InterVarsity press recently sent me a copy of a new book A Little Book for New Scientists: Why and How to Study Science by Josh Reeves and Steve Donaldson. The book is designed for Christian college, or possibly high school, students contemplating a career in science. It also contains insights in a short readable format that pastors, including youth pastors, may find useful.

Despite the fact that I am no longer a new scientist, I immediately dove in and began to read.  Josh Reeves is an assistant professor of Science and Religion at Samford University in Alabama with an undergraduate degree in Psychology, an MDiv, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Science and Religion track) from Boston University.  Steve Donaldson is a professor of Computer Science at Samford (BS in Physics, BS in Engineering, MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science).   Both Reeves and Donaldson have long-standing interest in the questions at the forefront of science and religion, particularly science and Christianity.

I have to admit that curiosity with a touch of skepticism drove some of my interest in the book.  As a scientist with now 20+ years as a professor and 30+ years as a researcher I was curious to see where I would agree or disagree with the views expressed by Reeves and Donaldson. Outside perspectives can be enlightening, but also infuriating on occasion. (Well, Reeves brings an outside perspective – Donaldson has more direct science experience.)  Samford, however, has an active program in Science and Religion – and Reeves and Donaldson bring a wealth of experience to this book.

Why study science? Part one of the book addresses this basic question in three chapters. In the first, Reeves and Donaldson point to the two books metaphor “For over 1500 years, Christians have used the metaphor of God’s two books to suggest the complementarity of natural and supernatural knowledge.” (p. 22)  God speaks both in the general revelation of his creation and in the special revelation to his people.

Science will not differ for the secular or religious person – not when it comes to empirical observation or mathematics. But there is a difference:

They [secular scientists] just fail to see the true spiritual significance of what they study. In other words, they do not comprehend the spiritual realities to which the physical realm bears witness, with the result that secular scientists are often wrong when they try to construct a worldview based on science. (p. 26)

The two book metaphor has limits however. These limits do not challenge the science – but point to the inability of the investigation of nature alone to bring us to a saving relationship with the Creator. Christianity is a personal and historical religion. God reveals himself through people and actions. This cannot be deduced from any kind of scientific investigation of nature. Reeves and Donaldson quote Francis Bacon who noted that creation and investigation of God’s works in creation “shows the omnipotency and wisdom of the maker, but not his image.” (p. 27)  One can be a faithful Christian with no knowledge or understanding of modern science, but one cannot be a faithful Christian without the knowledge or understanding of the personal character of God and historical events transmitted down to us through the church and through Scripture.

Reeves and Donaldson next give a brief overview of the history of apparent conflict between science and the church. While the conflict is quite real on issues of metaphysical and spiritual importance, the conflict on scientific questions is overblown. Scientific materialism is at odds with Christian faith, but science itself is not. Even the famous case of Galileo needs to be understood in context – (1) Galileo was at the cutting edge and the mainstream science community (if we can push such an idea back to the time) did not accept his ideas and (2) much of the reaction was to Galileo’s rather aggressive, even offensive, method of communicating his ideas. This isn’t a simple case of science vs. the church.

Science and ethics. The final chapter in the first section of the book looks at science and ethics (image Wikipedia). The bottom line is that we need Christians in the sciences to evaluate the claims made in the name of science and to use the knowledge obtained or obtainable through science to live out the Christian calling of love of God and love for one another.

The title of this post comes from this section.  Reeves and Donaldson claim that “there is a long history of people claiming that scientists are ethically superior to their fellow citizens.” This statement surprised me because I am not aware of anyone making this claim, nor has it cropped up in anything I’ve read. In fact, I don’t think I had ever heard the claim prior to this. Not in reading of the history of science or in the present day.  It also surprised me because I know it isn’t true – all of the foibles and flaws of the general population are at play among scientists as well.  Ambition … The allure of money, sex, and power runs deep. The issues are discussed in more depth in the book, but Reeves and Donaldson certainly agree that there is no ground for viewing scientists as ethically superior.

Reeves and Donaldson move from this to talk of science as a community activity. Whereas scientists as individuals are not ethically superior to other humans, could the scientific community as a whole provide an ethically superior outlook?

Our society tends to see scientists in either/or terms. Either they are especially trustworthy, playing the role of priests who can produce sacred truths for a secular society, or they are a corrupt institution because they are beholden to political pressures.  A better view, as the sociologist Harry Collins has explained, is to see scientists in a middle-ground category: scientists are merely experts, and as such “should be accorded all the attention and respect we give to other experts in our society like potters, carpenters, real estate agents, and plumbers.” The main reason we trust experts is that they participate in communities that evaluate their actions. (p. 47)

The particular set of examples Collins gives here is telling (quoted approvingly it appears, by Reeves and Donaldson). Scientists are technicians producing a product or middlemen arranging a connection? And where does trust come into the mix with a potter? Potters need licenses? I could go off on a tangent – but perhaps it is better to step back and look at the bigger point. The main reason we trust scientists is that they participate in communities of experts – any new idea, insight, or result must be defended in a community of people capable of evaluating the ideas. The cutting edge should be taken with a grain of salt as the bugs haven’t necessarily been worked out – but well established theories are just that for a reason. The scientific enterprise is intrinsically a community endeavor. Ideas may start with an individual (although the reality is usually more complex than this) but they don’t stay with the individual.

But ethics is a far more embracing idea than simply judging the accuracy of answers to perplexing problems in the natural world. The scientific community places value on certain kinds of pursuits –  but society at large should be involved in these discussions. How much time and money should be invested in developing better tools of war? Stand-off detection of biological and chemical threats and explosives? Drugs, imaging methods, materials, solar energy conversion, particle physics,  cosmology, evolution, next generation telescopes, and a myriad of other topics? What should be the balance between basic and applied research?

In their conclusion to this section Reeves and Donaldson note that “if Christians abandon science for fear of anti-Christian bias in scientific research, it only ensures that no Christians will be left to evaluate claims made in the name of science.” (p. 54)  I think it goes deeper than this – if Christians abandon science for fear of anti-Christian bias it ensures that no Christians will be at the table to challenge metaphysical claims that move beyond science, and it ensures that Christians will be missing from the table when decisions are made to value one avenue of study over another. We will benefit if Christians are active in the communities that make these decisions.

Why should Christians study science?

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

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By Jonathan Storment

Today I want to close out the series that I have been doing on Spiritual warfare interacting with Richard Beck’s new book “Reviving Old Scratch”

One of the most encouraging things that I have seen over the past few years has been several of the progressive churches’ leading voices re-discovering how important church is.

My biggest beef for a long time among my progressive Christian friends is that they were so quick to love Jesus, but not the church, without much regard for the very group of people that Jesus claims as His Body on earth.

I get that everyone had stories behind their dismissive approach to the gathering of God’s people, sometimes those stories are of great pain or betrayal. I also get that church takes a thousand different forms, from under trees in Africa, to strip malls, or Cathedrals, or living rooms.

But generally speaking, conservative people placed a higher value on belonging to a local community of faith than my progressive friends.

So the past few years, seeing leaders like Rachel Held Evans, Nadia Boltz-Weber, Scot McKnight, and Sarah Bessey (among many others) write books emphasizing how important church really is has been a breath a fresh air.

It might be a surprise that a book on Spiritual warfare talks so much about just being a part of a local church until you begin to realize how much those two things overlap.

Remember when Jesus first announced that He was going to build the Church? He takes His disciples to Caesarea Philippi, a hub of worship for the pagan god Pan, and he announces He is starting a church and “the gates of Hell cannot prevail over her”

We progressive Christians are drawn to doing something. We want to help lighten the suffering in the world, and so we become activists. We wear the bracelet on our wrists, and we picket or blog and tweet our particular vision on what we need to do to make the world a better place.

All of these are well and good (I do them too), but here is Beck’s needed pushback. I am quoting him at length here:

And yet, Jesus wasn’t much of a political activist, but what Jesus did do and the early church followed his lead – was to create a community characterized by two things: the practices of care and peace. People flocked to Jesus because he cared for them. He healed them, protected them, honored them, included them, blessed them, and fed them….Over and over in the epistles, the church is encouraged to are for and love each other, in concrete and tangible ways…The church is a laboratory of love, a place where material care, sharing, hospitality, and mutual honoring are practiced and lived out….In addition to care, Jesus also practiced peace. In Jesus’ band of followers were Zealots and a tax collector, sworn enemies of one another. Jesus, a Jew, cared for Samaritans and colonial occupiers. Following Jesus, the early church was revolutionary in how it broke down the “wall of hostility” that had existed between Jew and Gentile. The church is also a laboratory of peace: Repeatedly, the Bible tells us that the church is the place where we come together to practice care and peace. The church is a laboratory of love and reconciliation, a workshop of sharing and forgiving, a testing ground of mercy and grace.

And what is vitally important about all this is how care and peace are practices being worked out face-to-face with real people. The kingdom of God is the hard, intimate, and sweaty work of simply getting along with people. The church is the laboratory of care and peace where you can’t get away with loving humanity abstractly and theoretically. You have to practice care and peace with the person standing right in front of you, the person boring you or annoying you as you’re sipping bad coffee together.

Jesus didn’t leave behind a political party. Jesus gave us a group of people to get along with.

And while that might seem simple enough, if you’ve ever tried caring for and living at peace with a group of people, you know it’s one of the hardest things in the world. It’s much easier to love people in the abstract than to love actual human beings. But that’s what the church gives you: actual human beings.

That’s church. Just an ordinary group of people who gather each week to participate in the liturgy of drinking bad coffee together, the liturgy where we practice the hard, awkward, and intimate work of caring for each other. A liturgy so powerful, transformative, and holy that even atheists are starting to gather on Sunday mornings in “Sunday assemblies” to experience it.

Drinking bad coffee is saving the world.

When we love humanity in the abstract, like loving humanity via social media or through a political party, one of the things that is persistently hidden from us is our own inner darkness, our own spiritual poverty and brokenness – our inner demons.

Community, real community, involves exposure. Only community can reveal, surface, and unmask our inner brokenness and sinfulness.

Two things here as I close out this book review. One, is this not true? In the quieter moments, when we are in between spats of moral outrage on Twitter about the Gorilla or what our Senators are or are not doing, does anyone else have those moments where we start to realize that I am not really as great of a person as I think I am and that the anger isn’t as pure as I thought it was, but instead was filled with bits of malice and envy and a lot of ego-building?

In church, we come face to face to our real personal brokenness, and maybe that’s why we don’t like her these days, not just because of the bad experiences, but because some of those experiences made us confront evil, the kind that actually causes suffering, isn’t just out there….it’s in me too.

And secondly, I think everyone should read this book, because I go to church with Richard Beck. I’m the preacher for his family, I’ve seen them live this out.

One of the more wonderful parts of reading this book was that I’ve gotten to see first hand a lot of the stories he tells (one of the more confusing parts was that he had to change their names).

He is smoking what he is selling here.

Over the past decade, there is not a commitment bigger to the Becks than to the local church and to the disenfranchised of Abilene.

Sure, he’s brilliant, and a great writer, and this is a wonderful book, but it’s more than ideas for him. It is a way of life.

And if you were to come to church on Sunday and ask the people that he picked up from the disability center to come to church, or at Freedom on Wednesday and ask the people who he picked up in the van about Richard, some of them would tell you that he hasn’t saved the world, but he has saved their world.

And if you came to the Bible class he teaches you would probably see him drinking bad coffee with others, practicing love and peace with real people.

You know, Spiritual Warfare.

NT Wright’s newest book, scheduled for publication in about a month and at this site a course is being developed about it, is called The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion. I’ve heard Wright say some of these things; but never better than in this book.

Today I want to post the opening two paragraphs and then a few lines from the second page … get ready because this book will be discussed widely:

“Young hero wins hearts.” Had there been newspapers in Jerusalem in the year we now call ad 33, this was the headline you would not have seen. When Jesus of Nazareth died the horrible death of crucifixion at the hands of the Roman army, nobody thought him a hero. Nobody was saying, as they hurriedly laid his body in a tomb, that his death had been a splendid victory, a heroic martyrdom. His movement, which had in any case been something of a ragtag group of followers, was over. Nothing had changed. Another young leader had been brutally liquidated. This was the sort of thing that Rome did best. Caesar was on his throne. Death, as usual, had the last word.

Except that in this case it didn’t. As Jesus’s followers looked back on that day in the light of what happened soon afterward, they came up with the shocking, scandalous, nonsensical claim that his death had launched a revolution. That something had happened that afternoon that had changed the world. That by six o’clock on that dark Friday evening the world was a different place. ..

It wasn’t just that they believed Jesus had been raised from the dead. They did believe that, of course, and that too was scandalous nonsense in their day as it is in ours. But they quickly came to see his resurrection not simply as an astonishing new beginning in itself, but as the result of what had happened three days earlier. The resurrection was the first visible sign that the revolution was already under way. More signs would follow.

In a recent public lecture, NT Wright canvassed a wide terrain with clarity and grace and humor, all to zero in on the epistemology of love. It’s a good piece, which you can access at the link below, but I swiped a few memorable paragraphs.

Enjoy.

NT Wright:

In part this was, as I said, a reaction to a church that had become dogmatic and out of touch. But the Epicurean revival of the Enlightenment was, more importantly, in the service of political agendas. It produced, of course, the French Revolution; but, more insidiously perhaps, by kicking God upstairs and insisting that the downstairs world of ‘facts’ could get on by itself, it paved the way for massive exploitation both of natural resources and of the conquered lands and peoples of the European empires. The split between science and religion is one aspect of a larger split between God and the world, affecting equally the question of faith and public life. We can’t understand the roots of the science/religion split unless we map it on to the much larger split and take into account the other areas where the same problem has taken hold, particularly in the political sphere. That is why the same rhetoric that Richard Dawkins uses about science and faith is found in those who are desperate to keep the church out of public life. And the language of this movement has been, again and again, about modes of knowing: the science studied, and the technology developed, were about ‘objective’ knowledge, whereas the world of faith and religion was seen as quintessentially ‘subjective’ (‘true for you but not for me’, and so on). And since the western world had all these ‘facts’, including of course better weapons of war, it made sense to create new facts on the ground that would serve the interests of that same western world. And my case to you tonight is that this objective/subjective split must be, and can be, transcended when we realise that the highest form of knowledge is love….

And the whole point of the Enlightenment was that history reached its climax and turning-point in – the Enlightenment itself. There cannot be two decisive moments. What we today perceive as the science/religion split, or the faith-and-public-life split, is the long outworking of the Enlightenment’s self-serving and elitist claim that world history had turned its decisive corner, that humankind had come of age, when Europe and America suddenly opened their eyes. Subsequent history shows what this has meant: wonderful advances in medicine, technology, and travel; terrible disasters in warfare, genocide, and new forms of slavery. I do not want to be operated on by a pre-modern dentist (or a postmodern one, for that matter); but I do not trust world leaders who have swallowed the enlightenment’s agendas wholesale, as most of them have. …

The other myth which has haunted our culture, and still reappears in movies, is Frankenstein. Once you cut science loose from its earlier context within faith and culture it can and will produce rampaging monsters. If ever there was a story for the twentieth century, there it is; and our question, a question even more urgent for western governments than that of Brexit or the refugee crisis, is: how to stop our home-made monsters pulling down the house on top of us. Once again there’s more that could be said about that, but let me just comment that if I were devising an education programme for teenagers, trying to get them to think into our current global dilemmas, I would love to show them Faust and Frankenstein in the movies and get them to discuss not only the Holocaust but 9/11, nuclear weapons, multinational tax arrangements and so on with those myths in their minds. And then, with all those questions and resources still resonating, I would have them read the stories which have a radically different twist: Joseph in Egypt; Daniel in Babylon; and on to plays like Measure for Measure, poems like Eliot’s The Waste Land, or indeed Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner; always circling back, with all aesthetic antennae fully operative, to the book of Revelation and ultimately to the gospels themselves. (We have allowed the Bible to be locked into a sanitized space called ‘religious studies’; that is a classic post-Enlightenment way of making sure they can’t come out and challenge the received folly.) There is a different story. We do not have to stay trapped in the Faust and Frankenstein myths. Once we realise how deeply we have sunk into the split-level universe, so that our current surface noise about science and religion is seen to be part of a much larger problem, we might be able to see ways in which the next generation may find its way into a wiser, more complete way of being human….

And now the question of knowledge finally comes into focus. The secular revolution has separated out knowledge into objective and subjective. The scientist, in this paradigm, has ‘objective’ knowledge, tested in laboratories, universally true. The artist, the poet, the theologian, has ‘subjective’ knowledge – dreams, fantasies, unprovable ideas – which are to be set aside when we (metaphorically and literally) get ‘down to business’. You can see this in education: when the school budget is stretched, the head teacher is tempted to cut down on music, drama, art and so on. They are ‘the pretty bit around the edge’, a luxury we may not be able to afford. That is dangerous nonsense. Look at the Venezuelan Children’s Orchestra. Look what happens when they take drama into prisons. Look at the way J. K. Rowling has taught a generation to read, to imagine, to dream. If you want true knowledge you have to love. And to learn about true love you have to hear, to smell, to imagine the story of the crucified Nazarene….

The point about love, at this level, is that it transcends the object/subject distinction. Of course it does: when I truly love, whether the object of my love is a planet or a person, a symphony or a sunset, I am celebrating the otherness of the beloved, wanting the beloved to be what it really is, greater than my imagining or perception, stranger, more mysterious. Love celebrates that mystery: in that sense, it is truly ‘objective’; but it is also of course delightedly ‘subjective’. Without the subjective pole, it becomes mere cool appraisal or ‘tolerance’. Without the objective pole, the celebration of the other as other, it is simply lust, cutting the beloved down to the size of my desires and projects, whether it be sexual lust exploiting another human being or industrial lust exploiting raw materials for profit despite the consequences. A colleague of mine put his finger on the first of these, speaking of ‘the decline of sex’, and explaining, ‘We all know how to do it but we’ve all forgotten why.’ That is exactly the same as the second, the Frankensteinian scientism of our day: we can do it, so why not and who’s to stop us? And this is where Jonathan Sacks’s aphorism comes in again: science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts things together to see what they mean. And sometimes the meaning tells you to stop pulling them apart. It’s a crisis of meaning that we face in our day, and a crisis of knowledge that brings that into focus; and the answer to the false antithesis of objective and subjective, which has been throttling our culture for too long, is a full-on reawakening of an epistemology of love. We have had enough of the Faustian pact in which we merely ‘tolerate’ one another; ‘toleration’ is an Enlightenment parody of love. It is time for the dangerous gospel notion of love to make a comeback in our culture….

Historians have focused on the so-called ‘axial age’ of the last centuries BC, but the truly remarkable story is not about the pre-Christian transformation of ideas but the Christian-initiated transformation of society in the first centuries AD. Against much misinformation, we must tell and teach that story as if our lives depend upon it, because actually they do. It is not simply a knowledge-story, a history-of-ideas project. It is a love-story, the story of ordinary, often frightened, but faithful men and women who went out to bring healing, education, freedom and hope to a world where such things had before only been available to a tiny minority, and who did so because they were following Jesus. And in that love-story new knowledge emerged, not simply because of the great thinkers, though they matter as well, but because the followers of Jesus were opening up new ways to be human, were loving in order to know and then finding that deeper knowledge led to deeper love.

By Leslie Leyland Fields

I didn’t know the Sea of Galilee was polluted. I sit in the tiny skiff with Micah and his crewman, trying not to gape. It’s early morning, just sunrise. An egret lands two feet from me in the bow and stays with us. We pass a row of fancy hotels just as the smell of sewage hit my nose. I glance at Micah, a lifelong Galilee fisherman, to see if he registers the foul smell at all. He does not. But I can see its source: resort hotels line this section of the lake, just where the stench begins. It appears they are dumping their raw waste into the waters. Later, I would confirm this. To my surprise, Micah chooses this very area to set his net this morning. Later that day, I watch him drink a plastic cup of water, then throw it overboard along with the cellophane wrapper from the box of cookies they ate for lunch. I saw the garbage that came in with each pull of the net.

I live on a huge sea in Alaska. I understand why people mistake the ocean as a limitless resource that can absorb every offense in its incalculable vastness. But this lake, this “sea” I can encompass in a single glance? Who could miss its fragility, its limits? And this body of water is considered sacred, holy to many around the world. Nearly three million people will visit its shores each year, venerating the waters Jesus lived beside, that he walked upon, that he calmed with a command, “Peace! Be still!” These holy waters also collect the agricultural runoff from the hillsides around its shores, runoff that has turned the Jordan River into a thickened greenish soup, barely moving.

Micah didn’t catch much that day. In fact, fisherman rarely catch many fish anymore. Before 2005, 295 tons of St Peter’s Fish were caught annually. In 2009, the total was only eight tons. In 2010, stocks had fallen so low fishing was banned entirely for two years.

It is hard for me to make sense of this blindness and abuse here on the very lake Jesus chose to live and to heal and spread the good news of the coming of the Lord, where fish were multiplied and miraculous catches broke fishing nets. Abundance has been the rule of the day for centuries in this lake. The 19th century English clergyman, Henry Baker Tristram, recorded that “the density of the shoals of fish in the Sea of Galilee can scarcely be conceived by those who have not witnessed them”. And now—-the fish are few. Holy waters will not absorb and absolve our sin and our guilt. The plastic will not degrade. The fish will not multiply. The water will only dirty us, it will not cleanse. Why do we close our eyes and kill what we need, what we love?

This happens so often. When anything we love and need is plentiful, when the fish are thick, something dies. It’s happened to us in our good years, when the salmon throng our nets. We forget to look. We do not see their beauty, their scales like armor, fit each to each, their silver-stippled sides, their shimmering backs, their blue eyes, their rainbow tails. Even as we hold them in our cramping hands, then toss them into totes of ice, they are lost to us. We waste them.

We cannot see beyond the moment, and imagine they are inexhaustible, these fish. These waters. We believe they are all here for us. We cannot imagine a river drying up, a drought of salmon, an emptied lake. We do not know we are that powerful, that wrong. We don’t know it starts with closing our eyes.

Isn’t this our human history? We are inclined to waste, all of us.

We cannot not create waste. Even the purest water will turn to waste in our bodies. There is always something left over. Only the dead produce nothing. But we’re wasteful in our waste. In America, we generate 250 million tons of waste annually. We bury more than 30 million tons of food in landfills every year. We throw too much away because we buy too much. And we buy too much because, in the land of plenty, we don’t know the difference between need and want. It is clear: in our all-too-human economy, the more we have, the more we squander.

While pulling those empty nets on the lake in Galilee, I knew I was just a few miles from the hillside where another economy was displayed. More than five thousand were there that day, gathered to hear the words of this strange rabbi. When he stopped teaching, when it was time to eat, there was no food but one boy’s sack lunch of five barley loaves and two small fish. How can so little feed this massive hungry throng? It was enough. Jesus broke the bread and the fish, thanked God, and passed them from hand to hand, somehow the fish and bread splitting, multiplying in their very hands to fill every mouth, every appetite. When all had eaten, astonished at the bounty, He was not done. Jesus rounded his disciples and instructed them, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be lost. “

They must have protested. What was the sense of this? When food is sparse, when resources are thin, when a god is limited and his miracles cautious and rare, we expect frugality. Yes, save every crust! Who knows when more is coming! But when the God of all plenitude has just filled every appetite and need—and can do it again and again? Even then, Let nothing be lost? Yes, even then. Especially then. In times of bounty as well as in times of want, God’s resources never lose their value.

It has always been so, since the very beginning, since the first “Let there be” was spoken out of the mouth of the Creator God. Can we envision the flocks of birds, the hordes of animals, the masses of fish sent spinning and swimming in those new fresh seas? And then, into all this thriving busy world, came Adam, Adam, formed from the dirt, the Hebrew word Adamah, which tells us something crucial about man and his place in creation. Adamah is not simply ground or dirt, but specifically arable soil. The soil-man, who bears as well “the image of God,” is placed in a place that further locates and identifies him: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and watch it.” To cultivate and watch it, guard it. Man and woman, then, are given a specific task and position: to act as God’s representatives over all that was made, to bring it under God’s authority that it might multiply and flourish. Multiply and flourish.

It’s still not this simple. In the creation account, there’s a tension between the essential humility of humans, made from “humus,” the earth, but who are then given the authority to “rule and subdue” all the other creatures, also made of humus. When we focus more on our authority rather than our responsibilities in creation, nature may be seen as existing solely for our own purposes and pleasures, setting the stage for environmental exploitation. Lynn White made just such a charge in his watershed essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” that appeared in Science magazine, in 1967. White attacked Christianity as “the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” He characterized the Christian perspective as the belief that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve [humans]” Thus, for White, Christian arrogance towards nature “bears a huge burden of guilt” for the contemporary environmental crisis.

I can’t deny some truth in these charges. But a growing number of eco-theologians, including Norman Wirzba, Wendell Berry and Ellen C. Davis, are righting the balance, offering biblical support for a humbler view of humankind as a member in a “community of creation” rather than a lord over it. Adam and Eve are set in a world already buzzing and humming and teeming with creatures who are blessed before we even show up. Yes, man and woman are uniquely made in the image of God, the Imago Dei, and are given rule over creation, but they are to use and cultivate the earth in such a way that the birds of the air, the fish and all creeping things, whom God delights in and pronounces “very good”—the same words used for humans—can likewise feed, multiply and flourish. That all creatures may feed, multiply and flourish. This is how our own presence blesses all of creation. We are here for this: to bless. How do I say this any of this to Micah? I did not.

On the shores of the island I live and fish on in Alaska, the charge over our waters and land feels personal and intimate. How shall we respond? We’ll guard the purity of our waters. We’ll pull plastic from the waters and tidelines. When I go out to the nets to pull salmon from the ocean, I’ll try to remember to see them again. I’ll hold a red salmon in my hands and feel its weight, admire its fit of scale on scale. I’ll place my hand on the rainbow fan of a king salmon tail, marveling. When I walk a salmon in each hand up to my house, to the kitchen, I will carve every bit of flesh from its bones. From our salmon dinners, I will toss what’s left into chowder. I will fillet the silvers carefully, packing them neatly into the freezer for the winter ahead. Every bite will taste of ocean and care. Every bite will feed and nourish my family and friends and all who gather for potlucks at our church and our house. Let nothing be wasted. Not this ocean, not any lake or sea, not a single fish. Let the hungry gather. Let us offer what we have—-two small fish that we raise our heads and thank God for, then break and pass from hand to hand to hungry mouth until all are filled, and still we pass the basket, collecting now what’s left for any more who hunger and need.

Let nothing be lost. Like this, Let nothing be lost.

By John Frye

Son of God and Son of Man

J. R. Daniel Kirk (A Man Attested by God) dives into the Synoptic Gospels to support his view that Jesus is not presented as one who is ontologically God, but is, instead, an idealized human figure. Kirk is methodical and draws upon many texts (both biblical and non-canonical) to support his hypothesis. Chapter 2 considers the title “son of God.” Kirk concludes that “son of God” applied to Jesus simply means that Jesus is the chosen human agent of God, empowered by the Spirit to reign as the messianic Davidic King becoming God’s ideal human representative to rule the earth. Son of God does not (need to) suggest preexistence or divinity. Chapter 3 considers the title “son of man”which Kirk concludes simply means “a human one” or a “human being.” Again, the supporting dataset is massive. Contrary to many New Testament scholars, Kirk argues that there is no necessary ontological divinity associated with “son of God” and “son of man.” Jesus in the Synoptics fits the idealized human figure template.

When one embraces that “idealized human figures” as an established human category (in Judaism), then anyone who fits the characteristics of that category, i.e., Jesus in the Synoptics, is going to confirm Kirk’s hypothesis. Those scholars who see anything beyond an idealized human figure are making an exegetical and theological leap that is unwarranted. Kirk acknowledges that John’s Gospel and other New Testament letters point to and support a high divine Christology. That is why Kirk insists that his focus is only the Synoptic Gospels. To ascribe real deity to the human person of Jesus of Nazareth in any Synoptic text is a form of eisegesis. A real paradigm shift is needed to appreciate what the Synoptics offer about the human person Jesus and to provoke a clearer, very high human Christology.

I am familiar with the exegetical work of scholars who argue for a high divine Christology in the Synoptic Gospels. Kirk disagrees with their exegetical work because they cannot thoroughly divine, as he has, the overwhelming pattern of idealized human figures in the Synoptics. There is no need to see Jesus on the creator side of the creature/creator divide. I cannot ascertain if Kirk firmly concludes that the non-preexistent Christ Jesus “becomes” a divinized person in his exaltation and glorious enthronement. I don’t think he holds to an ontological change in the person of Christ Jesus.

Here are a few of my concerns. When one has several interpretive options in key Synoptic texts based on the available evidence, to select the idealized human figure option does not mean that the other options are invalid. For example, I am not convinced that the veneration and profound awe in Judaism for idealized human figures is equal to and the same as the worship of YHWH. This aspect of idealized human figures—receiving worship reserved for God alone—is critical to Kirk’s hypothesis. When the disciples worshiped the resurrected Jesus (Matthew 28:9), they were offering “acceptable homage” paid to the messianic king (375) and, therefore, did not infringe on their Jewish monotheism (376). Another example, the startling birth narratives in Luke’s Gospel seem to be deflated as Kirk writes, “Jesus’s conception as ‘son of God’ indicates an act of divine creation rather than incarnation” (392). Is Luke’s Jesus merely “the human Lord through whom the divine Lord rules and saves” (411)? How did the early church communities who read these Gospels accept the idealized human Jesus while the Apostles Paul and John were advancing a reconfiguration of Jewish monotheism pointing to a high divine Christology? Kirk’s answer is, “That is to say, the mere fact that one strand of early Christianity evinces a preexistence Christology does not immediately demand that all subsequent instantiations must similarly reflect the notion that Jesus is divine” (572). I would say that just because Kirk sees Jesus as an idealized human figure does not immediately demand that all other scholars use that category to interpret Jesus.

Behind Kirk’s thinking is the conceptual model of Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kirk endeavors to create a paradigm shift in Jesus studies that promotes human Christologies. Using Kirk’s characteristics of Jewish idealized human figures, one finds it difficult, if not impossible to ascertain that Jesus in the Synoptics was God in the flesh. Kirk hopes his hypothesis of idealized human figures “will to some extent stem the rushing tide of conversation about divine Christology and reclaim…the most important thing the Synoptic Gospels tell us about Jesus: he is some kind of human Christ” (581).

Since the Synoptic Gospels were written within a growing dataset of New Testament divine Christology (as attested in many of Paul’s letters), why do we need to believe that the traditions behind Matthew, Mark, and Luke fall in line with Kirk’s Jewish idealized human figures hypothesis? Within the emerging theology of the early church, why not see the Synoptics falling in line with the dawning awareness that Jesus is, indeed, the Second Adam, the ideal human being, and, yes, God incarnate? I find Kirk’s work to be a powerful verification of the true humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, which I applaud, without giving me any reason to doubt the indicators of revealed deity in the Synoptics.

I enjoy the creative unfolding of theology as a human endeavor that is reformed and always reforming. I’m not afraid of Kirk’s hypothesis. Yet, I don’t sense a thrilled advancement in Christology, but a disappointing step backward. No scholar who sees a high divine Christology in the Synoptics would disagree with Kirk’s strong affirmation of Jesus’ real, thorough-going humanity. I don’t see Kirk convincing many of those scholars to his view. I don’t see a tossing aside of centuries of traditional high divine Christologies. James D. G. Dunn’s foray into John’s Gospel brought about a dramatic change in his Christology that is advanced in his Christology in the Making (second edition). About the one most significant human being ever to be born, live, die and rise again, why do we need three of the four New Testament Gospels to simply reiterate common 1st century Jewish thinking?

Out of pastoral curiosity I ask J. R. Daniel Kirk: Do you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was ontologically God in the flesh even in light of your “idealized human figures” view of Jesus in the Synoptics? Do you believe the theology of John’s Gospel and, among other (assumed) Pauline texts, affirm Paul’s acceptance and repetition of the early Christian hymn of Philippians 2:5-11 that celebrates Jesus’ preexistence and incarnation as man?

Trust is a powerful word. From the Merriam Webster dictionary definition:

belief that someone or something is reliable, good, honest, effective, etc.

a) assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something

b) one in which confidence is placed

Webster’s Unabridged 1983 to the right, (click for a larger image) uses biblical references as illustrations of the word in context: Whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe (Prov. 29:25) and For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth (Ps. 71:5).

As Christians we tend to emphasize head knowledge – belief in the correct doctrines and dogmas. But the most important Christian attitude is one of trust. We trust in the Lord because he is trustworthy.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
(Prov. 3:5-6)

In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah:
…
Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. (Is 26:4)

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.
He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream,
and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green,
and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.”
(Jer. 17:7-8)

Pete Enns is featured in an excellent video from Eastern University.

I’ve found that trusting God is so central and important to the way we live the life of faith. … See, when we use the word believe we use words like what do you believe in or I believe that. Trust is different. Trust is a who word.

Watch the whole video – four minutes well spent.

What does it mean to trust in the Lord?

In what ways do we try to put our trust in something other than the Lord?

What is the result?

We can put our trust in a political system. (Hard to do this year.)

We can put our trust in a theory of the inspiration of Scripture.

We can put our trust in pastors and Christian leaders.

But none of these equate to trust in the Lord.

We can believe a set of propositions.

I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

But this also, doesn’t equate to trust unless we think long and hard about what “believe” means.

In Simply Christian NT Wright writes:

The gospel—the “good news” of what the creator God has done in Jesus—is first and foremost news about something that has happened. And the first and most appropriate response to that news is to believe it. God has raised Jesus from the dead, and has thereby declared in a single powerful action that Jesus has launched the long-awaited kingdom of God, and that (by means of Jesus’s death) the evil of all the world has been defeated at last. When the alarm clock goes off, this is what it says: “Here’s the good news. Wake up and believe it!”

This message, though, is so utterly unlikely and extraordinary that you can’t expect people simply to believe it in the same way they might believe you if you said it was raining outside. And yet, as people hear the message, at least some find that they do believe it. It makes sense to them. … Ultimately, believing that God raised Jesus from the dead is a matter of believing and trusting in the God who would, and did, do such a thing.

This is where our word “belief” can be inadequate or even misleading.What the early Christians meant by “belief” included both believing that God had done certain things and believing in the God who had done them. This is not belief that God exists, though clearly that is involved, too, but loving, grateful trust. (pp. 206-207)

The Lord we trust is the Lord we believe in.

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

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(Image from Wikipedia: credit)

The story told by the fossils is one of great age, with a succession of flora and fauna in the distinct layers of sedimentary rock.  Part three of the new book The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth: Can Noah’s Flood Explain the Grand Canyon? describes the fossils found in the Grand Canyon layers, and in the Grand Staircase layers above the current canyon plateau. This is a massive stretch of sedimentary rocks, according to modern geology spanning about 500 million years, from the Cambrian through the Mesozoic eras and up to the modern day.  Flood geology as proposed by at least some Young Earth Creationists places all this deposition and most of the subsequent erosion within a very short time – as little as one year for the deposition and certainly no more than 2000 years for all deposition and erosion, from the tilted Precambrian “Supergroup” layers below the canyon to the current top of the staircase. In fact, many place all of the layers below the great unconformity as pre-flood, the tilting of these layers as early flood and the deposition up to Bryce Canyon as late flood, the major erosion is early post flood as waters drain (i.e. most of this shaping of the land occurred within one to two years), with modest erosion continuing through to the present.  An image by the National Park Service (source), available at Wikipedia (source) illustrates these layers.  The Precambrian Grand Canyon Supergroup is represented by the tilted layers near the canyon in the yellow Precambrian rock. More than two miles of sedimentary rock was deposited and hardened above the Precambrian layer.

The fossils contained in the multiple layers of sedimentary rock tell a story – not a story consistent with a massive catastrophic flood. A summary of Grand Canyon Fossils is found on the park website here. It is common to point to the faunal succession, that is the layering of animal fossils as evidence for many layers over along period of time. Ralphy Stearly, a paleontologist by training and Professor of  Geology at Calvin College, has written a nice description of the faunal succession in chapter 13. These range from trilobites and other “simpler” creatures in the lowest layers to dinosaur bones near Bryce Canyon at the top of the formation. (The image of trilobites to the right is one I took – and is not specifically from the Grand Canyon.) Although the layers provide witness to a succession of increasing complexity, it is important to remember that so-called “simple” creatures are found in many layers. Sponges are found in Cambrian layers, and  in subsequent layers characteristic of marine environments. And, of course, sponges are found in the oceans today. But rabbits and dinosaurs, for example, are not found in the Cambrian layers.  The fossils are found in communities representing different environments – fresh water, marine, swamp, sandy desert. Hydrodynamic sorting is often invoked to explain the layering observed, with earthquake sorting as another mechanism. These explanations are not convincing, except to the one who is already convinced that the global flood must explain the layers.

But the layered remains of animals, while the most evident in the popular literature, are not the most convincing fossil evidence for an ancient earth with the Grand Staircase layers testifying to a succession of life forms and environments.  Even more convincing is the floral succession and the trace fossils left behind by various animals.  Joel Duff (Professor of Biology at the University of Akron) provides a chapter on the floral fossils while David Elliot (Professor of Geology Northern Arizona University) outlines the evidence provided by trace fossils in chapter 15.

Floral Succession. The Grand Staircase environment was marine in the Cambrian and Devonian eras, thus no terrestrial plants are found. In the Cambrian layers world wide only algae and fungi (lichen) are found on land. Mosses, horsetails and some other simple land plants are found in Devonian layers. The Mississippian and Pennsylvanian periods (359-259 mya according to modern geology) are characterized by the presence of ferns and horsetails and other nonflowering, nonconifers vascular plants. Some are found in the canyon layers, providing evidence for transition from a marine environment to a land environment. The current upper layers of the Grand Canyon correspond to these periods.  Above the Grand Canyon conifers (cone producing plants) appear in the Permian (259 to 252 mya according to modern geology).  Flowering plants don’t appear until the Jurassic period and don’t become common until the Cretaceous.  Remains of flowering plants are not found in the Grand Canyon layers. (image source)

But the most persuasive evidence is not from the macroscopic remains of plants, but from the fossilized pollen and spores found in the sedimentary rock.

Pollen and spores are microscopic reproductive products of plants that, due to their environmentally resistant outer walls, are among the most easily fossilized living structures. Spores are typically, but not always, larger than pollen grains and can be thought of as the “seeds” of ferns, lycopods, and mosses. Pollen is the male sex cell of flowering plants and gymnosperms (cone-bearing plants such as pine and spruce trees). (p. 149)

Pollen and spores demonstrate the same principle of floral succession in the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase that the macrofossils do. Cambrian and Devonian rocks, represented by strata from the Tapeats Sandstone up to the Temple Butte Formation, contain only simple trilete (three-lobed) spores, which were generated from now-extinct simple spore-bearing plants and algae. Unmistakable spores from lycopods and ferns are plentiful in rocks above the Temple Butte Formation.  … These spores are associated with the plant remains of ferns and horsetails (Calamites) and giant lycophyte trees (Lepidodendron).

Fossil pollen from conifer-like (non-flowering) trees (Cordaites) is first encountered in the upper rock formations of the canyon. … Conifers are the dominant plants in the Grand Staircase, and their pollen is readily distinguishable from flowering-plant pollen.

Significantly, the absence of any macroscopic fossils of flowering plants in Grand Canyon rock layers in matched by a complete absence of fossil flowering-plant pollen. (p. 150)

Both macroscopic and microscopic (pollen) fossils of flowering-plants are found in the upper layers of the Grand Staircase dating to the Cretaceous period.  This sequence of floral succession in the rocks of the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase is not consistent with a massive flood over the region. Any kind of sorting based on size would not segregate fossilized pollen, spores, and plants in this well attested pattern. In addition, Genesis attests to seed bearing plants before the flood. Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. (1:11), Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. (1:29)  That fossil remnants of seed-bearing plants are only found in the uppermost layers of the Grand Staircase should be a cause for rethinking the flood scenario.  It simply does not work.  Pollen and spores should certainly be mixed among the layers with the pollen of flowering plants present in all layers.

Trace Fossils.  The final fossil form found in the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase is the trace fossil. Rather than fossilized structures of plants and animals, these are tracks or traces that remain, demonstrating that an animal or plant of some short lived in the past (image source). The image of a fern above is also a trace fossil – an imprint of a fern.  Many kinds of trace fossils are found, with those in the Coconino Sandstone a good illustration. The tracks in the image are from this sandstone deposit.

Although no actual remains of organisms have been found in the Coconino Sandstone, the traces of animals and their behavior have been preserved as footprints and burrows in the sand. These traces range from large to small vertebrate tracks and also include tracks and burrows very similar to those left by spiders, scorpions, millipedes, and other arthropods in modern desert environments. The Coconino Sandstone contains no evidence of aquatic organisms of any kind that might support an argument for deposition in a deepwater, flood environment, such as has been proposed by flood geologists. (p. 154)

The sand at the back of each step in the image above indicates that the animal was moving up the sloping face of a sand dune. The fine claw marks, and many even more detailed features of other track of other animals demonstrate that these were produced and hardened in a dry environment with only a little moisture in the sand to hold the track.  These are inconsistent with any flood scenario. They are consistent with traces left in sand today (albeit not (yet) hardened into rock).

Elliot concludes:

Taken as a whole, the sedimentary and trace fossil evidence clearly and unambiguously points toward a desert environment for the Coconino Sandstone. Although flood geologists claim that this sandstone was deposited in rapidly flowing water that was hundreds of feet deep, the presence of raindrop impressions, desiccation cracks, … and the preservation of footprints, are all clear indicators of a sand desert. Asserting an aquatic environment for the Coconino Sandstone requires ignoring nearly all of the geological and paleontological  evidence. Truly, as one flood geologist has said, “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” (p. 154)

More could be said about the story these fossils tell. The three chapters in part three of The Grand Canyon, Monument to an Ancient Earth only provide an introduction, and I have provided only a brief sketch of the chapters. But this should be enough to introduce the interested layperson to the reasons why the vast majority of Christians with training in geology and paleontology find the evidence for an old earth convincing. If you are interested, pick up a copy of the book and read the chapters complete with a multitude of illustrations. This isn’t direct evidence for evolution (although it is consistent with evolution). The point is that many plants and animals left readily observed traces in a clear faunal and floral succession, in multiple communities occupying very different environments. These fossils are found in distinct successive layers in the Grand Canyon and Grand Staircase. This is not consistent with a young earth or with flood geology.

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.