6.13.2009

Denis Lamoureux's Book and Genesis 1-11

I'm planning on reading Dr. Denis O. Lamoureux's Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution. I'm extremely excited, because Dr. Lamoureux (who is at the conference I am at!) has Ph.D.'s both in biology and theology.

This excerpt from the Preface seems to summarize the book's thesis:
"An assumption embraced by many Christians is that God revealed scientific facts in the Bible hundreds of generations before their discovery by modern science. This view of biblical inspiration asserts that the Holy Spirit dictated information about the natural world to secretary-like writers. As a result, there is purportedly a correspondence or alignment between Scripture and science. This is known as 'concordism.' Christians often claim that it is a feature of biblical inerrancy and infallibility. However, chapters 4 and 5 [of the book] review the astronomy, geology, and biology in Scripture and conclude that the science in the Bible is an ancient understanding of nature - the science-of-the-day a few thousand years ago. According to this perspective, the Holy Spirit descended to the knowledge level of the inspired authors by using their conceptualization of the physical world in order to communicate as effectively as possible inerrant and infallible Messages of Faith. This approach to biblical revelation is modeled on the greatest act of revelation - the Incarnation. God revealed Himself by descending into human flesh through Jesus, and in a similar way, the Bible uses a human understanding of the structure, operation, and origin of the world.

Chapters 6 and 7 [of the book] examine Gen[esis] 1-11 in order to determine whether concordism characterizes the relationship between the biological origins accounts and the facts of history. Like the ancient science in Scripture, it will be shown that these opening chapters include an ancient understanding of the origin of the cosmos and humanity. This ancient history is a vessel that transports inerrant and infallible foundations of the Christian faith: the universe and life were made by the God of the Bible, the creation is very good, only men and women are created in the Image of God, the Lord intended us to be in relationships with one another and in particular with Him, everyone has fallen into sin, God judges humans for their sinfulness, and He has chosen a special people through which to bless the entire world. Together, the four chapters on scriptural interpretation conclude that concordism is not a feature of Gen[esis] 1-11, and as a result there is no conflict with the modern understanding of origins offered by academic disciplines of science and history."
Some preliminary thoughts:

1. Buy or read the book!

2. Seriously. I saw Dr. Lamoureux present a lecture yesterday on evolution and intelligent design, and he is a fantastic, faith-filled speaker - with a killer moustache to boot.

3. There is nothing overly radical in Dr. Lamoureux's thesis. Virtually all Christians would deny that the Earth is flat or that the Sun revolves around the Earth, despite the several passages (e.g., Joshua 10:1-15; 1 Samuel 2:8; Job 9:6, 38:4; Psalm 19:4-6, 104:5; Isaiah 41:9; Daniel 4:11; Matthew 5:45) that could indicate otherwise.

The analogy, of course, is not perfect. Many of the references to the "ends of the earth" or the sun's rising and setting are poetic or metaphorical, not meant to be understood as "scientific" descriptions of the world. But this certainly is not always the case; one would be hard-pressed to believe that the author of Joshua, for example, wrote Joshua 10 the way he did whilebelieving that the Earth was a sphere that revolved around the Sun.

4. Of course, Genesis 1-11 are much trickier than Flat Earth theory or geocentrism, because Genesis 1-11 describes the Creation and Fall of Man - a topic of much more theological import than the shape of the Earth (cf. Romans 5-8, 1 Corinthians 15). Dr. Lamoureux promises to address these issues in his book.

5. All Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16). We know this much. But we do not know what exactly it means for Scripture to be "God-breathed" (i.e., inspired) means without some careful investigation and reflection. And I, for one, am excited to buckle down and investigate.

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