A GOD WHO LOVES WHAT'S REAL
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Marti Steussy

February 22, 2009

What do we say on Evolution Sunday?  Some in this city would doubtless say that belief in evolution is totally incompatible with Christianity.  I don't think that.  Perhaps others will celebrate the “new physics,” as if it resolved all tensions between science and religion, although I think that's more than any physics can deliver.  For me the interesting question is, “if we do accept evolutionary theory, which aspects of our own Christian traditions get highlighted?”  And my answer will be that evolution can help us notice the possibility that God is experimental, relational, and doesn't necessarily determine all answers in advance.

Classical Christian theology has mostly described God using Greek philosophy's terms of perfection: all-knowing, all-powerful, never-changing and therefore unfeeling, [1] although people in the pews have never particularly accepted that last piece of the classical formulation!  Unfortunately, when creationists try to explain the evidence for evolution with reference to this God who absolutely controls the universe and has an absolute plan for it, they end up describing an ego-obsessed trickster who arranges for fossils in the rocks just to test how blind our faith can be.

Evolutionary theory by itself, of course, does not require a God at all, and it suggests that there's never been a golden age of perfection.  Instead of the world being produced according to a prearranged perfect plan, it says, life has groped its way haphazardly up from the slime, and as long as there has been life there has also been death.  Nor does evoluation guarantee that we will ever reach perfection.  Instead, we are always on the way, always working with old biological equipment that is not perfectly adapted to present environments.  If we are going to suppose that there's a God involved with all this, the best fit would be an experimental God, a God who didn't have everything predetermined but was willing to try things and see how they worked out.

Interestingly, that's a lot like what we've got in the Genesis creation stories.  Let me say first that I don't think they were ever meant to be read as literal historical accounts of the creation of the universe or humankind.  And the reason I think that is that we actually have two creation stories in Genesis, side by side, and with respect to literal details they don't agree with each other.  In Genesis 1 humans are created on the sixth day.  Genesis 2 says the first human is created “on the day that Yahweh God formed the earth and sky,” which would be the first or second day, not the sixth.  In Genesis 1 plants are created before animals and animals before humans, who are created simultaneously male and female.  In Genesis 2 a human is created first, then plants, then animals, and then the division into male and female. [2]   In Genesis 1 humans are created by word, in Genesis 2 God shapes them from clay.  The interesting thing is that these conflicting stories have been left to stand side by side—although it's also interesting how we usually manage not to notice it.  When we expect a unified story, that's what we see, regardless of what is in front of us!

I don't think the discrepancies mean that whoever put Genesis together was stupid.  I do think it means that the author understood these stories as legends or parables, because when you're dealing with those you don't require that they all describe a thing in the same way.  And if the composers of Genesis understood these as parables, it's wrong-headed for us to read them as factual history. 

So I'm not going to bother to say that Genesis 1 tells approximately the same story as science, only with God's days being a lot longer than our own.  It doesn't tell the same story as science.  It does have water and earth before plants before animals, just as the evolutionary hypothesis does.  But in Genesis 1, plants come even before the sun and stars, and the sky is a beaten metal dome. [3]   These details don't mesh with scientific reconstructions.  But I'm OK with that, since as I've said, I don't think we're even supposed to read this as literal history.  Instead we have two symbolic stories that highlight different aspects of God, the universe, and humankind.  If you look elsewhere in the Bible, for instance to Proverbs or Psalms, you can find even more different stories about how creation happened.

I've said that Christian theology has usually portrayed God as a master architect, who has all the blueprints completed before the first brick is laid.  But actually, both Genesis stories show God more as a tinkerer.  In Genesis 1, God makes things, then steps back and assesses them like an artist stepping back from the canvas to look over a not-yet-finished painting.  “Ah, that's good!” [4]   But not good enough.  After judging that what has been made is good, God goes on to adjust it a bit—a sky here, some oceans there, how about some fish—and pauses again to see how the picture is coming along.  God even, repeatedly, invites creatures to participate in the creation process: the earth puts forth vegetation, the waters put forth swarming fish, lights in the sky govern seasons and humans govern the animals.

As pictured in Genesis 1, the process goes along without a hitch until the climactic moment when God says, “yes, very good!”  In Genesis 2, the experimental aspect is even more striking, because not everything goes right.  The process gets off to a good start: God has an orchard, water for it, and a human to take care of it.  God has even arranged food for the human to eat.  But when God then pauses to look things over, the answer is not, as in Genesis 1, “good!”  In Genesis 2, God looks at the orchard and the human and says, “ not good ”!  “It is not good for the human to be alone.”

So God sets about making a companion for the human creature.  And if we read without the presupposition that God must have perfect foreknowledge, must have everything figured out in advance, what happens next is almost comical.  God makes an animal and brings it to the human to see what the human will say.  Then another animal, and another, all the domestic animals and all the wild animals and all the birds of the air, and the human keeps saying, “not that one.”  If we hadn't already decided otherwise, we might think God expects the human to choose one of these animals as its partner.  Indeed, if we hadn't already decided otherwise, we might think that God brings the animals to the humans for evaluation because God doesn't know for sure what the human wants!  If we hadn't already decided otherwise, we might even think God is trying to come up with the right partner and not getting it right!

Eventually, of course, the human declares that God has got it right. 

This, at last! this one, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,

This one will be called woman, because from man she was taken!

How interesting, that in this story it's the human who finally declares God's efforts very good!

That's not the end of the surprises for God, of course.  The humans do not obey the rule God has given them, and God punishes their disobedience.  Whether or not you take this as literal history (and I don't), the picture of God sits uneasily with our usual assumptions.  For many centuries theologians have asked, didn't God know they would disobey?  Why didn't God design the human to be more obedient?  Some are so sure that God is in control that they think God meant for the humans to eat the fruit.  After all, doesn't God want us to know about good and evil?  Or maybe this was all part of the preparation for Jesus?

There's another possibility, of course.  Could be that God was taken by surprise.  Could be that God, like most of us parents, didn't know how what the children were going to do.  Could be that God, like us, has to figure it out on the fly sometimes. 

When God forbade the fruit, God said, “in the day you eat of it, you die,” but this doesn't happen.  People often try to smooth this over by saying that at the moment of disobedience the humans became mortal, but that's not what “on the day you do it, you die” usually means in Hebrew, and in fact the story never says that they were immortal to begin with. [5]   Since this is not the only biblical story in which God changes God's mind, [6] I'm inclined to think that what we're seeing is simply God's willingness to forgive.  And for sure, now that the humans know they are naked, God makes them some real clothes.  One way or another, God is determined to work things out with these wayward children.

There are, of course, other ways to read the Bible.  As we might expect from a book whose first two chapters give us two different creation stories, the Bible offers us multiple viewpoints, and there certainly are passages that speak of God as unchanging.  Some may really mean that God plans every detail in advance.  Others may simply be saying that God's goals for us are unchanging, without implying that God controls or foreknows every detail about how we will get there.  Plenty of other stories suggest that God learns as God goes along, such as the scene on the mountain with the knife at Isaac's throat, when God tells Abraham, “don't do anything to him, for now I know that you will not withhold your son” (Gen 22:12).

A flexible, improvisational artist kind of God fits better with the story of evolution than does the image of a God as all-controlling architect.  But where does that leave us as humans?  Genesis 1 and 2 both recognize, as evolutionary thought does, our close relationship to the other land animals.  But each also recognizes that humans have a disproportionate impact on the other living creatures of the world.  Genesis 1 is optimistic, with the creation of humans being the final step that renders the world “very good.”  Genesis 2 is more pessimistic, recognizing that we can bring curse upon one another and the earth.  Each story has a truth to tell.  Science likewise sees both sides of us, and it cannot tell us whether the positive possibilities of humans or their destructiveness will have the final word.

Although human beings are often described as the peak of evolution or even its goal, that kind of language steps way past the proper boundaries of science.  We have not yet even shown that we are a survivable species.  If we are not, who knows what new and perhaps better successor may emerge?  In the meantime, I would hope the idea of a flexible God, figuring things out with us as we go along, would help us be a bit less judgmental and a bit more compassionate towards one another and the rest of creation.  Not only are we not perfect, but we never have been.  Not only are we not perfect, but maybe “perfect” isn't even the right concept by which to judge creatures in process.  We are so very eager to put things in nice clean well-defined categories, but biology doesn't work that way. 

It has not only shades of gray but all kinds of colors as well.

In an evolutionary world, we have to make do with what we've got.  If we can't sort things out perfectly, it might be because perfect solutions don't exist.  But God has, from the beginning, been willing to work with the imperfect and the incomplete.  God even seems to take delight in the surprises that emerge from an unfinished, evolving system.  And if God didn't have everything figured out from the start, than we can't expect that past revelation will answer all question.  We need to stay in conversation with God.

What evolutionary theory cannot promise us, but Christianity does, is that whatever happens, we are held in a love that will not let us go.  That doesn't make death or suffering go away, we know that.  But it does assure us that we do not face them alone.  

Footnotes

[1] They felt an unchanging God must also be unfeeling, because feeling involves being affected by something/something else and therefore changing.

[2] Some English translations fudge a bit to cover over the discrepancies between the stories.  The New International Version (NIV), for instance, translates “in the day” as “when” in Gen 2:4, and says “had planted” rather than “planted” in 2:8.

[3] The word used for “dome” comes from the blacksmithing verb used in verses such as Ex 39:3, Isa 40:19, and Num 17:4, notice also the imagery (using this verb) in Job 37:18.

[4] Hebrew: tov, it overlaps with the English words beautiful and delightful as well as “good.”

[5] The idea that humans were created immortal receives its first clear biblical statement in an apocryphal book, the Wisdom of Solomon, which says in 2:23 -24 that “God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil's envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.”  The New Testament writers appear to have been familiar with this book, and that may be why they speak of Adam having brought death into the world (and also why they suppose that the snake of Gen 3 was “the devil,” something never suggested in Genesis itself).  Their understanding of the orchard story differs in several ways from what Genesis presents if we take Genesis on its own terms.

[6] See for instance the clear statements in 1 Sam 15:11 and 35, and notice the contradiction between their assertion that God has changed God's mind about Saul, and the prophet Samuel's statement in verse 29 of the same chapter that God doesn't change mind!  (All three verses, 11, 29, and 39, use the exact same Hebrew word for repenting/being sorry/changing one's mind.)