Category Archives: Theology

It would be mean-spirited of me not to cash in on the centenary of Alfred Russell Wallace’s death, and the opportunity was given by the BioLogos token-atheist Lou Jost the other day on this thread. He was putting down Roger Sawtelle with a post of the standard “You just don’t understand the theory of evolution” genre:

Milton: Paradise Lost, ii. line 996 (though I confess I got it from Martin Magnus on Mars by William F Temple, 1956). The incoherence of the “creation free to create itself” theology of much modern theistic evolution, and especially “the angel of the church at BioLogos“, has been a major theme here on the Hump. So much so that it’s hard to think of the most informative link, but this one is relevant.

The creation accounts of Genesis are the introduction to the five foundation works which make up Israel’s covenant document, the Torah. The centrepiece of that is the covenant on Mount Sinai in Exodus, in which God gives the nation he’s called and rescued the promise of (a) a numerous people (b) a land and (c) blessings from his presence (in return for covenant obedience summarised in the Decalogue and under threat of punishment for disobedience in various places, especially Leviticus). The climax of Exodus is the descent of God to the tabernacle to dwell with his people. One key (and unique) feature is that Israel is called to demonstrate Yahweh’s … Continue reading →

The work I’ve done on the changed position of the Christian Church regarding the supposed damage inflicted by the Fall on nature was prompted by revisiting the usually cited biblical supports for a “fallen creation.” See here and the several posts following. I concluded that there is a very poor scriptural case for it. Amongst them was the passage in Romans 8.18-27.

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 … Continue reading →

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, … Continue reading →