As I grew up in a homeschool family, educated by faithful, conservative Christian parents, my learning included a lot of education in Creation science. Teaching in this vein is enthusiastically received by many who have been and are being equipped to respond to the intellectual challenges of our post-Darwin world. When scientists with degrees put together observations to craft sound arguments for a worldview that falls in line with the Genesis account, we find new courage to face an establishment of scientific scholars and professional educators who adamantly insist that evolutionary theory answers the question of human origins and treat anyone who dares to bring up other options as ignorant obscurantists. I am grateful for those who have worked hard to show that the Bible and science are not irreconcilable.
At the peak of the modernist assault on Christianity, fundamentalists had to respond to the great assertion that "science has proven the Bible wrong."(And even those of us who cringe at that term and quickly substitute terms like "evangelical" that have less negative stereotypes attached would have been proud to call ourselves fundamentalists in that day.)Marshaling the scientific evidence for a created world rather than an evolved world to show that it's not quite so ridiculous as scientific scholars and scholars of higher criticism would have you think. I heard enough good lectures during my formation as a thinker that it's pretty natural to my mind to take Genesis 1 at face value and accept the days as literal days. I'm glad we can have confidence that in accepting the Bible we are not throwing all intelligence out the window. I prefer reasoned faith to blind faith. (Sorry, Kierkegaard)I hope that we have come far enough that we can now hear sermons from texts about the glory of God's creation that focus on the text and what it conveys about God's power and majesty. The text of Genesis is not meant to be a springboard into a lecture on creation science, and the figurative language of poetry about nature is meant to paint pictures on the canvas of your mind, not describe scientific realities.
Even as many struggle to break the stalemate in the battle to allow teachers in public education (at any level) to question evolutionary theory, new challenges to the authority of scripture come up. The most popular objection in my experience has been that the Bible we have "isn't really what was written. How do we know what's been changed from the original?" So wonderful...just when Christian (and non-Christian) thinkers are putting together some really good arguments against evolution so that I can hold to inerrancy and not be viewed as complete ignoramus because I accept the Creation account, the objection changes to something that does a complete end-run around that issue. My neatly-wrapped package of ideas - the original documents of Scripture were inerrant, and plenty of credible scientists are fine with its account - has been unwrapped and the contents tossed aside as unconvincing and uninteresting. In this case, why does it matter that the autographs were innerant? Nobody has any idea what they actually said, because surely the text was corrupted and changed and selectively edited since then.
The generational thinking that caused the questions to change is fascinating to watch. Modernity said, "Progress, new ideas, and new research have the answers." So when Darwin's new research came out, this gave a clear basis for rejecting the Biblical account. The truly intelligent people went with the new, scientific answers. The Bible simply wasn't new enough to keep up with intellectualism.
When perspectivalism shook up some of the tenets of modernism, along with it came a craving for that which is authentic, pure, and back to the original. Now the Bible isn't quite old enough to be accepted. A.D. 367? Athanasius, you're a cool guy, but you lived a little too long after Jesus, Peter and Paul to really be able to say what their teachings were like. Then you get hundreds of years of medievial catholicism holding responsibility to preserve the text. What could have happened then? If I don't eat all that processed food because it's full of preservatives, covered with high fructose corn syrup, and touched up with synthetic dye instead of locally-grown, organic real food, why would I take anything less than the very parchment on which Luke scrawled his historical accounts as real, authentic, from-the-source revelation? Tell me about autographs being inerrant all you want...blah blah blah...how do you know all the other gospels written weren't the actual authentic ones?
Okay, I've written enough to raise this question. More thoughts to come...
Showing posts with label apologetics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apologetics. Show all posts
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Friday, December 12, 2008
Being spiritual...and being postmodern
Sorry for the recent inactivity - finals week kept me kinda busy, but I know a lot of you reading were in the same boat. I want to include a little more on the "spiritual" conversation that Austin started. I was reading some Jonathan Edwards this summer and ran across his definition. The quote is from an updated version of his work (kind of the Message:Remix version of Edwards, or maybe the CEV), so you don't get the fun of wading through complicated sentence structures and archaic language like you normally would with Edwards. Sorry to disappoint. In "Religious Affections" (as edited by James R. Houston) he said:
"In the New Testament, persons or things are termed spiritual in relation to the Spirit of God. 'Spirit' is the word that is used to signify the third person in the Trinity. It is therefore substantive of what the Scriptures mean by spiritual...Thus, it is only in relationship to the Spirit of God and His influences that persons and things are called spiritual."
So I guess that we can look to fruit of the Spirit (in character) and expression of the gifts of the Spirit (in service) as well as the desire for and application of spiritual truth as things involved in growing spiritually. In speaking to those outside the church, this will need to be clearly defined, though. They may just as easily think you're going to Yelm to consult a medium or learning to connect with the environment when you talk about being spiritual.
Concerning postmodernism: I love how just saying this word makes us as evangelicals feel like we're relevant. I keep watching the youth culture of our country to see whether they are going to continue to progress in postmodern thinking or react against it. Probably just when the church learns to speak effectively to postmodernism, we'll realize that it's past and a new trend has taken it's place. But this is job security for Christian thinkers, eh?
But right now we have a culture using this system as a grid for interpreting reality. Or so they claim. In fact, I think the skepticism and subjectivity is applied to morals, religion and literature, but not to decisions of everyday life. If you want to see a postmodern thinker abandon his or her commitment to skepticism, try questioning evolutionary theory or the science that indicates global warming is in danger of wrecking the world and is man-caused. These things, which are based on extrapolations of data from the present into the past or future, don't seem to be questioned much in the secular, postmodern academic climate. To live everyday life requires making a large number of assumptions that show people operate not with a mindset of absolute uncertainty, but have a range of possibilities that they accept as plausible, and others they write off as ridiculous.
We ought to be advocates to the postmodern world of a range of plausible options for reality that allows us to eliminate others as implausible. There must be room for interpretive differences when we approach Scripture and religious matters in general, but within a certain range. There is room for warranted confidence, even if their isn't for objective certainty.
I'm not really responding to Austin's post above, but giving other thoughts on the topic, since he brought it up. If we take the good elements he mentioned in our approach to theology and combine them with an apologetic stance that refuse to deny the possibility of knowing God as revealed, not as we make him up according to our perspectives, and of being able to accept God's authority on moral matters, although we can't be very certain based on our own sin-tainted reasoning, then we are in good stead.
Historic orthodox Christianity is based on historical facts communicated in literary form, however, and we can't allow our theology to be divorced from facts, and thus we must be able to note our interpretive presuppositions so that we will not be ruled by them, but not allow the fact that people have presuppositions take away our right to claim warranted and reasoned belief that cannot be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, but is certain enough to live our lives by.
"In the New Testament, persons or things are termed spiritual in relation to the Spirit of God. 'Spirit' is the word that is used to signify the third person in the Trinity. It is therefore substantive of what the Scriptures mean by spiritual...Thus, it is only in relationship to the Spirit of God and His influences that persons and things are called spiritual."
So I guess that we can look to fruit of the Spirit (in character) and expression of the gifts of the Spirit (in service) as well as the desire for and application of spiritual truth as things involved in growing spiritually. In speaking to those outside the church, this will need to be clearly defined, though. They may just as easily think you're going to Yelm to consult a medium or learning to connect with the environment when you talk about being spiritual.
Concerning postmodernism: I love how just saying this word makes us as evangelicals feel like we're relevant. I keep watching the youth culture of our country to see whether they are going to continue to progress in postmodern thinking or react against it. Probably just when the church learns to speak effectively to postmodernism, we'll realize that it's past and a new trend has taken it's place. But this is job security for Christian thinkers, eh?
But right now we have a culture using this system as a grid for interpreting reality. Or so they claim. In fact, I think the skepticism and subjectivity is applied to morals, religion and literature, but not to decisions of everyday life. If you want to see a postmodern thinker abandon his or her commitment to skepticism, try questioning evolutionary theory or the science that indicates global warming is in danger of wrecking the world and is man-caused. These things, which are based on extrapolations of data from the present into the past or future, don't seem to be questioned much in the secular, postmodern academic climate. To live everyday life requires making a large number of assumptions that show people operate not with a mindset of absolute uncertainty, but have a range of possibilities that they accept as plausible, and others they write off as ridiculous.
We ought to be advocates to the postmodern world of a range of plausible options for reality that allows us to eliminate others as implausible. There must be room for interpretive differences when we approach Scripture and religious matters in general, but within a certain range. There is room for warranted confidence, even if their isn't for objective certainty.
I'm not really responding to Austin's post above, but giving other thoughts on the topic, since he brought it up. If we take the good elements he mentioned in our approach to theology and combine them with an apologetic stance that refuse to deny the possibility of knowing God as revealed, not as we make him up according to our perspectives, and of being able to accept God's authority on moral matters, although we can't be very certain based on our own sin-tainted reasoning, then we are in good stead.
Historic orthodox Christianity is based on historical facts communicated in literary form, however, and we can't allow our theology to be divorced from facts, and thus we must be able to note our interpretive presuppositions so that we will not be ruled by them, but not allow the fact that people have presuppositions take away our right to claim warranted and reasoned belief that cannot be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, but is certain enough to live our lives by.
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