Book Review: The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone

I don't actually enjoy much theology. Only about 10% of it has the "snap" that makes it worth it, but when it has that "snap" it's the most important reading in the world. Cone has that "snap." His writing is also elegant and trimmed to make its point and move on. This book shows a parallel that few white people see (although Girard saw it and he is duly cited here). Then it critiques a prominent theologian (Niebuhr), shows how this worked in the lived-out history of another prominent theologian (MLK), found it in the arts, and found it in the words of women. This is not just a crucial piece of theology that needs to be understood, it is an expansive example of how to include all voices and all fields in your argument. The most important book I've read this year.

A Letter to My Son About the Soul

Monday, May 7, 2019

Dear Aidan,

It was a blessing and a curse watching you compete Saturday. Yes, it was Bible Quiz (of all things), but it’s the same emotions any parent feels watching their kid play a weekend sport. I hoped you would take to this, and you have beyond any expectations.

So it was a blessing watching you remember words precisely and play the little parts of the game expertly, especially when you guess right and gain a lot of points.

But your high-risk strategy has a necessary downside, when you guess wrong and lose a lot of points. You take a lot of three-point shots, and the percentage is worse, but they’re worth more.

After that one prelim round, when your losses clustered all together, I saw my own reaction mirrored in yours. You couldn’t talk. You collapsed into yourself and walked away. I tried to put a hand on your shoulder but I don’t know if you even felt it. I could only let you be, and wait for the next round, if there was a next round.

There was, and you brought it all. You sailed through it with a tight precision. Then you went on, climbing step by step to take the top prize, winning a trophy so big it can only be classified as baggage. The trophy shows in its own ludicrous size that it is not the point. Who wants this chunk of wood and “gold” paint?

I wasn’t happy to have to make space for that thing in the trunk, but I was happy because it culminated months of your hard work. You wanted this, you considered the cost, planned a path, executed a strategy, ran into an obstacle, and overcame it.

I thought about why you were doing this, and I recalled the musical version of Percy Jackson that we had seen two nights before. The first song was all about the young demigods trying to catch their distant god-parents’ attention by accomplishing something big, something that the distracted gods just HAVE to notice. Did you notice how even their camp schedule was based around competition, and how the daughter of Athena honed her own battle strategy so that her god-mother would notice her? That’s the natural consequence of a world of competition: winning forces people to take notice. It was true for the Greeks, it was true for the Egyptians, and the Norse, and the soccer moms today.

Percy Jackson is missing his god-father, and that aspect to his character fits with the Greco-Roman world. All the powerful people believed this 2000 years ago: a god was a powerful man who gave you life but is off on business now and has left you to make a mark. Make some noise and maybe he’ll notice.

Jesus contradicted all this. He said God is near, God is love, God scatters life through a world like a sower scattering seed through a world of obstacles -- but God doesn’t just leave it there. God makes every seed grow, even the tiniest mustard seed, without us knowing exactly how. God gives Godself, overflowing as the Spirit, a bubbling stream to anyone who asks.

This is very different from a world where the person who captures the flag or wins the quest might get his father’s attention. Jesus was building on a foundation of Hebrew prophecies, laws, and songs showing that God is the good creator and sustainer of all things. Jesus took it farther by saying God is so good at giving gifts that God knows not just what you want but what you need. What we need is, ultimately, the Spirit of the Good Giver, who made us to need that Spirit.

Since it’s the week after Easter, I’m reminded of John’s picture of Jesus, risen from the grave, giving the disciples the Spirit by breathing on them. Kind of weird -- not the kind of image that has been repeated in Western Art that often -- but deep and resonant in its weirdness. That action means a lot:

First, don’t miss the obvious. Jesus had breath, a physical body that does the one thing physical, living bodies do all the time, in that it exhaled air.

Second, he gave that breath away, emptying himself to lift them up.

And he did so in a deliberate repetition of what happened thousands of years before in the Garden of Eden, when God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul.

This last image is from Genesis 2. It takes place in the same Bible as John 20, but many pages before, written at a different time in a different language. The Genesis verse doesn’t have much detail beyond a few solid, earthy words: “blow”; “nostrils” (they were face to face); and the mysterious term “soul.”

At this point in the story, God had formed Adam’s body from the dust, but that wasn’t enough. God was the good father to the first man and gave the gift of breath, and Adam started to move. I like the Latin term for soul best: “anima.” (Knowing the many sides of this word is why you’re learning Latin!) God blew on Adam and Adam became ANIMA-ted. “Soul” is an earthy term like “dust” and “nostrils,” and can be applied to all things that move. But in Adam’s case it was a special gift of God, reflected in the special phrase “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” God only knows precisely how that worked, but somehow something thin, active, and without parts flooded the physical, soulish body of Adam.

I can take apart an animated thing in the lab and learn something about how it works. The amazing thing is how much I can see. Living things are built from an untold number of chemical cycles, in which food comes in, is broken down, is used to build new cells, is breathed out as carbon dioxide, which a plant can “breathe in” and build up. The atoms are constantly cycling. As you breathe in and out, some atoms get lodged in your body but others fly away. I read once that 98% of the atoms in your body are replaced every year.

But you’re clearly the same Aidan who competed in Bible Quiz last year, right? So whatever it is that makes you “you,” it’s not the atoms. And whatever made Adam Adam, it wasn’t the atoms. The point of Genesis 2 is not to trace the atoms, it’s to show God giving the soul, face to face with the first man. (The point of chemistry is to trace the atoms, and that’s so relatively unimportant that we could wait a couple more millenia before learning it.)

Adam’s body of chemical cycles, reproducing and repairing, breathing air in and out, it all came from the earth. Each cycle moves because it is missing something: the atoms bind and the chemicals react to make something new. Also, each cycle has a hole in the middle. There’s a lot of empty space in the cycles. Even the atoms themselves, which seem so solid to us, are mostly empty space, with each dense nucleus relative to the atomic radius being only the size of a pea in a cathedral. Even the most solid things and the most dynamic things are open and empty, matter moving in the void. If this seems inadequate, that’s because it is inadequate. I think this is a sign that behind the void is a Creator without parts who has non-material, non-dissectable ways of filling all that emptiness.

Can I reiterate how much I don’t know here? It doesn’t really matter how long it took for these cycles to build from the dust, because there wasn’t anyone around to be impatient about it. Adam only became a soul when his eyes faced God’s (we know that that means on his side but not on God’s) and God’s breath became his. Whatever atoms were involved would soon leave him.

What would always remain in him was thin, strong, and without parts: Adam’s memory of the fact that there was once a relationship, face to face, Creator to creature. God had the same memory. God remembered Adam and his descendants.

The word-picture in Genesis 2 is like the verse in Genesis 1 where humans are all made in God’s “image,” to bring in another mysterious word. The simplest way to make an image of something is to hold a mirror to it. When Adam saw God, imagine God’s own image reflecting off Adam’s eyes, being pieced together in Adam’s brain, and therefore flooding and shaping Adam’s being. Carefully put Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7 side by side, and imagine Adam face to face with God, reflecting his Creator, shining for all others to see.

There’s a lot of questions you probably have about the rest of Genesis 2, but this letter’s already long enough. In the rest of Genesis 2 relationships are made, and in Genesis 3, they are broken.

The image language shows up in a few other places scatted through the Hebrew scriptures. In Psalm 73, the same Hebrew word for image is used for God looking on the proud and mighty, the demigods of this world, but here something is broken: “Like one waking from a dream, Lord, when arising, you will despise their image.” We’ve all warped the mirror and defaced the image in some ways, all of us except Jesus, the perfect and accurate image of God. Paul uses the word “image” to say this exact thing in Colossians 1.

Adam’s body was a bottle of flesh, made with dynamic cycles of atoms with empty space scatted throughout, from the dust of this world, according to the patterns of this world. God gave Adam a puff of “breath” that made him a living soul, able to move deliberately, think, and speak, able to relate. God gave you this same “breath,” through Adam and Eve, through Cain and Cain’s wife or Seth and his wife, through … … … , through Grandpa and Nana, through me, to you. You can also move, think, speak, relate, and choose. For example, you can choose to work hard to win Bible Quiz, and I respect and admire that choice. I want it to pay off, even as I know it won’t always.

The gift of God comes from above and is not subject to scientific study or dissection. It has no parts we can pry open, but a secret center only you (and God) can detect. The rules of science, worked out over hundreds of years, apply to atoms, but the soul was forged by a relationship with a God not made of atoms, or any parts at all.

Science can only dissect what’s below it, so that God’s gifts of spirit and soul were excluded from it at this beginning. We can hear the sound of God’s breath with our own God-given minds, but we can’t tell where it came from or where it is going.

But we have something better than science for studying the soul. I have my own soul and you have yours. This is the secret place at the center, the closet where Jesus says only the Father can see. Only God knows what was going on inside you when you had that terrible round of quizzing, I could only guess. I couldn’t reach you, but God heard every word you prayed, however frantically or half-heartedly or even unknowingly in groans too deep for words.

Others have talked about this mystery: the soul as a gift of God, embedded in but independent from the atoms of the flesh. Philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza might have something to offer, some good, some not. However, my current favorite word-picture for the soul comes not from a philosopher but from a poet.

That poet is John Davies, who lived around the time of Shakespeare, when people were struggling with this same question and we started to learn how to take the world apart. From this struggle, Davies wrote a poem in which he approached the problem systematically, like a scientist, but with poetry in the place of the scientific method. Davies tries on eight metaphors and discards each as not fitting:

The soul doesn’t dwell in the body like a tent;

it’s not like a pilot sitting in a ship;

or a spider in its web;

or an imprint in wax;

or water in a bottle;

or as a liquid mixed in another;

or as heat emitted from a fire;

or as a voice spreading through the air.

Each of these has its points (I’m intrigued by the idea of a soul as an imprint in wax), but each also has a flaw (if the soul’s an empty imprint, then what is the part that thinks and feels and stays with God, that part of the dying thief that Jesus promised would be with him this day “in Paradise”?).

Davies finds a metaphor that exceeds the rest when he finally compares the soul to sunlight through air. Specifically, the soul is in the body the same way that morning light fills a room, which “in an instant doth herself unite / To the transparent air, in all and part.”

This works really well as a metaphor, especially given all the empty space inside atoms and in the biochemical cycles of life. Imagine how the light is independent of the air, how it can be blocked by the air, but it’s still there. The sun still shines outside, and the sunlight is still given to even the most clouded room.

In the same way, if the body corrupted by disease or decay, or weighed down by stress or depression, the soul is still there, given by its Giver, diffusing every part of the body as the sunlight fills the room. You can’t dissect or control the sunlight, you can only reflect it. And I read somewhere that God made the light and Jesus is the light of the world: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,  begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father” as Christians have recited for more than a millennium in the Nicene Creed.

Another Christian picked up on the same sort of image in a different way, this one a father of four called J.R.R. Tolkien. You probably figured I’d bring him into this sooner or later. Tolkien’s metaphor of soul and body is the Phial of Galadriel. Galadriel, one of the characters closest to the Creator, gives Frodo a tiny bottle. I remember being disappointed the first time I read this. Bilbo got a glowing sword, but Frodo gets a fragile bottle?

Of course, this isn’t just any bottle. The water holds the light of Earendil’s star, from a jewel called a Silmaril that itself holds the brilliant light of the Two Trees that once lit the world, in a chain reaching back to the beginning of creation. Imagine it glimmering like the light of Venus or Jupiter, unwavering in the western sky on our evening walks. It doesn’t seem like much, but it drives the darkness of monstrous, entangling evil away.

Your soul is a light filling the bottle of your flesh. You choose how you hold it up and pour out its light. This is the gift God gave to you, through Adam and through me.

Jesus reflected and embodied this light, with a hidden, humble glory that only some saw. Take care of your soul like Frodo took care of the Phial of Galadriel, and at a moment when “even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought” you may find yourself holding it high as you recite ancient words in the moment of need. Frodo found that “another voice spoke through his, clear, untroubled by the foul air of the pit.” This voice can speak through you too.

As you trudge along the path, you might wonder if that light is even there, but in the darkness it will shine. When you struggled on Saturday at the Quiz Meet, things got dark and you had to trust that the habits you formed in secret would return by God’s grace. That’s just a foretaste to the bigger challenges that you cannot meet alone. Saturday, you met a big spider, but Shelob herself is out there.

Fear not. Jesus defeated the darkness by standing firm and taking the worst sin can do – which is that it killed him and stopped all his motion, all his “anima,” down to the atoms. Jesus stood firm as others mocked because he knew that all they could do was destroy his body. Jesus trusted that God would give him a new “bottle” after the old one was destroyed.

Jesus was right. God’s light shines on even when the body is destroyed by death, and that part of you that perceives and feels and dreams will be with Jesus always. God will hold you safe, as the good Father who is better than we can ask or imagine.

Jesus studied his Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, as you studied. Those scriptures told him that God has always worked this way: God’s Messiah would suffer shame and would die, then would rise after three days. Even study itself is filled with empty spaces and pauses, with times of blankness that God fills with the light of God’s Spirit. As you work to push these words into your memory, they shape faith and literally reshape the atoms in your neurons into windows that light can shine through.

I believe that shaping your brain to follow his words will open the space to let God’s light fill your body and soul. It’s not about the words themselves, but the space they open for God to move.

Even if this space closes, and you lose sight of God’s grace in the heat of competition, and if a fleshly and idolatrous brain drains the meaning from words by rote repetition, even if the quiz round crashes and burns and you don’t move on, God is in the failure too, because God himself failed according to the world’s standards, yet we call that day of failure “Good Friday.” Trust that God sees in secret and God gives life in secret, even in the face of failure, whatever befall.

Even in a stuffy Bible Quiz room when you’re hungry and tired and you have hours to go, and you’ve disappointed yourself after months of work, you have never disappointed me and you have never disappointed your heavenly Father, who always runs with open arms toward his prodigal son.

Remember that God’s light shines like the sun behind the clouds, and that Jesus himself is the reality that made everything and sits enthroned above and behind everything. Let God’s light be your vision, filling you and lifting you to see the hidden, generous glory of Christ that has sustained creation since God first said, “Let there be light.”

On March 25 fifteen years ago God said “Let there be Aidan.” I held your tiny form and saw that light when I first looked into your eyes, face to face. The light between us revealed to me that God gave us to each other. At that moment God created a truth that will never change: that I am filled with light when I remember you, because I love you. And I love you because God loved you first, and made you for this.

Love, Dad

Book Review: Christians at the Cross by NT Wright

This little book of sermons was fruitful for me, which is all the more striking because I found this by chance, needing some reading material in a pinch on Good Friday. It's a window into NT Wright's pastoral side: his messages to a neglected community during Holy Week. I'm familiar with the main points of his speaking, but seeing them adapted to a specific group of parishoners brings them alive in a new way. Also, most of these sermons pair a passage from the gospel of John with a passage from Isaiah, and they sent me back to read the Servant Songs of Isaiah more fully. In this context, they came alive for me in a new way as well. The Servant is a teacher, and we see his thoughts and doubts transparently, as well as his conviction that God is near and God will save. That spoke to me most of all, and isn't the point of Holy Week to hear God's word in a new way?

Book Review: The Uncontrolling Love of God

I'm faced with a dilemma: how do I interact on a deep level with a book that challenges a central tenet of theology when I listened to the book as a free audiobook? One thing's for sure: I'm not going to be able to give a coherent contribution to this debate, so I'll settle for bullet points! Better yet, listen to Thomas Oord read his own book for free by downloading the book here, then join the conversation.

-- When I met Tom, I knew right away that he was a theologian to take seriously, because his very manner is not too serious. He exudes grace and life. This aspect of his personality shines through in his book. Tom argues that God's love comes before God's power in everything. Which includes his ability to control the natural world. God's nature of love makes it so that He cannot stop certain evils from happening. Tom makes it clear that God is still "all-mighty" and that miracles happen, but that God's love prevents him from coercing anything created because love comes first in the nature of God.

-- The word study I appreciated most was of the word "kenosis," which literally means "emptying," but Tom's preferred "pouring out" is better. This fits very well with Robert Spaemann's definition of life as being that "which exists in itself and pours itself out." Pouring is a dynamic process and there's lots to unpack for a chemist in that very definition.

-- Chapter 2 is an excellent summary of randomness and chaos. I think I may use it in class someday.

-- Tom's argument is fundamentally that God is near, being active in the very regularities of nature. That the regularity of nature is itself a manifestation of God's faithfulness. This is a fundamental tenet of theology that we have lost somewhere along the way, and this book helps us recover it.

-- I have several "what-about" questions: What about the Trinity (it's more implicit than explicit)? Why is explanation of evil so important when a large majority of evil is explainable, especially if we consider the risks we willingly take on when we move through this regular universe? (Tom refers to an example of a rock through a windshield, but I think this is a consequence of the technology that allows our soft bodies to move so quickly down the road. Expecting God to stop every fatal rock would be "putting God to the test" as much as Jesus flinging himself down from the Temple parapet.) He writes about Scripture and power later on but I think that should come earlier because it is so prevalent a theme that dealing with it feels tacked-on in so short a book. For example, when Jesus says "All authority is given to me in heaven and earth" what does that mean in terms of uncontrolling love? And most of all, what about the resurrection and eschatology?

-- Ultimately I agree that God is near and God is love. Tom's solution may be rooted too much in a modern view of the universe. Justifying evil events involves causation, and causation itself has become a slippery concept, and which makes blame and explanation slippery as well. Tom writes about chaos theory and the unpredictable results of small events, but then he comments that we may soon know more about chaos theory, when chaos theory says these things are by definition unknowable. This is where I wish I could engage exactly with this section, because to me chaos theory is like the uncertainty principle: it's not that we can eventually reduce the uncertainty but that the uncertainty is by definition irreducible. I don't think we'll ever know more about chaos theory in a way that would address that question (but I'm not sure from listening!).

-- What if this theology makes us more fearful? There is no fear in love. But uncontrolling love at first blush makes me more afraid. Is that my failing or that of the theology?

This is a thought-provoking book that is good for Christians to talk about, as long as we keep all our conversations grounded in the truth of both books (nature and scripture) and as always permeated with love. If we do that God will be there among the two or three gathered. In that spirit I look forward to the conversations that will result.

"On Being Wrong in Science" posted at the BioLogos Blog

I just posted a guest blog at the BioLogos blog about my scientific and theological journeys titled "On Being Wrong in Science." Check it out, and also check out the post from John Walton that inspired it (referred to in the first sentence).

Book Review: Models of Atonement by George L. Murphy

In my years of attending and listening to American Scientific Affiliation conferences, I've found that George Murphy gives reliably repeatable and ponderable talks. He is a Lutheran pastor with a Ph.D. in physics, and is one of the clearest voices on the (positive) implications of evolution for faith.

This most recent book of his is a high-water mark. With the precision and concision of a physics textbook, Murphy surveys the different ways theologians have thought about Jesus' reconciling work and lays out how he thinks these can brought together with the scientific discoveries since Darwin. This isn't trying to mix oil and water together -- this is a genuine reconciliation on the level of science and religion. I found many resonances with NT Wright's recent huge book on Romans.

The book is so short that I'm left wanting more. For example, Murphy argues for a faith-first view of atonement rather than other views in which love is primary. But what about "the greatest of these is love"? This book opens up a fascinating and helpful avenue for thinking about the sacraments, and makes a strong case that the future is more important than the past when it comes to theology.

I feel like these ideas are the "equations" suggesting application through sanctifying "homework problems." I hope theologians find this book and read it because it opens up so many theological scholarly projects that I can't even keep track of them in my head. A wonderful (if short) book.

Chemical Faithfulness, Part 3: Natural Laboratories for the Origin of Life

In the past two parts of this series I described how liquid water is living water, its special chemistry shaping geology and biology to give us the world today. Water’s life-giving power extends even deeper than this, as deep as a few billion years back in time. We saw how liquid water’s chemical power created the Puget Sound and sustains deep-sea ecosystems today. Likewise, water could have participated in creation long ago.

The chemical ingredients life needs come together at the deep ocean vents: carbon, sulfur, hydrogen, iron, nickel, and especially energy from within the earth.  Long ago, water’s chemical power may have brought these ingredients together to shape the first life forms.

I once avoided these ideas because I felt that a chemical bridge from non-life to life threatened God’s creative sovereignty. But now I’ve changed my mind. If God came up with the ideas, then they actually convey God’s creative sovereignty. The more I appreciate the dynamic elegance of water’s chemistry, the more I think that God appreciates dynamic elegance, too. All origin of life experiments have an important role for the chemical power of flowing, liquid water.

For example, some deep-sea vents form rocks with holes that look suspiciously like small cells. These cavities naturally stockpile and separate chemicals, like natural laboratories with billions of chambers. They are lined with iron and nickel atoms that react with the sulfur and hydrogen streaming out of the earth like Champagne bubbles.

One of the central molecules in all metabolism, pyruvate, forms spontaneously in these vents, as well as other related molecules that look like the breakdown products of pyruvate found in every cell. It’s as if a biochemical network is budding from the rocks. The holes in the rock can hold different mixtures of chemicals in place, like the 96-well plates scientists use to run 96 experiments at once. In the rock, simple circular chemical cycles could have formed and started to turn, fed by gas bubbles.

Or maybe the heat was more gentle, the toasty temperature of a hot spring at the earth’s surface. This makes a different kind of natural laboratory, where holes in the rock act as gas condensers, collecting steam and letting it drip down in a purifying cycle. Every organic chemistry lab contains complex glass sculptures built to condense and distill. Some hot springs have rocks that do the same chemistry.

Experiments in a similar environment found conditions where simple 4- or 5-atom molecules naturally rearrange into the complex, three-part nucleosides that make up DNA. In an elegant flourish, this fascinating set of reactions is catalyzed, not by a rare element or molecule, but by the very common bio-molecule, phosphate. DNA has phosphate in it, meaning this important molecule may incorporate its own catalyst.

Origin of life chemistry as a field is full of successes like these but also its fair share of failures. One major failure is summed up by Steven Benner as “the asphalt problem”: undirected reactions tend to make tar. What’s interesting to me is where the failures may come from. I think most experiments were too simple, too purified, and too dilute. If the experiments are made dirtier, in many cases with actual “dirt,” they work better. The deep-sea experiment above can’t make pyruvate without the iron and nickel from rocks. In the DNA-making experiment, the DNA nucleosides are not made from a sequence of reactions, but by mixing everything together in one pot and running thousands of reactions at once. The more the experimental conditions mimic the geological complexity of the early earth, the more the resulting chemicals look like biological complexity (that is, pyruvate or DNA nucleosides).

This experiment is run with chemical ingredients provided by the periodic table and the physical forces of mixing and geology, which are mediated by liquid, living water. If God gave the chemical laws, then God gave water this power, and this could be how God created. God works with me patiently and through the world around me – perhaps he did the same at the creation of life.

If we can imagine God giving his power to God’s creation, then origin of life chemistry experiments have no necessary conflict with a strong theology of creation. The first biochemical cycles would have obeyed the rules of chemistry, and we know Who made those rules. Even the deepest part of the sea at the far extent of Earth’s history is part of God’s creation and ordered by God’s Word.

Water is the medium of life-giving grace, and we can see through it to the one who ordered the atoms with the rules of chemical bonding (and the math that sets those rules). In Greek, such rules would be called the logos -- the wisdom and Word by which worlds were created. As a chemist, I am called to seek out the subset of those rules called chemistry, and to understand that God is at work providing and upholding them.

The world looks different if flowing, living water is seen as a chemical gifted with the potential to create life. We know water is powerful enough to carve landscapes, form gemstones and ores, and support fantastic microbes. Now to these powers is added the ability to make life by reacting with rocks, and the story of creation becomes that much more amazing.

The length of this story is incomprehensible to our small experience. Our experiments show that Earth held an ocean of life-sustaining water on its surface for 4 billion years, not boiling it into steam like Venus or losing it to a barrage of asteroid impacts, like Mars. The word for that duration of constancy is faithfulness. Through eons, God has cared for us by upholding a universe with constant chemical laws, rules that convey the simple grace of living water.

I am writing a book that recounts the story of these chemical laws, this logos, that shaped the world around us. Water is so important to that story that I changed the book’s title halfway through to give water a place of honor – now it is called River of Life: How Chemistry Shaped Biology. A river is living water, and water, despite its small size, is the chemical cornerstone of life.

The angle of science and the angle of theology fit together and co-illuminate in the story of “living water.” The creator who emptied himself of power and became so small at Christmas also made the small but powerful molecule H₂O, then gave us oceans of it. The more things we discover about that molecule, the more we can delight in the hand that gave it yesterday and continues to give it today.

Book Review: Paul and the Faithfulness of God, Parts 3 and 4 (Book 2) by NT Wright

Looking back on it, I had to train for this book like a climber has to train for Mt. Rainier. I've read and listened to Wright's other books and lectures (including the first three in this series), but I'm happy to announce I didn't fall into a crevasse or anything. There's no way that a few sentences here can really express what I got out of these 1519 pages (or 50 hours of reading), but I have a few scattered thoughts upon completion:

-- Wright's intention to describe theology as a narrative rather than propositions is parallel to what I try to do in science. I learned a lot from him in how to disagree and argue with a broad range of other academics. Whatever you think of his conclusions, theology is stronger for Wright's arguments, and I think science can be stronger if similar narrative arguments are made in it (it also helps that I think those arguments are essentially right). Therefore I wrote a book.

-- The decision to lop off a lot of the arguments and put them into a separate book (Interpreters) is much appreciated. That said, there were several places where I drifted along because I just don't have a dog in that fight, or I already know where my "dog" sits. These amount to maybe 100 pages at most. In other books that would bog the book down. In this one it's 5% of the book so the point may be insignificant.

-- What I appreciate most is how Wright integrates history into the narrative and insists that we need to use the historical categories, not modern ones, to understand Paul's train of thought. And things that before I thought were intrusions or leaps of intuition turn out to be much more solid and make perfect sense in the light of the history. He did this for Jesus in Book 2, and now he does it for Paul in Book 4. Paul makes sense in new ways for me.

-- Wright writes well. Allusions to Pride and Prejudice and Midsummer Night's Dream play major roles in particular chapters, and he is a master of the biblical allusion (big surprise there). At the end he brings in Walter Benjamin, a philosopher friend of Hannah Arendt's I have never heard of but intend to find out more.

-- Wright's pastoral care is also integrated into the book. This is not just about the mind, but it is about practice and the entire life. So, if you care to train, this mountain is worth climbing. Excuse me while I decompress.

Book Review: Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Parts I and II)

Not often is Page 570 the break point in a book and one not even half through at that. This book continues on up to around 1500 in Parts III and IV. Not since I've read fantasy novels have I encountered a story this long. But, as with the previous NT Wright books, this story is worth it.


I'm struck by how NT Wright is bringing multiple stories together into a coherent narrative here. What I'm trying to do with my own manuscript is not that different. And this book feels just slightly expanded from time to time. For one thing, Wright took most of his arguments with other scholars and put them in a whole 'nother book, which I'm very grateful for, because that's what exasperates me most about other writers like Hauerwas. I want you to talk to me, not those other writers over there. I'm selfish.


Wright returns to his beloved six-part diagrams here, too, but at the end of Part II they come together in a way that, I'll begrudgingly admit, is indeed illuminating.


So far this book looks to do for Romans and 1 Corinthians what the previous book (The Resurrection of the Son of God) did for the ends of the 4 Gospels. It does tell a story, and Wright does show how that story is both continuous and discontinuous with what went before. The story makes Paul make sense in a deep and lasting way. I love that.


This book is doing what it should, and since Wright had lofty goals in writing it, to make that statement is high praise. I'm looking forward to Parts III and IV, although I may need to rest my brain first. I'm not even halfway up the mountain yet.

The Chemistry of Ashes

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.
-- Sonnet 73, Shakespeare

Today is Ash Wednesday, in Latin, "dies cinerum," the Day of Cinders.

How long can you sit and watch a fire? The constant motion of the flickering flames fascinates and nearly hypnotizes. The live flames tell a story, whispering kinship. That's true at levels that run as deep as chemistry.

You warm yourself with the same reaction that makes fire burn. Carbon chains + oxygen = steam and carbon dioxide gas. You exhale the exhaust of fire. The structures so carefully built and pieced together in the growing limb are fuel for the flame, vaporized into a gas that slips away like so much vanity. Gas comes from the same root as "chaos." The old order melts away.

Yet there is something left when the fire is complete. Some elemental carbons sit solid in the fireplace, a residue only suitable for marking a line that soils a forehead.

Along with the carbon, if there was anything metal, especially one of the larger metals like iron, nickel, copper, silver, gold, these are too heavy to become gas and would be left behind as well, indistinguishable from the black carbon but assuredly there, broken in tiny bits. The constructed chains, the facade, it all burns away but the heavy metals stay. The elements may melt with the fervent heat but they persist. What is scattered can be gathered and used again.

What can take ashes and put them together into new life? You would need to reverse the reaction, to pull down the heaven above, catching carbon dioxide and water vapor, then shaping it like a potter shapes clay. The second law of thermodynamics says, rightfully, that this is very hard to do.

What you would need to reverse the reaction is an exhaled breath from another life. You would need to take in what another fire breathed out. "Breath" in Hebrew is "nephesh" which also means "soul." You would take in this exhaled soul and you would inhale, and if it was reorganized and reborn in the right configuration, you would live. Exhaust would become new life.

The second law of thermodynamics says that this is very hard to do. It is extremely improbable in a closed system. But it is not impossible. And we do not live in a closed system.

Today we watch the fire burn and draw stick figures with the ashes, crosses, plus signs, made from the elements of lost life. Any life, no matter how well lived, ends in ashes. All intentions, whether selfless or selfish, all the piecing together of the puzzle, all of it burns, igniting from the pressure of its own useless weight. Your mitochondria, where you burn all your carbon chains and run the combustion reaction that warms your skin, are also the direct cause of the poison molecules, the reactive oxygen species and the runaway electrons, that careen out of control and break apart your cells, aging your body and shattering your DNA. All fire has its exhaust. This can be papered over for a day, but it can never be avoided. Thanks be to God.

The next forty days are the age of carbon, of soot and charcoal, of smouldering vapors, a time to wait in the ashes, continuing the slow burn, sitting in the broken pieces, waiting for a breath from above.

Book Review: My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman

The book My Bright Abyss is subtitled Meditation of a Modern Believer, but the believer of the subtitle (Christian Wiman) is a poet who deconstructs and inverts the very word belief. It's not for nothing that someone else called Wiman the "atheist Christian." He's fond of apophatic language (describing God, not by what God is like, but by what God is not like), paradox, and the search for meaning in silence despite a loud, modern world set against anything quiet. But this is not Chesteron's sometimes-too-triumphant paradox, it is a true puzzle that no one knows. What shapes Wiman's whole perspective is a seven-year struggle with a rare cancer and the intense intimacy with pain and struggle that comes with that. Wiman also believes that Christ is God and that God was crucified (he also quotes Jurgen Moltmann on this) -- that God was somehow calling out to Godself when he cried "Why have you forsaken me?"

Overall, this book is billed as modern, and Wiman is thoroughly modern, but his perspective on suffering and the cross feels old, like a medieval saint's reflections, with shades of Kierkegaard. This book is hard going at times, just like life is, but it is dense and rewarding. There are a few head-scratching moments, like when Wiman mistakes Isaiah for Elijah, and I would like to know more about what Wiman thinks about scripture's poetry, the stories we share as Christians, although there are frequent enough allusions to it. I'd like to know more. Hopefully there will be a next book, the Gilead to this book's Housekeeping (to continue the Robinson references). I think sometimes Wiman tilts too far toward the question when there is a partial, through-a-glass-darkly answer to ponder. I occasionally found this book frustrating and slow but in a good way, like a hard poem. Wiman's voice is a unique creation and well worth hearing in the harmony of the believers.

When the Scriptures of Science Fail

Sometimes the best part of the book comes out after it's published. Rebecca Skloot's book on Henrietta Lacks led to many fascinating developments after it came out, including a remarkable agreement on her genome publication with Lacks's family, something that would never have been possible without the book. Into the Wild by John Krakauer is now another example. Why did Chris McCandless starve in a bus walking distance from a highway? Krakauer originally had a biochemical explanation for this, but recent evidence has come out that refocuses and implicates a different biochemical cause. Read about it here.

What strikes me about the story now is that McCandless trusted his field guide. He had to. He was right to. It represented centuries of experience. But that field guide did not include the fact that, in a weakened state, eating this one plant would have enough of a neurotoxin to take out the nerves, moving your legs in a slow, weakening erosion of your ability to keep yourself alive. The field guide was flawed. (I'm even leaving out the part about how he could have crossed the river to safety if he had a good enough map ... )

McCandless trusted his book, and his book let him down. This can happen with any book -- all knowledge is incomplete. Scientific summaries of experience may be more reliable but they are still incomplete.

This is true with the Hebrew Scriptures, too. When Israel trusted their rituals and the presence of the temple in Jerusalem, trusting that this would protect the nation from invaders, they were shown to be wrong. (Well, right with Assyria, wrong with Babylon, it's complicated.) Both stories show that books can let you down.

But the story with Israel is more complicated. Israel was ignoring the book as it trusted in the building. Particularly brushed under the rug were passages in the Torah against idolatry and worship with the heart. Prophets pointed this out; false prophets reassured that it was OK ("The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord"). Then judgement came, and the unique place on earth where the Lord of the cosmos was worshipped was leveled. Even now, that feels wrong, unfair, disproportionate. The sheer cry of lament in Lamentations shows just how horrible it was. My heart takes Israel's side in this, probably as a defensive maneuver for my own coverups.

Yet, in the face of a cataclysm, embers survived, waiting for breath to glow again. The Jewish faith survived the destruction of the temple, rising from the ashes. And then the second temple was destroyed -- and Israel survived, and Christianity rose as well. The second destruction led to two religions where before there had been one. Who could predict that?

Faith is not faith that nothing bad will ever happen. Faith is faith that when the bad things happen that God remains faithful. Even when death happens, times thousands.

I don't know how it all adds up. There are always false prophets and idols in every person's own mind. There are times of adundance and times of abundance. A time to be born and a time to die.

When you're going out by yourself, a science field guide is the only community you have. It, like any community, can let you down, and may be more likely to let you down than a living, breathing community, as messed up as that community may be.

In the middle of all this "letting down" -- books letting us down, friends letting us down, ourselves letting us down every hour -- faith says, despite what it looks like right now, I know God holds us in his hand. It's a simple point, but it's a point I hear in the story of McCandless as it's now told. Rest in peace, Chris.

Living from the Diaphragm

In church, I love it when the translation is wrong.

In a sense, the translation is always wrong. When reading the New Testament, we're always fitting English words over the Greek, and sometimes they fit snugly, while other times they don't fit at all, hanging off in one place, pinching in another, truncating and even obscuring the best parts.

Just today this showed up in Romans 12:3. Romans 12:1-2 is one of the most well-read verses, and justly so. Romans 12:3 is different because it's practical and straightforward, and it can also be deflected and moved past a little too easily if you're not careful.

Romans 12:3 reads "Don't be uperphronein but rather be sōphronein," which is translated something like "Don't be high-minded but be sober-minded." That works, but it sounds a little bumper-stickery, maybe too moralistic. Don't drink and drive, you know. If you didn't come to church drunk then you can pat yourself on the back and move on. You'd be missing the heart of the verse.

If words were garments, then one of these fits well while the other doesn't. Uperphronein as "high-minded" fits pretty well -- you can even see the "Uper" that relates to our "hyper" or "uber-" prefix. But the "so" in sophronein is not really about sobering up, it's more about being sane and being safe. It's about being balanced and connected with reality rather than disconnected. The person who has unplugged from the lying distant voices online, the one connected to local reality, seasons, rhythms, and relationships is the one who is "sophronein." "Safe" is also a nice angle on this word. I want my students to be "safe-minded" in lab, so we take care and work deliberately.

Also, the "phronein" has multiple layers of meaning. It's about how you see yourself, so "-minded" works, but it's also about much more. It's about the center of things, where your heart is, and how you have trained yourself to see, how you self-control ot regulate yourself. It comes from the root "phren", which means the regulator of all other things. We get the word "diaphragm" from it, and this is where it really makes sense for me.

Soon after I joined choir (and married the accompanist), I learned that I wasn't singing right. I may have had emotion and volume but it was not regulated. I wasn't singing from the diaphragm. I had to learn to stand stright, shoulders back, breathe deep, and most of all, keep the right things tense and the right things loose.

The diaphragm supports all the other things going on -- it is the core and the discipline regulating all other singing. Every time we sing the first thing we do is take 5-10 minutes to sing warm-ups, nonsensical sounds that are designed to get the diaphragm toned up and regulating the way it should. It is boring, it is work, it is hard, and some days are better than others, but it comes from a true place, which is the constant need to hold the diaphragm right as you're singing. Your heart may in the right place, but if your diaphragm isn't, you won't sound right.

Paul is saying here that we need to live warmed-up, and need to maintain self-control in all things, including especially our self-assessment of "how am I doing today." We'll mess up, sometimes even when we warmed up right, sometimes in a place where everyone can see, sometimes where only God can see. The danger is not in the messing up but in thinking too highly of ourselves so that we don't give ourselves the chance to mess up.

Live loud and balanced, from the diaphragm.

All that is contained in a contrast between two Greek words, and it's well-nigh impossible to capture in English so succinctly. So there are tools online to help you unpack (I like the Biblos Interlinear Greek Bible, as someone who doesn't really know Greek at all!). These tools help me hear more layers of what there is to hear and help bridge the gap between the 21st-century English and the 1st-century Greek. Inbetween are textures of meaning. It adds another dimension to reading, and it allows the ancient words to speak more clearly.

Book Review: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

How a few decades changes a person. When assigned to read this book in high school, my friends made fun of its intense, detailed, natural focus, and, conforming to the non-conformity, I joined right in. Even so, there were images I never forgot: a cat's bloody footprints and a frog sucked hollow by a waterbug. And that was just in the first few chapters.

Now I've returned to finish it for good and find that Annie Dillard has produced a readable, vivid book of what can only be called natural theology. Her willingness to look at the harsh parts of nature unflinchingly, even with an appropriate understated fascination, is the bitter streak that balances the talk of balance and harmony. The book hasn't changed in twenty years, so it must be me.

I wonder how Dillard's occasional God-talk sounds to someone who doesn't come from the Christian viewpoint. I would like to see a new Atheist response to someone who would take the time to read this book. (Alas, they don't seem to have time to turn from the science to something like this.) Also, I'd like to see a secular science writer who can describe nature with the force and power of Dillard. Haven't seen it yet. Maybe Loren Eiseley comes close, and he's even quoted in this, but his work is much more placid than the energy that pulses through Dillard's prose.

It's too early to review this book -- I just finished it and my head's still reeling -- but it was worth reading slowly, as summer changed from early to late, only a few pages at a time. It's that rich and multi-layered. I'd like to know what others think of it, so comment below if you have ...

Book Review: The Pastor by Eugene Peterson

In a way, Eugene Peterson has been a pastor to me. I first read his books (and "The Message," his translation of the Bible) when I came to Seattle and joined my church 16, 17 years ago now. Peterson's words are tangled up with my own pastor's words and I'm sure mixed up at some point. I used to seek out "The Message" to use in Bible readings for the congregation or Sunday School. Because I associate Peterson's writing with my own translocation to the Northwest, I found it particularly fitting that in this, his memoir, he starts by drawing strong lines of attachment to his own place, western Montana (which I certainly count as Northwest enough to be "Northwest"). Peterson's words have always been part of the mental map of the Northwest for me, and now I find out that's because he is indeed part of the Northwest. I can't claim to have known this long ago, but I'd like to think that I may have felt it on an unconscious level.

The Pastor is not really about being a pastor; it's more about being part of a church. Peterson strikes an uncommon balance in that it's always clear that the church is distinct -- the church is The Church as opposed to the world -- but the church is not sealed off or even "above" the world it is called out from. Rather, the church is "for" the world it is called out from. Peterson may express this paradox better than any other current writer, to me at least.

So to learn about how the church should be the church, I suggest reading this man's memoir. It's not perfect, it could use some editing, but then again, so could this review. Another benefit is that you get some glimpses into what really matters for a writer writing -- and I even copied a page to put up on my bulletin board to glance over as I embark on this summer's writing project, high praise indeed because there's only so much room on that board. This book is worth the space on that board, and it's worth the time it took to read.

I may have never read a memoir that left the indelible impression, not so much of the author, but of the people and the God that he spent his life with. It's hard to call it a memoir because it is so other-focused in effect. A remarkable, quiet, and moving book.

Book Review: Why Does the World Exist?

Spoiler alert: Why Does the World Exist? doesn't really answer its title question. Rather, the point is the journey, as you might expect from an author with a philosophy background interviewing various intellectuals and putting it together at a "magazine" level of detail. Most of the arguments I had heard before, but Holt allows the physicists and philosophers to use their own words and engages them like a student in one of their classes would. He also lets you know what he thinks about their arguments and why he finds many of them unsatisfying. I learned two things about myself from this book: 1.) My own impression that the anthropic principle is pretty powerful is indeed backed up by a large number of the intellectuals in this book, in their own ways. Although I don't think Holt is hard enough on the multiverse claims. 2.) I naturally resonated with the only two intellectuals with a theistic leaning: Richard Swinburne and John Updike. Probably confirmation bias, which shows why this is such a hard topic to explore semi-objectively, but I appreciated their inclusion in this book, and would have liked to have a few more chapters from those like them. There's a couple of simplistic swipes at theology but not too many.

I really do think theism is dismissed too readily by the modern mind because we assume that personality must be complex. The idea that a universe came from a personality rather than a mechanism is the key dividing line for me. I just don't have a problem with that. I think the irreducible part of the universe is more about personality than mechanism, and lo and behold, the theists make sense to me.  Holt is clearly on the other side of this. Is it that I tend toward stoicism and Holt toward epicureanism?

This book succeeds not because it is completely balanced, but because it is unbalanced, from Holt's point of view and with his questions and his life driving him on. The interplay of life and work is what makes this book succinct. It's not really a detective story, but it's more of a memoir at heart. That makes it work.

Book Review: To Change the World

To Change the World is a difficult book to critique. It's broad in scope, arguing that the Christian Right (Dobson & co.), the Christian Left (Wallis & co.), and the Neo-Anabaptists (Hauerwas & co.) have all basically got it wrong. Rather than "a pox on all your houses," James Davison Hunter argues that Christians should look to Jeremiah 29 in the context of exile and adopt a posture of "faithful presence" in positions throughout the culture.

The difficulty with a book like this is that it is of necessity so large that to be readable it can only criticize summaries, and summaries are going to be straw men in one way or another. As far as the political Right and Left, Hunter makes a very good argument that the very politics they practice underwrites the political assumptions that create the sense of injustice and aggreivance they feed off in the first place. A vicious feedback cycle that gets us nowhere. They need their enemies, and some among them idolize their own ossified positions. I'm with Hunter on this -- hence the irony and tragedy in his subtitle.

Hunter's criticisms of the neo-Anabaptists are more problematic to me. That's quite a diverse group, especially because Hunter includes people like Richard B. Hays, who don't truly belong. Hauerwas does belong, but Hauerwas has produced such a large body of work that I can't help but feel that Hunter is cherry-picking in what he quotes. For instance, if you're going to say that neo-Anabaptists are all about disengagement, you need to look at the counterargument that is Hauerwas's Gifford Lectures, in which he adapts natural theology to his own framework. This and Hauerwas's State of the University are the best things I've read by him, I'd say, and they're not about disengagement by any stretch of the word. So my favorite writings of Hauerwas are nowhere to be found, but how could they be? There's only 300 pages here, and I'd be complaining if there was much more. The truly wrong -- as in, that's just wrong -- quotes come from other "neo-Anabaptists," none of whom I have read. How influential are those?

And yet ... I have the feeling that Hauerwas is indeed incomplete without other people showing where he's not quite all that, and I did find this section one of the most interesting parts of Hunter's book. Just like G.K. Chesterton and Hauerwas create sparks and tension, I'm happy to have other sources of that. I like sparks. Dissonant chords are interesting.

I have to conclude that Hunter's underlying thesis is not wrong. I do think "faithful presence" indeed comes closer than the other three positions as described in this book, and that's what I want to focus on. Mainly, I find elements of "faithful presence" in the non-extreme positions of the other three "wings" of Christianity, in a mere Christianity kind of way. I'll bet Hunter would agree, and I appreciate the positive agenda those two words start to write for us. So this book does just what it can do. It doesn't slay the giants, but I don't think it sets out to. It does point out that changing the world is hard, we can't do it alone, and relying on God with patience, perseverance and wisdom is what's really important. I can appreciate that, and reading this book, I did appreciate it.

News Flash: Both Science and Faith Require Nuance, Reason, and Logic

A week ago Nicholas Wade, New York Times science writer, published an op-ed on science and religion, and a week ago the blogosphere lit up. There's a lot to write about in just that, because the atheist reaction to Wade's "accommodationism" surprised me. I merely found Wade's op-ed boring, occasionally wrong, and historically inaccurate, but ultimately inoffensive: on some fronts at least he was trying. Kind of like E.O. Wilson at times. I just didn't see it as something for people to get worked up about. But worked up people did get, leading to a long letters to the editor section in yesterday's Times, reproduced on the Why Evolution is True blog as "A bunch of us go after Nicholas Wade" (what do you call a witch hunt for people who don't believe in witches?).

Jerry Coyne was the first to "go after Nicholas Wade" by pointing out BioLogos:

"Organizations like BioLogos, founded by National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, have spent many years and much money trying to turn Christian creationists toward evolution by “respecting their faith”. It hasn’t worked."

Never mind that BioLogos has only existed for half a decade or so now. People haven't changed their minds on a complex issue that rarely directly impacts them after five years of an organization's existence (BioLogos is just running their first big RFE now, in fact!). Time to throw in the towel on dialogue, then.

But it was really this sentence of Coyne's that caught my eye, pithily put but problematic:

"Teaching that the book of Genesis is a metaphor, as Wade suggests, is anathema to fundamentalists since it implies that Jesus died for a metaphor—the original sin of a nonexistent Adam and Eve."

Coyne is certainly right in that some unreflective fundamentalists say this. But repeating it (unreflectively) as applicable to all Christians, even all fundamentalists, is the strawiest of straw men. It's the "Lowest Common Denominator" argument: scrub away all nuance from the argument and then attack the others for believing something without nuance. It's the mirror image of the fundamentalist attacking the evolutionist because single nucleotide changes can't add up to make a flagellum. The evolutionist might even agree with that way of putting it, but it's the other ways of changing DNA that might be true. (In this case, changes larger than single nucleotide changes, for example.)

If Coyne wants fundamentalists to adopt nuance beyond the arguments of intelligent design then he himself needs to adopt nuance toward theology. But I don't blame him for this lack of nuance, because the church itself has slipped into a materialist interpretation of original sin, a medieval-style thought in which something must physically soil the atoms passed down from father to son. Then Jesus' redemption would be some kind of physical actions that scrubbed the soul-atom clean, some kind of cleansing enzyme (in his blood?). If you think about it enough it doesn't totally make sense, whether you're fundamentalist or atheist.

There's also the matter of history. There's no evidence that Jesus would have thought of original sin this way. Paul has some verses that were interpreted by Augustine a certain too-material way, perhaps, which blossomed into the medieval-substance way of looking at sin. The church needs to do a lot of thinking about what this means, and has done too much "coasting" on what Augustine thought, with subtle tweaks that have degenerated the doctrine of original sin through the years into the medieval-substance way of looking at it that Coyne thinks is our only option.

It comes down to what Jesus died for. If we reduce it to some sort of heavenly transaction that reverses Adam and Eve's bad choice, only, then maybe Coyne has a point. But nothing in Christianity is heavenly only. Jesus died to show us how to make choices now that will affect the future, not just to reverse some event in the distant past. If Jesus' death means anything, it means that change and redemption can come now. If Jesus can change people now and put together a community that is different from the world in a qualitative way, we must start from that, and then we can worry about exactly what Adam and Eve were and what the nature of Original Sin is.

Of course, that paragraph itself is without nuance. We're never going to perfect the present, and it's fine to think about the past. But this one-track-mind-focus on Adam and Eve is clearly missing the point of what Jesus did and continues to do. I'm just frustrated with the lack of nuance. The intricacies of theology are just as fascinating (and as dependent on logic) as the intricacies of science, and I'm tired of people selling one or the other short. I'm as fascinated by the question of "What is original sin?" as I am by the question of "How was life formed?". We need nuance all around. (Isn't that what the Beatles sang -- "all you need is nuance"? No?)

Coyne closes with "Reconciliation doesn’t change minds; reason and logic do." For the record, I disagree that reconciliation is useless -- in fact, reconciliation is one of those Things That Jesus Died For, possible more than original sin, if you read all of Paul. But beyond that, I'm agreeing with the second half of the statement and am asking for reason and logic. I'm just asking that the reason and logic be applied theologically to the doctrine of original sin as well, by the church first and then by its critics.

Whatever the answers are, I can tell you that they'll be complex enough that it will take more than five years for an originization like BioLogos to even raise them, much less answer them. Let's leave Nicholas Wade alone for daring to propose something, even wrong-headed as it may be, because talking this out is the only way we're going to get anywhere.

Music as Medicine

As a pre-med advisor who's married to a musician (and as someone who sort of collects inspirational academic speeches as a hobby), I thought this Welcome Address to The Boston Conservatory really nailed a lot of why we do what we do. Read the whole thing by clicking on that link ... or if you really need to cut to the chase, this is the conclusion and heart of it:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft. 

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

I have one problem with the last paragraph (just a little idolatry going on as Barfield might say, nothing too unusual): religion that doesn't do this is not religion, because this healing is precisely the point of God's saving action. See Micah 6:8 + James 1:27 + the whole book of Isaiah (which translated means "God saves" and is one of the more incredible word symphonies ever assembled). 

What If We're All Wrong About Genesis 1?

I spend a lot of my time arguing (with myself as well as with others) about what Genesis 1 means. After all, it's the first words you read in the Bible, and it literally covers all of creation in its scope. Whatever the conclusion, I start from the conviction that Genesis contains multiple layers of truth, and learning to read those words is more complicated than the child's process of learning to read: they're translations from another language, they're thousands of years old, they're more poetic than prosaic, and the ancient texts don't even bother to include the vowels. So it's a problem more complicated than the most complicated Doctor Who episode. Still, both Doctor Who and Genesis are fascinating because they're complicated; it's their puzzle-like nature that makes the best parts the best parts.

But for all the debates about what Genesis says about the events of creation (that happened, at any rate, before any human was around to observe them); for all the sturm und drang about the ancient terms like "firmament" (which, needless to say, implies something "firm" up where we know there is empty space); and for all the people leaving and coming to different faiths from the results of interpreations of these texts, I just heard a talk that made me wonder, what if we're all wrong? Not wrong in content, necessarily, but wrong in emphasis? What if what really matters about Genesis is another point entirely, one that does not negate arguments about creation but rather goes in another direction entirely?

The talk that sums this up best is a half-hour lecture (less if played at 2X) by Paul H. Seely at the recent ASA national meeting in San Diego, titled "Why the Framework Hypothesis Does Not Work and What Does." You can listen to it here.

In this pithy little talk, Paul Seely* argues against the framework hypothesis, which basically says the six days in Genesis are a poetic device to organize nature into heavens, sea/sky, and earth, and then to fill each of those domains with, respectively, stars, fish/birds, and plants/animals. Now, when most people argue against the framework hypothesis, they say that instead, we should read Genesis 1 as a literal sequence of events, organized chronologically (then there's the question of how long the timescale is, what each word means, how X could come before Y when X depends on Y ... ). Interpretations that run the gamut from the framework hypothesis to literal six-times-24-hours creation basically assume that this text is focused on creation itself. Seely changes the focus when he says, what if Genesis 1 is as much about the Creator, and as much about us, as it is about creation? And if Genesis 1 is for us, maybe it's as much about how we should work as it is about how God worked.

It should be clear when we look at the ancient Hebrew terms that we're scratching our head for exactly what they mean. One of the biggest headscratchers is how could light be made, and morning and evening, before the sun and stars were made? Seely's answer is, because when you're working you need light. That's what everyone understood back then. So for God to work, first he made light so he could work. He was showing us how to work, and he put it in terms we (back then) could understand -- just like Jesus came to us using terms we could understand. It's a basic fact about God that he pursues us and meets us where we are, speaking Hebrew to the Hebrews.

If this is so, the most important thing about Genesis 1 is not what these weird Hebrew vocabulary words mean so we can sequence what kind of creatures were here first, although that may be an interesting puzzle. Did the placement of dinosaurs in the sequence of creation really matter to the ancient Israelite? Is the sequence of Genesis 1 supposed to be some kind of hidden Bible code (like a DVD's easter egg), so that only after 5000 years we could finally look back and see, hey, they didn't know what it was about but we do! Or is what science can see (at last) not the most important thing at all? After all, the text gives us five verbs at the end of the sequence in a massive repetition: "God ended his work," "he rested," "God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it," "he had rested." Last I checked, none of us can create a universe -- but we all work and we all rest. We all choose how to rest, and we can all choose to rest once every seven days.

What good news! It's a holy thing to rest! This is something to shout from the housetops. And I'm not kidding.

There's good puzzles, and real truth, in knowing that God worked to create creation. Thinking about how the Genesis 1 days are ordered can complement our scientific observation that creation too is organized and ordered. I think this insight is so important that I'm thinking of writing a whole book about how the world was ordered by chemistry, in fact. I believe Genesis 1 contains truth on that level. But the usefulness of that insight is more limited than an insight about how you should organize your work, day in and day out. For those of us not actively writing a book about creation or investigating the science of origins, what we really need to know is that God himself rested after six days of work, so we should too. The other stuff is secondary, or at least more infrequent.

Resting is deceptively hard. Both me and my first-born boy have trouble going to sleep with all the thoughts, memories, even regrets of the day whizzing around through our heads like a little hamster on a wheel. To bring the good Doctor back into it, one of the best parts of yesterday's Doctor Who episode ("The Power of Three") was when the Doctor had to wait -- and ended up driving himself and everyone around him crazy, like a five-year-old with a sugar high. He couldn't wait. Neither can we. But God says we need to when he says we need to rest.

Every time we sleep we die a little death and become completely dependent on what is beyond our control. Maybe that's why the stories of those who die in their sleep are so unsettling. It could happen anytime. We are most vulnerable when we sleep, and we are that way one-third of our lives. Actually, we're that way our whole lives; we just don't always know it.

One of my basic rules is, if we want to understand Genesis, we need to look at Psalms, and Psalms backs me up on this. In Psalm 127 I find that this attitude is at least part of what we should take away from Genesis 1 -- and if we aren't maybe we're reading it wrong. I'll close with these thoughts on dependency and rest:

Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it;
Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.
It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows;
For so He gives His beloved sleep.

[More thoughts on rest and Genesis, but from the standpoint of Hebrews, found here.]



* = I realize that many others have indeed made this argument, but I'm speaking from my own experience, which has heard those other voices but not really heard them till listening to Seely's argument all at once.