Sermon Starters: Know Thy Frog DNA

Houghton College Chapel: 10/25/19

Text: Genesis 1:1-5

Introduction

• I used to have the role Dr. Sarah Derck has here. Every once and a while I would get a question from the parent of a prospective student. "What do you believe about evolution? What is your interpretation of Genesis 1?
• I would usually answer two things: 1) God did it and 2) the Bible is true.

I. "All truth is God's truth."

• When it comes to these sorts of issues, I strongly believe in an old saying: "All truth is God's truth." If you find something that is really true in one area (e.g., business), then it's going to fit with something that is really true in another area (e.g., music). Truth is what God thinks, and God thinks about a lot of things in every area.
• So if something is true in science, it's going to fit with the truth of Scripture.
• One big problem is that we always seem to assume that the problem is with the understanding of science and not with my understanding of Scripture.
• We are inevitably a mixture of stuff that is really there and stuff that is really tradition, or culture, or just the fact that we are weird.
• Matthew doesn't say there were just three wise men. Some people will get very upset with you if you tell them.
• Jurassic Park - they mixed frog DNA with the real dinosaur DNA. We all inevitably have some frog DNA in our faith.
• 1 Corinthians 3:11-13 - the foundation is Christ. We build stuff on him--some gold (Apostle's Creed) but also some grass (not least because you're weird).

2. Let's look at the Genesis text.

• Genesis 1:1-2
• I see three main take-aways: 1) God did it, 2) God did it alone, and 3) God brought order out of chaos.
• Debate about the rest. For example, many think this is God creating out of pre-existent chaos like in the Enuma Elish or Greek Theognis.
• I tend to read it with what I consider golden Christian glasses. Creation out of nothing (ex nihilo). Creation out of empty set! It implies that God is omnipotent and omniscient.

3. Beware of staking your faith on any one interpretation or conclusion of science.

• Beware of the "God of the gaps."
• Beware of the "evidence demands" approach of a certain apologetic. It is ultimately about faith and God is the one who gives us the power to have faith.
• Having said that, it is fun to read these verses with a view to some modern science.
• Big Bang - suggests there was a beginning. Many twentieth century scientists resisted this conclusion, including Einstein. Fred Hoyle.
• Genesis 1:3 - author of Genesis didn't have anything like what I'm about to say in mind, but perhaps God smiled at the thought of CBR 13.8 billion years ago.
• Fine tuning of universe: expansion just right not to rip or crunch. Just right for the right proportion of helium and hydrogen. Just the right asymmetry between matter and antimatter, just the right balance between the forces.
• Francis Collins suggests this really only leaves two possibilities: creation or the multiverse. Both require faith.

Conclusion

Romans 11:33-36

Adam and the Genome 8: 12 Theses about Genesis

I'm reading the book, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, by Scot McKnight and Dennis Venema.

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction
1. Evolution as a Scientific Theory
2. Genomes as Language, Genomes as Books
3. Adam's Last Stand?
4. Intelligent Design?
5. Four Principles for Bible Reading

Chapter 6
1. Chapter 6 is titled, "Adam and Eve of Genesis in Their Context: Twelve Theses." You find different angles on things out there, sometimes they come at things from different angles, but they are working toward the same destination. McKnight's angle in this chapter is:

"The Bible's opening chapter is an ancient Near Eastern form of science" (111). But his point is not thereby to dismiss it. His point is to understand it in dialog with other ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) creation stories. This approach, he argues, is most respectful of the text because this is the way of reading the Genesis text that reads it for what it actually meant in context. "These [ANE] texts express the kinds of ideas 'in the air' when Genesis 1 and 2 were drafted" (113).

McKnight has a hermeneutic that says, we read biblical texts both within and as critiques of cultural context. Or as I have put it, revelation begins with where a culture is, but it doesn't stay there. God meets us where we are, but he doesn't leave us there. So we should expect the biblical creation stories both to resemble and yet to push against the other ANE creation stories.

2. What are these ANE creation stories:

• Enuma Elish -- Marduk creates humanity so that the gods can rest and stop working
• Gilgamesh -- the Babylonian flood story
• Atrahasis -- A god creates humans from clay and his own flesh and blood, so that humanity can work for the gods
• Assur story -- Sumerian story, gods give birth from the blood of gods

McKnight discusses both similarities between these stories and Genesis but, more importantly, he notes key differences. For example, God is the unopposed creator in Genesis, while none of the gods in the other creation stories are completely in control.  It is here that we get his "twelve theses" in this chapter.

I might add that he is bracketing in this chapter concerns about whether Adam and Eve are "historical" or "fictional." He is treating them as they appear in the text of Genesis without addressing these questions now. He is exploring the "literary Adam and Eve" (118).

The Twelve Theses (in my words)
1. There is one God, the creator who is outside the cosmos.

He is not part of the universe but created it. Hear Bill Arnold of Asbury fame: "Ancient religion was polytheistic, mythological, and anthropomorphic... while Genesis 1 is monotheistic, scornful of mythology, and engages in anthropomorphism only as figures of speech" (119). Also, McKnight adds, God creates through the Son of God, who is his Wisdom.

2. Adam and Eve are not the result of cosmic battle, but of God's design.

3. God orders creation into a temple.

Jon Levenson writes, "The concern of the creation theology is not creatio ex nihilo, but the establishment of a benevolent and life-sustaining order" (124). McKnight writes, "To 'rest' in that world is to enter into a temple" (126). "The earth is not designed as a scene of conflict but a scene of worship" (127).

I'm not as clear on the temple/worship theme being present myself.

4. All humans are made in God's image.

Humans "are called by God to mediate God's power and authority in the world" (129). I'm less clear about the intention of statement: "Humans are not given the responsibility to rule other humans but to rule creation" (131).

5. Humans are distinct from the rest of creation.

6. Humans are gendered for procreation and are tasked with governing and nurturing the earth.

I wouldn't want to take this statement too far: "They image God whenever each separately or whenever both together rule, subdue, or cause any element of creation to flourish in God's design for it" (133). McKnight warns about both extreme individualism (Thomas Paine) and collectivism (Mao Tse-Tung).

7. Humans are called to work the earth.

8. Humans name creatures, showing understanding of them and how they fit and function.

"To name is to know and understand by observation, and then to assign oneself a relationship to and a responsibility for that which is named" (137). Helper is used of God in the OT, he notes, BTW.

9. God gives humans the freedom to grow as well as to disobey him.

McKnight quotes Brueggemann: "In God's garden, there is mutuality and equity. In God's garden now, permeated by distrust, there is control and distortion" (141). McKnight sees this as descriptive of the consequence of sin, not prescriptive of how it should be.

10. Humans are called to undo the curse.

"All humans, male and female, remain images of God" (142). The mission remains.

11. Adam and Eve  represent both Israel and everyone.

"This text is far more about Adam and Eve as Israel than about the historical, biological, and genetic Adam and Eve" (144). It is a foreshadowing of Israel's entrance into the land in Joshua, by many accounts.

12. Adam and Eve are presented as "genealogical" Adam and Eve.

That is to say, the Bible does present Adam and Eve as the genealogical parents of all the people in the Bible.

Preface to Friday Science: My Creation Quest

1. I have decided to blog through a recent book by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight called, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. Scot is a faith-filled New Testament scholar and Dennis Venema is a faith-filled scientist.

Perhaps I should start by giving part of my own story on these topics. Ideologically, I grew up fundamentalist. My family did not have the heart of a fundamentalist, but we had the ideas of them. Fundamentalism is a militant version of a religion whose main goal is to combat forces of change coming from the surrounding culture.

I was going through my teens in the decades when Jerry Falwell was working his magic on America. I went to some of the early evolution debates between Henry Morris and Kenneth Miller because I grew up in the shadow of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was quite convinced that evolution was intrinsically antithetical to Christianity.

I was frankly disappointed with Morris as a debater. He seemed to spend most his time quoting people and giving quasi-philosophical arguments. I wanted him to blast the evolutionist with evidence. I was more pleased later with Duane Gish but let's just say that if I hadn't already been convinced, I don't think he would have convinced me. I've more recently watched Ken Ham debate Bill Nye and, again, it seems like his arguments are far more presuppositional than evidentiary.

2. In the meantime, I received a call to ministry in college. Later I felt within that call a call to train ministers in the Bible. So I went on to get a PhD in New Testament. I went through a common process of learning that there were reasons why scholars had some of the "funny ideas" I had once made fun of.

Having started out as a chemistry major and both loving and having an aptitude for math and science, I was well wired by the time I got to seminary to follow the evidence to its most likely conclusions. What I came to conclude is that at least some of my seminary professors were playing a bit of a game. They went through the motions of gathering evidence and making arguments, but it seemed to me that other interests were really guiding their conclusions, unacknowledged preconditions.

To be honest, I have personally found this to be the case for many biblical scholars, both conservative and liberal. And of course I have been accused of "cooking the books" too. The Bible scholars I have always admired are the straight shooters, but they seem few and far between.

I have at least heard that disillusionment is a common tale for faith-filled believers who go on to do graduate degrees in science. Some of them unnecessarily lose their faith in the process because they have been told that certain conclusions are incompatible with Christian faith. Then as those conclusions seem inevitable to them, they draw the logical inference--Christian faith must be wrong.

3. I am not an expert on matters of science. I have the aptitude (or at least did when my brain was nimble) and I have the interest. But I am not qualified to say what science reasonably concludes.

What I am an expert on is the Bible, and I know enough from my field to know that the biblical reasons often given against evolution are often based on shoddy understanding. In my opinion, it would not be good exegesis to read Genesis 1 as a blueprint for scientific creationism. Genesis 1 is poetic in nature and is in dialog with Ancient Near Eastern creation stories, not nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first century science.

In my opinion, the problem for Christian understanding in relation to evolution is not Genesis 1 but Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. Evolution requires lots of death, so if physical death entered the world through Adam, then evolution presumably contradicts Christian understanding.

There has been some interesting push-back on this line of thinking. What if Paul is talking about spiritual death rather than physical death? In the Garden of Eden, do not Adam and Eve need to eat from the Tree of Life to live forever, meaning that they are not immortal by nature? And whether you understand Sin as a nature or a power, you could say it came into play with Adam and Eve.

4. So in the not too distant past, even fifteen years ago, it was easy to say, "Could not Adam and Eve have been the first humans into which God placed a soul?" This approach would allow us to retain Adam and Eve in their historical form and yet let each individual make up their own mind on whether they were the absolute beginning or the spiritual beginning.

Enter Francis Collins and The Language of God. Collins is clearly a faith-filled individual. But he has also cracked the human genome. As I understand it, the current understanding of DNA is that we cannot identity a single set of parents who converge in the past. The current understanding is apparently that "the DNA in current humans could not have come from a pool of fewer than approximately 10,000 humans" (xi).

Accordingly, we have seen a few books come out very recently trying to grapple with this new conclusion from genetics in relation to Adam and Eve:

• The book I am reading now: Venema and McKnight, Adam and the Genome
• John Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve
• Cavanaugh and Smith, Evolution and the Fall

5. I do not assume that the recent finding of genetics is correct. But nor do I assume that our traditional interpretation of Romans is correct. What I assume is that:

• "All truth is God's truth." Once we understand the Bible appropriately and science appropriately, there will be no true contradiction.
• Our understanding of the Bible is hardly infallible. Interpretations come and go. Most of us aren't particularly skilled interpreters of the original meaning.
• There's a lot of truth in science. If I don't believe this, I should probably turn in the computer I'm typing on, as well as my cell phone and car. Most of us aren't particularly skilled at science.

It seems to me that at least some of us need to participate in this discussion. In this age where the democratization of knowledge is reducing Christian expertise to the lowest common denominator, it might be time to bring more advanced discussions out into the open.

Adam Conclusion 2

Another area where modern study potentially impacts our discussions is in the area of brain research and psychology. Neuro-scientists still have a long way to go in mapping the brain, but it seems fairly clear that there is least some part of the brain that corresponds to each human experience. Whether it be thinking, memory, anger, personality, or even religious experience, we can say which parts of the brain "light up" when that happens. Change the structure of the brain--whether through Alzheimers, cancer, or physical injury--and you change the person.

These discoveries have led some Christians to explore whether the idea of the soul might itself be an instance of Christian language that points to something real but not exactly in the way we have thought. [1] Such Christians point out that the word soul in the Old Testament never refers to a detachable part of me that survives death. Rather, the Hebrew word soul refers to an entire living thing, whether it be a human or a fish. Even in the New Testament, it is only rarely that the word seems to refer to a part of my human make-up (e.g., Heb. 4:12*). Our common conceptions of the soul have as much to do with later Greek influence on Christianity than on what the Bible actually says.

The point here is not to take a position on this issue. Our point is that if scholars are debating on this level, then we can see how far afield the old arguments about whether our carnal nature can be eradicated or suppressed were. Yet no one who pays much attention to the world around us will doubt that our world is thoroughly "enslaved to sin." Ask the social worker at the local elementary school or the prosecutor who works at the courthouse or the nurse that works the emergency room or the person who helps with foreign aid. They can perhaps identify with the pessimism of Joshua 24:19 as Joshua tells the Israelites, "You cannot serve the LORD."

In other words, you guys can't hack it. Serving God is just too hard. Godliness and righteousness is a miracle in this world. This issue, perhaps more than any other, surfaces especially in Romans 6-7, the subject of our next section.

[1] cf. Joel Green, ***

Adam Conclusion 1

It is all fine and good to look behind the layers of Christian interpretation of Paul and Paul's interpretation of Genesis, but what do we take for life from all of it today. One benefit of analyzing the layers is the potential clarity it brings on what exactly we are believing. We now have some choices to make and a much more complex landscape to find ourselves in.

Contemporary culture brings other factors to consider in our picture as well. For example, it is virtually the unanimous consensus of scientists across the disciplines that the universe is very, very old and that complex life evolved over time from simpler forms of life. We know the dirty word, "evolution." Could virtually the entire scientific community be wrong? Certainly they seem to have been before--on whether the sun goes round the earth, on whether time was a fixed framework, on whether space was continuous and infinite. But still, when we realize how much more there is to Paul and Genesis than we might have thought, one has to wonder whether we have as firm a biblical basis as we might think to oppose the notion that God might have directed an evolutionary process in some way ("theistic" evolution).

If we want to be able to engage our culture, we had better think long and hard about the options before we simply close down discussion and just say, "No matter what evidence you see, you will lose your faith unless you close your mind to it." For example, I cannot think of anything that would contradict the authority or truthfulness of Genesis 1 if it were a poetic presentation of God as sole creator of an orderly world rather than a straightforward blow-by-blow documentary. [1] Indeed, those who think they take Genesis 1 literally somehow miss that God places the sun and moon on Day 4 in the expanse that has waters above it. In other words, if we had to take Genesis 1 literally, we would have to believe that we go straight up through sun and stars to primordial waters at the top of creation. [2]

If anything, Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 pose the greater challenge, as Paul seems to say that death and the decay of the world entered as a result of Adam's sin. At this point, some Christian scientists, convinced by the evidence of their field as they understand it, will strategize possible reinterpretations of Paul. Perhaps he meant spiritual death entered through Adam, not physical death. Perhaps he actually understood it as Genesis does--that everything would have died anyway and it was only the fact that Adam and Eve did not get to eat from the tree of life that resulted in death.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we as Christians regularly shift over time in what passages we emphasize and do not emphasize, usually without realizing it. For example, at one point in my life, passages in the Bible against women adorning themselves with jewelry caught my attention (e.g., 1 Pet. 3). An earring was such a big deal to me, given where I was raised, it seemed impossible that a woman could wear one without it being a big deal. I now laugh about that, knowing that most women are about as "prideful" to wear an earring as I might be when I try to match my shirt and pants.

Whether we should focus so hard on such a specific reading of this handful of 5-10 verses is a legitimate question, especially since the arguments of the Bible are always made in the categories of their original authors and audiences--otherwise God would not have got his message across. Paul's point, is it not, is that Christ has abolished death for all those who trust in him. To make this point, he draws on one contemporary understanding of Genesis. His point has to do with the Romans more than with history and certainly more than it has to do with science. Here we remember that it was atheistic evolution and its social consequences that got the dander up of fundamentalists in the early twentieth century. [3] Before then, many godly Christians had tried to strategize whether some form of theistic evolution might be compatible with the Bible and Christianity, as many godly Christian scientists do today.

So let those Christian scientists who are competent debate the evidence both for and against theistic evolution. Let us remember that science is often wrong and has been known to change its mind many times on a massive scale. But let us also remember that the biblical texts themselves are not without their own ambiguity, and that the Spirit has often "instructed," "corrected," and "trained in righteousness" through figurative interpretations. [4] What will only hinder faith in the long run is if we pretend we have it all sorted out and that everyone who disagrees with us is an infidel--especially when most of us are neither competent scientists or interpreters of the Bible!

[1] In other words, if it were more in dialog with the other creation stories of its day than with the concerns of the twentieth century.

[2] Not to mention the likelihood that Genesis 1 had a flat earth in mind.

[3] For example, it was ironically social Darwinism that fueled William Jennings Bryan's opposition to evolution. Social Darwinism was an attitude of "survival of the fittest" among the elite and rich entrepeneurs that was used to justify a complete disregard for the people they emploited, especially their helpless workers.

[4] See volume 1.

Adam cont. cont. cont.

Paul himself had expanded on the Genesis text. The Genesis text itself does not use words like condemnation or disobedience. Paul adds this larger perspective to the story. As much as anything, Genesis explains why men have to work so hard tilling the soil, why women have such pain giving birth to children, as well as why humans and snakes do not get along (Gen. 3:15 in its original meaning). [1] Since Adam and Eve would have still had to eat from the tree of life to live forever (3:22), the Genesis story sees human death as a result of their actions but not really the cause of death itself. Death in the story is apparently the default existence of creatures.

A couple other aspects of the story come from later interpretations rather than Genesis itself. So it was not until the first century before Christ that we have any evidence of anyone thinking the serpent was Satan. Indeed, Jewish understanding of the Satan does not seem to appear until well after the Jews returned from the Babylonian captivity in 538BC. [2] Further, the specific consequences to the soil and to pregnant women fall well short of Paul's more systemic subjugation of the creation to corruption. Here again, this dimension comes from Paul rather than from the Genesis text...

[1] Later Christians would hear overtones of Christ's defeat of Satan in Genesis 3:15, although certainly the original Israelite audience would not have understood the verse this way.

[2] Satan is not mentioned in any of the books from Genesis to 2 Kings, only in the very late book of 1 Chronicles and the post-exilic Zechariah. Job's subject matter may seem patriarchal, but the first two chapters likely come from well into the period after the exile.

Adam cont. cont.

Christian interpretations of Genesis 2 and 3 today are an interesting mixture of reinterpretation piled on reinterpretation, like a wall that has been painted over several times without completely removing the previous paint. For example, we do not find the idea that the "image of God" mentioned in Genesis 1:27 has been either marred or destroyed anywhere in the biblical texts. [1] Nowhere in the entire Bible do we find any idea of this sort. The story of Adam and Eve’s sin in Genesis 3 never mentions the image of God being damaged or destroyed, and Paul himself never thinks of it as damaged in any way. It is an idea that comes entirely from later Christian tradition. It may point to a truth, but it is not a truth that does not come strictly from the Bible.

Language of Adam’s sin being the “Fall” or the “original sin” also comes from Augustine rather than the Bible. The Fall is a shorthand term for the event of Adam’s sin that resulted in humanity and the creation being under the power of Sin and subject to decay. Adam’s sin is thus the first or “original” sin. But Augustine and later Christian tradition in the West meant much more by these terms than Paul himself, and we can probably call a great deal of it into question.

So for Augustine the original sin was sexual in nature, something that neither Genesis nor Paul taught. Augustine’s negative view of human sexuality cast an unhealthy shadow over Roman Catholicism for a thousand years. [2] Augustine and perhaps even the majority of later Christians in the West also believed that Christians continue to have the guilt of Adam’s sin hanging over their head, often believing that infant baptism is important to cleanse a child of Adam’s sin. While we have no problem with infant baptism, this particular view of it has nothing to do with anything the Bible teaches about Adam’s sin. [3] Romans 5:12 only says that death has passed on us because we all sin like Adam, not that we die as part of the penalty for Adam’s sin. We die because we all sin, Paul said. [4]

Similarly, the NIV and other versions introduce later interpretations into Paul when they translate Paul’s word flesh with the phrase “sinful nature” or, as some refer to it, our “carnal nature.” The skew here is to introduce the word “nature” into the discussion, which Paul never uses in this context. The “flesh” for Paul clearly related to my skin, since that is the starting point for understanding the word. But Paul could also say that, “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (8:8, NRSV). Paul could use the word flesh in a morally neutral way (e.g., of Jesus in Rom. 1:3). But he could also use it of that part of me that makes me lose in my struggle against Sin (e.g., Rom. 7:5).

In short, flesh for Paul was the material part of me, the part of me that belongs to this creation, my body. As such it is the part of me that is particularly susceptible to the power of Sin in this world. [5] But as we will see in the next section, the Spirit of God inside of a person meant for Paul that that person was no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit.

Particularly in holiness circles, language of a sinful or carnal (fleshly) nature led to all sorts of rabbit trails. What was already partially a metaphor in Paul was taken so literally as to lead to debates over the absurd. Thinking of the sinful nature as a thing inside of me, thinkers debated whether the thing might be eradicated or only suppressed. So if it could be eradicated, how might it ever come back? But if only suppressed, then what did that say about the power of God over Sin. In the end, Paul thought about it in terms of powers over my body. Either I was under the power of Sin, the default state of my flesh given the current age. Or I could become a slave to righteousness under the power of the Holy Spirit.

[1] Let alone the later Christian delineation of the image of God in us to aspects like the "natural," "moral," and "political" image

[2] Not that Augustine was solely responsible for these views, which were not uncommon in his day. No doubt such views were part of the reason celibacy became a requirement of priests around the year AD1000.

[3] Augustine wrongly translated Romans 5:12 in reference to Adam, “in whom” all sinned. Augustine believed that we were all present in Adam when he sinned and thus that we all carried the guilt of Adam’s sin. But the NIV and other translations are almost certainly correct to translate the verse to say, “in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.”

[4] Notice that Paul himself interprets Genesis differently than the impression we would get from Genesis 3 on its own. There it seems that the default for Adam and Eve was to die from the beginning and that it was only by eating from the tree of life that they might live forever.

[5] Interestingly, Paul talks in Romans 7 as if my mind (and presumably spirit) was not included in this part of me (e.g., Rom. 7:25).