Francis Beckwith
April 8, 2010 1:00 PM
http://francisbeckwith.com
We are so trapped in the present that many of us forget--or don't remember, or never know--that American Christian fundamentalism never required a belief in young-earth creationism.
In the 1950s Biola University had on its faculty, Bernard Ramm, a strong critic of the creationism that was dominant at the time: http://www.amazon.com/Christian-View-Science-Scripture-Bernard/dp/0802814298. It was not considered a big deal then, since in the famous five volume THE FUNDAMENTALS, theistic evolution was defended by James Orr! So much for fundamentalists all being young-earth creationists.
http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/2010/04/evolution-defense-behind-theologians-ouster_comments.html
Francis Beckwith is so trapped in the present that he's forgotten–or never knew–that James Orr was a Scotsman, not an American. What is more, Orr was hardly a fundamentalist.
(I'm the former Publius)
ReplyDelete1.) Like I said, Orr was part of the United Free Church, which heading for a reunion with the Church of Scotland. The conservatives broke away and call themselves Free Church of Scotland to this day. Orr was not one of these people.
2.) Orr did not affirm either natural selection or Darwinism, which is clear if you actually read what he wrote:
A newer evolution has arisen which breaks with Darwin on the three points most essential to his theory: 1. The fortuitous character of the variations on which "natural selection" works. Variations are now felt to be along definite lines, and to be guided to definite ends. 2. The insufficiency of "natural selection" (on which Darwin almost wholly relied) to accomplish the tasks Darwin assigned to it. 3. The slow and insensible rate of the changes by which new species were supposed to be produced. Instead of this the newer tendency is to seek the origin of new species in rapid and sudden changes, the causes of which lie within the organism—in "mutations," as they are coming to be called—so that the process may be as brief as formerly it was supposed to be long. "Evolution," in short, is coming to be recognized as but a new name for "creation," only that the creative power now works from within, instead of, as in the old conception, in an external, plastic fashion. It is, however, creation none the less.
(see pages 500-501 of the PDF at http://tinyurl.com/y7qfx4q)
Obviously this is dated. Yet it is something like Warfield's notion of evolution as secondary causes, but nothing like the BioLogos TE theory accepted by Francis Collins, Bruce Waltke and Tim Keller
3.) Orr would have called himself Reformed and not fundamentalist, as would Machen, Warfield and other Presbyterians. The term, then as now, had connotations of Arminian moralism, premillenialism and revivalism. For example, the OPC and old CRC were never "fundamentalist."
Another question:
How "Christian" is BioLogos anyway?
1.) The benefactor is the late billionaire John Templeton, who was some sort of Universalist.
2.) One of the "leading figures" is one Howard Van Till.
http://www.biologos.org/resources/leading-figures
No relation to Cornelius Van Til, this fellow was a major figure in the CRC meltdown of the 80s and 90s. He is now calling himself a "freethinker" (whatever that means). Van Till even has a deconversion story:
http://www.freethoughtassociation.org/images/uploads/pdf/ODoRs.pdf
About Bernard Ramm: his book, The Christian View of Science and Scripture, was the first shot in the so-called "battle for the Bible," the inerrancy conflict that has never really ended. Think of Ramm as the Clark Pinnock of the 1950s. He started out as a sort of academic fundamentalist who kept moving further and further leftward.
ReplyDeleteSo, no, it is wrong to say Ramm's book was no big deal. Interestingly, it is possible that Meredith Kline developed his framework view as a sort of via media between Ramm and the YEC view.
"Think of Ramm as the Clark Pinnock of the 1950s."
ReplyDeleteThanks. That's helpful.
Of course, I knew he was a Scotsman. One of my church history textbooks (in 1983) was his The Progress of Dogma (http://www.ccel.org/o/orr/). (I studied under John Montgomery at the old Simon Greenleaf. It was a terrific experience, and thanks to Montgomery, I never drifted into creationism. John used to say, there are two things about which American Evangelicals write the most and know the least, "The beginning and the end." He was right, and still is.).
ReplyDeleteMy point was to show that the inclusion of Orr's essay in The Fundamentals--the multi-volume collection edited by Dixon and Torey (founder of BIOLA) and deeply important to the founding and formation of American fundamentalism--was not outside the scope of acceptable belief by American fundamentalists. Orr's nationality was not relevant to that claim.
Frank, you miss the point:
ReplyDelete1.) Scroll up.
a. James Orr's idea of evolution was nothing like that promoted by BioLogos. For that matter, neither was Warfield's. You're trying to read methodological naturalism into Orr and it doesn't wash.
b.) The Fundamentals contributors had a range of views. On the extremes, G. Campbell Morgan was a British Israelite and E.Y. Mullins was a neo-Gnostic. Robert Speer's lack of fundamentalism got the library named after him at New Princeton. In addition, the confessional Reformed guys refused the name "fundamentalist." So you can't assume a "range of acceptable views" based on the contributors.
2.) Your claim that Bernard Ramm's evolutionism was tolerated without controversy is completely false. He didn't last at Biola, now did he?
3.) You implicitly claim that the inerrantists of 100 years ago would have tolerated the BioLogos view that treats the existence of Adam as adiphora. That's hogwash.
4.) I don't see any evidence that John Warwick Montgomery endorses the BioLogos view, either. So why drop the name?
Francis Beckwith also says, elsewhere:
ReplyDeleteCouple that with Calvin's claim that geocentricity is required by Scripture.
Calvin never said any such thing, as BioLogos' Alister McGrath admits in Twilight of Atheism:
Take the Calvin myth. The intellectual authority of the great atheist writer Bertrand Russell was such that few bothered to check out his assertions. Russell did not source his citation from Calvin, forcing others to work out where he got it from. The noted historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn attempted to track it down when studying early responses to Copernicus s theory. Yet neither Kuhn nor anyone else could find anything like the quotation attributed to Calvin in any of his published writings. It did, however, feature prominently in the pages of Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896): "Calvin took the lead, in his Commentary on Genesis, by condemning all who asserted that the earth is not at the center of the universe. He clinched the matter by the usual reference to the first verse of the ninety-third Psalm, and asked, 'Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?' " Although White referred to a specific work by Calvin, at no point in that work—or anywhere else—did Calvin state anything even remotely resembling the words or thoughts attributed to him. So where did White get his quotation from? In a remarkable piece of literary detective work, Edward Rosen showed that the quotation could be traced back, not to any work of Calvin, but to a work published in 1886 by E W. Farrer. Once more, no source was provided for the citation. The trail fizzled out at that point. Farrer was a cleric at Westminster Abbey in London who perhaps lacked the will and resources to check his facts. The remark attributed to Calvin thus had to be dismissed as pure invention.
I submit that Francis Beckwith has no idea what he is talking about.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteOops. Found a typo and deleted my prior post. Here is the correct version.
ReplyDeleteTwo points:
First, I was not referring to the quote which McGrath is discussing. I was thinking about one of Calvin's sermons: http://www.nd.edu/~mdowd1/postings/CalvinAstroRev.html
Second, even if I am wrong about Calvin (though I do not think I am, and it is nevertheless the case that Luther is clear on this point, incidentally), the point was to bring this principle to bear on this discussion: sometimes it is okay to change our interpretation of Scripture in light of extra-Scriptural knowledge. What this means is that the inspiration and authority of Scripture is not undermined simply because we may discover the dominant understanding of a passage turned out to be wrong. This is why Ramm's book is important: he provides a hermeneutical principle--the Bible talks phenomenologically and scientifically on such issues--that is fruitful. After all, because science changes, it would be foolish for God to inspire a book that taught the science of a particular age, which will likely be overturned in the future by more discoveries and insights. This is one of the reasons why I have my doubts about certain aspects (though not all aspects) of the ID project.
But who cares? Aquinas was wrong about several scientific beliefs. I don't lose sleep over that. And neither should you when Calvin and Luther blow it. They had very good reasons to believe what they believed, even though we know now that they were wrong.
We can learn from their mistakes. And I think that's precisely what Ramm, Orr, and Warfield were doing. Whether or not they hold views identical to some BioLogos is not the point. The point is that their views were not lock-step fundamentalist and still perfectly consistent with the authority and inspiration of Scripture.