Is the Gospel Good News? (McMaster New Testament Studies Series Book 8) by Porter Stanley E

Author:Porter, Stanley E. [Porter, Stanley E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2019-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

Theology

9

“The Word Became Flesh ”

Christian Theology and Science as Coinherent, Not Conflicted . . . A Post-Intellectual Approach

W. Ross Hastings

Introduction

I have found over the years of playing the occasional golf game (with people I do not know) that it is best to try to keep my vocation as a pastor or professor of theology a secret. On one occasion on Burnaby Mountain, one chap I was joined with swore like a trooper all the way through the first nine holes, which he played abominably. A blue hue followed him everywhere he played a shot. At the tenth, he found himself under a tree, swung with full abandon, and wrapped his shaft around a branch. After taking swears and cusses to a new level, he turned to me, and I kid you not, in his next breath asked me, “So what do you do for a living?” I told him that I played a lot of rugby and was used to this kind of language and that it was really a matter between him and God anyway; he was not much put at ease. When I told him that I have a Ph.D. in chemistry and that my first career was in science teaching before becoming a pastor and theologian, he looked utterly bewildered. He then said what is almost always said to me in this situation, “How do you put those two things together?” That is the question I want to try to answer in this paper.

When it comes to the relationship between science and the Christian faith, Denis Lamoureux, in his book Evolutionary Creation , has reflected what I am afraid is the sad truth: Bad theology and bad science have characterized the Christian tradition, and we have not learned from it! Lazar Puhalo, Orthodox theologian and scientist, believes that a primary reason for the conflict model has not so much been modern science, as if it were some kind of “international plot” to overthrow Christianity; it is rather the “bad” scholastic theology of the West in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions and a fundamentalism that is present especially within the latter. These Western traditions, he asserts, were shaped more by the influence of Greek philosophy, specifically that of Aristotle through Islamic philosophy and of Neoplatonism through Augustine and his “analogy of being.” Puhalo states that “Aristotle had written on the essence of natural mechanisms, but he favoured the search for truth in philosophical processes rather than experimental ones. It was Aristotelianism that formed the dogmatized canon of ‘scientific fact,’ or at least the canon of acceptable thought.” 343 He insists that under scholasticism, philosophy sat over both science and theology, the former being determined by presuppositions about the unchangeable and static nature of the cosmos and by misreadings of Scripture and the latter being determined by philosophy’s idolatrous reductionisms concerning God, robbing humanity of its relationship with creation and its formation through the empirical discoveries about creation through science. Puhalo does acknowledge that the systematic reasoning process

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