Through the apostolic ministry, Jesus translates his eternal reality and saving work into the preaching of the apostles, which is today condensed into the New Testament. As true God and man, Christ is present to his Church. Within his Church, Christ continues to exchange sin and death for life and righteousness through the sacraments and the preaching office.
Therefore, ultimately, the presence of the risen Jesus and the exchange of realities he affects through his continuing presence in the Word and sacrament ministry of the Church makes theology possible. The theology of the Church depends on the real presence of incarnate Christ, which manifests as infinite and absolute. Yet, at the same time, Christ’s presence is contextual. Through the teachers and pastors of the Church, the risen Christ translates himself into the theology of the Church in the way that he translated himself into his Incarnate life: through the work of the Word and the Spirit.
Luther’s engagement with Scripture offers us some important conceptual tools at this point. In his commentary on Psalm 119, the Reformer argued that the language of the Psalm provided the Church with a model of how theologians ought to engage the truth of the biblical text. For Luther, “prayer, meditation, and suffering/testing form a theologian” (oratio, meditatio, tentatio faciunt theologum).
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.
Theology and science are not hermetically sealed off from one another. Theologians should strive to find agreement between contemporary science and the teachings of Scripture. All truth is one (since it comes from God!), and one should expect that when humans investigate nature and other fields of inquiry with right reason, there should ultimately be no conflict with Scripture. We should also note that, contrary to Matthew Becker’s misrepresentations, Francis Pieper actually shared this sentiment. In the passage in Christian Dogmatics in which he rejects heliocentrism, Pieper also expresses hope that Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity would in fact vindicate geocentricism.1 It did not, of course, but Pieper was not the anti-intellectual, anti-scientific Fundamentalist Becker portrays.
Obviously, although human beings are finite and have damaged noetic capacities due to sin, we are still competent to gain some knowledge of the created world. Still, as the Reformed theologian Keith Mathison observes, our finitude and fallenness make us capable of making mistakes in our interpretations of both scientific data and the Bible.2 Consequently, just as when Scripture properly understood can expose the errors of science, scientific truth when pitted against a particular interpretation of Scripture may prompt the interpreter to rethink his reading of the text. Perhaps a particular traditional interpretation and not the genuine teaching of Scripture itself may be the barrier to seeing agreement between certain historical or scientific facts and the text. But if there is no way to reconcile certain scientific claims with the text understood on the basis of the literal sense and the analogy of faith, then Scripture must rule supreme. Damaged and finite human reason cannot place a priori limitations on what the Word of God can and cannot say.
In a later section on science and theology Becker protests against this perspective. He asserts that, generally speaking, our knowledge of scientific facts must almost always be correct. If it were not, then God would be attempting to fool us by giving us access to faulty data through our minds and senses.3 One could of course equally point out that if one accepted the premise, based on science, that Scripture was errant, God would also be guilty of deceiving His people by giving them a record of His revelation which mixed together error and truth without any means of separating them. At another point, Becker states that he would like to see mutuality, cooperation, and dialogue between theology and science.4 However, he ultimately asserts 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.
To be continued…..
Part 1 available here; Part 3 available here; Part 4 available here; and Part 5 available here
[1] Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951),1:473–74.
[2] Keith Mathison, A Reformed Approach to Science and Scripture (Sanford, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2013).
[3] Matthew Becker, Fundamental Theology: A Protestant Perspective (New York: T & T Clark, 2014), 440.
[4] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 446–47.
Adapted from Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 113-114.
