HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Charting a New Reformation
Part XI –The Third Thesis: Original Sin
The Myth of the Fall
“The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings have fallen into “original sin” is pre-Darwinian mythology and pre-Darwinian non-sense.”
If one were to look at recent Christian history, one would discover that most of the ecclesiastical energy over the past 150 years has been employed against two perceived major enemies. The first was Charles Darwin and evolution and the second was the challenge to accept homosexuality as normal in spite of certain biblical texts, which condemned it as vile and abnormal. The institutional church has now lost both of those battles, but the intensity of the conflict indicates that the church regarded both issues as life and death struggles. Today we examine the older of those two challenges. Why did so many Christians view the thought of Charles Darwin to be a dagger aimed at the heart Christianity? First, we gather the data.
The ink was hardly dry on the printed pages of the book The Origins of the Species by Natural Selection, published in 1859, before the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, rose to defend Christianity against this Darwinian attack. In 1860 he met a Darwinian stand-in, named Thomas Huxley, in a public debate held at the Museum of National History of Oxford University. In this much-heralded event Bishop Wilberforce was regarded as the champion of both faith and morality. Thomas Huxley was seen as the opponent of divine truth and as the disturber of the virtues of public order.
When one reads the content of that debate, however, one realizes quickly that Wilberforce was the loser. Like so many politicians are trained to do, he neither engaged Darwin’s data nor his conclusions, resorting rather to ridicule. The telling moment in the debate came when Wilberforce asked Huxley to identify on which side of his heritage, his mother’s or his father’s, was it that the apes had been his ancestors. Wilberforce’s supporters laughed at his cleverness, but one resorts to ridicule only when one cannot resort to the facts. People in 1860 were quite certain that Wilberforce had been victorious; he was hailed as a hero. One hundred years later, however, Samuel Wilberforce had been all but forgotten. His father William Wilberforce, the leader in England’s battle to end slavery, is the Wilberforce remembered and honored. History has actually dubbed Bishop Wilberforce as “Soapy Sam” because he was so garrulous that words, mostly meaningless, but well spoken, literally bubbled out of his mouth. Charles Darwin and his disciple Thomas Huxley are revered today as men of science, who changed human thinking in a very dramatic way. Darwin has even been given the honor of being buried in Westminster Abbey, the burial place of Great Britain’s most notable intellectuals.
Darwin’s victory was slow and steady, but ultimately it was total. Modern science today is organized around the thought of Charles Darwin. Darwin’s insights are assumed in all of the medical schools in the developed world. Yet inside church circles traditional Christians still express their fears by continuing to fight a relentless, though steadily retreating, rear guard battle aimed at defanging Darwinism and its perceived challenge to what they call “Christian truth.”
Following the Wilberforce-Huxley debate, there was next an organized attempt at rebuttal put on by a group of mostly Presbyterian clergy, generally associated with the conservative Princeton Theological Seminary. This seminary, despite its location, is not a part of Princeton University as many people seem to think.
The Princeton Seminary has long been a very traditional, almost fundamentalist institution. Between 1910 and 1915 it led the Christian fight against Charles Darwin. Aided and abetted by a large grant from the Universal Oil Company of California (Unocal), a group of conservative divines organized a tractarian movement to defend what they believed was “classical Christianity” against what they seemed certain was a threat from the forces of godless secularism, primarily identified with the work of Charles Darwin. These tracts, published and mailed by the hundreds of thousands to religious leaders around the world over a period of about six years, were called “The Fundamentals.” From this title the word “fundamentalism” entered the Christian vocabulary.
In time these five basic principles were expanded into 90 chapters and published in a series of eight volumes. The original framers of these “Fundamentals” stated that if one were to disagree with any of these five basic Christian teachings, they had surrendered the right to be called Christian, but were rather “true heretics.” The five fundamentals were:
1. The inerrancy of Holy Scripture
2. The Deity of Jesus Christ as God incarnate
3. The Virgin Birth of Jesus as literal biology
4. The bodily (physical) resuscitation of Jesus as the meaning of resurrection.
5. The substitutionary atonement of Christ on the Cross
It did not take a genius to recognize that behind each of these defense lines was the writing of Charles Darwin. It is of interest to note that no reputable theologians I know today would still defend any one of these fundamental principles in its literal form. The world of theological learning continues to expand daily.
The next attack on Darwin that captured public attention in America took place in a small Tennessee town, named Dayton, in the heat of the summer of 1925. It was a trial deliberately provoked to determine the limits of organized Christianity to affect what people can study in public schools. It was not an accident.
The American Civil Liberties Union recruited a young, high school science teacher named John Scopes, to challenge a state law in Tennessee that nothing “contrary to the word of God as found in Holy Scripture” could be taught in the public schools of Tennessee. The charges against Scopes were that he was teaching Darwin and evolution as scientifically true. His trial riveted the attention of the entire nation. Newspapers from across this land together with the infant radio industry broadcast the story of this trial around the world. The lawyer for John Scopes, Clarence Darrow, made his defense an analysis of the clearly contradictory texts of the “inerrant word of God.” The lawyer for the defense, William Jennings Bryan, was a self-taught student of the Bible, who believed all the discrepancies in the Bible could be harmonized if one knew the Bible well enough. Scopes was convicted by this Tennessee jury and fined $100, a fine that was never paid, but the ultimate result of this trial was that the work of Charles Darwin came out of the ivy-covered walls of academia and entered the mainstream of American life. No household in this land failed to discuss this trial and, no matter how vigilantly the literal Bible was defended, the die was forever cast against biblical fundamentalism.
That event still did not end the battle against Darwin. Later, political efforts were made by religious people to get around the firewall called the separation of Church and State to allow an alternative to “Godless evolution” to be taught in America’s public schools. “Creation Science” was the name of the first effort, which failed. Then in a second effort, Creation Science was repackaged as “Intelligent Design,” which also failed. To this day, however, candidates running for the nomination of the Republican Party to be president of the United States, still find it politically expensive to state whether or not they believe in evolution. The work of Charles Darwin still threatens many in religious circles, especially in rural and small town America.
What was there about the thought of Charles Darwin that was anathema to the traditional world of Christian fundamentalism? At first it was simply his challenge to the literal accuracy of the story of the seven-day creation in the book of Genesis. Darwin’s theory of evolution required hundreds of thousands of years; indeed far more time than even Darwin himself could in his day contemplate. When someone suggested, however, that each of the “days” in the Bible’s creation story could have been a billion years or so, fundamentalists began to breathe a sigh of relief. This sense of security was reinforced when another fundamentalist noted that in the Genesis creation story the sun was not actually created until the fourth day, so that each of those biblical days could not have been of the twenty-four hour variety. That produced a kind of truce between the literal Bible and evolution, so peace flowed over that aspect of the Darwinian debate. The issue was not ended, but a momentary treaty of non-aggression was accomplished.
Then, however, the deeper issues began to be faced. Creation for Darwin was an ongoing not a perfect, finished process, which the biblical story had assumed. Without a perfect beginning there could have been no fall from perfection into “original sin.” If human life was not fallen, then “original sin” had no meaning. Without “original sin,” from which we had to be saved, the way we told the Christ story began to fall apart. One cannot save that which has never fallen; one cannot be restored to a status one has never possessed. Suddenly, the primary way in which Christians had been taught to think of Jesus as the savior of the sinful, the redeemer of the lost and the rescuer of the fallen lay in ruins.
This was the real and enduring threat of Darwin that could not be dodged by Christians even with clever, sometimes irrational compromises. We will turn next week to look at “original sin,” which we can now assert is “pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian non-sense.”
Stay tuned. The New Reformation is not only necessary, it is inevitable.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Janah, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
What do you think of the book, Conversations with God, by Neale Walsh? It is interesting and I want to believe it, but really don’t.
Answer:
Dear Janah,
Neale Walsh’s book has been very popular and has an appeal for a number of people. He writes in a lively and provocative style. He portrays a deity so engaged with human life that people feel comforted by his words. It has, however, a minimal appeal for me. That is not the fault of this book so much as it is an inability on my part to make most of the assumptions that he seems so easily to make. I cannot suspend my rationality. I cannot force my brain to operate within his universe. I am always questioning his presuppositions which keep me from ever accepting his conclusions. I am not able to turn off my skeptical mind. It is not the reality of God about which my skepticism is exercised, but by the way God is defined by him. I rejoice whenever people in search of meaning find it in any source, but theology is an ultimate mystery since it searches for a God who can never be described in human terms. I worry about those who believe they have arrived at “the Truth.” Neale Walsh falls into that category for me. So I am not a fan!
Thanks for asking.
John Shelby Spong
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