Adam and the Genome 10: Paul and Adam

Second to last chapter review of 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
6. Twelve Theses about Genesis
7. Seven Jewish Texts on Adam

Finished the book. Chapter 8 is titled, "Adam, the Genome, and the Apostle Paul."

1. This was the chapter I have been waiting for. McKnight knows his Romans scholarship. But frankly, I was left unsatisfied. This is the chapter where I wrestle with evolution. I wrestle with evolution philosophically and theologically. This chapter is exegetical. It does not answer my big question.

My big question is this. Why are humans prone to sin? What is the cause? It would wreak havoc with my theology to think that God made us and the world this way. My sense of salvation says that Jesus came to free us from this condition. In my opinion, McKnight does not really try to answer this question. Yet this is the question.

Paul uses the figure of Adam to express the human condition. I agree with McKnight's exegesis. But I am left lacking an answer to the more significant theological and philosophical question.

I found the Afterword unhelpful. It will not help anyone struggling with this issue, in my opinion, except perhaps to know that Origen and other early Christians did not take the Genesis text completely literally.

2. McKnight lays out five theses in this chapter:

• The Adam of Paul is the literary, genealogical, image-of-God Adam found in Genesis.
• The Adam of Paul is the Adam of the Bible filtered through--both in agreement and in disagreement with--the Jewish interpretive tradition about Adam.
• The Adam of Paul is the archetypal, moral Adam who is the archetype for both Israel and all humanity.
• Adam and all his descendants are connected but original sin as original guilt and damnation for all humans by birth is not found in Paul. Paul doesn't tell us how this continuity works.
• The Adam of Paul was not the historical Adam.

What is McKnight getting at with these claims?

First, he is highlighting the fact that Paul is building a case out of the text of Genesis. This is the "literary" Adam. McKnight makes it clear, "I am not assuming this is fiction or that Paul somehow got it wrong" (176). He is simply pointing out that Paul is making an argument from Genesis as a text.

For me, there is a lot of hermeneutics hiding here. Most readers of the Bible are not equipped to distinguish the story world of the biblical text from the biblical text as an event in history. From a historical perspective, the writing of Genesis was an event in history and the stories in Genesis are story worlds in that text. From a pre-modern perspective, we are part of the continuous story world of the text, which we are unable to distinguish from history.

So I am not sure how many will like McKnight's distinction. In my words, I would say that God meets us where we are, and God met Paul within his reading of the Genesis text. If we exegete Genesis, we can see that Paul's reading of the Genesis text differed from the Genesis text itself in some regards. We believe both Paul and Genesis spoke inspired truths, but they were truths that were independent of each other. Again, the pre-modern reader has difficulty distinguishing the two and then cannot distinguish either from history itself.

3. McKnight has been trying to make a case that Paul interpreted Genesis as other Jews did--as a text with meanings that served his context, not as a text that served meanings in its original Ancient Near Eastern context (the original meaning of Genesis). He doesn't necessarily address the inspiration question, but this is the way God inspires. This is the incarnational principle--God meets us where we are so we can understand him.

McKnight has highlighted how various Jewish writers read Adam to serve their context. Paul does the same, and we believe in an inspired way. But this is not the original meaning of Genesis. This is an inspired meaning for Paul writing to the Romans in the first century AD. Many will be surprised at compelling evidence that Romans 1 draws heavily from the Book of Wisdom 13.

McKnight goes further, echoing evangelical scholars like Doug Moo, in noting that the absence of Eve from Paul's discussion in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 is a hint that he is thinking of Adam more in typological than historical terms. Adam is an antitype of Christ. He serves as a foil to highlight what Christ has done. The point is not Adam. The point is Christ. Otherwise, he would pay attention to Eve in this context.

4. Of course I completely agree--and the vast majority of experts on Romans do--that Paul has no theology of inherited guilt. We should only speak of original sin in terms of Adam's sin. Paul does not teach that we genetically inherit sin from Adam or that we are guilty before God because of Adam.

The key passage here is Romans 5:12 and the prepositional phrase eph ho. Augustine could not do Greek and so misinterpreted this expression to mean that we all sinned in Adam and thus are guilty of Adam's sin. But everyone agrees and McKnight gives the evidence that what Paul is saying is that death passed to all people because all sin.

There is no genetically passed on sin here. There is no sin nature here. There is only the fact that we all sin like Adam and therefore die like Adam. Let us put to rest the idea of original sin in the sense of inherited guilt. As McKnight says, "humans have been impacted by Adam's sin, but individuals are not accountable until they sin themselves" (186).

I might note McKnight's claim that the "all" in Romans 5:12 is referring to both Jew and Gentile, not to every individual. I think McKnight would say that all individuals sin too, but he may be right that Paul here is thinking "not just Gentiles have sinned and die, but Jews sin and die too because of Adam." This fits with Romans 3:23 where Paul is not thinking "all [individuals] have sinned" (although he believes that too), but all [namely both Jew and Gentile] have sinned.

5. I feel like a chapter is missing. Perhaps they needed a theologian to come in and address the big question I started out with. Even if Paul does not explain how there is a continuity of sinning from Adam to today, how would we Christians explain it in the light of evolution? Was there evil before Adam and if so, where did it come from? Surely God didn't make the world this way!

This is a question of the problem of evil. Did God create the world sinful so that Christ could eventually save us? If Adam represents a moment in the early history of humanity, what was that moment? What changed? What becomes of Christian theology if nothing ever changed at some point??? The Fall of Satan?

My understanding of Paul's theology is that Sin as a power entered the world as a result of Adam's sin. Walton and Holland understand this as a certain federalism, which makes sense to me, but McKnight seems to reject this idea at least exegetically. But the answer to our theological question--a question for our context and our situation--must surely move beyond exegesis to theology.

Adam, as the head of the human race (McKnight and Wright might rightly push us to see Adam biblically more focally as the head of Israel's race) was representative of all humanity that would come afterwards. This is good theology whether it is precisely exegetical or not. For Paul, the power of Sin over the world is surely a consequence of Adam's sin.

It is not a genetic power. The idea of a sinful nature is not Pauline. It is Augustinian. The NIV2011 has rightly expunged this anachronism and returned to the original word, flesh. My flesh is not intrinsically evil. It is just weak without the Spirit. When the power of Sin entered the world, my flesh could not withstand it. We all became destined to sin like Adam. This is my basic understanding of Paul's thinking in Romans 6-8.

I won't try to write the missing chapter. It is still a theological sticky wicket, in my opinion. Perhaps McKnight intentionally left the book open ended so that the discussion might continue.

Assuming there was a representative Adam and Eve, might we see the Fall as what was withheld from humanity rather than something added? The tree of life withheld? The Holy Spirit withheld?

The discussion continues...

Adam and the Genome 9: Seven Jewish Texts on Adam

Second to last chapter review of 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
6. Twelve Theses about Genesis

Chapter 7 is titled, "The Variety of Adam and Eves in the Ancient World. Let me dive into the seven Jewish texts on Adam that he explores.

Sirach
This book, which is in the Catholic, Orthodox, and other Bibles, dates in its Greek form to the late 100s, but much of it was probably written in Hebrew around 200BC. McKnight spends more time with Sirach than he does with any of the other texts. His conclusions seem to be:

• Sirach is processing the "literary" Adam more than the historical Adam. That is to say, Sirach is making use of Adam as a figure in the Genesis text rather than as a real person in history.
• Adam becomes archetypal of all humans and especially Israel. We are not constrained by his choices but as humans we behave like him. This is especially true when it comes to Adam as a moral agent. Adam is a "volitional" Adam--he makes choices like we make choices.
• Eve is treated harshly, which is typical of Sirach. She is considered the source of sin and death.

I've never been sad that Sirach is not in most Protestant canons.

Wisdom of Solomon
The book of Wisdom is also in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Paul may draw on it in Romans 1, and Hebrews actually alludes to it in 1:3.

• Sin entered the world through the Devil's envy, an allusion to the Genesis 2-3 story.
• Wisdom though protects Adam, delivers him from his transgressions, gives him strength to rule.
• Wisdom is interpreting the literary text of Genesis, but Adam is also assumed to have been historical.

Philo
Philo was a Greek speaking Jew from Egypt who was about 15-25 years older than Jesus and who lived to about the time Paul was beginning his missionary journeys. He was very philosophical--a mixture of Platonism and Stoicism.

• Philo "is the paradigmatic example of our thesis that each Jewish author saw in Adam what one believed and used Adam to prop up a theology or philosophy" (158).
• Philo's primary interpretation of Adam is allegorical. There is the Platonic, archetypical human being and there is the shadowy, embodied Adam.
• But Philo does seem to think of Adam as the geneological father of the human race.

Jubilees
Jubilees dates to around 150BC and was likely a proto-Essene document. It retells the Genesis story. The main function of Adam in this text is as a prototype of the Law-observant Israelite.

Josephus
Josephus was a Jewish general to quickly surrendered to the Romans in the Jewish War (AD66-72) and thereafter became a Jewish historian writing in part for the Roman world. For him Adam was indeed the first man genealogically, but even more importantly he was an example of virtue.

4 Ezra
4 Ezra is an apocalypse that dates to about AD100 and it comes closest to Paul's use of Adam. 4 Ezra especially struggles with the problem of evil--why did God allow the Romans to destroy Jerusalem and its temple? Adam is the first human, a genealogical Adam. He is responsible for bringing the power of Sin in the world. We have a choice, but there is more of a sense of a Fall here than elsewhere.

2 Baruch
Another apocalypse that probably dates from around the same time as 4 Ezra, another book struggling with the destruction of Jerusalem. Each of us faces the same choice as Adam. Adam is everyone and we are all Adam.

Conclusion
McKnight's main point in this chapter seems to be that none of these Jewish texts focus on Adam as a historical figure. Yes, there is a sense that Adam is the genealogical father of the human race, but this is hardly the focus of any of these texts. Rather, 1) each author is focused on interpreting the text of Genesis (the literary Adam) and 2) they do so in accordance with their own theological agendas and purposes.

A common theme is that Adam is archetypal in some way, a model human either for good or bad. In particular, he presents the archetypal moral choice that faces every human. "The historical Adam that Christians now believe in has yet to make his appearance on the pages of history... The construct Christians use when they speak of the historical Adam is not to be found in the Old Testament or in other Jewish sources" (169).

Paul is now queued up for next week.

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.

Adam and the Genome 7: Four Principles for Bible Reading

Chapter 5 begins the second set of chapters, by Scot McKnight in Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight's book, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science.

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?

Chapter 5
Chapter 5 is titled, "Adam, Eve, and the Genome: Four Principles for Reading the Bible after the Human Genome Project."

1. Scot begins the chapter with his own story, which is so similar to so many of us. Indeed, he mentions a student who came up to him after a lecture at North Park University and said, "Thank you. This lecture saved my faith" (104). I don't know if this claim is true, but McKnight claims that "The number one reason young Christians leave the faith is the conflict between science and faith, and that conflict can be narrowed to the conflict between evolutionary theory and human origins as traditionally read in Genesis 1-2" (104-15).

This brings me to a request for the majority of Christians who do not struggle with this issue or who have come to the conclusion that the science for creationism is clear cut. I dare say that we all have thoughts about God and the Bible that are wrong. How could we not? It is sobering to see the issues where Christians have vehemently said, "It's this way, no other," only for others to agree later that they were completely wrong.

I don't believe that our precise understandings save us. I don't believe the Bible teaches that our understanding saves us. We are saved on the basis of our faith in Jesus Christ. You will not find a verse that says we can only be saved if we have a particular understanding of the Bible or science. Rather "the one who comes to God must believe that he exists and rewards those who diligently seek him" (Heb. 11:6).

So Christians need to leave a space for other Christians who struggle on the questions of science or who have reached different conclusions on matters of science and faith. Souls are at stake. Woe to anyone who puts a stumblingblock before one of these little ones! Now that's actually something the Bible says, Jesus in fact.

2. Here are some quotes from the early part of the chapter:

• "There is a better way, one that permits each of the disciplines to speak its own language but also requires each of the voices to speak to one another" (94).
• A defining moment for Scot was asking himself the question "whether traditional interpretations of Genesis 1-2 were perhaps well intended but misguided and in need of rethinking" (95).
• "Every statement about Adam and Eve in the Old Testament, in Jewish literature, and in the New Testament is made from a context and into a context" (97).

3. Scot sets out four principles in this discussion:

A. Respect - "To understand what someone is telling us, we must respect that person as a person" (98). In terms of Genesis 1-11, "we must respect that text as designed for the ancient Near Eastern culture" (99). "It is disrespectful to Genesis 1-11 to think it somehow should understand modern science, DNA, and the Human Genome Project, or for that matter the science of any generation after the writing down of Genesis 1-11!

"Genuine respect begins when we let Genesis 1-11 be Genesis 1-11, which means letting Genesis 1-11 be ancient Near Eastern and not modern Western science" (100).

B. Honesty - "Face the facts and do not fear the facts" (100). "Are you willing to face the facts--the facts of the Bible and the facts of science?"

McKnight makes the controversial claim that some of the most ardent defenders of certain interpretations of the Bible on these issues might actually be afraid. They are afraid to open the door to such questions because they are afraid it will lead them to lose their faith.

McKnight does not only ascribe this kind of uncharitable spirit to creationists but to some Christian evolutionists as well. He quotes Ron Osborn: "I have often been equally dismayed by the attitudes evinced by some individuals on the other side of the debate over creation and evolution... how quickly some are prepared to write off people of sincere faith who are at different places in their intellectual and spiritual journeys" (101).

C. Sensitivity to the Student of Science
I already mentioned the student whose faith McKnight says was saved by him opening up the window to the possibility of having faith and yet not concluding God created the universe 10,000 years ago. "The student is in my rearview mirror in all I have to say in my section of this book" (105).

D. Primacy of Scripture
Scot is an evangelical, so the Bible always comes first. The investigation of truth can go to other bodies of knowledge in addition to the Bible, but it always starts with the Bible: "Scripture first.'

4. He ends the chapter with a sense of some of the complexity these discussions can take on. For example, what do we mean by the "historical" Adam and Eve? Another view of Adam and Eve is the "archetypal view," Adam and Eve as representatives of all humanity. His sense of a "literary" view does not so much draw conclusions on the historical, but looks at them within the text of the Bible.

More to come...

Adam and the Genome 6: Intelligent Design

In chapter 4, the last of Dennis Venema's chapters, Venema addresses intelligent design. I'm reading Venema and Scot McKnight's book, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science.

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?

Chapter 4
1. Chapter 4 is titled, "What About Intelligent Design?" The first part of the chapter recounts the arguments for intelligent design advanced most powerfully by Michael Behe. Behe's fundamental idea is that of "irreducible complexity." There are aspects to biological systems that seem to involve a set of complex interrelationships, all of which have to be in place for it to work.

I think the best illustration of this idea that Venema gives is that of a stone arch. You can't build an arch by adding stones to the side one by one. They would fall over. The keystone has to be in place before they will stay in place. But you can't put the keystone in until the other stones are in place.

Bottom line is that an intelligent designer has to come alongside with scaffolding to build the thing. Human biochemistry, Behe argues, is exactly like that.

2. I lament Venema's tone a little in a few places. Most of the time he is completely under control. But clearly he has been engaged in an ongoing argument with Michael Behe and others like Stephen Meyer in the Intelligent Design community. What makes it worse is that Venema was in their camp not too long ago, so there may be a tendency to be impatient, as it were, with his former self. These are all familiar dynamics for me on other issues.

What I think I've found is that, if you have any hope of winning over those who are disposed against your position for ideological reasons, you almost have to behave perfectly for a long time while they process your arguments. You have to be a saint, and even then the odds are stacked against you. You can know you know more about the subject. You even can know that arguments against you don't hold any water and see obvious flaws in them. Your faith and character can be impugned,

But if you get cocky or lose your cool, the opposition simply says, "See, this person has a moral problem or see, this person is not behaving like a Christian, which reinforces that their ideas aren't Christian. What need of further evidence have we?"

So I probably would have written these chapters with a tiny bit more of an exploratory tone. Every once and a while, it feels like a tiny bit of sarcasm and condescension creeps in, which probably is not ultimately helpful.

3. So what I would say is that what he shows in the rest of the chapter is not a proof that Behe and Meyer are wrong, but some reason to believe that their arguments are not nearly as strong as they might appear if you do not have extended training in genetics, biochemistry, microbiology, and cell biology.

Behe argues that for new "irreducibly complex" biochemical structures to form, there would need to be new "binding sites" for them to bind to. This suggests to him that multiple mutations would need to happen all at the same time, which he considers so improbable as to be mathematically impossible.

So Venema shows evidence that these sorts of things likely happen all the time. In fruit flies, for example, it looks as if one gene has been randomly duplicated in one species (called a paralog), while not in others. All it took was then four mutations--not at once but one at a time--for this paralog to take on an essential function for the particular kind of fruit fly.

In short, an irreducibly complex, essential protein seems to be explicable as a result of six seemingly random events, each of which was unnecessary and initially non-essential to the fly: 1) the initial duplication of the gene, 2) the addition of mutation 1, 3) the addition of mutation 2, 4) the addition of mutation 3, 5) the addition of mutation 4, and 6) the ensuing dependence on the way these mutations came to function collectively.

4. A much rarer event that the current "look" of the vertebrate genome has is what is called a "whole genome duplication." Venema suggests that this sort of event has only happened twice in the history of evolution, one of which introduced the backbone. Unlike the paralog of the previous example, this sort of event would involve a move from two to four chromosomes, doubling the length of the genome, in effect.

Computers have compared non-vertebrate genomes with vertebrate ones and certainly this looks to be true. That is where the rub is. The genome looks the way we would expect it to look if it developed in this way. Indeed, it is the theory that has led the geneticists to look for these things that they have found.

This does not prove it happened that way. Perhaps we could say that either God created it to look this way or it happened this way.

5. An experiment with E. coli has provided another example of the kind of thing Behe considers irreducible complexity developing by chance. Researchers created a population of E. coli bacteria that largely did not have a binding site for a particular virus. Yet significant amounts of that virus were introduced to the environment.

Within four random mutations, a new binding site had developed to which the bacteria could bind.

6. Stephen Meyer has argued that what are called protein folds are extremely rare and irreducibly complex such that the mathematical probability of them developing by chance is an impossibility. He draws especially on a study by Douglas Axe to support this claim experimentally.

Venema finds numerous flaws in their line of argument, so much so that he believes Meyer must not fully understand the genetics (note 38). First, Venema has already suggested a number of mechanisms by which new functions come into being by chance--gene duplication, mutation, whole gene duplication. According to Venema, it is wrong in the first place to think that anything comes de novo in evolution. It is about descent with modification. Genes split, fuse, stick extra stuff in or accidentally shift the sequence.

One example is a bacteria found in Japan that "eats" nylon, which has only existed since the 1930s. This new bacteria popped into existence in a moment when a single mutation shifted all the codons after it by one place. By coincidence, this shift created a bacteria that could weakly draw carbon and nitrogen from nylon for its "food."

Since other bacteria cannot do this, we know this bacterium has only existed for some time since the 1930s. And this bacterium has a number of the protein folds that Meyer says cannot happen mathematically by chance. Certainly God could have decided to mutate this bacteria for the good of Japan right before they bombed Pearl Harbor. Or it could be random. :-)

7. Venema also points out a number of problems with extending Axe's study beyond its original limits. Axe started with a barely functional bacterium with a specific enzyme that performed a specific function. He comes up with a mathematical impossibility that this bacterium would produce that enzyme to do that function by chance.

But Venema argues it doesn't work this way. Most bacteria have multiple back-up systems that were intentionally kept out of this study so that the study would be able to show failure. And evolution is not about the likelihood of a specific chain of events but the likelihood that some random chain of events will unfold.

As Venema's chapters close, here is his sense of design: "Evolution may be God's chosen design to bring about biodiversity on earth" (89). "I view evolution as God's grand design for creating life" (90).

I look forward to what McKnight has to say about these things theologically, starting next week.

Friday Science: Adam and the Genome 5

On to chapter 3 of a book by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight called, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science.

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction
1. Evolution as a Scientific Theory
2. Genomes as Language, Genomes as Books

Chapter 3
1. Chapter 3 is titled, "Adam's Last Stand?" In it, Dennis Venema presents the genetic arguments for the claim that humanity as we know descended from a pool of some 10,000 individuals. That is to say, humanity does not descend from two individuals but from a population of several thousand.

McKnight will process this claim theologically in the second half of the book. Venema's purpose is to get the current understanding of genetics on the page. His assessment of the creationist response is worded very strongly: "There does not appear to be anyone in the antievolutionary camp at present with the necessary training to properly understand the evidence, much less offer a compelling case against it" (65).

2. The gist of the arguments relate to the fact that the number of variants present in a population seems to connect to the size of the population. Venema uses the example of the Tasmanian Devil as an example. The TD has a profound lack of genetic variability because at some point in the recent past it experienced a genetic bottleneck.

At some point in the last few hundred years, the population was so drastically reduced, that most TDs have exactly the same alleles (genetic options). This now includes a fatal cancer that TD immune systems do not recognize as harmful. In humans, an organ from another human is inevitably genetically different enough that it provokes a strong immune reaction. In Devils, the genetic material is so similar that a cancer does not.

3. So I counted five separate arguments from genetics in the chapter that all independently point to the same conclusion. "We descend from a population that has never dipped below about 10,000 individuals" (48).

• First, if you take the human mutation rate. Then take the mathematical probability of new mutations spreading in a population or being lost. Then look at how many alleles (genetic variations) are currently present. This calculation suggests that at least 10,000 humans would be necessary to generate that many alleles at a particular point in the past.
• linkage disequilibrium - When two genes are located close to each other on the same chromosome, the alleles present at both locations tend to be inherited together. It takes some time for "cross-overs" to happen in a population in relation to closely located genes. After crunching the data, it suggests a parent population of about 10,000 individuals.
• A snapshot of genes not near each other at a point in the past can suggest a minimum population at that point in the past. If we choose around 200,000BC (when homo sapiens is alleged to have emerged), the pool is about 7,000 in Sub-Saharan Africa and about 3000 human ancestors elsewhere, which adds to 10,000.
• Another approach using mutation frequency and many pairs of genes suggests a human bottleneck of about 1,200 between 40,000 and 20,000 years outside of sub-Saharan Africa, with a bottleneck in Africa of about 5,700 some 50,000 years ago. This adds up to about 6,900 in our total human ancestral pool.
• Looking at more distant ancestors between humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, we see that humans and gorillas can share some variants that did not survive in chimpanzees. This is called "incomplete lineage sorting" (ILS). The data suggests that about 50,000 common ancestors would be necessary to account for the genetic material of current humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas.

He concludes: "To date, every genetic analysis estimating ancestral population sizes has agreed that we descend from a population of thousands, not a single ancestral couple" (55).

Venema is basically arguing that if we assume that Adam and Eve are meant to be taken literally rather than literary expressions of the human condition, they were part of a larger population rather than the sole parents of humanity.

4. Much of the rest of the chapter is given to the current state of fossil research. Perhaps I have not yet conveyed Venema's correction of the idea that evolution happens in a straight line. Rather, he would say, you have a collection of variations in a population. Over time the average genetic characteristics of the population change in a certain direction, which is not a straight line.

Similarly, it is not likely that we have fossils that are in a direct line. Instead, we find distant cousins from other branches.

So the current composite theory is that homo sapiens arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago. About 50,000 years ago, significant numbers of humans left Africa (at least 1200). As they left, they encountered other "hominin" species like Neanderthals in Europe and Denisovans in Asia (who themselves may have earlier encountered homo erectus there).

Those descended directly from Africa have none of these other hominins in their genes. Those descended from Europeans have 1-4 percent Neanderthal in their genes. Those in Asia have some Neanderthal and 3-5 percent Denisovan. The Denisovan genome may incorporate some homo erectus genetics as well. All these hominins share a common ancestry that goes back to about 800,000 years ago in Africa.

5. One last thing of interest in the chapter is his explanation of "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y Chromosome Adam." The Y gene is only passed down through males. If a man has only female offspring, then no genetics unique to the father's Y gene is passed down. Similarly, mitochondrial genes are only passed down through eggs. If a mother only has sons, her unique mitochondrial genes come to an end.

So all living beings are said to descend from a common "mitochondrial Eve" who lived in Africa somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. Similarly, all men are said to descend from a common male who lived in Africa somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. These two individuals are just two separate genetic lines for different aspects of human genetics. They are unrelated to each other (that is, they were not a couple), and they are different from the population from which our regular chromosomal DNA is said to emerge.

In short, "all humans can descend from one Mitochondrial Eve for our mitochondrial DNA, one Y-Chromosome Adam for our Y chromosomes, and 10,000 other ancestors for our regular chromosomal DNA" (64).

Very interested to see what McKnight does with all this!

Friday Science: Adam and the Genome 4

Here's chapter 2 of a new book by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight called, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. Both are men of faith. Chapter 2 is titled, "Genomes as Language, Genomes as Books."

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction
Evolution as a Scientific Theory

1. 1. In chapter 2, Dennis Venema gives a basic explanation of how genes replicate themselves and activate proteins. It is actually a quite impressive simplification of genetic science. In the process, he gives us a small taste of the genomic evidence for evolution. At the end of the chapter, he says, “It is no exaggeration to say that (the very, very few) trained biologists who reject common ancestry do so because of prior religious commitments, not for scientific reasons” (40).

He actually quotes from a blog post of one of the them. Todd Wood is a young earth creationist by faith. He is quite clear, however, about how the evidence looks. “Evolution is not a theory in crisis… There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution… I say these things not because… I’ve ‘converted’ to evolution… Creation students, listen to me very carefully… evolution is an extremely successful scientific theory. That doesn’t make it ultimately true… It is my own faith choice to reject evolution” (41).

I am just a beginner when it comes to such things, but my guess is that the situation is this. We could suppose, by faith, that God created in an instant the genomic map of all organisms to look as if they could have gradually evolved following processes we now can observe on a small scale. But the most natural explanation, if we had no prior commitments to go either way, would be to conclude that there has been a gradual development from simpler to more complex organisms over millions of years.

2. Some of the chapter consists of some basic genetics. Most of us have heard of DNA. DNA exists in a double spiral. Sections of DNA are called “genes,” and sections of genes are called “chromosomes.” Humans have 46 chromosomes, 23 from our father and 23 from our mother. Women have two “X” chromosomes. Men have an X and a Y chromosome. In children, women always contribute an X chromosome, while men contribute either an X (making it a girl) or a Y (making it a boy). So Henry VIII should have had himself executed for not having a boy.

There are only four basic building blocks in DNA, chemicals called cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. Cytosine only bonds with guanine, and adenine only bond with thymine. So you can replicate a strand by breaking it in half and then making all these “nucleotides” available. The right ones will find the right plug-ins and bond. In fact, this is how our cells reproduce.

It is also how our DNA puts into motion our physical characteristics. Something called “messenger RNA” duplicates one of the DNA strands, takes that information off and uses it to produce a variety of proteins, which in turn activate things like our eye color or hair color or nose length, etc.

There is apparently a lot of dead space in our genes, stuff that doesn’t do much of anything. In fact, only about 5 to 6 percent of our genome are the actual genes. Three genes make a codon, which collectively code for the production of a particular protein.

3. Errors and mutations do happen. Perhaps a nucleotide doesn’t bond to the right corresponding nucleotide. Perhaps a “stop” mutation cuts off the gene so that it doesn’t finish giving complete information. Perhaps there is a deletion mutation, which throws off the three codon pattern.

For a parent-child generation, of the some 3 billion pairs of nucleotides in our DNA, there might be about 100 mutations, most if not all of which will go completely unnoticed.

4. None of the above is particularly controversial. What is controversial is how to interpret what we observe when we set the genome of humans alongside chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, even chicken, dogs, and whales. Venema gives the example of insulin in dogs and humans. The gene sequence has a great deal in common.

In fact, it has enough in common that dog insulin would work in a human. Apparently, there is a lot of wasted space in DNA so that there can be quite a bit of variety and it all still work. This is not how a German would design it—too much unneeded and irrelevant space. But you can imagine that if a process was wandering somewhat randomly, it would be convenient if you only had to randomly come close for something to work.

Then he puts the sequence of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans alongside as well. Even closer agreement to the human sequence. Chimpanzees and gorillas are slightly closer to humans in sequence than orangutans.

Later in the chapter, he looks that the olfactory sequence for primates. It turns out that there are the remnants of genes that do not function that are present in, say, wolves. Humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans all have a certain stopped gene that is complete in wolves. This is a shortened gene that doesn’t do anything. Humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas all have a certain gene deleted that wolves have and orangutans still have. Humans and chimpanzees have a deletion that the gorillas and orangutans still have. Meanwhile, each of these primates have a mutation in this sequence that none of the others have.

So this could all be God having fun, knowing that in the early 2000s humans would be able to unlock these codes. Wait for it, Gabriel, Francis Collins is almost ready for that joke we planned 6000 years ago. But if we were just going on the evidence alone, we might hypothesize that orangutan split off from a common ancestor first, then gorillas, then lastly chimpanzees and humans. This explains why some still have functioning genes that wolves and others still have working and why others have the same traces of earlier mutations.

Similarly, the stretch of human genes that corresponds to the part of the chicken gene that codes for an egg shell has a large number of nucleotides in the same sequence. It’s just that the key genes to make a shell are missing in humans. But there is a lot of junk in that stretch of human DNA that corresponds to a stretch of chicken DNA that works.

5. I found his opening to the chapter brilliant, since I love languages. First, he compared genomes to languages. He has a background in West Frisian in the Netherlands and put two sentences up next to each other, Apparently they sound much the same:

English: “Butter, bread, and green cheese is good English and good Frise.

West Frisian: “Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk.

By implication, the young earth creationist would have to say that God created these two languages to look and sound very similar, but he created them this way from the very beginning. He created them to be very, very similar but there would be no historical relationship between them.

If we had no prior assumptions, however, we would more naturally conclude that at some point, perhaps in the 600s AD, a common group of Anglo-Saxons split, some going to the island of England and others staying nearby on the continent. Over time, little variations arose in the way they wrote and pronounced certain words. Today, you can see a common ancestry, but the isolation of the two has resulted in some interesting “mutations.”

He shows the same in English translations of John 14:6 from the 1300s to today. Wycliffe spelled truth, “treuthe.” Tyndale in the 1500s spelled it “truthe.” The original 1611 KJV said “trueth.” And the 1769 edition of the KJV says “truth.” Same word, variations over time.

Friday Science: Adam and the Genome 3

Hit and run this morning with a new book by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight called, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. Both are men of strong faith.

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction

1. Now quickly chapter 1. Chapter 1 is titled, "Evolution as a Scientific Theory." Venema gives a bit of his personal story. Grew up against evolution. Didn't agree with it even through his PhD program. He now teaches biology at Trinity Western University

He spends a section of the first chapter correcting the sense that scientific theories are guesses or conjectures. A hypothesis in science does get to be called a theory until it has produced an extensive body of results that fit with it. In common language, we might say, "It's just a theory." But that is not how theories work in science. "A hypothesis that is not rejected after many, many predictions and tests eventually becomes a broad explanatory framework that has withstood repeated experimentation and that makes accurate predictions about the natural world: in other words, a theory" (4).

He then dismisses the often referenced studies on diet and health. Most of this is not good science. It is rather sensational journalism and people trying to sell you stuff. Don't mistake the fake science from the long, painstaking real stuff.

2. He has a long quote from John Edwards dismissing the idea that the earth goes around the sun. Edwards gives both theological and scientific arguments against it. One argument against it, the absence of a stellar paradox, Venema indicates was shown to be present two hundred years later. His point is that what seems difficult for Christian belief today might not seem difficult to a later generation. And sometimes it takes a little time to show what at first seems counterintuitive.

The latter part of this chapter gives an example. The idea that mammals descended from fish seems odd to say the least, as does the idea that tetrapods came out of the water to land and then that some of them returned to the sea as whales. Darwin suggested the latter and was soundly laughed to scorn for it.

Venema then gives evidence that, while not proving these hypotheses, has made them more plausible and has failed to disprove the theories. Lungfish are an example of a fish that to this day has the breathing apparatus both of water and air. They also have bones in their fins. Paleontological work in this time period has also found fossils of several species that blur the distinction between fish and tetrapod.

Finally, he speaks of fossils of species found around the Indian Ocean that have features that are suitable for water but that are still tetrapods. He follows up with the embryology of whales, which shows that the embryos begin toward developing back legs but then call it off in later development.

These fossils do not prove the hypothesis, but they support it and "fail to reject" it upon further experimentation.

Here endeth the first chapter.

Friday Science: Adam and the Genome 2

1. I am blogging through a new book by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight called, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. Both are men of strong faith. Yesterday, I gave a sort of personal preface.

The Foreword by Tremper Longman III gives a taste of the recent conundrum. If evolution were not already difficult for many Christians to harmonize with the Bible, recent DNA research has suggested that "humanity begins not with a single couple but rather with an original population of some thousands of people" (vii).

2. The Introduction then gives a little more personal detail on the two authors. Dennis Venema wonders "if my path would have been less circuitous if the church had had a better relationship with science to begin with." Venema teaches college biology at Trinity Western University in Vancouver. Interestingly, he did not become convinced that evolution was correct until after he had actually become a college professor (11)!

Venema makes a comment that I have been making for years. The real issue for Christianity and evolution is not in Genesis. That's easy. The real issue is in Paul's writings and, more specifically, with the theological problem of Sin, evil, and death.

Scot McKnight is a New Testament scholar who is coming at the problem from the other side, from the biblical side. He is wrestling with this question that Longman mentions in the Foreword: "The DNA in current humans could not have come from a pool of fewer than approximately 10,000 humans" (xi).

I'll stop there to today, as other things press... See you next Friday, dv.

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.

I (Still) Believe: Scot McKnight

The book is out, John Byron and Joel Lohr's, I (Still) Believe! You can now get it for reals! Although I'm finishing the book, I'm being more selective now in my posts. Here is a post on Scot McKnight's testimony.

Previous posts include:

Richard Bauckham
Walter Brueggemann
Ellen Davis
James Dunn
Gordon Fee
Beverly Roberts Gaventa
John Goldingay

1. I have always known that Scot likes sports, and that is clear from this chapter as well. He traded in a sports destiny for a teaching one, though, when he was injured his senior year of high school. There's no question in my mind that Scot has had a blessed life. I'm sure he has had pains as well, but his life gives off a strong aroma of peace.

He married his childhood sweetheart before he was even out of college. They have a model marriage, indeed a dream marriage. He is obviously a greatly intelligent scholar. You can see his appetite to learn everywhere in this chapter. Unlike myself, who mostly wanted to read, read, read, Scot was actually able to do it.

He was one of Dunn's students when he was still at Nottingham. He ended up teaching at Trinity. His taking of Wayne Grudem's place is ironic, as he mentions. He pitched to Walter Kaiser (then Dean) that they needed an Arminian who favored women in ministry to balance out the department. I have never heard a negative word from Scot about Trinity, but it is also clear that he is now finally in his sweet spot at Northern (with a good run at North Park in the meantime).

Northern is an amazing seminary in Chicago with an amazing team. Important for him is the unified support for women in ministry there. This is also a value of Wesley Seminary and Indiana Wesleyan University. Last week a prospective student at Wesley Seminary asked if she would only be allowed to take certain courses because she is a woman. That's the way it is at some seminaries. Why would a woman go there??? Come to Northern or Wesley or IWU's School of Theology and Ministry!

2. He has some nice stories of his interactions with students over the years. A key insight he shares is that "I was not teaching subjects to students... but teaching students about a subject" (166).

In college Scot transitioned from fundamentalism to evangelicalism. A class on the Synoptic Gospels made him what he is. In particular, over the next years his detailed study of the Gospels would convince him that they used sources and edited them in keeping with their theologies.

The end point of this journey was a sense that the Bible "is not one self-contained text added to the previous but one text interacting with--sometimes agreeing, sometimes even disagreeing, but often expanding and adjusting and renewing--the previous texts" (167). "God's inspiration then is at work in a history and a community as expressed by an author for a given moment."

He concludes that "the Bible is God's true and living Word is far more in line with the realities of the Bible itself than the political terms that have arisen among evangelicals in the twentieth century" (168). And here he refers to the term inerrancy.

I'll let you buy the book and read the rest, including some controversial comments on historical Jesus studies.

Scot's the man!

Good News for a Lifetime

Just wrote this:

"What does this fact mean for us [the meaning of the gospel]? In his book, King Jesus Gospel, Scot McKnight argues that it means we not focus narrowly on just trying to “get people saved.” That is to say, some parts of American Christianity focus quite heavily on getting people to “pray the sinner’s prayer” or get baptized. Preaching the gospel comes to be preaching people to cross an initial threshold into Christianity, getting them converted.

"But if the gospel centers on the good news that Jesus is king, then Jesus is not just king for a day. He is king for the rest of eternity. Believing in the good news cannot thus be something you do for a moment and then walk away. Accepting someone as a Lord is never a matter of a true/false test. A Lord is a master. Someone is not your master unless you do whatever they tell you to do.

"So the person who receives the gospel is someone who becomes a lifelong servant and follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. It may begin in a moment, but it never ends. Any narrow focus on the gospel as just salvation—let alone just how to get “saved”—deeply impoverishes it."

Theology at Missio Alliance

I think there may be a sense around here at the Missio Alliance that one of the reasons the Emergent Village didn't really go anywhere or do anything is that it wasn't theologically grounded well. The emergent movement knew what they didn't like about evangelicalism-as-usual, but they tried to ground the thought of the movement in postmodernism. Since postmodernism is an anti-theology, that left the movement without any real grounding that would stick.

The theological framework invoked at the conference so far is missional, with Scot McKnight, Cherith Fee-Nordling, and David Fitch so far as its theologians.

Scot McKnight
You won't be surprised to hear echoes of his King Jesus Gospel here.  The idea here is that the gospel is about Jesus as king.  It's focus is not about some narrow sense of getting people to pray for forgiveness and get baptized.  With the good news being about the kingship of Christ, then we have a robust sense of salvation that not only includes helping the poor and redeeming societal structures, but a sense of conversion that extends beyond a moment to a pilgrimage.

Nevertheless, I think I picked up a hint of a view of theology with which I disagree. If I heard him right, he invoked a distinction between an approach that aims at "the right way" and one that looks for relevance.  This reminds me of the Barth-Finney debate over whether God is responsible for the effect of the word or whether we can do things that bring about a better sermon effect.

It may, although I'm not sure if McKnight meant it, have a tinge of Platonism and presuppositionalism that creates a dichotomy between truth and effect.  Wesleyanism tends to be what I am now calling a "pragmatic theology."  What I mean by this notion is that truth should not be divorced from its effect but that, to a very large extent, truth is a function of effect.

Truth in this universe is, in general, what works in this universe.  God has built truth into this universe as what works in this universe.  In that sense, it is misguided to mistake ideas as the sources of truth that somehow play themselves out in this universe, as if the universe is some kind of Platonic copy of a divine ideal. Nor will we most accurately understand truth if we think of it in terms of revelations in God's mind that he has revealed to us in the Bible.

Rather, when God reveals truth, he is revealing the way he has made us and the world, how we and the world work. Therefore, theology when it is most true is also most useful. I may post on this later, but my point is that theologians should not think that revivalist traditions are unthinking because they do not always articulate a theology "behind" their practice. Rather theology is intrinsic to practice. It is most accurate when it is most closely tied to its effect. This is a superior form of theology to the abstracted version of it so loved by the stereotypical theologian.

David Fitch
I'll mention Fitch first.  It was interesting to have him next to Howard-John Wesley.  HJW's presentation might not contradict his as much if you take the pragmatic theological approach I just offered. The question becomes, "What do their theologies look like in practice?"  If their theologies result in a similar effect or look, then they are kindred even if the abstractions contradict each other.

And they did at least sound like they did. But I do not think HJW's disagreed with David's so much in practice.  

Fitch was trying to move beyond old fundamentalist categories like inerrancy to a storied approach to the Bible.  We live into the world of the Bible and experience its authority as the authority of God over us in his story of walking with the world. There's no question in my mind that this is a much more accurate theological abstraction than the one neo-evangelicalism came up with in the 50s.

Cherith Fee-Nordling
Her presentation by far has been the best of the conference. If I were to sum up her main point it would be a plea against Gnosticism. The world is not evil, only fallen.  God created a good world.  We are not spirits waiting to be released to our true heavenly home.  Rather, the earth is our eternal destination, a redeemed earth. Jesus might have become human just to be with us, even if Adam hadn't sinned and didn't need redeemed.  Jesus was truly and fully human... and he liked it.

I continue to think that the best theological descriptor of this group sociologically is post-conservative and that the best theological category to describe it is "missional."  Wesleyanism at its best fits well here.

Grudem: Necessity of Scripture 2

...continued from yesterday
_____________
Not-necessary
Grudem does not consider the Bible necessary 1) for a person to believe God exists or 2) to have a moral conscience. He simply doesn't believe this level of knowledge is sufficient to save a person. By contrast, Hebrews 11:6 came to mind: "Without faith it is impossible to please him, for the one who comes to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who diligently seek him." Can a person who, to the best of their understanding, loves God and loves neighbor be saved through Christ, despite not knowing about him?

I personally, coming from the Wesleyan-pietist tradition, find it hard to see God consigning to hell those who never had a chance, those who do not have the privilege of having the Bible or its message. It is an extension, on the one hand, of the fact that I don't believe in deterministic predestination.  On the other hand, it is an extension of my belief in prevenient grace, that God gives some light to everyone in the world. Christianity otherwise seems incoherent.

So my sympathies here are the logical conclusion of my own Christian tradition's core values, although my own tradition has not necessarily been consistent on the topic.  It is a hope based on big principles in Scripture like the fact that God looks on the heart and wants everyone to be saved. In other words, it comes from an understanding of God's fundamental nature as love. If God consigns the vast majority of humanity to hell for an ignorance that is no fault of their own, it is hard to imagine how he can be considered loving in any normal sense of the word. Similarly, if God consigns people to heaven primarily on the basis of cognitive knowledge, he seems rather shallow.

That is not to say that there are not difficulties with this position. What then am I to do with Romans 10 and the evangelistic enterprise of the early church--or of my own church? It at least helps to realize that words like "gospel" and "evangelism" have been skewed somewhat in their meaning. Once again we see partially why those in Grudem's circles have been scrambling in the face of books like Scot McKnight's King Jesus Gospel and to fight N. T. Wright's version of the new perspective on Paul. It's easy for them simply to decry those like Wesleyan-Arminians with a different theology.  It's another to find some of their own supposed biblical foundations pulled out from under them.

The gospel in Paul is the good news that Jesus has been enthroned king (Rom. 1:1-3) after God raised him victoriously from the dead (1 Cor. 15:1-4).  The gospel in the Gospels has a slightly different focus but it is compatible.  The gospel in the Gospels is the good news that God's kingdom is returning to the earth (Mark 1:14-15), with the resultant good news for the oppressed (Luke 4:18).  Surely the good news includes the whole story, including Jesus' death and the implications in salvation, but the focus is on the reign of God and Christ.

When the early Christians preached the good news (euangelion), they were primarily preaching the lordship of Jesus and the kingdom of God. True, Jesus' atoning death was part of that message (1 Cor. 2:2).  If God's reign is soon coming to the earth and if my sin stands in the way, then Christ's death for my sins is a major concern, and Christ's death is part of the good news.

There is a connection between the rise of modern evangelism and dispensationalism.  In the late 1800s many Christians became convinced that Christ was about to return. At the same time, 2000 years of intervening history was ignored and they saw themselves as the early church of Acts.  Pentecostalism recovered speaking in tongues, as in Acts. While the early church saw the mission to get the good news to the ends of the earth as already accomplished (Col. 1:23), the world had gotten bigger and the reset button was hit on the idea that Christ would return after everyone had heard. Thus the rise of modern missions.

In the early church, the setting was similar but slightly different.  They also, including Paul, thought the Lord would return to earth very soon.  They were preparing the way for this Day of salvation and wrath by preparing everyone for the Lordship of Jesus. They were following the ideal course.  Certainly it's good to be ready for the king's arrival, to have your house in order before he arrives. It thus makes absolute sense to spread the good news of Christ's kingship and the good news of potential salvation.

I won't pretend that this broader understanding of evangelism resolves all the tensions with Romans 10. I'll only point out that the tensions are with other Scriptural principles, not least that God is love and wants everyone to be saved. Paul gives the most normal path in Romans 10, the one built off the fundamental metaphor of the messenger who brings good news from afar that a new king has been enthroned. In this metaphor there is a messenger (like Paul) who brings the good news that Jesus is king.

Is there another option he uses before the messenger arrives?  The path of the patriarchs?  The path of Job?  The path of the Old Testament heroes of faith?  The path of the child or mentally challenged person who does not understand?  I sure hope so.  It's hard to see how Christianity's fundamental claims about God's nature don't disintegrate otherwise.

I end with a final note on the idea of conscience. I do not think that Romans 2:14-15 is about some universal conscience we all have.  Like N. T. Wright and others, I believe the Gentiles in this passage who have the "Law written on their hearts" are Gentile believers who have received the Holy Spirit (cf. Hebrews 10:14-18).  Good thing too, because cultural anthropology has observed that there is very little in the way of a universal conscience around the world.

Most parents protect their children. Most cultures think it wrong to randomly kill someone in your own group. That's about it and there are some "deviant" cultures even on these. The idea of there being a specific moral law built within us doesn't seem to pan out very well in reality. It's a Christian tradition that I'm not sure has much biblical support.

The conscience in the New Testament is one's awareness of sin (Hebrews 10:2-3), which depends on one's understanding and thus one's training. A Jew should be aware of what sin is because they have been taught revelation in the Scriptures. However, a person's "sin knower" can also malfunction (Tit 1:15).

A Robust Sense of Evangelism

Scot McKnight, in King Jesus Gospel has, along with N. T. Wright, refocused us on what the gospel actually is in the New Testament.  Despite the embarrassment of the Gospel Coalition, whose key players for some time have been trying their hardest to plug the leaks in their sinking ship.

Sorry, the truth doesn't care. The gospel is the good news that 1) our God reigns (Gospels) and that 2) Jesus is king (Paul), 3) along with all the good stuff that entails (Acts).  It's not about how to get saved and, although our salvation is part of the good news, it is a minor part.  It is more an implication of the gospel than the focus of the gospel. In Luke, the gospel is primarily good news to the poor and the disempowered (thus the GC conference this year where they will apply all their intellect to argue that the earth is flat).

Here's the next step.  Since the gospel is God and Jesus focused--not me focused, not my salvation focused--this has implications for what it means to "evangelize" and what "evangelism" is (since it is the verb, "to proclaim the good news") and what an "evangelist" is ("someone who proclaims the good news").

An evangelist is someone who proclaims the good news that our God reigns (Gospels) and that Jesus is king (Paul), along with all the good stuff that entails (Acts).  To evangelize is to proclaim to others the good news that our God reigns, that his kingdom made its Normandy landing in the ministry of Jesus (Gospels), that Jesus is God's king over the cosmos (Paul).  That proclamation is evangelism.

True, going would seem to be part of this evangelism and, yes, such preaching aims at a response.  What response?  Confession of the lordship of Jesus, of course, since he is king (Romans 10).  Repentance and submission to the rule of God, of course (Gospels).  Such a response of course means you will be saved, but that is a consequence.  The focus is on the reign of God and his Christ, not on me.

A final word on the Great Commission.  The Great Commission is about making disciples.  Nothing is mentioned about evangelism, although evangelism certainly fits with the Great Commission.  But evangelism is not mentioned.  You make disciples by 1) baptizing them and 2) teaching them.  Baptizing does get them in, but involved a confession of Jesus as Lord and thus submission to his kingship.  Becoming a follower was thus not a matter of praying a sinner's prayer or a moment of justification.

Once we have a more accurate understanding of the gospel, then we'll have to have a more robust sense of evangelism too.

Wesley, Soterianism, and Oliver Wendell Holmes...

... No, these don't all go together, but I thought it would peak your curiosity more than "Thoughts I've Had Today."

Wesley and Soterianism
I was reflecting today in class about the fact that the ordo salutis ("order of salvation") was the defining feature of Wesley's theology, and I was connecting this fact to my take-away from Scot McKnight's recent King Jesus Gospel that the very terms of the Reformation got us out of focus on the gospel in the process of correcting an overemphasis on the church as the agent of salvation.

Let me put it in my own terms. The focal point of the Reformation was the argument over the role of works in salvation, indulgences in particular. (The other emphases of the Reformation followed naturally on this focal issue.  The argument over Scripture was about the ground rules of the debate. The foci on Christ and grace had to do with the theological framework of the question of works)

The result is that Protestantism has always tended to overemphasize Paul and overemphasize anthropology at the center of theology.  That is to say, the terms of Luther's debate inevitably has led us to focus on the human problem and its solution as the center of theology.  Rather, God should be the center of theology.

Wesley was simply playing out the terms of the Reformation on the details. So he took justification from Luther, extended sanctification from Calvin, appropriated the Arminian wing of the Calvinist tree, and threw in some assurance of salvation from the Moravians for good measure.  Since he was Anglican, he remained closer to Roman Catholicism than Luther or Calvin.

Oliver Wendell Holmes
Finished the second and third chapters of The Metaphysical Club on the plane home yesterday. Felt quite sorry for Holmes in chapter 2 as the naive "all or nothing" abolitionist/idealist got a real life lesson in the absurd violence of the Civil War.  It is a good reminder for anyone who is excited about war.  War should always, always be a last resort when everything else has failed.

But I didn't like the post-Civil War Holmes. He came to consider individual lives as generally unimportant in comparison to society doing its thing.  Rules became simply conventional for him and his big deal was simply following them, no matter who got run over in the process.

Having started quite interested in the man, I ended that section with little identification with him at all.

Epilog: Good News versus Soterian

It seemed appropriate to sit back and reflect a little after finishing Scot McKnight's book, King Jesus Gospel.  I had a sense of where I thought Scot would go with the book and in my mind he went half there.  I suppose it has a lot to do with the question he was posing.  What would a fuller sense of the gospel look like in contrast to what happens in an awful lot of American churches?

His answer is that the meaning of "gospel" is something much bigger than what he calls a "soterian" approach.  Since he has invented the word, it is completely appropriate.  A "soterian," as he defines it, is someone whose overwhelming focus is on getting people "saved."  He has made it clear elsewhere that he doesn't actually think the word "salvation" is this narrow in the NT.  What he is targeting is practices associated with a very narrow way of thinking about salvation.

To put it in my own way (which is much the same as Scot's), the gospel is, in the first instance, the good news about the inaugurated kingship of Jesus and the kingdom of God that he inaugurates.  I'm not too sure why this is so controversial in some circles.  People like Scot and Wright might debate some of the details, but it really isn't debatable.  End of story.

This original sense of the gospel is not "me" focused.  It doesn't center on me getting saved.  It is much bigger, much more important than me and my individual salvation.  I think what's really bugging McKnight (and Tom Wright before him) is the all-too-typical, shallow, self-centered focus of so much American Christianity, as if the center of the good news is me and what's in it for me.

Further, Scot is rightly concerned that so many Christians act like the whole deal is done once they "say the magic words."  There are many who believe in eternal security and go on to take very seriously the lordship of Jesus for the rest of their lives.  And there are some who act like once they've read the words on the card, they're done.  Eternal oops there.

Here are two further thoughts upon reflection:
1. God's creational good news
Scot says in the early chapters that the gospel relates to the "Story of Jesus" part of the overall Christian story.  I've hinted before that he is doing a dance between wanting to define words the way the NT does and doing theology, which almost always has to move beyond the specific words of specific biblical authors to formulate an integrated perspective.

The word "missional" does some of that.  I wonder what this book would have looked like if Scot had posed the question "missional versus soterian."  Then it would have more easily looked at a bigger version of the story.  It would have allowed us to talk not only of good news for humanity but about good news for the creation as well.  The NT doesn't actually use the word "gospel" in this way, but it is a valid theological broadening of the implications of the way the NT uses the word "gospel."

Missional has been somewhat of a buzz word, but it still seems to narrow God's purposes for the world to the area of saving.  I personally believe that beauty remains in the world, even after the Fall.  I find it hard to believe that every last bit of goodness flew out of the creation with Adam's sin, and the Bible certainly does not require us to believe that.

God thus has intentions for the creation that do not involve human beings and that are in addition to saving it.  The biggest story we can comprehend is the "creational" story.  I knew a student who pretty much lost his faith traveling the world after college (I've lost track of him).  It seems to me there is a faith crisis waiting to happen if we must limit God's walk with the world to the incredibly narrow story of Israel and story of the church.

I don't think most people have a sense of how few people God must care about if this is it.  We are so surrounded by Christianity that it is easy to assume that most people should know better.  Take a few months and travel through Asia.  Look at a map and compare the size of Judah to the rest of the ancient world.  Then read the book of Jonah. There is at least a potential difference between what Christ has done for the world and what the world knows about Christ.

2. A full switch to what God has done
I came to an ironic realization this morning.  In his chapter on salvation taking over the gospel, Scot pinpoints the Reformation as the point where salvation started on a trajectory to become more important than the gospel.  He says there that it did not happen at once--not with Luther and Calvin--but that it took a while.  It occurred to me where it most took place--with the Anabaptists!

It is the Anabaptist tradition that has been most influential on American Christianity and it is the Anabaptist tradition that has most focused on an event of faith once a person has reached an age of understanding.  With deep respect, I believe this is why I ended the book feeling like it had only gone half way.  As long as we are so focused on this event as the be-all-and-end-all of salvation, we will still ultimately be soterians.

Wesley was of course influenced by the Anabaptist tradition.  But we are not hindered as Wesleyans from recognizing that for Paul, the most important moment of justification and salvation is the final one.  Paul rarely--if even once--uses the word "salvation" in relation to anything but the final escape from God's judgment.  Ephesians 2:8 is the only possible exception I can think of, and even it may speak proleptically (poetically speaking of something that is still to happen but is so certain to happen that we can speak of it as already happened).

It is true that Paul predominantly speaks of justification in the past tense.  We can be justified now and this is incredibly important.  BUT the most important thing is that we are justified when we stand in the judgment.  "It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God's sight, but the doers of the law will be justified" (Rom. 2:13).  More important is the "day of wrath, when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.  For he will repay according to each one's deeds" (Rom. 2:5-6).  And this includes believers: "the work of each builder will become visible, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each has done" (1 Cor. 3:13).

Paul's theology was not focused on a justification event in mid-life.  I personally don't think justification was the centerpiece of his theology overall--it was an issue that stood at the center of his debates with Judaizing believers and thus it comes up in Galatians and Romans.  I believe the central focus of Paul's preaching was the cross and what Christ had done.

But even when Paul argued over justification, his concern was with ultimate justification before God, not with a mid-life crisis event.  Certainly we should by all means seek God's justification ASAP.  We can and should be justified now.  But Paul was not arguing over the timing.  He was arguing over the basis.

The role of Acts in our thinking is significant here.  Scot takes the pattern "repent, believe, be baptized" as normative.  An important question is the context of Acts.  For example, these conversions are "first wave."  They refer to places where the tsunami of the gospel is reaching for the first time.  How might the process look different in a place where the wave is retreating?  It is an unexamined assumption that it would look exactly the same.

Even more crucial is the most important element of Acts' equation and one I find that an awful lot of people miss, namely, the Holy Spirit.  Repentance is incredibly important.  Faith is incredibly important.  Baptism is very significant.  But the sine qua non, the most crucial ingredient of all, is the Holy Spirit.  And here we have the precedent of John the Baptist to know that a child can have the Spirit long before they understand the gospel.  These are at least things worth some reflection.

I'll end with a reflection my colleague Keith Drury once made.  "There is no point in my life," he concluded, "at which I would have gone to hell."  His reasoning was thus, put in my own words.

"When I was a child, I did not know what it meant to have faith in God or confess Jesus as Lord.  If I had died at that point or if Christ had returned, God would have accepted me.  The first time I half way understood my need for Christ, I accepted his death for me.  I affirmed him as my king.  If I had died then or Christ had returned, God would have accepted me.  Although I have sinned since then, I have also confessed my sins without undue delay and asked God for forgiveness.  I do not believe there has ever been a time since I confessed Jesus as Lord that God would not have received me if I had died or if Christ had returned."

I could muse more, but I'll stop there (I'll put in a shameless plug for my life reflections on Romans book if you want more ;-). Let me only say that we, and Wesleyans in particular, should do some significant reflection before we conclude the "soterian" path within broader evangelicalism is the right one for us.