A Refutation of: Easter isn't about sacrifice, it's about faith and love - by Jay Parini

The opinion piece from CNN was written by Jay Parini, an author and English teacher at Middlebury College.  It appears that his perspective is that of someone who believes Jesus to be a good example, but not the Son of God, and the Bible to be a useful book, but not inspired Scripture.  My comments on his essay will appear in italics and bold interspersed throughout.

(CNN)You think you know what Easter means?

Even when people have no idea about this season, around this time of year there is an awareness that something is happening. A person comes into the office or classroom with a charcoal cross on his or her forehead; a friend or colleague is taking a trip to see family for the holiday; the stores are selling Cadbury eggs.

Certainly the calendar marks off the day as something special, and there is also a general sense of the turning season: the long winter has ended and summer itself winks in the margins of daily life.

Indeed, Easter marks a change, and it has to do with the feeling of rebirth or regeneration. But it is more complicated than that.

I have a visceral sense of all this, having been raised in a fundamentalist household, and my memories of Easter reach back to beginnings: my father, a Baptist minister, understood the centrality of this special day, even the whole Easter weekend. As a boy, I fidgeted through long services on Good Friday and listened to readings of the seven last words of Jesus on the cross, which built up to the resounding: "It is finished."

I recall being quite upset, imagining the cruelty of the sacrifice of God's only son. I thought it was horrific. I didn't want him to have to die for miserable sinners like myself.

Soon enough I grew to dislike this version of Easter, with the crucifixion as some form of blood-revenge. Why would a God who had gone to the trouble to create humanity take such umbrage? Why would he need to put his only son on the cross and see him publicly tortured—brutalized--to satisfy his feelings of disappointment and anger at what his people had done? Was I missing something?

Short answer; yes, you were certainly missing a great deal.  First off, you should be upset imagining the cruelty of the sacrifice of God's Son, it is a horrific death of an innocent man.  Whether you wanted him to die on your behalf or not, isn't the question.  The real question is what God wanted to do, and God was not content to let humanity remain in rebellion against him, was not content to let that rebellion result in the destruction of those he had created in his image.  God decided to rescue humanity, and God alone had both the wisdom to understand what that would entail and the power/righteousness to carry it out.

The famous hymn about being "washed in the blood of the Lamb" sounded, to my young ears, increasingly disturbing. God is better than this, I thought. The human beings he had created were surely good enough for him?

One of the great conceits of the modern age: We can define God ourselves (or eliminate him altogether).  God is holy, perfect, free of any contamination of sin.  "Good enough" is not an option, it is not even close.  To be in the presence of God is to likewise be holy, or to be dead.  The design of the Tabernacle and Temple illustrated this barrier between God and humanity with its concentric layers of approaching God's presence and the limitation of only the High Priest on the Day of Atonement being allowed to enter into the Holy of Holies and see the presence of God between the cherubim of the Ark of the Covenant.  Why would a Messiah have been necessary at all if humanity was "good enough"?  And what would Jesus' mission have been if not the salvation of humanity?  Either Jesus Christ came to save Lost sinners, the only way that it could be done, or he died a failure upon that Cross.

Simplistic ideas about the meaning of the crucifixion still abound, and there is a vast industry founded on what is called "substitution theology." One can easily dig through the Hebrew and Greek scriptures to snatch occasional verses that seem to support this transactional theology, with God in a bargaining mode, needing "payment" for our sins.

This paragraph is dripping with disdain for those of us (that is, anyone retaining the Orthodox Christianity of the Early Church, Ecumenical Councils and Creeds, the Reformers, etc.  Not to mention the authorial intent of every NT author) who understand that what Jesus accomplished on the Cross was a substitute for the punishment that each of us has earned through rebellion against God.  And yes, one can easily read both the Old and New Testament and find passages of Scripture that support the understanding that what Jesus did was a payment for our sins.  This traditional, mainstream, accepted interpretation of the Scriptures on the question of the purpose and efficacy of the Cross is far from "simplistic", it is an awe inspiring act of Amazing Grace, unparalleled love, and selfless sacrifice.

But I've studied the scriptures carefully, especially the gospels and Paul's letters, and I see no reason to capitulate to this downsized version of Easter weekend, with a vengeful God putting up his own son on a cross for satisfaction of some kind.

"I see no reason to capitulate to the Scriptures"  Not exactly what he said, but the essence of the point.  I have no idea how God's willingness to redeem humanity from sin, and in the process destroy the power of sin and death, can be viewed as a "downsized version of Easter".  I am also at a loss how anyone can honestly have studied the Gospels and Paul's letters and not see the repeated quotations of Jesus that this is the plan of God (Mark 8:31 for example: He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again) and the repeated explanations of Paul that this sacrifice was on our behalf (Romans 3:25 for example:  God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished—).  FYI, maybe read the book of Hebrews too, the entire thing is about the superiority of Jesus' sacrifice.

That Jay Parini thinks that Jesus upon the Cross has anything to do with vengeance shows a significant lack of understanding of the theology he has decided to reject.  Holiness, righteousness, justice, grace, love, and mercy are the themes around which the discussion of God's redemptive plan revolve, not vengeance.

In any case, the idea of satisfaction or "payment" is fairly recent, tracing back to St. Anselm in Cur Deus Homo? This treatise, written in the late 11th century, put forward the idea of the death of Jesus as atonement for human sins, a "satisfaction" for the wrath of God.

A century or so later, Peter Abelard famously rejected Anselm's theory, suggesting that the death of Jesus was simply an act of love, showing humanity a way forward, an example of divine benevolence. Jesus lived and died to teach us how to live and die ourselves, or how to "empty ourselves out," as St. Paul says. The crucifixion is first and foremost a prelude to the Resurrection.

This "fairly recent" argument is utterly specious.  I suppose you can't trace the idea of substitutionary atonement back to the New Testament itself if you utterly ignore the portion of Scripture that teach it (Matthew 20:28 or Colossians 1:19-20 for example).  It is true, but not some sort of important point, that nobody stated the theory expressed in the NT exactly the way that St. Anselm did until he did it, but perhaps Jay Parini has forgotten about St. Augustine who wrote the following in On the Trinity in the 5th Century, “What, then, is the righteousness by which the devil was conquered? What, except the righteousness of Jesus Christ? And how was he conquered? Because, when he [the devil] found in Him nothing worthy of death, yet he slew Him. And certainly it is just, that we whom he [the devil] held as debtors, should be dismissed free by believing in Him whom he [the devil] slew without any debt. In this way it is that we are said to be justified in the blood of Christ. For so that innocent blood was shed for the remission of our sins…  He conquered the devil first by righteousness, and afterwards by power: namely, by righteousness, because He had no sin, and was slain by him most unjustly; but by power, because having been dead He lived again, never afterwards to die. But He would have conquered the devil by power, even though He could not have been slain by him: although it belongs to a greater power to conquer death itself also by rising again, than to avoid it by living. But the reason is really a different one, why we are justified in the blood of Christ, when we are rescued from the power of the devil through the remission of sins: it pertains to this, that the devil is conquered by Christ by righteousness, not by power.”  The list could go on and on of those who believed that Jesus died for our sins from the Early Church Fathers to the Reformers, but if St. Augustine isn't enough of an example to ignore this paragraph of the essay, nothing else will be.

So this is the "grand vision" of Easter that he prefers?  Jesus lived and died to show us an example of how to "empty ourselves" {To what end?}  How is this a solution to the problem of sinful human nature?  How does this address the fundamental questions of sin, justice, death, and the afterlife?  To think that a perversion of Easter where Jesus dies as some sort of example, and accomplishes nothing else, somehow paints a kinder view of God is ludicrous.  What then of the prayer that the cup be taken away in the Garden?  What then of the refusal to save himself?  The entire Bible falls apart when you jerk away the foundation upon which it is build, to ignore so much of Scripture because you prefer that it say something else is not an option open to those who would have faith in Jesus Christ.

Jesus had faith in God, resting in the arms of an all-embracing love. That's a fancy way of saying that Jesus trusted that all would be well in the end, which is what Easter teaches us. And a crucial text here -- a key one -- is Romans 3:22, where Paul suggests that reconciliation with God, which is a better way to define "righteousness," is achieved through imitating Jesus in his self-abandonment on the cross on Good Friday.

Yes, Jesus had faith in God (more specifically the Father, Jesus himself was just as much God as the Father), and yes, he knew that all would "be well in the end" (Hebrews 12:2 fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.)  But that is NOT what Easter teaches us.  Hey man, just chill out, it will all work out just fine in the end.  Sigh, We are so far off from Orthodox Christianity and the traditional accepted meaning of Scripture that it is hard to find a point of commonality.  The quotation of Romans 3:22, certainly an important passage, is odd to say the least.  Paul is NOT suggesting that reconciliation/righteousness is achieved through OUR imitating Jesus; quite the opposite in fact.  Paul is stating categorically that our righteousness comes FROM God through faith in Jesus (Note the crucial parallel discussion in Ephesians 2:8-9, For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.).  If only he had kept reading, for in Romans 3:24 the true source of our justification (the repair of our relationship with God) is made clear, "and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus."  Are we to imitate Jesus?  Absolutely.  Does that imitation reconcile us to God?  Not in the least, and for a very good reason.  We have no chance, no hope, of imitating Jesus until AFTER we have been reconciled to God through faith in Jesus, at which point we receive the Holy Spirit who empowers us to live like Jesus.  Neither our salvation nor our subsequent imitation of Jesus is on our own merit, nor does it puff up our pride, all of it is according to God's grace.

I would translate this critical verse in this way: "We are reconciled with God by imitating the faith of Jesus, and we hold him dearly for this." (I always prefer to use the phrase "hold dearly" for "believe," as this is the root of the word. It has no reference to "belief" in the epistemological sense of that term.) There is clearly a huge difference between having "faith in Jesus" -- a nod of assent -- and imitating the "faith of Jesus."

This entire paragraph is meaningless.  You do not have permission to translate Scripture in ways that suit your fancy.  Yes, there can be more than one acceptable translation of the Bible's Hebrew and Greek into English, and they do vary slightly, but not like this.  The original Greek of Romans 3:22 and Jay Parini's preferred self-translation are saying the opposite.  Paul wrote about God's righteousness, available to us through faith in Jesus.  Parini's mis-translation is about our own supposed righteousness achieved through our own effort.

Yes, there is a difference between having "faith in Jesus" (necessary for salvation) and imitating the "faith of Jesus" (discipleship).  One is how we become reconciled to God, the other is how we walk once we have received reconciliation.  He evidently wants to eliminate the need for "faith in Jesus" and replace it with imitating the "faith of Jesus"  Nope, we need both, and we need "faith in Jesus" first.

Easter teaches Christians this, I believe: to emulate the faith of Jesus in the goodness of the universe-- to rest in God, whatever we mean by that great holy syllable, which seems a stumbling block for so many in our highly secular world. It teaches us about what it means to lose ourselves, our petty little selves, in order to gain something larger: reconciliation with creation itself.

Christians all walk with Jesus out of the tomb on Easter morning, reborn as free people, released from the straightjacket of time itself. And this is nothing but joy.

Holy non-sequitur Batman; Jesus had faith in the goodness of the universe??  The universe is not good (or evil), how can an inanimate object have a moral quality?  God is Good.  We are NOT to seek reconciliation with Creation itself (some sort of Pantheism?).  Our sole need/priority/purpose is to be reconciled with God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).  Jesus died to make that reconciliation possible for us, he was raised to life again to proclaim his victory over sin and death and to give us the hope that if we place our trust in him we too will be raised to life on the Last Day.  

I pity an interpretation of Easter that is about relaxing and not getting too caught up in a busy life.  We need not be liberated from time itself.  We are not prisoners of time.  We, as human beings, are enslaved to sin (rebellion against God).  Our only hope, our only recourse, is to stop trying to dig our way out of the hole, put our trust in what Jesus Christ has already done on our behalf (shedding his blood in payment for our sins and rising from the dead), and start living by the Spirit according to Jesus' example and God's Word.  The true meaning of Easter?  Give me that old time religion, it's good enough for me.  Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, nothing less; my hope is in the crucified and risen Savior.

Sermon Video: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" Luke 24:1-12

In Luke's account of the resurrection of Jesus, there is no effort taken to hide the initial reactions of the women at the tomb (frightened, confused), nor of the apostles (disbelief, confusion, wonder).  Luke's Gospel is not a sanitized version of events, but rather an account of real people grappling with incredible news at a time when they were still trying to process the emotionally and psychologically devastating news of Jesus' execution.  God's Word does not condemn, initial, hesitancy or doubt, rather it requires that we move from that beginning toward trust and belief.  What brought this period of confusion/doubt to an end for the first witnesses of Jesus' resurrection?  His appearance personally among them.  And while we of this generation have not been afforded the blessing of seeing Jesus face to face, we can still get to know Jesus more, still deepen our faith and set doubt aside.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video: Jesus and his friends - Luke 22:14-16

Less than twenty-four hours before his brutal death upon a Roman cross, Jesus celebrates the Passover with his chosen disciples; his friends.  He tells them, "I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer."  For Jesus there was immense value in this time with his companions before he walked the Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrows) alone.  Jesus' friends bolstered his courage and his hope, helping him find the endurance to complete the Father's plan and drink the cup placed before him.  We too require Christian fellowship to fulfill the tasks assigned to us by the Father.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Sermon Video: "If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out." - Luke 19:37-40

As Jesus enters into Jerusalem to the joyous proclamation of his followers that he is the long-awaited Messiah come in the name of the Lord, he is confronted by the request of the Pharisees that he squelch the enthusiasm of the crowd.  In response, Jesus tells the Pharisees that, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out."  Hyperbole?  It feels like it, but pointing to an important theological truth: The glory of God will not be denied.  God, being God, and being holy, righteous, and abounding in loving kindness, must be praised; it will happen.
What then is our response?  How effective and sufficient is our praise of God?  Is our worship all that it should be, as individuals, and as a church?  Do we encourage others to praise God, or get in their way?  These are important questions of self-examination we ought to actively pursue.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

When Protestants and Catholics agreed: the sun revolves around the earth

Despite the mathematical proofs of the Greek mathematicians Pythagoras (580-500 BC) and Eratosthenes (276-194 BC), the later of whom calculated the earth's circumference within 2% by comparing the angles of shadows at different locations on the earth, it was still possible to find Early Church leaders hundreds of years later who rejected the notion of a spherical earth based upon references in the Scriptures to the "foundations of the earth, "corners of the earth", pillars of heaven", and the "waters above the firmament".  While the prevalence of those believing in a "flat earth" prior to Columbus is often over-stated by prideful modern people disdainful of the wisdom of the ancients, it is clearly true that some within the Church had theological reasons for doing so that had nothing to do with scientific observations.

Eventually the Church embraced the Ptolemaic system (Ptolemaeus AD 83-161) which continued to place the spherical earth at the center of the universe and posited ten concentric spheres which rotated around it containing the heavenly bodies.

"The geocentric model represented the best that science had to offer during the time when it was firmly held.  It was entirely consistent with both naked-eye observation and philosophy.  It was equally accepted and endorsed by both science and religion.  The problem is that while scientific conclusions are always tentative, the Christian Church - just as some did with the ancient cosmogony - decided to build an elaborate theological and scriptural defense of the geocentric model.  By failing to apply the lessons of the past, the church once again foolishly committed itself to a popular scientific theory supposedly based on the testimony of the Scriptures." (Gordon Glover, Beyond the Firmament: Understanding Science and the Theology of Creation)

In the 16th century, when Copernicus proposed that the earth and all the planetary bodies revolved around the sun, a theory which would soon be confirmed by observation's made by Galileo Galilei with the newly invented telescope, it became a theological issue rather than merely an astronomical one because the Church had previously decided that the Ptolemaic system had the support of Scripture.  Thus Copernicus and Galileo would eventually be condemned as heretics by the inquisition; a stain upon the reputation of the Church that remains to this day {Galileo was not officially rehabilitated by the Catholic Church until Pope John Paul II did so in 1992}.

Protestants might want to snicker at the following words of Pope Paul V in response to Galileo, but they might want to hold that thought.  "The first proposition, that the sun is the centre and does not revolve about the earth, is foolish, absurd, false in theology, and heretical, because expressly contrary to Holy Scripture.  The second proposition, that the earth is not the centre but revolves about the sun, is absurd, false in philosophy, and from a theological point of view at least, opposed to the true faith."

There were few issues of agreement between the leaders of Catholicism and Protestantism during the 16th and 17th centuries, the two sides couldn't even agree to present a united front against the ongoing threat of Ottoman invasions.  And yet, both sides had chosen to elevate the language of Scripture into the scientific realm, turning any contrary scientific observations and theories into challenges to Church authority and potentially heresy.

Martin Luther (1483-1546): "People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon.  Whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some new system, which of all systems is of course the very best.  This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth." (Martin Luther, Table Talk)

Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560): "The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty-four hours.  But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun revolves...Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious.  It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God and to acquiesce in it." (Philipp Melanchthon, Elements of Physics)

John Calvin: "We indeed are not ignorant, that the circuit of the heavens is finite, and that the earth, like a little globe, is placed in the center." (John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis)

With hind-sight, the words of these respected and often brilliant theologians seem both appallingly arrogant and exceedingly foolish, and yet they are a symptom of a larger problem that even those gifted by God to lead his Church can fall victim to: The Pride of Certainty.  I'm all for certainty in its proper place, without it we have only shifting sands and chaos.  We, as a Church, must be certain about the core tenants of our faith and the essence of the Gospel.  But what happens when we elevate other issues, other ideas and interpretations to the level of dogma and with disdain dismiss those who disagree with us as heretics?  In that case, not only does the Church suffer a lack of humility and grace, not only does it foster anger and divisions, but it also appears foolish to the Lost, to those with whom we are called to share the Gospel.

Consider, then, how the lesson of these futile attempts to deny that the earth revolves around the sun might be applied to the Church in our world today.  Let us take great care to distinguish between the Truth revealed to us by God's Word, a Truth that never changes and has no fear of knowledge and fact, and the interpretations and theories of men, however brilliant we might think them to be.

Sermon Video: An immoral people cannot expect God's blessings - Haggai 2:10-19

Utilizing an illustration involving consecrated food and the defilement associated with touching a dead body, the LORD utilizes the prophet Haggai to show his people the danger of disobedience.  During the 16 years when the temple was not being rebuilt, the LORD tried to get his people to pay attention by affecting their harvests and limiting their material successes.  This was not evidently noticed by the people because they didn't act until the prophet made the connection clear to them.  Moving forward, however, God promises to once more bless his people because they are no longer disobedient.  What then is the connection for the Church?  While not under the blessings and curses of the Covenant of Moses, we too are held to a high standard of holiness and righteousness as well as being required to put away immorality.  We do not look to the harvest for confirmation of how we're doing, nor do we need to, for the Word of God has made clear to us our obligations and the Spirit of God now dwells with God's people.

To watch the video, click on the link below:

Faith, Science, and Creation, is there a way forward?

Something isn’t right in the modern western world in the interactions between Faith and Science.  We may not understand what the problem is, how it started, or how to solve it, but the tension is palpable, we can feel it.  Antagonism is the most visible interaction on the part of Christians (and/or those claiming to be Christians) with science, treating the two as mortal enemies, but we also see accommodation, a long-shot hope of wedding the two peacefully, and finally we see rejection, an attempt to pretend that science doesn’t exist or at least have anything useful to say.  This can’t be the way things are supposed to be, but are they the way they have to be?  Is there an option other than being enemies, part of a one-sided arranged marriage, or strangers?

                To trace the history of the relationship between science and faith is a massive undertaking, but one area in particular is a microcosm of the strange interactions between the two: Creation.  How did we get here, when, and why are universal and fundamental questions of humanity.  They have been asked and answered all over the globe since the beginning of recorded history in innumerable ways.  The people of Israel were given a definitive answer to the question of why in the book of Genesis: to fulfill the good pleasure and further the glory of God.  God created because God wanted to create, and beyond that, God created beings capable of interacting with him because he desired both love and worship from them.  As Christians, heirs to the philosophy/worldview of Judaism, we know why we are here.  We have a purpose and a direction given to us by faith.  Do we also know, from Holy Scripture, how and when?

                It was assumed that we did, that such questions had easy answers related to divine fiat in the not too distant past.  And then science came into its maturity and threw those assumptions into confusion.  Astronomy, archaeology, biology, chemistry, physics, and more have each taken a chunk out of the assumption that God created the universe, as we see it today, a few thousand years before the time of Abraham.  What then ought to be the response of faith to these assertions by science?

                Denial was the first response of the Church, beginning with Galileo and Copernicus, and denial still has a prominent role in various Christian responses.  These responses range from saying that the evidence proposed by scientists is wrong (either a claim of ignorance on the part of scientists who don’t understand their own fields, or a conspiracy theory by them to falsify their findings), to saying that the evidence is indeed what it is, but that the interpretation is wrong because the evidence itself is a ruse, a type of red herring, placed there by either God or the devil to lead non-believers astray.  In other words, the evidence is real that the universe is billions of years old, but it should be ignored.  In the discussion of Creation, a denial/aggression against science stance typically involves an attempt to take the text of Genesis “literally” (a word to be used with great caution in Biblical interpretation as it means different things to different people and is often abused as a cudgel against those who interpret a text differently), as in “literally six twenty-four-hour days”.  It also involves viewing the description of the six days of creation as a how-to guide explaining what God did and the order/time frame he did it in.  In this view there is no room for an old universe, no room for a Big Bang, and certainly no room for any type of evolutionary processes.  As Gordon Glover wrote in Beyond the Firmament, Understanding Science and the Theology of Creation, “If we raise our children to believe that supernatural explanations are in competition with natural ones, we are basically entrusting their salvation to ignorance and incredulity.” (P. 32) If Glover’s characterization of the various forms of denial offends you, keep reading and keep thinking.

                The second response of portions of the Church to the advancements of science in relation to Creation was accommodation.  If science says that the universe is billions of years old, the response is to find collaboration for that finding in the text of Genesis.  Thus Gap Theory and Day-Age Theory attempt to postulate an alliance between science and faith by molding the interpretation of Genesis to fit scientific theory.  So, rather than insisting upon a Young Earth like those antagonistic to science, accommodation allows for an old one, viewing either time gaps between various points in the story, or the “days” of Creation as the equivalent of eons.  Coupled with this interpretation are things like Intelligent Design and Theistic Evolution which preserve a role for God, behind the scenes as the architect, of the natural processes described by science.  Thus accommodation of Genesis with science no longer takes the text “literally”, but allows for both a Big Bang and Evolutionary processes, provided that God is the unseen force behind it all.  This might seem like a win-win scenario, one in which the text of Scripture still has something to contribute while science is not viewed as an enemy, provided that either Gap Theory or Day-Age Theory is a viable interpretation of the text of Genesis, an important caveat.

                The third response, ignoring what science has to say about the origins of the cosmos and humanity, is a self-defeating retreat that will be, at best, a Pyrrhic victory, like that of the Church over Galileo in 1633, a short-sighted decision whose negative consequences the Church continues to reap.

                But what if there is another option, one that retains a faithful commitment to the text of Holy Scripture and works within the framework of the plain meaning of the text, that treats it as God’s Word given to mankind according to his purposes (not ours), but that at the same time doesn’t promote an attitude of hostility to science, nor attempt to force them to exist in the same space, and also doesn’t resort to burying one’s head in the sand or yelling, “Not listening!  Not listening!”  For that to be the way forward, we would need to consider what the purpose of Genesis 1-3 was when it was written, how it was received by its original audience, and which questions it was intended to answer among our most common: How, when, and why.  In the end, it is possible that we can be more faithful to the text of Scripture by admitting that it answers everything we need to know about why (and who), but much less than we had assumed about how and when.

                Perhaps Genesis 1-3 is the story of how God gave the world its functions, taking it from formlessness to usefulness, and setting it up for humanity with God as its sovereign.  Instead of a how-to guide, the text of Genesis 1-3 can be viewed as a Cosmic Temple Inauguration (see John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate), one in which God assigns functions to things he had already created, assigns names to them, and then on the Seventh Day takes his “rest” with the Cosmos as his temple and mankind as his steward.  This viewpoint has the very positive aspect of being compatible with the viewpoints of those living in the Near East in the Ancient World, as most of the ancient accounts which still exist from that area/period involve the ordering of chaos into purpose by a god(s).  In that vein, the Genesis account is not different from them except in its understood assumption that only one God, the true God, is involved, and the clear lack of effort required by that God to make the Cosmos orderly, mere commands suffice to accomplish it.  To the people of Israel being led by Moses out of bondage, then, the story of Genesis would not be odd when compared to those told by the Egyptians or Babylonians except for its monotheism and the universal sovereignty claimed by God (as opposed to the typical local/shared sovereignty of the pantheon of gods).  In other words, perhaps God utilized a format for explaining humanity’s role/purpose that made sense to the ancient people he was telling it to rather than a format that would answer all of the questions asked of it by a naturalistic/materialistic society 3,500 years later.  That might seem like an easy point to arrive at, but human beings have a hard time setting aside their own worldviews in order to see things from the perspective of another culture or time period.  Modern human beings are so immersed in the post-Enlightenment naturalistic worldview of an ascendant science that we by default view ancient documents through our interpretive lens without even knowing it.

                Why would God choose to focus upon the functionality of the Cosmos in the account given to Moses rather than an explanation of the material origins of the universe?  Most importantly, it fit his purpose, which was not to share with his people how he created the Cosmos, but why.  When Job asked God for an explanation which his experience of injustice certainly seemed worthy of, he wasn’t given one, in part because God told Job that he did not have the capacity to understand the answers to his questions.  The collective human wisdom of modern science has scratched the surface of answering questions of how and when, and much remains beyond our grasp; in what way would a materialistic/scientific explanation be possible or even useful to those who lived 3,500 years ago?  When God brought his people out of Egypt with signs and wonders, he didn’t bother to explain to them how he turned Nile to blood or where the plagues of locusts or gnats came from.  How was immaterial, why was the key; they were signs of God’s power and warnings to Pharaoh.  The purpose of being told that God is responsible for an event in history (like Creation or the Plagues upon Egypt) is so that humanity can recognize God’s power, submit to his authority, and worship him.  The purpose is not to satisfy our curiosity, to answer all of our questions, or to convince the skeptical, as if God’s revelation of himself to us has to be on our terms; the “gap” between God’s proclamation (revelation) of his activity and our own understanding of it is the place filled by Faith.  If answers to our questions are available, that’s fine, but we don’t need them when we put our trust in the faithfulness of God.  We don’t need to know how and when if we know who and why.

                If Genesis is indeed not an attempt by God to explain how/when he created the Cosmos, including humanity, it leaves Christians free to accept scientific explanations if they prove plausible, and if those explanations are later refined or rejected thanks to new evidence or new theories, to not have that process impact our faith.  Faith is no longer on defense against science, forever trying to fend off its attacks, nor is it endlessly trying to accommodate science, hoping to be able to squeeze the latest developments in numerous scientific fields into the sparse text of Genesis 1-3.  Christians are thus free to focus upon the most important question: Why did God create us, however and whenever he did so, and what does that tell us about the purpose of our lives?  God is still the ultimate cause, God is still the intelligence behind the natural laws set up by his hand and maintained by his will, and God remains the final destination of each human soul.  Science cannot answer questions of why, it never could and it never will.  Philosophy and Religion are not scientific fields, they seek to answer questions beyond the materialistic realm of science, questions that cannot be verified or disproved by experimentation.  These are the questions which have been of the utmost importance to humanity throughout the ages.  Our ancient ancestors in the faith, the children of Abraham, had comparatively little scientific knowledge to work with, but it did not impact their ability to be a people of faith, dependent upon God and in obedience to his will.  Today we know many things about how the natural world works, but the truly important questions remain dependent upon revelation from the spiritual realm.

                Faith and Science are not enemies, nor are they bosom buddies, and they don’t have to be strangers; they answer different questions in different ways.  Science can make our lives better, faith makes our lives meaningful.  Science can fix some of the problems that humanity has brought upon itself, faith can fix humanity itself.   Science can expand what we can do, faith can tell us what we should do.   Science if forever learning and growing, faith rests upon a bedrock of Truth that stretches back beyond Abraham and calls us to live righteous lives by faith just as did our ancestors in the faith. 

Sermon Video: "In this place I will grant peace" Haggai 2:1-9,20-23

As the people have already returned to working on the temple following the urging of the prophet Haggai, what message does God have for them one month later?  Surprisingly, God chooses to point out to the people the vastly diminished scope of their effort in comparison to the glory achieved by their ancestors.  The Jewish remnant, now a province of Persia, have no hope of matching the results of their ancestors who built Solomon's magnificent temple during the height of the power and wealth of the Kingdom of Israel.  So why would God remind them of the fact that things are not what they once were?  Because they already knew it.  God chose to confront the issue head-on because he wanted to reassure the people that he was still with them, that his Spirit would still be among them, and that he would indeed be glorified in the temple they were rebuilding, even if it was but an imitation of the temple destroyed in 586 BC.
Here at 1st Baptist of Franklin we can understand the emotions of the Jewish remnant when they contemplated the glory of a few generations previously.  One hundred years ago our church building had 2,100 seats in the sanctuary (since renovated into an auditorium and recreation area, capacity now about 300), and the Sunday School attendance books show weeks with over 1,000 people.  Those huge numbers were doing the height of the oil boom, an era long past in Venango County.  What then do we do with less than 1/10th of their numbers?  Mourn the loss of that "golden age"?  No, we hold fast to the promises of God that he is with us in our generation as well, that God has a place for us in his will, that his Spirit remains among us, and that he most certainly will be glorified in our generation as he was in their generation.

To watch the video, click on the link below: