augustine, bonhoeffer and collins

One of the side benefits of spending ten days in the hospital is that once I had gained a certain level of lucidity I had all day to read. This allowed me to finish an interesting book that Deb & Murray Flagg brought me. The title is The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, and it’s by Francis Collins, who heads the Human Genome Project. I might not have picked this book up for myself, since the title gives the impression of one more attempt to prove the validity of the Christian faith on the basis of scientific evidence, a task that I find highly questionable on theological grounds. However, Deb & Murray had heard the author on a radio interview and rightly surmised that this was not at all what Collins was trying to do. Rather, his book reads more like a confession of faith, a narration of his own journey as the wonders revealed by led him to questions that science could not address, and an invitation to further dialogue between practitioners of science and faith.

In this sense, Collins follows a line of reasoning somewhat like that laid out 16 centuries ago by St. Augustine. In his Confessions, Augustine credits Neoplatonist philosophers for leading him to the threshold of faith, but concludes that ultimate truth can only be found by subjecting himself to God’s self-revelation in Christ and in Scripture and not through human reason. For Augustine, human reason is structured in such a way as to point past itself to what it cannot grasp. When taken to its limit, reason is finally humbled before the realization that the meaning of human existence lies beyond our powers to discern it; it can only be told to us through divine revelation. Specifically, for Augustine, this means that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ reveal to us what we cannot figure out on our own. It seems to me that Collins takes a similar tack: stopping short of suggesting that natural phenomena somehow prove or require God’s existence, he nevertheless finds himself, having mastered his field of scientific study, filled with a sense of awe that compels him to believe in what he cannot prove and to find in the Scriptures knowledge that transcends scientific inquiry.

In the 1940s, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer approached the subject from a different angle. His approach will help to highlight my main criticism of Collins’ book. Writing from a Nazi prison cell as he faced his imminent execution, he postulated that the world had “come of age,” that is, reached a stage of development in which religion was no longer necessary to explain the workings of nature and human community, and in which we could no longer assume that God would powerfully intervene to make all things well. Moreover, for Bonhoeffer, this was a good thing in terms of Christian theology: “Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness” (Letter and Papers, 361).

It’s not that Bonhoeffer is particularly enthused about the “world come of age”—it is, after all, the developed world that produces the Holocaust and the war that is destroying Europe—rather, by virtue of its sheer godlessness, the world that has outgrown religion makes visible God’s true character. God is not the divine fixer who occasionally pops out of paradise to solve our personal problems, but the humbled and rejected Lord who enters fully into the social affairs of a secular world and suffers under its evils. The path of Christian discipleship, in this model, is to engage patiently and painfully in the life of the world, to side with the victims of oppression and exclusion, and to embody the hope of true human community in an often dehumanizing world.

Like Augustine, Bonhoeffer takes humanity’s highest achievements and possibilities as the point of departure from which we enter into faith. But he adds the dimension that this faith specifically takes the form of following Jesus in his weakness and suffering with Jesus the evils that humans are capable of inflicting upon one another.

This takes me to one of my two main hesitations concerning Collins’ book. The God he describes is the God depicted in mainstream European theology from the fourth century to the middle of the twentieth: a majestic, powerful God who reigns sovereign over all things, makes them well and maintains them in their right order. This portrayal works well among relatively wealthy and comfortable societies, and suggests that developments beneficial to the members of such societies are expressions of divine benevolence—not necessarily an unbiblical view, but an incomplete one. It lacks another important characteristic of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, that ours is a God who suffers, who willingly and patiently endures the chaos of a not yet fully redeemed creation.

As theologians have attempted to make sense of the enormous destruction and violence that humans have inflicted upon one another at various times and places over the last hundred years, and as the voices of faith communities comprised of the victims of economic deprivation, political persecution, and ethnic scourging have come to the fore, this side of God’s character has gained more attention. That it could go missing from Collins’ picture of God is, to me, a serious weakness in his book. It may also correspond to a frequently heard criticism of the Human Genome Project in general: that for the sake of genetic diseases, which constitute the main health concerns in developed countries, it siphons resources away from such matters as malnutrition and infectious disease, which are of more immediate concern to the members of underdeveloped countries.

My second hesitation has less to do with the book itself than with its reception among Evangelicals, with whom Collins seems to identify. He rightly foresees that many will reject his book outright for his acceptance of evolution, but this doesn’t matter to me. My concern has to do with those who will embrace his book. Specifically, I fear that they might make the same mistake that we have made with C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity for the last fifty years: that we will confuse a defense of the faith with the content of the faith.

In the 1950s, Lewis demonstrated the rationality of the Christian faith, and many appreciative readers let it end at that. Christian faith and practice consisted of little more than any well bred post-War Englishman would have come up with on his own: love for God and county, love for one’s fellow human being, chaste moral behavior, obedience to existing laws, circumspection, patience, modesty—not too different from the picture of Christianity one now gains from Collins. But our faith is more than that. It looks specifically to the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, to his roots in the Hebrew prophets, and to the practices of the early church. From these sources it draws a subversive force, one that resists existing political and economic structures, and names the ways that they rob humans of their dignity, destroy community, deface creation, and limit our capacity to love one another. In Jesus it discovers an ethic that overcomes evil not with force but with truthfulness and forgiveness, and that loves enemies even at the risk of death. It would be difficult to derive this kind of ethic from The Language of God.

For all that, I consider it well worth reading. Collins wisely distances himself from such past apologetics missteps as appealing to God fill in the gaps that science can’t explain (a strategy that consistently breaks down when natural explanations are discovered for previously unexplained phenomena), and he rejects the “Intelligent Design” argument, a variation on that strategy which argues that evolution can’t account for nature’s “irreducible complexity,” and that therefore the world must have come into being through deliberate divine intentions. Instead, he offers the simple testimony that, for him, the awesome beauty and intricacy of the natural world led him to faith in the Christian God, and that this faith need not be seen as enemy or hindrance to serious inquiry into the nature and mechanics of the created world.

(P.S. Greg Crowthers, Ben McFarland, and Daniel Phillips, I would especially welcome your responses, since I’ve no doubt that you’re all familiar with Collins’ book and have probably put some thoughts into its scientific and/or theological merits.)