Evolutionary Christianity?
Add emotionalism plus evolutionary scientism and you’ve got a plea to be a
theistic evolutionist
by Lita Cosner
Published: 21 December 2010(GMT+10)
“An evolutionary worldview can enrich your life, deepen your faith, and bless
our world,” according to the front page of the Evolutionary Christianity website <www.evolutionarychristianity.com>.
Starting on 4 December 2010 and running through the beginning of January 2011, 30
pastors, scientists, and theologians will be giving a teleseminar series promoting
a theistic evolutionary viewpoint.
Some of the leading ‘Christian’ lights against a traditional Christian
view of the world
The page is full of many unfortunate straw men and emotive arguments against ‘polarized’
views like “science-rejecting creationism” and “faith-rejecting
atheism.” They argue that one can be a serious Christian and an evolutionist,
and strongly imply that this is the only position that a Christian who takes science
seriously can hold.
But taking a closer look at some of the participants is telling:
John Polkinghorne: An Anglican physicist and theistic evolutionist
whose ‘God-of-the-gaps’ theology has defined God almost out of existence,
according to the ID movement’s
Phillip Johnson, and relegated Him to being only the lighter of the fuse of the
Big Bang. For instance, Polkinghorne says,
“God I think interacts with the world, but doesn’t over-rule it. God
has, if you like—is conducting the improvised performance of the universe.
So I think what is settled is much less determinative, and there is much more flexibility
and freedom and surprise and openness in what’s going on.” Translation:
God is not the sovereign miracle-working ruler of the universe, but is largely limited
by natural processes. He is incapable of even knowing, let alone determining, the
future in the way in which the Bible indicates.
Kenneth Miller: Cell biologist and author of
Finding Darwin’s God and
Only a Theory (titles linked to the CMI reviews). For all his
claims of reconciling God and evolution, his views are scarcely different from an
atheist’s.
Karl Giberson: Vice-President of BioLogos. As mentioned
in our critique of BioLogos, while
it claims to be compatible with Christianity, one looks in vain for something that
marks it out as distinctively Christian. Indeed, it admits that it is compatible
with many faiths. And its articles explain away the Bible’s plain meaning
rather than defend its teaching.
Mary Southard: Relatively unknown, Mary Southard is a Catholic
Nun whose artwork reveals more of an earth-worshipping worldview than a Christ-worshipping
one. For instance, one of her paintings contains the words “You are a child
of the universe” and “It takes the universe to make a child.”
There are many worldviews that could produce such statements, but traditional Christianity
isn’t one of them. Another painting has the ying and yang of Chinese beliefs.
The only places where I could discern Christian imagery in the paintings is when
they were used in sacrilegious context, such as a crown of thorns encircling the
earth in a painting entitled “The Passion of the Earth.”
This level of serious error, including doctrines like universalism and acceptance
of the truth claims of other religions which contradict Christianity, puts several
of the participants clearly outside of the historically-accepted definition of ‘Christian’.
There is very little actual text in the galleries, but one statement in the “Art
for Earth Healing Gallery” speaks volumes:
“As the revelation of our amazing Universe roars into human consciousness
in our time, so does the revelation of the Cosmic disaster, the withering of life,
and the possibilities for future life on our beautiful planet. Our hearts are breaking
with grief, with terror, are numbed, paralyzed in the face of destruction so awful,
so senseless, so huge, so denied and ignored! In our honest moments we know the
tragedy is now. The pervasive suffering, violence, environmental death evokes in
us great lament, great and tender compassion. As we allow ourselves to awaken, we
become part of a Great Turning, a consciousness growing beyond selfishness, a love
expanding to embrace ALL, becoming a healing, creative Presence … ”
With admittedly little more than her paintings and a few statements to go from,
to define Sister Southard’s views as representative of Christian orthodoxy
would be generous to a fault. As such, she is hardly the sort of person from whom
the average evangelical would want to take pointers on faith.
Ross Hostetter: Promotes himself as a proponent of “Integral
Christianity.” One cannot find information on what exactly this means from
the website itself, but going to another website about Integral Christianity, it
seems to promote evolving from actual belief in Christianity into a sort of Eastern
mystic, universalist experience of God.
Diarmiud O’Murchu: An Irish Catholic Priest and social psychologist,
his website has a page called “The Cosmic Walk” that describes ‘creation’s
story’ in terms of a 15-billion year history including the development of
the seven chakras, a Hindu idea. And in an essay entitled “Christian Life
(Essay 1)” he endorses universalism, saying, “If the rise of the Christian
Faith marks an axial moment (as suggested by Karl Jaspers), might that not also
be true of other religions? And if so, wouldn’t we expect to encounter a process
of Incarnation also in their creeds? I suggest that we don’t have to look
beyond the Avatars of Hunduism [sic], the Bodhisatvas of Buddhism, the Prophets
of Islam–in all cases, human beings so highly developed humanly that they
are capable of revealing the life and power of the divine source.
“And why stop at the major religions? Perhaps right through human history,
incarnational figures have befriended us as models and catalysts, including several
of the great Goddesses, reclaimed by feminists in recent decades.”
Tom Thresher: Pastor of the Suquamish United Church of Christ.
The UCC is hardly a bastion of Christian orthodoxy to begin with (they support same-sex
marriage as a denomination, their hymnbook claims to “honor both male and
female images of God”, and many, though not all, UCC pastors reject doctrines
like substitutionary atonement and salvation through Christ alone). And when Thresher
says in his 10 October sermon that the sorts of beliefs he proposes are well within
the bounds of the UCC, he’s probably right, though that’s more a condemnation
of the UCC than it is a commendation of his theology. His sermons contain statements
like:
The contributors run the gamut from shallow to heretical, and not one is a person
who should be teaching Christians anything about their faith.
“What we call God cannot be known by the mind.”
“We are that. We are God incarnate. We are this incredible mystery that we
can’t even think about.”
“It makes the understanding of our tradition very difficult to maintain—that
there is a God out there that would reject the other hundred billion planets that
need salvation and send his only one son to us. [We recommend reading
Did God create life on other planets for more on this]. It makes it very
hard for us to hold on to that piece of the tradition. (One person suggested, when
we had this conversation, that well maybe God had lots of daughters. I think that’s
a good way to hold onto the tradition.)”
“The other thing about our story that makes it problematic is that we are
the only major religious tradition that claims that we have the one and only Savior.”
“Ours is not a story of how one person became the Christ and saved us. Our
story is a pathway of how each of us awakens to the Christ within us, to differing
degrees, but all of us in a process of awakening to our essential nature—which
is the Christ—and at every step along the way being redeemed, being saved.”1
John Shelby Spong: One of the most notorious participants is the
retired Episcopalian priest John Shelby Spong. He denies every essential doctrine
of Christianity: God as personal Creator distinct from His creation as well as the
deity, Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Christ. And he mocks the inerrancy
and authority of Scripture regarding its history, theology and even morality. He
is an avid supporter of homosexual behaviour and induced abortion. One telling claim
is, “There are passages in the Gospels that portray Jesus of Nazareth as narrow-minded,
vindictive, and even hypocritical.” His claims have been comprehensively dealt
with in What’s Wrong With Bishop Spong?
Brian McLaren: Described on the Evolutionary Christianity page
as a “rock star” of the Emergent Church, Brian McLaren has been recognized
by Time magazine as one of America’s Top 25 influential evangelicals
(though few evangelicals would be happy about Time associating him with
them—for instance, he manages to write a “reading of John 14:6”, available on his website, that refuses
to say whether Jesus really is the only way to salvation). He has been condemned
by many others on a lot of theological fronts, but it’s hard to nail him down
because he is very good at writing without taking a definitive position. One gets
the idea that it’s important to act on what a person believes about Jesus,
but you won’t find McLaren going to great depth or detail explaining what
those beliefs should be or why they’re important. What is unclear
is what exactly he has to add to a dialogue about theistic evolution.
We take no delight in pointing out these fallacies by those who profess faith in
Christ. However, like BioLogos
they are seeking to influence the church by taking a pluralistic, ecumenical and
all–embracing approach. In other words, let’s embrace the culture and
its ideas rather than oppose it, even if the culture’s science is actually
aimed at discrediting the very foundations of the Bible in Genesis and the Gospel
that flows from it. It is a flawed approach, because the Gospel simply becomes irrelevant
and meaningless to that very same culture. In the process the very fabric of what
it is to be a Christian—that is, recognizing what the Saviour has done for
us, is demolished. Christ came to redeem us from the curse of death that entered
into the Creation in the Garden of Eden. If evolution (death and suffering over
millions of years) is the way ‘God did it’ then Christ’s death
is irrelevant and nothing special. For example, what do we do with passages like
Hebrews 9:22?
“… without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness
of sins.”
Don’t fall for it
Most Christians find it difficult
to defend and even talk about their faith, so the emotional charm of saying
that evolution can bless your faith can be appealing to many, considering our desire
to be accepted and loved by others. That’s why so many of us have tinkered
with the idea of adding evolution and millions of years to the Bible at some time
(believing the world’s scientific interpretations to be authoritative). But
at what cost? If the price is a watering down of the Gospel so much that it becomes
a ‘many ways to God, believe what you want’ piece of piety, then it
is highly unlikely to win souls for Christ.
Christianity is relevant because its major doctrines are rooted in history. Every
New Testament author, and the Lord Jesus Christ (the Saviour Himself) believed
this to be the case (see Use of Genesis in New Testament).
The contributors run the gamut from shallow to heretical, and not one is a person
who should be teaching Christians anything about their faith.
Theistic evolution is really revisionism of Scripture that undermines practically
every major Christian doctrine, and the New Testament and its authors. This level
of serious error, including fallacious doctrines like universalism and acceptance
of the truth claims of other religions which contradict Christianity, puts several
of the participants clearly outside of the historically-accepted definition of ‘Christian’.
And only a generous presumption of better than their teaching indicates allows including
them as Christians (only God knows the heart 1 Samuel 16:7). The contributors run the gamut from shallow
to heretical. We take no pleasure in publishing such ‘negative’ articles,
but we feel that it is important to alert Christians to the beliefs of the people
involved in Evolutionary Christianity to enable them to critically examine their
teaching—very few Christians would want to be taught by people who hold heretical
beliefs, and we believe that Christians have a right to know when people who put
themselves forward as teachers reject core doctrines of Christianity.
Related articles
Reference
- These statements are taken from the 10 and 17 October sermon
transcripts, available online from the Suquamish United Church of Christ website.
Return to text.
| With more information than ever before, Christians can stand tall because the Word of God is real, authoritative and accurate. Your support is vital in keeping this site going and growing.  | | |
|
