Relocating To Elfland

“We must know that God’s providence, as it is taught in Scripture, is opposed to fortune and fortuitous happenings. Now it has been commonly accepted in all ages, and almost all mortals hold the same opinion today, that all things come about through chance. What we ought to believe concerning providence is by this depraved opinion most certainly not only beclouded, but almost buried. Suppose a man falls among thieves, or wild beasts; is shipwrecked at sea by a sudden gale; is killed by a falling house or tree. Suppose another man wandering through the desert finds help in his straits; having been tossed by the waves, reaches harbor; miraculously escapes death by a finger’s breadth. Carnal reason ascribes all such happenings, whether prosperous or adverse, to fortune. But anyone who has been taught by Christ’s lips that all the hairs of his head are numbered [Matt. 10:30] will look farther afield for a cause, and will consider that all events are governed by God’s secret plan. And concerning inanimate objects we ought to hold that, although each one has by nature been endowed with its own property, yet it does not exercise its own power except in so far as it is directed by God’s ever-present hand. These are, thus, nothing but instruments to which God continually imparts as much effectiveness as he wills, and according to his own purpose bends and turns them to either one action or another.

“No creature has a force more wondrous or glorious than that of the sun. For besides lighting the whole earth with its brightness, how great a thing is it that by its heat it nourishes and quickens all living things! That with its rays it breathes fruitfulness into the earth! That it warms the seeds in the bosom of the earth, draws them forth with budding greenness, increases and strengthens them, nourishes them anew, until they rise up into stalks! That it feeds the plant with continual warmth, until it grows into flower, and from flower into fruit! That then, also, with baking heat it brings the fruit to maturity! That in like manner trees and vines warmed by the sun first put forth buds and leaves, then put forth a flower, and from the flower produce fruit! Yet the Lord, to claim the whole credit for all these things, willed that, before he created the sun, light should come to be and earth be filled with all manner of herbs and fruits [Gen. 1:3, 11, 14]. Therefore a godly man will not make the sun either the principal or the necessary cause of these things which existed before the creation of the sun, but merely the instrument that God uses because he so wills; for with no more difficulty he might abandon it, and act through himself. Then when we read that at Joshua’s prayers the sun stood still in one degree for two days [Josh. 10:13], and that its shadow went back ten degrees for the sake of King Hezekiah [II Kings 20:11 or Isa. 38:8], God has witnessed by those few miracles that the sun does not daily rise and set by a blind instinct of nature but that he himself, to renew our remembrance of his fatherly favor toward us, governs its course. Nothing is more natural than for spring to follow winter; summer, spring; and fall, summer – each in turn. Yet in this series one sees such great and uneven diversity that it readily appears each year, month, and day is governed by a new, a special, providence of God.”

(John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Book 1, chapter 16, section 2)

“The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.” (G. K. Chesterton, Heretics)

“God makes narrative room in his triune life for others than himself; this act is the act of creation, and this accommodation is created time. . . . God takes time in his time for us. This is his act of creation.” (Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, pp. 34, 35)

“Modern scientists often research the past using the assumptions [sic] that all apparent ages must be real. But that is their assumption. They assume that God (or their idolatrous substitute for God) must have acted in the past in exactly the same way as they see him operating now. But again, that assumes more than they know. The ‘deceit’ arises not because God has deceived per­fectly innocent people, but because people have ignored Genesis and have deceived themselves about how much they know about God and how much they know about his ways in the past. They have assumed from the begin­ning that mature creation is untrue. A little humility would help.” (Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach, p. 120)

“[Abraham] Kuyper appears to say something that is almost essential for the survival of the Christian academic community in a secular setting – that science cannot be regarded as a sovereign domain that sets its own rules to which Christians and everyone else must conform if they are to retain their intellectual respectability. As philosophers of science now are also recognizing, science itself is controlled to substantial degrees by assumptions and commitments. Christians, then, should be free frankly to state their metaphysical starting points and their assumptions and to introduce these into their scientific work in all areas of human inquiry; they should employ underlying control beliefs that differ widely from those of non-Christians.” (George Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, pp. 255–56)

“Since the object does not produce the subject, nor the subject the object, the power that binds the two organically together must of necessity be sought outside of each. And however much we may speculate and ponder, no  explanation can ever suggest itself to our sense, of the all-sufficient ground for this admirable correspondence and affinity between object and subject, on which the possibility and development of science wholly rests, until at the hand of Holy Scripture we confess that the Author of the cosmos created man in the cosmos as microcosmos ‘after his image and likeness.’ ” (Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, p. 83)

It is often said that God has written two books, the book of scripture and the book of nature. Both are true and trustworthy (it is said), because both are from God.

This book metaphor is frequently marshaled in support of the idea that, if we reach a conclusion after careful scientific study of the book of nature, that conclusion is as trustworthy as anything we have concluded from scripture – in fact, the assured results of scientific inquiry into God’s book of nature should chasten our ever-so-fallible interpretations of the book of scripture.

And this (it gives me no end of cheer to report) allows us to revise venerable interpretations of the Bible (Genesis, in particular) so we can sit at the table with the modern scientific community and not feel like idiots. If that isn’t a cause for thanks, now, what is? I mean, it’s just plain awful to feel one is lacking by the latest standards of intellectual credibility.

So what are we to make of this? Let’s leave aside for now the question whether God “speaks” to us in nature about nature (i.e., the book of nature includes science lessons) or about Himself, or perhaps both. That’s not a small question, by the way – we need to have some idea what God intends to say in the book of nature (what its contents are) before we get too confident about our inferences from it. But let’s just suppose for a moment that we were to get a “sure word” from the book of nature about something in nature – something really indisputable by every known standard of accepted science.

What if this “sure word” in the book of nature were to clash – absolutely, irreconcilably clash – with something in the book of scripture? Well, surely God wouldn’t lie to us in the book of nature, right? It’s absolutely reliable. So if the book of nature says “X” and our reading of the book of scripture says “non-X,” we need to listen to nature and revise our reading of the other book accordingly.

Okay. Now suppose (HT: Mark Horne) that the book of nature tells us fairly definitively that the body of a 90-year-old woman can’t conceive, that her body is (to borrow a phrase) “as good as dead”? God wouldn’t lie, would He? He wouldn’t deceive us. His providential laws of nature can be relied on absolutely; there’s no “God in the gaps” messing with things.

Abraham was a good scientist. When God told him Sarah was going to have a baby, he laughed (Genesis 17:17). “That just doesn’t happen. The book of nature says so.” Probably he heard God wrong. Better try a new reading of the divine promises, one that brings them into accord with the conclusions of accepted science.

There’s a technical term for that. It’s called unbelief.

My point is this: there are times when the book of scripture tells us, without equivocation, that God has done, is doing, or is going to do something that is impossible by every responsible reading of the book of nature. And faith says, “Yes, Lord.” Not because it is irresponsible, but because it understands that the cosmos isn’t governed by laws of nature; it’s governed by God. And He can do – He does do – stuff that makes no sense by the canons of accepted science. Why are we so afraid to accept this?

“No conceivable number of false mediums affects the probability of the existence of real mediums one way or the other. This is surely obvious enough. No conceivable number of forged bank-notes can disprove the existence of the Bank of England. If anything, the argument might as well be turned the other way; we might say with rather more reason that as all hypocrisies are the evil fruits of public virtue, so in the same way the more real spiritualism there is in the world the more false spiritualism there is likely to be.” (G. K. Chesterton, “Skepticism and Spiritualism”)

“We need to reform our thinking about science. And we need to do it in a global way, by tackling on a large scale our conception of what kind of world we live in and what is our human role in it. Western civilization has lost sight of any unified goal, except perhaps the superficial goals of pleasure, prosperity, and tolerance. We have lost our way as a civilization, and the uni­versities have become multi-versities with no center. The grade schools are lit­tle better. The atmosphere says, ‘Work on these apparently meaningless assignments now, so that you will be able to go to college, get a good job, and live the American dream of a large home with two cars and a plasma screen TV.’ The malaise about science and its meaning is only part of a larger malaise of meaninglessness engulfing us.” (Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach, p. 12)

The historicity of Adam is very much up for debate among Western Christians at present. One of the things that has made this debate possible is the increasing popularity of “non-literal” readings of Genesis 1; the ascendancy of such readings, in turn, has been prompted by a desire to bring the church’s interpretation of Genesis into accord with the findings of modern science. It is said that the church must do with the historicity of Adam (which is based on a certain reading of Genesis 1) what it eventually had to do with geocentric cosmology (which was based on a certain reading of the Psalms) after Galileo’s findings four centuries ago.

I really, really wonder about this Galileo analogy. One hears it all the time, but the more I think about it, the more it strikes me as facile. If we accept the popular rendering of Galileo’s story, he found himself up against a church that treated certain poetic imagery as a scientific description of the world, not because scripture itself demanded this reading (comparing scripture with scripture, it’s usually not that hard to tell when a biblical writer is waxing poetic), but because the reading was in accord with an older cosmological paradigm than the one Galileo was proposing. If the church looks foolish in retrospect, it’s because its interpretation of scripture was over-determined by an outdated model of the cosmos.

I don’t think the church actually needed Galileo’s extrabiblical findings to chasten its reading of scripture; I happen to think a more careful comparing of scripture with scripture would have compelled it to keep its cosmological options open. But be that as it may, what I want to argue rather vigorously is that comparison of scripture with scripture demands belief in a historical Adam and Eve, regardless of anything extrabiblical science has ever had to say on the subject.

Even if one were somehow able to make a compelling case that Genesis 1 is poetic (whatever exactly that means), the hard fact is that scripture – both in the rest of Genesis and elsewhere – traces the historical lineage of the human race back to a man named Adam and his wife named Eve. There is not a hint anywhere in the Bible that our historical genealogy tails off into poetic mist when we get all the way back to the opening two chapters. If Noah begat three sons named Shem, Ham, and Japheth; and if Abraham is the father of Isaac and Ishmael; then Adam is the father of Seth (1 Chronicles 1:1; Luke 3:38); Enoch is the seventh from Adam (Jude 14); and if Enoch is seventh, than Adam is the first. If we have some doubts about this, Adam was formed “first,” then Eve (1 Timothy 2:13); and after they were both deceived (non-poetically, it would seem, given the fallout), the whole human race (“all”) died “in Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:22), the “first man” (protos anthropos, 1 Corinthians 15:45).

One may sneer at this, because one holds that Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam are the equivalent of Galileo’s cosmology and it’s time for the church to get with the program; but do let’s admit that the biblical case for Adam’s historicity is enormously more airtight than a geocentric reading of the Psalms. It doesn’t require much interpretive discernment to notice that the Bible regularly describes the earth in metaphorical language, whereas every time Adam is mentioned he’s either the terminus ad quo of our human (biological, historical) genealogy or the original source in a universal etiology of sin (one does speculate at what point the descendants of Mitochondrial Eve might have become subject to divine judgment).