Although they are both ultimately problematic, Fundamentalism and right-wing Postmodernist theologies are more workable than theological Liberalism because they remain committed to the basic content of the Christian faith. The issue tends to be more how they seek to establish the validity of their epistemic judgments and less at the content of their judgments. Similarly, in the dialectic of antinomianism and legalism, legalism has the advantage of at least acknowledging the existence of the law. This is true even if legalists suffers from the same delusion as antinomians, namely that we can escape the condemnation of the law. Hence, it is not wrong to acknowledge the acceptance of a law of belief (fides quae creditor) as a necessary condition for possessing genuine Christian faith (fides qua creditor). Rather, what is problematic is to see the law and not the promise of grace is the foundation of the divine-human relationship, and therefore the starting point of all our truth claims.
Postmodernism is correct that there is no neutral starting point for our epistemic projects, even if we admit that the frameworks we employ are vulnerable to critique and falsification. Therefore, we begin with the explicitly biblical presupposition that humans are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26). Christians confess that the biblical God is always and eternally the Holy Trinity. God as Trinity is an eternal linguistic agent, who gracious gives of himself in speaking forth the Word and the spiration of the Spirit. Hence, the Christian God is an eternally gracious and responsive God. God gives and responds to himself within the eternal dialogue and self-communication of the divine life.
We should keep a number of relevant points in mind when examining how Luther construes the theological task. First, the cycle of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio recapitulations the Incarnation and work of Christ. Much as the Word was incarnate through the coming of the Spirit, so too divine truth becomes incarnate in the mind and proclamation of the theologian through the coming of the Word and the Spirit through oratio and meditatio.
In Christ’s incarnation, the Holy Spirit enhypostically incorporated a human nature derived from Mary into the pre-existent Word, so that He might operate in the created world. So too (at least in Johann Gerhard’s account) the Spirit incorporates the pre-existent knowledge of the theologian in the theological task. Finally, Christ’s communication of the Word was tested by his suffering and death, and validated by his resurrection. So too, the interpreter must undergo the testing of his interpretation and application of Scripture within the arena of the kingdom of the world.
The incarnational nature of the theological method of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio also shows how theology can be historically contextual and culturally responsive, while at the same time be faithfully ground in the unchanging Word of God. The theologian’s act of faithfully translating the Word of God into the contemporary idiom is brought about only by the work of the Spirit. The Spirit himself incorporates the knowledge and thought-forms available to the interpreter in his context. Since the Word of God as revelation is embedded in history and the created order, the theologian may seek to clarify the Word by drawing on multiple contextualized disciplines and sources of knowledge that will clarify its meaning.
Only a doctrine of creation ex nihilo as taught by the Bible, where God’s rationality determines nature all the way down to its deepest level, could provide a stable and consistent basis for science.
Ultimately, science presupposes that humans have a capacity for rationality, and that their rationality in part mirrors divine reason (i.e., it is part of the imago Dei) as reflected in the created order (Psalm 19; Romans 1).1 This compatibility is what makes rational scientific investigation possible.2 As Alister McGrath observes (following Alasdair MacIntyre3), in order to remain credible, intellectual disciplines and traditions of thought must give an account of why they are true. The story of creation that the Bible provides gives a rationale for why science should work, thereby supporting science and giving an account of why it is a rational and credible enterprise, something science obviously cannot do on its own.4
If such a concept of nature and humans’ ability to investigate seems self-evident to the reader, we should note that such assumptions are not held by many cultures, religions, and philosophical schools (Epicureanism, Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism, etc.). Scientific revolutions did not arise in these cultures, because they could not account for why the external world and scientific data were both rational and knowable.
From this argument it also follows that if science is possible because of the existence of a creator God, then this same God who made all things out of nothing certainly can be relied on to have the power to suspend the laws of nature and perform miracles, as the Bible reports. Therefore, as odd as it may seem to many, to have a theoretical basis for science (i.e., an almighty creator God), one must allow for the possibility of miracles. If miracles are at the very least possible, one cannot discount the inerrancy of the Bible because it contains miracles that transcend normal scientific explanation.
The Logos creates the cosmos. God the Geometer — mid-13th century French frontispiece (image from Wikipedia).
Hence, the atheist and materialist argument against the inerrancy of the Bible is inherently contradictory. Indeed, as Alvin Plantinga observes,5 if atheists and materialists are correct and the Bible is wrong about the existence of a creator God, not only would belief in science lack justification, so would atheism and materialism themselves. That is to say, if humans are the random products of evolution and not of a rational creator God, then the human mind and its perception automatically must be called into question in a fundamental way. Although evolution may be relied upon to give humans mental pictures of the world that will help them reproduce and spread their DNA, there is no particular reason to think that such ideas will correspond to actual reality. One can imagine the human mind producing all sorts of false beliefs that would promote reproduction and survival but that would not necessarily be true in the sense of corresponding to reality. This uncertainty about whether a mind that has randomly evolved for the purpose of spreading DNA could generate true beliefs about reality would also call into question the validity of atheism and materialism. Hence, atheism and materialism self-destruct from the implications of their own premises. Ultimately, they cannot even give a coherent account of a reality in which human beings could genuinely know that atheism and materialism were true.
[1] Luther: reason is “something divine.” Disputation Concerning Man, 1536 (AE 34:137; WA 39/1:175).
[2] Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology, vol. 1: Nature (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2003), 197–203.
[3] See Alasdair MacInytre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).
[4] Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology, vol. 2: Reality (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2006), 55–121.
[5] Alvin Plantinga, “Is Naturalism Irrational?” in The Analytical Theist: An AlvinPlantinga Reader, ed. James Sennett (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 72–96.
Adapted from Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 116-117.
In the light of the paradigmatic anomalies of irreducible complexity, gene entropy, and the lack of transitional species in the fossil record, macroevolution has more problems as a theory regarding the origins of life than many allow.1
Along similar lines, it often is argued by materialists and atheists that Scripture cannot be truthful on the grounds that it contains supernatural events which, it is alleged, are intrinsically at variance with science and human reason. We have already seen in a previous chapter that this is an absurd argument. Science deals with temporal, finite causes which are observable and quantifiable. Miracles and other supernatural events occur because the supernatural God, who cannot be seen or limited, can transcend the laws of nature as He so chooses. Allowing that miraculous events have occurred in the past does not call into question the rational causal order of the universe. Rather, the entire point of a miracle is that it is an exception to the rule of imminent causation, thereby validating this natural causal order and the ability of the sciences to investigate it.
On another level, though, we should note that the atheist argument for the incompatibility of the Bible and science is ultimately self-contradictory. First, there is a growing body of historical evidence that Christianity and the Bible made the Scientific Revolution possible.2 Only by believing in a God who created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) according to a rational plan could science work conceptually.3 Although the Greeks did engage in some science, by the Pax Romana classical science essentially had stalled.4 And science was possible for the Greeks only because their philosophy often posited a rational or divine principle underlying and organizing the chaotic matter of the universe (prime mover, demiurge, logos, etc.). Still, since at its deepest level nature remained chaotic, one could argue that science and rationality could go only so far in explaining it. Only a doctrine of creation ex nihilo as taught by the Bible, where God’s rationality determines nature all the way down to its deepest level, could provide a stable and consistent basis for science.
[1] See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its ScientificPretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010).
[2] Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science,Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 121–200.
[3] Stark, For the Glory of God, 176–77.
[4] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its FashionableEnemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 67.
Adapted from Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 115-116.
However, Becker and others ultimately assert that if science says that Scripture is wrong, Scripture must simply bow to the superior wisdom of science and modify its claims. In this vein Becker tells us that we can no longer believe that death is the result of sin (Romans 5), since the theory of biological evolution presupposes that death is simply another cog in the cosmic machine of life.
Such a perspective is problematic for several reasons. First, it presupposes that raw scientific data simply reveal the inner structures of reality to rational and autonomous human beings in an absolutely transparent manner. Nevertheless, although humans have access to the data of reality, their finitude means that such data are always incomplete. Moreover, such data are always interpreted within a scientific paradigm, or interpretive lens, that organizes the information. Since these lenses are always provisional and not infrequently wrong, humans cannot claim any scientific judgment is infallible.1
Hence, if a scientific theory or piece of historical or scientific datum seems to contradict Scripture, there is no particular reason to think Scripture is wrong. Many scientific theories have turned out to be wrong. These incorrect theories and discredited paradigms include many that contradicted Scripture. In these cases the error was in the minds of the interpreters and not in Scripture itself. If we follow Becker’s suggestion, we would operate under the assumption that the Word of God is fallible but human reason is not. In light of history, this position is untenable.
Indeed, if Christians of the past had followed Becker and his seeming faith in the near-infallibility of science, they would have been proven wrong in the long term on numerous occasions.2 One wonders how Becker would answer such a challenge. Should Thomas Aquinas have simply rejected creation exnihilo because Aristotle and the Arabic philosophers posited the eternity of the universe?3
Aquinas not amused when natural philosophers deny creation exnihilo.
What about scientific racism and eugenics? Should early twentieth-century Christians simply have rejected the scriptural teaching of a common origin of humanity and accepted what was then considered to be a highly scientific theory of polygenesis and racial gradations?4 To this latter point Becker would likely say that scientific racism and eugenics were simply junk science, whereas macroevolution and other newer scientific theories are not. Nonetheless, just as contemporary macroevolution is taught at all major universities and forms the basis of many governmental policies, so too were once scientific racism and eugenics. Also, in the light of the paradigmatic anomalies of irreducible complexity, gene entropy, and the lack of transitional species in the fossil record, macroevolution has more problems as a theory regarding the origins of life than Becker allows.5
[1] See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[2] See similar arguments in Angus J. L. Menuge, “The Cultural and Aesthetic Impact of Lutheranism,” in Where Christ Is Present: A Theology for All Seasons on the 500th Anniversaryof the Reformation, ed. John Warwick Montgomery and Gene Edward Veith (Corona, CA: 1517 Legacy, 2015), 220–29.
[3] J. B. M. Wissink, ed., The Eternity of the World in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas andHis Contemporaries (Leiden: Brill, 1990).
[4] See Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create aMaster Race (Washington, DC: Dialogue Press, 2012); Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler:Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
[5] See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its ScientificPretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010).
Adapted from Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 114-115.
