Thinking Old Thoughts in New Ways

In theology, as in much else in life, you can’t go back. Take human origins. Once the stories in Genesis were taken naively by many as the way things happened: Once upon a time there was a garden, a man, a woman, and a snake . . ., that sort of thing. You can still read the stories in that way, but it’s much, much harder. To read Genesis as history, you now have to read the stories against the scientific consensus. In doing so, you have to account for among other things the fossil record, the history latent in human DNA, the obvious parallels between the Genesis and Babylonian accounts, and the seams in the literature of Genesis itself. You have to claim your position against well-established scholarly conclusions. 

If you believe that you must for some theological (or other) reason claim Genesis as history, you have a couple of options. One is open combat. You assert that the dominant science along with modern biblical studies has gotten things wrong. The Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky, with its full-sized ark replica, takes this option: it disputes the science in favor of what its founder, Ken Ham, calls “biblical reasoning.” A second option is compartmentalization. You hold both to science, as you know it, and the Bible, as you know it, and you try never to bring those two into the same room at the same time. I suspect that many of the visitors to the Kentucky ark adopt this strategy. They enjoy the ark, as they would enjoy, say, a scientific museum of natural history, and they try not to think too hard about what one might say about the other.

Traditional theology is often like that. Take Reformed theology. In the period immediately after the Reformation, Reformed theology rather quickly consolidated into a theological system. This system has its own terminology and structures. It’s covenantal, federal, and predestinarian. It tends to legalism. It favors, partly for that reason, penal substitutionary atonement. It claims to be based on the Bible alone (sola scriptura), but it reads the Bible through the eyes of the theological system, meaning there are some parts of the Bible it takes seriously and other parts, not so much.

By now this system is showing its age. Traditional Reformed theology requires, to take just one example, what has been called “the historicity of Adam”: the claim that the first human, the biblical Adam, was the covenant head for all humanity—our covenant head. When Adam sinned by eating the forbidden fruit, his sin was “imputed” to all his descendants. No Adam, no covenant head, no “covenant of works;” the system begins to fall apart.

Aside from lots of difficulties internal to this theology, including the fact that it’s not really biblical, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to bring the story into compliance with what we know scientifically of human origins. Where in evolutionary history is this first human being to be located? Human origins are complex. We carry in our bodies genetic material from more than one human species. Species evolve in community. Our nearest shared male ancestor, known as Y-chromosonal Adam, did not live alone but in a community of other early humans. And this is just the beginning of the complications. The story and the science simply don’t line up.

So what do you do with that? Consider the options again. One is open combat. You can claim that there was in fact an Adam and a garden and that the science is just wrong. Or, you can compartmentalize: you can think in terms of the theological system on Sunday (or in your theological seminary) and in terms of the science on Monday, when you go to work to a job that may depend on modern science (which these days would include farming). 

The retro-Reformed movement that has disturbed the denomination in which I grew up belongs mostly, in my judgment, to the compartmentalization school. It acts as if the traditional Reformed theological system—all the covenants, the atonement theory, the various imputations, and other features of the system—can be discussed, debated, and decided at a synod as if it’s all quite factual: this is how things are. This is how God is; this is how humans are; this is what happens when you die. In the hothouse atmosphere of the church, science scarcely comes up at all.

It’s like being immersed in a video game. For the time you spend playing the game, you live in the world of the game. One of things that attracts a certain kind of person to Reformed theology—see Collin Hansen’s Young, Restless, Reformed (2008)—is its intricacy. It’s nerdy. There are lots of fine distinctions. You can become good at it, learn to do theological tricks within the framework of the system.

Sometimes this leads to a kind of theological showing off. Once, in a classical examination I attended, a delegate asked a candidate for ministry how many imputations there were in Reformed theology. The answer, should you be wondering, is three: the imputation of Adam’s sin to his heirs, the imputation of human sin to Christ, and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the elect. To the immense satisfaction of the questioner, the candidate didn’t know the answer. Chalk up a theological point for the guy asking the question—a guy who, as it turned out, supported apartheid.

To know the system is not the same as knowing theology, if theology is the study of the relationship between the eternal and the temporal. Theology has to be about something. It has to offer a wisdom for life, an insight into the human condition, a sense both of time and eternity. Theology must wrestle with the questions that come to all of us in the course of life. Theology stands at the edge of an open grave as the casket is lowered down and dares ask what we can and should say. Theology is not afraid of questions or facts, whether they are of science or history. Theology is not afraid of skeptical thought or biblical hope. Knowing how many imputations there are in the Reformed system does not by itself lead to theological wisdom. 

The best theologians—there have been many of them throughout Christian history—are always trying to get the questions right. For any theology worth considering, we must ask, what’s ultimately at stake here? What does this theology tell us about human life that we otherwise would not know? What wisdom does this theology have to tell us for the time in which we live? 

I call this work “retrieval.” We honor our forebears best by working to retrieve from what they believed the kernel of solid truth that we too can and should believe. Retrieval is not simply going back. The work of retrieval does not skip over what we have learned in the time since a theology was first formulated. In considering human sin and the human prospect, for example, we cannot skip over what we have learned of human evolution and what we have observed in the horrors of modern history. We must ask—with all the resources available to us, including science—what kind of creatures we are. And what will happen to us. 

In a series of posts to come, I hope to engage you along with me in the work of retrieval. I’ve already written a piece about the Reformed doctrine of election, a doctrine that many of us would think long past its expiration date. It’s waiting to go—the piece, not the doctrine. It seems to me that there is still in election a core truth that names what we otherwise would not be able to name. I propose to retrieve from the idea of election a hard limit on talk about who’s in and who’s out in any eternal sense. Election says no to evangelical fundamentalism. 

But that’s for next time. In the meantime, is there a doctrine, a teaching, at the heart of Reformed theology (or another theology) that in your experience cries out for retrieval? Covenant, say? Or faith? Or another? Let me know. This is important work, even in a time as politically perilous as ours (always on my mind, as on yours). Theology is ultimately about the human experience. About what it means to be alive in this time or any time. About what we as humans are called to do and be. And that very soon gets political. In thinking about theology, we are thinking about what matters most to us and to our world. The survival of the humanity is at stake. We ought always to be about the work of retrieval.

Clay