven is not a promise of anything other than what we have already received by faith; it does, though, promise more, namely, its completion” (172). Heaven is not a fantasy. It is not an escape from what is. If we don’t like what is, we may not like heaven. Heaven is the cosmos brought to completion.

Heaven is a city. “The surprise in St. John’s rendition of heaven is that it comes to us in the form of a city…” (173). Heaven is not a Garden of Eden re-do. Heaven is the city of Jerusalem re-do.

Peterson notes that cities in the Bible don’t often get good press. Nod founded by the first murderer. Arrogant Babel. Even Jerusalem had its dark, evil days. Heaven is not leaving the city for the vast countryside, serene lakes, and massive mountain ranges. “There is not so much as a hint of escapism in St. John’s heaven” 174). God renews the city. “Now, descending out of heaven we see the city as a community in adoration, ready to receive God’s love in faithfulness, a bride adorned for her her husband! … [T]he city and the bride are us” (175).

Check out Peterson’s discussion of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the Twelve Apostles. Thoughtful, compelling lessons. “Heaven is an intricate system of completions” (177).

I hope you will acquire and read Reversed Thunder. I believe you’ll find yourself returning to it often for vision, encouragement, and a humbled appreciation for the real purpose of the Book of Revelation.