Posted on 3/30/2005 1:12:09 P
Posted on 03/30/2005 11:58:27 AM PST by sionnsar
ECUSA's Committee on Science, Technology and Faith has published something it calls "A Catechism of Creation: An Episcopal Understanding." It's a long document but the following selections should give some idea of its contents:
Theologians throughout the history of the Church have explained these concepts this way: God inspired the ancient writers to describe the world in concepts and language they and their audiences could understand, not in our concepts and language. The ancient world-picture—a “three-storied” creation of the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth (Ex. 20:4)—though meaningful in its own time, was replaced by succeeding models and most recently by our modern portrait of a vast universe with billions of galaxies. The Bible’s theological declarations about God and creation remain true because they are not dependent upon the ancient world-picture in which they appear.
Big Bang cosmology seems to be in tune with both the concepts of creation out of nothing and continuous creation. However, theology does not depend upon science to verify its doctrines, just as science does not depend upon theology to verify its theories. However, science can inspire theology to think new thoughts about the relationship between God and the creation, as Big Bang cosmology and evolution have done.
Theologians have sought to explain “image and likeness” in various ways: that it refers to those divine gifts of unconditional love and compassion, our reason and imagination, our moral and ethical capacities, our freedom, or our creativity. To think that these gifts may have been bestowed through the evolutionary process does not conflict with biblical and theological notions that God acts in creation. Scripture affirms that God was involved (Gen. 1:26-27).
While theologians have proposed different models of how God acts in an evolving world, they agree that God is best understood as interacting with the world rather than intervening in it—a God intimately present in the world (as Scripture also reveals) rather than a God “out there.” According to Anglican priest and biologist Arthur Peacocke, God acts as Creator “in, with and under” the natural processes of chance and natural selection. Theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes that God uses random genetic mutations to ensure variety, resilience, novelty and freedom in the world. At the same time, the universe operates by certain natural laws or “secondary causes” by which God, the Primary Cause, ensures regularity and reliability in nature. Physicist and theologian Howard Van Till writes that God has creatively and generously given the creation all of the powers and capacities “in the beginning” that enable it to organize and transform itself into the variety of atoms, molecules, chemical elements, galaxies, stars, and planets in the universe, and species of living things on this earth.
In this evolving universe, God does not dictate the outcome of nature’s activities, but allows the world to become what it is able to become in all of its diversity: one could say that God has a purpose rather than a fixed plan, a goal rather than a blueprint. As the nineteenth-century Anglican minister Charles Kingsley put it, God has made a world that is able to make itself. Polkinghorne states that God has given the world a free process, just as God has given human beings free choice. Divine Love (1 John 4:8) frees the universe and life to develop as they are able to by using all of their divinely given powers and capacities. The universe, as Augustine of Hippo said in the fourth century, is “God’s love song.” Because God’s Love is poured out within the creation, theologian Denis Edwards asserts that “the Trinitarian God is present to every creature in its being and becoming.” These are but some of the concepts that contemporary theologians are offering to account for God’s relationship to an evolving creation.
Knowing the creation as evolving also helps us to think of God’s relationship to the cosmos in another way. In Phil. 2:5-11, Christ is said to “empty himself” of divinity and take in human form the role of a servant. The Greek word for emptying is kenosis. A kenotic theology of creation expresses the notion that the Triune God freely and graciously withdraws absolute power in order to “let the world be” (Genesis 1). A loving parent is faithful to her child, guides and protects him, but allows him to become his own self. In a comparable but more profound way, God the Divine Lover loves God’s own creation, faithfully holding it in existence, calling it to greater levels of complexity and beauty, but allowing the physical laws that govern the galaxies, and those of chance, environment, and selection that govern life, to take cosmic and biotic evolution in whatever directions the gifts given to creation permit. God’s kenosis gives the universe its freedom and opens up its future; God’s covenantal faithfulness and natural laws ensure its cohesion and regularity.
One can maintain that God’s creation shows design without agreeing with the arguments of the Intelligent Design Movement. Instead of implying a “Designer God” who from time to time intervenes in the creation, one may speak of a Creator who has built capabilities and processes for design into the very structure of the universe from its beginning. For example, many scientists have noted a remarkable set of coincidences in the values of the forces that hold atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies together. If any of these values were different by even the tiniest amount, our universe and life could not exist. These facts give Christians reasons to believe that we live in a created universe that has been given the capacities for design. But, this is a theological conclusion based upon an interpretation of scientific data and not a scientific argument for the existence of a Designer.
The God of evolution is the biblical God, subtle and gracious, who interacts with and rejoices in the enormous variety, diversity, and beauty of this evolving creation. When we contemplate the tremendous gift of freedom God has bestowed upon the creation, and how the Holy Spirit preserves in covenantal faithfulness the physical laws, powers and processes that enable such variety and beauty, these thoughts may move our hearts to a deeper admiration, awe and gratitude for God’s works. They may inspire a curiosity to know God’s creation more deeply, celebrate it with thanksgiving, and devote ourselves to caring for it.
Am I surprised by this document? Not at all. This is the Episcopal Church, after all, which has been taking orders from the secular culture for decades and lost any sense of the transcendent a long time before that. This kind of sucking up is what I expect from the Waylon Smithers of Christianity; the only thing that would have shocked me is if ECUSA had defended anything even remotely orthodox.
In their zeal to distance themselves from the fundies, ECUSA is apparently prepared to advocate something boneheadedly self-contradictory
Because it's logically and theologically idiotic. If "in this evolving universe, God does not dictate the outcome of nature’s activities, but allows the world to become what it is able to become in all of its diversity, if the creation is "evolving" and if "God the Divine Lover loves God’s own creation, faithfully holding it in existence, calling it to greater levels of complexity and beauty, but allowing the physical laws that govern the galaxies, and those of chance, environment, and selection that govern life, to take cosmic and biotic evolution in whatever directions the gifts given to creation permit" and if we consider "the tremendous gift of freedom God has bestowed upon the creation," then one wonders why Christ came into the world at all.
After all, this "freedom" God has provided for us apparently means that we have the freedom to commit any sin we care to. ECUSA's deity apparently provided Adam and Eve with the "freedom" to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So why God has the right to hold men to account for the sins they commit is unclear since, according to ECUSA, God allows "the physical laws that govern the galaxies, and those of chance, environment, and selection that govern life, to take cosmic and biotic evolution in whatever directions the gifts given to creation permit." To ECUSA, then, God is the author of sin.
But the scientific and theological implications of this document interest me much less than the political ones. This seems to be a preview of what ECUSA's theological justification will amount to. The Bible condemns homosexual activity? Not to worry. "God inspired the ancient writers to describe the world in concepts and language they and their audiences could understand, not in our concepts and language." And "God the Divine Lover loves God’s own creation, faithfully holding it in existence, calling it to greater levels of complexity and beauty, but allowing the physical laws that govern the galaxies, and those of chance, environment, and selection that govern life, to take cosmic and biotic evolution in whatever directions the gifts given to creation permit." And the creation is "evolving" and "the God of evolution is the biblical God." So homosexual activity isn't a sin anymore.
Because we said so, that's why.
Posted on 3/30/2005 1:12:09 P
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. Essentially the old ploy of trying to find spaces in the Scripture to squeeze in Darwinism is now flipped: the ECUSA is trying to find spaces in Darwinism to squeeze in a little Scripture.
The shameless abuse of the word kenosis is particularly sleazy.
My heart goes out to my separated ECUSA brethren who are dealing with this apostasy in their midst.
And I guess it goes without saying that Francis Hall+'s masterwork is now off-limits to ECUSA seminarians. After all, Fr. Hall+'s work is the classic one debunking kenosis as a viable theory of the Incarnation.
In Christ,
Deacon Paul+
Francis J. Hall - probably the greatest theologian in the Anglican Communion since Cardinal Newman.
We do have the freedom to commit any sin we care to. Christ came into the world to show that doing so will separate us from God, but that if we are repentant and turn away from our sinful choices, we can re-connect to Him.
2 points for anyone who gets the reference.
(hint: Astronomy Domini?)
"We do have the freedom to commit any sin we care to. Christ came into the world to show that doing so will separate us from God, but that if we are repentant and turn away from our sinful choices, we can re-connect to Him."
Exactly!
But the West, unfortunately, through its conception of Original Sin has almost inevitably had to face the charge that "God is the author of Sin".
AMEN!
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