Should Economics Be Ethical?

Tonight I am posting a few reflections inspired by a video at this link:

Video on Income Distribution

In many ways, this video speaks for itself and needs no commentary.  And yet, I know that many will strongly disagree with the point that its creator is trying to make.  The question of income distribution and what is to be done about it marks one of the key fault lines in modern US politics.  I would like to address just two of the objections raised by those libertarians and fiscally conservative thinkers to the line of argument presented in the video.

Objection #1:  The WHOLE pie is getting bigger.  Yes, the poor may be poorer relative to the wealthy, but in absolute terms, they are actually better off than before.  Economics is not a "zero sum game."

Response:  This is a well-worn argument from laissez faire capitalists of all shapes and sizes.  And, to some extent, it is true.  Even though the income distribution is less equal than before, it can be demonstrated that the poor have benefitted in certain ways by participation in the larger system of free market economics.  When the waterline rises, all the boats rise with it.  

However, although this argument works if we look at the last 60 years since WWII, I am not sure that it is as conclusive if we narrow the scope down to the last 30 years.  In terms of buying power and wages relative to the cost of living, the poor in today's economy, according to some economists, are actually worse off than they were in 1980.  I would argue that the days of the "whole pie getting bigger" are over.  The boom of the post-WWII economy did benefit all Americans economically, but that is not the current reality.  We might also note that there were MORE financial regulations during the period of the 1950s and 60s than there are today.  For more on this, see this wonderful little video:  Senator Warren Lays the Smack Down

Secondly, I question what we mean by "better off."  This question goes beyond the realm of economics and into the realm of philosophy, theology, and sociology.  Is the generation of wealth the ultimate good for a society?  Is the creation of more stuff the telos of human behavior?  Moreover, does obsession with production, accumulation, and general creation of wealth even lead to greater levels of happiness?  I recall reading an article several years ago (if I find the source I will add the link later) which compared the poor of America's inner cities to the poor of India's slums.  In terms of absolute wealth, the American poor were far better off.  They ate more food, slept in more comfortable homes, had access to better drinking water, and even enjoyed luxuries like television.  The poor of India, on the other hand, lacked many or all of these.  But here is what's so fascinating:  the poor of India reported greater levels of happiness and satisfaction in their lives than did the poor of the United States.  Perplexed by this finding, the researchers dug deeper and ultimately determined that the residents of India's slums were happier due to the sense of community, fraternity, and solidarity that they found among their peers.  The poor of America's inner cities, in contrast, experienced fragmentation, alienation, isolation, and fear.  We could draw many fascinating conclusions from this, but for my purposes here I would simply state that the creation of wealth in and of itself does not necessarily benefit humanity or lead to greater levels of happiness.  The assumption of many economists that a "higher standard of living" is a self-evident, inherent good fails to recognize that achieving "a higher standard of living" is not the end goal of human existence.  There are greater goals.  One of those greater goals, I would argue (based on my theology) is the experience of community and unity with one another.  The vast inequality in the distribution of wealth that we find in the United States actually breaks down this sense of community and instead creates envy, class warfare, and various and sundry (I have always wanted to use that phrase in a blog post) forms of social strife.  Thus, a) the argument that the pie is getting bigger may not even be true anymore and b) even if it is, that does not necessarily mean that humanity is better off.

Objection #2: Economics is an amoral discipline.  It exists on its own and cannot be bothered with questions of morality and ethics.

Response:  Do I really need to respond to this?  Evidently I do because I distinctly recall hearing a self-described member of the religious right (a member of my church and leader in my youth group during my high school years) and a Republican staffer for the Illinois state congress stating, "We simply cannot start thinking of economics in moral terms.  The two have nothing to do with one another."  For a firmly committed libertarian, that is indeed the line that one must take to be consistent.  Ayn Rand saw this perfectly well.  You see, it all depends on what story you believe in.  If the world is nothing more than a dog-eat-dog, winner-takes-all free-for-all devoid of any larger meaning-making metanarrative, then there is no moralizing to be done.  In fact, injecting morality into the conversation is to appeal to a trick of nature, a weakness in the human evolutionary process, a particularly powerful and malicious meme (to use Dawkin's term) that deceives us all.  I don't have time to go into this philosophy here because books have been written on it, but suffice it to say that thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Satre, Epicurus of the third century BCE, and Ayn Rand have maintained that without God (and the larger metanarrative that S/he provides), the only true meaning in life is self-gratification.  There is no right or wrong; there are just brute facts.  And the truly enlightened individuals who realize this (the übermensch) are able to cast off the shackles of morality and embrace the glory of their own will to power.  This is why Rand can write a book entitled "The Virtue of Selfishness."  

Do I need to say it?  These ideas are not Christian.  They are the antithesis of Christianity.  Nietzsche loathed Christians because they had been deluded into thinking that humility was actually a virtue.  He scoffed at their ignorance.  Well, Friedrich, I'm a Christian.  And as such, I believe in right and wrong.  I believe in good and evil.  I can look at the war in Syria and claim, "That is a bad thing."  The nihilist cannot do that.  I can also look at an economy in which 1% of the population controls 35.4% of its wealth and say, "That's a sad state of affairs.  In fact, it's wrong."  

I will state it very simply:  Economics is a moral discipline.  It, like all that exists, exists because God created it.  And it falls under the umbrella of that which has meaning and value, that which has moral weight, that which "stands under judgment."  As Jim Wallis is fond of saying (and I agree with him), "A budget is a moral document."  The way that the earth's limited resources are used reveals what we value -- and there are good uses of it and bad uses of it.  The Christian who is firmly convinced that God is God over all things must then evaluate every pattern of thinking according to the nature of God.  Economics does not get a free pass.  It too must be evaluated as ethical or unethical.  (To the schizophrenic Christian libertarian, I say, "Please stop fragmenting your mind.  You're gonna hurt yourself.  Economics and ethics aren't two different universes; they're inextricably bound.  Better yet, economics is subservient to ethics... or at least it ought to be.")  It seems ridiculous to me that I must even write this because it seems so obvious, yet some Christians have been so utterly duped by the language of capitalism that they actually say things like "We simply cannot think of economics in moral terms."  

Once economics is opened up to the critique of morality, I believe we are then right to claim that such an absurdly unequal distribution of wealth as we currently have in America is not only lamentable, but positively immoral.  Measures must be taken to fight it.  We must even leverage the authority of the government to at least partly address this imbalance for the sake of the common good.  The tools that we use to accomplish such a Herculean challenge are crude, but they are better than nothing -- I'm speaking of tools such as the progressive income tax (*gasp* Fox News watchers everywhere are calling me a socialist right now), a robust social safety net, public education, labor laws (which tries to counterbalance the power of that amoral übermensch who will not hesitate to squash a Filipino textile worker in order to increase his bottom line), strict financial regulations (in the hope we won't have a repeat of 2008), and on and on.  We are not aiming for perfection through these tools.  That's not possible.  But a more just society IS possible.  And a provisional, limited peace can be upheld until the ultimate, unadulterated shalom of God descends upon the earth.

Should economics be ethical?  Yes.  And right now the video that inspired this post shows us that we're not doing a very good job.

The Case for Flagless Churches

Many attend church week after week and never pause to reflect on the presence of a flag in the sanctuary.  Or singing “America, the Beautiful” on the Sunday after Independence Day.  Or a bulletin insert decorated with the stars and stripes.  I know that I didn’t for years.  These things were just as normal as donuts and coffee after Sunday School.  And yet, pausing and reflecting is something we must do because what we do on Sunday mornings matters.  Everything we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste (don’t forget communion!) in worship communicates.  These things orient our lives to eternal truths.   And by placing a flag in the podium we are, aware of it or not, participating in what sociologists call “civil religion.”  It’s a term I didn’t learn until seminary, but once I learned it, I began to see it at every turn.

Rob Hewell, author of Worship Beyond Nationalism, describes “civil religion” in this way:  “Civil religion develops as a nation-state seeks validation from the church or prevailing religious order for its establishment, protection, sustenance and ambitions.  It propagates itself through a cross-pollination of the stories, symbols and celebrations of the church and nation-state.”  In short, it is mixing patriotism with worship.  And it is ubiquitous in American churches.

The American flag did not appear in churches until World War I.  Why?  The simple answer is that a wave of patriotism always sweeps through a nation during times of war.  The tremendous cost and horror of “The Great War” united Americans and motivated them to display the flag in church.  The church felt the need to validate the nation and its agenda.  This was a lamentable change and it needs to be reversed.

When I was an English teacher in China, I had the opportunity to attend the officially state-sanctioned “three-self” church.  It caught me off guard when I entered the sanctuary and saw, next to the cross, a large Chinese flag hanging from the wall.  The juxtaposition angered me:  One was the symbol of peace, forgiveness, and salvation; the other was a symbol of communist, one-party rule; forced abortions; millions starved under the Great Leap Forward; repressed speech and freedom during the Cultural Revolution; and ongoing threats against political dissidents.  Why would Chinese Christians consent to displaying such a symbol next to the cross of Christ? 

But not so fast.  We do it too. 

Now I’m not equating the American government with the Chinese government.  Just hear me out.  Think about what the American flag symbolizes to different people groups.  To Native Americans, it means exile, dispossession of land, blankets infected with smallpox, rape, murder, Wounded Knee, and the Trail of Tears.  To African Americans, it means a history of slavery, broken families, Jim Crow, and burning crosses.   To my Iraqi neighbors, it is a symbol of military might, war, and national upheaval.  To the Japanese, it is a reminder of two of the worst days in human history, when thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians were instantly incinerated.  To Latin Americans, it is the emblem of a nation that funded bloodthirsty regimes in the 1980s.  I could go on.

Of course America and its flag are not all bad.  Like all nations, America has her moments of greatness.  But we can all agree that, at best, it has a checkered past.  For those who have been served well by the present state of things, the American flag may represent many beautiful things – freedom, liberty, the American Dream.  But the church of Christ is built on a different foundation.  Whereas America – like all nation-states – is founded on military power, Jesus demonstrated self-sacrificial nonviolence.  Whereas America obsesses over security, Jesus taught us to seek first the kingdom and worry not.  Whereas Americans chase the allure of upward mobility, Jesus demonstrated a way of life where “the Son of Man has no place to rest his head.”

You see, when we mix patriotism with the Christian faith, we pervert the faith.  We turn the universal

message of Christ into something tribal.  We confuse the nonviolent ethic of Jesus with the unending power struggles of the powers and principalities.  We fall prey to the temptation that has plagued the church since 313 CE, when Constantine decided he’d been divinely chosen to establish a Christian Empire.  This unholy concoction of the original way of Jesus and the way of the world expresses itself through our worship when we sing national anthems in our services, display flags in our sanctuaries, and use salvific rhetoric in reference to our national troops rather than to God.  Civil religion takes many forms.

We who claim to ally with Christ are part of a new nation, a separate and holy people that are (or ought to be) marked by our refusal to bend the knee to the violent gods that seek to subvert our allegiance.  In this nation, our laws are different, our language is different, our narrative is different, our relationships are different, and our ruler is different.  As Christians, we pledge our allegiance to that kingdom, and that kingdom demands all.  There is no room for any other alliance that might ask us to deny our true citizenship.  In this sense, we who follow Christ are all aliens in this world.  We who set our face toward Jerusalem have no nation but God’s. 

I pledge allegiance to the Lamb of God who was slain.  The one who is worthy to open the scroll.  The one who chose to lay down his life rather than grab political power. His kingdom, unlike America or China or any other earthly nation, will never end.  His kingdom is universal.  So let’s rid ourselves of our symbols of tribalism.  There is no room for them in the unbounded nation of God.

Why Christians Need to Talk about Trayvon

I am a Free Methodist through and through.  In fact, my Free Methodist credentials are quite impressive if I do say so myself.  To my knowledge, I am the only sixth generation ordained Free Methodist pastor.  In the world.  And so, I have devoted a good deal of my academic career to researching and thinking about my denomination's history and unique place within the larger witness of the church, probably because it has played such a large part in the formation of my own identity.

Several years ago I researched a very simple question:  What did Free Methodists have to say during the tumultuous decade of the 1960s?  Did they weigh in on Vietnam?  Did they back the civil rights movement or oppose it?  I set about reading as much as I could of the literature produced by my denomination during that decade.  I pored over the articles printed in the denominational magazine.  And you know what I found?  I found one -- ONE! -- article that even remotely questioned the legitimacy of the war in Vietnam.  It was the only article (more like a short blurb, really) that reminded Free Methodists of our Christian commitment to peacemaking and hatred of violence.

I did not find a single article addressing civil rights.

Think about that.  On the national level, what was taking place was unprecedented.  Martin Luther King was traveling the nation, legislation was being enacted, major strides toward racial equality were taking place... and my church was largely silent.

Remember: this is a denomination that boasts of roots in (and owes its name to) the 1860's anti-slavery movement.  I believe its silence, just a century later, is nothing short of tragic.  It's not like the church was filled with vocal racists and bigots.  Free Methodists weren't donning the white hood and burning crosses (and least, I don't think they were).  But they also weren't marching with the protesters, practicing civil disobedience, and attending the rally to hear about Dr. King's dream.  (By the way, if anyone who reads this knows of evidence to the contrary, please contact me.  I would be delighted to be proved wrong on this).

When my grandchildren ask me about the Trayvon Martin case, I don't want to tell them that I was silent.  I don't want to be found on the wrong side of history.  I want to tell them with pride that my church entered into the conversation and that, in fact, we were on the front lines, demanding that our nation talk about problems of systemic injustice.

Does the gospel have anything to say about what has transpired recently?  Some Christians evidently think that it does not.  According to the Christianity Today poll I participated in today, over 86% of churches did not even make the slightest mention of the Zimmerman trial.  That silence must be broken.  The gospel DOES have something to say here.  The gospel is a message of liberation, a message of hope, a message of reconciliation.  I believe that if Jesus had been alive in 1963, he would have applauded Dr. King's dream and worked to see it come to fruition.  And I believe that in our own day, Jesus would be standing with the family as they grieve over Trayvon's death. (He'd also be seeking to redeem Zimmerman from his violent ways.  Can't you hear him say, "George, put down your gun.  Those who live by the gun, die by the gun"?).  I can see Jesus wearing a hoodie.  It's in his nature to become like us and enter into our pain and our own struggle for justice.  That's what the incarnation is.

Is it any wonder why young people are turning away from the church in droves when the witness of the church has been so silent for so long?  God stands on the side of the victim, the poor, the outcast, the disfigured, the misunderstood black men of our day.  He calls his church to do the same.  And when we remain silent in the face of injustice, we betray the gospel.  Christians need to talk about Trayvon because the whole reason Jesus came to earth was to set prisoners free, give sight to the blind, proclaim good news to the poor, and initiate the year of Jubilee (see Luke 4).  He only asks that his people bear witness to that reality.

Hoodies up, y'all.  Can I get a witness?

Neurobiology, Free Will, and God's Judgment

I recently heard an interview on Fresh Air with Adrian Raine, a neurobiologist, criminologist, and author of the book The Anatomy of Violence.  Raine has conducted extensive brain-mapping of murderers, serial killers, and psychopaths and has demonstrated quite conclusively that violent criminals who have acted upon angry impulses very often have an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.  The prefrontal cortex is the segment of the brain that provides impulse control and effectively tells us "Even though you're really angry with him, don't pull out the kitchen knife and kill him."  Raine describes this part of the brain as the "guardian angel" of the human conscience.  As a result of his investigations, Raine is calling attention to the fact that some criminals commit crimes due to their very biological makeup.  And this not only applies to murder, but also to less serious offenses such as cheating on a test, stealing, lying, and so on.

Raine and the host Terry Gross talked extensively about the legal implications of this finding, but meanwhile my own brain was spinning as I considered the theological implications.  As a child of the Wesleyan tradition, I have always believed strongly in human free will and agency.  In fact, you could perhaps describe Wesleyan-Arminian theology as one massive theological project attempting to preserve the belief that we humans are free to choose between right and wrong, good and evil.

And then neuroscience comes along.

Now Adrian Raine is not saying that we never make any free choices.  But he is saying that we are less free than we have always thought we are.  Some people are biologically predisposed to violence and (consequently) others to peace.  Some find it easier to lie, cheat, and steal.  And a few (those known as psychopaths) feel no guilt whatsoever when engaging in behavior that hurts others.  It all depends on biology.

What am I to make of this theologically?  How do we incorporate such findings from the field of neurobiology into a doctrine of free will?

Perhaps this is why Christ instructs us never to judge one another.  The action of another individual might seem reprehensible to me (and it would be reprehensible if I were the one to do it), but that action might not be as freely chosen by the other individual as I would assume.  For example, it is clear from Scripture that bearing false witness is wrong.  But what if Bob has a neurological predisposition and enhanced proclivity for lying.  It would be easy for me to judge Bob for telling a lie, and I still do think that a lie is wrong.  But it might be less wrong for Bob than it would for me (assuming I do not have the same predisposition).  This means that our moral judgments on others can be quite inaccurate.  I do not know Bob's brain chemistry and therefore I cannot offer a perfectly clear judgment because any fair judgment would take his brain chemistry into account.  The question is one of moral culpability.  And our human ability to determine culpability is severely limited, if Dr. Raine is right.  (Some theologians will undoubtedly reject his theory out of hand since it doesn't fit into their theological framework, but I think that's just plain lazy and dishonest).

I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do know this:  it's a good thing God is judge and I am not.  His judgments are perfect.  I can declare with St. Paul, "How unsearchable are His judgments!"  He alone knows my brain chemistry and Bob's brain chemistry and the brain chemistry of everyone on earth... and that means that He alone can judge.

Why I Believe in Evolution

            When I was homeschooled in the seventh grade, my science curriculum, published by A Beka Books, convinced my impressionable 12-year-old mind that the theory of evolution was a bunch of hogwash.  It equipped me with loads of ammunition to take into battle against the evolutionists I would undoubtedly encounter in high school and college.  Now, a full twenty years later, I still consider myself to be an evangelical Christian, but one who accepts the theory of evolution.  In my own case, this dramatic change in perspective did not result from the study of science, but actually from the study of the Bible.  In this paper I hope to summarize in accessible language the nature of that shift in the hopes that it would edify the faith of others who wrestle with similar questions.[1]

Although some of my friends have chided me for “compromising with the world” and “trusting in man’s wisdom rather than God’s revelation” by embracing evolutionary theory, I remain convinced that God gives humans a natural curiosity about the world and, since our God is the God of all Truth, we who follow him[2] have nothing to fear in exploring his world.  Undoubtedly, many mysteries will remain in the mind of finite humanity, but I reject the all too frequent charge that Christians, as people of faith, should avoid seeking to understand such things through human reason.  This proclivity to pit faith against reason needs to be rejected.  No question is out of bounds for the Christian.

            I have never written a paper like this before.  Although it will be submitted for a grade at my divinity school, I’m really writing this paper for my many friends and family members who are evangelicals, mostly laypeople and non-theologians, and who want to know why I believe in evolution (hence the very informal and non-academic language).  I do not pretend that my answers will be satisfactory for all, but I do hope to shed some light on the issues and, at the very least, provoke some further thought into the matter. 

            So why does this ongoing debate between creationists and evolutionists matter?  Just a few months ago, I received an e-mail from a friend that I used to mentor during college and who is now a graduate student in ecology.  He was wrestling with how to take the bible seriously while also taking seriously the scientific evidence for evolution that he was learning about in his coursework.  This is a very common issue for students seeking to integrate faith and learning, particularly those in the scientific disciplines.  For some, encounters with Darwinism prove to be a major threat to the faith itself.  Forced to choose between science and the faith that they inherited from their childhood, many turn their backs on the church and loose their faith believing that what they had been taught as children is irrational. The Barna Group, a Christian polling organization, recently concluded a study in which they found the following:

One of the reasons young adults feel disconnected from church or from faith is the tension they feel between Christianity and science. The most common of the perceptions in this arena is "Christians are too confident they know all the answers" (35%). Three out of ten young adults with a Christian background feel that "churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in" (29%). Another one-quarter embrace the perception that "Christianity is anti-science" (25%). And nearly the same proportion (23%) said they have "been turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate." Furthermore, the research shows that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries.[3]

As this research shows, this issue does matter, especially among younger evangelicals.  When the church engages in pseudo-science – the kind of science I encountered in my seventh grade textbook – it damages the reputability of the faith, alienates people from the church, and dishonors Christ.[4] 

            I am not writing as a scientist and so the bulk of this paper will not deal with the scientific evidence for evolution.  I will not discuss, for example, the results of the mapping of the human genome, the fossil records, carbon dating, and so on.  But we might note briefly, however, that the theory of evolution is one of the most widely accepted scientific theories in our world today.  According to the Pew Research Center, 97% of scientists today believe in evolution.[5]  (It’s hard to find 97% of scientists who agree on anything!)  Faced with this fact, creationists are forced to ask why such a huge majority of scientists disagree with their own view.  As a creationist myself for many years, I was convinced by my subculture that there was a widespread conspiracy among scientists to prove evolution since they wanted to believe that there is no God.  How else, it seemed to me, can we explain the almost unanimous acceptance of evolutionary theory?  But I eventually concluded that this conspiracy theory hardly seems plausible.  In my own experience, most scientists are eager seekers of truth without a hidden agenda.  They use their minds to the best of their ability in seeking to understand the cosmos and we are wrong to question their integrity without evidence.

            Instead of addressing the scientific end of the debate, I want to look at Scripture and how Scripture is interpreted.  As an evangelical, I am committed to the authority of Scripture and believe that it is inspired and God-breathed.  As I mentioned, my own journey away from creationism to becoming a theistic evolutionist came as the result of study of the Bible.  Since I am writing this paper to my fellow evangelicals, I hope that we can agree upon the authority of Scripture as a common starting-place. 

            When we open up the Bible to read its first pages, we must recognize what questions we the readers bring with us to the text.  Some of the questions that we ask as 21^st century interpreters of Scripture might be different than the questions burning in the minds of the original authors.  For example, we might come to Genesis 1-2 with the question, “How did the earth and the universe come to be?  Why is there something rather than nothing?  What is a history of what actually happened at the beginning of the world?”  Yet what if these were not the questions in the minds of the original authors of Genesis?  What if their concerns were entirely different than our own?  What if they wrote Genesis for a different reason than providing a science book about the origins of the universe?

            Whenever we read Scripture, it is essential that we establish the genre of what we are reading.  Understanding the genre is half of the battle.  I used to tell my parishioners that there is a difference between a love letter from my wife and my 2001 Toyota Camry Owner’s Manual.  Both are printed words on a page, but that is where the similarities end.  If I opened up my wife’s letter and read it as though it were my car owner’s manual, I would quickly end up very confused.  In the same way, when we open up Genesis and expect it to be a recorded history of actual events or a scientific textbook about the origins of the universe, we will immediately embark on adventures in missing the point. 

            Just try to read the first few chapters of Genesis literally.  It quickly becomes rather absurd.  We then find ourselves asking questions like, “How could there have been days one, two, and three without a sun or moon (which were created on day four)?  Why are there two creation stories instead of one (Genesis 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-25)?  Why are plants created before man in the first account, but man is created before plants in the second account?  And in Genesis 4, from whom is Cain fearful of retaliation for murdering his brother?  Who are these people “in the land of Nod” that Cain goes to live with if Adam and Eve’s only remaining child is Cain?”  And then there is the ever-embarrassing question asked in Sunday School classes by countless children: “Where did Adam and Eve’s children find husbands and wives to marry?”  These are just a few examples of the questions that emerge from a purely literal reading of the first few chapters of Genesis.

            At this point, I think a word about taking the Bible literally is in order.  I can already hear the objections:  “But I believe this is God’s Word.  God says what he means and means what he says.  If we can’t trust the Bible in one place, then we can’t trust it at all.  We have to take it literally because if we don’t then how do we know if any of it is true?”  First, there is a difference between taking the Bible literally and taking it seriously.  Sometimes to take the Bible seriously (i.e. on its own terms as it was intended to be read) means precisely that we do not take it literally.  If I tell you that it is raining cats and dogs here in Durham as I write this, I hope that you won’t take me literally.  I hope that you will not go to YouTube in hopes of finding videos of Siamese kittens and Rottweiler puppies falling from the North Carolina sky (as entertaining as that might be).  Of course, you would understand that I am using an expression that I did not intend to be understood literally.  If you did take me literally, then you would not be taking me seriously.  After all, Jesus didn’t want his own hearers to take him literally all of the time.[6]  Much to his audience’s consternation, Jesus frequently told confusing parables – stories about things that never actually happened but that nonetheless contain deep truths.  We would be wrong to criticize him for failing to speak literally.  The moment we in the audience start bickering about what city the prodigal son visited in his escapades or in what year this or that parable took place is the moment we miss the point entirely.

            Similarly, Genesis should be read as a story containing deep truths, but not necessarily as a true story in the same way that, say, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom recounts the history of the Civil War.  Unfortunately we oftentimes import our own modern understanding of history onto the Bible.  But what we understand to be history (akin to Joe Friday asking for “just the facts, ma’am” in Dragnet) is quite different from what ancient peoples understood history to be.  The ancients preferred to tell stories for their explanatory and moral power, as opposed to our concern for accurate chronology.  And so when we open our Bibles, we must always remember that we are eavesdropping in on a conversation that took place in a foreign land among a foreign people with very different values and thought patterns than our own.

In short, my main idea is this:  Genesis is not (and was never intended to be) a scientific guide to the origins of the universe.  Nor was it intended to be a factual history in the same way that we think of factual histories.  To read it this way sets us on course for a multitude of absurd questions.  And, worse, we are in danger of missing the point entirely. 

            Genesis, like the rest of Scripture, was written to teach God’s people about God – about his nature, about his relationship to creation, about his covenant love for the nation of Israel, and about his salvific purposes for humanity.  When we read Genesis, we are reading something theological, not scientific.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the entirety of the Bible was written for this purpose:  to disclose the nature of the One True God and to reveal how we might have restored relationship with Him.  But when we start reading the Bible as though it exists to teach us scientific truths about the world, then we fall into the same trap that led the church of late medieval Europe to condemn those first astronomers for claiming that the earth revolves around the sun.[7]

            So what is Genesis about?  To determine this, we must first learn who wrote it and why.  The traditional view that prevailed for many years held that Moses himself wrote the first five books of the Old Testament (called the Pentateuch).  However, most Old Testament scholars today, both Jewish and Christian, agree that Genesis was written much later in the post-Exilic period of Israel’s history.  The Old Testament scholar Peter Enns summarizes the predominant view among scholars this way: “The Penteteuch was not authored out of whole cloth by a second-millenium Moses but it is the product of a complex literary process – written, oral, or both – that did not come to a close until the post-exilic period.  This… is a virtual scholarly consensus after one and a half centuries of debate.”[8] 

With this in mind, then, we begin to understand what motivated the authors of Genesis in their compilation of the text.  We must keep in mind that the exile into Babylon was the most cataclysmic and catastrophic event in Israel’s history.  The exile was not simply a mater of relocating to a new land; it was, in the mind of the Jews, proof that God had forever abandoned his people.  The trauma of this event was the driving force – the motivation behind – the creation of what we today call the Old Testament.  To quote Enns again, “The creation of the Hebrew Bible, in other words, is an exercise in national self-definition in response to the Babylonian exile.”[9]  Keeping this context in mind, then, we are able to better understand who wrote Genesis and why.  And this changes the way we read it.  Rather that trying to find in Genesis an ahistorical, objective, scientific explanation of the origins of human life, we find a distinctively Jewish document written as a declaration to a scattered and bewildered people, declaring, “This is who we are, and this is the God we worship!  Despite what you see, we are the people of God even now!”  The story of Adam and Eve, then, recapitulates the story of Israel and reminds Israel (and us in the church today!) that there is still hope and that our God has not abandoned us.[10]

            One other method for explaining the aboutness of Genesis is to compare it to other creation stories of the Ancient Near East and notice how the biblical account differs.  The Hebrew people were not the only ones who wrote an account of the beginning of the world.  The ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and other cultures beyond Mesopotamia did as well.  The Babylonian text Enuma Elish, for example, is often called the “Babylonian Genesis” because of its many similarities.  Just like in Genesis 1, the Enuma Elish describes the creation of order out of chaos[11], the darkness that preceded creation, the light that came before the sun, moon, and stars, the separation of the waters, and a sequence of days of creation.[12]  The Jewish compilers of Genesis were familiar with the Enuma Elish, which is far older than Israel’s creation story, and used it in editing the text that appears in our Bibles today.  But significantly the Israelites changed some key elements of the Babylonian story.  Rather than describing creation as the result of struggle and conflict as the Babylonian story does, Genesis depicts creation through God’s very words.  In addition, the force of chaos is depersonalized in the Bible.  What emerges, then, is a direct challenge to the prevailing creation myths of the ancient near east. Genesis insists that God alone created the world by an act of his own sovereign will.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the one true God and stands in judgment over all other supposed gods.  In short, the aboutness of Genesis is theological.  It is a polemical theological response to the polytheism and conflict-driven creation myths of other cultures.   The Israelites were saying through their story, “Our God is the Only God.  He alone is the Creator.  He alone is to be worshiped.” 

A similar comparison between the remainder of Genesis chapters 1-11 could be made (in particular, with the many flood narratives of other cultures such as those found in the Sumerian Gilgamesh Epic or the Akkadian Atrahasis) but space will not allow it here.  The important point is that Genesis 1-11, like the similar stories found in the Ancient Near East at the time, were not written as historical chronicles as though a newspaper journalist was standing nearby during each event and writing down everything that happened (for that is how I once thought of it as a child).  Rather, these stories taken together

“present not a picture of history but a picture of how Israel sees itself as God’s people and the surrounding world.  This point is essentially self-evident and so shapes our expectations of what Genesis is prepared to deliver for those who read it today.  These early chapters are the Word of God, but they are not history in any normally accepted sense of the word today.  And they are most certainly not science.  They speak another language altogether.”[13] 

They speak another language altogether.  In a way, that is the central idea

I want to convey to you who read this paper.  The conflict between modern scientific teaching about evolution and the stories of creation found in Genesis is not as great as we oftentimes think.  In a sense, the two are speaking different languages.  They are talking past one another.[14]  Evolutionary theory is a scientific attempt to understand “what actually happened” in history and how life was created.  But Genesis is not about that.  It is addressing another issue entirely.  At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I will say it again: the authors of Genesis were concerned with explaining to their Jewish readers how there is still hope even in the midst of exile, how God has a special relationship with his people, how humanity is unique and special in God’s eyes, and how the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is different from the false gods of the surrounding cultures.  You might say these are the boundaries of the “aboutness” of Genesis.  Reading our own modernist concerns (which extend beyond these boundaries) into Scripture does violence to the text.

All of this might leave you thinking, “But what does the Bible have to say about when and how God created the material world?”  The answer (which you may not like) is that the Bible doesn’t say much at all.  Rather, I conclude from Scripture that whatever method God used for creating this world, we can trust that his hand has been behind it.  The Bible, contrary to what some have claimed from behind the pulpit, is not God’s answer book to every possible question we might imagine.  This is not to diminish the Bible, but merely to point out that it was written for a particular reason, and we must respect those reasons without trying to import more meaning into the text than was intended.  I believe that the Bible contains everything necessary for salvation.  It does not contain modern science for that is not why it was written.  Failing to acknowledge that fact is like reading a love letter from your wife in hopes that you will discover how to repair the exhaust system in your Toyota.

There are many questions I have not addressed here.  For example, what does a belief in evolution imply about the nature of evil in the world?  What does it mean for our doctrine of the fall or original sin?  What are we to make of Paul’s reference to Adam in Romans 5?[15]  If humans are evolved from other lower species, what does it mean to be “made in God’s image”?  All of these are excellent questions that would take me beyond the scope of this paper.  I will include a bibliography at the end of this paper for further reading if you are interested in examining these questions in more depth.  What I hope I have accomplished is to open the door to further exploration in this area and also to have given an account of how it is possible to believe in evolution while also remaining committed to the authority of Scripture. 

            If you’ll indulge me, I want to offer one final comment.  I realize that this is a highly charged, emotional issue for many.  It certainly has been for me as I traveled the road from literal seven-day creationism to theistic evolution.  Evangelicals are a people of the book.  The reason this debate generates so much heat is that many perceive evolution to be a threat to the authority of Scripture and, as a result, to our way of life.  Since the Reformation, Protestants have been largely committed to sola Scriptura (only the Bible).  So when a new theory like evolution comes along it is perceived as a threat not only to the Bible, but also to our religious identity.  Evolution requires Christians to engage in a rather painful process: the work of rethinking theology in light of new evidence.  For some the very idea of such a project is anathema.  But I truly believe that we as Christians must embrace the pain and ambiguity of not knowing all the answers.  When we do this – when we recognize our own limitations and remain open to the conclusions of modern science – we witness to our faith in the God of all Truth.  And so I write this paper not as an enemy, but as an ally.  I want to see the church thrive and I long to see this “stumbling block” removed from the faith journey of so many who hunger for God.

Bibliography

Augustine. The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Translated by J. H. Taylor, 2 vols. New York:  Paulist Press, 1982.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich.  Creation and Fall & Temptation:  Two Biblical Studies.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Cunningham, Conor. Darwin's Pious Idea : Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2010.

Enns, Peter. The Evolution of Adam : What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins.  Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012.

Goldingay, John.  Genesis for Everyone.  Volume 1.  Louisville, KY:  WJK Press, 2010.

Haught, John F. God after Darwin : A Theology of Evolution. 2nd ed.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008.

Hummel, Charles E.  The Galileo Connection:  Resolving the Conflicts between Science and the Bible.  Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity, 1986.

Kobe, Donald H. "Copernicus and Martin Luther: An Encounter Between Science and Religion” American Journal of Physics 66.3 (March 1998): 190-196.

Northcott, Michael S. and R. J. Berry, eds.  Theology After Darwin.  Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2009.

Southgate, Christopher.  The Groaning of Creation:  God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil.  Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

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[1] Two weeks ago, I mentioned on Facebook that I would like to share this paper with anyone who might find the topic interesting.  I received over fifty requests within 24 hours.

[2] I have chosen to use the masculine pronoun for God in this paper deliberately since doing so is the common practice among those evangelicals I am addressing.

[3] Quoted in Karl Giberson, “Creationists Drive Young People out of the Church,” The Huffington Post, accessed 29 April 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karl-giberson-phd/creationists-and-young-christians_b_1096839.html

[4] Even St. Augustine, writing over 1500 years ago, warned against Christians taking the creation stories of Genesis literally:  “It is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these [cosmological] topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.”  Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. J. H. Taylor, 2 vols. (New York:  Paulist Press, 1982), 1:42-43.

[5] “Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.  Accessed 29 April 2013. 

[6] In Matthew 16:6-11 Jesus seems to be downright frustrated that his followers always thought so literally!

[7] There are a striking number of similarities between the current evolution-creation debate and the debate over geocentric-heliocentric models that took place during the Copernican Revolution of the 16^th century.  For a clear and accessible book on this topic see Charles E. Hummel’s The Galileo Connection:  Resolving the Conflicts between Science and the Bible.  The theologians of Copernicus’ day referred to the story of Israel’s battle at Gibeon in which the “sun stood motionless in the middle of the sky” (Joshua 10:13) as clear biblical proof of geocentrism since, in the words of Martin Luther, “Joshua commanded the sun to stand still and not the earth.”  Thus, Copernicus stood condemned because he did not take the Bible literally!  See Donald H. Kobe, “Copernicus and Martin Luther: An Encounter Between Science and Religion” American Journal of Physics 66.3 (March 1998): 190.

[8] Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam : What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins  (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), 23. For a summary of these debates, see chapter 2.

[9] The Evolution of Adam : What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins  (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012), 28.

[10] Enns actually goes so far as to suggest that the first chapters of Genesis are not ultimately about all of humanity, but rather are exclusively about the nation of Israel.  Adam and Eve function as the archetypes of the Israelite people.  He concludes, “Adam is not a story of the origin of humanity in general but of Israel in particular.  When seen from this perspective, efforts to reconcile Adam and evolution become unnecessary – at least from the point of view of Genesis.” Enns, Evolution of Adam, 70.  To put this another way, the story of Adam and Eve is not an answer to the question “Where do people come from?” but rather “Where do the people of Israel come from?”  It is about national identity more than anything else.

[11] As a side note, most Christians do not realize this, but Genesis nowhere indicates a doctrine of God’s creation ex nihilo (out of nothing).  Genesis 1 assumes matter already existed albeit in a state of chaos.  This is much more clear in the original Hebrew.  The new Common English Bible is a far better translation here than the NIV.  This is not to say that the doctrine of God’s creation “out of nothing” is untrue – just that it cannot be derived through Scripture alone.

[12] Walton, John.  The Lost World of Genesis One:  Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity, 2009), 78-86.

[13] Enns, The Evolution of Adam : What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins, 50; Conor Cunningham, Darwin's Pious Idea : Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong  (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2010); John F. Haught, God after Darwin : A Theology of Evolution, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2008).

[14] John Walton, professor at Wheaton College, makes a strong case from biblical studies that Genesis offers an account of functional origins, not material origins.  Drawing from his study of the Hebrew, Walton contends that Genesis explains why the Jews practiced Sabbath, why they worshipped the way they did, etc. rather than explaining material origins.  This is another variation on the same thesis that modern science and Genesis are speaking different languages.  See his book The Lost World of Genesis One.

[15] This is a particularly difficult question that Peter Enns addresses in the second half of his book The Evolution of Adam.