D.A. Carson: How Could a Good God Allow Suffering?

D.A. Carson recently gave an excellent lecture/sermon (sermon-lecture?) on what the bible has to say on evil, suffering and God's goodness. If you have an hour, or even an hour and a half to watch the whole thing, it can be found here. He is definitely first-class when it comes to expositing the bible to old-Christians, young-Christians and non-Christians alike ... at the same time ... in my opinion.

Hermeneutical Commitments

John Walton, in his commentary on Genesis, lays down some “commitments” he feels are necessary in approaching the bible, especially when concerns a dicey or heated topic – in this case the topic of gender roles.  He writes:

First, we must make some methodological commitments (italics his) lest we be guilty of dressing up our own desires so that they look like the Bible’s teaching (italics mine).

1.     We must allow the text to pursue its own agenda, not force it to pursue ours.

2.     We must be committed to the intention of the author rather than getting whatever mileage we can out of the words he used.

3.     We must resist overinterpreting the text in order to derive the angle we are seeking.

4.     We must be willing to have our minds changed by the text—that is at least part of the definition of submitting ourselves to the authority of the text (italics mine again).

5.     We must be willing to accept the inevitable disappointment if the text does not address or solve the questions we would like answers to.

….

Second, we must make some personal commitments (italics his) to one another as members of God’s family.

1.     We must be willing to preserve a godly perspective on the issue and accord Christian respect to those we disagree with, refusing to belittle, degrade, accuse, or insult them. Ad hominem arguments and other varieties of “negative campaigning” should be set aside.

2.     We must not allow our differences of opinion to overshadow and disrupt the effectiveness of ministry and our Christian witness.

3.     We must decry the arrogance that accompanies a feeling of self-righteousness and portrays others as somehow less godly because of the position they hold.

….

Third, we must be willing to make some values commitments (italics his) to take a stand against the distorted values of our society that often fuel the debate.

1.     We must determine that individual “rights” and the pursuit of them will not take precedence over more important values, as they have in our society at large.

2.     We must resist any desire to hoard or attain power, though our society and our fallenness drive us to pursue it above all else.

3.     We must constantly strive to divest ourselves of self, though we live in a “What about me?” world.

4.     We must accept that ministry is not to be considered a route to self-fulfillment; it is a service to God and his people.

No Answers in Genesis

Lest the bold title of this post be over-read and lead to serious misunderstanding, this is about using the bible to make scientific assertions, not about denying the truth-value of Genesis.

Over at Thinking Christian, Tom Gilson posted (awhile ago) some very good thoughts on putting the creation-evolution debate in perspective with regard to its necessity for Orthodoxy (to loosely paraphrase).  In essence, it’s ok to say we don’t know when we don’t know and it’s important to recognize when we don’t know.  Concerning this debate, it’s important for Christians to realize that the debates involved in evolution are much more complex and involve much more sophisticated analysis that most people know/understand – perhaps especially among those who feel the need to voice strong opinion.  To this I say, “Well put”.

With that prelude, it was not too many decades ago that the creation-evolution debate was in full flame within the church.  Recently, it has rekindled due to some goings-on with Bruce Waltke and other high profile biblical, especially OT, scholars publicly admitting that evolutionary theory is not incompatible (note the logic of the negatives) with Genesis 1 (the incident is a little more complex but that seems to be the nub of it.)  This has recently created a flurry of re-affirmation of the “plain reading” of Genesis 1 in asserting a 6-day creation view as biblical (i.e. orthodox).

This is no small issue, often times creating considerable division between those who hold scripture as canonical for life, yet see little reason why science should be so wrong in their claims of origins (perhaps theistic evolution should be the answer), and those who plainly see that origins are clearly spelled out in scripture, are plainly contradicted by science, and therefore clearly denies God by denying Scripture.  These are by no means the extremes of the spectrum, but such disparity can often lead the first group to view the latter as perhaps somewhat fundamentalistic, and at least a little narrow minded in their approach to scripture.  Meanwhile the latter group often sees the former as compromising God’s word, as not truly or fully submitting to the authority of scripture, and perhaps being a bit too influenced by the liberal thought of academia.   Along the lines of Tom Gilson, I think this calls for checking both our judgmentalism and our too-small orthodoxy box at the door.  Of course some if not many fit the caricatures of each camp, but we suffer flawed thinking if we think that it’s necessarily the case.

At its best, what seems to be going on is a division between those who do not want the Christian faith compromised by assenting to a theory that really wants to explain away God and those who want to find some sort of allowance that science, though (generally) denying God, is objective enough to read some truth out of God’s “natural revelation”.  I think there is a way out of this dichotomy and room for parts of both.

First, some considerations towards the first group:

1) It almost invariably happens in the quest to understand Scripture that what Scripture asserts to be true and what’s incidental to the assertion (historical, cultural, etc.) are confused to some degree or another. Take as an example Job 38:4 and 6 which reflect the view common in its day picturing an actual foundation (pillars) holding up a flat disc called earth.  Now, it’s been well proven – not least by astronauts – that the earth is round and doesn’t have an actual foundation. I can’t help but chuckle picturing a conversation with someone back in the day explaining that the earth is not just round but actually just suspended in … hmmm … Nothingness? Blackness? Space? If you’ve seen The Emperor’s New Groove, in the words of Kronk: “Riiight.”   So, anyways, the understanding of the author used by the bible, picturing a flat earth or pillars holding up the earth, may be wrong but that doesn’t make the bible wrong in any real sense because the text isn’t asserting the fact but using the incidental cultural view to proclaim God’s sovereign majesty in creation. [Update: I changed this sentence slightly since my wife informed me that what I wrote isn’t quite what I meant.]    The earth still exists no matter what cultural viewpoint is standing on it … and God created it.

What’s happening is that the author is correctly proclaiming an attribute of God through an erroneous astrological viewpoint, which God didn’t see fit to correct.  The confusion between assertion and incident is natural when one simply doesn’t understand the world-view of the original author, something inevitable in finite and fallen humans.  This confusion is often decreased when considerable effort is made to understand the cultural-historical background(s) of the text, knowing that what the text means is more important than what the text means to me.  Likewise the confusion is increased when no care or thought is taken to understanding that there is an author before a reader.  When this happens, it’s easy to ask the wrong questions, questions foreign to the world of the author, and so get the wrong answers, making the bible affirm something it didn’t intend to affirm.  Examples of this abound throughout history. The peoples of the OT, for example, assumed slavery, so that if one tries one can find all sorts of Scripture references that “support” slavery. After all, even in the NT Paul in Ephesians 6:5 ff commands that slaves obey their masters, not run away, and masters are to treat their slave with goodwill, not threatening them.  If slavery is such a bad thing, why doesn’t Paul abolish it then and there? … Not too many would argue along these lines these days, but would probably sound quite ludicrous.  But cultural incidentals have been used also to affirm arranged marriages, inferiority of women, geocentrism, flat earth, etc., some of which were long standing dogmas of the church.  But the bible can, and often does, make profound theological assertions within a given cultural framework without asserting the cultural framework. Great care needs to be taken when using the bible to assert a cultural issue.

2) At the same time, when #1 above isn’t kept in view, it can be easy to take current cultural frameworks and agendas and transpose them back on the text.  The scientific inquiry of today is far removed from the cultural framework of Jesus’ day, let alone Genesis 1.  But when something comes along that threatens the theistic assertions of the church in the name of objective scientific inquiry, and there is little perspective of the actual cultural framework of, say, Genesis 1, then it can be easy to develop a counter-argument in the name of Scripture while being far from it.  The problem is that we’re still playing the scientific game and using non-scientific tools.  A new playing field is needed.

3) When someone comes along who doesn’t see the scientific explanation as satisfactory and tries to correct the understanding of the text (especially because he/she places high value on it), tensions can arise because the major weapon is being removed from the arsenal.  And it seems a better understanding has come along, defended by some highly respected biblical scholars.  Genesis 1 is using imagery/symbolism common in its day to portray God creating the cosmos, with the earth at its center, to be his temple/dwelling place from which he orders the cosmos.  Whether or not the 6 (or 7) days are literal is a question that already strains the text.  The symbolism and structure was common in its day and had something much different to assert than a precise literal accounting of the order of creation, a scientific journal log of sorts. 

Now, it would take a good post or two to really defend the whole of Genesis 1, but a fair survey of the parallel literature of Genesis would find, for example, that 7’s abound to a degree that transcends the literal.  Its usage seems to usually concern something like “A full or complete cycle of time or effort sufficient for its due significance.”  So, for example, we read in the Epic of Gilgamesh that Enkidu has sex with a harlot 6 days and 7 nights – sufficient to tame him from his feral ways.  Afterwards he drinks 7 jars of beer – sufficient to become a man.  Gilgamesh himself builds an ark with 7 decks and completes it in 7 days.  The ark ran aground in 6 days and he releases a dove on the 7^th.  When Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh weeps for 6 days and 7 nights.  There are numerous other examples in Ancient Near East (ANE) literature where 7^th day refers to the climax of a cataclysmic cosmic event or the completion of a temple dedication ritual.

It’s possible that the 7 days in Genesis are meant to be literal, but the above indicates that the point of the text lies far from the point.  That the text obviously means 7 days misses the point.  The author obviously speaks of 7 days in a literary sense inasmuch as he wants to portray his point.  What it appears the author wishes to portray is a vivid description of perfection and completeness with which God creates everything that exists.

In the end, perhaps it really is 7 literal days that Genesis 1 portrays. But the meaning intended to be conveyed lies so far from this that it’s hardly a point that should delineate orthodoxy.  One can be reasonably faithful to the text without taking 7 literal days.

All this hardly means things are dandy with the other perspective.  In my opinion science, though an important endeavor, is not all it’s cracked up to be.  I’ll leave this to another post.


[Update: Upon further reflection, I'd add that there's also no need to exclude a literal 7 days just because there is greater symbolism evident.It may very well be that a literal understanding actually establishes the symbolism. If God exists, then it's His world after all. We are hardly in a place to judge otherwise.]

More Global Warming Fiasco

Recently Dr. Hal Lewis, a prominent member of the American Physical Society (APS), resigned from his society membership.  You can read all about it here at the Telegraph.  Note his reason:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.

Wow.  Those are strong words.  He goes on to explain that in the aftermath of ClimateGate, nothing was done by the APS.

The APS followed up with a response to his resignation letter here.

Dr. Lewis, and colleagues Dr. Roger Cohen and Dr. Will Happer, responded to/deconstructed their response here with an addendum by Dr. Cohen.

Now, the resignation of a high profile member, and support from a few colleagues, does not in and of itself indicate something wrong with the system they seek to separate from, though it is suggestive.  There are plenty of respectable quacks out there, let alone respectable people, who simply become disenchanted, causing an unjustifiable separation from something more flawed than previously realized.

However, the follow-up deconstruction by Dr. Lewis hints to me that here is a man who is acting fairly out of a relatively reasonable assessment of the situation and is reasonably justified in his criticism and denouncement.  I think this is just one of many instances of a pandemic in this country of corrupt political and economic entities who seek control and wealth by manipulation and scare tactics.  This calls for a mindset of critical realism instead of the naiveté so rampant in this country.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Blogging time has been hard to come by in the last few weeks given holidays, sickness, tiredness, and busy prep for leading a bible study on Genesis.  I’m hoping soon to do a couple of posts on the creation-evolution debate but in the meantime I read a very incisive quote while reading John Walton’s commentary on Genesis.  He quotes Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

Romans 1:28 comes to mind … God help us.

World Christians

D.A. Carson, in his book The Cross and Christian Ministry, in commenting on 1 Cor. 9:19-27, concerning many Christians, states:  

     

      Instead of feeling that their most important citizenship is in heaven, and that they are just passing through down here on their way “home” to the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb. 12:22-23, they become embroiled with petty priorities that constitute an implicit denial of the lordship of Christ.

      What we need, then, are world Christians—not simply American Christians or British Christians or Kenyan Christians, but world Christians. By “world Christians,” I am referring to Christians … of whom the following things are true:

      Their allegiance to Jesus Christ and his kingdom is self-consciously set above all national, cultural, linguistic, and racial allegiances.

      Their commitment to the church, Jesus’ messianic community, is to the church everywhere, wherever the church is truly manifest, and not only to its manifestation on home turf.

      The see themselves first and foremost as citizens of the heavenly kingdom and therefore consider all other citizenship a secondary matter.

      As a result, they are single-minded and sacrificial when it comes to the paramount mandate to evangelize and make disciples.

I don’t know much about Christians in the UK or Kenya, but a great many Christians here in the States, many political activists notwithstanding, would do well to consider these words.

A Little Christmas Perspective

Rachel Evans has an interesting post on her blog with some insightful thoughts on the misdirected fervor of many Christians this time of year.  Some of the points may be a little overstated, but I think they're worth some reflection.