Partly guilty as charged. I know George and his work originally through the ASA, though I have also seen him in a few other places.
One of the things I learned from George is that a “Lutheran voice” might emphasize theology of the cross (the suffering servant, who put aside power and allowed himself to be crucified) over theology of glory (the God of the philosophers, as in natural theology). That is Lutheran language, and in many evangelical circles it’s not heard very much (if at all).
Having learned this from George, I’ve repeated it myself in conversations with many friends who promote ID, as a way of emphasizing that the error Paul taught in Romans chapter 1 was not the error of failing to see the evidence for God’s existence, but the error of failing to find the true God–the crucified God that Paul had to tell them about. In other words, Romans One isn’t so much a text about the need to make natural theological arguments (George would probably say this in stronger terms), but about the need to be explicit about the specific God who created all things: Jesus Christ, he who was crucified and raised from the dead. Indeed, the negative results that Paul preaches against are preached to those who “knew God” from nature, but “not as God,” and so they practiced idolatry, worshiping the wrong god(s), serving “the creature more than the Creator.”
When I said those things in ID circles, I was met with incredulity. Many proponents of ID have indeed written the sorts of things I was told: that Romans teaches the need to do natural theology, and that any type of TE (including EC) that de-emphasizes design arguments is actually heretical, or at least in defiance of clear biblical teaching.
Well, I still think George is right about this text. A subsequent thought of my own, as an historian, is as follows. Paul was making common ground with his pagan Roman audience. As a highly literate Greco-Roman Jew, Paul knew perfectly well that the Stoics and other Roman writers (such as Cicero) were natural theologians. For example, Cicero argued that the great regularity and swiftness of celestial motion (remember that for the ancients, the starry heaven revolves daily about the Earth) is powerful evidence for a transcendent wisdom behind nature. Paul knew that many in his audience believed that, and he reminded them of it: “they are without excuse,” they already know that God exists. In other words, Paul wasn’t teaching the need to do natural theology; he was assuming that his audience already accepted the validity of inferring God from nature. The problem he was addressing was idolatry, not atheism: they already knew about the divine power, but were worshiping the wrong kind of divine power(s), false gods that they created for themselves from the creation, failing to see the true Creator.
In my conversations with theologians, biblical scholars, and historians at Concordia these past two years, I deliberately shared my thoughts on this text with them (as outlined above) and asked for comments: was I off base, or on target? Was this an appropriate way to interpret that text? Several affirmed my view, and no one spoke against it. They saw (of course) that it was fully consistent with preaching the theology of the cross, not the theology of glory, and it was also consistent with what they know about the biblical world.
If there is a distinctly Lutheran voice yet to be heard in the evangelical conversation about origins, then, it might indeed be this: don’t be so quick to promote natural theology. Remember that we preach the crucified God, not the God of the philosophers.
With thanks and appreciation to George Murphy, who first helped me see this great truth.