I’m rereading The Seven Pillars of Creation by William P. Brown a few weeks after I finished reading it for the first time. I’m doing this partly because it is such an excellent book. Truth be told, I’m also doing this because I didn’t fully absorb a good chunk of it the first time.
The subtitle of the book is: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder. Here’s how Brown describes the purpose of the book:
“In a nutshell, this study is aimed at engaging science in the theological interpretation of Scripture. It is written for those who desire to know both what the Bible possibly says about creation in light of its ancient historical and literary contexts and what the Bible can mean within our context as informed by science.”
Yes, the intersection of faith and science.
That’s the street corner where all too often you’ll see uneasy, fearful, or aggressively defensive Christians interacting with dismissive and even aggressively hostile scientists.
Is the Christian faith incompatible with science?
This is a fundamental question.
It’s especially fundamental if one is going to delve into questions of how Christians should interact with the world one believes is God’s. Since part of my purpose in writing this blog is to explore questions that challenge me and that might challenge others, I’ve decided to look more into this question and share what I learn along the way. And I used the word “odyssey” in the title for this post consciously to reflect the fact that I sense a bit of danger in this exploration.
William Brown’s book, recommended to me by Rabbi Lawrence Troster, is a good starting point. A Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Brown is an erudite guide to the creation accounts in the Bible and is clearly immersed in the world of scientific literature as well.
Here are two portions of Brown’s introduction I’d like to share today:
“Central to the Christian faith is a doctrine that resists the temptation to distance the biblical world from the natural world: the incarnation. Barbara Brown Taylor puts it well: “(F)aith in an incarnational God will not allow us to ignore the physical world, nor any of its nuances. Such faith calls us to know and respect the physical, fleshy world, whose “nuances” are its wondrous workings, its delicate balances and indomitable dynamics, its life-sustaining regularities and surprising anomalies, its remarkable intelligibility and bewildering complexity, its order and chaos. Such is the World made flesh, and faith in the Word made flesh acknowledges that the very forces that produced me also produced microbes, bees, and manatees.” (page 7)
“To talk comprehensively about the story of God’s creative and redemptive work is to overturn the woefully narrow view that treats the world as merely the stage for humanity’s salvation. The world that God so loved in John 3:16 is nothing less than cosmic.” (page 9)
I hope you’ll pay attention to the world today as you meditate on those thoughts.
