The Right Questions
In January, at the outset of Servants Quarters, I sought to explain why our biblical stewardship studies would commence with a six-month walk through biblical worldview studies. Why consider who created the world, before tackling the legitimacy of modern calls to tithe? Why ruminate on the source of pain and brokenness in the human experience, before asking whether incurring debt is unwise by biblical standards? Why concentrate for a time on how healing might be brought to our brokenness, before exploring together what percentage of our income would God have us save? One important reason for choosing this approach to stewardship is to make sure that each of us is walking through the same forest, before we begin analyzing any trees. We want to increase the likelihood that our dialogue will be rooted in a shared appreciation for God’s sovereignty over every square inch of creation, as well as a better understanding of the materialistic worldview so widely embraced by our culture, by default if not on purpose.
Our worldview topic for April is creation. How did we and the rest of creation get here? Why are we here? As I reflect on our primary book for the month – The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning & Public Debate by Phillip Johnson – I realize only now how much the approach described above bears its influence. Johnson, a law professor turned Intelligent Design advocate, has sought to bring light to bear on the weaknesses of Darwinism, and materialism more generally, by asking the right questions in the right order. As aptly described by Nancy Pearcey in the foreword of Right Questions:
[Johnson] rallied Christians behind the crucial point of confrontation with the secular world [namely,] the question of philosophical naturalism: Is nature all there is? Can natural forces alone explain the universe and everything in it? Did life arise by blind, materialistic, Darwinian processes, or does the evidence point to other forces? In confronting secular culture, these are the right questions to start with; all others are secondary. Christians may argue about the details of how God created or the timing of creation; but they all agree that the universe is the handiwork of a personal God. Likewise, on the other side, evolutionists may argue over the precise mechanism and timing of evolution – for example, whether natural selection needs to be supplemented by other mechanisms – but they agree that the overall process is blind, undirected, purposeless (p.9).
Rather than begin the dialogue with specific questions about how, if at all, the creation account in Genesis can be reconciled with Darwinism, Johnson asks people to focus on John 1 and compare it with the materialistic story of creation.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.
“In the beginning was the Word.” Is that true or false? Is it fact or pious platitude? . . . There is an unacknowledged creation story that is at the root of all secular learning which is the precise opposite of John 1:1 in every way. . . . It is:
In the beginning were the particles and the impersonal laws of physics.
And the particles somehow became complex living stuff;
And the stuff imagined God;
But then discovered evolution.
That is the basic story of evolutionary naturalism, or scientific materialism. There was no “Word” – no intelligence or purpose – at the beginning. Only the laws and the particles existed, and these two things plus chance had to do all the creating. Without them nothing was made that has been made. The particles combined to become complex living stuff through a process of evolution that involved only chemical combinations governed by chance and natural law (pp.63-64).
As you read about Johnson’s approach to Darwinism, I ask you to consider how, if at all, we might use it as a model for cultural engagement on questions of stewardship. It seems to me that Christians waste a lot of time and energy arguing about, for example, whether Old Testament commands to tithe bind us today. What if instead we spent some of that time and energy clarifying what unites us – submission to God’s sovereignty – and exploring the practical implications of that unity? What if, rather than arguing amongst ourselves, we spent more time and energy seeking to identify and divide God’s opposition? Johnson has engaged academics and the scientific establishment; who might we seek to engage? What if we focused on highlighting the empty promises of cultural elements who claim that a durable sense of meaning and peace can be found apart from God in serial self-indulgence? What if we focused on helping one another resist the lies and temptations of a materialistic culture? Which approach likely would have a greater impact for the Kingdom?