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Amnesty International

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2015/01/09/preaching-and-posture/

The Week Damon Linker

Under the Radar

http://biologos.org//blog/learning-to-celebrate-creation-together

How do we deal with the spirituality issues here? At the heart of it, there are some spiritual challenges that are presented to us. It’s tough to wrestle with them, and that’s why we need a safe space. It’s tough for all kinds of pastoral and academic leaders. Also, for theological reasons, these are tough questions. I still haven’t settled in my mind a plausible answer to the “Historical Adam” question, for instance. I want to hang on to what the Apostle Paul says, that it’s by one person that sin came into the world, that it’s by one person that we have been rescued from that sinful condition. I’m struggling with it, but I need safe places in which to explore with other Christians who are willing to explore.

I’ve learned quite a bit from my Catholic friends on this issue. One of my dear friends—a blessed memory, she died about a year ago—was Margaret O’Gara who taught theology at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. Margaret and I spent about eight years working on Catholic—Evangelical dialogue together at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, Minnesota. Margaret really attempted to understand Evangelicalism. A couple of us who were Evangelicals were sitting around one night at dinner, and she said, “I really admire Evangelicalism; there’s something in it that really attracts me, but the one thing I can’t get is this whole creation thing. Why are you people so hung up on a literal creation?” And so, we tried to explain to her what’s going on with people who care deeply about the fact that God is the creator of all things. They may get it wrong. They may go in the wrong direction on this issue, but there’s a deep impulse there that we take seriously. Then she said this, “Don’t you Evangelicals realize that God is slow?”

It hit me that we have a hard time with that. We want instantaneous conversions. I remember the testimony of a guy at my church when I was a kid. He said, “I was an atheist on August 3, 1948, and I walked into this church, and ten minutes later at this point”—he would walk to the spot—“it happened. I was a new creature in Jesus Christ.” There’s something wonderful about that, but we really like it when things happen fast. “Name it and claim it”; that’s another part of it. We want instantaneous healing. We have a hard time with a slow God, and, yet, God is slow.

In this challenge, I was immensely pleased to come across a wonderful paragraph by Father Ernan McMullin who taught in the Notre Dame philosophy department for several decades. Father McMullin was a priest from Ireland who was a very distinguished person in philosophy of science. He affirmed that over a period of a million years, there have been—and I’m quoting him here—“uncountable species that flourished and vanished [and] have left a trace of themselves in us.” The Bible, he says, sees God as preparing the world—this is him again— “for the coming of Christ back through Abraham to Adam.” He asks, is it too much of a stretch “to suggest that natural science now allows us to extend the story indefinitely further back?” And then this wonderful passage follows:

“When Christ took on human nature, the DNA that made him the son of Mary may have linked him to a more ancient heritage stretching far beyond Adam to the shallows of unimaginably ancient seas. And so, in the Incarnation, it would not have been just human nature that was joined to the Divine, but in a less direct but no less real sense all those myriad organisms that had unknowingly over the eons shaped the way for the coming of the human.”

First Things

Siedentop’s central thesis is provocative and plausible, though inevitably in need of further documentation and argument. In essence it is this: Christianity, by stressing the equality of all human beings before God effectively undermined previous categories which divided up or stratified society. Family, polis, and social hierarchy were all ultimately relativized in the light of the concept of a universal human nature.