Dogmatics 42 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> If we say that God created the world, are we overstepping the domain of theology? Some people today would insist that this is a statement that belongs to natural science. >> Thanks for your question. And a simple answer to that would be no, we're not overstepping the domain of theology. But it's an important issue that you raise and so let's talk about the issue and the challenge it poses and the sorts of things it might imply. Christians who live in North America and Europe today face the challenge that religious talk, or especially talk that is based on religion, especially the Christian faith, has been marginalized in society. In other words, increasingly, the public discourse, the social discourse, judgments require talk that is not based on any particular faith, not based on the belief in God. So, less and less does there seem to be a place for religion, except to help individuals get along. So you can see that, for instance, in posting the Ten Commandments in a public school or in a courthouse or the issue of saying prayer in school, or a nativity scene on public ground or hosting a religious activity after school in a public school. In issues like that, you see that in some ways religion has been increasingly marginalized. Another area that religion comes into, you might say, a challenge or conflict is with natural science. And the question that you asked suggests this issue, this challenge. Now, the religion/science issue as we find it in North America and in Europe seems to reflect what is sometimes called the fact value distinction or the fact belief distinction. Facts are what everyone is supposed to know, everyone is supposed to agree about, while beliefs and values are those things which you might or might not hold, which some people believe or which some people hold. Now, science is supposed to be that area which deals with facts, while religion is understood increasingly in our culture as that which deals with beliefs and values. And so science may have a part to play for us all, but religion has a place only for some of us. It is not for the -- I say the public discourse. So you can see this in the issue of creation. In our public schools it has been that what science maybe taught, not because it's true, but because it deals with supposed facts, while a religious account of creation cannot be taught not because it's false, but because it is based on religion, based on beliefs and values which only some people hold. And this is the kind of situation where we get the idea or the point is made that you're stepping out of bounds when you insist that for us we should regard or we should consider that the universe is the creation of an intelligent being, of a supreme being and the like. And so in, say, the academy and University, the idea of intelligent design, which isn't even necessarily a religious point of view, is ruled out because it suggests a supernatural being which only some people believe in. Now, in the United States, we have a freedom of religion, which means that you're free to believe whatever you want. No one is supposed to question your right to believe that God made the universe or that there is no God. But if you want everyone to at least consider that the universe is the creation of a God, you want to consider a point of view which is not held by the scientific community, then you typically run into some opposition and trouble. Now, in part this is related to our society, especially in the United States with its democracy, but there are other conditions, too, which have led to it, especially in this issue between religion and science. For 200 years and more, science has really found little if any place for God. That didn't always used to be the case, even when it came to Galileo and Newton. They weren't out to deny a place for a creator, although Newton was not really a Christian, he was not a Trinitarian Christian. But around the beginning of the 19th century the mathematician and scientist Noplas *** wrote a book on the world. And Napoleon, who knew him, read it and posed a famous question to him. You know, I read your book, but I found no place for the author of the universe and where is it? To which Noplas *** answered: I had no need of that hypothesis. In developing a way of talking about the universe, science went away from a place for God. And then with development of Darwinism, especially in the 20th century, the very idea of that, that there was a God, could be explained away. And while these are not necessary to much of scientific work, many in the so-called scientific community hold these things or at least live by those rules. And it is this community which has had considerable influence in public discourse, in public education and the like. Now, how did this come about and what's the place of the Christian church in all this? I think it's important to take this into account. Sometimes it's thought that the new discoveries, for instance, and the new thinking that came up with people like Capernacus and Galileo, people like Newton and Noplas, Darwin, development of genetics and the like, that these sorts of things have posed challenges to the traditional Christian world view, and have called in the question and made it doubtful. What this account of things fails to recognize, though, is that the Christian tradition has always lived with things which are difficult, with apparent contradictions, and have not found them to be challenges to its belief but rather have clearly accepted that. We have talked about, for instance, the Trinitarian dogma, the belief that there is one God in three persons, and three persons in one God. Something about which not only do we not have a clear knowledge of, but something which is just beyond our experience, something which seems so strange, something which can't be pictured. Or the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, the incarnation, that's in one person, Jesus of Nazareth, there is both God and man. True God, begotten of the father of eternity, also true man, born of the virgin Mary. And the mystery, the apparent contradiction that the God man died. But these things, far from being troublesome for the church, or central to its faith and to its life, and are accepted not because they're plausible but have been accepted because they come from and are taught by the Word of God, by the scriptures. And it's really the erosion of the authority of the Bible and the erosion of the authority of the church and of Christian theology which has given the opportunity for other points of view to not only challenge, but to cause doubts and lead to the rejection of not only of certain points of view, but even of talking from a Christian perspective in the wider society. In other words, something has happened and it's then the erosion of the authority of the Bible, the loss of its status as the revelation of God, and the loss of the place of the church to be the place in which God's revelation is believed, taught and confessed that has allowed the church to be, you might say, marginalized. The erosion, of course, of the church's authority and the authority of the Bible is rooted in church history itself. The reformation, the Lutheran reformation, definitely caused a problem over authority. What was authoritative, you might say it pitted the church against the Bible in a certain way, not that they should be separated. But what Luther and the reformers were calling for was the view that scripture really alone was the rule and norm for our life and we ought to embody that in a very clear and explicit way. That, though, led to civil, to political problems and erupted in the religious wars in the early 17th century. And that kind of catastrophe, that catastrophe itself led people afterwards to doubt, to wonder about the institution of the church, the Christian religion, the Christian faith and doctrines, and to seek certainty about what is true and what is right and what is good, not on the basis of the scriptures, not on the basis of the church which taught from the scripture, not on the basis of the church's reflection, its doctrines, but in reason, experience, or history or nature. So, for instance, in philosophy there was Descartes, who just trying to think through this problem, not only was going to doubt what probably was doubtful, but doubt everything that was -- could not be said with utter certainty, which led him to his formula Coeto Ergo Soon. *** We knew what he was thinking and therefore he said �I am.� In dealing with the Bible, there was Spinoza, not a Christian, but a Jew. However, in His approach to the Bible he summed up what became a very strong movement, where he determined not to read the Bible in view of the tradition or the doctrines or the church, but rather himself, impartially, he thought. And that is the origins, that kind of thinking of critical and historical readings of the scriptures. Now, it was in western culture through the medieval period and into the renaissance and reformation that one was expected to conform all thinking, all life, to the Bible and to the practices of the church. But that's how it used to be when the Bible was authoritative. That's how it used to be when the church was held to be authoritative. But with the advent of the modern period, which comes in the 17th century, which comes with the enlightenment, which comes with the developments of like Descartes and philosophy and higher criticisms of the Bible, that now the Bible and the church were expected to conform to other judgments, to the judgments that one got from history or from philosophy or from science. In other words, because the church's authority and the Bible's authority in particular was undermined, now challenges really were challenges. They wouldn't be accepted as mysteries. Contradictions now were grounds to reject something. For instance, it didn't seem possible that people lived for 900 years. It didn't seem likely that one could speak about the cosmology of the Old Testament. For instance, now we knew that the earth went around the sun and the sun did not go around the earth. Now, these things, though, became not just things to be somehow harmonized or to be regarded as mysteries which had to be accepted because of the authority of the scriptures and its teaching, but rather as I said before became grounds for people to be doubtful and to then explain these things away. And so there came up a couple of different reactions, really, in the church to this. There were some who in the face of apparent contradictions would concede them and limit the reach, you might say, the authority or the scope of the scripture and its influence, would reduce that less and less. That, you might say, is the reaction of, for instance, the deists. That is the reaction of the omniscience called liberal Protestant tradition. On the other hand there was a different reaction, and that would be to attempt to establish on the grounds of those who were objecting the truth of what the Bible said. What's important to note here is that, in a sense, both of these reactions, both you might say the liberal and the conservative reaction, tended to give up on the idea that we had to live with a certain amount of mystery. In other words, contradictions were there. They did as best we could to hammer them out. And if they couldn't be then either they would be lived against or you would still keep trying to figure out a way in which to explain them. But in the face of the new challenges, from science, from history, from philosophy, there really came up a sense that the church either had to defend itself or it had to pull back. Christians, in fact, all creation, owe God obedience, are responsible to Him. And one way of being responsible to God is to acknowledge Him as creator and to acknowledge His account of creation as true and right. Having said that, of course, we also should acknowledge that in many things the Bible has little specific or explicit to say, including matters of science. Over much of what the natural sciences deal with, the Bible provides little Christian perspective on things. And it is true that God has provided us with a marvelously regular and harmonized universe and so observation and reason can work very well to help us to understand and get around in the universe better. But we also need to recognize that in the challenge that Christian theology and that Christians face today in the west, especially North America and Europe, that there may be quite a lot at stake, especially in our concept of God in all this. In our doctrine, in our theology of creation, we affirm God as the creator of all things, of the universe in its entirety, in that this God is the God of Israel, that He's the God and father of Jesus Christ the Lord. And what is implied in this story then is a God who has great power, that He is omnipotent, and that He is entirely free. Teaching that God is the creator means that all things are His creation, they come from His will. They are the product of His work, and that we have no claim over God. And so you see on the one hand, I hope, why Christian theology is challenged, but I hope also that you can see why and how Christian theology needs to --