Preserving Orthodoxy & Honoring Scientific Reality

Faith & Science Conversation
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Many? Not all? A perfect sacrifice for what? A ransom to whom?

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If you are serious, I suggest reading a catechism from a mainline church.

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I’m deadly serious and what good would that do? What do any of them, or you, know that I don’t?

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Rowing back slightly, the text says:

Matthew 16:21 [ Jesus Predicts His Death ] From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

Jesus believed in divinely and humanly faithful human ignorance that He had to do the Father’s will did He not?

I want to make this work beaglelady. Desperately. But it cannot work grammatico-historically. And this site is riven with that dead, deadly hermeneutic, or the 80% dead right hand of it, where the text is as meant as it’s conservatively, literally, linguistically possible to be; false orthodoxy preserved in aspic. Formalin. The stark, pre-modern, enculturated ghastliness of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (it’s obvious although dishonest liberals refuse to see it) permeated Jesus’ fully human mind unless He were divinely intelligent, subtle, layered in knowing. And He wasn’t. Not in this. He believed. In His perichoretic, utterly divinely suffused utter humanity.

I suspect that you are such a liberal : )

We HAVE to explore Jesus’ epistemology honestly.

We HAVE to honour scientific (rational, ontological) reality, to work out the noumenon, the ding an sich of the reality behind incarnation, in the mind of God.

We HAVE to love God with all of our minds.

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It would seem that Martin is in need of an English translator … I’ll attempt it here.

Attempted translation: Martin wants to believe a workable theory of atonement - and penal or substitutionary atonement fails. Badly. Some liberal Christians are still disingenuously trying to make it work, though. Martin suggests that even Jesus was not aware of (much less promoting) this failed theory of atonement.

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Fairy Nuff.

Aye, no atonement theory is true. But the at-one-ment still happened and it certainly involved sacrifice, submission, punishment, violence, abuse, injustice, horror, pain, evil, abandonment, fear, ignorance, faith, forgiveness, hope, solidarity, love.

It’s not that I want to believe that, I have to, I have no choice.

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Currently I’m halfway through chapter 2 which outlines the theory of evolution.

My first impressions are that he is probably one of the most charitable writers I have read in sometime. As he assess Christian objections to evolution he regularly warns the reader against rejecting them without a fair hearing and whilst also warning the reader against excepting evolutionary conclusions uncritically.

Also, whilst he unashamedly points to the Scientific problems (as he sees then) with a YEC position. He is also not afraid to highlight the interpretive problems for Reformed Christians accepting evolutionary science.

Finally, it is great to see both Christian and non-Christian sources used to explain evolutionary theory.

So far a very promising start.

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I suspect that you are a white male fundagelical. Biologos elite!

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Then hopefully I’m as wrong as yourself beaglelady. Although 30 years ago. You were right. The Biologos elite! Ha! I view them from the left where I viewed them from the right. They don’t change. My view has been augmented.

And might one ask ones view on my proposition of Jesus’ assumption of PSA?

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I do agree that the first thing required , or one of them anyways, would be to define what is original sin.

When I look back throughout history original sin seemed to first start off with this focus on unbaptized infants. The belief seemed to have been that original sin meant that everyone was born as little sinner and already guilty of the sins of Adam and that you needed to practice infant baptism because if the infant died before baptism it would go to purgatory and suffer a blissful suffering until made clean and then go to heaven.

Over the centuries the purpose of baptism within many churches have changed from how someone enters into a covenant with God and became nothing more than a symbol to show you accepted Jesus. Along with that changed the need for infants to be baptized and the idea of original sin though similar changed more into a concept that we are all born with the sin nature and that the sin nature is a byproduct of sin entering the world.

I disagree. I think sin is a byproduct of the law. Sin has always been around. But it was not recognized as sin before God commanded it as sin.

Romans 5:12-14 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned— 13 for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. 14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the offense of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.

On the larger focus though I don’t find it necessary for a correct view to be the view made by people in the past. Plus to preserve orthodoxy I think it’s almost useless as well. We have multiple views on what’s scripture. The Protestant bible is different form the Catholic bible and both bibles mention the book of Jasher and mentions the prophecies that Enoch made but neither Torah or compilation contains those books. There are books with those names, but they are rejected because it did not fit into the views that some councils had hundreds of years ago and more. Then even within groups using the same bible there are different manuscripts they are based on. The Septuagint and the Masoretic and even then once you have the same Torah based off of the same manuscripts you run into the issue of did the Jewish community use the paradigms within the Babylonian or Jewish talmud.

Which idea is more orthodoxy to those alive 1500 years ago? Saying a prayer to be saved by Jesus or being baptized into jesus? How do those compare to modern concept and things like a emotional response to the gospel and that realization found in those emotions without action means salvation. The historical view of scripture for many things depends on which time period you’re looking at and who sect within that time period.

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Thanks for posting that nice book review, by Richard Mouw.

Thanks for this summary, Paul,
I guess I need to read the book. Sounds interesting. I just added it to my reading list. I am particularly interested in how he interprets the original sin / cosmic fall ideas that you mention, because those seem to be issues that come up a lot in my discussions with people who do not believe in human evolution.

The other topic that makes people uncomfortable with human evolution is the idea that evolution would detract from the idea of the image of God, which could come from a de novo creation of Adam and Eve. Thus people often prefer seeing Adam and Eve as a first couple. Although I personally don’t think a first and only couple view would be necessary, I could see how that concession would create challenges for some people, so I’d like to hear more about what the book says on that topic.

That sounds encouraging!
Would love to hear more of your thoughts as you continue to work through the book, Liam.

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In his book “Reformed Theology & Evolutionary Theory,” Gijsbert van den Brink proposes that acceptance of evolutionary theory “does not force us to jettison the classical Christian notion of the Fall.” . . . “Here we may find the most profound theological motive for holding on to the notion of a historical Fall: it is not just ‘because the Bible says so,’ but because without such a notion we end up with a non-Christian worldview that is either deeply pessimistic or utopian. If the intrusion of sin and evil in the world is a serious but contingent phenomenon, however, then we can be redeemed from it without losing our human identity. Thus, we may be happy that the Fall is ‘only’ historical, because that means that our fallenness is contingent and accidental rather than essential and eternal. The Fall is not just our gradually emerging awareness of the fact that we are sinners and have been sinners all along. Rather, it is our willful and contingent—but, in the end, redeemable—choice for evil over against the good to which God enabled and summoned us.” (p. 180, 185-6) He sees Adam and Eve as representatives of the first group of evolving human beings that could be addressed by God in personal communication.

Regarding the image of God in the context of evolutionary theory, van den Brink opts for a theological account of human uniqueness rather than a biological one. He suggests that “the biblical notion of the image of God should be understood either in functional or in relational terms. . . . According to the functional view, it is the divinely conferred responsibility or function to take care of creation that constitutes the image of God.” (p. 151) According to the relational view, “we are also the only beings that are addressed by God so that we might know this, and so that we might live in loving relationship with one another as well as with God (Gen. 1:28).” (p. 154) “Thus, God bestowed his image on two people out of many—presumably Neolithic farmers around ten thousand years ago—who then received the calling to serve and worship him, just like Abram and Sarai would later receive a special calling from among their contemporaries. It was at this stage of human history that the Fall took place, when the same Neolithic couple that had received God’s image started to sin.” (p. 188)

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Thank you for that wonderful summary, Paul.
That was very helpful! I will have to get a copy of the book for myself.

Best,
Michelle

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Another book you might like if you haven’t already read it is Jon Garvey’s “The Generations of Heaven and Earth: Adam, the Ancient World, and Biblical Theology.” It is a companion volume to S. Joshua Swamidass’s book, “The Genealogical Adam & Eve” but covers much of the same territory as van den Brink’s book.

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Thanks for that suggestion, Paul!
Yes, I have a copy of Jon Garvey’s book, "The Generations of Heaven and Earth," on my night stand now…just started reading it. After I finish that one, I plan on reading Garvey’s other book, “God’s Good Earth.” I also recently finished Swamidass’ book, the “Genealogical Adam and Eve.”

Your description of the functional or relational view of Adam and Eve described by van den Brink sounds like the federal headship model, which could dovetail nicely with the genealogical view of Adam and Eve. I like those models, because they preserve the historical view of Adam and Eve in the context of human evolution.

As you must be aware, (but sharing here for the benefit of others who might be interested), the need to preserve a historical Adam and Eve was described nicely in these essays here at BioLogos:

2010 by David Opderbeck:

2012 by Tim Keller

2020 by Thomas H. McCall

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