Re: [asa] Science as Christian vocation

>>> John Walley <john_walley@yahoo.com> 2/4/2009 9:23 AM >>> raises an
interesting question:

Interesting. I think one of the issues the church has with evolution and TE
is because they don't want to accept the seemingly harsh and cruel concept
of survival of the fittest. But if this was God's mechanism of creating life
in the animal world, how do we then bridge the gap to the sanctity of life
in humans?

This opens a tremendus can of worms, not only eugenics but abortion, human
relief etc. What is the stopgap to prevent the logical progression to the
liberal theology of Schmucker?

Ted replies:
The "stopgap," if that's the correct word, is a robust view of divine
transcendence and the incarnation. Which Schmucker lacked, entirely. Note
how for SCS God and nature are virtually indistinguishable, hence what
happens in nature is equivalent to a moral lesson. If one has the view that
God is most clearly seen in Christ, not in nature, then we have warrant to
claim that our morality ought to come from the Creator and not the
creation.

A very short answer that needs a much longer and more careful one, but I
think this is at least partly the right answer with regard to SCS. Many
liberal Protestants of that era did not believe in the divinity of Jesus,
just as they did not believe in the genuine transcendence of God: like SCS,
they did not believe that the laws of nature were actually *creations,*
rather they saw them as eternal as God is eternal (see the article for this
wording from SCS). God was not sovereign over them, just as God was not
literally and actually incarnate in Jesus. Without a genuinely transcendent
God literally present among us, it's a lot easier IMO for someone like SCS
to accept the perfectability of humanity through evolution ( = eugenics).
IMO, you need a robust view of God (incl. transcendence & incarnation) to
stand apart from and to critique the conclusions we might otherwise draw
from science, or what passes for it (eugenics at the time).

Ted

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Received on Wed Feb 4 10:31:10 2009