Is Evolution Socially Corrosive?

[beaglelady]

Here is an article on evolution and its critics by former BioLogos writer Karl Giberson. (At one point he was even the leader here.) He now teaches at Stonehill College, a liberal Catholic Institution.

Is Evolution Socially Corrosive?

[fmiddel]

@Eddie

He writes as if “inclusiveness” is a particularly Christian or Biblical value, rather than a modern liberal value, and as if “inclusiveness” is more important than righteousness.

Inclusiveness is a particularly Christian value. To deny this is to miss some significant elements of Jesus’ ministry and some key arguments of Paul as well. I would even argue that righteousness and inclusivity are not incompatible, or opposed so that they must be “held in tension.” It is “unrighteous” to be divisive and non-inclusive when it comes to the family of God.

This is why Jesus says “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” in the context of extending grace and mercy to outsiders just as you would to your family members (something we miss because we read the scripture with our own cultural glasses on–glasses that presume individualism rather than “family identity” or “community identity”).

[fmiddel]

[quote=“Eddie, post:9, topic:4854”]
Yes, but it is not a value that trumps all other values.[/quote]

I’ve already addressed that. Christian inclusivity and righteousness are not at odds.

I agree that Christ was more inclusive than some others of his era regarding women, eating with tax collectors, etc.

Your statement minimizes that absolutely shocking and counter-cultural nature of Jesus’ ministry. It was iconoclastic. They “turned the world upside down” when it came to cultural values.

Yes, he was. You’re arguing against what I didn’t say. I didn’t say “Jesus was all about inclusiveness and nothing else.”

Does “No man comes to Father, except through me?” sound very inclusive of Hindus, Muslims, Taoists, Zoroastrians, etc.? Do you think his inclusiveness would extend (as Giberson’s apparently does, based on more than one statement in his article) to LGBT lifestyles? I don’t think Christ’s inclusiveness had that much in common with modern liberal, secular humanist “different strokes for different folks” and “all value judgments are purely relative” inclusiveness – though to listen to sermons from the pulpits of liberal mainstream denominations you would think there was no difference at all.

It does tend to be difficult when imposing contemporary situations onto Jesus and vice versa. But…to whom does Jesus shut the door? To whom does Jesus say, “You cannot come to the Father through me?”

[quote]I don’t know what you mean by being “divisive.” If one member of a Christian community thinks that premarital sex is wrong, and makes an issue of it, is he being “divisive” because some other members of the community want to engage in premarital sex? If one member of a Christian community thinks that abortion (except in the extreme case where a mother’s life is in danger) is wrong, and makes an issue of it, is she being “divisive” because some other members of the community would like to have guilt-free, shame-free abortions after a night of sexual abandon? The fact is that sometimes righteousness is in tension with “inclusiveness”; inclusiveness as an abstract principle is vacuous, the abdication of all standards lest someone fall short of a standard and feel “excluded.”

That’s kind of what 1 Corinthians is about. Keep in mind that Paul only said to exclude somebody when they had behaved in ways worse than the pagans around them…

So where is the line at which point we divide or exclude?

[fmiddel]

@Eddie

Well, for Paul, “behaving in worse ways” would include LGBT lifestyles. He doesn’t mention them specifically, but it’s quite obvious that terms like fornication and uncleanness, in Paul’s first-century Jewish context, would cover them. So is a Christian in a modern church being “divisive” for saying the church should exclude those lifestyles? Or is the “divisive” person the one who is pushing hard for the church to include those lifestyles?[/quote]

I think you missed my point. Paul only addressed a sexual issue when it was well beyond the mores of the surrounding pagan culture. Homosexuality was not beyond the mores of the surrounding culture. It’s not that Paul “doesn’t care about that”; the point is that excluding somebody was an extreme position. I think the biblical position on sexuality is clear. But at what point do we exclude somebody? Do you exclude the homosexual? What about the fornicator? What about the divorced? What about the glutton and the gossip?

You’re trying to make Jesus into a modern liberal.

If you think that, you have ignored what I posted.

I studied under a historian who knew all the Jewish literature of the period. He argued that while Jesus was surprisingly liberal on some things, he was very conservative and traditional on other things.

“Liberal” and “conservative” are modern constructs and it is anachronistic to impose them on his culture. We should be very…“conservative” in doing so.

His position on divorce, for example, was a hard-line one, not the liberal one accepted by most of the modern Protestant churches which claim to be following Jesus.

Absolutely. But what did he say to the woman at the well? And what was his advice to her?

And Jesus’s remarks on looking lustfully as being equivalent to performing the sin itself certainly have application to the millions of mainline-denomination Christians who without qualm go to watch Hollywood movies with moments of sexual titillation in them. Jesus would have denounced modern liberal churchmanship at least as strongly as he denounced the Pharisees in his day.

And yet he ate with tax collectors. Eating with someone in that culture was a strong and intimate association. Lest you think that collecting taxes “is not that bad” compared to, say, fornication, it was essentially traitorous: working on behalf of the pagans against the holy people, the holy land, and the holy Covenant–collecting money that would be used for the Roman war machine, pagan temples and idols, and potentially wooden crosses on which would be hung the faithful who fought against Rome (crucifixion was reserved for slaves and rebels).

So Jesus had a high (Hillel-like) stance on marriage. But he didn’t exclude the sinners.

I don’t think you’ve responded seriously to my question about other religions. If Christianity were fully “inclusive,” then all those missionaries were wasting their time converting Hindus and Muslims and Amazonian pagans to the faith. If “all roads lead to God” then the Church could simply accept membership in any religious organization, even non-Christian ones, as adequate for salvation. It could be “inclusive.” But historically, it hasn’t been. “Whosoever would be saved…” (Athanasian Creed).

I think you missed my response. I’m not a universalist. Our “inclusion” of others is hardly a guarantee of salvation. Exclusion may prevent an opportunity for that however.

[quote]However, I sense we have gone off-topic from evolution and social corrosion. I don’t know how that happened. But I think we should drop this discussion, unless you would care to start a new topic on it.

Oops, I had already responded and hadn’t gotten this far yet…

[Professormom]

@fmiddel

To whom does Jesus say, “You cannot come to the Father through me?”

I love this sentence.

[BradKramer]

@fmiddel @Eddie OK, this discussion is no longer about evolution or even science and faith generally, so it needs to be continued through private messages or brought back on track.

[Professormom]

This article (with the exception of where it conflates the author’s politics and his thesis) takes the evolution discussion in an interesting direction. It comes back to whether life is a zero sum game. If the “other”, whatever that represents, is given greater value, does that devalue the “original” (for lack of a better term.) If the answer was “yes”, that could radically change our perspective on the effects of evolutionary thinking on society.

I think “no” is a more defensible response because I don’t see it as a zero sum game. I see us as ever striving to be higher, more noble and more holy. And since God is limitless, our capacity to love and find synergy and abundance is not limited by miserly humanness:-)

When any theory capture public attention, it can be viewed as desirable or undesirable by different interest groups. Some of it is simply personality, some of it is a love for drama or conflict. Evolutionary theory can be used for good or evil, as most things. But, as in the Hilter example, if a nut job is going to take an idea and run with it, I see that as a statement about the heart condition of said nut job, rather than a valid assessment of the theory.

We are above the animals, but we are not independent of them. We respect various human groups because they are part of God’s creation, but we do not need to agree with their world views. Evolution demonstrates the connection, without assigning a response. That part is all Jesus.

[beaglelady]

Excellent response!

[Professormom]

Thx, @beaglelady.