The Hump of the Camel

In my recent long essay, I contrasted the commonest modern manifestions of theistic evolution with the approach of TE’s first representatives in Darwin’s time. I showed that the latters’ central distinctive was divine teleology. This contrasts directly with the cautiously expressed undirectedness of evolution in the Origin of Species, due to Darwin’s near-atheist agnosticism, and even more with the insistent secularism of Huxley and his successors, which has become the default position in biological science.

I also demonstrated that modern TE, formulated academically by the science and faith scholars (mainly liberal Protestant and Catholic) and popularised by authors often from within the biological professions (also multi-confessional but with a higher proportion of avowed evangelicals), has tended to make a virtue of ateleology by developing a “hands-off” theology of nature’s freedom. This is heavily dependent on the personalist view of God that began to diverge from historic theology in the nineteenth century. Read the rest of this entry »

A number of posts on this blog revolve around the ideas that much that is wrong with the theological origins debate is also what is wrong with contemporary Christianity, and that much of that has to do with the emphasis on personal freedom and autonomy in our culture. A related concept, in my view, is the prominence of theistic personalism, whose source is the belief, originally from the scholastic Duns Scotus, that God can only relate to us genuinely if his mode of being is the same as ours. Prior to that, the classical view of Thomas Aquinas and his theological predecessors was that God is essentially different from us, and relates to us through analogies of our mental processes (though strictly, it is our mental processes that are shadowy analogies of his real ones). Read the rest of this entry »

I have to sympathise with new BioLogos poster hanan-d, who is trying to discover whether theistic evolution implies or allows for God’s directive will or not. He’s mentioned on several occasions that his enquiry arises from a crisis of personal faith, not simply intellectual curiosity, and yet he continues to be met with dismissive one-liners from beaglelady, and accusations of ignorance, cowardice and bad faith by melanogaster. Admittedly those responses are what everybody gets from that particular double-act, but one might have wished for a more straightforward set of explanations, and perhaps more empathy.

After all, as the survey currently headlining the forum shows, theistic evolution is the firm option on origins of only 3% of US Protestant pastors, so if only out of self interest a more user-friendly apologetic would be helpful. By the way, hanan-d’s e-mails to the original poster and other BioLogos leaders have, he says, elicited no response at all. I admire his stickability in persisting, which seems greater than my own. Read the rest of this entry »

PNGarrison makes some nice comments on theodicy in response to the final part of my essay on theistic evolution and design. He is, of course, absolutely right to suggest that the interest in some kind of theodicy is normal to humanity: “Why does God…?” comes even from the lips of babes and sucklings. So my main aim in devoting a section to it in the essay was to object to its becoming a controlling factor in theology. There are good reasons for the predominant attitude in Scripture, which is in essence, “Who are you to talk back to God?”. Amongst them maybe the most important is to guide us to a classical kind of theism in which God is not “just like us, only more so,” but the One who dwells in inaccessible light.

Still, theodicy must exist if only because anti-theodicy exists, and since the latter has become one of the “undeniables” in the origins debate, it’s worth at least showing that it can be denied, at least in part. Read the rest of this entry »

Theodicy

A third major plank of modern theistic evolution is theodicy. We saw above how Charles Kingsley rejected the prevalent theology of a fallen creation, and saw both the goodness and the harshness of nature as commensurate with the revealed character of God. I would assert that even so he, and more so Darwin, retained a view of nature that was skewed by three centuries of pessimism. Kingsley’s gloomy co-religionists got their “red in tooth and claw” view ultimately from pagan culture, via the Renaissance humanist project. Before that, Christianity had virtually no concept of “natural evil”, but only of God’s wise, if often mysterious, governance. Our own pessimism about nature, like our unchristian glorification of autonomous free will, comes from the same stable. Read the rest of this entry »

Kenoticism

Closely associated with “nature’s freedom” – whether causally or consequently is hard to say – is another commonplace of theistic evolution, divine kenosis. To Gray, Kingsley or Warfield, evolution showed the power and sovereignty of God in a new, more glorious, light. Today’s TEs are more concerned to argue for the absence of God’s power and sovereignty. Building on late 20th century theologies of suffering of those like Jurgen Moltmann, very many science and faith writers have taken the idea of kenosis and applied it to the whole creation.

The theological construction project goes like this this. Philippians 2.7 (frequently specifically quoted because it is the sole biblical reference) teaches that Christ emptied himself (Greek kenosis). This means he emptied himself of divinity and became a man. Therefore self-emptying is the very nature of Christ. We see God in Christ. Therefore self-emptying is the very nature of God. Therefore Creation was performed by self-emptying, which must mean God’s limiting his divine attributes by allowing autonomy to his creation. QED.

By a small further building extension, kenosis in relation to man means God’s allowing him complete autonomy of will, which requires God’s voluntarily (or in some versions ontologically) giving up his omniscience so as to leave the universe open to human choice: this is the substance of Open Theism, a fringe position in Evangelical Christianity, but a major one in theistic evolution. You’ll maybe notice that the nature of God in all this is mainly, it seems, not to act according to his own nature – a unique phenomenon! It may also be doubted if it is a possible, still less a desirable, phenomenon. In classical theology, God doesn’t know – he is knowledge, just as he is love, wisdom, power and so on. For him to “choose not to know” is for him to choose not to be what he is. More incoherence.

To build an entire theology of God, creation, and salvation on one verse is, perhaps, a little foolhardy. The danger is realised (though I hesitate to speak it aloud, given the reverence with which kenoticism is held) because it relies on a complete misinterpretation of the key text. I’ve written in some depth on that[xvii] , and could have added three or four further lines of argument. The central point, though is that Philippians refers not to the Son of God giving up his divine attributes and becoming an error-prone man at all, but to the man Jesus Christ, fully aware of his true divinity, choosing not to vaunt it but to “make himself nothing” (the usual meaning of kenosis in Paul) and submit to servanthood and death… as a result of which he immediately becomes exalted by God above all other names and every knee bows before him as Lord, to the glory of the Father. That half of the story is always omitted.

In truth, a case need not be made from Philippians for God’s ongoing exercise of sovereignty, which is actually essential to, and coterminous with, his love. It is the warp and woof of the whole Bible, as is his sole role in the act of creation, secondary causes notwithstanding. As a token example to check out, there are few titles amongst the many used for the Father or Jesus that do not carry connotations of sovereignty. Even “Christ” is a term of kingship.

Yet TEs, like other modern Evangelicals, have a rather ambiguous respect for Scripture. In part this may be because kenosis has now been used to undermine the trustworthiness of the Bible, and even the teaching of Christ: both, having emptied themselves of divinity, are to be seen as human and fallible. This conceit is not new – it’s just new to Evangelicalism. As old-fashioned liberal teaching it was bog standard. As Warfield said 120 years ago:

We are told that authority is limited by knowledge, and that Christ’s knowledge was limited to pure religion. We are told that even in matters of religion he accommodated Himself, in the form at least of His teachings, to the times in which he lived. Thus all “external authority” is gradually evaporated, and men are left to the sole authority each of his own spirit, whether under the name of reason or under the name of the Holy Spirit in the heart.

Does that not have a familiar ring?

[xvii]http://potiphar.jongarvey.co.uk/2012/10/25/and-kenotic-model-of-creation/

Benjamin Warfield

B B Warfield was not just a Princeton Presbyterian theologian, but one of the leading theological scholars of his age. A sign of how superficially we consider matters now is that he was the person most responsible for the modern Evangelical doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy, and yet considered that Charles Darwin took too literal a view of the Bible. Go figure, as they say! Read the rest of this entry »