The following is a modified transcript from the audio teaching series by Ken Boa. This is from the leadership series on the subject of quality and excellence.

In our leadership series I want to talk about the theme of quality and excellence. Excellence is often a skill development area we hear a lot about but I want to think of excellence as a destination as it is a process that we learn and seek to continually improve. You don’t just sit there. It becomes a continual ongoing movement further up and higher in toward a process of greater and greater excellence.

I think it’s illustrated well in Colossians 3: 23-24. Excellence will depend upon the audience to whom you play in a very real way. In Colossians 3:23 Paul says’ “Whatever you do work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord. Whatever you do work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord not for men since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” So he’s saying here, whatever you do, do it with your heart as working for the Lord not for men. You’re going to receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Verse 25 speaks about anyone who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong. There is no favoritism. Then he talks about the masters who provide for their slaves what is right and fair because they also have a Master in heaven. The point here is that whatever you do, do it with a conscious awareness of the presence of the Lord in your life. Your best effort is given because there’s never a circumstance in which the One you follow is not with you urging you on. There’s an awareness then of Christ’s presence. An on going awareness of the fact that the motive of pursuing Him should drive us to a better thing that we would do simply to impress or please men.

I think I’ve given this illustration on a couple of occasions but it bears repeating. The illustration of when I went to England for the first time in 1984. We visited West Minister Abbey and they had removed the statues from the chancel to clean them. This was the first time they had been moved for cleaning after many hundreds of years. They discovered their backsides were carved as well and as intricately as the front side. That’s a rather stunning idea. Now why did they do that? They knew that once they were put in place no human eye would see them but they also knew that God would see them since they were doing is as unto the Lord not to impress people. They saw their work then, and this is a key principle for you and me, they saw their work as worship. What they were doing with their hands was worship to God. You’ve heard the phrase whistle while you work. Worshipping is another matter entirely. I think we can look at it that way, work, if done for the King and in the presence of Christ, is done with excellence to be pleasing to Him rather than to impress people. That work then becomes worship.

In a very real way there’s this level of skill that you want to develop and cultivate, a level of excellence. You’re pursuing quality and excellence in your work because you’re playing to the right Audience. It’s a very simple principle but this is a principle that transmutes the secular into the sacred. That’s the alchemy of grace. It has a way of transmuting what appears to be secular into something spiritual because the focus of our hearts is what makes it spiritual. The focus of my heart could this day be pleasing to Jesus.

There’s a good prayer to offer at the beginning of the day. It’d be an interesting thing to have a little card or reminder and as you sit down at your desk at the beginning of the day you’d have a little prayer: “ Lord, I’d like to be pleasing to You today. My desire is to be more pleasing to You than to impress people.” You cannot, as you know, seek to please Christ and at the same time seek to impress people. You can’t do them at the same time. You’ll either minister or manipulate. If you’re seeking to impress people you’ll be kind of committed to manipulating them. But if you seek to be pleasing to Christ and serve people you’ll be on to something. You’re onto worship because you’re not only honoring Christ but you’re also manifesting that honor by serving people. The two connect well together.

When you do your work with excellence, diligence and care then it means that you are doing it as unto the King. You’re looking to Him ultimately for the reward rather than to others. I like the idea of turning the day into that. This day Lord may I seek, may it be my intention to be pleasing to you in the work of my hands. It reminds me of Psalm 90: 17. The last verse where they cry out; “Establish, O God, the work of our hands. Give permanence to the work of our hands.” May I suggest that though all the works of men will perish on this planet, (Peter 3:10 says; “The earth and it’s works will be burned up.”), there is something that we can do even the work of our hands that will persevere if that work of our hands is done with the purpose of building into people and serving and honoring Christ. That will endure. There’s an enduring consequence even though all that we build and create will perish yet the focus of our heart to be pleasing to Christ and serving others will be something that will endure. It gives us something of significance that will last. That’s an important concept.

I’m inviting you then to pray that prayer at the beginning of your workday. You know what will happen though? You’ll forget it in the course of the day but that’s all right. God is looking not for perfection but holy intention. You might have a little card reminding you that to be pleasing to Him would be a desire that you have, an intention. A.W. Tozer in the book, Pursuit of God, says it’s not perfection but holy intention that is pleasing to the heart of God. Intend what is pleasing to Him and then it’s pleasing to Him. He knows our frame. He’s mindful that we’re but dust. Nevertheless, He will take our intention and He will honor that intention. Then when we slip away and get back into selfish modes and we find ourselves going back into the old habits of manipulation and so forth, that’s okay, we might recall it to mind and return with that simple prayer. Don’t chide yourself but just pick back up and go from there.

After awhile, I believe you can actually begin to build the skill of practicing His presence in the course of your day. That would be a good thing to do. It’d be an interesting prayer to pray. This could be just like a little flash prayer before you pick up the phone to actually be praying for the person and even that conversation. Whatever it’s on, that it’d be pleasing to Him. What I’m suggesting is that this isn’t something that takes extra time but it’s a mindset that you can cultivate that would be honoring His presence in the course of events because you need to understand that conscious awareness of His presence is a realization that He is already there. He’s going to be present whether you are aware of it or not. He’s going to be watching. It’d be wise for you to orient your mind with reality. We’re not simply talking about losing ourselves but we’re talking about bringing ourselves into touch with what’s real in real work.

There are still some basic principles that would apply across the board whether you’re a believer or unbeliever. There are certain principles of excellence. The issue is to learn your craft and to become skillful at what you do. The only difference is this and even a brand new believer can understand this, who are you doing it for? Are you doing it to be pleasing to Him? A brand new believer, just like a kid who wants to please his daddy, can understand this principle. In fact there’s that simplicity of intention of coming to Him in a childlike sense of desiring to be simply pleasing to Him. We understand what that’s like. Has He made you good at something? Whatever it is, I think when you do it well you could feel God’s pleasure even though it may appear to be secular. You can feel God’s pleasure because what you’re doing is honoring Him in what you do. So if I’m here for a season, while I’m here I want to maximize that opportunity so that I can leverage that for eternal gain and move on from there.

Let’s move on to our next text, Hebrew 1: 1-4. I want to argue that we serve a God who’s committed to excellence and perfection in everything He does. That’s the reality. The fact is God saw all that He had made and what did He declare it at the end? It was good. It was good. It was good and finally it was very good. He left it well. He didn’t make us as we now are. We changed ourselves. We are now a distorted image of God. But it’s His intention to reverse that distortion and that devastation that was wrought by sin and to bring all things to a glorious consummation and to a new creation.

In Hebrews chapter 1 we have this portrait of how God is at work in the history of redemption where it says in the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways (Hebrews 1: 1). But in these last days, so he’s contrasting- how many ways did He speak in the Old Testament economy? - reveal Himself? How did He reveal Himself in the past? He revealed Himself through prophets, angels (angelic revelation and guidance), the burning bush; certain particular places that were holy like Bethel, dreams and visions, mighty acts of deliverance (10 signs given to Pharaoh, the Passover, the manna and the quail, the pillar of fire and the pillar of the cloud), and other sorts of ways.

The author of Hebrews goes on to say,” but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son.” In other words the highest form of revelation is personal revelation. Now God Himself comes down to us and takes upon Himself humanity and brings it up into heaven. As C. S. Lewis put it so well -the Son of God became the Son of Man so that the sons of men might become sons of God. He reaches down and takes humanity up into the Godhead and thus makes it possible now to communicate. So when Jesus is asked by Philip to show us the Father it is enough for us, (By the way that is an amazing prayer. It’s almost about the biggest thing you could ask for; just show me God the Father.) Jesus replies, “Have I not been with you so long Philip and yet you do not know the Father? To see Me is to see the Father” (John 14: 8-9). Remember to hear Him He said is to hear the Father’s word (John 14: 10-11). To believe in Him was to believe in the Father and to reject Him was to reject the Father (John 15:23). He says, I and the Father are one (John 10:30). It’s the identity in the tri-unity of God. He’s spoken to us by His Son whom He has appointed heir of all things and through whom He made the universe (Hebrews 1:2-3). The Father through Christ made the kosmos. He spoke it into being.

The Son, he goes on to say, is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being. He sustains all things by His powerful hand. After He provided purification for sins He sat down at the right hand of the majesty in heaven. So He became much superior to the angels as the name He has inherited is superior to theirs. Then he goes on to make a series of contrast that Christ is superior to the angels, to Moses, who offers a better rest than Joshua, He offers a better priesthood than Levi, a better covenant, a better sanctuary, a better sacrifice and the power to live a better life. Hebrews is filled with these contrasts.

The point of the book is why are you going back to revert to Judaism when now you have the substance. Don’t go back to the shadow when you have the substance. The problem here was that a lot of the Jewish believers were beginning to revert back into Judaism because they were fearful of the persecution they were going to be facing as followers of Jesus. That is why the book exhorts them.

Here’s my point though, Jesus illustrates the excellence of the Father, the beauty of the Father and the glory of the Father. So as we look at Jesus we see the excellence and radiance of the Father. In fact it’s speaking of Him when it says He does everything well. He’s done all things well (Mark 7:37). God is the blessed and only ruler, the King of kings and the Lord of lords who lives in unapproachable light whom no one has seen or can see. To Him be honor and might forever. God is worthy and great and worthy of our praise because of His splendor and His awesome works. I recommend Psalm 145. That is a great Psalm to meditate on God’s excellence. It’s a good thing to realize that all excellence again comes from the hand of God. He is the One who is the Author of excellence and in seeking to be skillful with your hands and create beauty and excellence and something that’s worthwhile, you are really imitating Him and you’re manifesting that.

Let’s move on then to the next passage, Malachi 1. I remember hearing these words from my father, “Do as I say and not as I do.” I still remember him saying that. I don’t remember what was happening but the lawn mower was there and my dad was bummed out about something. I was only about 7 years old and I said that doesn’t fly. But to do as I say and not as I do didn’t fly because obviously it’s one thing to speak about quality and it’s another thing entirely to pursue quality and excellence.

What we are going to be seeing here is the shoddiness of Israel’s worship as a result of externalism where they were more concerned about the appearance of surface things rather than the substance. They dishonored God by offering Him in the temple different kinds of blemished, inferior and indifferent sacrifices. Malachi 1: 6-8, “A son honors his father and a servant his master. Then if I am a father, where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is My respect?’ says The Lord of hosts to you, O priests who despise My name. But you say, ‘How have we despised Your name?’ “You are presenting defiled food upon my altar. But you say, ‘How have we defiled You?’ In that you say, ‘The table of the Lord is to be despised.’ “ But when you present the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? And when you present the lame and sick, is it not evil? Why not offer it to your governor? Would he be pleased with you? Or would he receive you kindly?” says the Lord of hosts.” Try offering the trash you offer God to a human being, a person in authority and see if that will fly! I say that is a marvelous portrait of a lot religiosity and a lot of shoddy mediocrity that goes on in the name of religion. It’s a result of the shoddiness of externalism and apathy. In my view it’s folly that we can suppose that we can get away with it because we don’t see Him. That’s a serious mistake.

The point here is that we ought to be, as followers of Christ, people who manifest a distinctiveness that demands an explanation. There ought to be a quality or hope about you that requires an explanation. If you play to people you become a conformist. If you seek to be pleasing to God instead of people then you’re set apart from the crowd and you’re different and distinct. That’s the idea here. Again it’s the audience to whom you play. This idea of your quality of life if it’s internal rather than an external, if you pursue the invisible not just the visible, now you’re appealing to God, seeking to be satisfying to Him.

That’s why a contractor then knows he may be able to get away with certain things just before the sheet rock goes up, use second grade materials or cut corners and I’m saying you may get away with that before people occasionally but you won’t get away with that before God. At the end of the day, He sees what others do not see. We have been called as a people to reflect God’s perfections and He’ll be satisfied with nothing else than that. He again loves us and accepts us as we are. He’s pleased with our faltering and I stress faltering movements in His direction. God’s expectations for us will always transcend our own. So He who begins a good work in you will carry it to completion until the day of Christ Jesus (Phil. 1).

Another text is 1 Thessalonians 5: 23-24, “May God Himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through; may your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The One who calls you is faithful and He will do it.” The point here is that when you walk in God’s power, the power of His Spirit, you have a source of power that can make it possible for you to do that which is pleasing to Him. You’re doing it for the Name and you’re doing it in the power of the Spirit.

I believe your real key spiritual battles will be fought on the daily mundane small decisions, not the huge things. It’s really not the big things at all but it’s the little things that will matter. You see a lack of fidelity in the little things will lead to a lack of fidelity in the large. So if you’re faithful in the small things eventually it will also accrue to the large. That shoddiness in this and that can really deceive us; it’s the spirituality of small things not the mountaintop experiences. In those situations then, we make choices.

I want to go to David as an example of excellence. Psalm 78 is a maskil of Asaph. It is a Psalm Asaph wrote. It’s a beautiful Psalm, which reviews God’s redemptive work among His people, but at the end of that Psalm he speaks about another shepherd besides God. It talks about the fact that the Lord built His sanctuary and chose David as His servant. He took him from the sheep pens from tending his sheep and brought him to be the shepherd of His people Jacob of Israel and his inheritance. Note verse 72 the last verse in the Psalm, “ So he (David) shepherded them according to the integrity of his heart, and guided them with his skillful hands.” Now a leader is responsible for pursuing excellence and producing excellence through others. That’s a difficult task to do on our own but to do it through others is even a greater challenge, to do it organizationally is a great challenge. I believe that you and I are called to lead with skillful hands and so with skillful hands he led them. That’s the imagery there. There was a skill and a development there. He was a skillful leader.

Skillful leadership involves a variety of these qualities we’ve been looking at including the ability to communicate, to have vision, to have integrity, character, to model, to encourage, to build up, to solve problems and all these skillful qualities. You see, hearts guide hands at the end of the day. To have skillful hands you must have integrity of heart. You see where it says he shepherded then with integrity of heart with skillful hands he led them. So behind the hands is the heart. What’s the heart issue? To have the right heart then is the inner quality, it’s not just the outward level of the organization but the inward quality of your heart. That’s why the idea in Proverbs 4:23 deals with the issue of the heart, “Above all else guard your heart for it is the well-spring of life.” Guarding the deepest you, the deepest person, is the wellspring of life. In Luke 6:45 there is a similar image here. Jesus says the good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart and the evil man brings evil out of the evil stored up in his heart for out of the overflow of his heart his mouth speaks.

God’s concern is always the inner, below the surface of life. We as men look on the outward appearance. God looks at the heart. That’s the issue. That’s why Solomon says to his son, “Give me your heart my son and let your eyes delight in my way.” That’s a fundamental issue.

The last text I want us to look at is in Exodus 35 and 36. In those two chapters what we see here are the materials for the Tabernacle and then the various articles of the Tabernacle- how they were to be constructed and what they looked like. The idea here that in the building of the Tabernacle two men were called that had skillful hearts. In Exodus 35:30-35, “Then Moses said to the Israelites, “See, the Lord has chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and He has filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill (That word skill is the word for wisdom), ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts- to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood and to engage in all kinds of artistic craftsmanship. And He has given both him and Oholiab son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan, the ability to teach others. He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work as craftsmen, designers, embroiderers in blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen, and weavers all of them master craftsmen and designers.” Bezalel and Oholiab and every skilled person to whom the Lord has given skill and ability to know how to carry out the work of the constructing of the sanctuary are to do the work just as the Lord has commanded. The imagery here is that wisdom, hokmah, is a word that means skill. The ultimate skill is the skill of living life.

The ultimate skill is ordering your life under the dominion of Christ. If you want to have true skill, take each of the areas of your life and bring them under the dominion of Jesus. Then you have a skillful life. A skillful craftsman can take something that’s raw material like raw gold or silver then shapes it and works with it or he’s able to take the linen and design it, weave it, embroider it and make it something beautiful. So you are like that raw material. God sees you as raw, unshaped and not ordered and designed and then through skill and discipline you become someone who begins to create beauty in your life. You have skill in the art of living the various aspects of your life under the dominion of God. I believe a skillful life has to do with wisdom. The two are connected together.

Now I’m going to say wisdom’s uneven. If we saw the heart of wisdom as the hub of a wheel and the spokes that radiate from that hub as being various facets of your life, one spoke is money, one spoke is relationships, another spoke is work, another spoke is your physical well-being, do you know what it would look like? It’d be very lopsided indeed! The fact is some people would have great wisdom in one area and then very, very poor, little nubs instead of spokes in other areas. Our lives are not perfectly uniform and even. There’s unevenness about our lives now. Skill would be to seek to become more developed and balanced.

There are going to be some areas that need to be developed in our lives that we can at least recognize and people that love us can point out those areas that need to be shored up. The point is if we bring those areas of our life, our business, our relationships, our finances, our time and all those things under God’s dominion and seek to order them and design them well under His dominion then you begin to pursue greater wisdom in the art of life.

In leadership as an art, Max DuPree talks about 20 signals of what he calls entropy picking up the principle in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy in thermodynamic systems are measures of randomness and their lack of their ability to do work so as entropy increases the amount of useful energy in a system diminishes over time. That’s just the nature of things. While that can be applied to thermodynamic systems and closed systems you can apply it to information systems as well. In any information transfer there’s going to be a loss of information somewhere along the line. But you can also apply it to everything else. That’s why your desk has a finite number of ordered states and an infinite number of disordered states! That’s why it’s a lot easier to break something than to put it back together again. It’s always amusing to see a movie going backwards because things go from chaos to order. If something breaks like an egg you see it coming back together. Try that in real life! It won’t work. There’s something about the way things work. That is to say, anything left to itself will eventually decay and decline. This is the way a fallen world is working- anything left to its self will decline. Frankly the only way you can increase order and beauty in a closed system is somehow for you to take extra energy. You need to make an intentional application of energy. The only way your body stays alive and continues to be ordered is because it takes energy from other sources and then converts it. That’s why we need to eat and take in oxygen and so forth. You’re constantly taking in energy from the environment and you’re ordering that and you have little machines that metabolize it, mechanisms in your body.

Most importantly there’s entropy in relationships. How do you sustain a relationship? How do you cause it to grow? The only way you’re going to do that is an intentional infusion of energy into that relationship. I know I told you this before but I have card files with names and I don’t even know who the people are any more. People I used to know I suppose but not any more. It’s depressing. You go through these old lists of things; you may vaguely remember whom that person might’ve been. Then you realize you spent a lot of valuable time with that person; you went out to dinner and so forth. They might as well be another cipher from another planet. You just don’t know who they are anymore. Why? Because things left to themselves will decline.

The biggest area of entropic decrease turns out to be our closest relationships if we’re not careful. If you don’t guard them and you take a person for granted and treat them with less respect and dignity than you would a stranger that’s a big mistakes. This happens with parents and kids, husbands and wives and closes relatives.

I’m suggesting then that there is spiritual entropy. That is to say your relationship with Christ will diminish unless you put in a conscious daily decision to invest energy in that relationship. It will diminish. That’s just the way it is. You’ll unlearn spiritual truth. The nature of it is the only way you can keep going is to constantly infuse energy let alone to increase the relationship.

Quality and excellence requires an infusion of intentionality, willingness, go back to where I started, to intentionally be pleasing to Him. If you love Me, what did Jesus say? You will keep my commandments. One way in which you keep His commandments is you abide in His word and allow His word to abide in you. You allow the word of God to seep into you by making choices. Frankly the most difficult moment in the day will be to open up this bible at the beginning of the day and break open the bread of life. It’s a hard thing to do. We have a thousand ways of avoiding that and we slip away from good habits into sloppy habits. Do nothing and it will be reinforced. Good habits constantly need conscious reinforcement. My encouragement to you would be to seek, at least to chose, find one verse for that day, each day and chew on that as manna. You will continue to grow and keep the relationship. That growth spiritually will affect your outward life and move you toward excellence in skill and quality.

This morning we’re going to be talking about servant leadership. This is the last session of the leadership series. We’ve done 52 sessions and we’ve looked at a variety of categories. We’ve looked at the issue of personal development; skill development and now we’re ending up with the relational development side of leadership.

There was a bleak and cold day in which George Washington stepped out of his headquarters. It was cold so he drew on his great coat, turned up his collar and pulled his hat down to shield his face from the cold, blowing wind. He walked down the road to where the soldiers were fortifying a camp and no one recognized this tall muffled man who was in fact the commander of the army. He came across a group of soldiers who were under the command of a corporal. They were building a breast work of logs and the corporal, all filled with himself as being important and superior, kept on barking orders. “Up with it,” he cried. “Now altogether push!” They were trying desperately to push this final log up on top of the crest. Each time they tried just at the last moment, the thing would fall back. They were exhausted. The corporal would again say, “ Up with it! What ails you? Up with it!” The men would tug again and again and the log came crashing down because they weren’t quite strong enough to do it. Finally, the third time when he starts barking at them, Washington himself goes up to them and exerts all his strength to push the log and it falls into place. The exhausted men were about to thank this unknown soldier and at that point he turned to the corporal and said, “ Why don’t you help your men with the heavy lifting when they need another hand?” The corporal replied, “Don’t you see that I’m a corporal?” Washington said, “Indeed,” as he opened up his coat and revealed his uniform, “ I’m the Commander-in Chief. The next time you have a log too heavy for your men to lift, send for me!”

That to me is an example of servant leadership. The corporal is all filled with himself. It’s an amazing analogy of our own lives in a way, isn’t it? Sometimes we get so filled with our self-importance. I want you to know that the most important position on this planet is totally trivial in comparison with the kingdom. None of those positions really matter much at all relative to the power of the kingdom. We need to get that in perspective. Don’t have too high of an estimate of yourself and think more highly of yourself than you ought to think.

Remember the banquet story from the last session? Someone had a dream where there was scrumptious food set before people at a banquet but no one could bend their elbows. Somebody got the idea that they could feed each other. You see the idea- instead of serving yourself- you serve each other. Everybody wins. It’s a biblical model of servant hood.

I think of servant hood a great deal when I think of the text in Matthew 25: 34-40. I won’t read all the verses but Jesus refers to the fact that, “The King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you? The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of brothers of mine, you did for me.’” (v. 34-40) Jesus attributes our servant hood to others as servant hood to Himself. What we do to serve people in need is in a very real way our service to Him. If we could only buy into that philosophy we would change our attitude to people who are closest to us in our lives. We’d realize again that even though people might sometimes be annoying, our service to them is our service to Christ. Our attitude toward them is our attitude toward Christ. In my view, I think we experience a lot of missed opportunities. My suspicion is even in the last few days we’ve missed some opportunities to do something for the least of these who are in our midst.

I fear we think of God’s calling in terms of the dramatic, the large things, then what we tend to miss is the subtle day-to-day opportunities. Most of life is really woven out of those small opportunities rather than the big events. Is it not? The big decisions we make will be shaped by what we do in the small decisions. Your character is going to be formed by the day-by-day process rather than just the big events. Similarly with God’s will we suppose somehow we’ll only approach God for big decisions in our life. In my view, God’s will is not actually a technique but a way of living where we look for Him in the small things. Then we discover that if we’re faithful there, He’ll reveal other things, as they’re needed.

We need people don’t we? We need them to embrace us, to carry our loads and to encourage one another. All of us at times struggle and are hurting. Sometimes we become the poor and the needy and others will need to help us. Just as others in the room here will be the ones that will serve others, others will serve them. There’s mutuality here.

Martin Luther in his Table Talk described how two goats when they met on a narrow bridge over deep water had a decision to make. They can’t go backwards and if they thrust at one another then they might both fall into the water and be drowned. Luther wrote, “Nature has taught them that if the one lays himself down and permits the other to go over him, both remain without hurt. Even so people should rather endure to be trod upon than to fall into debate and discord with one another.” This is the idea again of putting the needs of another person before our own.

What is the power to do that? How can we chose to walk in the way that Jesus Himself walked because surely we know that Jesus is the exemplar of servant leadership? He’s made that very clear in the gospels. I want to look at a man who exemplifies that kind of servant leadership. Barnabas whose real name was Joseph was a Levite from Cypress. The apostles called him Barnabas which means son of encouragement. He took on that name. He sold a field that he owned, brought the money and put it at the disciple’s feet. (Acts 4: 36) In the next scenes about Barnabas in the Book of Acts we see how he has a way of sponsoring and lifting people up. He surely did that with Paul when he was Saul. When everyone suspected this young Pharisee who is now a convert, Barnanbas lifted him up. We ultimately see how he then encouraged them to remain true to the Lord in their hearts in Acts 11:23 when he moved to Antioch. He had a contagious witness that people came to believe. We also see that when Paul was at loggerheads with John Mark because John Mark had bailed out on an earlier missionary trip and now wanted to join them, Barnabas stepped in. He decided to take John Mark with him instead of going with Paul. We see a man who refused to abandon good people who needed sponsorship, encouragement and development. He saw something in Mark that would ultimately need to be brought out. Instead of picking another champion, he invests his life in a man who can become a man who becomes a champion. He’s mentoring into a relationship and building into others. Paul then later says Mark has become very useful to me. Peter refers to him in the same way. Barnabas saw something in him and believed and invested in him. That is a mark of a servant leader.

A passage that is parallel to Matthew 20: 20-28 which we looked at last week is in Mark 10. Remember the mother of James and John came up with this modest request. She wanted Jesus to grant that her sons would sit on His right and on His left. The same conclusion is reached when Jesus talks with the disciples and takes them aside. Mark 10:41-45, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” This marvelous word was actually evoked by their selfishness; otherwise we wouldn’t of possessed it. Jesus uses this selfish act as an opportunity to make a teachable moment and to communicate to them. Look, I have become an exemplar among you.

That is illustrated also in Luke 22; the same kind of squabbling is going on. A dispute arose among them as to which of them was considered to be the greatest. They didn’t do it with Jesus right there. They kind of walked behind Him a little bit and had these discussions. To me one of the evidences of the authenticity of the gospels is how they tell on themselves. They basically reveal that they’re a bunch of spiritual dolts, blockheads! If we were there we too would be blockheads! It’s interesting that often the Pharisees were more on to what He was about than the disciples. The women caught on more quickly than did the disciples. It’s intriguing evidence. Here they are fighting over their place in the sun again. In this dispute Jesus says to them, (the problem with Jesus is He always knows what you’re talking about!), “ The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves. (Luke 22: 25-27)

I believe He said this just prior to His taking off His outer garments, putting on the towel of a servant, taking up a bowl of water and washing the feet of the disciples because there was no servant in the Upper Room. Evidently they’d gone up to the Upper Room with dirty feet because no servant was present as normally there would have been. You can be sure if the disciples were fighting about who was the greatest in the kingdom none of them were going to take that position. Jesus in a powerful way offers a visual parable and reveals these words in practice. Soon after He says this in the John text, we see that He then washes the disciples feet, a very embarrassing kind of thing indeed to reveal that.

We’ve looked at this before in John 13. The text explains why Jesus was able to do this. Jesus, knowing that His hour had come when He would go out of the world, knowing that all things had been given to Him from the Father and that He had come forth from God and that He was going back to God, He was able to actually take on the garment of a servant. He knew who He was, where He came from and where He was going. He knew His dignity, His destiny, His security, and His identity. He knew who He was. Because He was secure, He was secure enough to serve. I want you to know that you and I will not serve people well unless we are secure enough in Christ’s relationship where we do not need to be impressive to people. Rather when we’re secure in Him we can take the place of the lowest. We can take the place of the youngest. We can take the place of the servant. God will esteem that service as service to Himself. There’s a power in this. He empowers us to become better than we otherwise would have chosen to be. He not only becomes our exemplar but the one who empowers us.

Remember after the Upper Room discourse, He explains to them that it’s necessary for Him to go the Father so that He can now be with them at all times. Where two or more are gathered in My Name there I will be among you. No longer would He merely be in the localized body but He would be fully present in their lives. The “in Christ” relationship, the deep mystery, is this, Christ in you the hope of glory. Frankly I don’t fully grasp that. The idea here is that the One who spoke the worlds into being is also making us into His dwelling place. We also are in Him. That is a source of power. That power is released by the indwelling of the third member of the Trinity namely the Spirit of God. We are given not only an exemplar but we are given the source of power to enable us. We are also given a grasp of who and Who’s we are which gives us a significance, a security and a satisfaction that empowers us to become servant leaders.

We also have another example of servant leadership in 1 Timothy 5:1. In this case, Paul instructs Timothy, “Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father.” He is instructing Timothy and explains to him how to serve the congregations over which he has been given authority. In this particular chapter, treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers and younger women as sisters with absolute purity. Then he goes on to talk about other details concerning the church about the elders and so forth and finally he says, “I charge you, in the sight of God and Christ Jesus and the elect angels, to keep these instructions without partiality, and to do nothing out of favoritism. (v. 21) This is a real challenge and downfall for our lives. In James 2, the first half, He talks about favoritism, an attitude of treating people with personal favoritism.

He says in effect and this is a wonderful way of looking at power, we have to consider an important understanding. While no one ever had more power at their disposal than our Lord Jesus we see again from His life that though He could calm the raging storm and cast out demons and open the eyes of those who were blind yet He also used this power in other centered ways. What I see Him doing here, He has a power to treat others as His own. We’re invited now of taking any position of leadership we have and seeing those as members of our own family. If you begin to look at the people and perceive followers as members of your family it brings a new dimension there. What will happen then? You look at those who are in need and it brings them into a sharper focus. What happens here in the church could also be true in the market place, in the classroom and in the neighborhood. As a leader then the qualities of care, the quality of concern and the quality of love becomes very, very critical in our lives. We have a way of seeing in our lives something we didn’t see before. We have a way of understanding that God has called us to treat people in a family way. We see them as people who are co-sharers in these concepts.

There was a book that was written by Robert Greenleaf, Servant Leadership, A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. Greenleaf wrote, “ The servant leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from the one who is a leader first perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire mere material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve after leadership is established. The leader first and the servant first are the two extreme types and between them are shadings and blends that are part of an infinite variety of human nature.” You see this concept here? There are those who become servants first and leadership follows. There are those who want the leadership position first and they may serve as necessary.

The real mindset is to ask yourself the question, are the people that you lead, people who are growing as persons? That would be a test of true servant leadership. Are you serving them in that way? Are you serving them well so that they can begin to be people who experience care, concern and compassion?

The final text we’ll be looking at is Philippians 2: 19-24. In this text we have Timothy being commended to the Philippians by Paul while Paul is in a jail in Rome. He sent this letter to them, “I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, that I may be cheered when I receive news about you. I have no one else like him, who takes a genuine interest in your welfare. For everyone looks out for his own interests, not those of Jesus Christ. But you know that Timothy has proved himself, because as a son with his father he has served with me in the work of the gospel. I hope, therefore, to send him as soon as I see how things go with me. And I am confident in the Lord that I myself will come soon.” He’s saying something about Timothy; very few people take a genuine interest in other people first like he is. Their typical mindset is that they’re more concerned about their own interests rather than those of others. This text tells me that if I’m more focused on the interests of Jesus Christ then I will also be capable of focusing on the needs of others as well. If I know Whom I serve, if I’m serving Jesus Christ, then I will also be capable of focusing on the needs of others as well. If I know Whom I serve, if I’m serving Jesus, I can understand then that I’m given a position of influence and of power to serve them as well. I’m called to lead with God’s kingdom in mind. Those kinds of servant leaders are rare because typically they’re only thinking about their own welfare, position and power.

I want to go back to Luke 22: 24-30 and read the rest of it. Jesus was saying, “I am among you as one who serves.” In verse 28, “You are those who have stood by me in my trials. And I confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” That’s the part they like to hear! They enjoy that bit about where you’re going to get this kingdom and you’re going to eat and drink at My table in the kingdom and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. I truly believe that will yet be and that Jesus will bring that about in a very real way through those men. At the same time, this is telling them something, “I’m the One who confers power.” I’m the One who confers leadership. Understand that if you have any position of leadership, authority and influence, it is God who ordains and confers it. I must be willing to share in God’s kingdom values when I pursue these kinds of things.

John Piper in his book, Desiring God, told about a seminary professor who served as an usher in the balcony of a large church. Once as part of a service the pastor extolled him about his willingness to serve in this unglamorous role even though he had a doctorate in theology. The professor simply deflected the praise by quoting Psalm 84:10. “For a day in Thy courts is better than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.” So he saw his service, even though he had a Ph. D. in theology and he was a seminary professor, as being just as great and having just as much dignity. What gives your servant hood true dignity and greatness is the One that you’re really doing it for. It’s really the Audience to whom you play. That is what will truly make the difference- if you’re seeking to be pleasing to God. In other words he’s saying, I’m not heroically overcoming great obstacles of disinclination to keep the doors of the sanctuary. The word of God says it brings great blessing to take that position.

I think about William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army. He lived from 1829-1912 in the slums of London in 1865. At that time Victorian England was not very kind to it’s poor. Hence the Dickens’ novels, which were constantly excoriating the structural evil, that was rife in England at that time. Booth was actually arrested as he practiced his charity. He persevered and by 1880 the organization had grown so much that he was now ready to send his troops to America as well. He sent them over there and of course now the Salvation Army numbers thousands of members in all 50 states. On an anniversary, Booth wanted to send an inspiring message by cable to the Salvation Army posts that were all over the world. He knew he had to keep the message very brief because it would otherwise be too expensive. As a result, he chose to cable just one word. Guess what word he might have chosen? The word was “others”. That’s all he had to say and you get the message, others first. Your servant hood to others is really your servant hood to Jesus Christ.

I have a book called The Oxford Prayer. It’s a wonderful book that I strongly recommend for your reading because it is filled with wonderful prayers that have been collected throughout the centuries in all parts of the church. I have found it to be very useful. I found this little poem by Michael Quoist and I think it will illustrate what we’ve been talking about as we kind of tie our thoughts together.

Lord, why did you tell me to love all men, my brothers?
I have tried but I come back to you frightened.
Lord, I was so peaceful at home.
I was so comfortably settled.
It was well furnished and I felt cozy.
I was alone.
I was at peace, sheltered from the wind and rain and mud.
I would’ve stayed unsullied in my ivory tower.
But Lord, you’ve discovered a breach in my defenses.
You have forced me to open my door.
Like a squall of rain in the face the cry of men has awakened me.
Like a gale of wind a friendship has shaken me.
As a ray of light slips in unnoticed Your grace has stirred me.
And rashly enough I left my door ajar.
Now Lord I’m lost outside.
Men were lying in wait for me.
I did not know they were so near in this house and this street and this office.
My neighbor, my colleague, my friend.
As soon as I started to open the door I saw them.
Outstretched hands, burning eyes, longing hearts.
Like beggars on church steps the first ones came in Lord.
There was after all some space in my heart.
I welcomed them.
I would have cared for them and fondled them as my very own little lambs, my little flock.
You would have been pleased Lord.
I would have served and honored you in a proper respectable way.
Till then it was sensible.
But the next ones Lord!
The other men I had not seen them.
They were hidden behind the first ones.
There were more of them.
They were wretched.
They overpowered me without warning.
We had to crowd in.
I had to find room for them.
Now they have come from all over in successive waves.
Pushing one after another.
Jostling for position.
They have come from all over town, from all parts of the country, of the world.
Numberless and inexhaustible.
They don’t come alone any longer but in groups.
Bound one to another.
They come bending under heavy loads.
Loads of injustice, resentment and hate, of suffering and sin.
They drag the world behind them with everything rusted, twisted or badly adjusted.
Lord they hurt me.
They are in the way.
They are everywhere.
They are too hungry.
They are consuming me.
I can’t do anything anymore.
As they come in they push the door and the door opens wider.
Lord, my door is wide open.
I can’t stand it anymore.
It’s too much.
It’s no kind of life.
What about my job and my family, my peace, my liberty and me?
Lord, I’ve lost everything.
I don’t belong to myself anymore.
There’s no room for me at home.
“Don’t worry,” God said.
“You have gained all.
While men came into you,
I your Father, I your God,
Slipped in among them.”

You ask how to fight an idea. I’ll tell you: with another idea.

-- Massala (Stephen Boyd), in Ben-Hur (1959)

The greatest forces in human civilization are not nuclear weapons or massive armies, but ideas. It was an idea that motivated the great political revolutions of the past, including the French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the Democracy Revolution in Eastern Europe in 1989. Ideas are the source of both the weapons with which men wage war and the reasons for which they fight in the first place. The ideas we entertain about ourselves and our place in the world shape our decisions in every facet of life from how we spend our money to how we cast our votes.

Among the most influential ideas in the world today are those which have been developed in the sciences. The term science is used here in its broadest sense to refer to both the natural sciences, such as physics and biology, and the human sciences, such as psychology and history. All of these disciplines have emerged as special fields of study in the past two centuries, and all of them have rocked the world with intellectual revolutions no less dramatic and significant than the political revolutions mentioned earlier. Indeed, the scientific revolutions have in some cases directly contributed to the political revolutions, as we shall see.

Revolution in the Heavens

The first scientific revolution to challenge the Christian faith is now a part of the worldview of virtually every Christian (and every non-Christian as well). At first, though, this new idea seemed to undermine the Christian view of the place of human beings in God’s world. At the center -- if a pun may be allowed! -- of this revolution was the idea that the earth is not fixed at the center of the universe, but instead revolves around the sun along with other heavenly bodies. We take the idea for granted now, but at first the idea was hailed with scorn and evidently some fear.

The medieval view that the earth was the unmoving center of the universe, known as geocentrism, was inherited from the ancient Greeks and systematized in the second century AD by the pagan astronomer Ptolemy. Although the Ptolemaic system was not actually taught in the Bible, it was easy for the medieval Christian world to read the idea into various biblical texts. The Scripture most commonly cited to prove the geocentric position was Joshua 10:13, which states that in answer to Joshua’s prayer “the sun stopped in the middle of the sky, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.” The belief that the earth stood at the center of the universe with all heavenly bodies moving around the earth was correlated with the Christian doctrine that human beings were uniquely related to God as his representatives in the material universe. It seemed so sensible, so obvious, that the most important creatures in the universe would live at its center. This theological perspective, more typically assumed than stated, combined with the obvious fact that the earth feels stationary and the heavenly bodies look like they are revolving around the earth, made any suggestion to the contrary seem both irreverent and foolish.

Copernicus: A Mathematical Challenge

Not surprisingly, the first book to challenge the geocentric system was released to the public only shortly after the author’s death. Nicholas Copernicus, a Polish church official and physician, spent much of his life studying astronomy and working out an alternative to the Ptolemaic system. He wrote a brief treatise outlining his theory as early as 1514 and circulated it privately to a few close friends, but finished his complete book and agreed to its publication only in 1543 shortly before his death. The book, “On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres” (De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium), did not overturn the geocentric system overnight. For one thing, the argument is almost purely mathematical, showing that the paths followed in particular by the planets in the night sky are more simply described in mathematical terms on the assumption that the sun rather than the earth is at the center of the universe. (Even Copernicus did not realize that the sun was only one of billions of similar stars in the universe.) Indeed, Copernicus sought to stave off criticism of his book by describing it as “written for mathematicians.”¹ Another reason why the book did not immediately cause a furor (although it was severely criticized) was that the editor, the Lutheran scholar Osiander, had included a preface suggesting that the book merely agreed with the observed locations of the heavenly bodies in the sky over time and did not necessarily describe their actual movements.

Galileo: Look for Yourself!

What has come to be known as the Copernican revolution was fully set into motion by another astronomer about 70 years after Copernicus’s death. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), an Italian professor of mathematics, in 1609 constructed a telescope (a device he had heard had recently been invented in the Netherlands) and used it to look at the heavenly bodies. What Galileo saw “through the looking-glass” was no less strange to his contemporaries than what Alice encountered in her fictional travels: mountains and craters on the Moon, with shadows cast by the light of the sun (proving that the Moon was composed of ordinary material and not an immutable, heavenly “quintessence”); and four moons orbiting Jupiter (proving that not all heavenly bodies were orbiting the earth).

Galileo published his findings in 1609 in The Starry Messenger, a short, popularly written book that immediately provoked a storm of controversy that in some respects has not yet completely dissipated. The reactions from the intellectual establishment to Galileo’s findings are notorious. Some critics claimed that the moons of Jupiter were mere illusions, or suggested that there was some design flaw in Galileo’s telescope. Such excuses became difficult to sustain as more and more people began constructing their own telescopes and using them to look for themselves.

Unfortunately, the intellectual community raised the stakes by accusing Galileo of false doctrine as well as erroneous science, and goaded various religious leaders into attacking Galileo. One priest, Caccini, reportedly preached a sermon against Galileo using a slightly twisted version of Acts 1:11, “Ye men of Galileo, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?”² The main text, though, used against Galileo was the reference to the sun standing still (Joshua 10:13), mentioned earlier.

Galileo responded to these theological criticisms in the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), one of the classic writings on the relationship between science and theology. Galileo argued in this letter that biblical passages such as Joshua 10:13 spoke in ordinary language and described physical events as they appeared to human observers. That the event in Joshua occurred and was a miracle, Galileo did not doubt; but that the Bible meant to specify precisely how the event occurred, and to teach a particular system of astronomy, Galileo pointedly denied. In his view “the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word,” so that God is no less “excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.”³ Galileo pleaded eloquently for the freedom to study the facts of nature unhindered by theological interpretations of the Bible. To disallow such inquiry, Galileo warned, “it would be necessary to forbid men to look at the heavens,” and would implicitly impugn the many Scriptures which teach that God is revealed “in the open book of heaven.”⁴ Throughout his life Galileo upheld the complete truth of the Bible and its authority.

The religious aspect of the debate soon led to the Catholic church authorities ordering Galileo not to defend Copernicus’s views as scientific fact (though he was allowed to discuss the issue hypothetically). His eventual end-run around this order was to write a book entitled Dialogue on the Two Principal World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632). The Dialogue presented three characters — one defending the Ptolemaic system, one defending the Copernican system, and a third neutral participant — so that technically the book does not directly advocate the Copernican view. Of course, the Copernican system emerges triumphant, and the book was eventually banned by the Catholic church and Galileo forced to confess that he had taught error. It would be over three hundred years before the Catholic church would officially admit that it had erred in condemning Galileo’s opinion.

Secular Heavens?

This first round in the growing conflict between science and theology is often seen by non-Christians as having undermined the very foundation of the Christian world view. Robert Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar (a society of radical scholars who publicize an extremely skeptical rejection of the biblical accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings), speaks for many critics of biblical Christianity:

The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the sky by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens.⁵

This opinion of the significance of the Copernican revolution would have come as a surprise to Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler (another astronomer working out significant details of the Copernican system at the same time as Galileo). All three were devout Christians who fervently believed in the Bible and in Jesus Christ. Copernicus was a Roman Catholic church official who saw himself as fulfilling his duty to seek the truth. Johannes Kelper (1571-1630) was a German Protestant who retained his pious faith in Christ despite a very difficult life and rejection from all sides. As we have seen, Galileo was a faithful Catholic who was very knowledgeable about the Bible and Christian theology as well as mathematics and astronomy.

Funk’s assertion, though, does have some truth in it. Before the revolution in astronomy that began with Copernicus, the physical heavens were viewed in essentially supernaturalistic terms. Comets, shooting stars, and other celestial phenomena were regarded as miraculous signs from God. Absolute unchanging perfection — in effect, divine qualities — were attributed to the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies. The new science resulted in a humbler view of the physical universe, but it did not diminish the glory of God, and certainly did not imply his nonexistence.

On the other hand, another revolution in science was coming that would be seen by millions as making it possible to dispense with the very idea of the God of the Bible. This was the evolution revolution.

“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”

No more important revolutionary idea has shaped human history during the past two centuries than evolution. What began in 1859 with a book — Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection — quickly bloomed into a whole new way of looking at the world, at humanity, at God. Evolutionary theory has been extended beyond biology to provide a comprehensive account of the cosmos, life, the human mind, and religion. The ramifications of Darwinism are far-reaching and subversive to the traditional beliefs and values of Western civilization, including Christianity. So much is this the case that Daniel C. Dennett entitled his defense and explanation of naturalistic evolution Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea. My admiration for Darwin’s magnificent idea is unbounded, but I, too, cherish many of the ideas and ideals that it seems to challenge, and want to protect them.⁶

The “dangerous” aspect of Darwin’s idea is that it appears to imply that “meaning” and “purpose” are mere human projections — expressions of the values we choose to place on our own existence and the existence of the world in which we find ourselves. We find meaning and purpose in the natural processes that lead to our existence because, well, they enabled us to exist. But on a strict and thoroughgoing application of Darwin’s idea, we are not the product of a divine purpose, and our lives therefore do not have a divinely ordained meaning. Evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson’s often quoted words make the point:

Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.⁷

This was not the conclusion which Darwin himself appears to have entertained. Although Darwin’s religious beliefs are a subject of considerable debate, in Origin of Species he seems to have allowed for the existence of a Creator who originated life itself and who would remain in some way religiously significant.

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one.⁸

Understanding Darwin’s Idea

Darwin’s revolutionary idea was that most or all of the diversity of biological life, from the smallest organisms to the major plants and animals inhabiting the earth, arose through natural processes, the most important of which he called natural selection. In this process, offspring of any species will be produced with slightly differing characteristics, and those offspring whose characteristics were most conducive to their survival in changing environments over time would be perpetuated. For example, birds whose markings best enable them to hide from predators and to obtain food for themselves will tend to survive and produce offspring like themselves, so that those markings will be “selected” by nature. This natural criterion of whatever is most conducive to survival will be perpetuated was called survival of the fittest, a notion Darwin took from the economist philosopher Malthus. Darwin extrapolated this incremental process of development and diversification backwards into the ancient past. He hypothesized that such a process could allow mammals and birds to have evolved from amphibians or reptiles, fish to have evolved from simpler forms of sea life, and even plants and animals ultimately to be traceable back to a single ancestor.

Perhaps the most disturbing and controversial implication of Darwin’s theory was that human beings may have arisen from nonhuman species by the same natural process. Darwin defended this theory in The Descent of Man (1871). On Darwin’s view, modern man, apes, monkeys, and other primates are all related by a common ancestry. This idea presented an obvious and major contradiction to the biblical view of human beings as created “in God’s image” (Genesis 1:26-27) and unique among all living creatures on the earth by virtue of a transcendent, spiritual capacity. The Darwinian view of humanity, in fact, implied that human beings are merely extremely advanced, intelligent animals.

Evolution: Galileo Revisited?

It is tempting to compare the Christian church’s resistance to Darwinism to the Galileo incident, but such a comparison would be ill-advised. For one thing, evolutionary theory has been rather widely accepted in many Christian denominations worldwide. The major resistance to evolution has come from denominations and other Christian groups that have a stated policy of adherence to the Bible as an unerring revelation from God — a policy not found in many of the major denominations.

A second, more important point of dissimilarity is that while Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and all of the other scientists and thinkers who promoted the new astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were devout believers in God and in the Bible, Darwin and the scientists and thinkers who have promoted Darwinism for more than a hundred years have for the most part abandoned the biblical world view. Darwin himself was an agnostic, and after an initial generation of diverse and confused responses to Darwinism (from about 1860-1900), most Christians espousing a traditional, biblical theology have opposed Darwinism.

Third, while the counsel of many critics of Galileo was to refuse to look through his telescope, the counsel of most critics of Darwinism has been to look at the evidence more closely. After well over a hundred years and a veritable explosion of knowledge of biology at the microscopic level, the scientific community is further from a consensus on the merits of Darwinian evolution than they were when Darwin died in 1882. Indeed, while institutional opposition to evolutionism was strong in many quarters at first, since about the 1960s it has been evolutionists who have been in control of educational and other cultural institutions in the West and advocates of the biblical view of creation who have found their views unwelcome and even suppressed. In the United States it is now quite difficult for avowed creationists, even those of impeccable academic credentials and ability, to hold teaching posts in the sciences in state universities and colleges. Evolution has become the new dogma of the schools, and those who question it are the heretics. The problem is found around the world: one British scholar who cautiously advocates creationism (though not even of an explicitly Christian sort) puts the point this way:

Our descendants will marvel at the attempts of the neo-Darwinian lobby to suppress alternative inquiry, as we today marvel at the power of churchmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁹

A Tale of Two Trials

No more dramatic illustration of this reversal can be given than a comparison of the famous Scopes trial of 1925 with the less famous, but equally important, Arkansas Creationism case in the U.S. District Court in 1982. The Scopes trial, while famous, is remembered almost entirely through its fictional retelling in the play and 1960 film Inherit the Wind. Contrary to the Inherit story, Scopes was not a biology teacher and probably never taught evolution. The case was drummed up by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to challenge a Tennessee state law forbidding the teaching of evolution in its public schools. (The law did not forbid mentioning or discussing evolution.) William Jennings Bryan, representing the state of Tennessee, not only did not disallow scientific testimony as Inherit shows, he actually called scientific experts as witnesses himself! Nor did Bryan endorse a date of 4004 BC for creation; in fact, Bryan was untroubled by the idea that the universe was millions of years old. The state’s argument was simple: evolution was a dubious scientific theory that was clearly contrary to the beliefs of the vast majority of the people of Tennessee, who should be able to determine what was taught with taxpayers’ dollars to their children.¹⁰

The Arkansas case centered on a 1981 state law mandating a balanced presentation of both evolutionism and creationism in public schools. This was roughly what the ACLU had asked for in the Scopes trial; to be more precise, they had asked that the state not forbid evolution to be taught. Ironically, the ACLU once again sought to challenge the state law, this time arguing that creationism had no place in public school science classes and that evolution alone should be taught. By the early 1980s various other court cases had established as U.S. law that states could not mandate any teaching of “religion” in the public schools. The Arkansas law defined “creation-science” as including the idea that the universe was only several thousand years old and that its geology had been shaped by a global flood. This made it obvious that the version of creation to be presented was a specific interpretation of the teaching of Genesis, and it was largely on this basis that the state law was found unconstitutional. A similar balanced-treatment law in Tennessee was also struck down, despite the fact that it did not define creation-science with such distinctively religious positions. It was enough for the court that creation implied a Creator of any kind, thus implicitly supporting a “religious” belief.¹¹

Religion and Science: Either/Or?

The absolute dichotomy between religion and science which the court rulings assume is itself part of the objectionable creed of modern evolutionism. It assumes the very thing that the evolutionist claims to prove — that all nature can be explained without appeal to the existence or activity of God. It also makes the absurd assumption that scientific theories and beliefs do not have religious significance. Evolutionism is a basic tenet of various religious belief systems today, from secular humanism (in which irreligiosity has become a religion) to New Age humanism (in which evolution is itself a divine process). Ultimately the thoroughgoing evolutionists have only three choices: they can deny that there is a God, they can believe that all is God, or they can believe that all is evolving into God. Dennett begins his book with the question of whether evolution has shown that nothing is sacred, and ends his book with this conclusion:

Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. The world is sacred.¹²

This sort of conclusion about the meaning of evolution became increasingly common during the last quarter of the twentieth century, as the horrifying consequences of an atheistic, purely materialistic interpretation of evolutionism became clear to almost everyone. But the gap between affirming that everything is sacred and denying that anything is sacred can be quite narrow. If everything is sacred, then there is still nothing transcendently special about humanity, still no basis for viewing human beings as anything more than one species of animal life of which we happen to be particularly fond! This is the underlying reason why there is so much confusion in our culture about the relative values of infant children and unborn children, or of humans, whales, lobsters, and trees. The devaluation of human life cannot be reversed by declaring all life sacred.

Scientific Problems for Evolution

As was mentioned earlier, there is no consensus among biologists or other natural scientists on the subject of evolution. Admittedly the majority of professors of biology and of other sciences in the major universities and colleges in America and in other nations subscribe to some form of evolutionary theory. This seeming consensus, however, is something of a mirage.

First of all, the views of scientists cover a spectrum from a thoroughgoing materialistic evolutionism to a thoroughgoing supernaturalistic creationism, with various types of views combining evolution and creation in the middle. Some scientists hold that a transcendent personal God (such as one finds in Judaism, Islam, or Christianity) has somehow guided the natural evolutionary process (perhaps by “pre-loading” a direction for evolution in the original act of creation); others argue that life was created supernaturally and then all living things evolved naturally; others make an exception for the human race; still others hold that several supernatural acts moved the creation process forward, with some evolution taking place between those creative acts.

Second, among committed evolutionists who eschew all supernatural interventions, there is no consensus as to how evolution works. Some regard it as a mindless, blind process with no purpose; others view it as an intelligent, purposeful process of a cosmos in which the divine is inherent. Some espouse the neo-Darwinian view that views evolution as working through gradual, incremental changes; others argue that evolutionary advances come in quantum jumps or sudden radical changes.

Credible critiques of naturalistic evolutionism have been published in every generation since Darwin. In recent years the critiques have increased both in number and in scientific sophistication. Perhaps the best known of these was Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial, whose author was a law professor at Berkeley. Critiques by persons with scientific credentials have included Michael Pitman’s Adam and Evolution and Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.¹³ These books point out numerous flaws in the arguments used to establish evolution, and offer solid reasons to uphold some form of creationism. While a complete review of the arguments cannot be offered here, a few of the most important issues may be noted.

The Origin of Life: The Missing Ingredient

One of the most persistent problems facing a thoroughgoing evolutionism is to explain the origin of life itself. While in Origin of Species Darwin seems to concede the necessity for an initial divine creation of life, he later withdrew even this concession and suggested the possibility of a natural origin of life from nonlife if the initial conditions were right. The idea was developed independently by two scientists in the 1920s, each of whom worked out a primordial-soup theory of the origin of life (that is, one which explains life as arising on a microscopic level in an early earth rich in gases but lacking an oxygen atmosphere). Interestingly, both of these two scientists, Alexander I. Oparin (Russian) and J. B. S. Haldane (British) “were professed Marxists in a revolutionary era when it was fashionable to try and solve all sorts of problems here and now by dialectical and material means.”¹⁴ Their Marxist ideology does not, of course, invalidate their theory, but it does illuminate its roots. Historically, naturalistic evolution is an attempt to provide a purely materialistic account of human life as the basis for a purely materialistic theory of human values.

There are fundamental problems with primordial-soup scenarios of the origin of life. One of the assumptions of all such scenarios, that the early earth’s atmosphere would have been rich in such gases as ammonia and methane but poor in oxygen, has been discredited. Examinations of rocks dated by geologists to within the first billion years of earth history shows evidence of an oxygenated atmosphere in earth’s early history. Another crucial difficulty is that the results that have been obtained in laboratories have been minimal, and yet have required an enormous commitment of intellectual resources. It has taken years of research by numerous Ph.D.s in chemistry and biology and millions of dollars in technological development to produce tiny amounts of amino acids and other “building blocks” of life. At each stage of the “life-building” process, researchers stop the experiment, conserve the results, and then initiate another well-planned stage of the process. In short, all these experiments seem to be proving it how much intelligent planning and execution must have gone into producing life from nonlife.¹⁵

Considerations such as these are leading scientists who don’t believe in a personal God to desperate scenarios. Francis Crick, who co-discovered the double helix form of DNA, suggested that life was seeded on earth by extraterrestrials. Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the most honored astronomers of this century, and Chandra Wickramasinghe proposed that interstellar clouds had produced the essential building blocks of life, which were then transplanted to earth by a comet. After this hypothesis was trashed by the scientific community, both Hoyle and Wickramasinghe rethought the matter and concluded that some sort of intelligent creator must have introduced life on earth. Wickramasinghe actually testified in defense of the Balanced Treatment Act in Arkansas. A confessed Buddhist, Wickramasinghe testified that while he preferred to view the creator as inherent in the universe, a supernatural creator was an equally justifiable inference.¹⁶

The Origin of Species: The Missing Mechanism

Darwin’s fundamental claim was that the observable “natural selection” of characteristics in offspring conducive to the adaptation and survival of a species could be extrapolated backward to account for the origin of the incredible diversity and complexity of all living things on earth. Well over a century after Darwin’s Origin of Species, doubts remain as to whether this extrapolation is justifiable.

Darwin believed that the characteristics of parents were blended in their offspring. Such blending might seem to average out characteristics and thus eliminate variations over time. Evolutionists believe this problem was solved by Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics. Mendel showed that characteristics of parents are transmitted to their offspring in discrete units which he called genes. These genes are not blended, but rather one is selected over the other. For example, the offspring of a tall man and a short woman will not necessarily be a medium-height person, but will generally be either tall or short. This explains why we usually find distinct features in a child that resemble one parent over the other (for example, a girl may have her mother’s eyes but her father’s nose).

While genetics eliminates the blending problem, it raises another difficulty: gene selection is itself a conservative process that does not support innovation. To solve this problem, evolutionists have argued that mutations — changes in the genes themselves — have provided the innovative variations that have made evolution possible. Unfortunately, mutations noticeable enough to have any immediate effects on an organism tend to be destructive or debilitating, not helpful to its survival. Evolutionists have therefore been forced in one of two directions, both of them problematic.

On the one hand, those committed to a gradualist understanding of evolution argue that millions of “micromutations,” each of which provides only very slight adaptive benefits, could accumulate over millions of years to result in new species with new capacities. One problem attending this scenario is that even two or three billions of years is not enough time for life to evolve all the complex organisms that inhabit the earth in such a gradualist fashion (a point that has been made by mathematicians who looked at this very question). Another problem is that it is extremely difficult to explain how such micromutations could enable such complex organs as the ear or the eye to evolve, not just once, but evidently numerous times in various species.

On the other hand, an increasing number of evolutionists have adopted some form of “macromutation” theory — the idea being that once in a while a major mutation will turn out to be helpful rather than hurtful, and will be incorporated into the mutated organism’s offspring. The most notorious version of this theory was Berkeley geneticist Richard Goldschmidt’s “hopeful monster” theory, which endorsed the idea of a reptile laying an egg that produced a bird. A more sophisticated version, known as “punctuated equilibrium,” was introduced in the early 1980s by Stephen Jay Gould, but it amounts to the same thing (the offspring differs genetically just a little from its parents, but a big difference emerges when it reaches adulthood). The obvious objection to these macromutational theories is that in place of a supernatural, intelligently directed miracle a kind of natural, accidental “miracle” is supposed. So far, everything we know about genetics suggests that such beneficial macromutations are impossible.

Both micromutational and macromutational approaches to evolution suffer from an even more basic problem: a lack of evidence. Even if one were to grant that one or the other proposal for how evolution might have occurred had some plausibility, there is no evidence that evolution occurred. It remains an extrapolation back into the past, reasoning from observed microevolution (changes within species, such as variations in the coloration of a bird or the length of its beak) to macroevolution (changes resulting in new species and even new orders, such as reptiles as the ancestors of birds). There simply is no evidence for macroevolution. As Pitman notes, “Examples of ‘evolution in action,’ such as the peppered moth or Galapagos finch demonstrate variation but not radical, archetypal change.”¹⁷ The fossil record also contains no evidence for macroevolution; it is especially difficult to square with a gradualist interpretation of evolution, since it contains stubborn “gaps” and continues to support the conclusion that new species appeared suddenly in complete form.

The Origin of Humanity: The Missing Link

Of all the questions that can be raised about the theory of evolution, none is more vital than whether humans evolved from non-human animals. Theologically, there may be little at stake from a Christian point of view in the debate over the origins of the various species of plants and animals. It does not make any significant difference to the Christian faith whether dogs and cats are related, or even dogs and dogwoods. It does, however, make an enormous difference whether humans are related to monkeys. In thoroughgoing naturalistic evolutionism, human beings were not created with a dignity transcending all other animals, but instead are simply a particularly intelligent primate. The biblical teaching is that the human race has fallen from an original innocence, and that our tendencies to violence, greed, lust, deceit, and selfishness are in some sense unnatural for us. This teaching is at direct odds with the notion that the human race evolved from similar primate species, and that our unethical tendencies are actually part of our evolutionary history (perhaps necessary aspects of the “survival of the fittest”).

In addition to the problems attending the general theory of evolution, the evolutionary explanation for the origin of the human species has been plagued by the question of the “missing link.” In the first half of his book The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution, William R. Fix reviewed the history of frauds, hoaxes, and misidentifications that has characterized the search for the missing link between Homo sapiens and the lower primates from which we supposedly evolved. Two of the most notorious of these bogus links were Piltdown Man, a fraud constructed with sawed-off bones, and Nebraska Man, a link proposed on the basis of a single tooth which turned out to have come from an extinct pig.¹⁸ Both of these pseudo-links were introduced as evidence for the theory of evolution at the Scopes trial in 1925.¹⁹ Even the more respectable finds, such as Zinjanthropus, Homo habilis, and the several postulated ancestors named Australopithecus (including the famous “Lucy”), have been rejected or seriously questioned even by evolutionists as genuine “missing links.”

One of the most troubling aspects of evolutionary thought has been its racist implications. The logic is simple enough: If humans evolved from simpler, less intelligent primates, then perhaps some of are more “evolved” than others. Such racist thinking has accompanied evolutionism from the very beginning, starting with Darwin himself. Darwin visited the South American tribe of the Tierra del Feugians on his journeys and commented that “the difference between a Tierra del Feugian and a European is greater than the difference between a Tierra del Feugian and a beast.” Eventually, Christian missionaries discovered otherwise, living among the Feugians and documenting their rich culture and language.²⁰

Evolutionists may complain that such thinking is not essential to evolution nor universal among evolutionists. True enough; but evolutionists cannot make a convincing, rational case against such inferences. Although creationists have themselves not been immune from racism, it turns out that creationism is inherently antiracist while evolutionism offers no protection from racism and can reasonably be construed in its support. The same subjective reasoning that has made it difficult for evolutionists to agree on whether a set of bones comes from a human ancestor, a prehuman “missing link” ancestor, or a distant primate cousin, allows those educated in the evolutionary world view to regard human beings of other races as equal or inferior according to their own predisposed judgments.

Cosmology: Back to the Beginning

So far we have examined two scientific revolutions. The Copernican revolution eventually led us to realize that the earth not the immovable center of the universe but instead the third planet orbiting a fairly average star located in an inconspicuous place in an extremely large universe. This revolution rocked the Greek science and philosophy that had been integrated into the medieval Christian world view, but it did not directly challenge any essential aspects of the biblical, Christian faith. The Darwinian revolution led many, but by no means all, of us to regard our own human race as merely one of the myriad of animal species on planet Earth, highly evolved in terms of intelligence but not qualitatively superior or unique in the animal kingdom. This revolution has so far not been entirely successful in forging a new consensus, but where it has taken hold it has radically altered and even dismantled the Christian world view.

The third and final revolution to be considered in this chapter, associated especially with the work of Albert Einstein, is moving in a different direction. While the Copernican revolution required a refinement of the Christian world view and the Darwinian revolution put the Christian faith on the defensive, the Einsteinian revolution has actually restored credibility to the Christian, biblical premise of a Creator. While biologists reveled in the Darwinian hope of a naturalistic account of all life, the physicists and astronomers discovered surprising proof of a supernatural origin of the universe. At the same time, these evidences of creation challenged some traditional interpretations of the book of Genesis.

God and the Astronomers

The tale has been told many times, perhaps most memorably by the self-confessed agnostic Robert Jastrow in his book God and the Astronomers. In 1917 Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity. The Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter derived from Einstein’s equations the conclusion that the universe was expanding. Other scientists, notably Edwin Hubble and Arthur Eddington, followed up on de Sitter’s calculations and correlated them with observations dating from 1913 that in fact several galaxies were moving away from us at high speeds. Hubble verified through the use of his 100-inch telescope what de Sitter had predicted based on Einstein’s general relativity equations: that “the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it moves” — implying that the universe was expanding from a central point of origin like an inflating balloon or like an explosion. At the same time, Hubble found that “nearby” galaxies were actually millions of light years away.²¹ The implication of these findings was immediately obvious: the universe had a beginning. In 1965 astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the background radiation that scientists had predicted would be left behind by the initial explosion of the universe. Their discovery led to the almost complete triumph in modern cosmology of the so-called Big Bang theory.

The discovery that the universe had a beginning was not met with pleasure. Many scientists rebelled against the notion because it implied a Beginner. In fact, “Einstein was the first to complain.”²² He refused to believe that the universe was expanding until he looked for himself through Hubble’s telescope. (The lesson of Galileo was evidently not lost on Einstein!) Eddington admitted, “the notion of a beginning is repugnant to me.” Yet the evidence was there. Jastrow puts his finger on the problem: Many scientists have a “religious” commitment to the assumption that everything has a natural, scientifically accessible and quantifiable explanation. Just when they were becoming confident in this assumption, seemingly explaining everything from the formation of stars to the formation of species, they ran into something which in principle cannot be explained scientifically: that first instant of creation, when the universe began as a singularity, a point inaccessible to investigation.

It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.²³

Stephen Hawking: Nothing for a Creator to Do?

The cosmological evidence for a beginning of the universe continued to be resisted throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, though increasingly the strategy was to reinterpret that beginning to avoid a personal God. Perhaps the most brilliant scientist who has sought an alternative to a straightforward beginning of the universe is Stephen Hawking. The world-renowned cosmologist’s bestselling book A Brief History of Time repeatedly illustrates Jastrow’s contention that modern scientists are often committed religiously to a comprehensively naturalistic explanation of all things. Hawking states the premise explicitly: “The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that explains the whole universe.”²⁴

Ironically, Hawking himself contributed to the proof that the universe had a beginning. He and Roger Penrose had applied their study of black hole singularities to the question of the origin of the universe, and in 1970 they issued a paper “which at last proved that there must have been a big bang singularity provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe.”²⁵ The paper met with resistance, and Hawking himself admits the reason:

Many people do not like the idea that time had a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.²⁶

Hawking himself does not like the idea, and eventually came up with an alternative. His end-run around the problem is to postulate that the universe may be finite in size and age yet without boundaries (based on an application of quantum theory, too complicated to explain here!). Hawking uses the illustration of the earth: its surface is finite in size, yet it has no boundaries — no edge or starting point, no singularity where one would “fall off” the earth.²⁷ He suggests that the cosmos is similarly finite but has no boundaries, either of space (like an “edge”) or of time (i.e., like a beginning). This does not completely eliminate the idea of God, but it does, as Carl Sagan puts it in his introduction to the book, leave “nothing for a Creator to do.”²⁸ Hawking himself explains the appeal of his proposal as eliminating the idea of a boundary of space-time “at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time.”²⁹

There are several difficulties with Hawking’s proposal, not the least of which is that at present that is all it is; as Hawking himself admits, “it cannot be deduced from some other principle,” and so far it does not seem to be testable.³⁰ Second, it has been pointed out that Hawking has merely traded a singularity of relativity theory for a singularity of quantum theory. In Hawking’s proposal the singularity of a temporal beginning is still a reality from within our own “real time” perspective.³¹ But even Hawking ends up crediting the ultimate origin of the universe — the why of things, if not the how -- to “the mind of God.”³²

For Those Who Can’t Believe in God

Many other proposals to avoid altogether the idea of a personal Creator God have been put forth. Probably the most popular approach is to view the origin and evolution of the universe as a manifestation of an all-encompassing force or energy or mystical Spirit. New Age interpretations of quantum physics, such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics or Gary Zukov’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters, have sought to integrate Western science with Eastern mysticism.³³ Because some interpretations of quantum physics understand reality at the subatomic level to be indeterminate, New Age physicists have argued that at the quantum level all things are naturally possible — even the spontaneous origination of the physical universe. These New Age cosmologies rest on dubious understandings of quantum physics and sidestep the real problem: how does the reality governed by physical laws, quantum or otherwise, exist at all?³⁴

Some of the proposed alternatives to a personal Creator have a strong scent of desperation to them. Perhaps the most outrageous example of such desperate proposals was that put forth by Gilbert Fulmer. He admits that the universe had a beginning and that the most logical explanation for that beginning was that it was initiated by personal design. However, Fulmer also states quite candidly that he cannot bring himself to go back to the biblical account of creation by an infinite personal God. So he proposes an alternative scenario, based on the notion of time travel. He speculates that somewhere, sometime in the universe, perhaps billions of years into the future, perhaps in another galaxy if not here, a race of beings will become so advanced that they will be able to travel back in time. Such an advanced race would know about the Big Bang, but they would also be smart enough to know that there is no God to start it. So, theorizes Fulmer, they might take it upon themselves to send someone back to time zero and set off the Big Bang!³⁵ It does not seem to have occurred to Fulmer that such a Time Traveler would have to arrive at least a split second before the Big Bang in order then to do anything to start it; unfortunately, there was no time “before” the Big Bang! Fulmer’s suggestion (assuming it was meant sincerely) is extreme, but it illustrates the point that some people would rather believe anything other than in the God of the Bible.

The fervent belief that religion must be prevented from contaminating science is, as we said, a kind of religious belief itself. One historical factor that has encouraged this belief is the fact that in the past those in the Christian West too easily attributed various features of the natural world to direct supernatural agency, only to have some scientist come along and demonstrate a regular natural phenomenon to be at work. But to swing the pendulum to the other extreme and disallow the activity of God as a possible explanation for anything, regardless of the evidence, is also unwarranted.

Both of these extremes -- uncritical supernaturalism and uncritical naturalism — should therefore be avoided. The attribution of unexplained phenomena (planetary orbits, meteors, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like) to supernatural intervention by God has often been criticized as a “God of the gaps” approach. But just as irrational is the assumption made by many naturalists that God never intervenes in his creation and that everything, even the very existence of the universe, must be explainable in natural terms — what has been called a “Nature of the gaps” approach.³⁶ Similarly, Hugh Ross has criticized the appeal by cosmologists to the chance fluctuations posited by quantum theory to explain the origin of the universe as a kind of “Chance of the gaps” methodology.³⁷

An important distinction relating to these two extremes is that between operation science, which studies the ongoing processes and events in the natural world, and origin science, which studies the origins of the natural world and of life. To appeal to a supernatural intervention by God to explain the operations of the natural world is to make the “God of the gaps” mistake.³⁸ On the other hand, to refuse to allow the action of God as an explanation for the origins of the natural world is to commit the “Nature of the gaps” or “Chance of the gaps” error.

Astronomy and the Theologians

The evidence from cosmology that is convincing an increasing number of sometimes unwilling astronomers that a Creator brought the universe into existence has also received mixed responses from the community of Christian theologians and scholars. While many Christians have hailed the cosmological revolution as vindicating the biblical world view and providing exciting opportunities for a renewed defense of the Christian faith, other Christians have rejected the new cosmology because they regard it as conflicting with the biblical account of origins in Genesis.

One issue here dominates the debate among evangelical, conservative Christians about cosmology and creation: the age of the earth (and of the universe). The traditional interpretation of Genesis 1 understands the six “days” in that passage to refer to six literal, 24-hour, consecutive days, during which the entire universe, the earth, all living things, and finally the human race, were created. On this view the inference is usually drawn that the universe (or at least the earth) is no more than roughly 6,000 to 10,000 years old. That inference, of course, contradicts the ages of the earth and the universe accepted in modern cosmology (roughly 4.5 billion years for the earth, and about 10 to 20 billion years for the universe). The older age of the earth is criticized by young-earth creationists as not only in conflict with a literal reading of the six days of Genesis 1, but also as opening the door to naturalistic evolution.

There are serious arguments both for and against the young-earth interpretation of Genesis 1, and reputable evangelical theologians and exegetical scholars can be found on both sides of the debate. Ultimately the major issue separating old-earth creationists from young-earth creationists is the question of the relationship between science and theology. It is important to put the question that way, because to pit science against the Bible is to misconstrue the problem. The Bible is regarded by Christians as the unerring or infallible written revelation from God; theology is the very human, fallible enterprise of interpreting and applying the teachings of the Bible. Similarly, the physical universe, or nature, was created by God and therefore reflects his truth in all its data; science, though, is the all too human, fallible enterprise of interpreting the data of nature. Thus, the data of Scripture and the data of nature, since both come from God, may be regarded as fully reliable and consistent with one another, while our interpretations of either or both Scripture and nature may be inconsistent or in error.

The point is that three possibilities lay before us. (1) The mainstream scientists’ interpretation of the physical data may be right and the traditional interpretation of the Bible wrong. This was the case when Galileo and other scientists argued that the earth moved around the sun while theologians argued that the Bible taught that the earth stood still. (2) The mainstream scientists’ interpretation of the physical data may be wrong and the traditional interpretation of the Bible right. This is evidently the case when evolutionists argue that man evolved from lower primates, contrary to the virtual consensus among evangelical interpreters of the Bible. (3) The positions staked out by mainstream scientists and biblical interpreters may both be mixtures of truth and error. It is possible, even likely, that in many of the ongoing science-theology debates, including biology and cosmology, scientists and theologians have much to learn from each other.

The age of the universe and other questions on which there is no consensus even among evangelical Christian scholars and scientists will probably continue to be debated for some time to come. The challenge facing thinking Christians is to pursue the truth in such debates, even at the risk of giving up traditional ideas or of falling out of favor with the current intellectual establishment. If Christianity is to be a viable world and life view in the third millennium, it is vitally important that the Christian community come to terms with the scientific revolutions of today, even if (as has happened before) that process of coming to terms is not completed until tomorrow. In order to integrate the legitimate findings of science into the Christian world view, we need to make a major commitment of resources toward the exploration of these questions.

The church serves no good end by clinging to failed interpretations of the Bible and refusing to explore new directions. Christian scholars have an obligation to lead the way toward a renewed reverence for God’s truth wherever it can be found. Conservative scholars must develop a more aggressive attitude toward creation and encourage the church’s youth to enter not only the pastorate, mission work, and theology but also such fields as the natural sciences, archeology, anthropology, and the social sciences.³⁹

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¹ Pointed out in Charles E. Hummel, The Galileo Connection: Resolving Conflicts between Science and the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 52-53.

² Stillman Drake, trans., Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 154.

³ Galileo, “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” in ibid., 182, 183.

⁴ Ibid., 195-96.

⁵ Robert W. Funk, “Introduction,” in The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, A Polebridge Press Book (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 2.

⁶ Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 21.

⁷ George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 345, quoted, for example, in David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times (Manitou Springs, CO: Summit Press, 1991), 265.

⁸ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, Foreword by George Gaylord Simpson (New York: Collier, 1962), 477.

⁹ Michael Pitman, Adam and Evolution: A Scientific Critique of Neo-Darwinism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 255.

¹⁰ An excellent review of the myths and facts of the Scopes trial is found in James K. Fitzpatrick, God, Country and the Supreme Court (Chicago: Regnery Books, 1985), 109-29.

¹¹ For an account supportive of the Arkansas and Tennessee laws, see Bill Keith, Creation vs. Evolution: Scopes II -- The Great Debate (n.p.: Huntington House, 1982).

¹² Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 520.

¹³ Pitman, Adam and Evolution; Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986); Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1991). Johnson stands in a venerable tradition of critics of Darwinism who were trained in law; a notable earlier example is Norman Macbeth, Darwin Retried: An Appeal to Reason (Boston: Gambit, 1971).

¹⁴ John L. Casti, Paradigms Lost: Images of Man in the Mirror of Science (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 69. It should be noted that Casti is an evolutionist and firmly committed to a naturalistic theory of the origin of life.

¹⁵ Works detailing these problems include Charles B. Thaxton, Walter L. Bradley, and Roger L. Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories (New York: Philosophical Library, 1984); Robert Shapiro, Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (New York: Summit Books, 1986); Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

¹⁶ For two very different accounts of these scientists’ contribution to the debate, see Casti, Paradigms Lost, 115-21, 126; Keith, Creation vs. Evolution, 136-38.

¹⁷ Pitman, Adam and Evolution, 67.

¹⁸ William R. Fix, The Bone Peddlers: Selling Evolution (New York: Macmillan, 1984), xii, 11-15. Fix’s own answer to the question of evolution, developed in Part Two, is to view it as a process impelled forward by the force of “spirit” inherent in living things (and perhaps in the universe). His New Age interpretation of evolution is based largely on parapsychological research into ESP, out-of-body experiences, and the like.

¹⁹ Pitman, Adam and Evolution, 100.

²⁰ Ibid., 240-41; the Darwin quote is taken by Pitman from V. Barclay, Darwin Is Not for Children (1950), ch. 14.

²¹ Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 46-47, 85-86.

²² Ibid., 27.

²³ Ibid., 115-16.

²⁴ Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Introduction by Carl Sagan (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 10.

²⁵ Ibid., 50.

²⁶ Ibid., 46.

²⁷ Ibid., 135-36.

²⁸ Ibid., x.

²⁹ Ibid., 136.

³⁰ Ibid., 136-37.

³¹ See the discussion in Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993), 83-84.

³² Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 174-75.

³³ Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (Boulder: Shambala, 1975); Gary Zukov, The Dancing Wu Li Masters (New York: Morrow, 1979).

³⁴ On New Age physics, see Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 93-109.

³⁵ Gilbert Fulmer, “Cosmological Implications of Time Travel,” in The Intersection of Science Fiction and Philosophy: Critical Studies, ed. Robert E. Myers; Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 4 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 31-44.

³⁶ Norman L. Geisler, Knowing the Truth about Creation: How It Happened and What It Means for Us (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1989), 31-32.

³⁷ Hugh Ross, “Astronomical Evidences for a Personal, Transcendent God,” in The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer, ed. J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 155-56.

³⁸ Norman L. Geisler and J. Kerby Anderson, Origin Science: A Proposal for the Creation-Evolution Controversy (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), 28.

³⁹ Davis A. Young, The Biblical Flood: A Case Study of the Church’s Response to Extrabiblical Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 312.

“What I told you was true, from a certain point of view. . . . Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”

— Obi Won Kenobi, to Luke Skywalker, in The Return of the Jedi (1983)

In the previous two chapters, we have looked at the way modern science and psychology have changed the way we look at our world and ourselves and the challenges these new ideas pose to the Christian faith. Arguably the greatest challenge to the Christian faith, though, has yet to be considered. It is one thing to ask questions about the nature of the world or of ourselves — such as how old is the earth or whether human beings possess a soul. It is another thing altogether to ask questions about whether any questions about the world or ourselves can actually be answered. We are now living in a culture that increasingly questions the whole idea of truth as a reality that is the same for all people and according to which all people must order their lives.

For the past two centuries, philosophers and scientists, artists and theologians have turned in large numbers away from the supernaturalistic faith of historic Christianity and have sought an understanding and perspective of the world on a naturalistic basis. The goal was nothing less than a total rethinking of reality in terms fully comprehended by the human mind. Just as modern civilization seemed to be closing in on this goal, the whole project began to break down.

Culture watchers commonly refer to the breakdown of the modern world view and the resulting abandonment of the notion of objective truth and reality as postmodernism. At the heart of the postmodernist revolution is the claim that objectivism, the belief that truth and values exist independently of our perceiving them or believing in them, has been declared an outmoded, unrealizable ideal. Not only has God been declared dead, but Truth also has been pronounced dead. How can we tell a postmodernist that Jesus Christ is the Truth, when they don’t believe in truth any more? William Lane Craig has explained the problem this way:

The postmodernist is not merely saying that we cannot know with certainty which religious worldview is true and we therefore must be open-minded; rather he maintains that none of the religious worldviews is objectively true, and therefore none can be excluded in deference to the allegedly one true religion.¹

Relativism and Reality

The seeds of postmodernism were actually sown in the eighteenth century debates about epistemology — the branch of philosophy that asks how and whether we can know anything, and how we know what we know. Such debates seem esoteric to most people today, yet our culture has been profoundly affected by their outcome.

Some philosophers, called rationalists, maintained that we know things through the use of our mental, reasoning faculties. The problem with this claim was that by itself the mind would not have any information about which to think or reason. Other philosophers, called empiricists, maintained that we know things because the world external to us impacts us with information through our senses. One difficulty with this claim was that it could not explain how we know that certain things are always so (for example, how we know that two plus two always equals four). The mind is evidently not a mere blank slate on which the information that passes through our senses are written.

Immanuel Kant: Why We Can’t Know the Real World

Into this debate came the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant argued that the rationalists and empiricists were both half right and half wrong. “Pure reason” by itself has nothing to know, and mere sensations by themselves cannot be known. The mind, Kant argued, imposes a structure on the world as it receives information through the senses. It orders the chaos of sensations and, in effect, creates a world out of them. We can and do gain knowledge this way — but, Kant concluded, not knowledge of things in themselves, but things as they are perceived by us. What we know is not “out there,” but is rather what our minds have done with what is “out there.”

This way of looking at knowledge, Kant claimed, was akin to a Copernican revolution in epistemology. In the Copernican revolution we learned that the appearance of a regular motion of the sun is an illusion and that it is we that are moving, imposing the apparent motion on the sun. In the Kantian revolution we were told that the appearance of a regular structure of the world is an illusion and that it is we that are structuring the world, imposing the apparent structure on the world.

Kant was not a postmodernist. He believed that all of our minds imposed the same structure on the world, and therefore expected knowledge gained by one person to be recognizable by and shareable with other persons. But it should be obvious how short was the step from Kant’s modernism to today’s postmodernism. Take away the assumption that all human minds employ the same structural grid in organizing sense perceptions into intelligent knowledge, and the radical relativism of the postmodern era follows naturally. And that assumption itself could not be supported on Kant’s theory of knowledge. How can I know that other minds impose the same sort of structural form on the world as my mind does? If I cannot know things as they are in themselves, I certainly cannot know how other minds work in themselves.

Relativism: Why We Can’t Know the World Is Real

Not surprisingly, then, as the modern civilization of the West became an intercontinental, global civilization of diverse cultures, religions, and philosophies, the modernist assumption of a common rationality fell by the wayside. What has arisen in its place is another assumption, that of relativism. According to relativism, all knowledge is a construction, a way of looking at things, which has merit or value relative to the person or group of people who utilize it. Because the constructions used by a group have certain similarities and are developed as the individuals in the group interact, many postmodernists speak of “the social construction of reality.” Relativism, then, does not mean that an individual constructs his or her view of reality in isolation. It does mean, however, that no one view of reality is supreme or privileged. There is no objective reality “out there” that is known in this construction but not in that one. If there is anything existing independent of our perceptions of it (and postmodernists have differing “constructions” on that question!), there is no determinable, absolute reality that is waiting to be discovered and known. There are only varying constructions of that reality that differ because of our differing experiences, capacities, and conditions.

If these constructions or reality differ from one another, then, of what use are they? Different answers to that question can also be found, of course, but we will mention two of the most common. Constructions of reality are often held to be of relative validity to the extent that they provide a coherent or internally consistent way of looking at things. That is, as long as a person or group has a world view that makes sense of everything or nearly everything that they experience or encounter in life, that world view is valid for them. The other answer commonly given is that constructions of reality are of relative value to the extent that they provide an effective method for achieving goals. On this understanding, to the extent that a person or group has a world view that enables them to succeed in life, that world view is valid for them. If the first approach asks whether it makes sense, the second asks whether it works. Either question is allowable on postmodernist, relativistic premises. The question that is disallowed, that cannot even be asked, is whether it corresponds with external or objective reality — that is, whether it is true. Such a question is regarded as meaningless. For postmodernists, the only thing that is meaningful is the choice to embrace a world view that has no objective reality. One critic describes the philosophy this way:

Chinese food or French cuisine, Jesus or Nostradamus, permed or straight, life or death: they are all the same. What you choose does not matter, only your freedom in choosing.²

This Message Will Self-Destruct . . .

Despite the enormous sophistication and growing popularity of postmodernism, its relativistic view of knowledge and truth suffers from a simple, fatal flaw: relativism is self-defeating. That is, the claim that all knowledge is relative is a claim that refutes itself, or destroys itself, in the very act of making the claim.

The concept of a self-defeating or self-refuting claim is easy to understand. Suppose one of us were to write, “I cannot write a single sentence in English.” Obviously, in writing that sentence, I have just disproved it. A similar, more famous example is the “liar’s paradox.” If one of us were to say to you, “Everything I tell you is a lie,” that statement is self-refuting, because if it were true, that very statement would be a lie — but if it were a lie, then not everything I told you would be a lie.³ No evidence outside the statement is needed to show that it is false, and no amount of evidence could ever make it true.

Similarly, any statement affirming relativism is self-refuting. For example, if we assert that “all knowledge is relative,” then we are making a claim about the knowledge all other persons have, and thus we are making an absolute statement of truth. If “all knowledge is relative,” then we cannot know that! Perhaps the most blatant example of a self-defeating affirmation of relativism is John Caputo’s assertion, “The truth is that there is no truth.”⁴ Obviously, if this is true, it is false (since there would be at least this one truth). Such self-defeating statements also appear in moral discourse, such as the dictum of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, “It is forbidden to forbid.”⁵ One would think such transparently self-refuting statements would be rare, but they are commonplace in the literature, probably because they sound profoundly paradoxical. The fact of the matter, though, is that they are simply nonsense (that is, they make no sense).

This self-defeating nature of relativistic statements cannot be avoided by changing the terminology used. For example, if I claim that “all knowledge is a human construction,” that claim must apply to my knowledge that all knowledge is a human construction. But if my “knowledge” in this regard is itself a construction, it is only one way of looking at the question, and I have eliminated any possible basis for asserting it to be true of all knowledge possessed by other persons. Here is yet another example of a self-defeating statement, this one from postmodernist Walter Anderson: “In the postmodern world we are all required to make choices about our realities. . . . The only thing we lack is the option of not having to make choices. . . .”⁶ If we must “all” make such choices — if it is “required” and there is “no option” in this regard — and if, as Anderson in context clearly means, we are all living in “the postmodern world” whether we like it or not, then his whole statement assumes that there is one world in which we all live and about which one truth rules over all of us. In short, Anderson’s argument destroys itself because it presupposes the exact opposite of what it asserts. Of course, a softer claim might have been made — that we cannot avoid choosing what we will believe — but this is not Anderson’s claim, and it is not relativism.

Nor can the problem be avoided by adopting a softer, more humble form of relativism. For example, suppose someone were to say, “Well, I don’t know if all knowledge is relative for everyone else, but I know that all knowledge is relative for me.” To such an assertion we must ask whether this knowledge is itself relative. Is the humble relativist’s knowledge of the relativism of his knowledge subject to change depending on time, place, or circumstance? If it is, then it is not always or necessarily true even for him. If his knowledge of relativism is not subject to change, then it is an absolute, and his relativism is false — even for him!

Not only can no one affirm relativism without refuting it, no one can argue for it or provide evidence for it without refuting it. Relativists often appeal to the differing belief systems which human beings espouse as proof of relativism. For example, Anderson criticizes “fundamentalists” for their belief in absolute truths by pointing out that “there is not, in most parts of the contemporary world, much of a consensus about what those truths are — if there are any. . . .”⁷ But the argument assumes that I am living in the same “contemporary world” as Anderson and am aware of the diverse belief systems to which Anderson refers. Or again, relativists often point out that the appearance of a stick partially submerged in water differs depending on the direction from which it is viewed. But the experiment depends on our recognizing that it is the same stick, the same water, and the same glass that we both see — and the fact that we can exchange places and see what the other saw proves that relativism is indeed false. Any attempt to persuade someone to adopt relativism assumes absolutism.

It is true, of course, that we “construct” our world views through a process of interacting with our environment and with each other. This has the further implication that none of us knows everything, and that even what we know in common will have a different set of associations and be set in somewhat differing contexts. We must part company with the relativist and the postmodernist, however, when they reason from these facts to the conclusion that reality itself is a construction of the human mind. Rather, reality is the given setting in which our efforts to construct a world view take place and which set the boundaries and conditions of those efforts. In other words, reality is both the field on which we play the game of knowledge and the rules by which the game of knowledge is governed.

The postmodernist is right in claiming that the modernist project of acquiring absolutely objective, complete, and comprehensive knowledge of the world is impossible for finite humans. For this reason postmodern critiques of the Enlightenment and modern thought have value. But the postmodernist has really not abandoned modernism; he is really more of an ultramodernist. He retains the belief that human beings must determine for themselves what is real and what is right on the assumption of human self-sufficiency. The postmodernist is therefore every bit a humanist as the modernist. Postmodernists have simply concluded that this human determination of the real is to be taken even more literally: to determine what is real now means to make it real.

Reimagining Reality

Postmodernism and its relativistic view of knowledge are more widespread than the number of persons who self-consciously accept these labels. Throughout our civilization the belief in objective truth and objective reality is under assault. Relativism shows up in some of the strangest places. In every case, the argument is ultimately self-defeating.

For example, we are told that all texts, from the Bible to the U.S. Constitution, have different meanings depending on the political, ideological stance from which they are read. Those who disagree with the traditional interpretation of these texts advocate “deconstructing” them, that is, dismantling their actual meanings by showing their ideological assumptions. But if this theory were true, any and all statements that expressed this theory would also vary in meaning in this way — so that, from at least one particular ideological stance, the theory could still be interpreted to mean that texts have fixed meanings which all readers should respect. By this reasoning the postmodernist theory of interpretation of texts can itself be dismissed as reflecting a particular ideological stance.

Or again, it is claimed that modern physics, especially Einstein’s theories of relativity, have proved relativism. This claim, of course, is self-defeating, since it could only be true if Einstein’s theories of relativity were itself true. That is, it assumes that Einstein’s theories refer to absolute truths, not truths judged only from a certain perspective. Moreover, the argument completely misunderstands Einstein. Relativity is not the same thing as relativism. Relativity theory correlates space and time, matter and energy according to certain constant (i.e., absolute) truths, such as the formula E = mc² or the velocity of light as equaling 186,242 miles per second for all observers. Thus, relativity theory assumes that relativism is false and that some things are true for everyone.

History: The Way We Imagine We Were

One of the areas of thought in which relativism has made especially significant inroads is the field of historical knowledge. History used to be defined as the study of the past — the search for knowledge of what actually took place in the past. The assumption was that certain events took place at certain times for certain reasons, and to the extent that effects of those events have survived or can be found, we can acquire knowledge of those events and an understanding of how and why they happened. It was also assumed that the more accurate our understanding of the past, the more likely we were to be able to act effectively in the present and plan for the future.

This philosophy of history is now widely regarded as out of fashion. We are now told that history is constructed according to the perspectives (i.e., biases) of the historian, and that there is no objective way to judge which perspectives must be used and no way to be sure that our constructions correspond to the way things “really” were.

No one doubts that historians are guided by their own assumptions, experiences, training, and values, and that these factors play a part in shaping the conclusions reached by historians. But what is controversial is that such subjective factors make impossible comparisons of historical constructions in light of objective facts. But the reason for adopting this philosophy of history is not a secret. Many postmodern historians are quite open about the fact that in their view history serves ideological purposes. That is, the purpose of history is not to learn what actually happened in the past (which is supposedly an unrealizable goal), but rather to further a social or political agenda. For virtually all such postmodernists, that agenda is one of liberation of oppressed peoples, providing a voice for those whose perspective has been ignored or suppressed by the powerful.

This ideological philosophy of history is self-defeating, as its relativistic assumptions would suggest. After all, one can only commend revisioning history in the interests of the oppressed peoples if it is possible to identify who the oppressed peoples are. Every citation of slavery, genocide, persecution, or marginalization of a people assumes that we can examine the facts and agree that in truth the people in question did receive such treatment.

Afrocentrism: Teaching Myth as History

An excellent example of this trend in postmodern historiography is Afrocentrism, a program of revisionism aimed at claiming African origins for numerous famous people, inventions, and cultural developments traditionally attributed to European or other non-African sources. What is controversial here is not a search for the actual contributions of African peoples to the history and cultures of the world, or an effort to show that some African contributions have been overlooked or co-opted by Eurocentrists. Such a program would assume an objectivist philosophy of history as the search for knowledge of the actual past. What makes Afrocentrism troubling is its disregard for the facts and its open advocacy, at least on the part of some, of a view of history as essentially an ideological tool rather than a pursuit of the truth.

Mary Lefkowitz has authored an incisive critique of such Afrocentric revisionism in her book Not Out of Africa, in which she refutes the claim that Socrates (for example) was black and that the Greeks stole their philosophy and other intellectual legacies from African culture. Lefkowitz, a Jewish historian, is naturally sensitive to revisionism, since the Nazis created fictions about Jewish history to justify the Holocaust, and since more than a half century later a stubborn minority of people in the West still deny that the Holocaust occurred. Her comparison of the two examples of revisionism is to the point:

Academics ought to have seen right from the start that this “new historicism” has some serious shortcomings. But in fact most of us are just beginning to emerge from the fog far enough to see where history-without-facts can lead us, which is right back to fictive history of the kind developed to serve the Third Reich. It is not coincidental that ours is the era not just of Holocaust denial but of denial that the ancient Greeks were ancient Greeks and creators of their own intellectual heritage. . . . There are of course many possible interpretations of the truth, but some things are simply not true. It is not true that there was no Holocaust. There was a Holocaust, although we may disagree about the numbers of people killed. Likewise, it is not true that the Greeks stole their philosophy from Egypt. . . .” ⁸

Any attempt to circumvent this problem by claiming that there are different “truths” and that the Afrocentrists are as entitled to their truth as anyone else would miss the point. These revisionists are not seeking toleration, but are demanding (and in some cases getting) official acceptance as the new historical paradigm in universities and throughout the educational establishment. Competition among divergent theories or beliefs is nothing new in academia; what is new is that the players in some cases are explicitly denying that the competition must be awarded to the view that makes the best case for being true to the real world. Lefkowitz asks,

Are there, can there be, multiple, diverse “truths?” If there are, which “truth” should win? The one that is most loudly argued, or most persuasively phrased? Diverse “truths” are possible only if “truth” is understood to mean something like “point of view.” . . . . The notion of diversity does not extend to truth. ⁹

The fact that people acting on the basis of postmodern assumptions often insist that their view be given priority and acceptance while older, traditional views be discarded suggests something very disturbing. We have already seen that at its root the relativism of postmodern thought is irrational, indeed self-refuting. Why, then, would anyone insist on it? While this cannot be said about all who espouse relativism, in many cases it would seem to be little more than a cover for beliefs that cannot withstand rational, objective scrutiny.

We have been using Afrocentrism as an example of an interpretation of history that is typically postmodern and relativistic, but there are many more examples that could be given (such as the debates about the place of Christopher Columbus in history that raged during 1992, or the postmodern interpretations of history offered by Oliver Stone in such movies as JFK). Indeed, even the historical narratives of the Bible have been subject to revisionist constructions that assume a relativistic understanding of historical knowledge. It is one thing for skeptics to claim that the crucial historical events of the Bible never happened. It is another thing altogether for postmodernists to “re-read” biblical history and come away with completely different meanings that deny the reality of that history. In this regard they have made common cause with the modernist approach to biblical interpretation that has characterized theological liberalism for the past two centuries. It is liberalism and its postmodern successors that will occupy our attention in the next chapter.

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¹ William Lane Craig, “Politically Incorrect Salvation,” in Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World, ed. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Ockholm (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 77.

² Roger Lundin, “The Pragmatics of Postmodernity,” in Christian Apologetics in the Modern World, ed. Phillips and Ockholm, 35.

³ An amusing use of this “liar’s paradox” appears in the classic Star Trek episode “I, Mudd,” in which Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock use the self-defeating paradox to paralyze the collective computerized mind of a race of androids!

⁴ John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 156, cited in Craig, “Politically Incorrect Salvation,” 82.

⁵ Quoted in Ravi Zacharias, A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990), 57.

⁶ Walter Truett Anderson, Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Theatrical Politics, Ready-to-Wear Religion, Global Myths, Primitive Chic, and Other Wonders of the Postmodern World, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 7, 8 (emphasis in original).

⁷ Ibid., xi.

⁸ Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History, A New Republic Book (New York: HarperCollins — BasicBooks, 1996), 51, 161.

⁹ Ibid., 162.