Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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Archives for September 2017

Billions of Years? Part 6: Mutation

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Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here

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My concerns with Big Bang cosmology are relatively vague, given my limited exposure to physics. On the matter of biological evolution, though, I have more specific concerns. 

Those concerns begin with the origin of life from non-living material. I can recall in high school biology–which I took just shortly after life actually began–attempting to reenact the moment by zapping amino acids in grape juice with electrical current. I found the experience completely unconvincing. This single event remains the most difficult of the evolutionary problems. 

Once you have a living organism, however simple, where do you go from there? I think every evolutionist would agree with me that Darwinian evolution—including whatever the current form of it is—absolutely requires 3 things: mutation, which is the mechanism by which organisms can change; natural selection, which is the mechanism by which deleterious mutations can be discarded and beneficial ones preserved; and time (LOTS of time), which is necessary because there are a lot of differences between an amoeba and, say, Pele. Since all 3 of these elements are necessary, raising significant doubt about just one of them would disable the theory. I have concerns with all three. 

Let’s begin with mutation. 

Of course mutation happens; the reason you are not short, bald, and brown-eyed like me is that you are a mutant. There are a bazillion mutations going on right around us all the time. But Darwin and his successors didn’t simply posit that change happens; they posited that positive changes occur that slowly, gradually enable an organism to become better at surviving in its environment, eventually culminating in organisms as diverse as the life we see on the planet today. 

I have 3 questions about that. 

First, how frequent are beneficial mutations? I’ve seen suggested examples here and there, mostly at the level of bacteria and viruses. But the great majority of mutations seem to be either harmful—Down syndrome, fragile X, sickle-cell anemia—or at best neutral (hair color, eye color). I know, blondes have more fun, and don’t it make my brown eyes blue, and all that. But since human sexual attraction is far more complex than eye color, it’s hard to argue that blue eye color makes the survival of the species more likely. Observational science seems to indicate that mutations are on balance not a good thing for the organism.

I realize that according to the view, natural selection will kindly weed out the negatives. But doesn’t the rarity of clearly beneficial mutations mean that the process will take even longer than a few billion years? I mean, Climbing Mount Improbable involves a lot of little tiny steps. 

Second, and much more important, is the problem of what mutations actually do: jumble the genetic code, either by dropping “letters” (nucleobases) or rearranging them. What it can’t do is create genetic information that is simply not there. How would one rearrange the genetic code of an amoeba, regardless of the number of steps, to produce a spine, or a lung, or an ear, or a prefrontal cortex?  

Third, what observational evidence do we have of mutations crossing all lines in the alleged family tree? That’s the old question of “missing links,” of which there are far more than just the one between Bonzo and Bono. Why do they seem to be missing from the phylogenetic tree with such irritating regularity? Shouldn’t the fossil record be full of them? And isn’t it assuming your conclusion to observe microchanges within species and extrapolate that to macrochanges across orders, classes, phyla, and even kingdoms?

These questions are enough to give me serious pause on the mutation leg of the stool. But there are 2 other legs to go. 

As we’ll see next time, natural selection doesn’t seem to be the cure-all for these deficiencies. 

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Billions of Years? Part 5: Cosmic Evolution

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Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here

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According to the current popular view, cosmic evolution—the development of the universe—began just less than 14 billion years ago with a singularity: space and time did not yet exist, and all matter was infinitely dense. This singularity began a rapid expansion (the so-called “Big Bang”), with every particle—subatomic particles in the early stages—moving away from every other particle as the space containing them expanded. Eventually these particles began regathering—in space—to form nuclei, then atoms, then clouds of gas and dust, then stars, then galaxies. 

The physics behind all this is not simple. Lots of really smart people have wrestled with the questions raised; there are names like Einstein and Planck involved, and not a few Nobel prizes. The Big Bang model has made predictions, perhaps most notably the expected presence of Cosmic Background Radiation, which have been confirmed by later experimentation. This is pretty serious stuff. 

But any scientist—and lay person—should question his presuppositions, beginning with the very first ones. I have lots of questions; I’d like to focus on the singularity model for now. 

Some—many—of my questions, I’m pretty sure, stem from the fact that I’m not a physicist and don’t understand the model. I wonder, for example, how the expansion occurred without being restrained by gravity, which at that time had to be practically infinite—that is, the most gravity possible in the universe. But for all I know, that’s not even a legitimate question. I’m going to leave the heavy lifting to people who have actual expertise in the field. 

But I would like to raise a couple of considerations, one philosophical and one sociological (since my academic credentials are more right-brained than left). 

What caused the expansion? It seems to me that this is the very first question to be asked of the model. 

My first exposure to a serious answer to that question came in Stephen Hawking’s seminal work A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, where he addressed the question briefly. At singularity, he said, all the laws of physics are rendered inoperative; we have no scientific tools with which to investigate it. 

In the decades since Hawking’s book, the model has been refined, but I’m not aware of any suggestion that Hawking’s observation is viewed as incorrect; physicists today still agree that the singularity is not open to investigation by the tools of science. 

So the first premise of the entire worldview is outside the realm of scientific investigation. I’m OK with that—the existence of God in eternity past is outside the realm of scientific investigation too. But it seems ironic for adherents to the Big Bang model to ridicule supernaturalists on scientific grounds. 

In his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams took a swipe at supernaturalism with his question, “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” But how do we grant veto power to the Big Bang model when its first question is beyond scientific examination? Isn’t that a mite overconfident? 

My second question, the sociological one, has been generated by several decades of experience interacting with people who think I’m crazy—or hopelessly ignorant—to believe in a Creator God. When I ask them about their own model, their answers often indicate that they don’t understand it themselves. I recall several years ago, when I was still laboring under the misconception that the Big Bang was an explosion rather than a rapid expansion (and yes, the difference is significant to physicists), I asked an engineer how the explosion could overpower all the gravity in the universe. His reply was, “Hmm. I’ve never thought about that.” Now, to be fair, he’s an engineer, not a physicist, and yes, it’s a complex theory. But this is just on the surface of the model, and it astonished me that as an engineer, whose job it is to think through systems, he’d never even asked the question—literally the first question about his worldview, about which he was so confident. I, the religious guy, was the one asking the questions and seeking to understand the model. 

Now, my question was ignorant, as I later learned; the Big Bang, according to the model, did not work like an explosion. But my engineer friend didn’t know that, and he further admitted that he hadn’t given the foundation of his worldview any serious consideration. Yet he was confident that I was deluded. That doesn’t discredit the model, of course; the engineer wasn’t one of its developers. But it does make me SMH. 

I have other questions—the antimatter problem comes to mind—but my gravest concern is that by far the majority of fervent adherents to the Big Bang model—the people who most aggressively ridicule young-earth creationists—seem not to have asked and answered these questions for themselves, precisely because the model is so arcane. How are they on any firmer ground than those they ridicule? How is their position not, um, religious—based on faith in the High Priesthood, which understands these Very Complicated Doctrines?  

Given the apparent philosophical inconsistency, it seems presumptuous to ask me to discard hard evidence of a supernatural book in order to genuflect before the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Matter. And it seems grossly immoral for the many adherents who literally don’t know what they’re talking about to pass judgment on any who disagree. 

Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

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Billions of Years? Part 4: Approaching the Question

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Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here

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If the Bible’s account of creation is historical narrative and should be read straightforwardly, and if it says that creation occurred over a period of 6 “days” with “evenings and mornings,” and if the biblical genealogies place Adam a few thousand years ago, then we have a clear conflict between the biblical story and the broadly accepted modern evolutionary account. How do we respond to that conflict?

  • Assume that the science is settled, and the Bible is wrong?
  • Try to reconcile the two accounts by a creative reading of the biblical text?
  • Declare that Science Is Evil and move in next door to Simeon Stylites?

I see serious problems with all these approaches.

First, there is no statement more unscientific than that “the science is settled.” Science is never settled. Scientists regularly and correctly observe that errors are revealed and that models are constantly revised as new discoveries occur. Science, they tell us, is the ongoing, never-ending search for truth. I’m happy to accept their word on that. Question everything.

Second, my earlier posts (as linked above) have argued that there is no textual basis for getting hermeneutically creative with the biblical account. It is what it is.

Third, the fact that God is the Creator renders it impossible that genuine science could be in conflict with revealed truth. The heavens declare the glory of God (Ps 19.1), and the study of the heavens will not contradict God’s declarations about their origin. So I’m not going to live the rest of my life sitting cross-legged on my Luddite pillar. I’m going to study science as one more avenue toward increasing my knowledge of God.

As I’ve stated before, the demonstrated supernatural character of the Scripture requires that I give it the benefit of the doubt in any supposed conflict with science. That means that scientific “discoveries” that conflict with the biblical account have some serious burden of proof. I’m going to need more than consensus or, worse yet, allegation to bail on the biblical statements.

So I’m going to have to evaluate the evolutionary model to see just how rigorous it is. I recognize that that’s a risky business, since I’m not a scientist. In my graduate studies I learned what it means to acquire the specialized research skills necessary for a specific academic field, and I don’t take lightly the risk I’m taking on by evaluating a scientific model without those tools. I invite informed criticism. But I also note that name-calling is not rigorous rebuttal.

I’ve asked secular scientists about many of these things, and I haven’t gotten coherent, reasonable, validated answers—nothing even approaching the level of proof that I’m requiring if I’m going to reject the biblical account.

So the next few posts contain my thought process on evaluating the evolutionary model. Take it for what it’s worth, and refute it if you can.

To begin with, we need to note that there is no single “evolutionary model.” The modern secular view of cosmogeny requires at least 2 distinct phases: the beginning of the universe, and the beginning of life on earth. These phases require completely different mechanisms. The popular view is that the universe began with the so-called “Big Bang” more than 13 billion years ago, followed by material condensation into nebulae, stars, and galaxies, while biogenesis on Earth began about 4.5 billion years ago and has followed a mostly Darwinian process of mutation and natural selection since then.

How strong are the logical and observational bases of these processes? Strong enough to override the biblical account? We’ll begin by thinking about cosmic evolution, including both the Big Bang and the succeeding mechanism of star formation.

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Billions of Years? Part 3: Genesis Data on the Age of the Earth

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Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here

Part 1 Part 2

Last time we demonstrated that the Creation account in Genesis 1 is Hebrew narrative, which means that we should read it straightforwardly. We then demonstrated that it speaks of a personal agent who created the cosmos from nothing over a period described as 6 “days.” Before we begin to evaluate the claims of the old-earth position, however, we need to answer a second question from the text: how long ago did these 6 “days” occur?

The text reports that on the sixth “day” Elohim created a man, named Adam (“man”) (Gen 1.27; 2.19) and his wife, named Eve (“living”) (Gen 2.22; 3.20). Later in the narrative we’re given the same Adam as the starting point of a genealogy, including lifespans and progeny dates for everyone involved. Genesis 5 gives the data for every generation from Adam to Noah and his sons, and Genesis 11 gives the same data for every generation from Noah’s sons to Abraham. The lifespans and progeny dates from Abraham through David, whose life dates are generally agreed upon, appear throughout the biblical text up to the book of Samuel. 

Thus we have numbers that can be manipulated to yield a calendar year, or thereabouts, for the creation of Adam. There are variations in this date for several reasons, including some textual variants in the Hebrew manuscripts and some interpretational questions. (For a detailed analysis of the interpretative history of that question, see the dissertation of my former PhD student Ben Shaw [free registration required].) The most restrictive date would yield a creation somewhere around 4000 BC, as calculated by James Ussher in the 1600s, while textual variants might allow a date 1000 years or so earlier. 

Some have noted that it was traditional in ancient genealogies to omit generations that were considered unimportant; some interpreters have suggested, for example, that the genealogy of Jesus Christ in Matthew 1 has omitted some generations in order to yield 3 sets of 14 generations each (Mat 1.17), for easier memorization. It’s true that omitting generations did occur, but you’ll note that the Matthew list does not include the math; on the other hand, the Genesis genealogies include ages and sums that simply do not add up if generations are omitted. The omission suggestion introduces far more difficulties than it solves. 

And of course, to get from 4000 or 5000 BC to 4.5 billion BC, you’d be omitting 1 million generations for every generation you mention. Some suggestions are just silly on their face. 

So where does the text itself leave us? You have an earth and its contents created intentionally by a personal agent a few thousand years ago. 

Given earlier evidence that the Bible exhibits characteristics of extraordinary origin, you’re going to need an extremely high level of proof to set that obvious declaration aside. 

Does the old-earth view meet that level of evidence—something more substantial and logically compelling than “but everybody believes this!”? 

On to that question next time. 

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Billions of Years? Part 2: Genesis Data on the Creation Event

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Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here

Part 1

As noted in the last post, I’m starting with the demonstrated premise that the Bible is a supernatural book—the Word of God—and therefore authoritative. Further, it should be interpreted based on genre, like any other literature. In narratives, it should be read at face value unless the text itself give us reason to do otherwise. And once we’ve extracted its meaning, we shouldn’t torque it around unless we have a stronger reason to do so than “a whole bunch of people believe something else, and they’ll make fun of me if I don’t come around.” 

It makes sense, then, to start our investigation into the age of the earth by taking a look at what the Bible actually says about the topic. 

To begin with, the Creation narrative and the genealogies of the human race are clearly narrative, not poetry, as old-earth proponents used to suggest. The clearest indication of this is the style of the text itself; perhaps the most reliable predictor of Hebrew narrative is the waw consecutive, which is simply the use of and to connect verb clauses in a string. This form dominates Genesis 1; here’s a copy of the text with the waw-consecutive verbs highlighted in red. By contrast, a poetic description of the same Creation event appears in Psalm 104, and there’s hardly any red in it at all. 

It’s no surprise, then, that a leading expert on Hebrew literature, Robert Alter, identifies the first poetic passage of the Bible as Adam’s description of his wife all the way at the end of Genesis 2. 

Some old-earth proponents, facing this clear evidence that Genesis 1 is not poetry, have suggested that it is “exalted, semi-poetic prose.” I’ll observe that there’s no such genre recognized by Hebrew scholars. This is a whole new level of category error—ascribing a phenomenon to a category that not only is incorrect, but simply does not exist. 

So Genesis 1 is narrative, not poetry. That means we’re going to take it straightforwardly, barring evidence in the text itself that the author intends us to read it otherwise. So what does it say? 

    • There is a Creator, named Elohim, who is the subject of most of the verbs. He speaks throughout the passage, and he thinks through a planned action (Gen 1.26-27). This means that he has intellect and will. And since he evaluates his work throughout the process, calling it “good” repeatedly (e.g. Gen 1.4)., he appears to have emotions as well. He’s a full-orbed person, not merely a natural force of some kind. 
    • His creative work takes place in stages. He begins by creating the heavens and the earth (Gen 1.1)—or perhaps this is a summary statement that encompasses the description that follows. Then he brings material objects into being by simply speaking, with no source material mentioned. Specifically, he speaks to create light (Gen 1.3); a “firmament” (Gen 1.6-7 KJV), which separates upper waters from surface waters; the sun and the moon (Gen 1.16); and marine and avian life (Gen 1.20). 
    • He apparently creates some things out of existing material; for example, perhaps land animals come from the dirt (Gen 1.24; note the verb “bring forth” here), and man certainly is fashioned from clay (Gen 2.7), while the woman is fashioned from one of the man’s ribs (Gen 2.22). It appears that the waters already exist in Gen 1.6 (does this mean that Gen 1.1 is not a summary statement after all?) and that dirt exists in Gen 1.9, before it appears after a gathering of the waters. 
  • The periods during which Elohim performs these actions are described as “days,” with “evenings” and “mornings.” This language would lead us to assume diurnal, quotidian days, though we can’t be sure that all 6 creation days were precisely the same length, given that the sun does not exist until day 4. (I note, however, that the text gives no hint of a significant difference in length between day 3 and day 4. It seems obvious that there is a source of light for the first 3 days that would provide a definitional function similar to the sun. Note that the Bible ends with a new creation in which there is no sun, just as was the case in the very beginning. In that half of the inclusio, John reports that “the glory of God” and “the Lamb” are the light [Rev 21.23], and “the Lord God gives them light” [Rev 22.5]). 

What we’re left with from a natural reading of the narrative, then, is that a supernatural rational being created the material universe from nothing originally, over a period of 6 days of roughly 24 hours each. Nothing in the text itself leads to any other conclusion. If another narrative requires a very long period of time, then reading that back into this text is going to call for an extraordinary level of evidence. 

Before we can begin to evaluate that evidence, however, we need to answer one more question: how long ago did these Creation “days” occur? We’ll consider the evidence for that in the next post. 

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Billions of Years? Part 1

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Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here

Once you’ve decided that the Bible is a supernatural book, I suppose the next step is to learn and evaluate the arc of its story. That’s especially important these days because the story starts with divine creation, and today’s culture completely rejects that idea. The peer pressure in academia is completely opposed to the biblical creation story, and believing it is pretty much suicide for a well-regarded academic career.

In the 1940s several leaders of evangelical Christianity made a considered decision to moderate their stance toward the academic community and to seek “a place at the table.” By the mid-1950s one leading evangelical scholar, Bernard Ramm, had publicly embraced old-earth creationism in his book The Christian View of Science and Scripture, and evangelical scholars quickly followed suit. Today it’s difficult to find anyone on the Bible or science faculties of the mainstream evangelical colleges and seminaries who takes the Genesis timeline at face value. Millard Erickson, a conservative Southern Baptist and the author of a standard systematic theology, views young-earth creationism as indefensible in the light of modern science; you get the idea he classes it with “lost cause” Southern sympathizers who are still saving their confederate money.

Even with the upswing in talk of “intelligent design” in recent years, academics are still overwhelmingly old-earth. The ID leadership such as Michael Behe and William Dembski hold to an old earth, as does the “progressive creationist” Hugh Ross and, most famously, Biologos founder Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Research Project.

For what it’s worth, while academia has embraced the geologic timescale, and while a great many conservative evangelical academics have as well (though they may quibble over the use of the term evolution), the American populace has not followed along. Evolutionists are generally dismayed to find that after decades of indoctrination through the public school system, according to Gallup, in 2017 twice as many Americans believe in direct divine creation as believe in atheistic evolution; and as recently as 1999, the ratio was more than 5:1.

But despite that, publicly embracing young-earth creationism is generally counter-productive to an academic career, and I find its ranks shrinking among my evangelical academic peers.

So what am I still doing in a rapidly emptying room?

I’ll observe, at the risk of sounding judgmental, that the primary reason for bailing on a natural reading of Genesis 1-11 seems to be peer pressure—or more precisely, the behemoth of “scientific consensus” that Darwinian evolution, or one of its descendants, has been demonstrated true in its basic propositions. (“The science is settled!”) After a while, you go along, or you feel like the guy on the street corner with the sandwich board announcing that The End Is Near. Nobody wants to be that guy.

I can’t judge motives. Ramm argued for his change of heart from the compelling scientific evidence—though I didn’t find his evidence compelling at all, and I finished his book thinking, “You bailed on Genesis for that?!” Perhaps some are just intimidated by the size of the crowd and the uniformity of the arguments. Perhaps others just don’t want to face the ostracism and go along for the sake of their salaries and their pension plans. And perhaps some of them work backwards from that to find the evolutionist arguments more compelling than they really are.

I can only speak for myself. But once I have determined that the Bible is a supernatural book, I’m going to take it as straightforwardly as I would any other literary work, fiction or non-fiction. I’m going to read history as history, and poetry as poetry, and visionary apocalypse as visionary apocalypse, and do my best to find out what the divine author of this remarkable book says.

And if something comes along that asks me to do a wholesale reinterpretation of what the book says, I’m going to need it to be seriously convincing, beyond the social penalty of Not Going Along With The Crowd.

So far, I just haven’t found the science, or the accommodating theology, compelling or even mildly believable. I’m not about to bail on The Book for a bunch of biased brains. Or a boondoggle.

So here I am, in the padded room our culture has graciously provided for young-earth creationist academics, watching the room get roomier by the academic year.

I’d like to take a series of posts to lay out my thought process, for what it’s worth. I’m not a scientist, but I talk to a lot of them, and I’ve skimmed a little cream off the brains of each. I’ll start explaining my reasoning in the next post. See you then.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

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How Atheistic Educators Teach Theology in Spite of Themselves 

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Every day in every school, millions of schoolchildren are learning about God. In every subject. 

Don’t think so? 

Watch. 

If there were no Bibles, we’d know a lot about God. For starters, we could just look around. If God created the world—and he did—then it’s a piece of art. And art tells us a lot about the artist. Just a glance at Picasso’s work tells us that he distorted the female form. Hmmm. I wonder if he had issues with women. Turns out he did. 

So when we study the cosmos, the created universe, we’re studying the work of God—and we’re consequently studying him. In school we call that science. And for some reason we’ve gotten the idea that science and religion are in conflict. 

Nope. It’s all about him. 

What can be known about God is plain to [mankind], because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse (Rom 1.19-20). 

But there’s more. When God created the universe, he used a design language—a coding language, if you will. There are relationships between the parts of the universe. In school we call that language math.  

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures (Galileo). 

I would suggest that math is the most intimate look we get at the mind of God outside the Bible. It’s theology writ large. And we didn’t invent it; God did. He was counting before there were any humans around (Gen 1.5). 

Even more. When God created humans, he made them, as Scripture puts it, “in his image” (Gen 1.26-27). That means that when we study mankind—when we study the humanities—we’re studying God too. Language. Literature. The fine arts—music, speech, art. It all reflects the creative impulses of mankind, and in so doing it reflects the creative God who created us. It’s theology. 

And the sourcing doesn’t end with creation. Theologians call creation God’s first work, but they recognize another one as well. Since day 1, God has been directing in the affairs of men, telling a story that he has written from eternity past. 

He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place (Acts 17.26). 

He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings (Dan 2.21). 

And what do we call that in school? 

Theologians call it providence, or more specifically, government. Schoolteachers call it history. 

Every school subject is about God. Science, math, language, literature, fine arts, history. All of it. 

And no surprise, because it all comes from him. 

It’s a shame more schools don’t recognize that. And it’s ironic—downright comical—that thousands of educators are teaching about the God they deny without even realizing it. 

He who sits in the heavens laughs. 

And I like to chuckle right along with him. 

The Great Sin of the Evangelical Right

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A few posts back I mused about one of the church’s great purposes: to be a place where God’s people use their gifts to serve one another, to love their neighbors as themselves. 

There’s an even greater purpose, to which that one contributes. The church is to be, as the theologians say, doxological; it is to bring glory to God, to incite praise. 

How does it do this? Well, when the church gathers, we praise God in worship, and that’s certainly part of it. And as we use our gifts to nurture growth in others and help them become more like Christ, that’s part of it too. But there’s another way; it’s described in Ephesians 3. 

The church is God’s creation, not ours. He is the one who envisioned and then brought into being an organization—an organism—that is not limited by bloodline or geographical boundary, like OT Israel. It consists of Jews and Gentiles (Eph 3.6), from all over the globe, who are brought together in unified worship of God. 

And what is his purpose in doing that? Take a look at verse 10: 

To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God. 

That is, that the heavenly beings (“principalities and powers”) might look at what God has done in the church and recognize the rich wisdom of the God who did it. 

What does it take to impress someone who goes to work in heaven every day? 

And why would the unity of God’s diverse peoples be so impressive? Because Jews and Gentiles are supposed to be enemies, not friends. If natural enemies are gathered together, united in worship to God and in loving care for one another, there’s no earthly reason for it. Only God could do that. 

And now to explain this post’s title. 

Since the days of Jerry Falwell Sr.’s Moral Majority—and long before that—some Christians have listened to the siren song of political influence. They have chosen to position themselves publicly as the political enemies of the very people God has called them to reach, to draw into this inexplicably unified body. And for any number of reasons—fear of loss of earthly freedom or comforts, discomfort with or even disdain for people who are radically different from them, even perhaps the desire for power—they have devoted their energies to increasing the divide rather than tapping into the divine power that brings people together in one body, in Christ, despite those differences. 

But those other people are so different! They’re so wrong about so many things! 

Yes. Precisely. Only God could bring us together, by changing us—all of us—from the inside out. But he can and will do that. So why add to the momentum in the other direction? Why oppose his cause? 

Why tweak the political opposition for the lapses in logic of their political positions, when the cause—the real cause, the eternal one—is so much greater and so much more worthy of your limited effort? Do you really think that if you zing that leftist, he’ll be inclined to come to you for guidance to the grace that is truly greater than all his sin? Or do you not care whether he does at all? 

To whom have you shown such grace today? You know, the kind of grace God has shown you? 

There is a woman in my church who recommitted herself to Christ late in life. She comes whenever she can, despite significant physical obstacles. She asks me questions if something I’ve taught hasn’t been clear. And when she gets home, she downloads the Sunday school and sermon notes from the church website and pores over them, line by line, with her Bible open on her lap, filling her mind and her heart with the promises and commands of God. 

And she voted for Obama. 

Twice. 

And though I didn’t (even once!), I’m OK with that. Because she’s a reminder that the grace of God that has brought us together is greater than the forces that appear to be great enough to drive us apart—even to drive this great country to the brink of civil war. 

May her tribe increase. May our churches be filled with people who disagree with me and you about really important things—politics, lifestyles, culture, food and drink, medical approaches, whatever—and who are drawn together as one body by the far more powerful grace of the God we are all determined to love more than anyone or anything else. 

May people in our community who are angry, embittered, frustrated, frightened, hopeless see in our church clear evidence that there is a power that unites us that is infinitely greater than the nonsense around us—that our hope for today and tomorrow, as well as for eternity, is not in a president or a Congress or a Supreme Court, or even in violent confrontation in the streets, but in the one in whom we live and move and have our being—in the one whose will is done just as certainly on earth as it is in heaven. 

When we mock political opponents, when we add to the national polarization, when we speak passionately about this world more than the next, we make the mighty grace of God look weak and even inconsequential. And then we wonder why our countrymen mock him. 

God reigns. Why do so many of his people behave as though he doesn’t? 

Photo by Matt McLean on Unsplash