The Hump of the Camel

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 glory to all the nations. 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. Continue reading →

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. 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, 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). Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →