Four Myths About Catholicism

It's official: the Catholics have a new pope! And a pope who lives in a tiny apartment, cooks his own meals, and commutes via public transportation--sounds just like me, if I were a seventy-something cardinal. I, for one, am quite happy and excited for my Catholic brethren and hope that God will powerfully use Francis I for redemptive work in the Catholic church (particularly in dealing with the sex abuse scandals that have been looming) and in the world.

But not all Protestants share my enthusiasm. I've seen some dismissive or even derogatory responses to the new pope and jabs at Catholicism from Protestants, especially those of the more reformed variety. One of Christ's prayers for the church is that "they may be one as we are one" (John 17:20-23), which I take as a call to action every bit as much as the Great Commission. So despite our differences, I take this kind of combative rhetoric against Catholicism seriously.

Obviously I am not a Catholic; I do have real theological disagreements with the Catholic Church that make it overwhelmingly likely that I never will be one (particularly about accepting doctrine by church authority instead of exploring it for yourself) and so my following words are going to be less well-informed than they should be. I'm not necessarily arguing for the Catholic position on these issues, only for understanding of it and how it doesn't line up with some of the calumnies (Calvin word) thrown at it by Protestants. My goal is to address some the myths about Catholicism that seem to be prevalent in Protestantism, the best a Protestant thinker with little experience in Catholicism can.

I should mention that much of the following information is from the website CatholicBridge, which is run by an formerly evangelical couple who became Catholic and wanted to help inform other evangelicals about Catholicism. It's very well-written, humble, and does a good job of relating our beliefs to theirs.

Catholics believe the pope/priests have the power to forgive sins.

Jesus' ability to forgive sins was an implicit sign of His Godhood (Mark 2:1-12), the Protestant thinking goes. How dare those Catholics try to usurp His authority by claiming that their priests, bishops, and popes can also forgive sins!? They are turning the true gospel into a manmade religion of rituals and works! Christ instituted the priesthood of all believers, so of course no special person can have spiritual authority over anyone else to forgive sins!

CatholicBridge most directly addresses this objection here in the section on priests forgiving sins. In a nutshell, it seems that they don't believe Catholic priests have special spiritual "powers", but are priests by virtue of their role in serving the lay people (common priests). The difference between Catholic priests and Protestant pastors seems to be smaller than we tend to make it. I don't think they would say that the hierarchical structure of the Catholic church is any different, in principle, than the leadership of Protestant churches and denominations.

Consider this: someone in a Protestant church (I'll imagine my church) has a serious drinking problem. He hates this addiction, wants to be freed from it, and has been convicted and "repented" of it to God in the past, but has relapsed into it. What would you counsel him to do? Confess this sin to his pastor and seek counseling! My church stations people in front during the service to whom you can come to confess sins and ask for prayer. Are these prayer helpers responsible for forgiving your sin? Of course not. But--and this is what I think Catholics would say--God is able to effectively carry out this forgiveness through people in His church. The Catholic catechism says this:

Only God forgives sins (Mk 2:7) Since he is the Son of God Jesus himself says "The Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins" and exercises this divine power "Your sins are forgiven" (Mk 2:5, Lk 7:48) Further he gives this power to men to exercise in his name (Jn 20:21-23)

In fact, the Bible talks repeatedly about confessing our sins to each other (James 5:16, 1 John 1:9). Protestants have a tendency to overspiritualize repentance to be just between God and the sinner, but as in the above example just confessing your sin to God can often be no confession at all--not because of any deficiency in His ability to forgive but in our sincerity. I think there really is something to confessing your sins to another person, as a part of confessing them to God, and Catholicism seems to have a better grasp of this fact than many Protestant churches. The Church is the body of Christ, and if He forgave peoples' sins while in His earthly body, why can He not do the same through this one? So Catholics don't believe priests have any innate power to forgive sins, but that God can and does work His forgiveness of sins powerfully through them.

Somewhat related to this objection is the issue of indulgences. (And yes, Catholics do universally condemn the sale of indulgences or any other spiritual thing, which is called simony) This was actually pretty interesting to read. Lots of things of Catholicism that Protestants have problems with seem to really be things that we do have some conception of, just more clearly and under a different name. So with indulgences: That article has a seven-point table giving the steps of repenting of a sin and being healed of it, and how analogous they are in Protestantism and Catholicism. They are sin, awakening (conviction), repentance, confession, amends, penance, and blessing/indulgences. The catechism says about penance:

Absolution [forgiveness] takes away sin, but it does not remedy all the disorders sin has caused. Raised up from sin, the sinner must still recover his full spiritual health by doing something more to make amends for the sin: he must "make satisfaction for" or "expiate" his sins. This satisfaction is also called "penance."
...prayer, an offering, works of mercy, service of neighbour, voluntary self-denial, sacrifices, and patient acceptance of whatever crosses we must bear in life. These penances help configure us to Christ, who alone can expiate our sins once for all. They allow us to become co-heirs with the risen Christ, "provided we suffer with him" (Rom 8:17, Rom 3:25, 1 Jn 2:1-2)

Here Protestants might object that the last three or four steps are unnecessary works added on to the gospel, and you only need the steps through repentance or confession. But again, I see some overspiritualizing or "Christian pietism" going on--that is, the belief that all that matters is being made right with God in a legal-spiritual sense, getting that crucial "innocent" verdict, and then you're good to go. The Catholic view seems more holistic. It recognizes that even after your sin is forgiven, it can still have aftereffects. There is still damage done that needs to be undone. It recognizes that participation on our part is needed to undo this damage--sanctification is not merely passive, Philippians 2:12. Penance is this participation on our part in God's work of healing the disorders left behind by forgiven sin, and indulgences, then, are seen as God's richly rewarding this participation by blessing and healing us.

Catholics worship Mary and the saints.

I held a weaker version of this belief for a while. Why do Catholics pray to Mary or the saints, I wondered? Did they believe that God was really too distant for their prayers to reach, or didn't care for them as much as He did for His saints? Surely the practice of praying to mere people--dead people, even--was a reflection of idolatry.

CatholicBridge has articles about Mary and the saints. The gist of it is that they believe that all believers are "saints" in a sense, but some saints have been formally, indisputably recognized as such. It's like how we believe the Bible was canonized; the Church did not make certain books part of the canon and exclude others, but saw itself as recognizing which ones really were God's words. In the same way I think Catholics would say that the church doesn't make people into "saints" but only recognizes them as having been saints.

Anyway, Catholics, like many Protestants, believe that those who have died in Christ are not really dead but have eternal life! For God is not a God of the dead, but of the living. (Matthew 22:32) And then (here is where the scriptural support gets admittedly thin), if these radical, passionate Christ-followers are in heaven worshipping Him face-to-face, why not ask them to pray to Him for us? It's not so different from praying for one another, or asking our pastor to pray for us. Saints and Mary are "serious prayer warriors". Even if you don't agree with this practice, it definitely isn't anything like worshipping Mary and the saints, or elevating them to the same level as Christ.

Catholicism rejects the exclusive authority of the Bible (sola scriptura)

This one seems pretty self-explanatory. Catholics believe in the Bible as authoritative, but only equally so with church tradition and the proclamations of an infallible pope. Isn't that placing human authority on equal footing with God's authority as shown through His word?

This article has an excellent reply to this objection:

The Catholic Church loves the Bible. The Church protected the Bible across the ages until the Gutenberg press was invented. Century after century, monks in monasteries faithfully copied Scripture. It would take each monk a lifetime to copy one Bible and thousands of faithful Catholics dedicated their lives to this work. Catholics protected the Bible over the centuries of wars, famines, plaques, the fall of Rome, fires, and threats from all sides. This was long before any other denomination existed. And the Catholic Church chose which books to include in the Bible in the Synod of Hippo (393 AD) and confirmed it at Carthage (397 AD). We love the Bible. Honest!
The Bible is the Truth and no Catholic Dogma or tradition will contradict it, but Catholics do not believe that it is the authority. Otherwise there would have been no authority for the first 400 years of the Church.

Dang. That's a pretty good point. Before the Bible as we know it today was put together, God spoke to and shepherded His church primarily through people--the apostles, and then other church leaders in ensuing centuries. (Whom Catholics would consider to be part of the Catholic church) So clearly the Bible isn't everything or those early Christians would have been lost. How could early churches possibly have survived without Paul's comprehensive treatise about justification by faith in Romans!? And such a strong dichotomy between God's authority and human authority becomes hard to hold when you consider that every book of the Bible was written by--get ready for it--a human.

Of course Protestants--those who don't minimize the human element of scripture and focus on it being "God's very words"--understand that the Bible having a human side in no way negates its ability to be God's authoritative word. The difference seems to be that while Protestants believe that the "apostolic" authority in scripture died with its human authors, Catholics believe that the church--the Catholic church--still possesses it, with God continuing to shepherd it through His people the same way He did by inspiring the Bible and starting the church. While I don't agree with this proposition, it definitely isn't the same as proclaiming a man-made religion any more than first-century Christianity was man-made by being grown and guided by the work of the apostles.

Catholicism is a works-based religion, rejecting justification by faith alone (sola fide). More extremely, Catholics are not really Christians/"saved" and believe in a false gospel.

Now we get to probably the biggest objection Protestants, especially more reformed ones, have with Catholicism. Such as this article describing a Southern Baptist leader denouncing the Catholic church and the new pope. Mohler gets into the confusion about priests being given "spiritual authority" to forgive sins, but before that, writes:

“First and foremost, evangelicals must affirm that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is an essential, because that is the very definition of the gospel itself, and there is nothing more core, central and essential than the gospel,” Mohler said.
“The reformers were absolutely right in saying that any [other] understanding of justification – even the understanding that justification is by faith and something else -- is another gospel, is anathema to the gospel of Jesus Christ,” Mohler said. “The only way of understanding salvation by grace alone through faith alone is defining justification as the Scripture defines it, and that is justification by faith alone.”
Mohler noted that Pope Benedict XVI famously affirmed the doctrine of justification by faith when writing about the apostle Paul, “but he would not add that crucial word ‘alone.’”
“Lacking the word ‘alone,’ that means justification by faith that works in synergistic mechanism with our own righteousness or attempts at righteousness and efforts to gain merit,” Mohler said.

Mohler lays out the case pretty clearly: Catholics reject the core of the gospel, justification by faith alone, and instead subscribe to a man-made religion of legalistic works, which is really a false gospel.

I have covered what may be the source of this confusion in my previous post on sola fide. Paul writes that man is justified by faith alone, while James says man is justified by faith and works. What is going on? Paul is contrasting "faith alone" with faith-free legalism that attempts to make oneself righteous by exact, laser-precise obedience to the Mosaic law. By way of example, in a book on New Testament studies by Bruce Metzger I read some interesting stories of some ways the second-temple Jews, trying to renew their obedience after coming back from the exile, analyzed into the laws to figure out exactly how to apply them. They concluded, among other things, that it was lawful to walk through a field of grain on the Sabbath if it is ankle-high but not knee-high, because their robes might brush against the grain and accidentally "thresh" it, doing work. It's easy to see how this way of approaching the law might have led from faithful obedience to legalism.

I think many Protestants' almost obsessive devotion to Paul and his theology over the rest of the NT writers has led them to forget that while the gospel is our salvation from trying to earn righteousness, it is much more than this; the "law vs. grace" dichotomy falls far short of encompassing all of the theology in the New Testament, even theology of salvation. Focusing on Paul's theology of salvation, particularly in Romans, Ephesians, and Galations, can lead to a kind of absolutism where the slightest hint of anything on our part, besides faith, having anything to do with salvation is viewed and denounced as salvation by works. See Mohler's quote above: “The reformers were absolutely right in saying that any [other] understanding of justification – even the understanding that justification is by faith and something else -- is another gospel, is anathema to the gospel of Jesus Christ.” In practice, this means a theology of salvation that focuses on faith alone, pasting the issue of works on only in specific questions of ethics.

James, on the other hand. is contrasting "faith and works" with works-free faith that consists solely of propositional beliefs (sound familiar?). You need both of these elements to get a full understanding of the nature of saving faith. The balance of Paul and James' theologies of salvation is well expressed in the adage, "Faith alone justifies, but the faith that justifies is never alone." While Protestants tend to favor and focus on Paul's theology of salvation more, Catholics seem to either take a more balanced view or fall more toward James' view. Both are true and both are necessary. And you must read both in context; Paul's condemnation of pharisaical legalism in Romans can't be assumed to translate exactly to Catholic practices today any more than it was condemning James' focus on works in the first century.

Even this cursory study--and defense--of Catholic theology has been enlightening. It's striking how strongly incarnational it is; whereas the Protestant theology I'm surrounded by focuses on how we are able to commune with God despite our own failures and powerlessness, Catholicism seems to behold closely how God is able to work His power, His authority, and His love through us anyway, making manifest in billions of lives the spiritual blessings promised to us in His word.

Why the Hell? Prelude

This post is another offshoot of all the thinking I've been doing on faith and skepticism. I'll be looking at one of the most common and influential reasons I've seen skeptics give for their rejection of Christianity: the doctrine of hell. People express disbelief, ridicule, and even moral outrage at the notion of a God who willfully condemns people to eternal punishment for the smallest infractions. How is this view of God just, they ask? How is it loving for God to torture people for eternity? How is anyone who believes in hell not just deluding themselves about God's essential goodness? For the next however-long-it-takes (I reject any notion of posting on a set schedule) I'll be studying this criticism of hell.

First, a disclaimer: conservative theologians might now be worried that I am trying to "water down" Christian doctrine or alter it to be more palatable to our modern, western culture and sensibilities. I am aware of the danger of this habit, especially considering the whole controversy over Rob Bell's borderline universalist book Love Wins not too long ago. In the name of peoples' sensibilities, various Christian groups have turned the body of Christ into a fun social club, Christian doctrine into an indecisive "conversation", God into a kind of cosmic Santa Claus who just can't wait to bless you with a third car, and Christ Himself into a blond-haired, blue-eyed patron saint of the American Protestant middle class--your homeboy, your pal, even your boyfriend.

But if we take from these examples the lesson that correct Christian doctrine must be difficult to accept and if it is easy we're doing something wrong, we miss the mark. Different parts of the gospel are difficult to different cultures. For example, as westerners we have a relatively easy time applying Jesus' command to forgive others (when the media doesn't go into a condemning frenzy) relative to people in collectivist cultures where grudges can last generations and involve entire extended families. Some cultures have more trouble accepting the fact that God forgives than that He condemns. If so many people are leaving the church and pointing to hell as their biggest issue with Christianity, we must ask ourselves: do they dislike hell because they have rejected God and the gospel, or is there something wrong with how we are presenting the doctrine of hell that is rightly offensive to peoples' consciences?

I have been realizing that my posts lately have been pretty difficult to read, both because they are a bit of an organizational mess and because they are roughly the length of my honors thesis. Like I did with predestination, I'm going to try and solve both problems at once by breaking what would have been a long post up into a short series. Here is what's coming:

1. Exploring the "difficult" view of hell
2. What we can know about the nature of hell
3. What we can know about the intentions of God (pertaining to hell)

The Limits of Doubt: Higher and Lower Knowledge and Adventures in Epistemology

Epistemology: A branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods,and limits of human knowledge.

A few weeks ago in my post on Dan Barker's book Godless I mentioned a theory that atheism and Christianity (or theism in general) were based on two different epistemologies (perspectives on truth), one human-centric and one God-centric. Through reading, study, and conversations with atheists and skeptics I have refined this theory considerably to the point where it has begun making surprising amounts of sense as an explanation.

I just retook the Strengths Finder test last week for the first time in over two years. My number-one strength is now apparently "Input", new since last time, which means I love collecting and mentally organizing information. In keeping with this, I have been in several online conversations with skeptics, trying to get a fuller, more coherent picture of how they approach epistemology. You have to understand something before you can critique it. (Which is why I feel much more confident critiquing Christianity)

Scientific Inquiry and Materialistic Epistemology

The atheists I talked to espoused the method referred to as "scientific inquiry" or "skeptical inquiry" as our only reliable way of gaining objective knowledge about the universe. (Not ruling out ways of subjectively gaining knowledge, but those can't be shared with others or serve as a sound basis for action) This method entails the systematic gathering of evidence, then building knowledge out of this evidence using the scientific method and valid logical reasoning. As such, scientific tests of truth are applied to all truth, such as:

Occam's Razor: The simplest possible theory that explains the evidence should be chosen over more complex ones.

Falsifiability: A theory is worthless if there is no conceivable way it could be conclusively disproven.

This process is also somewhat analogous to what goes on in a courtroom. One poster in an online discussion wrote (emphasis added):

To put it another way: If someone has a way of explaining something that allows me to understand the universe. Something observable, understandable, repeatable, demonstrable (We call that the scientific method); It would be vastly dishonest and silly of me to then go off of something I cannot confirm, cannot show to be demonstrable, to not be understandable, to not be observable. In other words, I would need to throw away my logical thinking and skeptical way of looking at things to adopt a lot of bullcrap.
In the court of law we have a system that allows us to determine whether or not an eye witness is a credible witness to something. If the person cannot be correctly placed there as a witness (confirmed or as no way to confirm), has personal bias or gain in the matter or knowingly misrepresents data they can be disqualified. Now here's the fun part, in the court of law a witness can be make or bust in a case. They are responsible for an eye witness account for something, something crucial.
Many times people get thrown out as a credible witness if it's found they have a bias, or if they cannot be placed at the scene, or if the witness is strictly hearsay.
So if we will toss people out of the court of law for something as simple as a bias, or personal gain, or even hearsay evidence... WHY would a person base their ENTIRE LIFE on a book that is full of hearsay accounts, anonymous authors, biased accounts and data that cannot be accounted for nor confirmed. In other words, random people, no credibility, hearsay evidence and tons of bias to gain from it.

From this analogy we get some criteria for allowable evidence:

• Empirically observable
• Understandable/meaningful/coherent
• Repeatable/demonstrable (presumably not necessary, as in the case of evolution)

And for a valid witness:

• Correctly placed as a witness
• Unbiased
• Doesn't color or misrepresent the data

If this is the method by which all truth is to be gained and agreed upon, it is obvious that there is no room for anything Christians would call "faith", and no one is more aware of this than atheists and skeptics. In this system, faith is the drawing of unwarranted, arbitrary, unnecessarily complex conclusions from insufficient, highly subjective, and biased evidence.

Arguments Against Faith and God

In fact, atheists seem to see "blind faith" as the antithesis to sound knowledge of actual truth; if you try to use it to know what is true, you have strayed outside the bounds of rationality and can simply believe anything you want with no justification. In his scathing review of Francis Collins' book The Language of God, Sam Harris says, "If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything." Similarly, Dan Barker's refrain when he is arguing for reason instead of faith is, "With faith, anything goes." If you listen to faith instead of evidence and reason, you're believing whatever nonsense you want.

Christians often try to play this game and bring evidence or logical arguments for God's existence to bear, but this evidence either doesn't point to God, is counterbalanced by evidence against God, or ignores simpler, more likely explanations than God. An example of this first argument is the "argument from design", which may have worked hundreds of years ago when we had no idea where the complexity of the universe came from, but now evolution has conclusively shown us how order and apparent design can come from chaos by very simple rules. The best example of the second argument is the existence of pain and suffering in the world: what kind of God, especially one supposedly worthy of "love" and "worship", would create that? The third argument contradicts, for example, the cosmological argument, which makes an enormous leap to God as the explanation of the beginning of the universe as well as logical mistakes like forgetting that, by the same logic, a dynamic being such as God also had to have had a beginning.

Back to falsifiability: atheists accuse Christians of ad hoc arguments or special pleading to explain how evidence like the existence of suffering or God not providing concrete evidence for His existence (a simple "Hi! Here I am, worship Me!" would suffice) doesn't really weigh against their beliefs. Christians' constant qualifications of God ("He works in mysterious ways", "He wants us to have faith") to account for this evidence only add more complexity to the God hypothesis, making it an even less tenable explanation. With all this explaining away of evidence, atheists ask what, if any, evidence would actually cause Christians to stop believing in God. They suspect that nothing would fit the bill; that is, the God hypothesis is nonfalsifiable and therefore meaningless.

Some examples of this are Russell's teapot and, more recently, the parodic Flying Spaghetti Monster, an invisible, undetectable, noodly deity said to have created the universe. Like God, neither of these entites' existences can be falsified, but of course it would be absurd to go around arguing for their existence and teaching others to believe likewise. This demonstrates how the burden of proof rests on people making arbitrary claims that can't be verified or falsified by empirical methods, not on those arguing against them who are making their case from common sense and visible data that we can all agree on.

Similarly, historical claims like "Jesus actually rose from the dead" are unfounded because of the extreme improbability of miracles, according to what we know of the regularity of nature, compared to other, more plausible explanations like Jesus' disciples stealing His body and starting a cult saying He rose from the dead, or the whole Jesus thing simply being a premodern myth.

One last way atheists love to poke holes in theism (especially Christianity) is by challenging the possibility of having a coherent definition of God in the first place. Dan Barker, in his book, goes through God's various "omni-" attributes and explains why they are logically contradictory and impossible. For example, an omniscient being, perfectly knowing all things, would have to perfectly know itself, which would mean having a complete mental image of itself, which would also include a nested copy of this image, and so on to infinity--a contradiction. Or the very definition of God has a "supernatural, spiritual" being has never really been explained or nailed down in a satisfactory sense and until it has, there's no point arguing over it.

Two Levels of Knowledge

That was a distilled, more neutral form of the arguments I have been processing over the last few weeks. It's what I've been wrestling with for the last few weeks, both to understand and to answer. Here is a somewhat parodic summary of how I had been trying to answer it:

You're getting the burden of proof wrong. The starting point is not the nonexistence of God, it's ignorance of the existence or nonexistence of God. From there, the evidence for the existence of God (any god, at least) greatly outweighs the evidence against. Faith that looks arbitrary to you is not arbitrary to us Christians, it's a relationship with a higher being. You're creating a mental image of what you want or expect God to be like, then disbelieving in Him because He doesn't fit that image--that box you've put Him in. How do you know, scientifically, that science is the only source of truth?

If I wrote all of that well enough, you might be worried that I've become an atheist, or am well on my way. This has never been farther from the truth. The more I've made sense of these arguments, the less persuasive they have become. Here is the epistemology I arrived at. (And where it starts getting highly speculative)

The empirical kind of knowledge that is gained by skeptical inquiry and knowledge that comes by faith are of two different kinds. I refer to them as "bottom-up" and "top-down" knowledge, or the terms I will use, "lower" and "higher" knowledge. (These should not be taken as value judgments) Let me explain.

Lower knowledge is basically what I just described as the object of this "materialistic epistemology". It is gained through empirical observation and reasoning, the scientific method being the best modern example of this. Simple, atomic facts are gathered and theories are formed, refined, and tested to explain them. This process is hardly limited to scientific knowledge, though; it is generally the process of starting from oneself and building a body of knowledge outward from what is immediately observable. Descartes' one-liner, "I think, therefore I am" is a pithy statement of the most basic empirically observable truth: the existence of oneself.

Higher knowledge is different. I call it that because it is not built out from ourselves but places itself over and above us, relating what we know and who we are to some external point of reference outside ourselves. Higher knowledge isn't proved by evidence but transforms and determines how we view and interpret the evidence, subordinating it to some higher, teleological (purposeful) value or goal. It isn't uncovered by endlessly dividing and analyzing but unites the facts under something of greater importance to us. It answers the question of "why", not "what" or "how". This method of assigning significance to pieces of lower knowledge by their relation to your system of higher knowledge, I will call "meaning".

I argue that the human need for meaning is universal. No one, no one, is content to live a "purposeless" life. We need to "matter" to someone or something outside ourselves. With our western individualism and existentialism we might find the idea of being the "captain of your own destiny" appealing, but if we are free to decide what is of ultimate importance in life, unstable and fallible creatures that we are, that decision is worthless. In his Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer goes so far as to write, "But, rightly understood, the deification of man is the proclamation of nihilism. With the destruction of the biblical faith in God and of all divine commands and ordinances, man destroys himself." In fact, the universality of "man's search for meaning" would indicate that people are truly incapable of manufacturing meaning for themselves; they must search for it outside themselves. If you deny this fact, it only means you are blind to the specifics of your own system of higher knowledge. There is apparently something lacking in each of us that needs filling; Christians might call it the "God-shaped hole".

A Higher Apologetic

Higher knowledge also answers questions that lower knowledge can', questions that science can't answer--not the facts, but what those facts mean. "What is the meaning of life?", the perennial question goes. I wonder, why does everyone want to know? Why are we such a race of philosophers? Higher knowledge is prepared to answer questions such as:

• The existence of anything: "Why does the universe exist?"
• The ordered nature of nature/correspondence with mathematical thinking: "Why does nature appear to be so regular and predictable by mathematics in a way that aligns with our thinking?"
• All the striking coincidences that led to our existence (cosmic "fine-tuning", abiogenesis): "Were we 'meant' to exist?"
• The existence of external moral law and internal conscience/need for meaning: "Why do I exist?"
• Human consciousness: "Why and how do I (as a "self") exist?"
• The problem of pain: "Why is there suffering? What is the point? Is there a point?"
• Or the meta-question: "Why do humans have this insatiable need for meaning?"

When the above questions are used in the context of apologetics, atheists will often get defensive and deny that these questions reasonably point to God, without answering them for themselves--effectively denying that they need answers. Jumping outside what we can empirically sense and agree on is unjustified, arbitrary, and foolish when materialism has already made sense of these questions for us. But the only answer it can give is the impenetrable randomness and purposelessness of the universe according to science. So our sense of morality, desire for meaning, and "consciousness" are naturally selected, arising by chance, merely chemical phenomena in our brains, and we are free to do with them what we will. In doing so, it elevates science from a system of lower knowledge to a comprehensive system, a task for which science was never meant and at which it performs miserably. Elsewhere in Ethics, Bonhoeffer writes (not from his own position):

All knowledge is now based on self-knowledge. Instead of the original comprehension of God and of men and of things there is now a taking in vain of God and of men and of things. Everything is now drawn into the process of disunion. Knowledge now means the establishment of the relationship to oneself; it means the recognition in all things of oneself and of oneself in all things.

But it gets worse. The claim implicit here is that no system of higher knowledge needs to (or should) be assumed because you can empirically, objectively arrive at the "correct" one by observation and rational thinking, i.e. the generalized scientific method. But in fact, in the scientific method you are already using a system of higher knowledge (assuming that nature really is regular, predictable, and follows mathematical/logical laws) to interpret the data "scientifically". The usefulness of the scientific method as a system for gaining lower knowledge already depends on presumptions in your higher knowledge. The materialistic attempt to arrive at a system of higher knowledge from nothing has failed; it couldn't avoid assuming one first. Everyone has a system of higher knowledge--aware or unaware, simple or complex. Without one, life is meaningless.

Back to my comments on Dan Barker's use of the burden of proof. He asserted that the burden of proof is on anyone making a claim to truth that is not "obvious" or empirically falsifiable. But this is confusing the epistemology of lower knowledge with that of higher knowledge. Everyone assumes some system of higher knowledge without rigorously proving it, even if they may apply the laws of rationality to refine and extend it later. At the very least, in questions of higher knowledge the burden of proof lies on all parties involved to explain why their system makes better sense of questions of meaning and purpose like those above. In fact, considering how "normal" and "obvious" belief in the supernatural has been for most of human history, it could even be argued that the burden of proof lies on the relatively recent thinkers who rule out supernatural explanations in favor of materialistic ones--or, at least, that the definition of "obvious" is not obvious.

So, if higher knowledge can't be empirically derived, ask skeptics, isn't whatever system of higher knowledge we choose just arbitrary, at least as much a product of our origins and wishful thinking as of whether or not it's true? What's to stop people from just believing in whatever they want--God, Buddha, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.? Nothing. But I think people will choose the system of higher knowledge that they feel effectively answers their questions of meaning. C.S. Lewis calls this the "fitness" of a belief system--fitness for making sense of our existence. If the system they grew up in fails at this task, they will look elsewhere. No one sincerely believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster because the Flying Spaghetti Monster, besides being consciously made-up, makes little or no coherent, satisfactory sense of "life, the universe, and everything" and raises far more questions than it answers.

In contrast, through Christian theology I get the sense that I'm exploring something that really is "other" than myself, even "other" than humanity in general, just as much as I did as a math major. The very fact that God doesn't make immediate sense to me and isn't perfectly explainable, yet makes sense in a deeper way that I explore rather than invent in a process that forces me to grow as a person in His image, in love, joy, and wisdom, gives me an unshakable assurance that my faith is well-placed. Skeptics, of course, will demand detailed explanations for things that Christians are happy to accept as mysteries and use their unexplainability prima facie as proof that it's all nonsense. Theoretical physicists truly believe they are exploring a system of truths and rules that objectively exists "out there" and so take mysteries like the bizarreness of quantum mechanics or relativity as invitations to dig deeper, not as excuses to write the whole thing off. I think something similar, but deeper and more fulfilling, is going on between a Christian and his Christ.

Again, higher knowledge is not "proven" in the scientific sense; it makes no sense to apply probability to it and you can't be led to it purely by evidence because your higher knowledge controls how you view and interpret the evidence. This is why the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus is the Son of God to Francis Collins, but not to Sam Harris. This is also why, in rationalistic parlance, Christianity is "nonfalsifiable": no evidence can disprove a Christian's faith (or so we hope) because the Christian's faith makes sense of that evidence in a different way than the skeptic is hoping. In order to move outside your own paradigm and begin to understand a different one, you have to want to understand, to stop writing it off as nonsense and open yourself up to it.

One qualification for Christian readers: I am well aware that I seem to be putting Christianity on the same level as other world religions, even making it seem like nothing more than a more fulfilling way of looking at life, doing nothing that couldn't be done by taking a yoga class or improving your diet. Of course I believe it is far more than this. I believe that Christianity is based on important realities both historical and spiritual--namely the death and resurrection of Christ--and that the point of the higher knowledge it teaches it to shift the focus of our lives outside ourselves to God--the importance of this change can't be overstated. I am only treating Christianity and other faiths as a coherent bloc by what they have in common, namely their claim to offer revelatory answers to metaphysical questions like the ones I voiced above, in contrast to materialism, which asserts that these questions either don't matter, don't have meaningful answers, or can be answered empirically. I am arguing that skeptics really do carry a priori higher-knowledge assumptions just like the religious; we see this every time they make a moral or value judgment. They are just unaware of these assumptions because they categorically deny their validity.

The Dark Room

An analogy is in order. Imagine you are inspecting a room with a fellow detective. There are no windows or light sources, but the room is inexplicably, uniformly lit somehow; nonetheless, it is quite dim. You are walking around looking the whole room over; your partner is crawling on his hands and knees, closely poring over every object and floorboard with a magnifying glass. You comment, "This room is dark". Your partner responds, "No it isn't. I can see everything in it just fine. Every object, every detail, I've come across, I've been able to resolve just fine with my magnifying glass. Do you mean that the ceiling is dark? I may not be able to inspect it yet, but I will be able to once I get a stepladder. Point to your evidence that the room is actually dark." How would you respond, if not by taking away the magnifying glass and imploring him to look at the room as you do? What specific object could you possibly point to as proof that the room is dark on his terms? Would not your partner, dependent on the magnifying glass as he seems to be, respond to your efforts to persuade him to lay it aside as invitations to become blind and despair of any effort to make sense of the room?

I know it's a bit of a contrived example. The magnifying glass is scientific inquiry and the darkness of the room is the existence of God. No specific bit of evidence "proves" that the room is dark, but from your perspective the claim "the room is dark" has great explanatory power for the difficulty in seeing anything clearly. By trying to fit your claim into his system of discovering and evaluating truth, your partner makes it unintelligible and unbelievable to himself. Different belief (or nonbelief) systems change how you view the evidence. Every worldview looks consistent and sensible to itself while the others look unfounded and false; if you refuse to look outside your own, you will never consider or understand others.

Dan Barker asserts that while Christianity, with its claims of higher knowledge not based on any specific evidence, is unfalsifiable, while atheism is exquisitely falsifiable. He says that he would believe in God if, say, someone predicted to him the exact time of impact, trajectory, and composition of a meteorite. Would you, Dan? Or would you believe in radically powerful telescopes and computer simulations, or that time travel will be invented someday? Aren't those more likely than the existence of God? Jesus said that if someone won't listen to the scriptures, even someone rising from the dead wouldn't be enough to convince them (Luke 16:31). And He was right! (Matthew 28:15 and all the present-day atheological explanations for the resurrection)

For fairness' sake, there are also abundant examples today of the opposite error, subjugating the realm of lower knowledge to the higher. Consider the dichotomy often thrown around in more conservative Christian circles along the lines of: "What do you believe: your experience or the Word of God?" As if you had to deny one for the other! As I've argued, the Bible should shape how we interpret our experience, not simply contradict it; the one is constructive and leads to growth, the other is destructive and leads to frustration. This assumption is one of the foundations for the submerged anti-intellectualism that exists in much of popular Christianity. One of the characters in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash aptly explains the frustration critical thinkers have with this: "Ninety-nine percent of what goes on in most Christian churches has nothing to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all realize this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in peoples' minds."

Applications for Conversation

In light of all this, I have some modest proposals for how conversations between believers and skeptics in the modern, western world can be improved. First, for Christians, because I feel more comfortable critiquing my own faith:

1. Apologists, keep in mind the limitations of logical "proofs" and arguments for the existence of God. As I stated above, your system of higher knowledge--your explanatory "worldview" determines what you make of things like the Big Bang, abiogenesis, "fine-tuning", and other such pieces of evidence. If there really were an airtight, universally understandable proof for God, everyone would believe by now. And seriously, the ontological argument is pretty ridiculous.
2. More generally, realize that apologetics is about more than logic, reason, evidence, and argument. It seems from these emphases like we have largely allowed skeptics to set the terms and format for how the dialogue between us and them plays out. At the core of it, I think apologetics is really about conversation, relationship, and showing nonbelievers the character of Christ--to attract people to Jesus, not to argue them to Him. If I really respect and admire someone's character, I am highly inclined to listen to and consider what they have to say, even if we don't always agree. For people to understand the gospel, they have to first want to understand it. This was true for Jesus and certainly true for us.
3. Don't assume things about nonbelievers' reasons for their views, and don't claim to know "the truth" about what's going on. Dan Barker was rather indignant about this. People would tell him that he just didn't want to believe, needed to have more faith, ask the reason he stopped believing (as if there was just one), said God was testing him, etc. When you know Someone who professes to be "the Truth" and meet someone who doesn't, it's easy to let it go to your head. Paul's speech in Acts 17 is an excellent (albeit culturally contextualized) example of what it looks like to address nonbelievers from "where they're at", not where you're at.
4. Make every effort to understand nonbelievers and build relationships. Realize that atheists aren't God-hating, baby-eating, child-corrupting monsters from out east; by and large, they are intelligent, thoughtful people quite capable of living (by "Christian" standards) upright lives. They aren't amoral, they don't just refuse to believe, and they may not consciously dislike Jesus. Humanism doesn't just mean believing whatever you want, and throwing Romans 1:21 or Colossians 2:8 out there is not a good way to refute it.
5. This is a big one: do not minimize or dismiss honest questions and doubts people are having about God. (Distinguishing honest doubts from theological potshots takes wisdom) Countless ex-Christians became so because their questions about God, the Bible, or the church were met by "You just have to have faith", "Don't question God", or "God works in mysterious ways" instead of by honest answers. We are failing these people and it burdens me. Once you get those relationships and dialogues with skeptics going, you can start actually listening to their questions and doubts and addressing them. God doesn't need us to protect the truth, He wants us to question and investigate it for ourselves, and skeptics can teach us a thing or two about this process if we will listen.

And for skeptics:

1. Realize that your epistemological approach of subjecting everything to rational inquiry and demands for evidence is not the "obvious", "sensible", "logical", or "default" approach that everyone else needs to conform to. Something can be true without being fully explainable or provable empirically. (Consider looking for examples of things you believe without proof)
2. Logical fallacies can be helpful guides to truth, but they can also be tools for short-circuiting debates and "winning" them without convincing anyone but yourself. Their application is subjective: what looks to a Christian like you are arguing against a straw representation of their beliefs might look to you like a "no true Christian" fallacy or ad hoc sophistry on their part. If a belief isn't explainable in your system of truth, could true attempts to explain it look to you like logical fallacies?
3. Realize that there are options in between believing only what can be empirically/rationally proven and making up whatever garbage you want. I've found that perceived dichotomies between my position and the "wrong" one like this can indicate that I'm thinking in too few dimensions. Some Christians hold a similar view, only with basing all knowledge on the Bible.
4. If you must insist that witnesses for truth be rational and unbiased, practice what you preach. Stop caricaturing the beliefs you are arguing against, using dismissive language, and in general acting just as much like you have a monopoly on truth as Christian fundamentalists. Having my intelligence insulted and my faith called a "cult" offhand does not make me more disposed to take you seriously. When you say, "God/Christianity is incoherent and meaningless", I get that you aren't inclined to look into what Christians really believe and how it is coherent to them.
5. Be willing to take seriously the fact that many professing Christians are highly educated, even in the same fields (biology, philosophy, physics, Biblical criticism, history...) you are using to argue against Christianity, and that most Christians don't feel a need to read up on all the evidence on these things because they trust the word of these experts. For example, some atheists I've talked to act like there is no debate at all on the "fact" that the gospels are embellished second-century forgeries, even though I am inclined to side with Biblical scholars like Bruce Metzger who argue convincingly and substantively to the contrary. If the experts don't all agree, why do we need to? If I said that because Einstein, one of the most brilliant physicists ever to live, believed the theory of relativity, it was true, you would rightly point of that I was making an appeal to authority. But most people do believe the theory of relativity is true because of the expert witness of scientists like Einstein rather than by consulting the evidence and reading the papers themselves, and no one really questions it. There is a difference between justified belief and objective truth.

The Limits of Doubt

I used to be afraid to read books or talk to people that were critical of or hostile towards Christianity, as many of you may be. I was afraid they would lead me to doubt or even walk away from my faith--but after I'd already struggled so much with my own doubt, they ended up having the opposite effect. Mainly by presenting me with what appeared to be the logical conclusion of doubting and questioning, and compelling me to figure out why I yet disagreed with it. And, as a counterbalancing force to my doubt, came a deeper satisfaction in what and Who I believe and the admission that He has all the answers, not me. So, on top of everything else, I started questioning my doubts. I realized that sometimes to answer questions, it's myself, not just my understanding, that needs to change. As I hope I've shown in this post, that questioning has led to a richer, more encompassing, more intellectually satisfied faith.

N.T. Wright on Genesis 2 & 3

This quick video by N.T. Wright does a fantastic hermeneutical job on Genesis 2 and 3. I'm not actually sure whether N.T. Wright believes in a historical Adam and Eve, but that's the thing--in the message he's describing in this video, it doesn't matter. I think that by overly focusing on the question of Genesis 2 and 3's historicity, we not only get into the kind of nonsensical theologico-scientific debates about how old the earth is or what the "days" or creation correspond to in evolution, but we also get an understanding of Genesis that is entirely "back there" in the past and forget that the narrative of the fall is also intensely personally applicable. The fall narrative, this theme of God giving us something good and perfect and us disobeying and throwing it away, is not just something that happened to the human race once, it is something that happens to us today individually and corporately.

Evolution Part II

Since my post establishing my position on evolution, my view has changed completely and I think a new one is in order. I have been doing a lot of reading in the last month, particularly Peter Enns, Francis Collins, and John H. Walton, and I have finally come to a position in the evolution question that makes sense. After my post on Godless became my most commented-on post ever by getting my skeptic friends thinking, it's time to challenge my Christian brethren! I'm just going to set it all out at the beginning, and then you can stop reading if you want:

Genesis 1-2 is an ancient origin myth, compiled from centuries of oral tradition and different writings, and should be understood as such. Adam was not a historical, flesh-and-blood individual. The theory of evolution is probably true as described by modern science, and describes how God created life on earth as it is today through our modern system for describing the cosmos.

That was probably pretty shocking to my average reader. Let's break it down.

Genesis 1-2 is an ancient origin myth, compiled from centuries of oral tradition and different writings and should be understood as such.

First, it's important to realize where Genesis (and the rest of the Pentateuch) came from, the "genesis" of Genesis, if you will. Popular Christian tradition, at least the tradition I grew up in, claims that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but this claim is, at the very least, not entirely true and somewhat misleading. Of course the end of Deuteronomy chronicles the death of Moses, so he obviously didn't write that. But note what verse 34:6 says: "but to this day no one knows where his grave is." Clearly the Pentateuch was compiled and finished by someone writing well after the time of Moses, not Joshua or anyone else right after his death. Same with verse 10: "And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face", which is only meaningful if some time has passed since Moses died.

Or, for example, Genesis 36:31, which has an offhand reference to Israelite kings, which indicates a time of writing at least after the time of the judges. Or 12:6: "At that time the Canaanites were in the land", indicating it was written at least after the reign of David when the Canaanites were no longer in the land. The frequent third-person, past tense references to Moses also point to his not being the (singular) author. The current opinion of scholars is, in fact, that the Pentateuch was written by the scribe Ezra--not from whole cloth, but compiled and edited from a variety of older documents and oral traditions, which certainly could have come from Moses. (The influence of multiple documents is also likely responsible for the numerous parallel stories, like the two creation accounts or the somewhat disjointed nature of the flood story).

Genesis' authorship by a Hebrew living at least in or after the time of David makes it harder to read as a literal, uncolored, journalistic narrative, as we westerners tend to read everything in narrative format. Besides its origin, the genre of Genesis is also critical to understand what it said and did not say to its readers. The perceived conflict between Christianity and science has focused largely on the biological sciences (namely evolution), but advances in historical studies and archaeology in the last two hundred years have also produced some discoveries to shake things up. Specifically, writings from other ancient Near East (ANE) cultures relatively contemporary with the Israelites have been found, including those cultures' creation and other origin myths. These myths have some intriguing similarities and parallels with the book of Genesis that can inform us of how it would have been viewed and used by the Israelites.

For example, the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish has the following similarities with Genesis 1:

• Matter exists before the creation; creation is not creating something out of nothing as commonly believed ("the earth was without form and void, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters") but creating an orderly cosmos out of primordial chaos.
• Darkness precedes the creation.
• The chaos symbol in Enuma Elish is the goddess Tiamat; in the Bible it is "the deep", tehom in Hebrew, which is linguistically related to Tiamat.
• Light is created before the sun, moon, and stars.
• In Enuma Elish, the creator god Marduk slays his great-grandmother Tiamat and cuts her body in half, with one half creating a barrier between the waters above and below. In the Bible, God creates the sky as a solid barrier ("firmament") to separate the waters.
• The sequence of the days of creation is similar, including the firmament, land, celestial bodies, and humans, followed by a day of rest.

Similarly, the Mesopotamian epic Atrahasis has many similarities with Genesis 2-8:

• A garden watered by rivers, tended by God/the gods as a divine sanctuary.
• Humans are created from clay to work the garden.
• The institution of marriage.
• Humans anger the deity (in Atrahasis, hilariously, by making too much noise in their work so the gods can't sleep).
• In wrath, the deity sends a flood to cleanse the creation.
• The deity tells one man (Atrahasis or Noah) to build an ark in order to survive.
• In the act of reconciling the deity with humanity, the man makes a pleasant-smelling sacrifice.

Critical scholars point to similarities like these to say that the Bible is actually a derivative work of older myths, but I think they simply help place the Old Testament back in its native cultural setting. The Old Testament is not independent of human culture and worldview, but embedded in one particular one, that of the Israelites. These similarities don't mean the Old Testament was simply assembled from older, more "original" pagan myths but is reflective of the shared culture and worldview they arose from. Noting these similarities, which seemed to be standard assumptions for creation myths, lets us appreciate the big differences of Israel's story: there is only one God who does everything, there is no conflict or struggle, and the various forces of nature are portrayed as impersonal creations over which God has absolute control, not as subordinate deities. God is completely in control in setting up the cosmos, which was probably meant to imply that the God of Israel is superior to the gods of the surrounding nations. God has no set role or function in the cosmos that He is bound to like pagan deities; He assigns these roles and is not constrained by any. God is also uncreated; unlike other gods, whose origins are documented in their myths, God already exists "in the beginning" with no origin given or implied.

So what does this extremely abridged summary of what I've been reading have to do with our reading of Genesis 1? First and foremost, it means we should stop trying to find ways to make it support or even "fit" with the current scientific theories of origins. The ANE understanding of the cosmos was completely different than our modern, scientific one. To the Israelites and other ANE cultures, the universe looked like this:

At least they got the clouds right.

That is, they believed the earth was a flat disc (Isaiah 40:22 isn't predicting a spherical earth; it really means a disc-shaped earth) sitting on the cosmic sea (not floating, supported by pillars), with a solid dome (the firmament) supported by mountains holding up the waters above, with gates in it to allow water and snow through and God dwelling in the (literally) highest heaven.

Genesis doesn't argue for this view of the cosmos; it assumes it, because it was what everyone believed back then. When Genesis 7:11 says that "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened", that isn't just a poetic device; that's exactly, literally what it means, and it would have made perfect sense to an ancient reader, just like "A nor'easter dumped three feet of slushy mix on New England" would make perfect sense to Americans. The Bible did not unnecessarily try to confuse ancient readers by updating their view of the universe to the modern, "correct" one (assuming that our view is correct); it spoke of their existence and God's sovereignty in the context of the cosmos they knew. Obviously, this is a bit of a problem for Biblical inerrantists and concordists who feel a need to interpret what the Bible says to "fit" with modern ideas of truth. This expectation of the Bible to speak to a modern, scientific paradigm is, I think, unfair and culturally imperialistic, as if we, in the twenty-first century, have finally gotten it "right" in matters of science, literary style, or ethics, and all of history must now conform to our current body of knowledge. (It's a good thing inerrancy didn't become prominent until the 20th century, because no inerrantist in previous centuries without a modern understanding of science could have understood the Bible) Let's let the Bible speak to us as it is, not as we would write it today.

In the case of Genesis 1, this means the ancient Israelites likely interpreted the creation account literally, but very differently than we read it today. Ancient cultures had a functional ontology, as opposed to our material one--that is, "existence" was defined in terms of having a name and a function in the cosmos, not in terms of having a certain material composition and location. The Hebrew word for "create", bara, carries these functional connotations much more than physical ones. In modern terms, this usage might refer to a computer as being "created" when firmware and an operating system are installed on it (when it becomes usable, or "functional"), not when it is physically assembled.

So Genesis 1 isn't about God creating the universe ex nihilo according to the Big bang theory and evolution; it's about Him starting with a formless, chaotic, nonfunctional cosmos (an earth that is "without form and void") and "creating" an orderly, functional one out of it. For ancient cultures, this meant setting up and naming cosmic functions like the day/night cycle, the weather, or agriculture (the first three days). There is even a theory that, as earthly temples were seen as small versions of the cosmos, that it depicts God setting up the cosmos as His grand temple. The "rest" on the seventh day refers not to taking a break, but taking up residence in the temple to begin His work of running everything. This is the kind of creative work seen in contemporary creation myths to the OT. The difference in the accounts is not that the God of the Bible created in a material, "scientifically correct" way that would have made sense to no one in the culture while other gods didn't, it's that God did it alone with no conflict or difficulties. In other words, the differences are theological, not scientific. It's important to stress how (surprisingly) unique the Israelites' monotheism was among every other ANE culture; supporting this monotheism was arguably one of the main points of the Genesis account.

Another point is that the "narrative" portions of the OT aren't so much history as they are historiography. They were not written primarily to document what happened, where, when, how, etc. as we expect today, but to reinterpret history (even mythological history) to make some point. The important thing in these accounts is not so much what happened, but what it means. This was just how history was done back then. For other ANE cultures, this point was usually the legitimacy of the reigning king, who was thought to be the earthly representative of the gods. For the Old Testament, which often portrayed kings in harsh or negative lights, the point was to legitimate their God as supremely worthy of worship and His covenant with them. It's still hard for me to get my head around, but ANE cultures simply weren't as concerned with events as they were with outcomes; they valued interpreting the past more than simply documenting it. Another interesting point is that whereas other ANE cultures felt it was their sacred duty to interpret events to learn what they "meant" as divine revelation, the Israelites considered not only considered historical events but also their interpretations (e.g. through the prophets) to be revealed by God.

In light of all of this, many of the ways modern Christians approach the Old Testament start to seem like impositions of modern ways of thinking and analyzing that simply did not exist when it was written. If we expect such an ancient document to conform to modern ideas of journalistic rigor, science, and ethics, we will try to make it into something it is not and misread it. The first step in understanding the Old Testament is not asking, "What does this mean to me?" but "What did this mean to its original audience?" Remembering that the point of these accounts was not so much the events as the meaning of the outcome and how it interprets the present, we can imagine how the creation account would have resonated with a premodern reader and share in their appreciation of what it says about God, even if we don't share their view of the cosmos. This freedom from having to fit everything the Bible says with what I personally know about the world is transforming how I read the Bible (definitely for the better).

Adam was not a historical, flesh-and-blood individual.

Here is the real kicker. I was convinced of this point by Peter Enns' book, The Evolution of Adam, which was instrumental in addressing so many of the conflicts and doubt I'd been having surrounding the Bible. If we don't believe in the Hebrew view of the cosmos as depicted above (which I assume we don't), and if we accept that language like the sun "standing still" in Joshua 10 reflect this view, which we now hold to be incorrect, if we believe that Genesis 1-3 is a ANE creation myth written in this ancient worldview and a theological statement of definition for the Israelites and their God, in light of what we now know about human origins there is no reason to continue arguing that Adam was a historical person, especially if in the process we lose sight of Adam's theological significance in Genesis. To say that because of his depiction in Genesis to and by the Hebrews as a real person, we also need to argue today that he was, is to miss the point of all the cultural contextualizing I did above. Do we try to believe the world is flat because the Hebrews did?

I think the reason that Christians today who already don't hold to a literal, scientific view of Genesis (as I previously didn't) still hold to belief in a historical Adam is not because of their hermeneutic in reading Genesis, but for theological reasons and what the New Testament says about Adam, which I will get to below. It's also worth noting that after Genesis, there is no other mention of Adam in the Old Testament except in the beginning of 1 Chronicles in a genealogy. I'll also investigate that below.

The theory of evolution is probably true as described by modern science, and describes how God created life on earth as it is today through our modern system for describing the cosmos.

I say "probably" only because the theory of evolution is not complete and could be wrong on some points, not because I still hold out hope that it might be wrong wholesale. If we realize Genesis 1's status as a true ANE creation myth (theologically, not literally/historically true), the remaining obstacles (besides the ones laid out below) to reconciling evolution with the Bible evaporate. Evolution describes a process occurring in a sphere of events completely different from the one Genesis 1 concerns itself with and is defined in terms of a different, scientific view of the cosmos. Trying to modify evolution to fit into the ancient worldview of Genesis 1-2 or trying to reinterpret the text to speak to modern scientific questions is wrong because it ignores the significance of this difference. The challenge is affirming that the Israelites interpreted Genesis 1 literally (from their perspective) while acknowledging that the cosmology in which the book was written has been shown to be inaccurate. We need to go beyond what Genesis 1 actually says (which is different to us than to the ancient Israelites) to what it meant to its original audience, we can begin to transfer its significance to the present day.

Beyond the case I just laid out, you probably have some other objections to such a nonliteral (from our perspective) treatment of the Genesis creation story; I know I did. Here are some of the big ones I worked through:

What about the inclusion of Adam in Luke's genealogy of Christ? Is there some dividing line where the names stop being mythological and become historical people?

First, to be fair, the genealogy in 1 Chronicles 1 also includes Adam (his name is, in fact, the first word of the book). In both of these cases, these genealogies are more theological than historical, serving as statements of origin or (for 1 Chronicles) self-definition like Genesis. (They most likely lifted the immediate lineage of Adam directly from the tradition in Genesis) Since these genealogies touch on the same basic issue, I'm only going to worry about the Luke one. It has led me to do a comparison between it and the genealogy in Matthew 1, which yielded some interesting results.

The biggest one is, of course, that the lists of names are largely different (see my previous post, point 10). Matthew also doesn't extend back to Adam, only to Abraham. Though the lineage from Abraham to David is agreed upon (because it was already "canonized" in Genesis and Ruth), the Matthew and Luke genealogies diverge after David, coming together again with Shealtiel and Zerubbabel, then diverging again until Joseph. Apparently some manuscripts of Luke also insert two extra ancestors in the genealogy of David. What's also interesting is that the genealogies wildly disagree on the number of generations--in Matthew there are 16 generations (inclusive) from David to Shealtiel and 11 from Zerubbabel to Joseph; in Luke, there are 22 from David to Shealtiel and 20 from Zerubbabel to Joseph, the latter being almost twice as many. Also interestingly, the Luke genealogy has some familiar names--Joseph, Judah, Simeon, and Levi, all in a row as fathers rather than brothers. While the fathers of these men may have just been feeling nostalgic, it might also reflect a Jewish tradition.

It's important to be aware of our western tendency to always try to figure out "What exactly, really happened?" from accounts that may not be trying to answer that question. The important thing about both genealogies is that they both depict Jesus as a descendant of David, giving legitimacy to His role as the "king of the Jews". And the fact that the genealogies differ so widely indicates that their intention was not to document Jesus' exact family tree with thorough research and cross-referencing, but to make some other point--most importantly that Jesus is from the line of David. I can't claim to know how exactly the Israelites would really have tracked their ancestry (probably a largely oral process) or where the differing genealogies come from, but it no longer bothers me.

Paul uses Adam as a historical figure in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. Doesn't this settle the debate?

Well, for starters, as we stated above, the Old Testament's apparent use of Adam as a historical (for the Israelites) figure (like its use of the sky as a solid dome) doesn't obligate us to believe it today, so why should Paul's? But, of course, the real issue is that Paul doesn't just mention Adam but bases a theological argument on his understanding of Adam. Does our new understanding of Adam then invalidate Paul's point about original sin?

I don't think so, though it does change how we approach it. The first step of this is to reconstruct Paul's argument, as he understood it. Paul's (and other apostles') use of the Old Testament was quite different from how modern scholars approach it, as I explained in a previous post. I notice, however, that I didn't actually give any examples of Paul himself creatively using the OT, so I'll give one here. Romans 11:26-27 reads:

“The deliverer will come from Zion; he will turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.”

And Isaiah 59:20, which he is citing, says:

"The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins," declares the LORD.

Even accepting that Paul may have been using a different version of the OT than we have, there are some big differences between these. In Isaiah, the redeemer comes to Zion; in Romans, he comes from Zion. But more likely is that Paul was trying, in light of his knowledge of Christ, to make a new theological point by "adjusting" the text. It sounds dishonest today, but again, no one would have minded this kind of creative hermeneutics in Paul's time.

One more example to establish the ultimate precedent for the first-century usage of the OT: Jesus Himself in Matthew 22:23-33.

That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?”
Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”
When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.

The thing I want to draw attention to in this text is that to us, Jesus' argument makes absolutely no sense. Who today would read Exodus 3:6 and conclude from it that God would one day raise the dead imperishable and celibate, or claim that Moses immediately understood this? And yet, Jesus' (from our perspective) insane troll logic has its desired effect and silences the Sadducees.

Anyway, back to Paul. As I mentioned above, the OT's only mention of Adam outside of Genesis is in the genealogy in 1 Chronicles. Nowhere does it ever connect the Israelites' acts of disobedience with Adam's sin, as Paul does. This fits with how we have seen that the reality of Christ is big enough to Paul for him to radically reinterpret the scriptures around it. Let's look at Paul's argument in Romans 5:12-21.

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.
But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

It begins, of course, with a "therefore" (possibly Paul's favorite word), so we have to look back at the preceding text for some context. He was just exulting in the fact that Jesus has reconciled us to God by dying for us while we were still sinners and enemies to God. "Therefore," Paul says, "just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned." Paul's point here is not to argue for Adam as a historical person. He is using his understanding of Adam as a historical person in the Genesis 3 account to begin to draw a parallel with Christ's monumental act of righteousness. However, he then begins a tangent mid-verse and doesn't finish his thought until verse 18: "Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men." In Paul's "christotelic" interpretation of Genesis, Adam represents the great problem to which the gospel is the ultimate solution. If Jesus is the hammer, then Adam is the corresponding nail.

Paul is comparing and contrasting his understanding of Adam as the original sinner with Christ as the original savior. Just as in Adam's sin we all die, through Christ's righteousness we are all made alive. But obviously we can't somehow inherit sinfulness (let alone guilt) from someone who didn't exist. But once we've understood Paul's argument, our modern knowledge of Adam changes Paul's train of thought surprisingly little. Just as writers will freely make allusions to myths they don't believe as historical fact, so our understanding of Adam as the archetypal sinner need not be affected by his historical status. Enns says this in The Evolution of Adam:

By leaving behind Paul's Adam as not the historical first man, we are leaving behind Paul's understanding of the cause of the universal plight of sin and death. ... Admitting the historical and scientific problems with Paul's Adam does not mean in the least that the gospel message is therefore undermined. A literal Adam may not be the first man and cause of sin and death, as Paul understood it, but what remains of Paul's theology are the three core elements of the gospel:

1. The universal and self-evident problem of death
2. The universal and self-evident problem of sin
3. The historical event of the death and resurrection of Christ

In other words, Paul's understanding of Adam only serves as an explanation of the origin of our sinful nature, not as a support for our knowledge of sin in the present day. And we can still view Adam's act of disobedience as a kind of "prototype" for our own sin today. Remember that this question does not affect the Christian doctrine that people are innately sinful--the Bible and experience confirm this beyond all doubt, even if it doesn't tell us here why it is so.

One other answer to a possible objection: Paul is definitely treating Christ as a historical figure here, and so should we. The story of Adam is set in primordial time, filtered through hundreds of thousands of years of oral tradition, but the story of Christ happened in Paul's time, as historical to him as the fall of the Soviet Union is to us. (Though not as heavily documented at the time) Let me be clear: at no point in this discussion is the historical nature of Jesus in question. He came, He taught, he died, and he rose again.

Where did sin and death come from if not from a historical Adam? Did God create them?

This is the question that kept me from wholeheartedly embracing evolution for a long time. Evolution necessarily means that living organisms have been living, competing, and dying on earth for billions of years, long before Adam and Eve were around to bring sin into the world. How do you explain the existence of death in the world before sin? Does this mean that God created death, which is supposed to be His enemy? (1 Corinthians 15:26)

Disclaimer: My level of confidence for this question is much lower (around 25%) than it has been up to this point.

First, the Old Testament evidence:

Let's go over the commonly accepted narrative of the "Fall": God created the world perfect, putting two sinless humans in the garden to tend it. Because of their act of sin, God curses the man with toil and death, the women with pain in childbirth and strife with her husband, and the serpent to eat dust and be in enmity with the man. Also, somehow or other the rest of creation is cursed; there are now disease, aging, and natural disasters that bring death and suffering to every creature.

The problem with this narrative is that nowhere, nowhere in the Bible is the "fall" claimed as the reason for anything other than human sinfulness and death and the other things in the curse. There is no clear reason why human sin should also bring about the death of animals, except possibly that the "image of God" put on earth to exercise dominion over them has been tarnished. This is a stretch. If the Hebrews did have a myth for why everything dies, I don't think this is it; death seems to be more assumed (and explained in terms of God's creation of man) than introduced here. And, of course, if you do take this account literally as the reason for physical death, it only answers half of the question: why do women die? And why do they also return to dust rather than to ribs? It's just hard for me to read the text in such an explanatory way, at least in the modern sense.

There is also a strong hint that the garden wasn't meant to be seen as "perfect" as we often think of it: the talking, lying snake that tricks Adam and Eve into sinning in the first place. How did it get there? (Also recall that Genesis 3 doesn't specifically identify it with Satan; that is inferred by harmonizing interpreters) The snake's level of culpability in the fall is debatable, but it is strongly implied to be responsible for it. If the snake really is Satan or some other agent of evil, is it possible the reason for the world being imperfect is found outside humanity?

I don't think the Genesis account was written to answer broad questions about the human race; it was written by Israel, (originally) for Israel. One of the most likely theories I've heard about its role in their tradition was that Adam was a metaphor for the Israelites; his fall from the paradisaical garden paralleled the Israelites' exile from the promised land, making Genesis 3 a kind of proto-exile story paralleling Israel's history. (The Pentateuch's being fully compiled around or after the time of the exile makes this especially plausible) Again, recall that narrative works in the ANE weren't as concerned with what happened as with what it means--in this case, to the postexilic Jewish people about themselves and their God. Paul recontextualizes the Old Testament in light of the work of Christ, which was universal, for Jew and gentile, and so he also applies his interpretation of Adam to everyone.

And the New Testament:

Recall from above that basically the whole Protestant doctrine of original sin rests on Paul's writings in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, especially in Romans. I am now convinced that the "death" Paul writes about in relation to sin throughout Romans is not physical, but spiritual in nature--death as alienation and separation from God because of sin, and therefore receiving "death" instead of the the true life that is found in Him. Of the 20 uses of the Greek word for "death", θανατος ("thanatos"), in Romans, three refer to Christ's sacrificial death (and it is the spiritual, not physical, dimension of Christ's death that Paul makes much of) and the rest are either ambiguous in nature or definitely used in a spiritual sense (especially in Romans 7--e.g. in v. 9-10, Paul was not physically killed by the law). This understanding allows Paul's writing about sin and death in the present or past tense to make more sense--you aren't just going to die because of sin, if you are in sin you are currently dead or dying, in Paul's usage.

In fact, I think that attaching physical connotations to Paul's writing about the relationship between sin and death raises many unnecessary questions and problems. It is undeniable that Paul draws a strong, causal relationship between sin and death throughout the first half of Romans. (5:12, 5:21, 6:23, 7:9, 7:24, 8:2, 8:13, to name a few). The one I will concern myself with, however, is the one that seems to argue the most clearly for a causal relationship between sin and physical death, Romans 8:10: "But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness."

Context is, as they say, king, so let's look at the immediate context of this verse. Chapter 8 begins with "there is therefore...", "therefore" being Paul's way of linking his argument with what came before. Chapter 7 before it is, of course, the famous tongue-twisting "I do not do what I want to do" section where Paul expresses genuine angst over his still-extant sinful nature, the law of sin, that wages war in his members against the law of his mind. Having recently read Plato's Republic, I can't help but draw some parallels here with Plato's elevation of the transcendent, rational mind above the "spirit" (passions and emotions) and base desires which are associated with the physical body. Of course Paul doesn't think the mind is perfectly spiritual and unfallen (in Romans 12:2 it needs  "renewing"), but he seems to closely associate it with the "inner being" (7:22) that delights in God, not sin, desires to do what is right, and wars against the flesh. This reflects how, for Christians, sin and disobedience are most often unconscious, "in hiding", while our faith and desire for God are very conscious and intentional.

Anyway, in verse 24 Paul laments: "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" The word for "body" here, σωμα ("soma"), is the same as the one used in 8:10. This lament comes from the situation described in the previous three verses: "So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members." "Members" here, meaning the parts of the body, is also used to mean the parts of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12. It doesn't seem like Paul is using the word to mean the actual, physical organs of the body, but the faculties of his being that are still sinful (or possibly that he didn't draw a distinction between them as we do today; the heart was considered to be the center of human thought in Paul's time). The mental image I get is that the kingdom of God is planted in Paul like a seed (Matthew 13:31-32), growing outward (from the heart, thought by the Greeks to be the center of human thought and personality) and encompassing more and more of his person, pushing his unredeemed, sinful "members" outward.

Of course Paul is not saying that his arms, legs, eyes, ears, etc. are causing him to sin, just as Jesus wasn't in Matthew 5:29-30. He uses "members" in a more abstract sense to simply mean his unregenerate side. This, I think, is what he is getting at when he says "body of death" in v24: sin is like a cage that keeps him from loving God and turning from sin as his "inner man" desires. Then v25 serves as a summary: "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin." So Paul doesn't think that sin is some kind of physical phenomenon that is caused by an innately sinful physical body, but he doesn't seem to differentiate between them as strongly as we might think--the very fact that he uses "flesh" as a synonym for "sinful nature" is telling here.

Turning back to chapter 8, we see that Paul isn't necessarily referring to the physical body in verse 10--not exclusively, anyway. I think he is closely paralleling the moribund nature of our bodies with the deadness of our as-yet-unredeemed selves due to sin, and that this parallel is largely based on the culture he's from. Again, in the previous nine verses leading up to 8:10, he is talking about (inner) life by the Spirit and (inner) death in sin and the flesh. For Paul to switch from speaking of spiritual realities to biological applications so abruptly would be unusual, to say the least. Maybe, in his ancient understanding of the body, Paul also believed that physical death was due to sin, but in any case it isn't his main point. So then, again, in the next verse he can promise: "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you." The point is not just that we're going to live after dying (because then Jesus' resurrection of Lazarus would have been enough): it's that God is doing to utterly destroy the forces of sin and death at work in our "bodies".

Paul's specific theology aside, breaking the association between sin and physical death also clears up some other incongruities, such as:

• The identical (or near-identical) nature of human aging and death with that of other animals, who (presumably) don't sin.
• The lack of an observed causal relationship between sin and physical death the way we see one between sin and spiritual death as separation from God--whereas sin does definitely damage or even destroy our relationship with God, in general we see no such relationship with sin causing or hastening physical death. (Which Qoholeth laments several times in Ecclesiastes)
• The fact that people who are in Christ still (physically) die at all if their sin has been taken away. Does this mean Christ's death and resurrection were somehow less than perfectly effective for them? The NT often uses the phrase "fell asleep" to refer to this, which I don't think is just a euphemism--they saw physical death as less real than the death they were saved from.

So after all that, why, again, is there sin and death in the world? I'm not sure that the Bible gives a definitive answer to this question, or even that it's the right question. Our primary gospel concern is not the brokenness of the world (God has promised to deal with that) but our own sin, and Paul's Adam narrative still very much works on the personal level, using Adam's sin as the prototypical example of our own and rebellion. One thing I would say strongly is that we can't simply argue, as Alvin Plantinga seems to imply, that sin/moral evil is merely an inevitable consequence of free will, because this would mean the sin-free paradise depicted in Revelation is also free of free will--hardly something to look forward to! My best guess at this point, extrapolating from the Genesis 3 narrative, is that our sinful nature (but not our individual sins) is the result of external influence--the "serpent" in Genesis; call it the devil if you wish. I'm already too far out on a limb and I won't explore this explanation any further.

Why things aren't the way they "should" be is a hard question for any belief system. Obviously, I don't, and no one else does either, have any idea why God, being somehow in control of all things, chose (in some predeterminative sense) to have things happen the way they did. But from His perspective, history seems to have a definite direction and an ultimate destination, and it is in this that we place our hope--that regardless of where sin came from in the world or in ourselves, that Christ is the ultimate Answer.

A few acknowledgements: I am beholden to several books for this shift in my thinking about Genesis and my larger realization of the glaring need to read the Bible in its cultural context. I'll recommend them here.

As I mentioned in my sola scriptura post, Peter Enns has become possibly my favorite theologian, at least for Old Testament hermeneutics. The then-new for me, culturally conditioned way of reading scripture that he introduced came at the perfect time as the answer to my multiplying doubts. I have two of his books, but they share a lot of the same line of thinking so getting both isn't terribly necessary. Inspiration and Incarnation deals more broadly with interpretive challenges when reading the Old Testament and his view of the Bible as an "incarnational" (both divine and human, like Jesus) text; The Evolution of Adam focuses on the creation of Adam and Paul's use of Adam in the NT, and provided some of the basic framework for my argument here.

John Walton is another Old Testament scholar with somewhat more "mainstream" views on Adam, but with a huge knowledge of the cultural and historical background of the OT. The Lost World of Genesis One presents (surprisingly plausibly) his hypothesis that Genesis 1 is a kind of "cosmic inauguration" account depicting God creating the cosmos as His earthly temple and then taking up residence in it. Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament is more satisfyingly academic in tone, more like a textbook with an amazingly broad and deep overview of the thought world of the ancient Near East and frequent comparisons between ancient civilizations like Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Babylon with Israel.

This is the book I most recently read and it might be my highest recommendation of all of them. Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes goes over myriad ways that our western thought patterns and biases, many of which are below the level of conscious thought, with many examples from one of the authors' time as a missionary in Indonesia. The lessons in these pages may not overturn any major doctrine, but they will help you gain a richer understanding of the Bible and may answer some questions of "Why is THAT in there?" that you've had but never voiced.

Examining Sola Fide

The contrast between Paul and James' theologies of salvation have long been the source of much confusion for Christians and ridicule for non-Christians. For Paul writes "For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law" (Romans 3:28) while James writes "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone" (James 2:24). Well, who is right--James or Paul? Are we justified by faith alone, or by faith and works? Even if they won't admit it, I think most Protestants would say (or act like) Paul is right. Sole fide? (I didn't intend to go through a series on the five sola's, but I might do so now that I'm going)

This is partly a response to the latest post in Peter Enns' blog (which shows his talent for inflammatory post titles to draw you in), "Why I Don't Believe In God Anymore". He asserts that our word "believe" has become inadequate, concerned with orthodoxy and creeds over real relationship, and that "trust" is closer to how the Bible says we are to believe. Trust, it turns out, is much more difficult and scary than belief.

I think Enns hits the nail on the head. My church uses the phrase "intellectual assent" to describe this kind of empty, powerless belief: you know and wholeheartedly believe the doctrine of the trinity, the doctrine of the atonement, the doctrine of supra, infra, or sub-lapsarianism, but that's all. Your faith is agreement with doctrine, but nothing more. It does't change how you live; there is no trust involved, only easy, safe belief.

This is exactly the difference that James repeatedly addresses in his letter. He says that doing the word should come naturally from hearing it: "But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves." (1:22) And he unpacks this more in 2:14-26:

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.

James makes clear his case that Christianity is not just a set of "beliefs"; it must lead to good works to be true, otherwise it is "dead". He uses "faith" to mean these beliefs and "works" for the change that they must result in.

What, then do we do with Paul, who writes, "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9)? For just as much as James argues that faith and works are inseparable, Paul tells us that they are incompatible:

• For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law. (Romans 3:28)
• Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. (Romans 9:32)
• Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? (Galatians 3:2)

In short, Paul and James are addressing different issues and drawing two different distinctions. The "faith" Paul espouses is the same thing as James' "faith that leads to works" package. The "works" Paul is referring to constitute legalism, trying to self-righteously justify oneself to God by following the law instead of trusting. If, like I might have six months ago, you ask, "Well, then why doesn't the text say that?", James is not Paul.

Another image my pastor (semi) frequently uses is that of riding a bicycle on an icy road, trying not to fall to either side. On one side is legalism, and on the other is licentiousness, or (to use the theological term) antinomianism. The tension between Paul and James is similar. The center of the road is this faith-as-trust-that-leads-to-good-works. One ditch is legalism, "justification by works", trying to work your way up to what God offers to feel all good and self-righteous. The other ditch is the empty, "dead" faith James warns against that passes all the creedal litmus tests with flying colors but doesn't live any differently. If we are only concerned with avoiding one extreme (as Christians who overly focus on Paul may be and as sola fide states), we will swerve towards the other.