I don’t know what it means to be blogging like a fish on fire, but I’ll take it as a compliment. Tom defends the idea that sin does not extend to animals:

I think for St. Thomas “moral evil” resides within the sinner; the good that is lacking ought to exist in the sinner’s soul, I suppose in his will in particular.

This way of thinking doesn’t seem to me to blur the distinction between “human” and “nature.” A dog biting me can be analyzed in the same way as a man biting me. If the dog made the right decision for a dog, then there is no moral evil in the dog; if the dog made the wrong decision for a dog, then the dog has committed moral evil. The same can be said for the man making the right or wrong decision for a man.

Now, St. Thomas (if I may speak for him) would say that dogs by nature cannot make wrong decisions, that they are incapable of moral evil, and I would agree with him. I think his association of the distinction between human and animal with rationality needs patching up (if I understand him correctly, he straightforwardly accepts that animals are irrational), but I think it can be done without turning animals into moral agents.

This comment (and others) tells me I ought to clarify a few things. One, I think there’s a difference between the evil of an individual and fallenness in general. There’s the court-of-law sense of moral culpability, where each person is judged separately for their actions. For that kind of discussion, talk of moral agency makes sense. But fallenness is more of a general, even environmental condition. In Augustinian theory, a baby is born sinful through no choice of his own. Agency has nothing to do with it. Whether you think of it that way, or in the Eastern Orthodox terms of captivity to Satan, or in Irenaean terms of immaturity, it all describes some way that the whole world seems “off,” not as it should be; and the discrete sins of individuals are only symptoms of the disease. So I think it’s fair to include the violence and suffering in the natural world within fallenness even if animals (or earthquakes, or volcanos) aren’t moral agents.

Tom also brings up the point that is perhaps at the heart of this whole thing: the idea that people are not made to sin, and sin indicates a lack of something that ought to exist. I think the whole reason that original sin theory exists is not for theological neatness, or even to resolve the problem of evil, but because of a pastoral problem. How do you persuade people that their Creator wants them to act in ways that seem totally unnatural to them? I imagine that Christians of the first century faced questions similar to what they face today: “If God doesn’t want me to sleep around, why did he give me such a raging libido?” etc.

The original-sin answer says that you were, in fact, created differently than you think you were, but you are tainted with the sin of your ancestor Adam, which is reinforced by all the sinful behavior around you. This explanation worked well enough when people assumed that God created humanity in a discrete act, and so could have created us in any way imaginable. When we think we’re created by an evolutionary process, however, the idea becomes harder to defend. If we were forged in the drive for reproductive superiority, our nature should naturally seek it, yet Christianity calls that sinful. You are 98% genetically identical to a chimpanzee; is it any surprise that you act like one?

So I think Desmond Morris, for all his rampant ignorance, had a point that this particular understanding of the human condition requires that humans must have originally been very different from animals, and only became bestial from a distortion of our nature. He’s also right that biological and paleontological evidence is piling up against that idea. I don’t know how to envision sinless humans living in, say, the Earth of the Paleolithic. So it makes a lot more sense to me to think of creation falling, and being saved, all together.

I suppose one could argue that God, for some reason, picked out this particular hominid and infused us with some sort of Godness that makes us special. I guess that was what the priest who answered TS O’Rama was getting at: “Man, however, would have been protected from such (natural) violence by a special grace, among those given to Adam and Eve which protected them from suffering and death and provided them a harmony with God, self, each other and nature.” This reminds me of another one of Telford’s theories (like I said, we talked about this a long time!). He suggested that perhaps Eden was a real place, a separate benign environment in which God intended to bring humans to immortality but which humans proved unfit to live in. So God tossed us back into the cruel world, and decided to bring us to eternal life by a more drawn-out process which is recorded in the rest of the Bible (and that continues today). The “fall” would then have been more like a failure to rise.

Anyway, I think a few viable ideas have come up here, and since there’s no way to know for sure what happened I suppose one can use whichever works. (I suspect that Irenaeus might be most appealing to secular America, given its fascination with personal growth.) We just can’t use ideas of fallenness that depend, even unconsciously, on the image of God molding humans like potter’s clay, because there’s less and less reason to believe such a thing ever happened.

Some comments to this post enlightened me a bit about Eastern Christianity. Christopher wrote:

Peter Brown has written excellently on Augustine’s “invention” of Pelagianism. Though Morgan (Pelagius) seems not to have been an exceptionally humble guy, what little we know of his actual theologizing does not seem novel from Eastern perspectives because in such perspectives, even creation is grace–gift, so it is not so much that Morgan made G-d nearly unnecessary as that G-d is so at the heart of all things that there is no place finally without G-d’s grace, so act from that place–the place of creation completed.

My purpose in bringing up Pelagianism wasn’t because of what happened in the fifth century, but because so many people subscribe to that basic philosophy today. So wherever it came from, it’s worth discussing. I imagine the modern version came directly from Greek philosophy — those ideas have become popular since the neoclassical revival of the 18th century.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with seeing creation as grace, but the point is that it is not sufficient grace. If you get all the grace you need from the creation of the Father and the immanence of the Spirit, there isn’t much left for Jesus to do. I don’t know if that was what Pelagius preached, but that was one of the complaints against him. Also, I think that “God in all things” really needs to be contextualized in the Eastern Christian habit of seeing the material world through the lens of mystical revelation — eating intimates the heavenly feast, sex prefigures divine union, etc. Westerners have a habit of studying the physical world on its own terms and trying to discern philosophical norms from it, which is how we wound up with Social Darwinism and similar horrors.

Meanwhile, Quotemeister Neil submitted an excerpt from Orthodox theologian John Meyendorff:

It has been often recognized that Eastern patristic thought ignores the notion of a transmission of guilt from Adam to his descendants. However, it does not ignore the very fact of cosmic fallenness. This fallenness is not expressed in terms of divine punishment inflicted upon all humans (the Augustinian massa damnata) from parents to children, but rather in terms of a usurpation or illegitimate tyranny exercised by Satan upon God’s creation. Humans are rather seen as victims of the universal reign of death (indeed Satan is a ‘murderer from the beginning’: Jn 8.44). ‘Through fear of death, they are subject to lifelong bondage’ (Heb 2.15). What is being transmitted from parents to children is not sin but mortality and slavery, creating a condition where sin is inevitable: ‘Having become mortal,’ writes Theodoret of Cyrus, ‘[Adam and Eve] conceived mortal children, and mortal beings are necessarily subject to passions and fears, to pleasures and sorrows, to anger and hatred.’ The model here is Darwinian: fear of death generates struggle for survival, and survival is attainable only at the expense of others – a survival of the fittest, winning over the weak. ‘By becoming mortal, we acquired greater urge to sin,’ writes Theodore of Mopsuestia, ‘because we depend on food, drink, and other needs, and the desire to acquire those leads inevitably to sinful passions.’ Patristic references can be easily mutiplied, and their context is understandable if one remembers that the Greek Fathers read the Greek original of the famous passage of Rom 5.12 (‘As sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because [or 'and because of death'] all have sinned’) and were not conditioned by the Latin mistranslation, which implied that all sinned ‘in Adam.’

This is what I was groping toward at the end of the earlier post, before the cold medicine kicked in: that Satan corrupted nature first, and this in turn corrupted humanity. I’m glad to know I wasn’t making up new doctrine on the spot. It does go much better with evolutionary theory than the idea that human will alone brought evil into the world. (It also makes a lot more sense morally than the “inherited guilt” idea.) It’s even more dualistic than Augustine — how did the devil get so much power? — but we’re talking about original sin here, not the problem of evil.

It reminds me, though, of a quote Bill Allison posted just today:

Without death there is little innovation. Extinction — death of a species — is part and parcel of evolutionary change. In the absence of this kind of extinction new developments would not prosper.

Indeed, without death, the planet would still be dominated by archeobacteria, and the atmosphere would be unbreathable. Either the archeobacteria were meant to inherit the earth, or God (per Irenaeus) actually did intend some kind of evolution to occur by other means. I have a dim memory now of Telford telling me about a theory of “translation”, a sort of unfallen alternative to death, but I can’t remember now exactly how it worked or where he got the idea. Does anybody know what I mean?

Thanks for all the great comments, everyone. A lot of subjects came up, so let me deal with them one at a time.

If there’s one constant on this blog, it’s that everywhere I turn I seem to run into Stanley Hauerwas. Lee gave me the link to this article by Hauerwas and John Berkman on human/animal relations. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in it, but one point I want to highlight is its critique of “anthropocentrism”:

To put it most simply, the only significant theological difference between humans and animals lies in God’s giving humans a unique purpose. Herein lies what it means for God to create humans in God’s image. A part of this unique purpose is God’s charge to humans to tell animals who they are, and humans continue to do this by the very way they relate to other animals. We think there is an analogous relationship here; animals need humans to tell them their story, just as gentiles need Jews to tell them their story.

Our account of what humankind as created in the “image of God” means is admittedly a minority viewpoint. The dominant view holds that “image of God” is some unique human capacity or ability, such as rational ability. The presumption of this dominant view has been forcefully challenged by Millard Schumaker, who argues that this stance owes far more to Cartesian presuppositions than to Christian theology. There is simply no good theological reason for claiming that what it means to be human is to possess some unique capacity that distinguishes humankind from that which is non-human.

This is why I objected to cutting animals completely out of salvation: it seems based on an anemic cogito ergo sum version of what it means to be human. In terms of separating moral from natural evil, it turns being human into a kind of legal standing, like “mental competence,” that grants you certain rights and makes you morally culpable for certain actions. Yet I don’t feel that such legalisms get to the heart of fallenness or salvation.

This passage also reminds me of Desmond Morris’ belief that religion requires a sharp division between human and animal, stemming from a conviction that only humans have souls. If this were disproven, all religion would come crashing down. (This must come as a surprise to Hindus.) Some Christians seem to agree. The Assemblies of God defend their creationism by arguing that “If mankind has merely evolved from lower forms of life, one cannot possess the special imprint of God’s likeness.”

However, for Hauerwas and Berkman, the “likeness” of God describes not ensoulment but action:

At most, the concept of dominion can only mean that God has chosen humanity to be an image of God’s own rule in the world. In other words, God appoints humans as rulers not because humans hold any special intrinsic trait, but simply because of God’s sovereign will; God simply chooses humans for the task of acting as God’s deputies amidst God’s good creation. Thus, following Schumaker, Christians must not understand “image of God” to be based on any metaphysical or morphological difference between humans and other animals but must reconceive “image of God” in terms of the particular purposes that God assigns to humans. Specifically, Christians need to discover what it means for a human to act as an image of God’s rule in the world.

They then go on to argue for vegetarianism, as a way for Christians to prefigure the “peaceable kingdom.” I’m not so sure about that, partly because vegetarianism really isn’t all that nonviolent — between the underground critters torn up in tillage and the intended and accidental deaths from pesticides, crop-raising is virtually as destructive to animal life as livestock raising. (Not to mention, as Tom pointed out, that it’s pretty destructive to the plants.) So I don’t think anyone on this side of heaven can break from the life-eating-life cycle. But I do agree that viewing animals as fellow creatures of God, made for his glory and not our use, demands that we treat them better.

My attempt at starting a conversation about natural theology hasn’t had any takers so far, and it occurs to me that in that long rambling post I brought up too many issues at once. So perhaps it would be more productive to take them one at a time.

As I brought up in my conversation two years ago with Telford, the place where the Darwinian account of creation seems to conflict most sharply with orthodox Christian theology (biblical literalism aside) is in the doctrine of original sin. Clearly, the evidence contradicts the classical model of a perfect creation which was then corrupted when people started sinning. The Darwinian story makes it seem more like creation corrupted us.

It’s not a loss to take lightly, since original sin is a darn useful idea. It explains how evil exists in a world created by a benevolent God; why we all feel such a disjunct between how the world is and how we feel it should be, as well as how we feel we should be; how humans can be made in the image of God and destined to reign with him in heaven, and yet be such screw-ups. It also resonates with the nearly universal human feeling that there was a lost golden age back there somewhere. Huston Smith wrote that nearly all pagan religions describe a sense of drift from an original order, and “steps are needed to restore the world to its original condition.”

So what are the alternatives? Over the course of discussion and reading, a few possibilities came up:

Natural evil vs. moral evil. I think one popular way of resolving the problem of natural evil is to say it isn’t really evil; the word properly applies only when a free choice is made, and thus necessitates the human will. And certainly I don’t think that, say, a dog is morally culpable for biting me in the way that a human would be for assaulting me.

But this seems to be mostly making a semantic distinction that is not terribly meaningful. For one thing, when we talk about the problem of evil we’re generally talking about the problem of suffering, and natural evil creates plenty of suffering by itself. I don’t think it hurts a parent less to lose a child to a bear than to lose it to a drunk driver.

Secondly, as I implied, the whole distinction between what is human and what is nature gets blurred in a Darwinian context. We say that a dog has an instinct to bite; but don’t we have those instincts too? Is what we call “moral evil” really just a non-resistance to natural evil? Why does it suddenly become evil when it’s within us?

Pelagianism. Pelagius was Augustine’s chief opponent, and denied that original sin exists. The Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes his philosophy:

Pelagius denied the primitive state in paradise and original sin (cf. P. L., XXX, 678, “Insaniunt, qui de Adam per traducem asserunt ad nos venire peccatum”), insisted on the naturalness of concupiscence and the death of the body, and ascribed the actual existence and universality of sin to the bad example which Adam set by his first sin. As all his ideas were chiefly rooted in the old, pagan philosophy, especially in the popular system of the Stoics, rather than in Christianity, he regarded the moral strength of man’s will (liberum arbitrium), when steeled by asceticism, as sufficient in itself to desire and to attain the loftiest ideal of virtue. The value of Christ’s redemption was, in his opinion, limited mainly to instruction (doctrina) and example (exemplum), which the Saviour threw into the balance as a counterweight against Adam’s wicked example, so that nature retains the ability to conquer sin and to gain eternal life even without the aid of grace. By justification we are indeed cleansed of our personal sins through faith alone (loc. cit., 663, “per solam fidem justificat Deus impium convertendum”), but this pardon (gratia remissionis) implies no interior renovation of sanctification of the soul.

Even though Pelagianism as such didn’t outlive its founder for very long, this general attitude remains popular today, because it actually fits pretty well with Darwinism and humanism. Nature is what it is, and never has been or will be different; only people’s individual choices will improve things.

The problem, first of all, is that the Council of Ephesus declared this a heresy and no church has ever retaken it (though some have accused Arminians of being somewhat Pelagian). And the council had good reasons for doing so. God is kind of a bit player in this system, creating people with capacities for good and evil and then leaving it up to themselves. It has the same problem I mentioned above, about separating moral evil from natural evil. There also isn’t much hope in it; there is, after all, no real reason to believe people are going to choose the good in the future any more than they have in the past. The moral teachings of Jesus appear disconnected from the new creation, and therefore out of synch with reality.

Another problem is that this emphasis on the individual will glosses over the corporate nature of sin. Augustine’s picture of sin as a sort of virus that passes from parent to child and neighbor to neighbor, and corrupts whole societies, actually fits better with psychological and sociological observation than the notion that every person has a totally free choice to do good or evil. It’s popular among tough-on-crime types to think that, say, the impoverished child of a crack addict and a pedophile has just as much opportunity to choose the good as they do, but this idea doesn’t survive much serious thought. This is why the idea of Jesus rescuing humanity en masse and starting a counter-polity in the church make so much sense.

Irenaeus. Irenaeus was a Church Father who, unlike Pelagius, was a defender of orthodoxy. His idea of fallenness was a little different from Augustine’s, however, as Jake explained in a comment:

Augustine’s perspective of perfect humans falling; resulting in “original sin” is one perspective. Irenaeus offers a different view; that of humanity being created imperfect,and progressing towards perfection. The analogy he uses is that of an infant; the “fall” becomes the actions of immature children, not willful rebellion by adults.

This results in Irenaeus seeing evil as an essential part of the progression; part of the plan (think Job), rather than coming out nowhere as Augustine seems to suggest. That always troubled me; Augustine insists that God could not have created evil…that seems to put some serious limitations on God, doesn’t it? I’ll go with Irenaeus and Job. Unfortunately, most of Christendom is rooted in Augustinian (the former Manichean) thought. Any surprise that dualism is such a popular solution to the problem of evil?

This idea has several things going for it. As I mentioned here, the idea of progress from a spiritual childhood to adulthood, both individually and corporately, is well attested in the New Testament. Also, the whole Judeo-Christian cosmology follows a linear timeline with a beginning, middle and end, as opposed to cyclical or static schemes of time in other cultures. It posits an “evoluton” of sorts well before Darwin (albeit a more neatly progressive one than natural selection tends to follow).

But this idea also brings to mind a discussion at Bible study a few months back. Some passage in James set the pastor talking about how you need to let children suffer adversity and stumble a few times or they wouldn’t grow, so God lets us suffer for the same reason. Finally, another person snapped, “I never bought this stuff about adversity building character. It didn’t build my character to be molested by clergy!”

It was a good point. To characterize grave moral evils as part of the growth experience at best trivializes them, and at worst justifies them. So the idea that suffering is “part of the plan” makes me wonder what on earth that plan could be, and why I should trust it.

Actually, in my talks with Telford after our blog exchange he built an argument that essentially synthesized Augustine and Irenaeus. Creation was made imperfect and God had a plan to bring it to adulthood, but the corruption of sin is making it more painful than it ought to be. In this scheme of things, natural evil stems from the immature nature of creation, while moral evil comes from Augustinian rebellion of the human will against God’s attempt to make us grow up. This solves a certain number of problems, but not all.

The fallen angel. This is an old idea, and not really an alternative to the original-sin story. But the interesting feature of this for our discussion is that it has evil beginning not in the rebellion of Adam and Eve, but in an earlier rebellion by a supernatural being who then led the first couple astray. Therefore it does not saddle human beings with the entire responsibility for the existence of evil in the whole world.

This means reviving the idea of a personal, powerful Satan, which (despite C.S. Lewis’ efforts) is increasingly unfashionable in the non-creationist set that I’m talking to here. And for good reason, because that belief has led to some nasty behavior, most notably the witch hunts of the Renaissance era.

However, from my study of the witch hunts in college, it seems to me that the problem there wasn’t so much the belief in Satan as the waning belief in the saving power of Jesus. After all, for the first 1400 years the church believed in Satan and had a lot of paganism going on around it, but its official position was that witchcraft had no real power. They believed Jesus had crushed Satan, and so the images of him at the time are often of a ridiculous figure, deprived of his human captives and gnashing his teeth in helpless rage. This is quite a change from the witchcraft literature that appeared later, where Satan stalks the earth practically unhindered and Jesus has receded to near-irrelevance.

But anyway, getting to the topic at hand, should we then blame Satan for the corruption of nature as well as humanity? Could he have employed nature somehow in order to corrupt humanity? After all, the Eden story represents him with a snake, and Paul in Romans 1 describes the idolatry of animal gods as the first step leading to all other sins. I’m getting groggy with cold medicine, so I’ll leave it there, but it bears some thought.

As promised, I want to comment some more on evolution and Christianity, starting with my comment to Vaughn’s post.

Some commenters have said that the whole issue isn’t very important. They’re more interested in politics, personal morality, charity, and so on. And I respect that, because there are certainly many important things for churches to be doing. But I still want to stick up for the importance of natural theology, because I know I’m not the only person who, growing up in a nonreligious environment, turned to science to explain my place in the universe and what it means to be a human being.

Obviously, I wasn’t totally satisfied with what I got, or I wouldn’t have moved on to church. But my interest in science did give me a certain perspective that I found Christians were generally ill-prepared to deal with. Very early in my blogging life I got into a debate with Telford about this. Here was my first post about it; Telford’s response; and my follow-up. That was the last that I blogged about it, though Telford and I continued to talk and argue about it. It’s not really his subject, but it doesn’t seem to be the subject of very many Christians. So my bad attitude toward Nancey Murphy has mellowed somewhat since then: at least she’s trying. (This is a good thing, since she’s actually my fellow congregant now at Pasadena Mennonite Church, although I have yet to meet her.)

Anyway, I think the implications of this actually redound beyond those of us who are interested in science for one reason or the other. In the last couple hundred years there’s been a real change in the relationship between humanity and nature, not just because of science but because industrial life means we no longer live and die by it the way we used to. And this divorce has led Christian thought in a number of different directions. Two of them we discussed at Icthus: a hardline literalism that distrusts all science, and a quasi-dualism that more or less concedes the material world to science and restricts religion to an ever-shrinking “spiritual” realm. The latter view, which Stephen Jay Gould dubbed “non-overlapping magisteria”, holds that religion is there to provide moral instruction, and perhaps a broad sense of meaning, while it’s up to science to explain the facts of life.

The problem as I see it is that you can’t really separate your morality from your understanding of the universe. Morals aren’t plucked randomly from the air; they’re grounded in our understanding of human nature and our place in things. Hauerwas wrote the Christianity goes “with the grain” of the universe, and to think that way obviously requires a particular understanding of the universe.

Certainly, it’s not a terribly obvious understanding of the universe. If you look at the universe in its present state, it’s not at all clear why loving your enemies, giving away your possessions, refraining from adultery and so on will accomplish much of anything. From a Darwinian point of view, it may help your reproductive superiority to cooperate with others, but only within limits. Unless you buy the Priory of Sion stuff, Jesus left no descendants, and many of his early followers didn’t either. As I said before, Jesus was really something of a family-buster.

Another symptom of the human/nature disconnect shows up in apocalypticism. Jonathan wrote a while ago that he thinks dispensationalism is a heresy because it promotes dualism, in its sharp divide between earth and heaven and evident contempt for the earth. This contempt can conveniently dovetail with the interests of capitalism, as with the former Interior Secretary James Watt, who figured the environment wasn’t really worth much care because it’s all going to burn anyway.

But even Telford, who falls into none of these errors, I found difficult to talk to because of his blithe anthropocentrism. A lot of Christians (and a lot of non-Christians, for that matter) are so used to assuming that the important thing in the universe is the human drama, and the rest of it is just wallpaper, that they don’t quite get how radically scientific materialism has de-centered them. Although the ancients certainly felt puny compared to the forces of nature, even they didn’t realize quite how big the universe is, and how much of it seems to be nothing at all like us. The pagan gods were often capricious and mean, but they were recognizably humanoid. That’s quite a different picture from the vast, impersonal grinding machine that science pictures the universe to be.

And it’s also worth saying that I like nature, even with all the negative things I said about it to Telford. I recognize its beauty and its magnificence, and I think I felt an instinctive kinship with it even before I learned all the science. And I believe that’s true of humanity in general. For millennia, people have been imputing human intelligence and feelings into animals, telling stories of talking animals, human-animal hybrids, even animal gods. They knew animals were their relatives long before Darwin told them about it. I think this instinctive reverance for nature is part of what leads people in my demographic to Wiccanism and that sort of thing. Christianity really doesn’t provide a very friendly environment for it.

So what would an up-to-date Christian natural theology look like? I’m still not sure, but over the course of reading and discussion I’ve gotten some interesting hints. In that comment of Nate’s that I highlighted yesterday he said this about the early Genesis stories:

I have no problem with believing that the Garden of Eden and Cain and Abel and Noah were not literal realities, but that a servant of Yahweh used the prevailing myths of the time (myths in ancient times being “science”–that is, seeking to explain how the world worked and how things came to be) and applied Yahwehistic theology (which I affirm) to recontextualizing these stories. So he, she or they rejected the notion that the world was created through gods procreating or gods killing one another and chopping up their corpses, but that there was one god who created everything through his sovereign power. The myth that the gods created a flood to kill off all of the humans but a few escaped by building a boat was probably so widespread that it was accepted as scientific fact at the time, but the writer of the biblical story decided to retell it based on what Yahweh must have really done. So, instead of the gods killing off the humans because they were too loud, Yahweh must have decided this because they were unrighteous, for Yahweh is just. Instead of the survivors escaping against the will of the gods, Yahweh must have willed them to survive, because Yahweh is all powerful. So on and so on. The importance of the creation stories is not the stories themselves, for they belong to an earlier age of understanding, but the theology that influenced the way they were told.

I’d never quite thought of it like that, but this sounds very right to me. The textual analysts believe the first four books of the Bible were written all of a piece, and therefore after the liberation from Egypt and move to Canaan. It’s entirely plausible that Jewish scribes would have sought to rewrite the known history of the world through the lens of what the Exodus experience had taught them about God: he’s a deliverer, lawgiver, keeper of promises, smiter of evil etc. After the revelation of Jesus, his Jewish followers reinterpreted their history again in that light, seeing Eden as the scene of original sin and subsequent Jewish history as God laying the groundwork for his big redemptive act.

As Nate says, this all indicates that God isn’t going to reveal the technical facts about his creation to us, even if we have them wrong. He just wants us to get him right, and to remember his basic character and singularity. I think this idea that God plays along with our misconceptions bothers some people (Progressive Christian says that if Jesus literally “ascended,” even though heaven isn’t really “up there,” God must have been engaged in an “unusual charade”), but whatever the reason, scientific understanding doesn’t seem to be big on his agenda. So perhaps rather than trying to reinterpret God through the lens of science, we should take a look at how God regards the natural world in the Bible.

The Bible, unlike many ancient texts, does not anthropomorphize animals. Other than the talking serpent in Eden and the one-liner from Balaam’s ass, the animals in the Bible act just like animals in real life. In Romans 1, Paul also explicitly condemns the worship of animal gods. But there’s also a premodern bond between animals and humans that is sometimes very subtle. We’re so used to the image of God as shepherd that it’s easy to miss the implied relationship. “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” says Jesus in John 10:11, as if everyone knows that’s what good shepherds do. It’s a long way from that to factory farming, eh?

The Old Testament sacrifices of animals, which seem barbaric to us now, also actually imply a greater respect for animal life than our current mechanized slaughter. OT analyst Richard Friedman wrote: “Modern readers often think that sacrifice is the unnecessary taking of animal life, or that the person offering the sacrifice was giving up something to compensate for some sin or to win God’s favor. But in the biblical world, the most common type of sacrifice was for meals. The apparent rationale was that if people wanted to eat meat, they must recognize that they were taking life. They could not regard this as an ordinary act of daily secular life. It was a sacred act, to be performance in a prescribed manner, by an appointed person (a priest), at an altar.”

It is true, however, that animals in the OT were often forced to bear the sins of people. That’s why the NT frequently compares Jesus to a sacrificial animal. And so his sacrifice served not to just liberate people, but animals. When Telford and I were talking about this he told me that the idea that Jesus’ salvific power extended to the natural world used to be a lot more accepted, especially in Eastern Christianity. One image the conversation imprinted on my brain was from an Orthodox painting of Jesus’ baptism that showed the Jordan’s fish leaping for joy because he was blessing their water.

What that salvation looks like, no one really knows. Isaiah had his famous lines about predators eating plants and lions lying down with lambs, but of course you never know how literally to take those things. Either way, though, there’s a definite implication that not just humanity but “nature red in tooth and claw” will be profoundly changed by the Kingdom.

I think this is an important idea for the West to recover. For one thing, cutting the animals out of salvation also cuts our own animal nature out of salvation, and implies that only the upper cortices of our brains will really be “saved.” For another, so long as nature is assumed to be the way God ultimately wants it to be, it gets very difficult to claim that God has the sort of personality that Christians ascribe to him. Why would a God opposed to selfishness and killing approve of a world that runs on a Darwinian struggle for survival? Even if people actually followed his commands and stopped hurting each other, we would still be in a world that frequently hurts us.

Actually, this kind of brings me back to the discussion I’ve been having with Progressive Christian about why the bodily resurrection was “necessary”. For me it’s necessary because without a physical eschatology, Jesus’ moral instructions are an exercise in futility. They become, like Gould’s non-overlapping magisterium, principles plucked from the air, designed for a perfect world and not the real one.

So anyway, those are my beginning musings in search of a Christian natural theology. What are your thoughts?

We’re talking creationism over at Icthus. At some point I’d like to expand on my own comment there, but first I wanted to highlight Nate’s excellent comment:

When I was younger I figured that the Bible must be without error because it was inspired by God, and why would God let the writer he was inspiring to error? And if there was error, then God must not have inspired it, and if God did not inspire it, then our faith has no ground to stand on, and if our faith has no ground to stand on then it all sounds pretty silly. …

Eventually I had to step back and admit that both sides in the public debate had created a false dichotomy. The Bible could be both inspired by God as a ground for our faith and contain metaphor, allegory, discrepencies and even some mistakes (which I would later learn was the opinion of most conservative scholars: too bad they have no voice in the public debate). The problem is that when we conceive of inspiration as being a process when God feeds words into zombie writers, we do so because we want scripture to be God’s direct word to us, instead of a revelation of God that requires reflection. This is a sort of folk religion that proscirbes [ascribes?] a magical power to the Bible and distracts us from the one it points us to. Thus, we have the Bible studies where verses are taken out of context as “God’s word to you specifically.”

I was thinking about this whole question of inspiration after the discussion on hermeneutics last week, and came to a very similar conclusion. As I’ve said elsewhere, the traditional understanding of the Holy Spirit really blurs the boundaries between self and God, and so we modern Westerners have a hard time understanding it. So we push it to extremes: either you’re your own master, or you’re “possessed” by some outside force. So we have, on the one hand, mainstream Christians with a fairly poor sense of the Spirit, and on the other hand charismatics who go for wild stuff.

There is certainly some charismatic experience described in the New Testament: visions, dreams, speaking in tongues. But from very early days, the whole church was assumed to be guided by the Spirit, in mundane life as much as in showy spiritual events. So Catholics have, for instance, taken the decisions of the canonical councils to be Spirit-guided and therefore as authoritative as the Bible, even though nobody at these meetings goes into a trance and starts automatic-writing or anything. The Spirit, it is assumed, can work through ordinary thought processes.

Of course, that’s Catholicism, and not everybody is going to agree with that. But it’s clear that the entire Bible could not have been written in some charismatic state, if for no other reason than that Paul specifically states at certain points that such-and-such is a teaching he has “received,” whereas other pieces of advice are his own opinion.

On the other hand, this fact does not have to mean that the writers of the Bible were no more inspired when they wrote about God than, say, me. One of the more charming themes in the Bible is the way God keeps choosing people who become his instruments at the same time that they remain their own familiar screwed-up selves. So to say the writers were flawed human beings does not preclude them from having been chosen.

This leaves, of course, a lot of room for argument over just how long a leash the Spirit gives people. The Mennonite I talked to believes that the Spirit let the Church drift really far afield — so far that is was necessary for the Anabaptists to found new churches. And I suppose some liberal Christians might say that the writers were inspired because they managed to get down anything about Jesus, even if they were egregiously wrong about big questions like, say, his divinity. (Though worshipping a human being seems so inherently bad to me I don’t see it really making up for it; but that’s another subject.) Anyway, I do think this shows again why you can’t divide hermeneutics into these two neat opposites.

Thanks for the nice comments on my last post, and thanks to Mark for pointing out this piece defending a “hermeneutic of trust.” The author is responding specifically to feminist deconstructions of the Bible, which he thinks go a little too far:

Sadly, our common history is marked by epidemic violence, including violence against women, children and the powerless. Certainly this violence is to be condemned, and interpreters of the Bible have good grounds for proclaiming such condemnation. The difficulty in which we find ourselves, however, is this: If the Bible itself, the revelatory, identity-defining text of the Christian community, is portrayed as oppressive, on what basis do we know God or relate to God? A corollary question has crucial implications for biblical interpretation: If the Bible is dangerous, on what ground do we stand in conducting a critique of scripture that will render it less harmful?

For Schüssler Fiorenza the answer to the latter question is clear: a feminist critical hermeneutic “does not appeal to the Bible as its primary source but begins with women’s own experience and vision of liberation.” Experience (of a certain sort) is treated as unambiguously revelatory, and the Bible is critically scrutinized in its light. Regrettably, many practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and by no means only feminist interpreters, are remarkably credulous about the claims of experience. As a result, they endlessly critique the biblical texts but rarely get around to hearing scripture’s critique of us or hearing its message of grace.

This seems related, somewhat tangentially, to a post I found via AKMA, on internal vs. external sources of morality. This led to an interesting (but a bit frustrating, for some reason I can’t quite name) discussion in the comments about your “Inner Voice” as a source of revelation.