Carl Sagan/John Walton
Two seemingly unrelated things happened to me this past weekend: (1) I had a delightful email exchange with Dr. Walton, and (2) I tried to rent my favorite movie, Contact, from Blockbuster. No joy on Contact, but I was pleased to hear that Dr. Walton will be recommending BTF to his colleagues. Other than both being brilliant, what else could these two individuals possibly have in common?
Dr. Walton’s commentary on Genesis is one of the more insightful, precisely because it unpacks the text as the original Ancient Near-Eastern audience would have understood it. Once we familiarize ourselves with the world in which the Hebrews lived, we are able to see Genesis in its native context, apart from any modern scientific bias. If we are consistent in our handling the text, we will find God accommodating His revelation to the finite perceptions of the world in which the Hebrews found themselves. Why? So that mankind has a familiar context from which we can connect with Him. How else could the infinite and eternal God be understood by such finite creatures as ourselves?
I find it interesting that in Contact, when Ellie (played by Jodi Foster) finally connects with the alien race, they do not reveal themselves as they truly are. Without a familiar context, such an encounter would be meaningless. Because they are so far above us in both physical and mental faculties, it would have been too much of a shock to come face-to-face with these god-like beings. So the alien that appears to Ellie literally “puts on flesh” and takes the form of her deceased father, and the setting of their encounter resembles that of a beach in Pensacola (a strong memory from Ellie’s childhood).
Obviously, Dr. Sagan understood the principle of accommodation: the necessity of highly advanced beings to “humble” themselves and become “one of us” in order to facilitate the possibility of connecting with us on a personal level (alien incarnation?). Why is this important? Well, Dr. Sagan was raised in a Jewish household and was very familiar with the portrait of creation painted by the biblical authors. But rather than allow Yahweh the same artistic liscense as his hypothetical alien race, Sagan takes God to task for not laying down a more technically correct picture of the cosmos. His biographer, Anne Druyan, recently wrote:
“How was it, [Sagan] wondered, that the eternal and omniscient Creator described in the Bible could confidently assert so many fundamental misconceptions about Creation? Why would the God of the Scriptures be far less knowledgeable about nature than are we, newcomers, who have only just begun to study the universe? He could not bring himself to overlook the Bible’s formulation of a flat, six-thousand-year-old Earth… This newly acquired vision made the God who created the World seem hopelessly local and dated, bound to transparently human misperceptions and conceits of the past.”
Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, edited by Ann Druyan (New York, NY; Penguin, 2006), pg. x.
What made Dr. Sagan overlook the obvious need for an eternal, omniscient and omnipresent God to accommodate Himself to us in the same way that his own alien species used a familiar context to connect with Ellie? Perhaps he was influenced by creationist organizations like ICR and AiG who also reject this method of biblical inspiration and insist that God only speaks to us in literal matter-of-fact terms? On this hermeneutic, Carl Sagan and Ken Ham would find themselves in agreement.
April 12th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I’m about half way through Walton. I have been reading slowly, occasionally interrupting it to read other works. I found Walton’s treatment of Genesis 1 fairly insightful. However, I was disappointed that he seemed to abandon his hermeneutic about the literary genre starting at chapter 2, and starting reconstructing everything as literal history, right at the start with Adam and Eve. My understanding is that Walton does not believe in evolution. As one who has fully accepted the reality of common descent, I have also fully accepted the reality that humans are not descended from two people 6k years ago or from 8 people 4k years ago at the flood. Likewise I feel all the evidence and just plain common sense suggest that language differentiation didn’t happened at a singular location 3.8k years ago. Its this last story that seems to have the most elements of human myth, a reconstructed story to explain why we speak different languages. I just have a hard time accepting people in North America were speaking Hebrew (or whatever this proto-language was) at the time, especially since languages evolve and modify very much like creatures, sharing common ancestors and a history that can now be partly reconstructed.
I can’t expect Walton to write a work that specifically addresses my questions for the text. But since my overwhelming question is how God’s plan and message and how Biblical inerrancy are affected by the reality that what I am reading is not literal history, I haven’t found Walton very helpful. I don’t mean this as a slight on Dr. Walton at all, he has his own goals and intended audience, and the NIVApplication Commentary likewise has its own very valid goals. I’m a graduate of Wheaton College but regrettably never crossed paths with Dr. Walton. Mathematics and engineering were on the other side of campus.
April 12th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Pete,
I’m still in Chapter 2 myself for much the same reasons you are. But Dr. Walton’s position reaches far beyond what he relates to us in the NIV commentary. As he wrote to me recently in a personal email exchange:
“My Genesis Commentary that you quoted a few times represented the front edge of my development of a new paradigm for dealing with Genesis 1 as an ancient Near Eastern document… Some of this is in my Genesis commentary, but it was still in a very early stage of development and not worked out thoroughly. It is more carefully (and concisely) developed in my 2006 book, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament.”
I look forward to reading this book. I can’t comment on Dr. Walton’s personal opinion of evolution, but I do know that he has read widely on the subject, is married to a biochemist, and is quite knowledgable on scientific matters.
Peter Enns’ I&I might also be helpful to you.
April 12th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Gordon,
Excellent observations. The problem with many atheists is that they interpret the Bibe in a similar (if not identical) manner as young-earth creationists!
Pete,
(We’ve discussed this before on my blog …) You’re correct that Walton’s commentary is inconsistent in its use of the ANE perspective. I’ve got Walton’s ANE Thought, but I haven’t yet found the opportunity to read through it (and may not depending on how intense my Persian language classes turn out to be). Nevertheless, I do hope that Walton gets the opportunity to rework his Genesis commentary in light of his new book. (Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation is also on my must-read list.)
April 14th, 2008 at 9:44 am
“Peter Enns’ I&I might also be helpful to you.”
Funny thing about this ring of blogs is that few comment threats if any are complete before someone recommends one of the holy trinity of EC books
“Beyond the Firmament” Your very own
“Inspiration and Incarnation” Enns
“Genesis NIVApplication commentary” Walton
On another blog I also included “The Meaning of Creation” as the fourth holy book, but now I realize it is more like the missing Q document, the forerunner for which all the others have seemed to spawn.
I have already read Enns and should probably give it a second read (my pastor though has it at the moment). I had reserved excitement for the idea that the Bible was both 100% written by God and 100% written by man; though I never thought Enns quite fleshed out what that might mean. Or at least, he didn’t go far enough for me to help reconcile history and Biblical narrative. What Enns did say though was enough to get him suspended from Westminster so saying more was probably out of the question.
I’ll take a look at Walton’s new book. And hmmm, married to a biochemist… Okay, break the suspence for all us. You seem to have been exchanging a few emails with him, go ahead and ask him (I’ll promise not to tell the Wheaton Administration:)
April 14th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Pete,
When I said, “I can’t comment” — it’s becasue I really don’t know. I have my own opinion based on comments he made to me in personal correspondence, but I’m not sure it would be profitable to speculate publicly.
I also forgot that you had already read Enns. But you’re right, it has become a knee-jerk reaction to recommend I&I. I too wish he had gone further, but apparently he already offended the “keepers of the truth” that seem to police our denomination. Perhaps now that Enns is free from those constraints, he can further develop his ideas.
April 14th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
If Enns is ultimately dismissed, I hope he sees it as positive as “free from those constraints”:) I am SOOOOO glad my career is not tied to my religious belief where I have to be careful how my views shift less I lose my means of supporting myself. Now, I totally respect Westministers position; they are a private seminary; they have their beliefs drawn around the WCF and they are going to stick to it. They have ever right to (hopefully amicably) part ways with anyone who does not believe as they do (just as long as we no longer physically harm those who disagree). If I were on the board of a seminary and one of our professors starting asserting that Jesus was not God then we would need to part ways. But I’m glad I’m not in a position where my shifting views comes at the cost of my salary. How much more stress would these spiritual journeys cause if I feared thinking out loud might cost me my house. I know of at least one professor who lost his job at Wheaton for his views of faith and science; and it pains me to think that he lost his job over the crime of knowing more about reality then the administration. On second thought, it appears I am spoiled by my place in space and time. In many parts of the world and until quite recently even in the western world thinking out loud DOES cost you quite a bit more then your house. Thank God for religious freedom in this country!