Psalm 119:17 is both a little request and a world of insight. “Do good to your servant, and I will live; I will obey your word.” That first verb, “Do good,” brings one element of the verb gml to the surface: it can mean “to deal kindly” or even to “deal bountifully.” What seems to be a little request — “God, do good to me” — covers up a world of intention.

My favorite commentary on all things Psalms? John Goldingay, Psalm 101-150

The psalmist asks God, after the psalmist realizes that he has spent time learning Torah, to be good to him so he can spend plenty of days “keeping the word (dbr).” Like the student who has spent years of studying to get degrees, like the apprentice who has spent hours toiling under a master, like a minor league baseball player who has spent the dog days of summer grinding out his game, like parents who have spent decades nurturing children — and who each want to see the reward of their efforts — like teaching for decades, or working wood on one’s own, or playing in the big leagues, or seeing kids come of age with wisdom and righteousness.

That’s the longing of the psalmist: he has dedicated himself to the Torah and got it down, and he now simply asks God to have a long life of praxis. That request, by the way, is a serious one: this psalmist is being hunted down.

Humans, the psalmist seems to assume, have veiled eyes. To see, the veil must be lifted. “Open (galah) my eyes, that I may perceive…”. Here the words of Balaam in Numbers 22:31: “Then the LORD opened Balaam’s eyes, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road with his sword drawn. So he bowed low and fell facedown.”

The same theme, that of removing a veil, is found in 2 Cor 3:14-18 — and there the idea is that “in Christ” and “through the Spirit,” the veil is lifted so we can experience God “face to face.” That encounter reveals, heals, transforms, and empowers.

There can be an issue here: some contend that we cannot “understand,” as in “apprehend the meaning of,” the Bible without the Spirit. Or, to use the psalmist’s word, without divine opening of the eyes. Others say we read the Bible with our minds, but the heart is opened only through surrender to God’s Spirit and presence and faith in God to speak to us.

Here is a prayer from The Book of Common Prayer that is so appropriate to Psalm 119

Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.Amen.

The psalmist, in 119:19, tells us this: “I am only a sojourner in the land.” At first blush, this would mean he is a Gentile (ger ‘anoki) dwelling for awhile in the Land of Israel. On top of this, he says “do not hide your commandments from me.” What to say?
If taken to be a social descriptor, the psalmist is a Gentile who, in spite of his Gentile status, wants to learn and hear the commandments. But, my sources don’t show anyone who thinks this.

That means, since the contextual flow of the whole of Psalm 119 suggests a Jewish author, that “sojourner” is a metaphor for our sojourn on earth. Which, so it seems to me, fits with 119:17: he wants to live long enough to enjoy observing the Torah (after his effort to learn it). And, this also means that the “do not hide” is about the same as “deal kindly” in 119:17. That’s the process I went through to come to the meaning of the text: in our time on earth we are summoned to join the psalmist of learning Torah and observing Torah. Hence, every weekday we spend time on this blog pondering a passage in the Bible.

“My soul,” the psalmist announces, “is consumed in its longing for Yourmishpatim/commandments” (119:20). Actually, the word “consumed” means “crushed” (garas). My soul, he says, is broken into pieces because it so longs to commune with God through hearing from God.
To be honest, most of us part ways from the psalmist. How often do I so long to hear from God, how often do I so long to commune with God, that I sense that my being is falling into pieces because of that desire?

The psalmist’s longing to know God through the study and observance of Torah is not without opposition. He is aware of those who are “insolent” (119:21) and stray from the commandments. Even more, he experiences “taunt and abuse” (v. 22) and the “princes meet and speak against me” (v. 23).

It is not clear who this prince is: could be military, could be priestly, could be other royals. We don’t know; they are a pain to the psalmist. Nor are we certain who wrote this psalm. What we do know is what the text says: the psalmist is opposed in his commitment to do the Torah.
In spite of that, the psalmist makes one thing clear: “your servant studies your laws.” The word “studies” (siyach) means to germinate and to meditate; or, even better, to mutter to oneself through or to ponder and think upon and through.

The daily hours, the habit of pausing at set times in the day, permits us to hear the Word throughout the day and to give to us something to ponder and meditate on. The daily habit of reading the Bible does the same. The habit of memorizing permits the same. However you and I do it, the point is to get these words into the mind so we can chew on them, let them germinate, ponder, and meditate.
Those who for a variety of reasons — most of them highly uninformed — oppose the practice of meditation are opposing something explicitly taught in the Bible.

The psalmist declares his friends: “your decrees (edah) are my delight (shashua), my intimate companions (enosh etsah) — my friends who counsel me” (119:24). Again, the psalmist speaks from experience: his friends are the words of God; they are the ones who accompany him everywhere he goes; they are the ones who are whispering in his ears about what to do; they are the ones to whom he listens. Doesn’t take much imagination here: if you know someone well, you know how they think and what they would say in each experience in life. That, for the psalmist, is what God’s decrees/God’s words are like: they are his best friends, his most loyal counselors, his steady companions.
When his opponents sought counsel with one another, he sought counsel with the decrees of God.

If you’ve ever heard Fernando Ortega’s song about traveling the roads of New Mexico, he speaks of his friends as the columbine and the streams and the stars. Always with him. They lead him home. Don’t know the name of the song; but I like it.

The answer is Yes. There are a number of theologians doing “theological interpretation of Scripture” (TIS) today. While it is unfair to the nuances of each theologian to mix them all into one batch, the fundamental strategy is generically alike. That is, they know where they stand theologically, they believe where they stand is solid footing (they think it’s truth), and they then are liberated to see either reflections or intimations of that theology in the Old Testament.

What, after all, is the difference between Tim Keller finding “grace vs. religion” (grace, performance, etc) in Genesis, or so many in The Gospel Coalition finding Christ in the Old Testament (e.g., Graeme Goldsworthy’s tune), Protestant liberals/progressives finding social justice as the Bible’s central theme, African American or Latin American or feminist or womanist liberation theologians viewing the Bible through the lens of liberation, and Greg Boyd re-interpreting OT violence passages in light of cruciformity (understood as pacifistic)?

Much, but only in one way: the theology where they stand is different.

At the heart this becomes “How do we determine where we stand?” Do we stand with our own interpretations? With the historical critical method? With a creedalism or confessionalism or denominationalism? Or… with … someone like…

Greg Boyd, in his The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, finds an early example of his cruciform hermeneutic in Origen, who not only was at one time off limits but who has these days found reception among a wide spectrum of orthodox thinkers, including some evangelicals. If he got off base on his form of universalism does not mean everything he taught was wrong. Hence, there is a resurgence of Origen in our world today. This, it must be admitted, is a separate discussion, and one not for me, though I’d be glad to host a good post or a series of posts on Origenist theology.

An opener from Origen:

Origen: “The Holy Spirit supervised… cases [in Scripture] where that which appeared at the first glance could neither be true nor useful in order that… we should be led on to search for a meaning worthy of God” (417).

If the Dismissal and Synthesis views don’t answer the questions, what’s left?

If, as I have argued, all Scripture must bear witness to the crucified Christ, and if we can neither dismiss nor simply embrace the OT’s violent divine portraits, our only remaining option is to look for a way of interpreting these portraits that discloses how they reflect the self-sacrificial love of God revealed on Calvary. 418

At issue — always and forever — is hermeneutics. Which hermeneutics? Whose hermeneutics? What method? One method was allegory, a method now fallen out of favor but it wasn’t out of favor in the NT or patristic periods:

Though doctrines such as the incarnation, the Trinity, and baptism certainly appeared to be recently conceived, early Christian thinkers argued these doctrines were actually very ancient, for they are present in an allegorical form in the OT, which even many non-Christians assumed was older than Homer. Thus, allegorical exegesis, together with several other theologically driven interpretive techniques (e.g., typology), allowed early Christians to present their faith as a viable, intellectually attractive, and very ancient option. 424

Three Origenist principles:

First, as Maurice Wiles has noted, Origen held that “if the Holy Spirit is the author of all scripture … every part must be in full agreement with the meaning of every other part, since God never contradicts himself.’ 425

A second important and closely related aspect of Origen’s view of Scripture concerns his use of the incarnational analogy for understanding biblical inspiration…. the Bible is almost a first incarnation. 426

Origen’s incarnational model of inspiration led him to believe that there could be nothing superfluous in Scripture. 427

One, two, three. Sounds like the method I was introduced to in American fundamentalism though the name Origen wasn’t on the lips of those teaching it.

But this leads Origen then to the moral and hermeneutical problem:

Origen “refuses to believe in the literal truth of accounts of massacres carried out under God’s orders” (434). [these passages are “unworthy of God” Origen believed]

Origen simply could not see how the Christ-centered harmony that he believed permeated the canon could be preserved if the violence ascribed to God and his people in the OT was taken at face value. 442

Is this Marcionite? No, but he walks with Marcion a bit, and then radically parts paths:

Origen is, in effect, conceding to Marcion and others that the god of the OT is an evil deity, but only if one insists on interpreting the reports of his violent commands and actions literally. To Origen’s way of thinking, however, this simply proves that this sort of material is not to be interpreted this way. Instead, the “impossibility of the literal sense” of such material should force us to dig deeper to uncover ‘the inner meaning,” which, as we noted above, is precisely why the Spirit “breathed” these “impossibilities” into the inspired written witness to God’s faithful covenantal activity. 444

In the end, Origen knew where he stood. Is this how we all read the Bible?

… the primary reason Origen found the OT’s violent depictions of God to be problematic, if taken at face value, was that he was unwavering in his confidence that the crucified Christ fully revealed the true character of God and that this character was altogether nonviolent. 458

The Bible needs to become more central to our faith, not by way of absolute certain interpretations but by putting it on the table first. As NT Wright says,

To affirm “the authority of scripture” is precisely not to say, “We know what scripture means and don’t need to raise any more questions.” It is always a way of saying that the church in each generation must make fresh and rejuvenated efforts to understand scripture more fully and live by it more thoroughly, even if that means cutting across cherished traditions.

Psalm 119 invites us to put the Bible on the table first in our discussions.

“How can those who are young keep their way pure?,” asks the psalmist in the opening line of the Beth lines of Psalm 119 (v. 9a). Some think the entire psalm is the journal reflections of an ancient Israelite as life progresses. What impresses me is other verses in this great psalm that give context to the concern of this young man to get started when young.

Notice the following verses (culled from Derek Kidner):
1. Some are skeptical: 119:126: “your law is being broken.”
2. Some seek the psalmist’s life: 119:95: “The wicked are waiting to destroy me.”
3. Some smear the psalmist’s name: 119:69: “Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies.”
Notice that this causes the psalmist pain: he is sensitive about the words being said (“Take away the disgrace I dread” — v. 39), he feels humiliated (“Though I am lowly and despised” — v. 141) and he is exhausted by it all (“My soul is weary with sorrow” — v. 28).

Sometimes he lashes out against them — “Indignation grips me because of the wicked” — v. 53 — and sometimes he loathes them — “I look on the faithless with loathing” (158). So, the young man asks, how does one make it when the whole institution seems to be against the person committed to God? “By living according to your word” (119:9b). Not just by reading it; not just by listening to it; but by “living” it. The word “live” here comes from shamar — “to keep or observe.”

Start when you are young, the psalmist is saying, and what he means is start observing and keeping the Word.
In spite of what everyone else thinks. The genuinely counter-cultural person is observant.

“With all my heart,” the psalmist says in 119:10, “I have turned to You; do not let me stray from Your commandments. In my heart I treasure your promise.” Commitment to God, a life absorbed in Torah, begins in the heart. And when the commitment begins in the heart (13x in Ps 119), Torah produces wisdom rather than just knowledge. Such commitment, because it opens one entirely to the presence of God, purifies in and with love. Here are some observations:

1. Heart commitment implies inside-out, total revolution.
2. Heart commitment implies “faith seeking understanding.”
3. Heart commitment implies trust in God rather than self.
4. Heart commitment implies vulnerability to God — an admission of what the self is really like.
5. Heart commitment implies treasure in God and turning from sin.
6. Heart commitment implies finding instead of wandering.
Others suggestions? (Try to stick to Ps 119:9-16.)

Psalm 119:12-13 expresses the psalmists commitment — to learn the law and to rehearse the rules. Thus:”Praise be to you, O LORD; teach me your decrees. With my lips I recount all the laws that come from your mouth.”
Here the young psalmist blesses God (baruk) and petitions God to be the teacher; then the psalmist states that he will “rehearse/recount” all the laws (mishpat). What I hear is this: the heart set on God learns the Torah — by reading it regularly, listening to it longingly, and loving it with life. Do you regularly read the Bible so that you listen to it? Or is it just something to analyze, study, break apart?
The Torah students begin sessions with this prayer: “Blessed are you, O YHWH; teach me your laws.

The pleasure the psalmist speaks of in Psalm 119:14-15 is not simply the mental exhilaration of study and discovery — the sort of thing many experience when they chance upon something previously unseen in the Bible, which I think is grossly overrated for Bible study. No, the pleasure of the psalmist is otherwise. We sell ourselves short if we equate the “statutes” and “precepts” and “decrees” of these verses with the words on the page of the Bible. The psalmist finds these words to be communication from God, discovering these words as establishing relationship with God, and therefore the words as interpersonal communication. In knowing them as communionn with God the psalmist exhilarates.

Notice the words of pleasure:

I rejoice in following your statutes
as one rejoices in great riches.
I meditate on your precepts
and consider your ways.
I delight in your decrees;
I will not neglect your word.

The psalmist rejoices (shis) and delights (sha’ashu’im) — as one does in great riches. Exhilaration.

This exhilaration transcends knowing as cognition; it is the absorption in Torah and being absorbed by Torah, it is delight in knowing and being known, it is delight in both knowing and doing. I like how it begins in v. 14: “in” the way (derek) of your statutes — not just knowing but the knowing-doing in relationship with God; in the way of communing in in knowing-observing.

A meditation on the experience of the psalmist in Psalm 119; esp vv. 1-16. I take the key idea of this psalm to be absorption. I see this in three directions:

First, the psalmist is absorbed in the Torah as communication from God so that the psalmist is absorbed in God. Over and over the focus is on “Your” word, statutes, precepts, laws, regulations, and teachings. The psalmist delights in God, in hearing from God, and in knowing that God communicates through the Torah to God’s people.

Second, the psalmist is absorbed by the Torah. Not only is the Torah the object in which the psalmist delights; the Torah is the subject that overwhelms the psalmist so that one is caught up in and by the wordy presence of God. Not only is the psalmist studying to learn, but the psalmist is being studied by the Torah so that it becomes the “other” that addresses the psalmist.

And, third, the psalmist is absorbed toward others. This wordy presence of God in Torah, the authority of God that comes to the psalmist in the Torah, directs the psalmist’s life toward others. That means, the psalmist speaks about others, to others, and for others. The psalmist summons others to the Torah, to listen and learn.

Why? Because the Torah, this wordy presence of God, is not just words on a paper and not just propositions to be analyzed, but the missio Dei — it is the atoning presence of God among us. As we hear and listen and receive and observe and do and share and summon, we are caught up into the missio Dei in this world. Word is missio Dei, so if we are absorbed in it and by it, we will be caught into its fundamental missional direction of speaking to us so that we might hear God and speak to God and speak to others on behalf of God.

By Kristen Marble, an ordained elder with the Free Methodist Church, is the Pastor of Mars Hill Free Methodist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. She also teaches Bible & Theology courses for the Free Methodist Church during January intensive J-Term Courses. Kristen is working on a doctorate on the NT Context at Northern Seminary. Her doctoral project is exploring how the Old Testament should be used in the Church today. Kristen loves to travel, read, write, speak, explore thrift stores and experiment with new recipes alongside John, her husband of 22+ years, and her children, ages 11-23.

From a very young age I became badly infected by the travel bug. My family and I traveled a lot and I loved it! By the time I graduated high school, I had visited most of the 50 states. As an exchange student in high school and college, I quickly expanded my travel repertoire to include most of western and eastern Europe. John and I have continued that travel tradition with our own family, and our kids have been to over thirty states themselves. There’s something joyous about seeing new places, learning new things, and meeting new people. A busy international airport filled with the hustle-bustle of many-hued people, speaking innumerable languages, and wearing unique and colorful clothing demonstrates better than anything else the beauty of God’s diverse creation. I often imagine this as but a small foretaste of the beauty of heaven.

On Sunday, churches around the world – churches filled with those many-hued people, speaking innumerable languages, wearing unique and colorful clothing – will celebrate Pentecost. On Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus’ many disciples and an international praise party of at least fifteen tongues and tribes broke out. Thousands of Jews had gathered from around the first-century world in Jerusalem for the Holy Day, and no matter from where they came, they heard praises to Jesus in their native tongue! (See Acts 2)

On that single day, three thousand people came to faith and were baptized. Now that’s a revival! But the revival didn’t stop there. As each of those three thousand returned to their home country, they brought with them the Good News. They shared their experiences and joy, and small gatherings of worshipers cropped up in every corner of the Mediterranean world. If you could have traveled from one end of the world to another at that time, and visited each of these small churches, you would have encountered a great diversity of cultures, languages, dress, skin color, customs and ways of life.

Such beautiful diversity didn’t end after these early churches were established either. Several years ago I had the opportunity to be part of a five-language Easter service in South Africa. The service was a poignant reminder that God’s truth knows no national boundaries and is to be proclaimed by all. Today, many local Indianapolis Free Methodist congregations are experiencing such diversity as they welcome refugees and immigrants from around the world. Scripture is read in Swahili and English. Worship songs are sung in multiple languages. Church potlucks feature a tantalizing array of international food.

For generations the church in the West has raised up and trained missionaries to be sent out into the world. That continues to happen today, but now the world is also coming to us. And what a great opportunity for learning and growth. Indeed, the world has much to teach the western church!

On this week when we celebrate Pentecost, let us rededicate ourselves to embracing God’s diverse church that has no national boundaries, no official language, no standard dress, and no universal ways of worship. Whether you have traveled far and wide, or have barely made it out of your hometown, invite God to broaden your views about His Church. Intentionally seek out individuals who come from places you’ve never visited, who speak languages you do not know, and whose customs you do not understand. These are our brothers and sisters, and they also are image bearers of our Creator God.

While we may not all be able to travel, we have daily opportunities to go beyond what we know. Mark Twain’s challenge to travel applies to us all – whether we hop on an international flight, or simply drive to the grocery store: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

And once you’ve begun to travel, how can you bring your experiences into your church? How can our churches better represent the beautiful diversity of God’s creation? May this Pentecost Sunday be a time of radically embracing the splendor, uniqueness, and creativity of a God who transcends all nations, all tribes, and all tongues.

From Jonathan Storment: The author of this blog is a missionary in North Africa with Pioneer Bible Translators. She, along with her husband and three little girls, lives on the outskirts of a refugee camp in a very politically unstable part of the world. There they are working to facilitate disciple-making, Bible translation and mother tongue literacy among two least-reached Muslim groups.

Despite the occasional craziness, they really love what God has called them to do.

So this past Christmas was a rough one. I’ll spare you all the gory details, but on Christmas Day fighting broke out in our area (and when I say “our area” I mean soldiers shooting at each other from our fence line) and we spent a couple of days on the floor before things were quiet enough for some brave bush pilots to fly in and evacuate our family safely to East Africa.

I distinctly remember a time shortly after we arrived in Uganda when Bryan and I were haunting the aisles of a big supermarket in a fog, feeling paralyzed by what cereal to buy while we talked about the implications of what we had just gone through. I remember being rather matter of fact in that moment as I said something like “This will all still be okay as long as we don’t get looted.”

Two hours later we got the call saying we had lost just about everything.

Flash forward to four months later: I am writing this here in Uganda while Bryan is in North Africa on his second trip back. Yesterday he called me and told me how he and some local friends had gone to the market for lunch and had sat down in the small mud and tarp restaurant for a bite to eat. And just like every “restaurant” does in this part of the world, a woman came out and set down a pitcher of water and some plastic cups on the table in front of them.

Only these weren’t just any plastic cups. They were ours. They were these tacky lenticular knock-off Disney Princess cups that I had found in some random shop run by a friendly Darfuri man a couple years ago and had given them to my two year old as a potty-training reward. Costly and sentimental? Not really. Belonging to us? Most assuredly.

After months of coming to terms with the losses of having our homes looted, I was suddenly filled with indignation. “Did you demand to get them back?” I breathed hotly into the phone. But Bryan said no, not really. He had casually asked the woman where she had got the cups, and when she had awkwardly mumbled about them being hers, he simply told her that they had once belonged to his family and left it at that.

I went to bed last night mad. The dumb Disney cups reminded me that almost everything we once owned in South Sudan is now scattered to the wind (with the exception of the solar fridge that was too big to quickly get out the busted down back door and a trunk of stuffed animals we hid in the ceiling boards). And while it’s easy to say things like “Well, I am sure it all ended up in the hands of people who needed it more than we did,” – when confronted with the reality that someone else is using your stolen stuff, whether or not they need it quickly becomes emotionally obsolete.

However, at some point last night, through the haze of my feelings of frustration and general crapiness, the blessed words of Jesus came unwelcomingly to mind. “Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.” (Luke 6:30) I’m embarrassed to say that after 24 years as a Jesus-follower, this may be the first time I have sincerely gut-wrestled with those words.

It’s easy enough to explain them away, isn’t it? Because of course Jesus wouldn’t want us to be irresponsible in our generosity. And he certainly wouldn’t want us to just get taken advantage of like idiots. Of course, he wants us to be kind and charitable to the deserving. But he doesn’t want us to be crazy people. Right…?

Except that’s not what he says. He doesn’t nuance it or give explanatory caveats. He just says do it. And it’s in the context of lots of other absurdly over simplified statements like “love your enemies” and “pray for those who persecute you.” Ridiculous. But pretty straight-forward.

After years of awkwardly brushing over those words or toning them down just a bit (“because I mean seriously, if you gave to every single person that showed up at the gate, then what would happen?”) I was shocked to find that in the face of being literally confronted with people taking my stuff away, taking Jesus’ words at face value was incredibly and overwhelmingly freeing. Instead of obsessing over what in the world I’m supposed to do in this situation, choosing to believe what Jesus said – exactly as he said it – changes those words from vaguely uncomfortable to deeply comforting.

Because of course, it’s not about the tacky cups. It’s not about the solar panels or all the furniture and kitchen supplies or my grandmother’s quilt either. And in this situation, it’s not even about the people who took the stuff, their intentions or needs or experiences. It’s about my heart. And while Jesus meant those words literally, I don’t think he meant it because he’s primarily concerned about how much stuff I have or how much stuff someone else may or may not have. He said it because he cares about my heart. And as long as my heart is wrapped up with my stuff, with trying to preserve and protect and keep and find and save my stuff, I am missing out on things so much bigger.

It’s absolutely insane that at the end of the day, my family can lose everything in North Africa, and yet still be sitting in a “back-up” home in Uganda with more than enough eat, wear, play with and read. I don’t know if that is a sign of God’s great faithfulness to my family or a sign that I still haven’t learned this lesson yet. But I am working on it. And I am both thrilled and terrified of continuing to discover what freedoms lie in the hard, hard teachings of Jesus.

Dennis Venema’s final chapter in Adam and the Genome examines his move from a position of Intelligent Design to Evolutionary Creation. It isn’t that he finds the world a random mess with humans as lucky accidents. Rather, he has come to believe that evolutionary mechanisms are God’s means of intelligently designing and sustaining his creation. This is an important point. All Christians believe that God intelligently designed the earth and that humans are created in his image. The issue is really one of process – does science reveal an accurate evolutionary history or not? If so, this will have consequences for the ways in which we might understand and interpret Scripture – but it does not change the fact that God is the Creator.

The Intelligent Design (ID) movement argues that there are firm limits to the power of natural processes and that the origin and structure of life on earth exhibits features that point unmistakably to a designer. The key point is that these limits provide scientific evidence for the existence of this designer. As Christians we believe the designer to be God, but this isn’t a key tenet of ID.

Two significant design arguments advanced by Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution) and Stephen Meyer (Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt) center on irreducible complexity and the genesis of new information content.  Dennis digs into both of these areas of research. He finds the arguments for ID less than compelling (and I agree completely on this). I am not going to summarize Dennis’s analysis – buy the book and read it. Send questions – or set up a discussion group including biochemists and geneticists in the mix. One key point is that, in addition to the popular single site mutation, a variety of other mechanisms can also result in changes to the genome. These include gene duplication, register slippage and whole genome duplication. Many of the changes are neutral, but provide the working ground for the development of new or modified biochemical systems capable of new function. If a modification is beneficial, it eventually becomes dominant in the population.

God in our ignorance. Although Behe, Meyer, and many of their colleagues insist that they are looking for positive evidence for design rather than for gaps that only God can fill, the arguments still have the aura of God-of-the-gaps reasoning. In the conclusion to this chapter Dennis writes:

Over the course of my personal journey away from ID, I came to an uncomfortable conclusion: ID seemed strong only where there was a lack of relevant evidence. Though ID proponents strongly deny the charge, I cam to view ID as a God-of-the-gaps argument. The less one knows about the fossil record, the more compelling ID appears. The less one knows about the details of biochemical systems and how they change over time, the more compelling ID appears. The less one knows about the genetic code, the more compelling ID appears. The less one knows about the organization of the genome, the more compelling ID appears. The origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, and the origin of most complex biological systems are deep in the past, making them challenging, though not impossible, to study. Yet despite the challenges scientists face in these areas of inquiry, evidence continues to trickle in that undermines ID and supports evolution. Have chemists solved how life arose on earth? Not remotely, nor will they in the foreseeable future, if ever. Have biologists determined the detailed mechanism by which every complex biochemical structure arose through an evolutionary process? Not at all, nor will they. Is this good reason to claim that evolution has failed, that God must have created genetic information of complex biochemical structures directly? … The track record of these sorts of arguments is poor, even for the ID movement over the last twenty years. (p. 90)

Evolution can be design. We should move away from the idea that evolution and design are mutually exclusive. God can and does work through a wide range of process that we consider “natural.”  The distinction between natural process and divine action can distort our view of God’s work in his creation. The Bible gives us examples of God working personally with his people. Moses saw God, God spoke through visions and through prophets. The incarnation, the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus is the most important example. But the psalmist can also write “you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (139:13) as a testimony to God’s providence, not a repudiation of “natural” embryonic and fetal development. There is nothing inherently atheistic about evolutionary processes. Dennis asks “Could it be that God, in his wisdom, chose to use what we would call a “natural” mechanism to fill his creation with biodiversity adapted to its environment?” and “If he did, would he be any less a creator than if he had done so miraculously?” (p. 90)  I am convinced that God could, in his wisdom, use evolutionary processes and that this is completely consistent with our understanding of God as creator. On this question then, the wisest approach is simply to let the science take its course. We need not jump on every bandwagon, but we also need not fear the ultimate conclusions, whatever they are. We should be more concerned with the metaphysical conclusions that some people attempt to weld onto the science as though they were all one piece.

Finding God in what we know – not in what we don’t know.  Dennis also suggests that ID – the fixation on scientific evidence for a designer – is counter to the Scriptural witness. In Romans 1 Paul writes “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (1:20) Modern science sheds no light on this claim. God isn’t hidden in the details of the DNA or in the complex biochemical mechanisms of the cell. He is present in what we all know and see, from the beginning of the human race (whenever and wherever that was) right up to the present day. “Paul calls us to see God in what we know, not in what we don’t know – and as science reveals ever more about creation, we know more and more about how God chose to bring his creation into being.” (p. 91)

In the next post on Adam and the Genome we will begin to look at Scot’s contribution on Paul and Adam in context from the perspective of a New Testament scholar.

Where do we see God in creation?

What is the signature of design?

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