Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Smartypants Notions Like Cosmic Child Abuse

    Somehow it seems as thought advocates of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) as the key model of the atonement (I’d prefer metaphor) can’t stay kind and respectable. I wonder why it is that those of us who think that one needs to consider the character of God in terms of love, mercy, and forgiveness as well as justice, and who are concerned with careless formulations, are somehow less pious.

    I was really not planning to post any more on this topic for awhile, but then Adrian Warnock quoted this from J. I. Packer:

    Since all this was planned by the holy Three in their eternal solidarity of mutual love, and since the Father’s central purpose in it all was and is to glorify and exalt the Son as Saviour and Head of a new humanity, smartypants notions like “divine child abuse”, as a comment on the cross, are supremely silly, and as irrelevant and wrong as they could possibly be. [emphasis (color) from Adrian’s quote]

    But it’s not theologically educated opponents who are generally missing the point here. It is careless formulations that are being heard regularly in the pews as something very similar to cosmic child abuse. Some people like it, because it allows them to proclaim a tough God. They want the God of justice to put fear into the next generation. Others are driven away by it. It’s not the critics who have a problem here. It’s the proponents.

    I understand the trinity and the incarnation quite well. That’s why I’m disturbed by formulations that do sound very much like cosmic child abuse. It’s pointless for theologians who are writing for a lay audience to say things like “God’s wrath was poured out on his innocent son instead of on the guilty people who deserved it” and then complain that if people really understood the trinity, they’d realize it is really God pouring his wrath on himself. If people don’t understand the trinity–and you’ll find a crowd of folks in the pews who don’t–then they’re going to hear that sentence incorrectly and get the wrong idea about God.

    In fact, if they really do understand the trinity, I think they’ll have to see that PSA must be a metaphor. It elucidates part of the problem, but if you try to make it stand on all four, it just doesn’t fully make sense. Now not fully making sense isn’t entirely a bad thing. That just shows that a full understanding of the atonement remains outside our human grasp.

    If you want to call that a “smartypants” response, that’s your privilege and also Packer’s. But I think that dismissive attitude is dangerous. (Note that much of Packer’s article itself avoids the difficulties in phraseology to which I’m referring. He simply seems to ignore the problem of other formulations to which critics may respond. Of course, I still do disagree with him on making PSA central, but I do think he formulates PSA appropriately.)

    After having been annoyed by that quote, I also read this one by Peter Kirk. I think he deals well with Carson’s material. I would simply add that I prefer the word “metaphor” to “model.” “Models” need to be worked together into a single whole, or at least that is the feeling I get with the word. Metaphors can illustrate different parts and need not necessarioly stand on all four feet.

  • Adrian Warnock has a new URL

    I’ve updated my blogroll, and now y’all need to know that Adrian Warnock has a new URL (adrianwarnock.com).

  • Libby Sentence Commuted

    According to the Washington Post, President Bush has commuted former Cheney aid I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He left intact probation provisions and the fine.

    I greet this news with mixed emotions. On the one hand I’m tired of lengthy investigations in Washington that produce nothing but convictions for lying to investigators and grand juries. Consider what happened to President Clinton under those circumstances. At the same time, lying to investigators is a pretty serious problem, and what’s more, in this case the issue is the leaking of an important piece of classified information. With Cheney’s office right now behaving as though they are above the law on that point, I dislike sending the signal that this type of behavior is OK.

    For the most part, it appears that nobody will be held responsible for the actual crime.

  • Divine Child Abuse and the Use of Scripture

    It has probably seemed a little odd that I, as a non-evangelical, would follow the atonement discussions as closely as I do. To the extent that I have managed to do so, it has been for two reasons. First, no matter what stream of Christianity one belongs to, the atonement comes out somewhere near the center. If it does not, then I have to wonder if we’re talking about Christianity at all. Second, some of my best friends are evangelicals. Seriously, they are! I have been frequently told that I could be an evangelical if I wanted to, and I have even met people who call themselves evangelicals who are somewhat more liberal than I am.

    Nonetheless I prefer not to try to defend my use of a label for myself, so I’m going to stick with the twin “passionate moderate” and “liberal charismatic” labels that make so many people crazy, and allow others to define just what an evangelical is.

    I was interested in two posts by Adrian Warnock today. The first one dealt with the emerging church and the Emergent Village. There are a couple of points I want to engage in that post. The first is simply the statement of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). Bluntly I think advocates of this position are either a bit careless with their vocabulary, or they do believe in a doctrine that is dangerously flawed.

    Adrian is doubtless right that this problem is one that is not limited to the UK. While it was not so public an issue, I was part of a discussion group in seminary in which we debated some of these issues, and my seminary days are more than several years ago.

    Since Adrian’s post consisted largely of an extended quote from an article by Brett Kunkle on Resurgence, I will quote and work directly from that article. I am operating on the assumption that Adrian quoted this article approvingly. The article covers a great deal of ground and does so very carefully and so far as I can tell, fairly. I should note that in making my own judgment of fairness, I am working from what appears to be a weaker knowledge of the Emergent Village (EV) than Kunkle’s. My response is to his comments, and not intended either as a critique or endorsement of specific EV views.

    Here’s the first key quote:

    . . . Carol, a Christian, answers with a summary of substitutionary atonement: “Well, I believe that God sent Jesus into the world to absorb all the punishment for our sins. That’s what the cross was all about. It was Jesus absorbing the punishment that all of us deserve. He became the substitute for all of us. As he suffered and died, all our wrongs were paid for, so all of us can be forgiven.” . . . [quote footnoted to Brian McLaren, The Story We Find Ourselves In (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 101.]

    Please note that I have grabbed a piece of a paragraph. In order to limit the size of the quotation, I’m making the dangerous assumption that you will check the broader context. My reason for quoting this is that, as stated by Carol, the fictional character in McLaren’s book, PSA would, in fact, be divine child abuse. This statement of PSA ignores the doctrine of the Trinity, in my view, and carelessly states the doctrine of substitution as though God found some other person, an innocent person and had that person absorb the punishment for the rest of us, making forgiveness possible.

    At the same time, the idea that such “absorption” made it possible for all of us to be forgiven is troubling, at best, in terms of theology. Do the advocates of PSA truly believe that God is universally locked into this Medieval sense of punishment and satisfaction, so that he will somehow believe that justice has been done when an innocent person has been punished? Do they believe that he is unable to create the universe in any other way? That short statement, without a broader context, displays an impotent God, caught off-guard by our sin, and unable to resolve the matter except through this odd mechanism of killing an innocent person. Yet this is a description I have frequently heard in churches. It is precisely how many older Christians understand atonement. I am in no way surprised that McLaren would have the character in his book find injustice here–it would be hard to miss–and would look for better formulations.

    In response, however, Kunkle quotes two scriptures:

    Let me say three things in response. First, does McLaren actually think Jesus did not know why he had to die? What about Matthew 20:28? “…just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” Or what about Jesus’ words to his disciples at the Last Supper? “And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.’” Surely Jesus knew why he had to die. One cannot read the New Testament and conclude otherwise.

    Now this is one of the things that disturbs me in these debates even more than someone’s position on the issue of the atonement. Texts are trotted out, and we are told to assume they mean a certain thing when they don’t mean anything of the sort. Matthew 20:28, for example, is not a PSA text at all, it speaks of a ransom. Discussing to whom the ransom was to be paid has generated a whole string of weird theories over the years, which illustrate the problem when an illustration or a metaphor is extended beyond its intended use.

    Barclay comments eloquently in the Daily Study Bible on the parallel passage in Mark 10:45. His whole comment is worth reading, but let me just quote briefly:

    He had come, He said, to give His life a ransom for many. This is one of the great phrases of the gospel, and yet is is a phrase which has been sadly mishandled and maltreated. People have tried to erect a theory of the atonement on what is a saying of love. It was not long until people were asking to whom this ransom of the life of Christ had been paid? . . .

    . . . Suppose we say that freedom can only be obtained at the price of blood, sweat and tears, we never think of investigating to whom that price is paid. . . . [Barclay, Daily Study Bible: The Gospel of Mark, pp. 268-269]

    The second text likewise simply tells us that the blood is poured out for the forgiveness of sins, but fails entirely to tell us why this was necessary, or even that the pouring out of blood was absolutely necessary, or how such atonement would work. The advocates of PSA are trying to make the mechanism of the atonement be the key issue, when it should be the fact of the atonement. God, however he did it, has made reconciliation possible. Certainly, the two texts Kunkle has cited do not challenge McLaren’s approach (or mine) in any way.

    It seems to me that there is a greater concern amongst certain people about not merely understanding the mechanism of atonement (a task I believe we human beings will never accomplish this side of heaven), but in making sure that the mechanism is understood in a specific way. In so doing, they are happy with statements that include the mechanism, Jesus dying for our sins, even though those statements impugn God’s character.

    In his second post, Adrian makes quite a number of comments. I simply want to look at two:

    As we finally draw near to the conclusion of this long-running series on the atonement, it has struck me just how the lines are being drawn. On the one hand there are those of us who feel PSA is essential to the Gospel. It’s not that we think it’s the only thing—or indeed that every Gospel presentation must major on it. It’s just that we think it’s essential, and that Gospel presentations can’t deny it.

    This is succinct, and I must state my disagreement. The mechanism of the atonement is never an essential. The fact is. There is no requirement for theological understanding as a part of salvation. Thus, while I can state that PSA, carefully phrased, is a valuable metaphor for atonement, I believe it is also a very dangerous one, because it can so easily be stated in such a way as to look like injustice and abuse.

    I would say that my position on this issue has hardened, because I truly had not been aware that there were so many careless, and in my view dangerous, statements of substitutionary atonement from people who ought to know better.

    Wherever you stand on all the debates that fly around the blogosphere, I hope we can journey together for awhile and learn from each other—if nothing else, we should at least be able to gain an accurate view of what we both believe. I do believe that if we each focus on moving from where we stand one step closer to the God of the Bible, we will find ourselves gradually drawing closer together in what we believe.

    I have been far out on the periphery of what seems to be more a conservative evangelical debate. Nonetheless I have enjoyed the opportunity to interact even in a small way with this debate, and to hear what my more conservative brothers and sisters (I am an egalitarian after all!) are saying on an important topic.

  • Notes on Mark 10:32-52

    These notes accompany my podcast titled A Time to Seek Healing.

    Translation and Notes

    32Now they were on the road going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them, and the disciples were amazed. But those who followed were afraid. And taking the twelve aside again, he began to tell them again about things that were about to happen to him.

    Jesus is resolutely moving forward to his destiny, but as we shall see, the disciples are still unable to comprehend just what that destiny is. So for the third time, Jesus tells them what is about to happen.

    The border between Galilee and Jerusalem is the most important borderline in any life. It tests the reality of our profession. When we cross it in our lives and actions, we go from comfort into pain, from ease into jeopardy, as Jesus did. But if we do not cross it, we leave the road which leads to fullness of life, and to power. — IB Exposition on Mark 10:32

    33“Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the son of man will be betrayed to the high priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and hand him over to the gentiles, 34And they will strike him, spit on him, whip him, and kill him, but after three days he will rise up from the dead.”

    Jesus provides more details here than he has before. Why don’t the disciples see? For the same reason that we often do not—they had their own agenda.

    “Many a man has become a hero in the heat of the moment. But there is also the courage of the man who sees the grim thing approaching far ahead, of the man who has plenty time to turn back, of the man who could, if he chose to do so, evade the issue, and who yet inflexibly goes on. There is no doubt which is the higher courage.” — Barclay, DSB on Mark 10:32-34

    35And James and John, the sons of Zebedee approached him and said, “Teacher, We want to ask you something and have you do it for us.”

    Here is the disciple’s agenda—personal power in the new kingdom. This doesn’t mean that they were totally selfish and seeking only their own good. I’m certain that they were working on the best motivations. They thought that if they could just get into the right positions, they would be able to serve the victorious Messiah.

    This is the final form of unacceptable prayer. It was sincere; it was earnest; it was wrong. James and John were asking Jesus to fit into their plans. They had no concern at the moment over fitting into his plans. Prayer is always unacceptable when it says to God, “You do whatever I want.” — IB Exposition on Mark 10:35

    36So he said to them, “What do you want me to do for you?” 37They said to him, “Appoint us [to positions] so that one of us will sit at your right hand and one at your left in your glory.” 38Jesus said to them, “You don’t know what you’re asking for! Can you drink the cup that I am drinking or be baptized with the baptism that with which I’m being baptized?”

    Mar 10:38 – Ye know not what ye ask – Ye know not that ye ask for sufferings, which must needs pave the way to glory. The cup – Of inward; the baptism – Of outward sufferings. Our Lord was filled with sufferings within, and covered with them without. — John Wesley

    39They said to him, “We can.” Jesus said to them, “The cup that I am drinking you will drink, and you will be baptized with the baptism which which I am being baptized. 40But to sit at my right or my left is not mine to give, but is for those for who it was prepared.”

    “Jesus’ rule still takes place in the context of the Father’s sovereignty.” — Bock, p. 309

    It’s easy to read this as predestination, but I don’t see it in this passage. Jesus is simply leaving the positions in the kingdom to his Father’s sovereignty, and not making appointments early. The disciples still needed to prove themselves in service.

    41Now when the ten had heard this they became indignant at James and John. 42And Jesus called them and told them, “You know that those who consider themselves rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. 43But it is not to be this way among you, but whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant. 44And whoever wants to be first among you must be the servant of all.

    Again, we see the concept of servant leadership. One can get quite tangled in this whole issue, and assume that there is no place for leadership. Each person must abase themselves and never step to the front. But Jesus is simply putting things in the right perspective. Serve first, then lead, and your leadership is itself about service. Leading and serving at the same time is difficult, because it gives one the greatest opportunity for selfishness and for “lording it over people.” Those who have no power cannot be tempted by it. Jesus is looking for people who can lead and serve simultaneously, people who can be trusted with power because they will use it appropriately

    45For the Son of man didn’t come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many people.”

    See Isaiah 43:3-4, 23-24. Many scholars believe this saying was built on those passages. Some also cite Isaiah 53:10. See Bock, p. 309n15. Compare also 2 Corinthians 5:15.

    46Now they came to Jericho, and as he was coming out of Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd, the son of Timaeus, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar sat by the road.

    A seemingly chance encounter becomes the opportunity both for a healing and for teaching.

    47And when he had heard that Jesus the Nazarene was coming, he cried out and said, “Son of David, Jesus, have mercy on me.”

    The opportunity must be taken. We are left with the implication that had this man not cried out, he would have been missed.

    48And some folks began to rebuke him so that he would shut up. 49But Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Calm down! He’s calling you!” 50But throwing his outer garment off he stood up and went to Jesus.

    Opposition doesn’t stop him. He keeps on crying out. Jesus hears, cares, and calls out to him. Can you be stopped by individual need?

    There is sometimes a disdain for “meanwhile” ministries even on the part of those working for the reorganization of society. Acts of mercy and charity tend to become only “palliatives.” They contribute nothing to a new social structure. The individual need is lost sight of in the glow of the far, shining horizon. — IB Exposition on Mark 10:49

    51And Jesus answered him and said, “What do you want me to do?” And the blind man said to him, “Rabbi! I want to see!” 52And Jesus said to him, “Go! Your faith has healed you.” And immediately he began to see and followed him in the way.

    Do you see the contrast here to the disciples? Jesus is teaching a lesson here through the miracle. The most important thing the disciples needed from Jesus at that point was not a change of direction, greater intelligence or the promise of eventual power. They needed to see where they were going. They needed to be prepared. They eventually received that healing, but only after experiencing the depths of despair.

  • Book: In Discordance with the Scriptures

    Though it would be a slight exaggeration, one could call this a history of Bible translation for post-moderns. Rather than focusing heavily on the technical issues as do most books on this topic, it focuses on the political and social elements and emphasizes that Bible translation is not a purely objective and scientific process. Any translation is influenced by the social and theological values of the translators.

    After briefly providing the background on how English Bible translation developed, the author begins looking in detail at the English Revised Version, the forces that shaped it, and the reasons for its successes and failures. The text really comes alive with chapters 4 and 5, dealing with the translation of the RSV and the liberal-conservative controversy that resulted.

    From the historical point of view, this is the key watershed in the history of Bible translation. Before that, even though there were a number of translations, the King James Version was overwhelmingly dominant, and the only competitors that came even close were the ERV and the ASV. The RSV was intended as another general, standard, authorized English Bible to replace the KJV, but Thuesen documents the reasons why it didn’t work. There simply was no organization that could authorize the Bible that would be accepted by all protestants.

    The fight over the RSV also tended to focus on theological more than technical issues. It is these social and theological issues that often drove other Bible translations, such as the New American Standard Bible and the NIV.

    This book is well-researched, extensively footnoted, and well written. The author does ramble just a bit, in my opinion, but generally less than I do, so that’s OK!

    My numerical rating is a 4.

  • More on the Cheri Yecke Story

    Wesley Elsberry has posted some additional information on this story on The Panda’s Thumb, and on his blog in which he states he believes the story is confirmed.

    . . . As far as I am concerned, the Princeton Union-Eagle is vindicated in this matter; at the time that they reported, Cheri Pierson Yecke was indeed saying that teaching “intelligent design” was a decision that local school districts could undertake. Both the quote from the Princeton Union-Eagle and the subsequent criticism I made of Yecke’s position on the issue are upheld by this source.

    Wesley is quite right to point out that Yecke has only to hold a press conference and state her change of view if she no longer supports teaching intelligent design in high school classrooms. If she does still believe it should be taught, that is information the public has a right to know.

    Since this whole issue resulted from Yecke’s use of ReputationDefender to look for negative material, I would like to call attention to this article on MSNBC, which reports on the other side of such activity. There can be a problem with negative information overwhelming the positive. It’s also quite possible for positive information to overwhelm necessary and important negative information. Search providers such as Google are right to battle spammy methods that try to get positive information into the highest search slots.

    There is an apparent bias in the MSNBC story toward “cleaning up” negative information. But there is no guarantee that the negative information someone wants to clean up is actually inaccurate. Accurate negative information, especially for those involved in the public sector, is important. The search engines cannot guarantee accuracy; they can only aim for relevance.

    In an age when information can be readily disseminated by just about anyone, and accessed just as easily, each reader needs to beware of lies.

  • Scientists Thinking about Intelligent Design

    In an extraordinarily inane post over on Uncommon Descent, titled The best evolutionary biologists think about intelligent design, S. Cordova tells us that, well, as the title says, the best evolutionary biologists are thinking about intelligent design. This strikes me as rather like the child who provokes his parents into punishing him just because he wants attention. He is getting attention after all.

    Here’s why it looks like that to me.

    1. He references “Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Ken Miller, Sean Carroll, and Michael Ruse.” Why? Well, as he continues, they have all reviewed Michael Behe’s new book. Their reviews? They systematically demolished it. You will find links to Jerry Coyne’s review, Behe’s ineffectual response, and Coyne’s response along with some dot connecting info here. Yep! Evolutionary scientists are thinking about intelligent design and they think it’s not science.
    2. He references an article in Medical Systems Biology, in which he places ellipses right after the line “intelligent design is making headway in the laboratory…” Guess what the next sentence is in the article. “In this case, though, the designer turned out to be just some clever scientist.” Wow! It’s hard to even consider this deception, it’s so weak.
    3. The last one? Well, they have found a copy of Darwin’s Black Box on the shelf of John Maynard-Smith. Hmmm! You’ll find that I have a considerable library of young earth creationist literature. Does that mean I think it’s serious? No. It simply means I believe that many people are led astray by it.

    Rather an odd way to “defend” ID, isn’t it?

  • Absolute Theology; Flexible Science

    One of the interesting things I note about creationists of various stripes is that they display a tremendous flexibility in interpreting physical data, they generally take hold of one approach to Biblical interpretation and nothing can move them. One of the clearest explicit statements of this position comes in the first three chapters of Kurt Wise’s book Faith, Form, and Time, and especially the second chapter “The Biblical Standard.” The entire section is titled “God’s Word on the Matter.” Wise is to be congratulated for stating his foundation honestly.

    One of the critical issues for Wise is the meaning of “kind,” to which he dedicates a chapter (“After Their Kind”). This is an area where old earth creationists and young earth creationists share a common problem. I’m not planning to delve into the whole area of baraminology, which I think will ultimately be fruitless, but simply to use it as a starting example of theological inflexibility combined with a view of the data that is so flexible it could almost be described as “formless and void.” I blogged about this some time ago, and simply noted that if one took “after their kind” phenomenologically, something that many very conservative Biblical interpreters will advocate for certain obviously non-scientific Biblical statements, one has no problem.

    “After their kind” simply states what we observe to be the truth on a day to day basis. Interpreting this phrase to mean that there is somewhere a barrier that genetic variation cannot cross is a variety of theological inflexibility. Inflexibly holding to a particular view of “after their kind” creationists are then forced to be hopelessly flexible with the physical data in order to create boundaries that do not appear to exist.

    I was reminded again about this when reading the Summary of Reasons To Believe’s Testable Creation Model and a response to it, and even a negative response from the young earth side. It’s especially interesting to see the young earth and old earth people tear one anther apart over Biblical interpretation. Old earth creationists are more flexible in their Biblical interpretation and more willing to hear scientific evidence, but they are still demonstrate the quality I’m discussing.

    It is not just the literary genre of Genesis that is taken as obvious, though that is the starting point. A certain set of Christian doctrines is also beyond discussion, and the assumption is made that if Genesis is not taken as narrative history, those doctrines will also fail.

    Let me just take an example from the Answers in Genesis document 10 Dangers of Theistic Evolution. (I have taken the document form ChristianAnswers.net, but its origin is on AiG.) It would be fun to take this document apart point by point, simply because it so blatantly misrepresents evolution in general and theistic evolution in particular. Today, however, I want to note only one point, from their point #6:

    Theistic evolution does not acknowledge Adam as the first man, nor that he was created directly from “the dust of the ground” by God (Genesis 2:17). Most theistic evolutionists regard the creation account as being merely a mythical tale, albeit with some spiritual significance. However, the sinner Adam and the Savior Jesus are linked together in the Bible – Romans 5:16-18. Thus any view which mythologizes Adam undermines the biblical basis of Jesus’ work of redemption.

    Even in theistic evolution, there will be a “first man” somewhere, and there is no difficulty whatsoever with calling that first man “Adam.” Of course “created directly from ‘the dust of the ground’” is precisely where the disagreement is, but while they include that special item in their objection, they don’t explain how “directly” as opposed to “indirectly” harms the doctrines of the incarnation and redemption, which is what they are trying to defend. I have no numbers on how many theistic evolutionists regard Genesis as a “mythical tale,” but as someone who is a bit cautious with literary terms, I certainly don’t call Genesis 1 “myth” even though it has some elements of myth. Rather, it is theology, and specifically liturgy. As such, it not only has some “spiritual significance,” it is designed to present spiritual truths and to pass them on from generation to generation through worship.

    Creationists seem to think that if humanity took a considerable period of time to appear on the scene, then it is impossible for there to be a fall. But the fall, as described in Genesis, can very easily be understood as a fall from grace in a primitive state. Without the efforts of artists to make it look sort of like a modern nudist camp (with only two people and with trees and hair positioned strategically), all that Genesis implies is a primitive state in which the first humans managed the garden. There is an element here of the rural vs the urban that suggests that the story comes out of the period of early urbanization. One notes that after making himself into the ultimate bad guy, Cain heads off and builds a city (Genesis 4:17). None of this requires that the fall of humanity not be a historical event, though personally I think that this passage should be read with even more flexibility.

    Note that in the same document even progressive creationism (see their point #1) is regarded as dangerous. Thus the extremely strong evidence of an old earth must be disregarded totally in order to maintain a set of beliefs, including a literal garden of Eden, a historical moment of the fall, a “direct” creation of the man, and so forth. All of this is required in order to maintain the belief that Genesis 1 is narrative history.

    And yet with a little bit of flexibility, one could maintain the garden of Eden, as there must be a first human being, and there is nothing to require that God didn’t communicate with that human and direct him to some location. There is also nothing to say that God did that, outside of the Bible read as narrative history, but that’s beside the point. One could then have a historical rebellion by that first couple, followed by, of course, the story of redemption. Evolution does not interfere with the picture at all, unless of course one is incredibly rigid in reading literary materials.

    Essentially if the creationists would exhibit any of the flexibility they show in reinterpreting scientific information when they turn to their Bibles, they would find it easy to construct a doctrinal picture that would be in accord with orthodox Christianity. Unfortunately, for them, facts produced by researchers in the field and the lab are to be treated with less respect than their literal, detailed, interpretations of Biblical texts.

    It’s not the Bible that’s the problem here so much as people who refuse to let the Bible speak in its own way in its own time. In ancient times it spoke to a pre-scientific culture. It could speak today in a scientific culture, but for it to do so, one must be ready to restate its principles in the context of new knowledge and new discoveries. Otherwise it simply becomes a barrier to knowledge.

  • Dinosaurs and the Bible: A Creationists Fantasy

    . . . has moved here. It’s worth a look just for the header picture. The subtitle is “Dinosaurs and the Bible DON’T MIX!!!”