- Bruce Waltke’s Letter to RTS/Orlando Constituency
- Why Bruce Waltke’s Resignation Signals the End of Creationism
- PCA Position Paper Urges Unity in Diversity on Creation Issue
- How To Trust the Bible if Evolution Is True
- Waltke’s Survey on Hindrances to Creation by Evolution
- Copernicus’ Heliocentricty a Dangerous Threat to Inerrancy
- Here’s the ABC News Video on Bruce Waltke
In what could be the irony of the century, Bruce Waltke’s recent resignation from RTS over his views on evolution are a harbinger of the end times for creationism.
Here’s the back story from USA Today. And here it is in a nutshell:
- Bruce Waltke makes comments supporting evolution on the BioLogos website.
- His employer, RTS, “asks” him to have the video taken down.
- Waltke complies, against the wishes of the BioLogos foundation.
- His employer, RTS, prayerfully accepts Waltke’s resignation.
- Bruce Waltke and Darrel Falk, President of the BioLogos foundation, issue a joint statement.
So why is this the end of Creationism? Because when noted OT scholars like Bruce Waltke and Tremper Longman get fired or “disinvited” from a seminary the likes of RTS over views on creation/evolution, it won’t be long before people stop taking the RTS’s of the world seriously.
And with good reason.
Despite the drivel that comes out of Ken Ham and Answers In Genesis, a “literal” interpretation of the Genesis creation account should never be a test of orthodoxy. As long as we continue to treat the Bible like a scientific textbook the entire world will rightly regard us with the same skepticism with which they view various other cults.
None of this is meant to be a statement of my own views on the creation/evolution issue. In fact, I don’t think this issue is about creation and evolution at all. It’s about a particular view of the Bible and a particular view of inerrancy. People aren’t simply scared that God may have indeed used evolution; they are scared that if that is true, then somehow their faith is in on shaky ground because they feel they can’t trust the Bible.
Of course, their fears are only real if the Bible is meant to be a scientific textbook. If that’s what inerrancy means, then I can understand the fear. If, of course, the Bible is something other than a book of bare historical facts–if it is a book of stories (even true stories)–then we really do have nothing to fear but fear itself, not the specter of evil, creation-denying theologians.
It is past time for the Church to stop dividing over petty issues and stop building ridiculous walls of “orthodoxy” that are actually only tangential to the gospel.
These tragic events in the body of Christ are a major catalyst in my appeals for a storied theology. As evangelical Protestants, we must learn to generate dynamic (what I would call “storied” or narrative) metaphors for our theology.
Rather than asking whether someone falls within the borders, we should be asking if we are faithfully walking along a trajectory.Until we learn to ask whether we are faithfully embodying the story of the crucified and risen Christ, rather than whether we fall within the parameters delineated by our small sliver of Christendom, we will never be able to both take our theological commitments with profound seriousness and steer clear of theological purges that everyone with eyes to see (and by this, I mean with some irony, mostly those with no allegiance to evangelical Christianity) can recognize as devoid of godliness.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I more or less agree with you comments but I think you are kidding your self if you think this is a minor issue. The reason the “truly reformed” are so scared of evolution is that they are afraid their systematic theologies will collapse without a literal Adam (and often death before the fall). It’s well past time to start integrating the insight of modern science into our biblical hermeneutics but I think we are kidding our self’s if we think the end result is going to be just a few “tweaks”
Steve, you’re probably right. Part of the rub here is that Waltke does believe in a literal Adam.
I still maintain, though, that the primary issue at stake here for most of conservative evangelicalism–if not strictly Reformed folk–is the reliability or inerrancy of Scripture. Check out some of the statements in the PCA position paper to see that.
My suspicion is that once the “confessional chains” are loosened Dr. Waltke will just like Peter Enns begin to doubt The “Historical Adam” as well. Unless we adopt the kind of radical skepticism towards science/natural theology that men like Gorden Clark (and to a lesser extent even Cornelius Van Til) promoted this kind of “Theological Drift” is inevitable. However just like presuppositionalism evil twin “post-modernism” it is impossible for anyone but intellectual to be convince that what scientist discovers in his test tube does not in fact tell you something about the real world. My bet is within a generation it will be impossible to find a thoughtful Christians (except perhaps inside the reformed/Lutheran home school / parochial school bubble) that does not buy into evolution to some extent. On a separate but related note, I find it infuriating that the same Christian leaders that are driving men like Enns and Waltke out of confessional institutions cheer the work of men like Francis Collins and Michael Behe when the very foundations of their work depend on the concept of common descent.
Unfortunately science in now viewed in many circles as the enemy of faith, and any real or imagined attack is seen as a call to circle the wagons on orthodoxy. The range of belief within orthodoxy is getting smaller, and I fear that Bruce Walke is right when he says that we will only further isolate ourselves. God is greater than both sides can imagine, but I think we will always feel the need to shrink Him down into a box we can comprehend.
John, now that you mention it, why in the world is science viewed as the enemy of faith anyway? If science is the study of God’s natural world, it should be one of the greatest Christian disciplines. That doesn’t mean, of course, that unbelieving scientists won’t have some axe to grind at times with Christian thought, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Faith is the only gift given to man to finish the puzzles assembled by science. There is always a missing piece. Faith submits that piece for our understanding not our conjecture.
There seem to be a couple issues at play here:
Westminster Theological Seminary was essentially created to be a neo-Princeton, because after a long showdown, Princeton started to go in the direction of the rest of the Ivy League: towards modernist liberalism.
WTS, RTS, and CTS seem to be the Trinity of PCA Seminaries, and I wouldn’t be suprised if they all share WTS’s philosophy.
Therefore, when a member of the academic faculty at RTS makes a comment that seems like he is believes in evolution as the origin of the species, it should be no surprise that RTS would prefer that the statement not be on the record considering that historically Darwinianism was most probably the driving force in creating modernist liberalism in the first place.
The most important part of inerrancy is that the Bible is regarded as “truthful.” Not that it is truthful about certain categories of topics, but that it is truthful about all that it speaks about. If the Bible makes statements those statements are true regardless if they are moral and spiritual or if they are scientific. Of course, there are big questions of hermaneutics, that allow for diverse interpretations, such as deems a description of the universe as a poetic description rather than a scientific one.
Ben, the problem here is not that Waltke endorsed theistic evolution. He had already done that in his OT Theology book. The real problem is that RTS failed to stand behind him. As Waltke mentioned in his letter, he’s not the only PCA guy to hold this position. And I think that since he is such a renowned OT scholar that maybe we ought to at least be able to say, “Yes, our OT prof holds this position; it’s not the official position of the school, but we support him.”
Regarding the idea of inerrancy, I think your statement needs a little clarification. You say, “The most important part of inerrancy is that the Bible is regarded as ‘truthful.’” And I agree for the most part. The challenge is that we have defined truth in very modernistic ways. That is, we understand “truth” to be the same as “fact,” but those are not the same thing. That’s where I think your last statement is so important. If our hermeneutics are of the modernist variety (i.e., everything the Bible says must be factually, scientifically, historically “true”) then we run into real problems. I’m scared of the word “inerrancy” because most people don’t make the distinction between truth and fact.
Creationism, as a quasi-scientific phenomenon, is really the byproduct of a certain view of the Bible. I’m not comfortable with that view of the Bible. And I think that Waltke’s resignation signals (to me, at least) that this view of the Bible and its corresponding view of Genesis are becoming more of a fringe concept than a mainstream idea. When Waltke feels like he needs to resign from RTS because he can’t publicly declare his position on this issue, that’s not a good sign for RTS.
My statement about the truthfulness of the Bible was intentionally vague, partially to make the point.
The most important part is that it *is* truthful, regardless of the truthfulness of its interpretation. Whether the Bible is interpreted in this way or that is open for discussion, but the truthfulness of the Bible is not, at least if you are interested in being orthodox. Regardless of interpretation, if the Bible gets something “wrong” then inerrancy is out the window. If were talking interpretive differences that is one thing, but there is such incredible pressure to be culturally and intellectually arrogant that there are hundreds of seminaries with tenured professors who feel like they can call certain portions of the Bible wrong.
That being said, I think you should clarify what you mean by Creationism as a quasi-scientific phenomenon. Do you mean “that God created all things as explained in Genesis” or “that system of understanding creation that insists on particular interpretations of the Genesis account”?
Furthermore, not to be pedantic, but talking about creation in terms of “scientific” is actually, IMO, a misnomer. Science requires repeatable experiments and testable a hypothesis. Certain effects of creation are within the realm of science, such as planetary motion etc., but they aren’t actually scientific questions, they are historical questions. I bring this up not to be trivial but because I think that it matters how “ask the question.” If we ask it historically rather than scientifically I think it introduces a degree of humility in handling evidence.
Ben, you make some excellent points! You’re right that the Bible is “true” regardless of whether we understand it correctly or not. I think the problem, though, is how we understand this thing called “inerrancy.” Does the Bible claim this for itself in the way we modernists have understood it? I’m not sure. Of course I’m not calling the truthfulness of Scripture into question, but I’m not convinced that historical or scientific accuracy is the same as truthfulness.
Clarifying creationism: I DO mean “the system of understanding creation that insists on particular interpretations of the Genesis account.” Waltke himself affirms wholeheartedly that God created all things out of nothing. He just seems to think that he used certain evolutionary means to do that.
And, I agree with you that there are definitely aspects to the origins of the universe that fall in the realm of philosophy and history rather than science. However, that doesn’t mean that we can therefore throw out scientific evidence. I want to be careful walking that line. I do think you’re right though that we need to remember the historical/philosophical part of the discussion in order to hold onto the humility necessary in handling the evidence.
As for defining inerrency, I think the Wayne Grudem’s systematic theology does a wonderful job. Essentially he says that to the degree of precision implied, the words are true. He says, “When I say I live 7 miles from my church, that is true, even though I live 7.213 miles from church.” He also talks about things that are true according to common manners of speech such as, “when the sun rose they…” well the sun doesn’t rise, it just appears to based on the rotation of the earth, blah blah blah. That’s requiring a stricter degree of precision in speech than God desired to use. John Calvin’s explanation of “accommodation” in the Institutes comes to mind.
In terms of handling the scientific evidence, here is where I stand.
The evidence:
1. Living things evolve. This is observable. Bacteria cultures, bird population, heck, even viruses, which are considered nonliving, evolve.
2. Similar creatures share observable features.
3. Fossils exist which show extinct creatures similar to the ones that exist now with notable differences in features.
Essentially, this is the summary of the evidence we have. Now your interpretations come from this evidence.
I believe it is an error to take that evidence and declare, “Therefore, every living thing that currently exists have a single common ancestor.” Darwinism does that, and I think the reason is so that it may provide an explanation of the origins of the variety of living things without the intervention of a creator. A Darwinian approach in this sense is required to maintain an atheistic worldview, and hence assertions beyond the evidence are added such as common ancestry. If you don’t have common ancestry you have to explain how life began… millions of times independently. Darwinians have trouble explaining that once.
Unfortunately, just as some people think that the Bible requires you to believe in “creationism” (your definition), people think that the scientific evidence requires you to believe in Darwinism. Theistic evolution (of a Darwinian variety) for the most part seems to stamp God on a process that would be just fine without him.
The evidence does not demand that conclusion considering the alternatives such as: God created a variety of species that evolve, yet these species do not have a single common ancestor.
When you get down to it, something started it all. Either something came from nothing, or God creates it. The faith God gave me tells me it was Him.
Yes, John. No one here is arguing for a non-created universe. This is NOT atheistic darwinism; this is theistic evolution. There’s a big difference.
I think Ben has it right and we all must guard against the temptation of thinking that we know more than we do. I wonder if most of the heat from both sides comes from the fact that the origin of human rights is up for grabs. Authorship implies authority.
Very important issues hinge on our answer to the question, What is man? If man is an evolving thing then who is to say that some men are not more highly evolved than others and by right should rule the rest?
Perhaps we should take the scriptual story more seriously which seems to trace man’s dignity to his creation.
You might be interested in this: http://onesimusonline.blogspot.com/2010/04/will-real-adam-please-stand-up.html