Sydney Episcopalians Throwing Calvin at Natural Theology

Our Lord told a crowd the Parable of the Sower (or Soils). Later, his disciples came to him and asked him about the parable as follows:

When he was alone, the twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!' " Then Jesus said to them, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?" (Mark 4:10-13)

A constant expression of alarm is raised by graduates of Moore Theological College (the theological seminary of choice for Sydney Episcopalians) when Christians affirm evangelising the lost by means of Natural Theology. Any reference to Romans 1:20 (For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse) as sufficient recourse for such evangelism is countered with John Calvin who said: "Wherefore, the apostle, in the very place where he says that the worlds are images of invisible things, adds that it is by faith we understand that they were framed by the word of God (Heb. 11:3); thereby intimating that the invisible Godhead is indeed represented by such displays, but that we have no eyes to perceive it until they are enlightened through faith by internal revelation from God. When Paul says that that which may be known of God is manifested by the creation of the world, he does not mean such a manifestation as may be comprehended by the wit of man (Rom. 1:19); on the contrary, he shows that it has no further effect than to render us inexcusable (Acts 17:27). (Calvin's Institutes Ch 5)

Oh! How they pick and choose from Calvin's doctrine. Remember how they reject Calvin's acceptance of six days of twenty four hours duration for the Creation event and his acceptance of it occurring some six thousand years ago? They play fast and loose with Calvin yet declare themselves to be Calvinist in doctrine.

Well, for the exercise, let me test their credibility a little further.

Accepting Calvin's proposition that, in effect, man is so far fallen he is unable to discern God from observing the creation without the light of faith from God where then does that leave man when attempting to discern God from Scripture without light from God? In my opinion he is in the very same position. Without being enlightened through faith by internal revelation from God man is as much able to come under conviction of the reality of God through Scripture as a dog is able to discern the nutritional value of a can of dog food by looking at the list of contents on the label.

Consider our Lord Jesus' disciples of whom "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given." You would think that such an affirmation of their privileged position would have them well placed to understand the parables. But, no, they were no better in understanding than unbelievers, no better in understanding than those who sought death for our Lord. It required the light of explanation from our Lord for understanding. It later required light from the Holy Spirit to teach them all things and remind them of everything he said to them.

The thoroughgoing Calvinist must accept we are all so far fallen that, without the light of faith from God, there is no way we would receive the gospel of Jesus Christ with the conviction it requires.

This then poses a question for Christians engaging in evangelism. What message is God prepared to use to enlighten through faith by internal revelation?

In Athens, through the Apostle Paul, it was not immediately the message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead but more immediately something akin to Natural Theology through explanation of a Creator of all things. Only this message, followed by the message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, provoked some hearers to inquire further. The rest of the audience, in ignorance, sneered.

Consider, Sydney Episcopalians, the parables of our Lord Jesus Christ which you have used in evangelism. Are not many of his parables drawn from the natural order of life? The parable of the sower, the growing seed, the mustard seed, the yeast, the lost sheep and others involving man made objects and human relations are drawn from the natural order of life. Our Lord was not averse to evangelising with deference to Natural Theology so why do you criticise those who are likewise inclined?

You are in error to criticise your brethren who use Natural Theology and you are inconsistent. Criticism is only due if Natural Theology is confined only to that and has no intention to inflame a spark of interest by expounding all of Christ Jesus. For some hearers, only so much will be taken in one sitting and, though willing to say more, we must be wise to the situation. It is for God to use the means to enlighten through faith by internal revelation and we must leave to God that which is his.

Before closing I want to suggest a reason why many Sydney Episcopalians recoil at Natural Theology. Discussion with several reveals a lack of confidence in understanding the natural world and its relationship with God. This follows from their adoption of the chaotic proposition of Darwinism and trying to fit that with a God of order. Most will honestly admit difficulties they have in accommodating their view of the natural world and the revelation of God in Scripture. This is all a product of their making.

Sydney Episcopalians, your approach to evangelism and your understanding of the Creator God is confused and because of this you resort to a narrow revelation of God in Jesus Christ. In such a sorry state you ought not impose your limitations on your brethren nor on the will of God.

Sam Drucker

In Defence of Natural Theology

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring'." (Acts 17:24-28)

It was Neil Moore who a while back posted a blog linking wisdom with science. That set me thinking and I picked up something while recently reading the gospel according to Matthew. But first I need to set the scene with some comments about Paul in Athens.

Several Christian writers have used Acts 17 to encourage Christians to engage in evangelism. For brevity I have not quoted the entire chapter. I leave it to readers to do that. If they do, and do so without scales on their eyes they will see what Biblical Creationists have seen for some time. There are many people in the world for whom the preaching of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is nothing more than babbling. They are not ready to receive the message. Further preparation of the 'soil' is required. The Apostle Paul quickly realised this in Athens and amended his preaching to what is today called Natural Theology and then Paul brought into his conversation the resurrection of Christ. This approach attracted some sneering but others said "We want to hear you again on this subject." (Acts 17:32) - a marked improvement on the prior condition.

Perhaps about a millennium prior to that scene in Athens there was, ruling in Israel, King Solomon who possessed a knowledge of the creation which set him over and above everyone else in the world. News of him spread far and wide. The Queen of Sheba heard the reports and went to Jerusalem to test Solomon with some hard questions. What she heard and saw overwhelmed her. She remarked "Praise be to the LORD your God, who has delighted in you and placed you on the throne of Israel. Because of the LORD's eternal love for Israel, he has made you king, to maintain justice and righteousness." (1 Kings 10:9)

Don't miss the point here! The Queen of Sheba, along with observing how God had blessed Solomon with wealth, found Solomon to have an understanding of what is today called science which was far superior to anything or anyone she had known. She tested it against her own understanding and, we ought expect, in its outworking in the world around her. It proved right and played a major part in her praising God. Here was so-called Natural Theology as an instrument in the salvation of the Queen of Sheba.

Salvation of the Queen of Sheba?

What else can one conclude if our Lord Jesus Christ, when speaking of the wicked and adulterous generation of Pharisees and teachers of the law, says "The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here." (Matthew 12:42) Who else is appointed to judge and condemn the world but Jesus Christ and those who are adopted into Him through repentance and faith. (1Cor. 6:2-3)

Note also the distinction our Lord makes between the people of Tyre, Sidon and Sodom (Matt. 11:21-24) and the men of Ninevah at the time of Jonah's preaching and the Queen of the South. (Matt. 12:41-42) The former group are said to be under judgment (albeit a degree better off than Korazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum) whereas the latter are said to perform a role as judges. At one particular moment the citizens in the capital city of one the cruelest nations on earth (Assyria) were recipients of the mercy of God through the preaching of the word of God and their response of repentance. Also, the Queen of Sheba, outside the covenant of God with Israel, hears reports of the wonders of a man (Solomon) blessed of God and she goes to test the veracity of the reports. R. D. Patterson and Hermann J. Austel, commenting on the reaction of the Queen of Sheba in being "overwhelmed" after testing Solomon, say "This last is literally 'there was no more spirit left in her,' which indicates extremely strong emotion." It presents to me that this spiritual state of the Queen of Sheba is like that of conversion experience. This view is reinforced by our Lord Jesus' words when, at Matt. 5:3, he says "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Where then does this all lead us?

Clearly, the maligning of Natural Theology within the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney is misplaced. There always has been and always will be a place for rightly explaining the Creator God and the order of creation. Obviously we are today under a covenant ushered in by Jesus Christ and being brought into that covenant relationship involves explanation of and reception of the redeeming work of Christ. However, the covenant relationship offered by God today, through Christ Jesus, is not so restricted by explanation as to leave out the creating work of God through Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

That the order of creation is lightly regarded in the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney is indicative of a workman who has no confidence in certain tools of his trade. Those not understood or less regarded will not be employed. Further, holding to a Theistic Evolution view of the order of creation leaves the advocate with an explanation overloaded with words such as "maybe", "possibly", "mystery" and "uncertain." In such circumstance you would be reluctant to employ it or, as hearer, receive it.

Solomon's understanding of the order of creation was an instrument in the salvation of the "Queen of the South" and the Apostle Paul's successful resort to the order of creation when his message of the resurrection was confused by the Athenians are sufficient cause to reject the unhelpful notions of the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney toward Natural Theology.

To rely on Natural Theology (or order of creation) alone today is an incomplete theology just as much as not including it. A caution exists. In employing Natural Theology you are only offering empty rhetoric if what you present is not in accord with the clear word of God.

Sam Drucker

The natural 'god'?

Some snippets from an article by Kauffmann, attempting to build a 'natural divinity: this is the natural theology that theistic evolution may ultimately lead to: a complete collapse of the personal theism of the Bible! SAD in its mad adulation of materialism's rejection of the Bible is part of the problem, I would say.

Despite his atheism, Kauffmann's remarks are fascinating, as he identifies some of the consequences of materialism in its failure to cope with the world as we live it.

I also like his understanding of the Jewish 'situated history', which, of course, is grounded well and truly in the real time and space creation.

Over to Kauffmann:

If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin phrased it, arose all on its own.

It is important to the Western Hebraic-Hellenic tradition that the ancient Greeks relied preeminently on reason to seek, with Plato, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The ancient Jews, living with their God, relied more broadly on their full humanity. The ancient Jews and Greeks split the ancient Western world. The Jews, as Paul Johnson wrote in his History of the Jews, were the best historians of the ancient world, stubbornly commemorating the situated history of a people and their universal, single God, our Abrahamic God.

Is it, then, more amazing to think that an Abrahamic transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God created everything around us, all that we participate in, in six days, or that it all arose with no transcendent Creator God, all on its own? I believe the latter is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe. It is this view that I hope can be shared across all our religious traditions, embracing those like myself, who do not believe in a Creator God, as well as those who do. This view of God can be a shared religious and spiritual space for us all.

Science itself is more limited by the un-prestatable, unpredictable creativity in the universe than we have realized, and, in any case, science is not the only path to knowledge and understanding. Science cannot explain the intricate, context-dependent, creative, situated aspects of much of human action and invention, or the historicity that embraces and partially defines us. These, however, are just the domains of the humanities, from art and literature to history and law. Truth abides here, too.

The French existentialist philosophers struggled with the same issue, the view that the real universe is devoid of values. Our lives are full of value and meaning, yet no single framework offers a secure place for these facets of our humanity to coexist with fundamental science. We need a worldview in which brute facts yield values, a way to derive ought from is, just the step that Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume warned against. Agency, values, and “doing” did not come into being separately from the rest of existence; they are emergent in the evolution of the biosphere. We are the products of that evolution, and our values are real features of the universe.

On the Revelation of Jesus Christ and Natural Theology

How ironic that Eric should post a blog on Natural Theology just as I was deciding to do likewise. Rather than responding to Eric in the comments section of his blog I have decided to go ahead and post my blog.

I take the point of Eric (I think) that the term 'Natural Theology' is a bit of a misnomer. The abuses of ignorant atheists and biblical compromisers is insufficient cause to abandon the term but the more I read and understand about the Person of Jesus Christ in His Creation I am increasingly inclined to bring that which has been called 'Natural Theology' under the heading of 'Revelation of Jesus Christ'. That said, I now proceed with a blog and I expect to be posting more on the subject in the future.

We have much to be indebted to our Lord for, not the least being his gifting His Church with some giants whose legacy lives on well beyond their passing from this world. One of the giants has been spoken of elsewhere on this site and I wish to quote him in this blog and invite comment on his proposition. I refer to the late Professor A.E. Wilder-Smith, a man who had three (3) earned Doctorates. He was a Biochemist and among many other credits was an accomplished debater of Naturalists. Perhaps the thing that impresses me most about him is his predictions made twenty or more years ago concerning scientific discovery and applications which are being realised today.

For this blog I quote an extract from his book "The Creation of Life - a cybernetic approach to evolution." I quote from pages 227 to 229 of the third printing (1981) of the book first published in 1970. Having dealt with the inadequacies of (a) the Naturalistic explanation of matter possessing some inherent psychic property urging it up to life, and (b) the emergence of life on earth by an extra-terrestrial intelligence, he proceeds to expound the merit of a third option.

"Of the third account, that the substrate of the first-cause intelligence must be sought in the supramaterial, there is evidence. The fact that materialistic, physical sciences have missed finding such intelligence with physical means is surely proof of its transcendental nature. It is only by reasoning, logic and mathematics, that the gap in purely materialistic Darwinian randomness has shown up.

One cannot see, physically speaking, the intelligent energy that goes into the working out of a vitamin C synthesis. Nor can one physically see the intellectual effort that goes into a suspension-bridge blueprint. Yet no scientist would ever deny the presence of intellectual effort just because he cannot physically see it. He measures it, in so many man-hours to do so much blueprinting and so many man-hours to realize the blueprint in actual tons of suspension[-]bridge. He knows how to measure the work involved in both the encoding process and the decoding or realization (reading), process.

If this is so, why should there be difficulty in accounting for the basic encoding process by which the blueprint for life was drawn up at archebiopoesis or the beginning of life? Or why should there be difficulty about explaining the decoding process by which life is realized by growth regulated by the code on the material genes? In experimental everyday life, both coding and decoding are simply and boldly explained in terms of intelligent man-hours. Obviously then, there should be no difficulty either about the same basic processes in the origin and realization of life. The principles behind both are identical, even though their scale of operation may vary a trifle!

Thus the assumption of intelligence to account for origins and maintenance (or realization) of life, does not present any real difficulties of principle. Whether the intelligence is artificial, biological or even transmaterial does not offer any real impediment to theory. If we have no difficulties in using this same assumption of intelligence when dealing with pattern construction in the laboratory and industry, why should we ba[u]lk at the same assumption when we transfer our field of inquiry to the much grander scale of the universe and its patterns and codes, especially to the code we know as life?

The same principle applies to the patterns and codes behind atoms with their electron orbits (which decide the patterns of their chemical properties). The chemical patterns on DNA spirals, in their turn, decide the patterns and codes behind the genes and their outworkings in various morphological, physiological and metabolic codes. Each code and pattern gives rise to another, but they all revert, eventually, in their origin, to the grand code and pattern-maker known as intelligence.

The difficulties incurred in denying intelligence as the basis of code-order realization are certainly greater than those of assuming intelligence as the author. One is always finally reduced to assuming that randomness gave spontaneous birth to order (the Darwinian position) which amounts to a denial of the laws of thermodynamics and indeed all laws - for randomness is not subject to laws. [emphasis mine]. But to get around and to avoid the necessity of assuming exogenous intelligence (or Deity), scientists have been willing to commit even this type of scientific hara-kari, for to deny law is to kill all science.

If, on the other hand, we assume an intelligence behind the codes and order of the universe, we are more or less inevitably forced to assume the position described by our third postulate - that this intelligence must be transmaterial or transcendent. This position has the great advantage of destroying that old bugbear of the past which has hindered so many intellectuals in dealing with the Christian position - an anthropomorphic deity, and 'old man in the sky'. The intelligence we are talking about is ineffable, supreme, supramaterial and time-transcending. [emphasis mine]

Thus an intellectual stumbling block which has long stood in the way of intellectuals and kept them from believing in a supreme intelligence has been removed in principle by progress in cybernetic science , since it has been shown that intelligence is no longer bound to human biological substrates. Perhaps it may some day be shown that thought and intelligence, even in the laboratory, are not even bound to electrical phenomena; that they are both the activities of 'spirit'. For the Holy Book assures us that God is 'spirit' and that they that worship him must do so in 'spirit and in truth'." [emphasis mine].

Professor Wilder-Smith then went on to explain why William Paley's book 'Natural Theology' for a while held sway in intellectual thought but later succumbed to Darwinism. Professor Wilder-Smith then demonstrates advances in 'Information Science' which have since exposed the paucity of the Darwinian argument.

Now, it goes without saying that a theistic evolution position, being a corrupt hybrid position resorted to by a Church retreating with haste from the battlefront, has no place where the valid contenders for intellectual thought 'square-up'.

In light of the case presented by Professor Wilder-Smith, I find myself compelled to explore, with much caution and therefore requiring guidance from intelligent people, the revelation of Jesus Christ in the coding for all things in creation - for what do the Biblical passages "In the beginning was the Word [or as Professor Wilder-Smith says elsewhere - 'logos or concept'] and the Word was with God and the Word was God' (John 1:1) and "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:17) and "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." ( Romans 1:20) mean in the light of our more recent understanding of genetic coding (non-matter) of DNA (matter) and patterns and coding (non-matter) of atoms (matter)?

The answer to such a question is not found in Pantheism for it is clear that the encoder or source of the code is also exogenous to the code carrier.

I may soon have to abandon this pursuit because a respondent may point out a potential heresy. I don't want to pursue a heresy. On the other hand the potential to know our Lord Jesus Christ more intimately, He being closer to us than hitherto recognised, is advantageous over smouldering and not yet extinguished Deism in Sydney Anglicanism.

Could it be that in this proposition a more meaningful explanation is given for the premature death of an 'innocent' child in that the Lord Himself suffers in the cessation of the code for life in that infant? Our Lord Jesus Christ felt 'power' go out from Him for healing when touched by the woman with the bleeding complaint (Mark 5:30) perhaps he feels something of the injury or cessation of life.

What is involved in the "giving up the spirit' when someone dies? What is the distinction between the coding of the 'animate and the inanimate'?

There are many other Biblical statements, events and doctrines against which this concept for the order of life has to be measured. It has a long way to go. One thing that seems to fit is that the miracles of the Incarnate Son of God need not have occurred with the necessity of spoken words. Only thought was necessary to produce the outcome. The words were spoken only to let the audience know through whom the miracle came to pass.

I invite comments.

Neil Moore