Of course, being fully aware of how foreign a theistic evolutionary paradigm is to many an evangelical Christian audience, I’ve learned to have interactions about my views privately and with the utmost respect for the personal beliefs of my conversation partners—those beliefs are the ones I once held, after all. Furthermore, I’ve developed a heightened sensitivity to the issue of spiritual maturity, that is, how well-grounded one’s faith is in the person of Jesus Christ. As a result, I have had the pleasure of discussing my journey in an atmosphere of genuine mutual admiration with more than a few people in my worship community. Through these various dialogues, I have identified four fears about considering evolutionary creationism that, in most cases, mirrored those I experienced in my own journey. These fears are not petty, nor are they inconsequential. They are real and can have long-lasting effects if not dealt with in love, patience, honesty, and understanding. I’d like to describe and explore those fears and how they might be overcome through Christ, and always with an eye on deeper faith in Him.
Although this essay is written primarily for those who are honestly seeking an integration of scientific truth with their faith in Christ, yet are struggling mightily in the process, it can also serve as an aid to evolutionary creationists who seek to share how one’s Christian faith can remain intact, authentic, and vibrant, even during such a paradigm-shifting pilgrimage. It is my prayer that these reflections will assist the reader in identifying such personal fears, spur the genuine seeker to work through the sources of his or her anxieties, and direct him or her toward scholarly, pastoral resources (most always located in the footnotes of this essay) that can assist the acceptance of evolution as God’s chosen method of creating. All of this is possible without sacrificing such core tenets of evangelical faith as belief in the role of Jesus in actual history (cf. Luke 1:1-4), the necessity of the Holy Spirit to transcend our fallen natures (Rom 14:17), and the experience of spiritual rebirth as adopted children of God (John 1:12-13; 3:3).
The heart of all anxiety is fear of loss.
Confronting Our Fears, Part 2:
Losing Biblical Authority
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. (2 Tim 3:16-17, ESV)
Throughout my various conversations with fellow believers, the most-mentioned anxiety over accepting an evolutionary creationist paradigm is the fear of losing the Bible as one’s spiritual anchor and source of authority—the texts that give the global Christian community its doctrinal and philosophical distinctiveness. Growing up in the Baptist tradition and later becoming a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, the inerrancy of “God-breathed”5 Scripture and its identification as the fount of all truth was paramount in defining my life as a Christian believer. Of course, while some would debate the veracity of such a doctrine as it pertains to this discussion, I believe that neither inerrancy nor authority is at issue when it comes to Genesis’ opening chapter. The real issue is hermeneutics—how we read the authoritative texts.
An interpretative rule used commonly in evangelical Christian churches today states, “If the literal sense makes good sense, seek no other sense lest you come up with nonsense.” This method, however, lends itself unnecessarily to the fear of losing biblical authority. This tendency toward fear is especially acute when the individual doing the interpreting does not have at his or her fingertips the full scope of knowledge required to allow the biblical text to speak for itself—or rather, to allow God to speak through ancient genres with which the interpreter isn’t naturally familiar.
I readily admit that the “literal sense” of Genesis 1—as dictated by our own culture that focuses on material origins and unwittingly holds Genesis 1 hostage to the scientific method—does in fact rule out cosmological and biological evolution as God’s creative methods. But perhaps a better question would be whether a “literary sense” of Genesis 1 would allow for evolution. To read evolution into Scripture (eisegesis) or out of Scripture (exegesis) would be dishonest, especially considering that the author (or final redactor) of Genesis was not privy to modern scientific discoveries. I would also argue that a “literal” reading of Genesis 1, framed by our own modern paradigm, is unfaithful to the original intent of the author, and that we should take special care to read Genesis 1 “literarily” through the eyes of the ancient Hebrews, understanding what was (and wasn’t) important to them. Dr. Conrad Hyers writes:
This is the interpretive issue, and it cannot be settled by dogmatic assertions, threats about creeping secularism, or attempts to associate views with skepticism . . . . Nor can the issue be settled by marshaling scientific evidence for or against either evolution or six-day creation, since it would first need to be demonstrated that the Genesis accounts intended to offer scientific and historical statements. Otherwise the whole discussion is based on the wrong premises. As such it is scientific creationism itself which compromises the religious meaning of Genesis and is an accommodation to scientific language and method.6
Since Genesis was written in the Hebrew language and most of us can’t read Hebrew, we take for granted the necessity of translating from an ancient language into another in which we are fluent. Yet, we often forget that, because we are separated by at least 2,500 years from the culture that produced Genesis, we also need the culture “translated” for us as well.7
Returning to the text
As I mentioned above, adopting an overly literal hermeneutic strongly lends itself to ruling out both old-earth creationism and theistic evolution, but as a firm believer that “all truth is God’s truth,” I felt that I was missing something. Because I believed (and still do) that the six days of creation were six, successive, 24-hour periods (“there was evening and there was morning—the nth day”), I struggled mightily to understand Genesis 1 in light of what I had been learning about the vast age of the cosmos as determined by the best scientific minds, both secular and Christian.8 If the age of the cosmos truly was as old as the scientific establishment has led us to believe, I thought that digging deeper into the culture of the ancient Near East could help me reconcile the two opposing forces of scientific observation and biblical testimony.
It was at this time that I discovered the works of John Walton, Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College. His commentary on Genesis9 and his book on the conceptual world of the Hebrew Scriptures10 propelled me toward a realization that the focus of Genesis 1 was much less on the material origin of the cosmos and much more on the cosmos’ purpose as a functional and purposeful dwelling place for God—a cosmic temple, if you will. Furthermore, his reading actually accentuated mankind’s role as representative “image-bearers” of God, as wielders of his authority on Earth. I learned that the symbolism and literary structure of Genesis 1, including the 7-day structure of the creation week, had its roots in an ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cognitive environment that held the concepts of function and purpose to be more important than (but not entirely exclusive of) material origins, the latter of which currently guides our modern, scientific way of thinking. It even reconciled the seemingly contradictory accounts of a week long series of creative acts and a 13.8-billion-year-old universe.11
With these interpretive tools in hand, I was able to successfully assuage my fear of losing biblical authority insofar as Genesis 1 was concerned, and my openness to evolutionary theory came quite naturally. If the preponderance of scientific evidence adequately explained the existence of all biological organisms, past and present, by evolutionary means, I could accept mainstream evolutionary theory12 while maintaining the theological authority of the Bible’s opening chapter. As long as I took pains to bridge the vast cultural gap when attempting to determine the theological message of the text—which God accommodated for the Hebrew culture and chose to express in a culturally bound literary form—I wouldn’t need to fear abandoning the Bible as a source of theological truth and spiritual authority. As long as I aimed to let the Bible to speak for itself, using the best biblical scholarship available to determine who wrote the various books of the Bible, to whom they were written, and when they were written, I could have confidence that the end result would be a more faithful pronouncement of what the Bible is actually telling us, millennia later,