Below is a half-hour video passed on to me a while back by an archaeologist friend of mine. It is of a lecture given by Israeli archaeologist Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan University. The lecture is entitled, “Can Archaeological Correlates for the Mnemo-Narrative of Exodus be Found?” I think I embed the video properly, but if not, you can click the link above. I find this sort of thing fascinating. Maeir’s main point is that the exodus story in the Bible is... Read more
Someone recently passed on to me the an essay from the Huffington Post entitled “Christian Faith Requires Accepting Evolution.” It’s 2 years old, and some of you may recall it, but I missed it when it came out. The author, Jonathan Dudley, is the author of Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics, a graduate of Yale Divinity School and, at least at the time when the essay was written, was M.D. student at The Johns Hopkins School... Read more
When Christians run up against interpretive challenges in the Old Testament–like killing Canaanites to take their land or the meaning of the Adam story vis-a-vis science–a common way of handling these challenges is to make an appeal like: “Yes, but we can’t just look at these passages on their own terms. We have to keep the whole Christian canon in mind and see how the Gospel affects our understanding of this Old Testament passage.” I agree, pretty strongly in fact,... Read more
I had lunch a while back with two friends visiting the area, home for a few weeks from their normal lives in Kenya. In the course of conversation, one of them asked me, “Where do you experience God?” My inner recovering Calvinist quickly surfaces and I think to myself, “Mind your own business. And another thing, we don’t ‘experience’ God. We read about him and formulate thoughts about him. When we do experience God, it may be in a harshly... Read more
Christians have been butting heads with evolution since the 19th century. A lot is at stake. If evolution is right about how humans came to be, then the biblical story of Adam and Eve–which has been answered the question of human origins for almost 2000 years–isn’t. Those who believe that God himself is in some meaningful sense responsible for what’s in the Bible have a problem to address. Once you open the door to the possibility that God’s version of... Read more
In my last post, we looked at what the main point of the Old Testament is. A good time was had by all and lives were changed, I’m sure. Remember, I am not saying that land is “the center” of the Old Testament, but, boy oh boy, it is important. Think about it: where in the Old Testament is Israel not, anticipating receiving their own land, fighting to get it, fighting to keep it, fretting about losing it, or fretting... Read more
I was taught in seminary and graduate school, as were many others of my generation and several before that, that the OT doesn’t have “a” central point–there’s no central concept around which you can organize the OT. The OT is too diverse for that sort of thing. As soon as you find a theme that seems to work, it either doesn’t (e.g., covenant) or it’s too broad to be of much use (e.g., God). I agree, but some themes are... Read more
Denis Lamoureux, author of Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution and I Love Jesus & I Accept Evolution–and who also recently completed a series of posts here on the latter (the final post is here)–teaches an online course at St. Joseph’s College, University of Alberta, “Science and Religion: An Introduction.” A 20+ minute overview of the course (slides and audio overlay) can be found here. The course homepage is here. The course consists of 23 hours of slides with audio... Read more
A friend of mine–currently writing his PhD dissertation while in a witness protection program for knowing me–recently passed on the following quotes from James Barr. Barr, who died in 2006, was a world-renown Old Testament scholar, known for such linguistic classics as The Semantics of Biblical Language and Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament as well as theological and exegetical works (The Concept of Biblical Theology: An Old Testament Perspective, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of... Read more
I’ve been reading some books (like this one) and online essays lately on evangelicalism and evolution, and I have to stop and ask myself: Can evangelicalism really incorporate evolution into its theology system, or do these very attempts expose the problems of evangelical theology that need to be addressed? I’m not sure evolution and evangelicalism in its current form can ever truly coexist. For mainstream evangelicalism, Adam must be in some sense a historical individual. Why? Adam as myth, metaphor, symbol, etc. is, we are... Read more
Peter Enns
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