*Sightings* 2/7/2011

*Christian Evolutions*

— Martin E. Marty

Ever since 1859 anyone could start fights by breathing a single word:
 ¢â‚¬Å“evolution, ¢â‚¬  on which Charles Darwin held the patent. The conflicts were
billed as  ¢â‚¬Å“science vs. religion, ¢â‚¬  but it has been clear for 152 years that
some schools of scientists opposed other schools in science and some schools
of religion opposed others in religion. The  ¢â‚¬Å“moderns ¢â‚¬  advocated syntheses of
 ¢â‚¬Å“science ¢â‚¬  and  ¢â‚¬Å“religion, ¢â‚¬  while conservatives, some of them fundamentalist,
opposed them. New controversies keep developing.

If I read the reports accurately, there is one brewing within the ranks of
Christians often tabbed as evangelicals. For example, witness a project that
brings together leaders in various camps under the rubric  ¢â‚¬Å“The Advent of
Evolutionary Christianity. ¢â‚¬  As Katherine T. Phan reports in the *Christian
Post*, these leaders are trying to change the rules of the game and the
contending expectations as to how it is played and who wins.

All this could be easily overlooked or bypassed did it not create shock
waves within evangelicalism in the United States and Canada and also did it
not involve Brian McLaren. Never heard of him? You had if you tracked trends
in the Christian avant-garde; he was named one of the  ¢â‚¬Å“25 Most Influential
Evangelicals in America ¢â‚¬  by *Time* magazine in 2005. McLaren ¢â‚¬â„¢s mark has been
in what he and colleagues call  ¢â‚¬Å“The Emergent Church, ¢â‚¬  a hard-to-define,
dynamic, fluid movement. McLaren now stepped into it, as they used to say
down on the farm, by connecting Darwinian scientific evolution with
evolution-as-development in many forms barely related to scientific issues.

McLaren:  ¢â‚¬Å“Evolutionary Christianity is a fact of history about which a lot
of Christians are in deep denial. ¢â‚¬  He included Darwinian evolution under the
Evolutionary Christianity tent, and thus roused suspicion and attracted
attacks from anti-Darwinian Protestant conservatives. He described his
perspective, which blends two categories of evolution as being a liberator
for Christian thought and church forms. Brought up a conservative
evangelical, he has now broken from that past. One might ask: could there be
a problem here that can fancily be described as *ignoratio elenchi*, a
category error?

When McLaren describes the values in his  ¢â‚¬Å“Evolutionary Christianity ¢â‚¬  he is
often talking about doctrinal  ¢â‚¬Å“development, ¢â‚¬  which he finds even in
Catholicism (as did John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century). But the
issues raised in the  ¢â‚¬Å“evolution ¢â‚¬  in doctrine or in church forms prompts
quite different, or wholly different, questions than does standard-brand
scientific evolution. His critics think that McLaren has gone over the hill
or slid down the slippery slope of  ¢â‚¬Å“development ¢â‚¬  into relativism and the
abyss of heresy. If he and other panelists on TV and in conferences on
Evolutionary Christianity would disentangle one kind of evolution from
another, or regard the crossovers as metaphoric, matters would become more
clear. He can continue his fight over whether church doctrine and practice
have developed in one set of categories, while his openness to scientific,
as in biological, evolution could make it easier for others to participate
in ways that could be helpful in the academy, the church, and the larger
culture.

Otherwise or until then, he ¢â‚¬â„¢ll be a poster-boy for the heirs of old-school
anti-evolutionism to banish. Their heritage dates from 1859 and they now
offer little new. *The Christian Post* is reporting on a conflict whose
emergent outlines and battle lines are fuzzy, and often have no use for or
bearing on scientific evolutionary thought.

*References*

R. Albert Mohler, Jr,  ¢â‚¬Å“Why the Creation-Evolution Debate is So
Important<http://www.albertmohler.com/2011/02/01/creation-vs-evolution-the-new-shape-of-the-debate/>, ¢â‚¬ 
*Southern Seminary Magazine*, January 4, 2011.

Katherine T. Phan,  ¢â‚¬Å“Brian McLaren: Christians in Denial Over Evolution of
Faith<http://www.christianpost.com/article/20110127/brian-mclaren-christians-in-denial-over-evolution-of-faith/>, ¢â‚¬ 
*Christian Post*, January 27, 2011.

*Martin E. Marty’s* biography, current projects, publications, and contact
information can be found at www.illuminos.com.

———-

In this month’s Religion and Culture Web Forum, Jessica DeCou offers a comic
interpretation of the theology of Karl Barth, bringing his work into a
surprising and fruitful dialogue with the comedy of Craig Ferguson. Both
men, she contends,  ¢â‚¬Å“employ similar forms of humor in their efforts to unmask
the absurdity and irrationality of our submission to arbitrary human
powers. ¢â‚¬  The humor of Barth and Ferguson alike stresses human limitation
against illusory deification. DeCou argues for understanding both the humor
and the famous combativeness of Barth’s theology as part of this single
project, carried out against modern Neo-Protestant theology. The Religion
and Culture Web Forum is at:
http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/

———-

*Sightings* comes from the Martin Marty
Center<http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/>at the University of
Chicago Divinity School.

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