July 15, 2010

tothesource: You believe Bonhoeffer can speak wisdom today, sixty five years after his death, because of his emphasis on incarnation—the idea that theology and life are one. In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer insisted that, "anything short of obedience to God smacked of 'cheap grace.' Actions must follow what is believed, else one could not claim to believe it" (240). How does the legacy of a man whose ideas and actions were unified in obedience to God particularly address us today?

Eric Metaxas: One of the main reasons I'm so excited about the book coming out right now -- in 2010 -- is that I'm convinced Bonhoeffer's life speaks clearly and directly to us on several levels. For one thing, the parallels between Bonhoeffer's battle with Nazi fascism and our current battle with Islamo-fascism are extraordinary. We desperately need a model of how Christians ought to confront this kind of aggressive evil and Bonhoeffer provides it. But he also shows us how to deal with the cultural drift of the church itself. Bonhoeffer faced a church that had bowed its knee to the reigning culture, but we're facing that today as well. The situation that compelled Bonhoeffer and the other Confessing Church leaders to draft the Barmen Declaration in the 1930s is not so terribly different from the current situation that has compelled Christian leaders to draft the Manhattan Declaration. Bonhoeffer spoke boldly to the church in his own day, but his life speaks just as boldly to us today, who face the same issues and who are just as prone as the German church in the 1930s to refuse to act, whether out of inertia, ignorance, or willful disobedience. God help us to heed to cry of Bonhoeffer today, before it's too late.

tts: In your book, you point out that Bonhoeffer's "habit of saying things for effect that could easily be misinterpreted," (364) led to numerous misunderstandings in his own time. One glaring misconception that has snowballed with time paints Bonhoeffer as a post-religious Humanist, and has garnered Bonhoeffer some unlikely fans—notably the colorful anti-theist Christopher Hitchens. The confusion surrounds Bonhoeffer's assertion that "religion was a dead, man-made thing, and at the heart of Christianity was something entirely else—God himself, alive" (83). Can you clarify what Bonhoeffer meant (and did not mean) when he referred to "non-religious Christianity"?

Metaxas: Yes, the "religionless Christianity" comment is the classic example of this. Bonhoeffer meant precisely the opposite of what many people seem to think, and it's led to a terrific misunderstanding about him and what he believed that has endured for literally six decades! I go into details in the book, of course. There's something inescapably funny about people like Hitchens et al. draping themselves in the Bonhoeffer flag. Not only would Bonhoeffer have blasted them as dead wrong in their interpretations -- and as shamefully sloppy -- but even his friend Eberhard Bethge has done the same, and I quote Bethge's comment on this in my book.

But in the course of writing my book I came to understand how this vast misunderstanding actually happened. It began with the tragic choice to publish Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison first. It was the first exposure many people had to Bonhoeffer, and they saw the most private and unedited side of him without much real context for who he actually was and what he believed. You can see how people who wanted to think of him as theologically liberal, or as somehow post-Christian, got badly fooled. And there were many of them. After this first error, one merely had to cherry-pick one's facts to paint a picture of Bonhoeffer vastly different than who he actually was. So the fact that he wanted to visit Gandhi and that he attended Union and was concerned with racial issues led many to believe he was a standard-issue theological liberal, but this is as far from the truth as assuming that Senator Robert Byrd couldn't have been a member of the KKK. The facts are always a bit more complicated. I hope my book can finally establish the facts and show the reality of this man's life with the full context.

What Bonhoeffer meant by "religionless Christianity," in a nutshell, was real Christianity, the kind of deep faith in Jesus Christ that has been the hallmark of the holy remnant of Christian believers since the day of Pentecost. Mere churchgoing and tradition is dead religion, and Bonhoeffer saw that the church in Germany failed utterly to stand up to the demonic evil of the Third Reich. He was looking ahead to a Christian faith that was founded on a personal relationship with the living God, and he knew that that alone could stand up to evil.

But the idea that Hitchens and others have been able to think of Bonhoeffer as one of their own for so long must now come to an end. And yet I believe if they have the intellectual integrity to really look at Bonhoeffer as he was, they may for the first time in their lives see a bona fide and historical Christian faith that is shockingly appealing.

tts: In his book, Souls in Transition; The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Christian Smith describes my generation as "progressing yet further toward the nearly total submersion of the self into fluidly constructed, private networks of technologically managed intimates and associates…these relationship-oriented activities [blogging, text messaging, tweeting] appear to fill up, however problematically, the void opened by their lack of participation in fostering the shared goods of public life" (74). Far be it for me to disparage the Facebook ilk (especially since I "friended" you and messaged you to request this interview!), but I must note that Bonhoeffer strongly endorsed embodied community and self-sacrifice for the greater good. These values are foreign to my minimally committed, maximally interconnected contemporaries. As you introduce Bonhoeffer to audiences across the country, what responses are you encountering from young adults?

Metaxas: Bonhoeffer for some reasons holds great appeal to the younger generation. Perhaps that's because he was himself always young and will forever be so. But I also think that his authenticity and his courage unto death speak volumes and give him the ability to say things that others cannot so easily say. He makes groundedness and actual community and connection infinitely more appealing than whatever gratification one gets from social networking sites. I actually believe that if young people will read Bonhoeffer's Life Together, for example, it would change the face of modern Christendom. I zealously hope that my book might get people to fall in love with this wonderful man of God, and through him, to fall in love with what he believed and stood for, and most importantly, with the One in Whom he believed. That really would change the world, wouldn't it?

Responses to TIME OUT on Evolution:

Whoa, Dr. Wiker! I thought you called “Time Out!” No fair kicking Kenny under a flag of truce. A side bar of this issue of To The Source brings up “The Very Real Concerns of Creationists” with a link to 10 of those concerns, and taking “the media” to task for mocking Ken Ham and other Young Earth Creationists, and “rarely take the time to grasp their deep and legitimate concerns.” Dr. W., please take some time to grasp those concerns during your Time Out. Many of the arguments (we) Young Earthers champion are scientific arguments, dealing with scientific evidence and its interpretation. To The Source itself has featured several intriguing articles dealing with the flow of time and our perception of it. Russell Humphreys’ work on Starlight & Time, and John Hartnett’s follow-up Starlight, Time and the New Physics, are not trivial efforts by laymen to ignore “the great age of the earth.” Nor are the recent examinations of the “Cambrian Explosion” and massive inverted strata, such as the mountain—of literal evidence—in China, blind attempts to dismiss the fossil record. And don’t ignore the burgeoning field of information dynamics, the complexity of DNA and more in determining physiological charactistics. These very lively and disciplined inquiries challenge the presuppositions of evolution itself, and not merely Darwinism. That is the field we are playing on, and the efforts are rigorous. It’s really unsporting to ask for a breather, then disparage your opponents arguments with ‘this definsive position makes hash of the Reformed Theological Seminary’s motto, “A Mind for Truth. A Heart for God.”’ Or to say “It would seem to reduce Christianity to a kind of irrational fideism, a heart without a mind, because the mind is intent on denying real evidence for evolution.” Really, Doc, your gonna get a yellow card. Bruce Waltke has left the field and turned in his RTS jersey. Your team cannot bring the ball in and head for the goal while your opponent is observing your timeout. As a matter of good faith and sportsmanship, how about a video blog urging our fellow evangelicals to take Young Earth Creationism seriously? Then, let the ref blow the whistle (— surely, Dr. Wiker, you are not pretending to be the referee, right? Your bias toward evolution is much to strong for you to wear the stripes). And let’s get back to the debate at hand. - Pastor R.H., Orlando (not affilliated with RTS).

I find it troubling that you dismiss the young earth creationists without even acknowledging that there exists strong evidence that the earth is in fact young. Quoting your article: In realizing that Darwinism has been the default position defining scientific orthodoxy for nearly a century and a half, we need to understand that it has been the defining theory governing all evidence-gathering, evidence interpretation, text-book writing, teaching, and so on, for multiple generations. As a result, the "pile" of evidence supporting evolution is heavily weighted toward Darwinism. can easily be changed to explain my position on a young earth: In realizing old earth(ism) has been the default position defining scientific orthodoxy for nearly a century and a half, we need to understand that it has been the defining theory governing all evidence-gathering, evidence interpretation, text-book writing, teaching, and so on, for multiple generations. As a result, the "pile" of evidence supporting an old earth is heavily weighted toward itself. - M.B.

Perhaps you can give the Reasons to Believe team a shot at this, as the world's foremost scientific think tank on old-earth creationism (not theistic evolution, ID, or young-earth). They routinely debate both the predominant scientific atheists on home turf (U of T Austin, Cal Tech, you name it) or meet privately to hash things out with the biggies. Astrophysicist Hugh Ross (former Cal Tech faculty), Fuz Rana (Muslim convert to Christianity, biochemist, retired lead researcher for Proctor and Gamble), Jeff Zweering (UCLA research faculty, astronomy), Ken R. Samples (philosophy, theology, apologetics), and others. Reasons.org is the web site. Massive amounts of info available for free. Check out their marvelous books More Than a Theory (testable old-earth creation model), Who Was Adam (Adam, Eve, early hominids, etc), The Cell's Design, the Genesis Question, Why the Universe is the Way it Is, or The Creator and the Cosmos. I'd advise just hooking up with Hugh Ross on the phone and sorting it out. Marvelous people, marvelous theology, marvelous science. - A.V.M., MD Redding, CA

Theistic evolution is a problem. We basically cannot know about God except through His Word--the Bible which begins with, unfortunately for the theistic evolutionist, Genesis. If Genesis is not true--it says that Adam was made from dirt, not another animal, and Eve was created from material taken from Adam's body--then we have no reason to believe the rest of Scripture. It presents a real dilemma for those who say they accept the Bible as God's Word but want to pick and choose what verses they want to believe. As one who accepted the "truth" of evolution in grad school and turned from it as I studied Genesis, you can place any label on me that you wish. I promise that I will not be offended--I will just smile. - P.D., PhD, physiology--endocrinology

While I appreciate the attempts to give a balanced and reasonable compromise position between Darwinism and orthodox Christianity, I cannot understand how one can believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and yet accept theistic evolution. No matter how one argues, the two are contradictory. I cannot understand the Roman Catholic church having gone down that route. I also know many PhD scientists who do not believe that the evolutionary theory with its so-called “undeniable” long ages and progressive evolution is a necessary interpretation of the real evidence . I must admit that the points raised by the article “The Real Concerns of the Creationists” and the “10 Dangers of Theistic Evolution” by Professor Gitt make a lot of sense and should be taken seriously by anyone who claims that God is the Creator, that He has communicated His will to us in Scripture and that the concepts of sin(and its origin) and salvation are central pillars of the Christian faith. Thanks you. - Dr. N.W.W.

Dear To the Source, I have the greatest respect for Dr Benjamin Wiker and look forward to his articles and other publications. However, this article is fundamentally flawed because Dr Wiker does not take his own advice. If, indeed, the evidence is looked at through Christian spectacles, it looks very different. Evolution in the sense of molecules to man is definitely not proved beyond doubt and it most certainly is not a fact. I speak as one who holds two biology degrees and has worked as a research biologist. I learned my evolution theory from the renowned evolutionist Professor John Maynard Smith. I am not ignorant or obscurantist but am simply applying the very advice that Dr Wiker gives and have been doing so for the past 40 years. May I plead with you to permit a different perspective to be brought to this debate – one that disentangles the evidence for variation and the possible involvement of natural selection in that variation (which no-one disputes) from the unproven assumption that such processes have given rise to all life? There are very sophisticated arguments coming from the best of creationism, particularly in the UK, but Dr Wiker seems to be unaware of them. Sincerely yours, - Dr. S.B. Manchester, UK

Theologians should comment on theology and not science. Comments should be directed at what the Bible and Jesus teaches about creation. The Bible affirms that “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” Jesus said, “But at the beginning of creation God made them male and female.” These are the things that people need to understand. By the way, Catholics also believe that Mary is a mediatrix. - J.W. MD,MA

I have never responded to your articles, because I tend to be too slothful, and when I respond to people it takes time that I don't have to make sure I say what I would like to very carefully. But in this case, I will do something that I don't normally do, which is to respond quickly and, as it were, half-cocked. In all your articles dealing with Evolution vs Darwinism, the so-called struggle between science and religion (and even more 'so-called' proposed solutions), you never seem to address what is the crux of the issue for us Creationists, which is how original sin is explained by the various compromise theories. This is understandable, because original sin just doesn't command the central role for Catholics that it does for Protestants in defining the nature of Jesus Christ's work in His death and resurrection. For us, there is a seamless link between what happened in the Garden of Eden and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The one historical, literal event which took place at a very specific time in place led to the need for the other historical, literal event which also took place at a specific time and place. We note that Christian proponents of theistic evolution are always careful to say that they believe in a literal, physical resurrection of Jesus Christ, because all real Christians know in their hearts that if they don't affirm this they have undeniably ceased to be Christians. But it is hard for us to see the intellectual consistency in this. If man's fall into sin in the Garden of Eden is a metaphorical way of explaining the human condition, then why on earth wouldn't the redemption be metaphorical as well? Doesn't a metaphorical fall call for a metaphorical redemption. It is hard for many of us to see how any account of the Fall of Man that doesn't take place in a very specific, literal moment in time and space doesn't ultimately and inexorably lead to something like Bultmann's Easter Faith. And yet this never seems to be raised as a central issue in the debate. The basic line that I am constantly picking up is that the problem with with Darwinian Evolution is that it is a mindless, purposeless process that doesn't have room for a loving Creator's personal design of and care over His creation, or of His ultimate purposes for our lives. And that if a theistic version of evolution can be developed that somehow keeps God in the driver's seat, although in different way than we may have originally thought, the problem is solved. But for Christianity, and for Evangelical Protestantism in particular, its just not enough to say that there had to be a designer to make this intricate watch that we see. Equally important, we have to explain how the watch was broken and how it is going to get fixed. And any theistic evolutionary account, no matter how heavily christianized, is basically saying that the world of today is not all that different from the way God originally created it. How can any so-called scientific account be any different, since science only has natural processes that are currently in operation to work with? And if you don't think that the watch was ever broken, what need is there of a Gospel to fix it? You also say that the Catholic Church believes that the Bible is inerrant. While many individual Catholics such as my mother certainly believe this, I can hardly see how you could affirm that this is a position formally held by the Magesterium of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church long ago surrendered to the Historical-Critical method of understanding the scripture, beginning with the Documentary Hypothesis and similar ideas, and whatever has now replaced such theories. How many imprimatured Catholic scholars believe that God literally descended on Mt. Sinai and delivered the Law to the Jews after miraculously delivering them from Egypt, or that Paul wrote 2 Timothy as the letter clearly presents, or that God killed 185,000 Assyrians in one day, the central event on which the book of Isaiah is based, and without which it is nothing but a cruel joke? I think the problem we Creationists are having is not so much that what we are saying isn't being accepted without debate or question. Rather, it is that we are not being heard at all. And because we are not being heard, 'solutions' are constantly being offered to us that don't address what we see as the real problems. - M.M.

If you look at all of them as theories, you are much better off. Myths and superstitions have been around since mankind has been on this earth, and to this day, different cultures have different 'truths' and in order to stay in that culture you must accept their 'truths'. Forget about logic and reason and especially facts! If there was one 'religion', things would be a lot easier, and we wouldn't waste precious time killing each other over it. Evolution is going on all around us, every day, including man's understanding of his place in this universe. Alas, our brains have evolved as has our knowledge and understanding of what we are. What is between your ears is who you are, and when you die and go back into the earth or up in smoke, you might be remembered, and if you contributed anything, it might be published. We are not a blank slate, a noble savage or a ghost in a machine; we simply are, because we think we are. Y'all have a nice life, while it lasts............ - S.S.

Dr. Ben Wiker is a good theologian, I guess--I cannot really speak to that, but he seems to be trying to pin the problems I have with evolution on the bad theology of Darwin and faulty science of Darwinians. To claim that evolution happened, and it follows that it must still be happening, on a weak premise that the world has been scientifically proven to be old enough for evolution to occur, is not, in my opinion, good science nor is it defendable theology. Yes, I will agree that God "could have " chosen to create everthing that way and I could even handle all of that up to the creation of man. Whatever kind of evolution one might devise cannot get past it "creating" man without Adam (MAN) having two parents. If Adam had two parents, and it goes without saying--multitudes of ancestors, then the primary doctrine of Original Sin is, I believe, destroyed. Oh, and Eve had two parents also. There are other problems that I have with non-Darwinian evolution but this is enough. - P.D., PhD, Animal Science

The recent article condemning Darwinism but approving of "real" evolution was good so far as it went. You needed to at least tell us that the second part would be coming in which you would explain the 'evolution' you think we can believe in. Too many of us assume that Darwinian theory is all there is. Or, you might have recommended a book on the subject. Peace, - L.R.