Wishful Thinking

One of the claims made most often against religious faith, especially the Christian faith, is that the Christian faith is simply “wishful thinking.” We should just face the facts, the argument goes. Either there is no God or God has nothing to do with us. We must simply resign ourselves to this cruel fact of existence. We are all alone. All we have is each other. This is it. There is nothing else. To believe in anything greater is simply wishful thinking. In my own case, however, I don’t feel that this argument holds much water. My faith is not wishful thinking, and I’ll explain why I feel that way in a little bit. Firstly, though, I want to explain why I think that for some people, actually for those who believe in a particular way, faith is actually just wishful thinking.

In a now famous nationwide study, University of Notre Dame professor Dr. Christian Smith surveyed thousands of teenagers and their parents about their religious beliefs. The picture that was painted by the results of this study showed that a huge number of people who self-identify as Christians actually believe in a version of God that is quite unlike the God that is portrayed in the Bible and in the traditional doctrines of the Christian church. Dr. Smith gave a name for this way of believing in God. He called it Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Here are the tenets he deduced from the survey’s results:

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

This way of believing says that the most important things are being a good person and being happy. By being good it means being a decent person. God is somewhere out there but you don’t really have to pay attention to God unless you’re in deep trouble and God doesn’t really expect anything of you. Elements of the Christian faith such as worship, study of the Scriptures, repentance from sin, a willingness to sacrifice, and any sort of a distinctly Christian lifestyle don’t make an appearance in this way of believing. God is seen as a “divine butler” or “cosmic therapist.” Folks who believe this way pray only when they want God to give them something or when they want God to help them feel better about themselves. God blesses whatever they do because that’s what makes them happy. They’ll go to heaven when they die because they were decent people, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they ever went out of their way to do good but at least they didn’t do anything terribly evil and they usually opened doors for people and things of the sort. Dr. Smith writes that “a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” On this subject, Princeton Theological Seminary’s Dr. Kenda Creasy Dean writes, “The problem does not seem to be that churches are teaching young people badly, but that we are doing an exceedingly good job of teaching youth what we really believe, namely, that Christianity is not a big deal, that God requires little, and the church is a helpful social institution filled with nice people.” Now that’s wishful thinking… and idolatry.

This is all in contradiction with the Scriptures and with the traditional (what could be called orthodox) Christian faith. It is also in contradiction with one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes that I referenced quite a bit during the past six weeks in our Faith Begins at Home Sunday school class. Lewis writes, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance and, if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” Dr. Smith’s study revealed what a lot of us already knew—people are trying to live as though Christianity is moderately important, and that’s impossible. It is like the old cliché about trying to have your cake and eat it too. You can’t do it. That kind of faith is, in fact, wishful thinking and I join with atheists and agnostics in rejecting it as such.

The reason that I do not think that my faith is wishful thinking is that I don’t believe in that kind of way. I believe in a way that is called orthodox (not to be confused with Greek Orthodox) by many who share the same way of believing in Jesus Christ. This just means that I believe in the basic doctrines of the Christian faith that come from the Scriptures and are summarized in the Apostles’ Creed. In fact, that is how the esteemed G.K. Chesterton (a Roman Catholic), in his book aptly titled Orthodoxy, defines the orthodox faith he defends—the faith summarized in the Apostles’ Creed. C.S. Lewis uses the term “mere Christianity” instead of orthodoxy. The reason that I don’t feel that this kind of faith is wishful thinking is that I would never wish for the God that I find in the Bible or in traditional Christianity. I would not have come up with a God who takes sin and the accompanying injustice so seriously that he will punish his own chosen people repeatedly with conquest and exile. I would not have come up with a God who allows so much suffering in the world. I would not come up with a God who requires of me great sacrifices. I would not have come up with a rescue plan for sinful humanity that involved a virgin conceiving, wise men and shepherds visiting, a Galilean peasant preacher, a ragtag band that includes fishermen and a tax collector, a savior who wastes his time healing lepers before being betrayed by a friend, rejected by his own people, and executed in the nastiest way imaginable. I never would have come up with having him rise from the dead. I never would have come up with a God who insists on my ultimate allegiance to him. It all seems too strange and fantastical to me.

I would never wish for the God in which I have put my trust. I do not put my trust in the God revealed in the Bible and ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ because that’s who I came up with in my imagination. If I wished up my own God it would be a God that didn’t expect any more of me than just being a halfway decent person. It would be a God who left me alone to do what I wanted to do, to do what feels good all the time. It would be a God who would help me out by doing what I wanted God to do when I wanted God to do it. If I wished for a God it would be for a God who was my divine butler or my cosmic therapist. That’s why I know my faith is not just wishful thinking. I believe in the God of the Bible not because I wished for that God but because I believe the God revealed in the Bible is the real God. It is not what I would have come up with, but it is what I believe to be the actual truth. I never would have wished for all that. Yet, I believe it. I don’t just believe it intellectually. I put my trust in the truth of these events and the God behind them. I’ve given my entire life to this God and I am working day in and day out to live my life with this God and to raise my children to put their trust in this God as well. My very vocation is to help others to trust in this God and to live their lives in relationship with this God. But I don’t do this out of wishful thinking. I do this because I wholeheartedly believe, like all traditional Christians, that this is reality.

Let me see if I can illustrate this somehow. Let’s think of a hot, very windy, day. Trash is blowing around and flower pots keep blowing over. People’s hair is getting messed up. It’s hard to open car doors without them slamming shut immediately. I don’t agree with this wind. I don’t like a hot fast wind. I think I’m going to convince myself that the wind is really just a pleasant breeze that will make me comfortable on a pleasant spring day. My wishful thinking doesn’t change the wind though. So let’s try something else. I’m going to go inside so that I can just ignore the wind. However, when I go inside I can still hear it rattling the windows, and even if I couldn’t hear it this still wouldn’t change the fact that the hot powerful wind is still out there. So I can ignore the wind or wish that the wind was a different kind of wind but neither one of those things will actually be facing the truth of what is real and happening. The wind is there. I wouldn’t have come up with it myself, but it is there. Then I realize that the best thing to do, in fact what I am supposed to do, even what I was made to do, is not to fight or ignore the wind but to surrender to it. I could go outside and find a way to join in with the wind. In fact, if I was sailing a boat, I’d actually need this very same hot powerful wind. So I decide that this is precisely what I will do—I will put my boat in the water, I will open up my sails, and I will let the hot powerful wind carry me where the wind wants to carry me, not where I want to go. I wouldn’t have wished for that, but, oh, it’s so much better than I would have wished for, than I could have ever imagined.

I’ll continue this next week…

May you have a blessed Holy Week. I will see many of you on Maundy Thursday as well as on Good Friday.

Grace and Peace,
Pastor Everett

Reading Biographies Makes Me Thankful for God's Grace

I am just finishing up reading the newest biography of C.S. Lewis by Oxford professor and theologian Alister McGrath. I’m also reading Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. In addition, I have the 700 page Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas sitting on my shelf waiting for me whenever I feel up to a tome of that length. I love reading biographies. When I was in middle school and high school I was constantly reading sports biographies about athletes like Bo Jackson, Willie Mayes, and other all time greats. Over the years I’ve read biographies about Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, William Wilberforce, William Wallace, William Shakespeare, Henry Ward Beecher, John Knox, several of the founders of our nation, Jack Kerouac, and many more. A book that I believe God used to help me to follow my call to go to seminary is a book called Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church by Philip Yancey. This book includes biographical chapters on Martin Luther King Jr., G.K. Chesterton, Dr. Paul Brand, Robert Coles, Leo Tolstoy, Feodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. C. Everett Koop, John Donne, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Shusaku Endo, and Henri Nouwen. Recently, after hearing author Eric Metaxas speak in Cleveland I read the uncorrected proof of his upcoming book 7 Men and the Secret to their Greatness, which included biographical chapters on George Washington, William Wilberforce, Eric Liddell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jackie Robinson, Pope John Paul II, and Charles Colson. I’m also sharing my love of biographies with my kids. As I’ve mentioned in a post before, Wyatt and I read through the ABCs of Church History together and we have read small biographies together of Eric Liddell, Betty Green, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks. As you can tell, I have read very few biographies of women and I’m working towards remedying that. Just yesterday I ordered a book called Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America’s First Poet, which is a biography of the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet whose poems have stuck with me since I studied them as a freshman in college.

One of the things I value most about reading biographies is that it enables me to view these famous persons not as larger-than-life, almost mythic figures, but as human beings. When I learn more about someone’s life it takes them off the pedestal and puts them back on solid ground right next to me—they are human beings created in the image of God, yet human beings who are imperfect sinners. I think that prior to, let’s say the 1960’s, the blemishes on the lives of heroic figures were often hidden by their biographers. However, since the late 1960’s, I think it is much more common to vilify heroes in an effort to show that no one can be trusted. Before this change, George Washington couldn’t tell a lie and singlehandedly defeated the British. Since the change, George Washington is a nominally religious rich boy who owned slaves. Neither of these dichotomous ways of looking at people’s lives is accurate or helpful. People are complex. We do good things and we do bad things. We’re sinners that God can make into saints but who never, at least in this life, fully shed the sin within the saint. There are some people who I believe were so broken that they were just plain evil—Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Pol Pot to name a few—but they are the exception to the rule.

Many of the great men I’ve read about left broken hearts in their wake as they were accomplishing great things. It is a verifiable fact that Martin Luther King Jr. had an adulterous relationship during the height of his Christian based civil rights work. His adultery is still inexcusable, but it doesn’t negate all the good he accomplished as a broken, sinful man of faith. The abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher was a pretty big sleaze but he did contribute to the cause of abolition. John Knox said a lot of really bad things about women, mostly about the female monarchs of England, but he also insisted that girls be educated alongside boys in Scotland, which was extremely rare in those days. C.S. Lewis exchanged letters with admirers all over the world, but let his relationship with his best friend, J.R.R. Tolkien (who wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy) fizzle, and he also made some really strange choices late in his life. Woody Guthrie not only supported worker’s rights and showed the power of music to unite people, but he was an out of control alcoholic and a terrible husband and father.

In Psalm 8, we read, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.” That’s the good of it. In Romans 3 we read, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That’s the bad of it. In reading biographies I have come to see both the good and the bad of important people in history. We are sinners, all of us and that includes George Washington, Anne Bradstreet, and C.S. Lewis. But, as Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.” I think that's Einstein's version of Jesus' "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." I have read of the image of a great circle. Inside that great circle it says “Sinners Here.” Every person who ever lived is inside that circle. Only Jesus stands on the outside of that circle, yet Jesus is willing to get in that circle with us to bring us back into relationship with God and with one another.

Whenever I read about the lives of my heroes and I am forced to take off the rose colored glasses, at least three things happen. Firstly, an idol is crushed, which is always a good thing (see commandments 1 & 2). Secondly, it encourages me that if God can use these broken sinful people to do great things, maybe God will use this broken sinful person to do great things. Thirdly, it makes me give thanks for the grace of God in Jesus Christ, because it reminds me of what we are without God. So I encourage you to read some biographies, to teach your kids to read biographies, and to allow those biographies to give you a realistic look at human beings. With this in mind, I’ll leave you with Ephesians 2:1-10:

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Does It Matter What We Actually Believe?

This past Sunday I began my sermon with this paragraph:

Over the years, I have heard even Christians say, “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are a good person.” When it is a Christian who says this, usually the comment is followed by a quotation from the parable of the sheep and goats from Matthew 25 or from the letter of James. When it is spoken by a Christian, this comment implies that if we would just listen to what Jesus said about how we should treat one another and do what he said then that is the gospel. This comment also often implies, depending on who is saying it, that really Jesus was just a great moral teacher who came to show us how we should live more moral lives. According to this view, the Christian faith consists basically of our doing our best to live as Jesus lived, in other words, being a really good person. Based upon the Scriptures, however, the statement, “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you are a good person,” when it is made by one who calls himself or herself a Christian, can really only be made by someone who has never actually read the gospels and the rest of the New Testament or who has chosen to reject everything Jesus and the early church said about who Jesus was and is and what his actual purposes were. In connection with this, C.S. Lewis writes, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’” Lewis continues, “That is the one that we must not say… Let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

Here is some additional commentary on this that I was not able to fit into my sermon:

As we look at the bigger picture of the Scriptures, we see that what we believe is actually every bit as important as what we do. For instance, John 3:16 famously states, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life.” I don’t know about you, but if something makes the difference between perishing and eternal life, that thing must be pretty important. That would be why Jesus also says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled; believe in God. Believe also in me.” He also says, "I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life" (John 5:24). You see, the bigger picture includes a great theme of belief, which in the Hebrew and Greek means both believing that something is true and putting your trust in it. This great theme is demonstrated in passages such as Acts 16:31 when Paul and Silas respond to a jailer’s question about salvation by replying, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” Paul’s letters again and again make the case that what we believe is not only important; it is of utmost importance. In Romans 10:8-9, we read, “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. As Scripture says, ‘Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.’” We also read in Romans 1:16, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile." The big picture also includes many statements like 1 Peter 1:8, which says, “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.” If we read the entire letter of James, instead of just the famous verses, we actually see that James is never saying that it doesn’t matter what we believe. James is saying that what we believe must bear fruit in what we do, and this is certainly nothing unique to James. This is the same thing that all the prophets said, that John the Baptist said, that Jesus said, that Paul said, and this is, in fact, what every New Testament document is saying, including Revelation. So even though an isolated verse here and there could be used to make the case that “It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are a good person,” this is most certainly not what the Scriptures are saying overall. James is, of course, right, "faith without works is dead" but it is also right to say that works without faith is dead as well.

Orthodoxy, which means "right belief", may be out of style right now in our culture, but it is of utmost importance in the witness of the New Testament. If we do come to a point where we think, "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are a good person," we should at least do that in full knowledge that this is a personal opinion, which is not based upon the Bible or the teachings of the church, and is, in fact, at odds with those sources. For some reason, it seems, that some Christtians in a good natured effort to be able to get along with our friends and neighbors who are of different faiths or who are indifferent or hostile to the Christian faith (or to distance ourselves from those within our own faith who embarrass or even frighten us) have decided that they will give up their own beliefs in order to be friendlier to others. However, the idea that we have to water down or even give up the belief/truth/theology part of our faith is false. It is possible to wholeheartedly believe and follow Jesus Christ and still love, value, and get along with those who do not share those beliefs.

One of My Personal Heroes: Dr. Francis Collins, Md., PhD.

Before I begin, I should say that the posts on this blog do not necessarily reflect the thoughts and beliefs of the congregation of First Presbyterian Church in Washington Court House, Ohio. They are my thoughts and my beliefs.

I won’t give you a full biography of Dr. Francis Collins. You can read that in his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, which I wholeheartedly recommend. All you really need to know at this point is that he is the director of the National Institutes of Health, he was the director of the Human Genome Project, and he led the studies that discovered the genetic abnormalities that cause Cystic Fibrosis and Huntington’s Disease. He is one of the top medical scientists in the United States and the entire world. He is also a Christian. He even calls himself an Evangelical Christian. Because he is a top scientist and a Christian he is very interested and involved in trying to build bridges between serious modern Science and the Christian faith.

Because Dr. Collins is a Christian, he believes that human beings are sinful and that Jesus Christ is the risen Lord and Savior through whom reconciliation with God has come. He believes in repentance and forgiveness and that the Scriptures are the inspired Word of God. However, because he is a scientist and because he helped discover much of the genetic evidence for it, he knows better than anyone that the evidence for evolution is so incredibly overwhelming that for anyone to deny the strong likelihood of the truth of it is like a child covering her eyes and actually believing that because she cannot see the people around her anymore that they are no longer there. Dr. Collins is able to hold his strong orthodox Christian faith and his brilliant scientific mind and the overwhelming evidence for evolution together, and he feels it makes his faith even stronger. This is why Dr. Francis Collins is one of my heroes.

If you don’t already know this, I’m sorry to break it to you but the scientific evidence that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old is overwhelming. In fact, the Big Bang Theory that helps explain this was developed and championed by a Christian physicist, the Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre. The geological evidence for common descent and the changing of species over time is also overwhelming. The genetic evidence, especially after the mapping of the human genome, is incredibly overwhelming in favor of evolution. The fossil record, species distribution, comparative anatomy, developmental similarities, and comparative biochemistry/physiology all show overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution. To deny this is really to reject the validity of science. Dr. Collins’s good friend, the physicist Dr. Karl Giberson (who is also a Christian) in his book Saving Darwin: How to be Christian and Believe in Evolution, writes, “Absent evolution, thousands of patterns in nature become completely mysterious, without explanation. Creationism offers virtually no alternative explanations, and most of its ‘evidence’ is nothing more than a catalog of small details that don’t fit neatly into the standard evolutionary scenario. Rejecting evolution on the basis of these small details, however, would be like abandoning modern medicine because it can’t cure every illness or declaring that meteorology is not a science because weather forecasts are sometimes unrealiable.” Many creationist and Intelligent Design arguments are based off of 19th century information and even the most modern ones have trouble dealing with the scientific findings of the last 10-20 years.

Dr. Collins has taken it upon himself to stand in the gap between the extremists in the world of atheistic science (like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens) and the extremists in the world of strict Biblical literalism. Dr. Collins has founded an organization called Biologos. Through Biologos, Dr. Collins and a large number of serious scientists who are also faithful Christians and theologians who also accept the evidence for evolution, are trying to give a new option to those who think that in order to respect modern science that you have to be an atheist or agnostic and to those who say that in order to be a faithful Christian you have to believe in a literal reading (what many biblical scholars would call “misreading”) of the first chapters of Genesis, which means you must reject modern science. Dr. Collins and the other scientists and theologians at Biologos say, “That is not true! You can accept all the overwhelming scientific evidence for common descent and species changing over time and still have a relationship with Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. These are not mutually exclusive categories!" That’s why he’s one of my heroes. I encourage you to go to www.biologos.org to explore this amazing website.

Now, does this cause some problems for biblical interpretation and theology? Sure it does, but so did finding out that the Earth orbited the sun instead of the other way around. It causes us to look at the Word of God a little differently in parts, but evolution doesn’t really negate anything that someone would believe who’d been reading the Scriptures in ways that allow the Scriptures to say what they want to say instead of what we want them to say. Biblical scholar and theologian Peter Enns is extraordinarily helpful in this area. Accepting the overwhelming evidence for evolution doesn’t negate the fact that people still sin and that people still die. It doesn’t negate human uniqueness, the image of God, or the existence of a soul. It doesn’t negate our need for God or our need to be reconciled with God through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. As Pope John Paul II declared in 1996, "New findings lead us toward recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis... If the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God." C.S. Lewis also addresses this in his book The Problem of Pain in the chapter entitled “The Fall of Man.” C.S. Lewis, the hero of many Evangelical Christians, a man who lived and died decades before the strongest evidence of evolution had ever been found, had no problem with holding evolution and Christian faith together. Also, my favorite contemporary theologians like N.T. Wright, Peter Enns, and Alister McGrath have no problem with evolution and Christian faith going together. Evolution doesn’t tell us who created us, why we exist, or what happens after we die. It just describes what the overwhelming evidence shows and says, “According to the evidence, this is how we got here.” Evolution, when properly understood is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Way before C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine, who lived in the 400’s, warned against overly literal interpretations of the beginning of Genesis and chastised his contemporaries for using the Bible to embarrass the Church by opposing scientific knowledge supported by ample evidence. Also, Dr. Collins, in The Language of God, tells us about how “Benjamin Warfield, a conservative Protestant theologian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century… wrote, 'We must not, then, as Christians, assume an attitude of antagonism toward the truths of reason, or the truths of philosophy, or the truths of science, or the truths of history, or the truths of criticism. As children of the light, we must be careful to keep ourselves open to every ray of light. Let us, then, cultivate an attitude of courage as over against the investigations of the day. None should be more zealous in them than we. None should be more quick to discern truth in every field, more hospitable to receive it, and more loyal to follow it, whithersoever it leads.'”

We need to note, however, that whether or not we believe in a literal six-day creation, in some version of the Intelligent Design idea, or in what is called Theistic Evolution (Collins calls it "Biologos"), this is not a “salvation issue.” As Paul writes in Romans,

"The word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart,” that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. As the Scripture says, “Anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame.” For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

However, while I do not think that views held on the origins of the universe and humanity have any bearing on the salvation of the person holding that view, I do feel, along with St. Augustine, Francis Collins, and I would imagine many of the scientists and theologians with BioLogos that a stubborn unwillingness to accept the overwhelming evidence of every pertinent branch of science in favor of the views of the movements known as Creationism or Intelligent Design does actually endanger the salvation of others because for many non-Christians it causes an unnecessary barrier between an intelligent informed person and faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. I firmly believe that creationism and places like the Creation Museum in Kentucky with its exhibits of dinosaurs and human beings living together do not hurt science one bit because no one who knows anything about science takes them seriously. What it does hurt, however, is the Christian faith. Because of that I want nothing to do with Creationism and the Creation Museum or Intelligent Design and the Discovery Institute.

Here’s what St. Augustine wrote 1,600 years ago,

“Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a [non-Christian] to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics [he’s been writing about the natural sciences]; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show a vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but the people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books on matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learned from experience in light of reason?”

But what happens if evolution is proved wrong? That's a very important question. First of all, I think we do need to admit that with evolution we're not talking about simple observational evidence like there was for the sun orbiting the earth or a flat earth; with evolution we're talking about a hard independently verified scientific consensus that continues to be strengthened with every new finding in many different areas of science. Since the evidence is so overwhelming, evolution being proved wrong is pretty unlikely so don't get your hopes up. But even if evolution was proved wrong then that wouldn’t affect my Christian faith one bit. My faith isn’t in evolution. My faith isn't in science. My faith isn't in religion either. My faith isn't in a literalistic interpretation of the God-inspired ancient liturgical poem known as Genesis 1 either. My faith is in the Triune God, revealed to us most fully in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and through the inspired Word of God, even in the parts that shouldn't be interpreted literally. I have a relationship with this God. As mentioned earlier, evolution doesn’t tell us the who, the why, or the what now. The Scriptures do tell us these things and so does our Lord Jesus. I just think, like Dr. Collins, that it doesn’t make sense for Christians to put their heads in the sand when the evidence for common descent and the changing of species over time, when it is looked at thoroughly, scientifically, and with a realization that wherever the evidence leads cannot disprove the essentials of the Christian faith, is so incredibly overwhelming in its description of how we got here that it should not be denied. This isn't something worth being stubborn about. I am very stubborn about the who, the why, and the what now, but to me, in being stubborn about the how (the mechanism used for human origins) it just makes us look ignorant in ways that St. Augustine warned us about 1,600 years ago. If someone wants to think I'm ignorant because I believe in Jesus' resurrection then that's fine. According to the Scriptures, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is both a salvation issue and (unlike the mechanics for human origins) something that is outside the realm of what can be studied and described by science. Even though Biblical interpretation and theology would be easier if it wasn't so, I just think that the evidence for evolution is way too overwhelming to deny anymore. We simply have to deal with it. Dr. Collins has been a great help to me in that.

In Philippians 4:8, the Apostle Paul writes, “Finally, brothers [and sisters], whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.” Please consider reading The Language of God by my hero Francis Collins and please check out www.biologos.org to see if you find this synthesis between contemporary science and orthodox Christian faith to be as true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy as I do.

Grace and Peace to You in the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ,
Pastor Everett