Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He live in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light
In last week’s post I promised that I would spend more time talking about the presence of chaos in our world and how to think about it biblically and theologically. So here I go…
Actually, let me step back a minute and approach the issue from another angle. One of the more challenging aspects of the Christian faith to cohere with evolutionary theory is the fall. Volumes have been written on these challenges, some of which we would highly recommend. The questions are numerous. Where does the fall fit into an evolutionary history of life? How can death be an integral part of the created order even before humans came on the scene? What does human culpability even look like from an evolutionary stand point?
These are great questions. Those who tackle them work hard to make sense of them, theologically and scientifically. For many, though, the challenges are too great and rejecting evolutionary theories becomes an easier route. I would like to suggest here that while these are important questions to ask and they lead to vital conversations, they can also steer us away from an important perspective.
Focusing on the fall and the challenges that evolutionary theory raises with it, or even rejecting evolution because of the doctrine of the fall, can distract us from the story that the Bible is telling.
For example, if I ask you, “Where does the gospel start?” The almost knee-jerk reaction is “with the Fall.” Genesis 3 , human sin, is the reason for Jesus, the cross, and the whole gospel. Right? Well if that is true, then we are left with some really thorny complications relating the Bible’s story with an evolutionary history of life. But what if that answer is wrong?
What if the gospel story doesn’t start with Genesis 3, but with Genesis 1. Not only does this pass the Sound of Music test (“Let’s start from the very beginning; a very good place to start.”) but it also seems to be what the Bible itself would suggest to us. What if we rooted the gospel of Jesus, not in the fall, but in creation? This would seem to be more faithful to the biblical text, and to the story it’s telling. As a bonus it also opens up all kinds of space for creative thinking around evolutionary theory.
I struggle with the idea that something so central as the Incarnation was prompted by something as minor (in a cosmic sense) as human error. Or, how can such a good thing as God taking on flesh be prompted by such a bad thing as human sin? Was Jesus really just a Plan B that God kept in his back pocket just in case the first experiment went awry? That doesn’t really do justice to the language of the New Testament, where Jesus (the Word) is integral to the process and purpose of creation (see John 1, Colossians 1, Hebrews 1).
If the incarnation was planned from (before) the beginning, that would suggest that the initial creation was a start, but that this cosmos always had a direction; it was meant to go somewhere. It was never created as a static, perfect world. It was a project that would take time to be completed. God even invites his creation to help him carry the project along. (For example, in Genesis 1 God calls the land and the sea to bring forth new forms of life; he commands the humans to fill the earth and subdue it; in Genesis 2 something in God’s creation is “not good” and even the perfect realm of Eden has boundaries that are meant to be expanded.)
Creation is a project centered on the Word becoming flesh. Sin has marred the project but our gospel starts before sin enters the picture. Creation was always first and foremost about Christ. This means that it was always intended to become more than it was at the beginning. Creation is the framework to understand the gospel. I find in this paradigm an invitation to think creatively about how modern science can communicate with the biblical story. Doors open that may allow us to find Jesus within some form of an evolutionary history. And we also have a more nuanced way of talking about things like a virus, which I now recall was meant to be the point of this post.
But I’ve written enough for this week. I’ll have to save that for next time.