Blog Archive
for May, 2007
Closed Minds at the Creation Museum
— Monday, May 28th, 2007 —
My family attended the grand opening of the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum this past weekend and I saw what I expected to see: closed minded propagandists who don’t want any challenge to their narrow view of origins. But they weren’t in the Museum.
So we drove past the protesters and into a museum whose exhibits constantly reference both sides of the creation/evolution debate.
My three older boys were, quite literally, jumping up and down at the prospect of dinosaurs, and the animated creatures did not disappoint. The moving, roaring facsimile reptiles were big and (at least in the post-Fall exhibits) fierce. The 27 million dollar budget was obvious here, since the dinosaurs were more Jurassic Park quality than Land of the Lost. While my boys ran around on a lifesize replica of Noah’s Ark and pretended to sword-fight a T-Rex, their mother and I read the displays on ice ages, species development, and differing understandings of radiometric dating.
The planetarium inspired awe at the vastness of the universe, bringing to mind the Psalmist’s question “What is man that you are mindful of him?” while answering it as the New Testament does: with the Incarnation and atonement of the Redeemer-Ruler of the cosmos. I was pleasantly surprised that the planetarium exhibit acknowledges problems caused for any biblical historical timeline by the time it takes starlight to reach our field of vision. I was furthermore surprised that the exhibit didn’t take a dogmatic stance on any one of the possible creationist answers to the problem: whether the concept of starlight created already in transit or Russell Humphreys’ theory of the question resolved by relativity of space and time or any of the others.
In fact, this scientific humility marked the museum, in a way not typical of some other attempts at creation science. The Museum exhibits make clear a conviction that, hermeneutically and theologically, a relatively “young” universe makes the best sense of the biblical data. The Museum exhibits provide possible scientific explanations of how this biblical authority can be scientifically explained but they do not confuse the authority of Scripture with the derivative and revisable authority of any scientific theory, whether that is specifics of fossilization and flood geology or a “vapor canopy” over the pre-Flood biosphere.
Keep Reading...Egalitarian Report Card
— Friday, May 25th, 2007 —
Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), the nation’s leading evangelical feminist advocacy group, is appalled by the Roman Catholic Church. Well, so was Martin Luther. But the evangelical feminists are upset for reasons that never bothered Dr. Luther: the Roman Catholic Church won’t ordain women to the priesthood.
The latest post on CBE’s blog, “The CBE Scroll” argues that evangelicals have a great deal to learn from the bad report card the Catholic Church received from a group called the Women’s Justice Coalition which charges that women are relegated to the margins in Roman Catholic life. The CBE blogger roots this in the theology of male headship that exists in the Roman church, a situation that corresponds, the post argues, with certain sectors of evangelical Protestantism.
Of course, as with all report cards, it matters who is doing the grading.
Keep Reading...ETS President Converts to Catholicism
— Saturday, May 5th, 2007 —
Francis Beckwith, associate professor of church-state studies at Baylor University and current president of the Evangelical Theological Society, has been received into the Roman Catholic Church, according to reports today.
The Evangelical Theological Society was founded as an academic professional organization for conservative Protestant scholars. The ETS doctrinal statement is, in its entirety: “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs. God is a Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.”
Keep Reading...Evangelical Same-Sex Marriages?
— Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 —
9 Marks Ministries has posted the audio from a roundtable conversation between Mark Dever, C.J. Mahaney, Randy Stinson, and me at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. in November. As the blurb from the website advertises, I wonder aloud here whether most evangelical Christians are living in same-sex marriages and Mahaney challenges Dever to give more attention to gender issues than he does now. You can listen to the conversation here.
Speaking of gender conversation, the audio is also up from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s “Different by Design” conference in Minneapolis this past February. At this conference, Ligon Duncan and I talked about gender matters and then fielded questions from the audience. Dr. Duncan’s address is thoughtful and dynamic, and will fuel some needed conversation on these issues. You can access these talks here.
Keep Reading...
