Evolution and Eastern Orthodoxy: David J. Dunn

[truthseeker32]

Evolution and Eastern Orthodoxy | David J Dunn

The following is a review of Gayle E. Woloschak’s article, “The Compatibility of the Principles of Biological Evolution with Eastern Orthodoxy,” published in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 55.2 (2011).


I added Gayle Woloschak’s article on evolution and Orthodoxy to my reading list for a couple of reasons. For one, it goes to my interest in the culture wars and the ideas that fund them. It also bears upon my role as a recovering-evangelical convert to the Orthodox Church and the way I evaluate the impact people like me have on Orthodoxy at large.

Woloschak’s basic argument is that denying evolution is theologically problematic for an Orthodox Christian. She seems a bit surprised that she even has to argue her own thesis because denying the insights of science is not really Orthodox. It is a recent phenomenon she attributes partly to a large influx of converts.


Charles Darwin (By J. Cameron, via Wikimedia Commons)

The fathers of the church generally refused to read Scripture in any kind of literal way. Some of them, she says, even seemed to anticipate the theory of evolution. St. Basil, for instance, does speak about the six days of creation, but he also says that creation was not completed in six days. Creation, he said, is still being created. According to the author, rejecting evolution can lead to an exploitative view of nature. Only when we realize that human beings “and every other speices share in unity as they evolved into diversity” can we arrive at “a profound ecological consciousness and a view of humans as priests of creation” (213).

The author is partly right on that point, but plenty of evolutionists have exploited nature, too. In my opinion, exploitation of nature receives greater support from the eschatology of fundamentalism (which maintains that the world and all that is in it are supposed to suck, and the more they suck, they sooner Jesus comes).

It takes Woloschak a while to get to what I think is the heart of the problem. One reason Orthodox “fundamentalists” cite for rejecting evolution is that our theological sources presume an original perfection that has been lost. Eden has fallen. But evolutionary theory sees death and violence at the very beginning of the process of creation. These two narratives are not immediately compatible.


(via Wikimedia Commons)

She attempts to overcome this problem by invoking the somewhat controversial theologian, Fr. Sergei Bulgakov, who viewed Eden not so much as a lost paradise but a memory of our future. It is that perfection to which all creation is orientated and which, until it arrives, we experience in both grief and hope.

I tend to be a fan of Bulgakov in part because he is able to think faith and science together in tension. This is not only more Christian (because in my humble opinion biblical fundamentalism of any kind can only sustain itself by a remarkable act of dishonesty with one’s own intellect). It is specifically more Orthodox. Evolution is materialistic, and so is Orthodoxy. But our “advantage” over evolution is that we are able to, in a sense, complete it by keeping its materialism in its proper place. Says Woloschak,

Our passion for the immaterial and striving for the edenic state are expressions of our spirit and essential ingredient of our being ‘made in the image and likeness of God.; That part of our being need not be explained by biological evolution, nor could it be.

 

[Protoevangel]

Wow, the article is full of such disingenuous nonsense I don't really know where to start.

To start with though, this sentence ("The fathers of the church generally refused to read Scripture in any kind of literal way.") alone destroys any semblance of validity the author may have hoped to garner.

If you search the forums for "hexameron", you will find a number of threads where there is plenty of evidence regarding the literal interpretation of Genesis by a great number of the Church Fathers.

I did read a relatively decent article by an Orthodox evolutionist: Note to Orthodox Evolutionists: Stop Trying to Retroactively Recruit / Shanghai the Fathers to Your Camp! where he readily admits, "St. Basil does, in fact, quite plainly claim a young earth, and treats this belief as non-negotiable.", "St. Gregory's commentary is not a allegorical interpretation...", and most importantly, "It is better by far to acknowledge that you are outside the Fathers' consensus than make them agree with you. If you are an Orthodox evolutionist, please stop shanghaiing recruiting ancient Fathers to your camp."

Now, of course, his article is wrought with problems of it's own, committing the same errors he recognized in the Evolutionists he critiques... But even though he is blind to the fact that he is committing similar errors, his critique on those Evolutionists articles is still valid on it's own.

 

[ArmyMatt]

yeah, forgive me for saying so, but threads like this always lead nowhere. there are folks who support evolution, folks who reject it, folks who don't care. I personally fall in the middle camp.

 

[truthseeker32]

Here is a comment that followed the article:

I’d agree, fundamentalism and creationism aren’t really compatible with Orthodoxy, and in fact the ‘Bible-believing Christians’ of the Campus Crusade— uh, sorry, of the Evangelical Orthodox Church— plus Damascene Christensen’s nonsensical book, mostly drawn from fundie crackpot Philip Johnson under the aegis of S. Rose, are the main culprits for the present seeming cultural hegemony of this silliness among us. These men do not represent the tradition, and in fact for the most part they don’t even take their origin from the church, didn’t get their ideas from it, and in some cases aren’t even members of it.
It’s also a good point that ‘The fathers of the church generally refused to read Scripture in any kind of literal way.’ For example, they will tend to tell us that Eve was the ‘sensory, passive aspect of the mind’, and so forth— turning the whole story of Adam’s Fall into an allegory of the process of temptation and sin; or similar approaches. And in both Greek and Hebrew it’s pretty obvious that the story of ‘adam’ and ‘eve’ is a story about, literally, ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’. That is hardly the stuff of history, on the face of it.
As to the so-called ‘Garden of Eden’, careful study of the text actually rewards with the insight that the whole story is a metaphor for the Temple, with Adam/Man as the high priest. So the vocation of Adam/Man is to be the mediator, the one who brings the world to God, and the blessing of God into the world. And just as the climax of the OT story as a whole is the casting of Israel out of the Land of Promise and its Exile in Babylon (with promise of Restoration), so also, in the preface of that story, Adam/Man is cast out of the ‘garden of bliss’ (gan `eden; paradeisos tês tryphês, Gn 3.23) and given a promise of Restoration.
The rest of the Story is about the Promise, which begins to unfold with Abraham. Again a careful reading of God’s various sayings to him makes it clear that what is really being promised is a full Restoration of what Man— the high priest, Adam, Israel, humankind— has lost: ‘I will multiply you and make you a blessing for all the nations’.
By the time of Jesus, the Jews are more than ready to receive that blessing— or at least, they’ve had *enough* of suffering! And Jesus comes specifically to bring the Promise of God— and in the Bible, that means above all else, the Promise of Restoration from Exile, and ultimately the full promise to Abraham, to fulfillment.
Not really inhabiting the thought-world of the Scriptures, we tend to miss all this, though, and to read Jesus’ statment to the wise ‘gangster’ on the cross— ‘Today you will be with me in paradise’— as a statement about some intermediate realm between death and the general resurrection. And starting from that mis-presupposition, we ask all kinds of irrelevant questions like, Is Paradise the same as Heaven, or different?; and, Where is it located?, and so forth.
Actually when Jesus says, ‘You will be with me in paradise’, he’s not talking about anything like an ‘after-death state’ at all! He’s saying, ‘The Exile is over, and it’s over today, starting from here, on this cross.’ In Hebrew thought, nothing could be more explosive— or unexpected. Not just Israel’s Exile in Babylon, which was never really resolved, even though the people did formally return to their land— but Man’s long exile from the true Temple and Delight and vocation for which he had been created.
If we could just stop trying to get the Bible to give us answers to questions it doesn’t ask (What happens after death? Did the world evolve, or was it created? etc etc etc)— and just stay inside the story, as we do with any other piece of literature, we would find that the Bible is an astonishingly rich and meaningful tale.
For what man or woman is not familiar with the experience of Exile? And who does not long in his or her heart of hearts to unite again this world with its Creator, so that the Creator’s blessings of life and fruitfulness may flow generously into it anew— which is the priesthood for which we were created, and (we are told) destined?
We do ourselves such murderous disservice by pursuing our rationalizing fundamentalisms. We would never treat any other literature this way. Why do we try to force the Bible to be a Code of Criminal Law, an astrophysics textbook, and a biology manual all at once? Would we ever think of Dostoevsky that way? Is Melville any less ‘true’, even if, after reviewing all the evidence, he decides a whale is a ‘fish’?
@Richard Harris, that’s a clever poem, but I’m afraid it, too, must be classed under the same category mistake as fundamentalism. You simply fail to read the Story as it’s meant to be read; all you say is that you don’t like it, but you accept the same reading. Well, of course you’re responding to the way Christians often read it, and you haven’t been exposed to anything else, so you can’t be blamed. Christians are the most ignorant about their book! But— though this may be shocking news to you— it was never about ‘dogma’ or ‘strict rules on when to work, how to dress, and what to sup or sip’. And it is far more subtle, and challenging, than a casual reading-over (or hearsay) can ever convey. We have to ask not just, What are the rules?, but, What are the rules about?
I would like to challenge everyone to step away from all these silly pseudo-battles over creation”ism” and evolution, and start learning what the Text is actually saying, in itself. Of course, for that, at a distance of 2 to 3 thousand years, you will need guides— you cannot just pick up ‘God’s holy word the Bible’, and understand it! You cannot! —But I can, and do recommend, as a great place to start, NT Wright, How God Became King, John H Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Literature, Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature— those are just the faves that come to mind at the moment. There’s been an enormous amount of really great study published in the past 40 years in particular, which completely breaks out, leaves behind, and doesn’t even look in the general direction of all of the nonsense touted by S. Rose and his student Fr Christensen (who really knows better; what is he even doing??), Faux News, and the Baptist Churches of Oklahoma. Unfortunately, you’d never hear of it in the Orthodox Church— but seriously, it would give us a way to start making sense again.

 

[truthseeker32]

I did read a relatively decent article by an Orthodox evolutionist: Note to Orthodox Evolutionists: Stop Trying to Retroactively Recruit / Shanghai the Fathers to Your Camp! where he readily admits, "St. Basil does, in fact, quite plainly claim a young earth, and treats this belief as non-negotiable.", "St. Gregory's commentary is not a allegorical interpretation...", and most importantly, "It is better by far to acknowledge that you are outside the Fathers' consensus than make them agree with you. If you are an Orthodox evolutionist, please stop shanghaiing recruiting ancient Fathers to your camp."

quote]This is a good article by the same fella. It voices many of the concerns I have with Fr. Seraphim and some of his devotees.

What Makes Me Uneasy About Fr. Seraphim (Rose) and His Followers

 

[ArmyMatt]

This is a good article by the same fella. It voices many of the concerns I have with Fr. Seraphim and some of his devotees.

What Makes Me Uneasy About Fr. Seraphim (Rose) and His Followers

but, he doesn't bring up what Fr Seraphim did in that article, and it's pretty clear he didn't actually read what Fr Seraphim wrote. AND that guy that broke with canonical Orthodoxy, has returned. so the whole critique is about as weak as those who called Met Leonty a schismatic and liberal. they never look at the whole man.
http://jonathanscorner.com/seraphim/

 

[truthseeker32]

I wonder when he wrote it.