Science, Humanity, and Jesus

Theology on Tap in Brisbane recently celebrated its tenth anniversary.

On Sunday, June 8, I will give the next talk, on "Science, Humanity, and Jesus." Here is the abstract.

Cultural, political, economic, technological, and philosophical forces have been steadily eroding our humanity over the past few hundred years. Scientism is the notion that science has the answers to everything and has led to a reductionist, largely biological view of what it means to be human. With irony, I will give a scientific argument, using the concept of emergence, that the natural sciences are largely irrelevant for understanding our humanity. Emergence notes how reality is stratified and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Instead of science, we need to look to the humanities, including theology for insights. Truth, justice, and beauty are irreducible and transcendent. Meaning and significance comes from human relationships where love, mercy, hope, forgiveness, and grief are central. Jesus is the ultimate embodiment of humanity and offers us the power to be truly human.

Location is Raven Hotel in West End. 

Flyer is here.

Here is a copy of the text and of the slides.

Participating in the Greatest Story ever told

What role should the Bible play in the life of Christians, individually and collectively? How is the Bible to be read, interpreted, applied, and lived out?

This month in the theology reading group, we are discussing Eugene Peterson's book, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading.

It is the second book in a five-part series. Last year we discussed the first in the series, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places.

The title of the book is based on Revelation 10:9-10

...I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but “in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.”’ I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. 

Here are the main ideas from the book that stood out to me. They are interrelated. Some may seem basic or obvious, but they come alive through the power, creativity, and beauty of Peterson's prose.

1. The Bible must be central to the lives of Christians. It requires diligence for the Bible to not become peripheral due to the busyness of modern life and the seductive power of the self (the trinity of my Needs, my Wants, and my Feelings).

2. The Bible is to be lived. It is a great story that we are invited to participate in. This means obedience. Bible reading is not to be primarily about gathering information, but formation.

3. The Bible invites us into a "strange new world". [Here, Peterson is using Karl Barth's phrase.] It is counter-cultural to every culture of all time. To enter this strange world, we must read it as literature, having our imagination opened up by narrative, metaphor, and connectness.

4. The Bible is accessible to all regardless of their background (perspicuity). It can be and should be read by all. Just the plain old text! This accessibility does not preclude or diminish the value of careful and diligent scholarship.

5. Translation is necessary, subtle, and contentious. Translation is not just a technical exercise of precisely matching individual words in ancient Greek and Hebrew to words in modern English. Words are ambiguous. Phrases and sentences are even more ambiguous. "Context contaminates and interferes with precision" (p. 86) Translation matters because it makes the living Word of God accessible.

6. Lectio divina (reading spiritually) provides a model on "how to" read the Bible. But, it "is not a methodical technique... It is a cultivated, developed habit of living the text in Jesus' name." (page 116).  There are four elements, and they are not necessarily sequential. Lectio (read the text), meditatio (meditate on the text), oratio (pray the text), and contemplatio (live the text).

7. Bible reading is not just to be done alone. It is to be done in communities and out loud. The written word and the oral word are not the same. The original texts were largely read aloud and listened to by communities. Bible reading and liturgy should be inseparable.

Below are some choice quotes from the book.

“The Scriptures, read and prayed, are our primary and normative access to God as He reveals Himself to us. The Scriptures are our listening post for learning the language of the soul, the ways God speaks to us; they also provide the vocabulary and grammar that are appropriate for us as we in our turn speak to God.”

“The Bible is basically and overall a narrative - an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative.”

“All serious and good writing anticipates precisely this kind of reading-ruminative and leisurely, a dalliance with words in contrast to wolfing down information.”

“It is useful to reflect that the word 'liturgy' did not originate in church or worship settings. In the Greek world it referred to public service, what a citizen did for the community. As the church used the word in relation to worship, it kept this 'public service' quality - working for the community on behalf of or following orders from God. As we worship God, revealed personally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our Holy Scriptures, we are not doing something apart form or away from the non-Scripture=reading world; we do it for the world - bringing all creation and all history before God, presenting our bodies and all the beauties and needs of humankind before God in praise and intercession, penetrating and serving the world for whom Christ died in the strong name of the Trinity.”

“The Holy Scriptures are story-shaped. Reality is story-shaped. The world is story-shaped. Our lives are story-shaped. 'I had always,' wrote G.K. Chesterton in accounting for his Christian belief, 'felt life first as a story, and if there is a story, there is a story-teller.' We enter this story, following the story-making, storytelling Jesus, and spend the rest of our lives exploring the amazing and exquisite details, the words and sentences that go into the making of the story of our creation, salvation, and life of blessing. It is a story chock full of invisibles and intricate with connections. Imagination is required.”

“We are fond of saying that the Bible has all the answers. And that is certainly correct. The text of the Bible sets us in a reality that is congruent with who we are as created beings in God's image and what we are destined for in the purposes of Christ. But the Bible also has all the questions, many of them that we would just as soon were never asked of us, and some of which we will spend the rest of our lives doing our best to dodge. The Bible is a most comforting book; it is also a most discomfiting book.”

“Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, 'What does this mean?' but 'What can I obey?' A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.”

Genesis, science, and Jesus

In a recent podcast episode entitled, The Chemists, John Dickson discussed the worldview that the opening chapter of Genesis presents and how that relates to science and ultimately Jesus. Here is what he said:

"One of the key differences between the ancient Pagan way of thinking of, say, the Egyptians or Babylonians, and the Hebrew or biblical worldview is on this question of the orderliness of nature. Pagan creation narratives tended to stress the random, haphazard nature of the physical world. The classic is the Babylonian Enuma Elish, read out loud to the population every Babylonian New Year’s Day in Babylon. It says physical world is an after-thought, fashioned out of wreckage of a war of gods. Tiamat and Apsu—the mum and dad of the gods—go to war against their kids for making too much noise. But mum and dad ended up losing to the young warrior god, Marduk, who fashions the universe out of the bits and pieces of the carnage. The story embodies the common pagan idea that creation is ‘haphazard’ & ‘tainted’: matter is ‘alien’ stuff—accidental, unpredictable, possessed.

If that was your perspective, and you read Genesis 1, you’d be immediately struck by all ways Genesis stresses the beauty, orderliness, and goodness of physical creation. Pagans thought of creation as a kind of ‘war’; but Genesis sees it as a ballet: calm, patterned, graceful. Each creative scene in Gen 1 has 4-fold pattern:

(1) commences with a simple command,

(2) tells of the fulfillment of the command,

(3) includes an elaboration of the command, and

(4) concludes with the day formula, “there was evening, there was morning.” 

The first paragraph sets up the pattern for the rest of the show:

[1. Command] And God said, “Let there be light,” and

 [2. Fulfillment] there was light. 

[3. Elaboration] God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”

[4. Day formula] And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (Genesis 1:3–5)

And on it goes through the chapter like a carefully choreographed dance …

There’s a theological point being made here: the universe is not accidental; it’s the work of an orderly mind.  Then there’s the way the days correspond to each other like a canvas to a painting: days 1, 2, 3 are the canvas, days 4, 5, 6 are the painting. It’s hard to picture, so we’ll put an image in the show notes. But basically, day 1 is the canvas to day 4’s painting, Day 2 is the canvas to Day 5’s painting, and day 3 is the canvas to Day 6’s painting. So, On Day 1 ‘light’ itself is created; on Day 4 the actual ‘lights’ of the ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ are put in place. On Day 2 the ‘vault’ of the sky is created along with its counterpoint, the waters of the sea; and on Day 5 the sky is filled with birds and sea is filled with fish. On Day 3 the ‘land’ and ‘plants’ are created; on Day 6 animals and humans are created to walk on the land and enjoy the produce. This deliberately leaves Day 7 hanging, as a day of rest, to reflect on the newly filled canvas of creation.

Then there’s the very interesting comment repeated through the Genesis creation account that God made things “according to their kinds” and, what’s more, that God put certain creative powers in things so that they too could produce things according to their kinds. So, in Gen 1:11 we read:

“Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: [so the land becomes a co-creator with God] seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds …

The point begin made is that the genius of the Creator is imprinted into physical reality, into nature, so that acts with certain aims to produce certain outcomes that reflect God’s intention. There are tons of other ways Genesis makes this point, but the basic idea is that the creation isn’t accidental. It’s ordered and rational and is a functioning whole that acts according to certain rational principles.

It’s a remarkable departure from ancient pagan thinking. It’s true that the best Greek philosophers came to roughly the same conclusion centuries later. Aristotle, for example, (900 years after Moses) said the Forms of things exist within the things themselves. So he would say something like “the form of the oak tree is in the acorn. The form of the adult human is already in the foetus”. And so on. And so nature operates in orderly fashion, following the direction, we might say the equations, that are built into matter itself. All things act according to organising principle inherent in them, which Aristotle called the logos. Behind the logos, he insisted in Metaphysics Book 12 is the MIND, Unmoved Mover, the final cause of all motion and purpose. God!!

What the Jews had been saying for centuries … the Greeks declared by logical deduction. Nature operates according to the principles of rational genius, and the genius behind it all is the Mind of God. This is why John’s Gospel is so happy to employ the Greek philosophical word logos. I talked about this more in an Undeceptions single recently – can’t remember what it’s called – but the basic point is, John says:

“In the beginning was the logos and the logos was with God and the logos was God …”

And then he shocks us with:

“The logos became flesh and dwelt among us!”

In other words, the rational Genius of the creator – the same genius imprinted in creation – actually became a human being, Jesus Christ. Jesus is the logos. Jesus is the genius of creation. John wasn’t alone. Paul says something similar:

“In Jesus all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible … all things have been created through him and for him … and in him all things hold together.”

It’s right to think of Jesus as a first-century Galilean Jew, a historical figure we can investigate with the rules of historical enquiry. But from the beginning, from our earliest documents, Christians were saying much, much more about him. They were saying He is the genius by and through which creation came into being … and, what’s more, He is the ongoing principle that holds them all together in every moment. This is why the first modern scientists all saw their work as a kind of worship. Because when they understood the mathematics of planetary motion or the chemistry by which certain things happen, they are glimpsing the logos, who had a historical name, Jesus. "

An amusing quote from Karl Barth

"But what is involved and meant by that Word is rather and immediately the woe and the salvation which are eternal and thus also temporal, heavenly and for this reason also earthly, coming and therefore already present. By that Word are expressed and declared: woe and salvation to the Europeans and the Asians, the Americans and the Africans, woe and salvation to the poor rigid Communists and woe and salvation to the still poorer (because still more rigid) anti-Communists, woe and salvation to us Swiss as well, to our self-righteousness which is exceeded only by our business acumen, our profound anxiety, our milk and watches, our tourist trade, our narrow-minded rejection of voting rights for women, and our somewhat childish desire for a few choice atomic weapons."

Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, page 79. 

Life can be like trying to grab hold of vapour

Do you sometimes feel that finding meaning or purpose or happiness or change in your life is elusive? Is it like trying to grasp vapour or smoke?

Do you sometimes feel your efforts for a better life are futile?

You invest time, energy, and money in something such as a hobby, a job, a relationship, a church, an education, a political campaign, or a new place to live.  Sometimes it goes up in smoke. Even if it goes well, it doesn’t deliver what you hoped. This can lead to despair, depression, or cynicism.

Well, it is okay to feel this because there is a book in the Bible that addresses such experiences and feelings. 

It is the book of Ecclesiastes and for the next few months we will be looking at the book in detail, both in the sermons at church and in our community groups.

An old post discusses how Ecclesiastes resonates with how the distinguished theoretical physicist, Steven Weinberg, felt about science, in spite of its grand achievements.

Here is Eugene Peterson's helpful introduction to Ecclesiastes found in The Message.

"Unlike the animals, who seem quite content to simply be themselves, we humans are always looking for ways to be more than or other than what we find ourselves to be. We explore the countryside for excitement, search our souls for meaning, shop the world for pleasure. We try this. Then we try that. The usual fields of endeavor are money, sex, power, adventure, and knowledge.

Everything we try is so promising at first! But nothing ever seems to amount to very much. We intensify our efforts—but the harder we work at it, the less we get out of it. Some people give up early and settle for a humdrum life. Others never seem to learn, and so they flail away through a lifetime, becoming less and less human by the year, until by the time they die there is hardly enough humanity left to compose a corpse.

Ecclesiastes is a famous—maybe the world’s most famous—witness to this experience of futility. The acerbic wit catches our attention. The stark honesty compels notice. And people do notice—oh, how they notice! Nonreligious and religious alike notice. Unbelievers and believers notice. More than a few of them are surprised to find this kind of thing in the Bible.

But it is most emphatically and necessarily in the Bible in order to call a halt to our various and futile attempts to make something of our lives, so that we can give our full attention to God—who God is and what he does to make something of us. Ecclesiastes actually doesn’t say that much about God; the author leaves that to the other sixty-five books of the Bible. His task is to expose our total incapacity to find the meaning and completion of our lives on our own.

It is our propensity to go off on our own, trying to be human by our own devices and desires, that makes Ecclesiastes necessary reading. Ecclesiastes sweeps our souls clean of all “lifestyle” spiritualities so that we can be ready for God’s visitation revealed in Jesus Christ. Ecclesiastes is a John-the-Baptist kind of book. It functions not as a meal but as a bath. It is not nourishment; it is cleansing. It is repentance. It is purging. We read Ecclesiastes to get scrubbed clean from illusion and sentiment, from ideas that are idolatrous and feelings that cloy. It is an exposé and rejection of every arrogant and ignorant expectation that we can live our lives by ourselves on our own terms.

Ecclesiastes challenges the naive optimism that sets a goal that appeals to us and then goes after it with gusto, expecting the result to be a good life. The author’s cool skepticism, a refreshing negation to the lush and seductive suggestions swirling around us, promising everything but delivering nothing, clears the air. And once the air is cleared, we are ready for reality—for God."

As always, The Bible Project video is a short and helpful overview.

The character and disposition of an evangelical theologian

Reading my previous post about Evangelical Theology: An Introduction by Karl Barth may leave the impression that Barth mostly discusses academic theology as an academic discipline in which the theologian strives for objectivity and distances themselves from the object of study. However, the emphasis and perspective of the book is quite different. Much of the book is about the personal character and disposition that an evangelical theologian must have. Theology is personal and practical. It is subjective in that the object of study [the triune God that was revealed in history and recorded in Scripture] places the theologian in "crisis". The theologian is judged, critiqued, and loved by the living Word.

The Table of Contents illustrates how much of the book is about the life of an evangelical theologian.

• Commentary
• I. The Place of Theology
  • The Word
  • The Witnesses
  • The Community
  • The Spirit
• II. Theological Existence
  • Wonder
  • Concern
  • Commitment
  • Faith
• III. The Threat to Theology
  • Solitude
  • Doubt
  • Temptation
  • Hope
• IV. Theological Work
• Prayer
• Study
• Service
• Love

The importance of humility recurs throughout the book. An evangelical theologian must be humble. They cannot operate with presuppositions, dismiss tradition, and or place themself above historical witnesses to God's self-revelation.

"The position of theology,... , can in no wise be exalted above that of the biblical witnesses. The post-Biblical theologian may, no doubt, possess a better astronomy, geography, zoology, psychology, physiology, and so on than these biblical witnesses possessed; but as for the Word of God, he is not justified in comporting himself in relationship to those witnesses as though he knew more about the Word than they. 

 

He is neither a president of a seminary, nor the Chairman of the Board of some Christian Institute of Advanced Theological Studies, who might claim some authority over the prophets and apostles. He cannot grant or refuse them a hearing as though they were colleagues on the faculty. Still less is he a high-school teacher authorized to look over their shoulder benevolently or crossly, to correct their notebooks, or to give them good, average, or bad marks. 

 

Even the smallest, strangest, simplest, or obscurest among the biblical witnesses has an incomparable advantage over even the most pious, scholarly, and sagacious latter-day theologian." (page 31)

Evangelical theology is critical in the sense of being self-critical. All ideas are provisional approximations to the truth and must continually be critiqued and open to revision or discarding. This critical element is quite distinct from the "criticisms" that were fashionable in Barth's time such as historical criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism,... They were methods that tended to become presuppositions and placed the theologian above the text.

Humility for an evangelical theological means that their theology is all about God, not themself or their theology (system, method, content). The last chapter of the book, entitled "Love", contrasts agape love to eros love.

Love as Eros, is, in general terms, the primordially powerful desire, urge, impulse, and endeavor by which a created being seeks his own self-assertion, satisfaction, realization, and fulfillment in his relation to something else. He strives to draw near to this other person or thing, to win it for himself, to take it to himself, and to make it his own as clearly and definitively as possible. And in a special sense, love, as scientific Eros, is the same desire in its intellectual form.

.....Scientific, theological Eros has perpetually oscillated concerning the object which it should present to man for the sake of his self-assertion and self-fulfillment. That is to say, theological Eros can be directed either predominantly (and perhaps even exclusively) toward God or predominantly (and, once again, perhaps even exclusively) toward man. (page 197-8)

 

A narcissist cannot be an evangelical theologian.

The book challenges readers to reflect on their character and disposition if they aspire to be an evangelical theologian. At the beginning of the book, Barth discusses how everyone is a theologian, regardless of whether they identify themselves as such. 

The main weakness of the book is that it does not engage in a concrete and substantive way with the life or teachings of Jesus, such as his parables and the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps this is because Barth was embedded in the Reformed theological tradition. The book would have a sharper edge if it engaged with Anabaptist tradition. On the other hand, the book provides a wonderful framework, motivation, and invitation to dive into a fresh reading of the Gospels and let the living Word speak to the reader/theologian through the Power of the Holy Spirit.

Karl Barth's evangelical theology

Almost a quarter of a century ago, I first encountered and engaged with the theology of Karl Barth. It blew my mind and invigorated my spirit. Perhaps there were two main reasons why Barth resonated so well with me.

First, Barth seemed to have a deep respect for and appreciation of the Bible (and secondarily the historical Christian faith), without degenerating into a faith or perspective that was uncritical, naive, tribal, or simplistic.

Second, there seemed to be parallels with my scientific/academic mindset. Barth created for me an avenue to constructively engage my mind in my Christian life like what I enjoyed so much in my scientific life.

This month at the theology reading group, we are discussing Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. The book is based on lectures that Barth gave in Chicago and Princeton in 1962, during the only visit that he ever made to the USA. You can even listen to a live recording here.

The book is a wonderful entry point to Barth's rich and complex theology.  One measure of the influence of the book on me is that 18 previous posts on this blog consider quotations from the book. There 128 posts that are tagged Barth, more than just a handful of other topics (e.g., books, justice, history, politics,...)!

What does Barth mean by evangelical theology?

Theology is a "science" [wissenschaft = an academic discipline of study] in the following sense.

Theology is one among those human undertakings traditionally described as "sciences." Not only the natural sciences are "sciences." Humanistic sciences also seek to apprehend a specific object and its environment in the manner directed by the phenomenon itself; they seek to understand it on its own terms and to speak of it along with all the implications of its existence. The word "theology" seems to signify a special science, a very special science, whose task is to apprehend, understand, and speak of "God."  (page 3)

The object to study is the triune self-revealing God. In other words, Barth's perspective is that ontology determines epistemology. The method we use to find the truth about an object (epistemology) is determined by the nature of that object (ontology).

The qualifying attribute "evangelical" recalls both the New Testament and at the same time the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Therefore, it may be taken as a dual affirmation: the theology to be considered here is the one which, nourished by the hidden sources of the documents of Israel's history, first achieved unambiguous expression in the writings of the New Testament evangelists, apostles, and prophets; it is also, moreover, the theology newly discovered and accepted by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. 

The expression "evangelical," however, cannot and should not be intended and understood in a confessional, that is, in a denominational and exclusive, sense. This is forbidden first of all by the elementary fact that "evangelical" refers primarily and decisively to the Bible, which is in some way respected by all confessions. Not all so-called "Protestant" theology is evangelical theology; moreover, there is also evangelical theology in the Roman Catholic and Eastern orthodox worlds, as well as in the many later variations, including deteriorations, of the Reformation departure. What the word "evangelical" will objectively designate is that theology which treats of the God of the Gospel. "Evangelical" signifies the "catholic," ecumenical (not to say "conciliar") continuity and unity of this theology. " (page 5).

Evangelical theology is modest, happy, free, and critical.

Photo is of my son reading the book back in 2017.

In passing, I mention a paper that I wrote with Ben Myers is Dialectical Critical Realism in Science and Theology: Quantum Physics and Karl Barth.

With ambivalence and confusion, I should mention that my original Barth enthusiasm is tempered by more recent revelations about his inappropriate relationship with his assistant, Charlotte von Kirschenbaum. This raises thorny questions about how to separate the evaluation of a person's written work from their life. Is such a separation possible, appropriate, or essential?