Resurrection

The words lie at the heart of Christianity: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain" (1 Cor 15:17). What does the resurrection of Jesus mean in the evolutionary Christianity of Michael Dowd?

Dowd addresses the question by establishing criteria for reinterpreting religious symbols. New understandings, he says, must make sense naturally and scientifically. They must be true to experience around the world, not just within a given faith. They must inspire--both the religious and the nonreligious. Above all, they must validate the heart of earlier interpretations.

The heart. That's where the devil gets into the details. Can it be replaced while keeping a religion true to itself?

Dowd's approach works well with symbols of evil in Christianity: the Fall, Original Sin, Satan. Here the "language of the day" (science, reason, fact) translates readily into the "language of the night" (religion, myth, metaphor). Come at twilight and you'll hear a story you can indeed call "Christian."

But it's not so easy with the resurrection story. Like other miracle narratives, it is to Dowd a "meaningful night language expression of something about the nature of Reality." That something is this: pain and suffering can be redemptive, death is not the final word, one can transform troubled relationships and unjust social structures. To Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, the resurrection means that "something happened after the death of Jesus that had startling and enormous power."

One could extend this line of thinking. At the core of cosmic evolution lies a truth: death is generative. When early stars died, they produced the heavy chemical elements from which our earth was formed, from which its (carbon-based) life emerged. When mountains on that earth eroded, they produced the soils on which that life could root itself. As life sprang up, many forms went extinct. Had they not, earth's web of life would not have its present structure.

The death of Jesus takes this truth to another level. Extraordinary new things--a vision, an ethic, a church--came out of his death, out of all proportion to his life. These emergents can be verified historically. They "rose up." Nothing could be more generative.

But Christianity makes an additional claim: a body rose. It says it isn't metaphor but history. It says that Jesus ate. Liberal or conservative, one must at some point recognize what a tradition has been saying from the very beginning. Words must be honored, and here's the catch: what's night language to Dowd is day language to Christianity.

Dowd would claim that he is "validating the heart" of the resurrection story, that he is getting at the core of the doctrine. But who gets to say what the heart is, Dowd or the tradition? At its core--not Dowd's, not mine--the tradition says that Jesus rose, body as well as spirit. Nothing could be more central.

Dowd clearly loves his Christian heritage and holds it sacred. Jesus loved his heritage too, but there was an occasion on which he cautioned his listeners about putting new wine in old wineskins (Matthew 9:17). Sometimes you need a new vessel, a new name. It's a tough call.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

The Gospel According to Evolution

Absorb it. According to Michael Dowd, that's what we're supposed to do with the New Story coming out of science. That's what religious traditions are "aching" to do. I'll wait for the aching. I suspect instead that the Story will seep into those traditions slowly, case-by-case, symbol-by-symbol. And the devil (you should excuse the expression) will be in the details.

Dowd, once a pastor but still an evangelist, is wasting no time with his own "evolutionary Christianity." His distinction between the language of the day (science) and the language of the night (religion) enables him to reinterpret symbols like the Garden, the Fall, Original Sin, and Satan (no need to excuse the expression, he says). Here's how it works.

First, some day language. Science reveals that our brain is an accretion of older brains. It evolved like a city, not from a master plan, but neighborhood by neighborhood. The first to arrive was our reptilian brain, consisting of the brainstem and the cerebellum. It's located down south. Above it grew our "old" mammalian brain (the limbic system), and above that the "new" mammalian brain or neocortex. What sets us apart is our fourth and newest brain, the prefrontal cortex. It lies behind the forehead. Take a look.

Our earliest brain keeps us breathing and looking out for safety and sex. The second gives us dreams and deep emotions. The third makes use of symbols; it's our chatterbox or "monkey mind." Our most recent brain is the source of consciousness and self-awareness, of purpose and planning, of complex choice. Neurologically, it's where your "I" resides.

The Biblical story of the Garden is "a superb night language description" of our brain's evolution, says Dowd. It captures the experience subjectively, from the inside. The story says that God led Adam and Eve to a place--a tree, it was--that knew good and evil. (Day language says our ancestors developed a prefrontal cortex, which enabled them to know the same thing.) The story says our parents "fell." They committed an Original Sin whose effects we have to live with, like it or not. (Day language says we've inherited the instincts of older brains, some no longer adaptive.) Is evil the serpent in the Garden or the reptilian brain? Dowd would answer unequivocally: it's both.

And Satan? Temptation "is something that every human experiences by virtue of having an evolved brain." Satan represents the dark side of our unchosen nature, the byproducts of its earlier brains. Seeing that side as "other," seeing it as personal, can help us deal with it. If we can give it a name, so much the better. It's how we get the heart involved, not just the head.

The day-night distinction reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA strategy, and it works with these Christian symbols of evil. NOMA puts science and religion in separate compartments. Science here, religion there, and never the twain shall meet. But compartments leak and meanings mingle and Dowd rightly recognizes that we can tell but one story. That's what happens at twilight, and that's what can cause a problem in the gospel of evolution. I'll illustrate next week.

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The Pastor and the Atheist

They met at a talk by Brian Swimme on the Universe Story. He was a pastor, an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ. Before that he had been a fundamentalist Christian and an ardent anti-evolutionist. She was a science writer and an atheist. An odd meeting, to be sure. What did they do? Get married.

It took a while, of course, but a few months after they tied the knot, Michael Dowd asked Connie Barlow if she wanted to become an evangelist. "Of evolution," added. Connie said, "I'd love to." So they took to the road, and for six years now have been bringing The Great Story to young and old--to agnostics, humanists, atheists, and freethinkers; to people of many religious faiths, liberal and conservative. I heard him speak at a Unitarian Universalist gathering.

Now Viking has just released a book that distills their message, Thank God for Evolution. It's loaded with endorsements from scientists (including Nobel Laureates), skeptics, seekers, and spiritual guides. It's worthy of all the attention. The book lays out where I was going to be five years from now. It got me there, with a few reservations, in a week and a half.

The story line is Thomas Berry's and Brian Swimme's (and that of others like Loren Eiseley before them) but it takes a step beyond. Berry said that the Great Story allows for the telling of all other stories. Michael Dowd says that all religious traditions are "aching" to absorb it. And then he takes that extra step, beginning an exploration of how one tradition--his own Christianity--would look with the story absorbed.

Simple distinctions open things up. If the universe is the Word, that Word is being revealed publicly to science and privately to religion. Moreover, science uses day language--that of facts and reason--while religion uses the mythical language of the night. Both languages are true, one objectively, one subjectively. For me, the public-private distinction limps at times, religion being far more collective than Dowd suggests. But the day-night distinction is clear and effective. I've used it myself to describe the workings of autobiographical memory, and it still evokes that haunting melody about the music of the night from Phantom of the Opera. Dowd uses both distinctions to frame the conflict between science and religion (and between religions), while giving all a place of honor.

Barlow and Dowd call their approach CREATHEISM. She's the creATHEIST, he the creaTHEIST. Creatheism has much in common with process theology and panentheism, but those, say the authors, have largely been confined to academia. Their approach could also be called the "gospel according to evolution."

I'll save the details for next week, but here's an indication of the spirit of this gospel. Dowd is a Christian who's proud of a connection with evolutionary biologist and evangelizing atheist Richard Dawkins. He includes in his book a different Dawkins from the one you may know. This one writes without anger about questioning tradition and relying on evidence, putting his thoughts in the form of a letter to his ten-year-old daughter. Dowd juxtaposes a quote from the Buddha.

Another indication is the story of an atheist's reaction to the Creation Evidence Museum, which was built near the site of dinosaur tracks in Texas. The atheist was Connie, and she was happy to be in this edifice of conservative Christianity, happy to see anything that provides meaning to "an otherwise 'amythic' and unstoried culture." Thus, she'd "rather have kids learn about evolution in meaningful ways in church than meaninglessly in school."

Thomas Berry said, you've got to hear the music of the New Story. Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow agree. Make it the music of the night, they say, and make it sacred.

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