natalie's narrative

Either/Or

From my human origins reading for this week, "'In the Space of Six Days': The Days of Creation from Origen to the Westminster Assembly," by Robert Letham:

In recent years the idea has gained ground in conservative circles that [the six days of creation] are to be understood as days of twenty-four hours. The books of John Whitcomb and Henry Morris have been instrumental in the popularity of this view. Many argue that to adopt any other interpretation is to capitulate to evolutionary theories. […] This, we must confess, is an "arid question" but one forced upon us by strident attitudes implying truth is on one side only.

One value of (white) US American culture is the tendency to look at things in an exclusively binary way. Our world is either/or, us/them, black/white, good/evil. I can see how such a value has influenced evangelicalism, as well. Looking back as I have grown in my faith, I can sense that I have moved to a place where now there are blurred lines where I once thought solid un-crossable lines existed, gray area where I once thought black and white were neatly separated, and more questions where before were tidy answers. I still believe that non-negotiables exist, but I am trying to find a way to live out the gospel so that my beliefs do not ossify and stagnate and neatly fall into my either/or categories I create. Truth isn’t "on one side only"—and that statement seems to apply not only to evolution and Genesis, but also to many other things. To be honest I don’t like such nuance! Things were so much easier before…

The Literary Framework View

Here are my notes from class when we discussed a very brief summary of the literary framework interpretation of the creation account:

In the Hebrew world, they didn't think of "creation" as we post-Enlightenment people do. John Walton's (NIV Genesis commentary author) view of the creation account is that it is not an ontological account, but a phenomological one. It's not exact and technical; the language is loose. Literary terms such as "figurative,""literal," or "poetry" are too simplistic for OT genre.

In Hebrew culture, something existed when it had a function. It's not a physical issue, but a functional one. Being brought into existence meant:
(A) Being given a name
(B) Being separated from other things
(C) Being given a function

In 49 instances in the OT that the word "create" is used, the object is not physical, for example: purity, Zion, or darkness. God said, "Let there be a period of light," which according to Walton means He created time.

Maybe we aren't supposed to asked questions like, given the literary framework, "Did Adam and Eve literally eat an apple from a tree?" The fact that we say they ate an apple could testify to influences outside of the Bible that affect our interpretation of the creation story. The Bible never said it was an apple.

I don't know as much as I would like to know about this literary framework view, but it does sound like a good alternative to 1) throwing out science, 2) throwing out the Bible, and 3) using the Bible to fill in the gaps that science leaves.

Besides the political chapter in

Besides the political chapter in Scandal, another chapter I liked is titled "Thinking about Science." Noll focuses mainly on creationism, since over time American evangelicals have expended a lot of energy on this issue. His perspective on the rise of creationism is interesting; he believes that "the intellectual debate over evolution was also a debate over the role of Protestantism in a culture that had foresworn tradition" (181). The battle was [and maybe is] not necessarily over scientific vs. Biblical accounts of human origins, but more so over what force would prevail in American culture.

Noll points out that Asa Gray, a Congregationalist who was theologically conservative, was the person who did the most to bring Darwinism to North America. There were other theologically conservative evolutionists who "thought it was possible to affirm evolution within the boundaries of historic Christian doctrines" (180). The attitude change regarding evolution came about because of fundamentalist/dispensationalist influences (and other more complex things) in evanglicalism, and Noll calls creationism "scientific dispensationalism."

The implications for such a shift are that evangelicals no longer have the capability to examine nature as it is, therefore we have "lost out on the opportunity to understand more about nature as it is" (199). Also, Noll remarks:

millions of evangelicals think they are defending the Bible by defending
creation science, but in reality they are giving ultimate authority to the
merely temporal, situated, and contextualized interpretations of the Bible that
arose from the mania for science of the early nineteenth century. (199)

"Unlike their spiritual ancestors, modern

"Unlike their spiritual ancestors, modern evangelicals have not pursued comprehensive thinking under God or sought a mind shaped to its furthest reaches by Christian perspectives." p. 4 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll.

In Social Research today, we discussed how, if the Western church were to have continued its stifling of scientific discoveries that contradict Scripture, we would still hold to the ideas that the earth is flat and is the center of the universe. During our discussion, we did not even venture into the realm of gender roles or race, both of which Christians can misinterpret when lifting verses from the Bible. Anyway, my mind started wandering to the issue of creation vs. evolution. Is the church once again stifling science, and will we once again look back 200 years from now and shake our heads at how silly we can be? Will we have a high price to pay for not cultivating a Christian mind, as Noll warns?

The first chapel for this year at Wheaton centered around our year verse: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. Our president, Dr. Litfin, emphasized loving God with all your mind. He asked, why pay hefty tuition and put yourself under strenuous academic conditions? His answer: We are loving God when we are cultivating our minds for the glory of God. (Although I do wonder where the tuition part comes in!) Imagine what cultural change we could bring about--worldwide change--if American evangelicals start to value the mind. Let's take the wheel instead of continuing to allow deeply lost, secular-minded intellectuals influence the direction of our country and world.