“‘The Most Important Thing About Me’:
Christian-Humanist Reflections on Personal Ontology and Dealing with
Contemporary Tensions Between Natural Revelation and Special Revelation”
by Lloyd Arnett
Intro- Before I begin I’d like to posit two items to docket for future consideration after this
presentation is over:
1) Myron Penner’s cartoon: “Philosophy Department” and the tear-away
calendar with the number forty and a logo which read:
“Number of Days without a Logical Fallacy”
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word,”
2) The Famous Story of the Russian Czar: who threw this empirical challenge
one of his court sages- “Prove the existence of God to me in a
to which the sage replied: “Jews”
I’d also like to define one term I’ll use which I know has slightly different colors in different
disciplines. That word is “ontology.” I’ll be using it as we often do when speaking with
our SAMC students, as synonymous with “a philosophy of reality.”
I want to address, today, the unspoken tension: In the past one-to-two years some
science faculty at Christian colleges and universities have lost their positions for
maintaining as truths interpretations of research which seem to run contrary to
understandings of the truth of biblical revelation. This has been partly the result of
injudicious statements online and to the international press and partly the response of
panicked letters to university presidents and trustees.
How comes it that we cannot say, “That’s interesting: scientists of good faith have
pursued research, the interpretation of which creates a tension between natural
revelation and special revelation. It was not terribly long ago that the latest findings in
that field led to the opposite conclusions. I will not scurry to modify my own
understanding of God or Scripture to meet this latest challenge. I will not burn them as
heretics for posing this dilemma for me. I will hold this as an unresolved tension and
watch to see where this leads us all tomorrow. Because I have faith in the greatness of
God, I will not be afraid. I will join them in ‘faith seeking understanding’ until that time
when special revelation and natural revelation, faith and sight, are one.”
I think the answer to why we find that that is not the first thing that comes to the mind of
many is the start of understanding our whole address of this issue.
It may be fruitless to nervously scrutinize faculty views of science or theology when the
tension may come from elsewhere. The true friction may not be our disciplines or the
truth we find in them, but the interaction of those things with the one thing we must always
be aware of, the zeitgeist, the ‘spirit’ of our age—the spirit that is not only the climate of
intellectuals and academics, but of the common person as the implications of that climate
impact popular culture.
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Given this, I want to reflect on the tension of sailing the sea that exists between academic
freedom and intellectual responsibility, before God-and-the-watching world, positing
some places to stand which have been helpful to me on that ship as we navigate rocky
waters.
1) First, to me, no academic at a Christian university should ever be in danger of losing
her or his position or of being spiritually disenfranchised as a result of pursuing truth.
Some of our faculty are former L’Abri students and know that the late Francis Schaeffer
maintained that, of all people, Christians should not fear falling off the end of the earth.
That should be true of Christian institutions, including churches and church-related
colleges, as well as individuals. Truth is the language of heaven; it’s what we want our
faculty to pursue. If we want to prosecute error and vice, there is enough of it out there
without flogging sincere, believing colleagues.
2) All interpretive truth-claims with metaphysical implications have inherent logical
effects. I have no trouble accepting the possibility that in my genome map there are
traces of Neanderthals, Denisovans, or other hominds. In fact, I think this goes a long
way to explaining long-pondered biblical mysteries such as the enigmatic nephilim of the
Old Testament (though I know that for biblical literature people there are several more
compelling traditional theories about who they were). If for instance, however, I accept
the conclusion that at no time in the past were there fewer than 10,000 ancestors to what
we think of as modern homo sapiens, this sets up logical tensions with my understanding
of human history and special revelation. It was suggested to us in our genomic
discussions that there was no question of a domino effect, but, isn’t that a logical fallacy?
If I say that Adam and Eve were simply mythological figures or moral representative
types, I then have to move on to say that that has implications for other things, like Noah
and his family, unless I am willing to logically tackle the impossible problem of an ark with
10,000 people on it or other improbable solutions. Ancient cosmogonic documents from
various cultures speak of a widespread Flood or cataclysm. Was it universal or regional?
A biblical picture of the aftermath is a picture of people groups spreading out from the
middle east. If there were 10,000 people then people groups had to have first flooded
into the region (excuse the pun) from the opposite direction. So if we mythologize Noah,
at what point does the Bible leave off becoming legend and start becoming real-time
persons and events? And I don’t recall anyone mentioning that all these people are
listed in the genealogy of Christ.
And not only do all interpretations of new findings with metaphysical implications have
effects, they are contingent on future findings, as well as past—which means to me that
we need to hold some things in abeyance and not jump to precipitous conclusions.
I am old enough to have been in seminary during one of the critical biblical literature
announcements of the 20th century. I was studying with Dr. Herbert Livingston, (an Old
Testament scholar who translated much of the prophet Jeremiah for the NIV) when the
first translations of the discovered ancient library at Ebla were released. Since the 19 th
century there had been scholars who had maintained that there was no scientific analysis
or secular historical evidence for much of the Old Testament, persons or places. No
mention of things like “judges” among the Hebrew people and certainly no mention of
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some very famous biblical locations. Then, suddenly, there the words were, famous
biblical names, references to judges, and nothing more stunning than trade references to
the places with the names Sodom and Gomorah. Myth became temporal history in a
single announcement. One professor at a southern seminary told Dr. Livingston that he
took his lectures from one OT course, threw them away, and started over.
3) None of our disciplines is a monument of unassailable facts, including any in the
Natural Sciences. Moreover there is an entire field known as The History and Philosphy
of Science, which deals with the human story and intangibles of those who live by the
empirical method.
We know also, because scientists in various fields have told us so, that we do not live in a
closed and completely regular biosphere. We have a history of interruptions, sometimes
major ones; it just seems we do because our biosphere quickly recovers, covers-over the
interruptions, and moves on to a new regularity. We know that in the ancient past some
huge meteors have penetrated our atmosphere, that once temperate, even tropical
regions of the earth, seem now to be under northern icecap. We’re told that once the earth
was covered with what we generically call dinosaurs and, then, they were gone. We’re
led to believe that, where there was once a huge land basin, there suddenly existed the
Mediterranean Sea. To euphemize a popular slang phrase, “Stuff happens.”
Consequently I can unabashedly make an brash claim, today: I stand before you in this
moment as both a completely common biological entity and, by all understandings of
contemporary science, a biological impossibility. What do I mean?
Over the past several years I have investigated historical documents of my personal
family history from the 21st century back to the 18th century. I shared some of my
findings with our students this past year. One side of my family is a glorious record of
Christian discipleship and service in the pastoral ministry, and an immigrant family with
roots in German evangelicalism and eventually urban missions in the United States and a
movement into holiness Wesleyanism. But on the other side of the family, there has
been a code of silence and almost no record of the family’s past—which, as it turns out, is
a rogues’ gallery which includes the Dalton Gang, among the most notorious criminals of
the American wild west.
But, along the way, I discovered that the Christian side of my family has an ancient
anomaly which goes back thousands of years. It seems I come from an ancestral people
who left a biologically safe environment, and walked into a metaphysical and biological
vortex, an ancient “Bermuda Triangle,” if you will. In a distant part of the world they
migrated into an area where there was no sustainable source of clothing, animal fodder,
food, and most importantly, water. They found themselves in a situation where there
were established hostile people groups, to the south of them and to the north of them.
To the east was a nearly impassable desert and the west, impassable ocean. They were
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caught in an inhospitable wilderness that I have seen. They were there, not as a clan,
but by the hundreds of thousands. When they emerged on the stage of secular history
again it was 40 years later and they had not only survived but thrived and displaced other
people groups stronger than themselves in heavily fortified citiies. And, yes, they were
the Children of Israel. And here’s the point for me: by any known scientific standards
I’ve heard of, they should have been another Lost Colony of Virginia or, perhaps, more
accurately, a middle-eastern Donner Party. But the important thing is this: one could
investigate my physical anatomy and my genomic make-up ad infinitum and still not know
the most important thing about me—that, historically, here I am, a product of both my
biosphere and special revelation. My very existence is two truths living in tension.
A window into the truth as shared by multiple disciplines is to look at how science and,
say, the arts are influencing one another at the current time. 1) In critical theatre studies
my field is moving into a time known as “the death of theory” and has turned to psychology
and, especially, cognitive neuroscience, to affirm or discredit former theoretical models.
Colleagues are now interested in how findings in neuroscience are opening up how our
brain works when we see a play (which as it turns out is not like reading a book) and what
really happens when we give a performance. 2) And, over the summer I read the story
of a woman who was passionate about the pre-historic cave paintings of the so-called
“White Shaman” in south Texas and Mexico. Archaeologists had given up on them,
saying that once the culture was dead there was no way of interpreting them scientifically
or historically—but because she was a visual artist she started to see things in them
based on methods of composition that scientists had not and was beginning to interpret
them. She then, at 33, went on to study archaeology which started to help her open
them up more fully from a scientific perspective. No discipline has the definitive word on
everything— except perhaps Theatre.
4) We need always to remember where we are in time: at the latest point of hundreds of
years of enlightenment thinking where science is an idol.
It is not enough to say “This is the way the world is.” We live in an intellectually lop-sided
culture, which, for all our post-modernist fulminations, is more scientifically modernist
than ever. I believe this was reflected in the past year’s presentations in which faculty
from a number of disciplines reflected more of a deference to contemporary scientific
conclusions than I would have expected. We are a culture which looks for scientific
bases in all its disciplines and is subconsciously idolatrous before such fields as medical
science, even in and especially before the face of our moral malaise and subsequent
physical finitude.
We also live in a cynical age, in which twin pincers of modernism and post-modernism
can sometimes converge on people at once. I saw this twenty years ago in the social
science approach to religious studies courses at the University of Pittsburgh. The faculty
openly gave a presentation to academic advisors in which they stated that their strategy
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was to “deconstruct” the religious beliefs of first-year undergraduates and
“demythologize” them, so they could remold them with a sound sociology of religion.
There are serious dangers to just giving ourselves to such contemporary impulses. I
was just made privy to the demolition of the largest church drama program in North
America. When I asked a Christian professional traveling-performer what had
happened, he told me that there were several contributing factors but that the church
leaders had caved in to a popular understanding that drama is inauthentic, a fiction, is
untrue, and has no place in a church. My acquaintance has run into this at other places
and has consequently put together a performance called Truth be told....From a Guy Who
Makes Stuff Up.
4) Christian-humanist scholars of the past generation were fond of quoting the adage that “Every truth is paramount in its own order.”i
They understood that our knowing was the product of revelation of two primary types: special revelation and natural revelation. Special
revelation relates to God’s communication of the facts of metaphysical history, moral history, and related topics. Natural revelation
references that constellation of knowledge wherein we observe reality and, in the words of Kepler, “think God’s thoughts after Him” in every
other topic of the universe. Consequently, we cannot expect to have exacting knowledge of Theatre, for instance, or any other discipline
from Holy Writ. To learn about theatre, we go to theatre. Or, as an earlier Christian humanist, Galileo, once said concerning his own
area of knowledge, “The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”
As to every truth being paramount in its own order, the late John R.W. Stott wrote this:
Much of the controversy about the first chapters of Genesis, and indeed of the
debate between science and religion in general, has been unnecessary. We
Christians have ourselves been open to blame by forgetting that the Bible was
not designed by God to be a scientific textbook. I do not mean by this that the
biblical and the scientific accounts of things are necessarily incompatible, but
rather that they are complementary to one another, and not identical. Their
purposes are different. Science addresses itself to ‘how’ things function;
Scripture is preoccupied with ‘why’ questions.
God’s word is designed to make us Christians, not scientists, and to lead us to
eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ. It was not God’s intention to reveal in
Scripture what human beings could discover by their own investigations and
experiments. So the first three chapters of Genesis reveal in particular four
spiritual truths which could never be discovered by the scientific method. First,
that God made everything. Secondly, that he made it out of nothing. There was
no original raw material as eternal as himself on which he could work. Thirdly,
that he made man male and female in his own image. Fourthly, that everything
which he made was ‘very good.’ When it left his hand it was perfect. Sin and
suffering were foreign invasions into his lovely world, and spoiled it” (Stott, 58).
Galileo’s quote was clever and to the point, but perhaps also points to the easy handling
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of conflicts between the forms of revelation by keeping them in separate compartments.
Stott recognized their differences but refused to disintegrate them.
5) All of this leads, to my last consideration. It behooves Christian academics, all of us in
our respective fields, not to make injudicious public remarks, especially before our
students and more especially to the international press. In the public ontology
competing truth-claims are not something to be grappled with but uncritically seen as
invalidating one another. If a scientist believes that a finding is conclusive, it must mean
that no other discipline has anything to say about it. Professor Peter Schickele of P.D.Q.
Bach fame once ridiculed this attitude by parroting popular culture, saying of an historical
fact, “That’s the truth, you know. Truth is truth....you can’t have opinions about truth.”
What do our students hear from us? What we believe or only what we teach them? Do
they see us grappling, but with faith, with the kinds of tensions we’re discussing or do they
only see faculty with certitude about everything? I was in the last CCCU new faculty
conference at which Arthur Holmes taught. One of the challenges posited for us was
decidedly not postmodern, that we not just to teach things, but that professors are people
who profess something.
Related to this is that to which the church is the most sensitive and which we all must, I
believe, consider. It’s easy to take a youthful approach and say, “Well, that’s the truth
and that’s that. Let the chips fall where they will.” The problem, of course, is where the
chips fall. In our secular culture, any truth claim from a Christian source that seems to
invalidate God or His Word is regarded as relativistically validating self-sovereignty. It
will be trumpeted all out of proportion to its initial announcement and will be made use of
in all manner of inappropriate ways that the careful academic originating it would not have
intended. This is why we need to be judicious before the watching world.
Lastly, there are all times when we all skate on thin ice. Let’s not be overly hard on
geneticists. They have both positive and negative representatives in their field as each
of us does in ours. They have rogue-practitioners, like the scientist who, a few years
ago, announced to media “we’re nearly as wise as God; all that remains is to make a
man.” They have heroes, like Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize winning agronomist
whose genetic engineering of food is credited with keeping a billion people from starving
to death worldwide.
In particular, let us love our TWU colleagues. We have a great faculty. Let us trust
them, support them, honor them, until that time when faith and sight are truly one.
John R.W. Stott- from Confirmation: A Christian Handbook for Adults, London: Hodder
and Stoughton, 1991.
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i. Frequently seen in the writings of Dorothy L. Sayers. ”for every truth is paramount in
its own order, and dramatic truth, therefore, in drama.” (see “Playwrights Are Not
Evangelists” in World Theatre, Vol. 5, Winter 1955-56).
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