That is a clear statement of the evolutionary creationist position. But it begs the question. If God’s involvement is not detectable, how can God’s eternal power and divine nature be seen in what he has made? How can the heavens declare the glory of God if his involvement cannot been detected?
And why would God hide his active involvement?
I deleted my previous reply, as it seems more prudent to reply to the original poster. This is a particularly important statement:
I believe this to be true. It isn’t that God has hidden His involvement. The Fall rendered us incapable of seeing God’s continual involvement by confining us to a temporal existence.
So when it says that Yahweh is a God Who hides Himself, it’s actually talking about our inability to see?
I wouldn’t presume to second guess the way you think about Creation, but since you are asking questions like this, perhaps some of my thoughts will help you see that there are diverse ways of arriving at worship of a Creator.
With respect to Romans 1:20, I am a spiritual being in addition to being a physical organism. I can look at a beautiful sunset and say “Wow! That speaks of an awesome Creator”. That part is faith - I cannot fully explain it. I can also delve into the science of sunsets and learn about light, diffraction, water vapour, etc. For that matter, I can probe neurobiology and learn about eyes and brains and the amygdala and oxytocin. This science has great value to humanity. It can explain a lot about why the sunset gives me a sense of wonder. However, even if I was totally unaware of that, I would still say “Wow! That speaks of an awesome Creator”.
I could list examples of deep theorems of mathematics. My spiritual part says “Wow! An awesome Creator designed the universe so that that is true”. But I could also go through the details of a proof. That also has great value, but the details will contain a lot of ordinary steps. (Although one could appreciate beauty in the arc of the proof).
Finally, to relate this back to Evolutionary Biology, I can look at the grandeur of life and say “Wow! That speaks of an awesome Creator”. I can also delve into the scientific Theory of Evolution and see beauty in that. (However I wouldn’t pretend to know those details in the depth of many people on this forum).
A key to being a Christian in more than name only, philosophy or culture, and not just affirming Christian doctrine and principles, is actual experience with God? I would call it factual and real, not just subjective and ‘feelings’ related, even if no one other than yourself is involved. I’ve pointed to some examples in my first post above, and one that I’ve repeated fairly often here is about one of Tim Keller’s parishioners:
Another is Phil Yancey. Nominal Christians and ‘mere professors’ can ‘deconvert’ and lose the faith they never really had.
These are not necessarily my views but many (most?) classical theists believe God knows the future as time is considered is a part of the fabric of creation. A case for this can be made Biblically. Many verses are used such as Ephesians 1:4: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. I flirt with open view theism at times but in the end have no idea which is right. I leave the merit of this view for you to research and consider. But if such is true and God knows the future, can the physical processes that guide the evolution of life ever be unexpected to Him?
The Catholic Church allows for God guided evolution. This does not mean God has to jump in and perform supernatural miracles at every turn. God could but does not necessarily need to.
I think what @Christy quoted from Biologos might satisfy that:
“We believe that God typically sustains the world using faithful, consistent processes that humans describe as “natural laws.” Yet we also affirm that God works outside of natural law in supernatural events, including the miracles described in Scripture. In both natural and supernatural ways, God continues to be directly involved in creation and in human history.”
I would show what she quoted to your pastor and seek further clarification.
And for the record, people can claim God never intervened in evolution or point to apparent gaps claiming that he did. I’d say both views are the result of ignorant intellectual hubris. The latter is dangerous and is usually overturned as more evidence is gathered. The former just overstates the evidence based on faulty logic (we primates love patterns). Science works, so we run with it. It to think we can provide an exhaustive, definitive history of every event of the universe going backwards in the past is silly.
A “natural explanation” is not devoid of God. That is a myth of the modern world. For me natural means the world is ordered because God made it so just as Genesis 1 says and it continues to exist and be upheld and operate as such by His will every instant of its being along with everything else that exists. Kind of comes with the territory of an Omni-maximal being IMHO.
Don’t get bogged down by “randomness” in nature. If reality were truly “random” at its deepest level, science would be difficult. It’s the ordered and consistent nature of the world that allows science to work and be tested.
I’d like to hear how it would go if you checked out the Orthodox!
Or if the Church is truly God’s church and He left us the Holy Spirit after Christ ascended, shouldn’t it have a central authority?
For so many a Christians that central authority is a book…. A collection of paper published and printed by by some modern company after a large team of translators argued about how best to present these ancient Greek and Hebrew works to today’s audience. Before that these many manuscripts had to be gathered, analyzed and reconstructed by teams of textual scholars arguing over the details. Before that these works had to be written, were probably rewritten, copied, read out loud and disseminated (sent all over the church) which had to recognize which of these books (among many options) represents the canon and reject the others.
In the end one can make the same argument about the Bible and sola scripture: it’s a “central authority and . . . roadblock to thoughtful theology.”
How does one exist in any organization without it having some sort of central authority or defining parameters?
Vinnie
This is a big part of why I continue to have a fascination with the number a university friend came up with for the minimum number of interventions God would have to have made to get from a single cell to humans (he claimed seven): it doesn’t rely on gaps, it just looks at the significant characteristics of humans weighed against the observed pattern of evolution.
That was a point made by my first college biology professor who emphasized that all that our explanations are just attempts to discern how God has done things.
I think of this in the same terms as when Israel demanded a king, and God’s response was that they had rejected Him as their king.
Jesus chose twelve, not just one, and the only place where teaching authority is bestowed it is given to the Twelve as a group. I tend to agree with the ancient view that bishops are the successors of the Apostles; I discount all the RC bishops because they were not chosen in the ancient fashion, i.e. by the people of the diocese.
That’s not much of a central authority, but as far as I can see it’s what we have, with the caveat that the Fathers treated the scriptures as the highest authority (in fact the Fathers of a couple of different Councils regarded themselves as competent to decide if the pope was orthodox).
Which verses are you specifically thinking of when you stated this?
“That is a clear statement of the evolutionary creationist position. But it begs the question. If God’s involvement is not detectable, how can God’s eternal power and divine nature be seen in what he has made? How can the heavens declare the glory of God if his involvement cannot been detected?”
And in this case they didn’t demand a king. Jesus, the lord and King of the universe declared Peter the Rock on which the Church is built. The cases are dissimilar as could be. It is strange you would bring up a case so diametrically opposite to the one you are disagreeing with.
The authority of the Bible and Church have a symbiotic relationship. They are intertwined and inseparable. The “Bible fell from heaven” mentality so many Christians have is not intellectually sustainable. Jesus did choose 12 to symbolize the restoration of Israel. From within that 12 he singles out one. Davies and Allison’s magisterial, multivolume commentary on St Matthew has the following
I could quote plenty of ancient Church fathers that so many Christians are all too eager to quote when they say something they want to hear, but I don’t want to derail this thread. Nor do I want to deal with a bunch of what the authors correctly call “special pleading.” So you can have the last word on that if you want it.
Vinnie
Judaism doesn’t have a central authority. I see this advantageous when it comes to maintaining the assertion that “All truth is God’s truth”. This would allow churches to quickly adapt to new information. I do agree however without a central authority or common belief it does make it to difficult to become part of a faith. I often find myself in analysis paralysis when provided with too many options.
I recall hearing an exposition of Matthew 16:18 where in “you, Peter”, as pointing with a forefinger, was a little stone or pebble, and in “this rock”, the Lord was referring to himself as with his thumb, a boulder or consolidated rock. That is not contrary to Jesus being the cornerstone the builders rejected and a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. Coincidently, perhaps, the latter are from 1 Peter 2:8.
Yes to both. To many people, God hides in plain sight.
Exactly.
The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”
Matthew 13:10
The verses following answer.
Such an interpretation is possible if you want to ignore the literary structure and word plays that are present in the section itself and invent extraneous details that are not in the section . I prefer to take what is actually in the text more seriously than such speculations that add a lot of details not in the text. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? The most obvious and straightforward interpretation is staring us right in the face.
Another screenshot
Rome did, and you have their propaganda right above. Rome insisted they be king over the church – rejecting God from being king over the church.
But He didn’t – the only pledge of teaching authority goes to the Apostles as a group.
I have no idea on how you are coming up with such a distinction. Peter is the Rock upon which the Church (all of it) is built. That includes all ministries and gifts of the Church proper. Trying to filter out “teaching ministries” is just bizarre. It was first requested not by the people, not by Rome, not by Constantine. It was declared to be so quite directly and unequivocally by God the Son. Take up any disagreements with Him.
And there were only 11 apostles during the great commission, not 12.
Vinnie
From my expansive understanding of the Greek, it doesn’t look like the declensions of the respective nouns prohibit that reading. 
But I really, really want to be a critical scholar.
Dale
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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