How does the Bible engage the big ideas in the university

At their best universities engage with big questions. What does it mean to be human? How do we know what is true? What is real? How should we live?

I really like the new book, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture by Christopher Watkin.

To get the flavour of the book you can download the first few chapters for free or listen to a podcast where John Dickson interviews the author.

The book is a monumental achievement. I admire it for its scope, balance, tone, and accessibility. Its breadth and depth cover the whole Biblical narrative and significant ideas from modern Western philosophy, politics, humanities, and social sciences. This means engaging with many academic authors, concepts, and perspectives. This provides a balanced perspective that surpasses common sectarian or partisan slants, whether about theology or politics. The tone is gracious; people and ideas are critiqued with respect and without caricature. Finally, for an academic book, I find it relatively easy to read and engaging. I enjoy reading it because I learn so much. I am gaining a better understanding of the ideas and thinkers behind modernity and post-modernity while being challenged to contrast and compare them to the big theological ideas (such as creation-fall-redemption-recreation) that flow from the narrative of the Bible. Watkin's prose is winsome and occasionally light-hearted.

A central idea of the book is that most modern social theories and philosophies present false dichotomies. They are imbalanced and so do not capture all  dimensions of reality. Watkin argues that the Biblical narrative presents a balanced, more imaginative picture that affirms both polarities. He uses the term diagonalisation to describe this. It is not a matter of either-or but both-and. In different words, the Bible presents a dialectical view of reality. Diagonalisation is best illustrated by one of the many helpful diagrams in the book.

This dichotomy pits traditional societies against modern societies and communal identity against individual identity. This is then presented as a stark choice between crushing individual freedom or undermining community.

The doctrine of the Trinity removes these polarities as it affirms both individuality and community. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct persons but are also in a harmonious relationship. 

The many diagrams in the book represent that Watkin is steeped in the use of models: models for theology, models for modern thought, and diagonalisation is a model for relating theological concepts to modern thought. This is good provided that we remember the maxim, "all models are wrong, but some are useful".

Is there an essence to being human that transcends a scientific description?

There is a nice Biologos podcast about the wonderful novel Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. In the format of a book club three women reflect on the book. Lynette Strickland recently finished a PhD in biology, Rachel Wahlberg is a neuroscience graduate student, and Christina Bieber Lake is a literature professor. Each begins by reading one of their favourite passages from the book. Their discussion increased my appreciation of the book, wanting me to read it again and I am now suggesting it be read in a couple of the book clubs that I am part of.

This podcast made me aware of where the title of the book first appears in the narrative, besides. Below the main character, Gifty, a neuroscience graduate student, reflects on her work in the lab.

“Though I had done this millions of times, it still awed me to see a brain. To know that if I could only understand this little organ inside this one tiny mouse, that understanding still wouldn't speak to the full intricacy of the comparable organ inside my own head. And yet I had to try to understand, to extrapolate from that limited understanding in order to apply it to those of us who made up the species Homo Sapiens, the most complex animal, the only animal who believed he had transcended his Kingdom, as one of my high school biology teachers used to say. That belief, that transcendence, was held within the organ itself. Infinite, unknowable, soulful, perhaps even magical. I had traded the Pentecostalism of my childhood for this new religion, this new quest, knowing that I would never fully know.”

Later Gifty reflects more about the mysteries of human consciousness and the struggle to use science to answer our deepest questions.

“a neuroscientist who has at times given herself over to equating the essence that psychologists call the mind, that Christians call the soul, with the workings of the brain. I have indeed given that organ a kind of supremacy, believing and hoping that all of the answers to all of the questions that I have can and must be contained therein. But the truth is I haven’t much changed. I still have so many of the same questions, like “Do we have control over our thoughts?,” but I am looking for a different way to answer them. I am looking for new names for old feelings. My soul is still my soul, even if I rarely call it that.”

Why choose forgiveness rather than bitterness?

My wife and I enjoyed watching the movie The Light Between Oceans

Against a backdrop of beautiful and wild scenery, it deals with deep issues about trauma, parenthood, infertility, honesty, justice, and forgiveness.

One of the most powerful and central dialogues of the film is a dialogue between a wife and her husband, Frank. The version below is taken directly from the novel on which the movie is based.

 “But how? How can you just get over these things, darling?...You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?'

'I choose to...I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.'

'But it's not that easy.'

He smiled that Frank smile. 'Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things...I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No' - his voice became sober- 'we always have a choice. All of us.”

― M. L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf revisited

 This month's theology reading group discussed Exclusion and Embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation by Miroslav Volf. Wikipedia has a useful brief summary of the book.

I first read the book and discussed it in a group twelve years ago and wrote several blog posts about it. I have significantly benefited from re-reading it. Late in life, I now see the immense value of re-reading excellent books, particularly dense and profound ones. Over the past decade, I have built a greater knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of theology and philosophy, and how they engage (for better or worse) with modernism and postmodernism. This has increased my enjoyment and understanding of the book.

The book is impressive for both its scope and coherence. It covers a wide range of Biblical passages, events, histories, philosophies, and theologies. Furthermore, these topics and themes are woven together in a coherent whole. By his example, Volf makes a strong case that Christian theology should be public, for the sake of pluralistic societies and for the sake of the church.

Volf makes a convincing case for the following ideas.

Conflicts, small and large, are intertwined with questions of identity and otherness.

The natural outcome of an encounter with the "other", someone with a different identity to us, is exclusion. Discrimination, violence, and genocide are manifestations of the drive to exclude the other.

The counterpoint to exclusion is embrace, even embrace of enemies. There are many complexities to working out what such an embrace looks like. This requires grappling with issues of history, memory, truth, justice, peace, and forgiveness.

Evil exists. It must be grappled with politically, philosophically, and theologically. Both modernism and postmodernism have failed in their woeful inability to seriously engage with the concept of evil.

The Cross of Christ provides the template and resources to grapple, both intellectually and practically, with why and how, we need to move from exclusion to embrace.

In spite of the claims of modernity to the contrary, discussions of truth and justice can only be and should be conducted with reference to a specific tradition. [This reiterates the perspective of Alisdair MacIntyre.] There is no "view from nowhere", i.e, a perspective that is completely objective.

To grapple with conflicting identities, traditions, and perspectives we need to  practice "double vision" [taken from Thomas Nagel] whereby I acknowledge I have "the view from here" and work hard to engage with "the view from there". In different words, I endeavour to put myself in the shoes of the "other", even when I consider them morally repugnant or intellectually flawed.

For a Christian, nonviolence is the way to work towards peace. This is rooted in both the Cross, the Ressurection, and the hope of the Final Judgement. Evil not only exists but it will be punished, and in a just way. But, fallible humans are prone to deception and revenge. And so, that final judgement must rest with God, as Jesus embodied and Paul taught.

Christian Platonism and Science

Recently the theology reading group we discussed A Christian Theology of Science: Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge by Paul Tyson. 

Paul is a former member of our group and so were happy he could join us to discuss his book. Here is one summary.

We have come to separate natural knowledge (science) from faith and moral beliefs (religion), leading to serious difficulties in integrating knowledge and meaning, facts and values, and immanence and transcendence.

At the root of these dissonances is the difficult relationship between a naturalistic philosophy that purports to be a scientific realism and the things that make us human: transcendence, faith, meaning, and purpose. This is the result of science displacing Christian theology as Western modernity's first truth discourse. However, Christian theology contains deep resources in its approach to knowledge and reality that have not been brought to the science and religion conversation since the late nineteenth century.

You can download the beginning of the book here.

I have a great interest in the subject of this book and it stimulated and challenged my thinking. 

Tyson builds on two important ideas from the historian Peter Harrison. In his book, Territories of Science and Religion, Harrison makes the case that "science" and "religion" are ill-defined entities and their definition and "territories" [the domain of their relevance and authority] have shifted over time. Second, in a 2006 article, Harrison, observes that in the late 19th century there was a "remarkable reversal" "from Christian theology interpreting the true meaning and validity of natural philosophy to science interpreting the true meaning and validity of Christian theology" (page 31).

In other words, "This is a profound shift from faith-based theocentric ontological foundationalism (TOF) to egocentric epistemological foundationalism (EEF)." (p. 32). 

Thankfully, there is a ten-page glossary at the back of the book so the reader can keep refreshing their memory of how the author defines different terms. This is important as terms such as truth, theory, quality, meaning, wisdom, knowledge, and understanding are used in the sense that Plato used them, not how a modern scientist or citizen might use such terms. For example, theory (theoria) is "A vision of meaning. An inescapably imaginative and interpretive act of the meaning-discerning mind" (p.120).

I appreciated the book for giving a gentle introduction to a range of philosophical concepts, particularly metaphysics and transcendence.

The heart of the book is chapter 7, which includes several helpful diagrams, such as the one below, based on Plato's metaphysics.

This is based on four distinct categories of awareness considered by Plato. Tyson translates these into wisdom, mathematics, belief, and perception.

The central claim of the book is that modern science as a "first truth cultural discourse" has made the line between rationalism and wisdom uncrossable. In other words, modern physics has reduced metaphysics to the unreal, the realm of speculation and fantasy. We cannot know the true essence of reality, the ground of being. We can only know existence. Tyson has a very different vision. He claims that the separation of metaphysics and physics is intellectually incoherent. He cannot accept the position of some Christian scientists, such as myself, that the methodological naturalism of science is not necessarily in tension with Christian theology. He wants to imagine that Christian theology can provide a vision of natural knowledge.

Today we are a long way from Plato who considered metaphysics as the basis of physics. That is, one starts with qualities such as the character of God and from that reason towards what one thinks the world is like. This led to Aristotelian physics, which was discredited by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. This is why scientists, Christians and non-Christians, are nervous about elevating Christian theology [a specific metaphysics] back to its pre-modern status as "the first truth discourse". It has a bad track record.

On the other hand, some atheist scientists claim physics determines metaphysics. In different words, the content of physical theories tells us what the world is really like. Science determines questions of meaning, purpose, values, and morality.

Update. (March 2024). Peter Harrison has written a helpful review of the book.

Why read Old Testament books?

 A wonderful feature of The Message by Eugene Peterson is that the edition that I have has an introduction to each book of the Bible from the perspective of Peterson. At church we just started a sermon series on 2 Kings and so I just reread the introduction for Kings 1 and 2. Here it is.

Sovereignty, God's sovereignty, is one of the most difficult things for people of faith to live out in everyday routines. But we have no choice: God is Sovereign. God rules. Not only in our personal affairs, but in the cosmos. Not only in our times and places of worship, but in office buildings, political affairs, factories, universities, hospitals—yes, even behind the scenes in saloons and rock concerts. It's a wild and extravagant notion, to be sure. But nothing in our Scriptures is attested to more frequently or emphatically.

Yet not much in our daily experience confirms it. Impersonal forces and arrogant egos compete for the last word in power. Most of us are knocked around much of the time by forces and wills that give no hint of God. Still, generation after generation, men and women of sound mind continue to give sober witness to God's sovereign rule. One of the enduring titles given to Jesus is “King.”

So how do we manage to live believingly and obediently in and under this revealed sovereignty in a world that is mostly either ignorant or defiant of it?

Worship shaped by an obedient reading of Scripture is basic. We submit to having our imaginations and behaviors conditioned by the reality of God rather than by what is handed out in school curricula and media reporting. In the course of this worshipful listening, the Books of Kings turn out to provide essential data on what we can expect as we live under God's sovereign rule.

The story of our ancestors, the Hebrew kings, began in the Books of Samuel. This story makes it clear that it was not God's idea that the Hebrews have a king, but since they insisted, he let them have their way. But God never abdicated his sovereignty to any of the Hebrew kings; the idea was that they would represent his sovereignty, not that he would delegate his sovereignty to them.

But it never worked very well. After five hundred years and something over forty kings, there was not much to show for it. Even the bright spots—David and Hezekiah and Josiah—were not very bright. Human beings, no matter how well intentioned or gifted, don't seem to be able to represent God's rule anywhere close to satisfactory. The Books of Kings, in that light, are a relentless exposition of failure—a relentless five-hundred-year documentation proving that the Hebrew demand of God to “have a king” was about the worst thing they could have asked for.

But through the centuries, readers of this text have commonly realized something else: In the midst of the incredible mess these kings are making of God's purposes, God continues to work his purposes and uses them in the work—doesn't discard them, doesn't detour around them; he uses them. They are part of his sovereign rule, whether they want to be or not, whether they know it or not. God's purposes are worked out in confrontation and revelation, in judgment and salvation, but they are worked out. God's rule is not imposed in the sense that he forces each man and woman into absolute conformity to justice and truth and righteousness. The rule is worked from within, much of the time invisible and unnoticed, but always patiently and resolutely there. The Books of Kings provide a premier witness to the sovereignty of God carried out among some of the most unlikely and uncooperative people who have ever lived.

The benefit of reading these books is enormous. To begin with, our understanding and experience of God's sovereignty develops counter to all power-based and piety-based assumptions regarding God's effective rule. We quit spinning our wheels on utopian projects and dreams. Following that, we begin to realize that if God's sovereignty is never canceled out by the so deeply sin-flawed leaders (“kings”) in both our culture and our church, we can quite cheerfully exult in God's sovereignty as it is being exercised (though often silently and hiddenly) in all the circumstantial details of the actual present.

Remembering Tom McLeish

I was very sad to hear that Tom McLeish died of cancer at the end of February. He was an extraordinary person, scientist, and Christian. Tom can been characterised as a polymath or a "renaissance man". He modeled an integrated life, as a Christian, a scientist, and a member of a university community. He showed what universities should be about and can be about, in stark contrast to what they have become [fragmented, commercialised, and micro-managed]. 

A small measure of Tom's influence on me is that there are eight posts on my science blog about his work and another seven posts on this blog.

Tom's academic career is briefly sketched in an obituary from the University of York, where for the last few years he held a position, created for him, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the physics department. Tom was best known in the scientific community for his work on the theory of soft matter, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. I highly recommend his Very Short Introduction on the subject. But the influence and recognition of his intellectual contributions go far beyond his work on soft matter. For example, after the publication of The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art by Oxford University Press in 2019, the following year the journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews devoted a whole issue to seven different reviews of the book, with a response from Tom. 

Tom was a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation and was very supportive of the IFES Logos and Cosmos Initiative that the foundation funded and I am very involved in. He gave me valuable advice about many elements of this program and spoke at several training workshops. Participants have benefitted significantly from his books and talks about theology and the sciences.

David Bentley Hart has written a moving tribute to Tom. It contains a beautiful description of Tom's final days trusting in Christ, written by his wife. Tom was a model to me in life and in death.  

My condolences to Tom's family, friends, and colleagues. He died much too young and will be sorely missed.