Happy New Year.
I know far fewer people now than I used to who seriously doubt the world described by modern physics, chemistry, and biology as an evolving, relative, large, ancient, and strange universe. I never fully identified as an evangelical even when I was growing up as one; I left worshiping in primarily evangelical spaces when I graduated high school in 2013, and I haven’t been in evangelical spaces even secondarily since I entered grad school in 2016. Sometime ago it became more accepted in my wider family that it simply isn’t my thing, and the expectation that I make periodic appearances at the church I grew up in have dissipated. That’s probably to everyone’s benefit. I know relatively few people from that background that are happy to see my face, knowing some of the things I believed even back then, and even fewer who think they can revert me.
That’s probably the biggest reason I don’t know as many holdouts on the science. Outside of the evangelical sphere, the evolving cosmos is much less controversial, whether among Christians or non-Christians. I have met quite a few Orthodox creationists, admittedly, but I have also found almost to a man that they hold this position because it was what they already believed from their fundamentalist days and found ways to justify that fundamentalist opinion by appeal to patristic texts and figures (their new infallible, inerrant authorities) that are not as influential for cradle Orthodox (who do not see the issue, for the most part). I have met fewer Catholic creationists: they exist, but they are so out of step with the overall ethos of Catholicism and science that it seems to me they could not long persist in their error even among their more charitable co-religionists. (I mean, the Vatican Observatory exists.) The conservative side of Catholic thought, which tends to be represented by a thoroughgoing, manual-thumping Thomism, is nevertheless filled with plenty of people operative in the natural sciences, who fully accept, among other things, that the universe is roughly 14 billion years old, that life on earth shares a common chemical origin in the same astrophysical processes that govern the rest of the universe and a common biological origin between current and historic domains, kingdoms, phyla, genera, species, and so on, and that it is perfectly possible for this process to have begun and been carried out and be in various states compared to our own elsewhere in the cosmos. This means, also, that humans share common origins with the rest of life on the planet, and that we should be unsurprised to find that anatomically modern humans are not the first or the only humans in Earth’s biological history. Conservative Catholic scientists, philosophers, and theologians often try to spin these data to fit the needs of their dogmatic tradition, but they minimally accept them, for the most part. If that’s the conservative side, consider how just how much weirder some other Catholic thinkers are willing to let their cosmology get in light of the findings of modern science.
Non-Christians rarely have the trouble that Christians have had around these issues. Orthodox Jews still debate the compatibility of the Torah’s creation story with modern science, but as they constitute a minority of world Judaism, most Jews (Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and secular) can be said to accept the scientific picture of origins as accurate, whatever theological lenses they view it through. Muslims have never been hamstrung by the six-day creation story of Genesis, and some Islamic philosophers from the middle ages to the present have not only been fine with evolution but have in fact posited the theological or philosophical necessity of evolution as required by their form of Neoplatonic metaphysics. For Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, evolution, cosmic and biological, seems anticipated by their shared dharmic traditions of life, death, and rebirth, of the great antiquity and futurity of the cosmos, of its diversity of life, and of the changing forms that all things assume in the realm of samsara, defined by becoming and passing away. Christianity alone, especially in its Western forms, has encountered the difficulty of evolution for a theological tradition whose adherents often make claims not only about the history of a particular man in first-century CE Roman-ruled Palestine (a particular man whose life, we should stress, we cannot perfectly reconstruct as it is) but also about the history of the first humans ever. Christianity does not require belief in a historical fall, and many Early Christian theologians, like many Early Jewish theologians, did not take the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden to be a historical event; none or very few had anything like an idea of original sin passed down by the first couple subsequently to their descendants that required the divine intervention of God and a theandric savior to rectify. Most evangelicals, though, still structure their entire religious worldview around this event, emphasizing it at the expense of and as the controlling idea for other major events in the biblical canon like creation, covenant, and so on. For mainstream evangelical theology, original sin is both the cause of human dysfunction throughout history, in every individual person’s life, and of Jesus’s incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection, the thing for which, in other words, everything else has been the palliative.1 Insofar as evolution, then, downgrades the likelihood of the Garden story being either a literal history of the first human couple or even a loosely representative story of human origins—while all people alive on Earth today might, at some point in their shared genetic history, have a common ancestral couple, a mitochondrial Eve and a Y-chromosomal Adam, the idea that the human species is traceable to a single couple living in Mesopotamia some six to eight thousand years ago simply contradicts our evidence—evangelicals have instinctually been afraid of evolution throughout the history of their broader movement, from Scopes to Answers in Genesis.
Things are better today, though, even among evangelicals, than they used to be: not, mind you, among the sort who I grew up with, who are still more likely to believe in young-earth creationism and to hear it preached from the pulpit than to hear any form of theistic evolution engaged seriously. When I was in high school, Pete Enns was my path towards articulating the intuition I had always had that creation and evolution were compatible, with his books The Evolution of Adam and Incarnation and Inspiration, now in a second edition. (When I say I had always had this intuition, I really mean it: I remember being eight or nine years old and very forcefully arguing to my, shall we say, woodsy and belligerent father that God as Creator and evolution as the mechanism of creation were not opposites, albeit not exactly with those words.) Francis Collins’s The Language of God and the Biologos Foundation which he established also must have come into my awareness around this time. My guess is that where I was discovering these things at a time when they were still controversial in the evangelical world, as someone disinclined towards evangelicalism and possessed of a natural affinity for science, science fiction, and the wonder they inspire, and as someone who spent an awful lot of his time hiking around local parks, nature reserves, and just generally being outside whenever I could, these days resources of that sort are more popular and easily accessible to more people in the evangelical world. I have visited on occasion an evangelical service with my extended family and heard sermons on creation that invoke the compatibility of faith and science, and the wonder of evolution, in ways that strike me as influenced by Enns et al. N.T. Wright has also grown in massive popularity over the last two decades among evangelicals and liturgical Protestants (he’s especially well loved, as far as I can tell, in the ACNA), and Wright has always been an advocate of theistic evolution (one point I can praise him for). I’m still hearing plenty of nonsense come from some of the evangelicals I know and I’m still hearing about plenty of controversies in evangelical circles, but for whatever reason, debates about creation and evolution don’t seem to be among them: this topic doesn’t make the news the way it did when I was a kid, and it doesn’t pop up on, for example, late night punditry the way it once would on a regular basis. My anecdotal perspective on this seems to match the statistical data that the framing of questions around evolution often matters more than the substance. Plenty of evangelical Christians are willing to affirm that God creates an evolutionary world if things are phrased in the appropriate way to meet their preferences.
For me, there are many reasons that I never understood the problem. For one thing, I’ve always found the creation stories in Genesis rather boring if taken as a literal history. I’m not sure why anyone would really want to believe the world, or the universe at large, was made in six days, was small, and was really centered on the Planet Earth. I’m also not sure who wouldn’t find evolution exciting: awesome and terrible, furious beauty and sorrowful wonder, and who wouldn’t feel the drama, even the humanity of its inhuman scope, as well as the divinity enfolded both in its altissimis, high and low.
I also just do not get why there are people who do not or cannot see that these passages and the larger compilation of Genesis 1-11 to which they belong are generically myth, that is, that any ancient reader could easily identify. That might be because I was a weird kid who bought his first copies of Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish as a middle schooler and who was exposed to, and read, religious literature from numerous cultures while my own Christian commitments were still in early formation. It might be because I was also a kid who liked to watch Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, Jurassic Park, Godzilla, nature documentaries, and stuff about space on top of more ordinary fare, and so I was struck by contrast with the smallness and boring character of the world envisioned by the evangelicals and young-earth creationists I knew. I still feel this basic revulsion to any self-congratulating religious attitude that indulges in baseless anthropocentrism, that can’t or won’t or doesn’t want to imagine how big reality might be, whether through science, nature, history, comparative religion, literature and art, or whatever.
But my conviction that theistic evolution is true is, in the end, rooted in the fact that I genuinely felt then, and still feel now, that the evolving cosmos is in fact much more beautiful than the universe imagined by creationists. Consider the epic poetry of its scope: for fourteen billion years, as far as we know, God was infinitely present to and with the entire universe as it grew, changed, sometimes turbulently shifted, and to all life, even in the depth of its agonistic quest to survive and propagate. God was also present in and to and through the process that generated anatomically modern humans from common ancestors with animals, mammals, primates, hominids, and other apes, and in the flourishing of numerous human cultures over the 200,000 to 300,000 years of our existence, especially in the last 10,000 since the Agricultural Revolution and the last 5,000 of recorded history. If one holds, as the fun (and Whovian-named) thought experiment of the Silurian Hypothesis speculates, that there have been other civilizations on our planet prior to those created by Homo sapiens, then one would have to include them in the story (we do not currently have a reason to do so, but then, we could not possibly know given that the overall time it would take for such a civilization to arise and disappear is dwarfed by the larger history of the planet and the life on it); zooming in on the complexity of existence as experienced and demonstrated by other microbes, plants, and animals, we can already see that the divine significance of human life is nestled within a larger divine significance of life more generally, a deeper sophianicity connecting the human to the cosmic and both to God. Were we to decide, or discover irrefutably, that there is life elsewhere in the cosmos, perhaps even intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos, we would have to conclude much the same for them. (I happen to be of the opinion, and the hope, that the universe is likely full of life of all kinds: some that are very much like us in biochemical composition, some very unlike us; some perhaps very like us in psychological and sociological history, in the quality and features of their civilization, much if not most perhaps very unlike us, all up and down the Kardashev Scale.) And, things just get bigger if one considers that there may in fact be numerous “universes,” perhaps an infinite number.2
If one accepts a metaphysical picture of reality in which God’s transcendence of time and space implies also his immanence to it, and in which God’s sovereignty does not contradict creaturely freedom with a despotic determinism but instead sees God as the source and summit of existence, freely donating being to beings, mind to minds, and life to living things, letting the cosmos do its thing as it proceeds out from him (prohodos; exitus) and returns to him (epistrophē; reditus), then one can feel this as a drama of true creation from the divine angle, as God’s eternal Word that creation come to be is realized in the noetic, psychic, spatiotemporal, and material unfolding (that is what evolutio means) of his simplicity, infinity, and pure actuality as the Existing One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, in the infinitely Many expressions of that supernal Unity which are nevertheless contained by it without introducing a second term.
One can read the creation stories in Genesis in allegorical ways that give this multiple sense of creation, and that are agreeable to this wider picture. Philo distinguishes between the poiēsis of God, creation as it preexists eternally in the Logos of God, his Reason or Mind, which is the intelligible creation, and the plasis of God, the phenomenal creation of space, time, and matter that reflects, for Philo, as perfectly as possible the intelligible order but cannot do so completely by virtue of what matter is. (This will be a growing theme not only in the Middle Platonism of which Philo is a part but also of Late or “Neoplatonism,” too.) The first order does not have a “beginning” in time: its archē, in the Greek of LXX Genesis 1:1, is the Logos himself; but the second creation, the plasis, also doesn’t have a beginning in time, but is a temporally infinite succession without beginning or end in sequence, but whose beginning and therefore logically whose end is the Logos himself, and in and through the Logos, God. Philo squares the circle between the linear philosophy of history in the Hebrew Bible and the cyclical philosophy of history known to him via his Hellenic paideia: the world moves in endless cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth, as do souls through the process of reincarnation, but these cycles also genuinely move forward into real nova without novissima, and so one linear stretch of the present cycle is the covenantal saga of Israel, the Torah, the Jewish people, their hopes of national redemption, and so on. Christians could add Jesus and the Christian church to this picture and come out with largely the same balance, and at least one of them, Origen of Alexandria, did exactly that (Princ. I.5-6, II.1-3).
This is surely a much richer, much less cognitively dissonant, and much more satisfying tale of origins than creationism of either the young or old earth variety. This is a tale of creation that we might describe as Ovid describes his song: “The mind bears to speak of forms changed into new / bodies; oh gods, with my things begun (for you changed even them) / inspire and lead down a perpetual song from the origin of the world to my times” (In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illa) / aspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen; Met. I.1-4). Mind, forms, bodies, gods, breath, songs, times: any creation story that does not sing the perpetuum carmen is not worth chanting into the void.3 The rṣis knew that, and this is certainly one more reason to prefer the Philonic/evolutionary sort of creation, the mutuality it creates for Christians (and Jews) with other faiths, who have always been more comfortable with a very ancient and large cosmos, perhaps even an infinite multiverse of universes, and who have also been able to deal with the idea either that the world itself is temporally, quantitatively, derivatively eternal and/or that the world exists in a constant cycle of life, death, and rebirth. And this revolving cosmos, contrary to popular opinion, does in fact have a biblical basis. The Psalms, for example, frequently extol God as the constant in the decaying and rejuvenated world: “Of old You founded the earth, / and the heavens—Your handiwork. / They will perish and You will yet stand. / They will all wear away like a garment. / Like clothing You change them, and they pass away. / But You—Your years never end” (Ps 102:26-28).4
This brings me to my real interest, which is not so much creation and evolution but eschatology and consummation. The world’s unraveling of the infinite actuality of God in an infinite series of potencies and acts eventually bottoms out, at least ontologically, in a pure nothingness from which those potency-act combinations can be said to emerge as though from nothing. Spatiotemporally and materially, what that looks like in the finite material history of the future universe is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it will mean the Heat Death of the universe; perhaps it will result in a Great Crunch, where the expanding, evolving universe will snap back to a singularity. Perhaps this universe will then start up again, or perhaps once it dips back into the primordial waters of being a new one will emerge again in radiant beauty, like Aphrodite born from the sea-foam stirred by Kronos’s scythe and Ouranos’s…well, you get the idea. These are the scientific possibilities under discussion today, as well as the possibilities raised by a philosophical cosmology of a world that is reborn and moves through seemingly endless cycles of life, death, and rebirth, of decay and rejuvenation.
For many Christians today, just as the image of the evolving cosmos is threatening to their traditional (or, in the evangelical case, not-so-traditional) protology, so the image of a progressively dying cosmos, of a universe that still has many billions and trillions of years to go, long before which our own planet will be consumed by its star or else destroyed or conquered in some other way, and our own species likely either long since dead or scattered abroad, challenges traditional Christian eschatology. In the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, we confess that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead”; the Nicene adds “and of his kingdom there shall be no end.” We also confess our expectation of “the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come,” or “world to come”; the Apostles’ has “the resurrection of the flesh (resurrectio carnis) and life everlasting.”
Now, at the very origins of the Jesus Movement, the idea that this would be an intrahistorical, imminent parousia of the risen, glorified, heavenly Jesus as the messianic Son of Man, to gather the saints together, preside at the final judgment, and inaugurate the new cosmic age (in alignment with the vision of Daniel, Parables of Enoch, and other Early Jewish apocalyptic texts) was at the foundation of Jesus’s own preaching of the coming Kingdom of God, and of the kerygma of Jesus as Messiah, Son of God, and Lord shared, as far as we can tell, by James, Peter, and Paul. (John the Elder, if he is behind the Gospel of John and its tradition, seems to have intentionally retconned the imminent apocalypticism of the earlier Movement in favor of a more immanent apocalyptic vision of the singular advent of Jesus in his ministry, passion, death, and resurrection as the coming of the Son of Man.) For several centuries, Christians continued to expect an imminent eschaton, reimagining the sequence by which Jesus would return under the new circumstances that continued to emerge in their generations. The whole history, actually, of Western apocalypticism, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic, can be read this way, as a continual revision of eschatological expectation in light of deferred and defunct previous layers of hope, from which members of all three traditions periodically opted for more sapiential, “mystical” perspectives on cosmology and history that saw the eschatological realization as happening on a transcendent level beyond the historical.
Sapiential traditions are also capable of envisioning eschata to distinct epochs, of imagining and longing for new golden ages to be turned out by the rota Fortunae at some point in the future, as Wisdom of Solomon and Philo both do, and as the cosmology of the Puranas and many Mahayana Buddhists do. Wisdom and apocalypse are not antonyms; from this perspective, in fact, they are perionyms, synonyms for the same concept seen in different relational contexts. In the intensity of suffering, in the anxiety of feeling small against the rich and powerful rule of the mundane world, and its daimonic captivity to errant angels and gods, cosmic monsters and demiurgic captors, apocalypticism is the language of hope for a radical change of fortune, for the wheel to spin fast enough to bring judgment on the destroyers of creation and vindication for the righteous, the poor, and the have-nots. Apocalypticism uses the fire of righteous lament and anger to ignite a broader consciousness of reality, to burn down the thin veils that separate the sensible from the intelligible, the human from the cosmic and the cosmic from the divine. Apocalypticism as a mode of discourse assumes apokalypsis as a kind of consciousness, a divine responsum to suffering that includes but transcends the ordinary bounds of prophecy and oracle, and even dream. Wisdom, too, seeks to look beyond the veil of our ordinary, conventional awareness to a broader perspective on the world that can put our sense of evil and suffering into a context, but by reflecting on the way things already are here, now, rather than the way that they might someday (or somewhere else) be. Even when Wisdom writers engage in eschatology of the cosmic kind, it is secondary to the divine justice already worked into nature now and that should shape our larger concern for individual eschatology.
So, it is not that Christian eschatology prior to modernity never formulated or, at least, began to formulate alternatives to the imminent and disappointed apocalypticism of the first generations. But modern cosmology has certainly forced Christianity, if it is to remain credible, to become a more conscious and intentional agent of this shift in discursive mode than it once was. Just as Christians could once, in an age where this was in step with the best science of the day, credibly believe that Jesus had ascended vertically into the heavens and sat down at their pinnacle above every ruling power in the universe, but must rethink what they mean by belief in the ascension today in a universe that has no true “up,” “down,” “top,” “bottom,” or “center” that is not relative and therefore relational, so, too, Christians today have to rethink what they might mean by the parousia in a world that is, speaking impressionistically, ageless and endless, one among an infinite number, and one that is not likely to come to an end any time soon, and certainly not before Homo sapiens as a species have likely died out or so radically changed their biology to survive in other spheres as to be unrecognizable in the future to their current ancestors. David Bentley Hart said something along these lines once, and I think he had it right, that just as we will not find a Garden were we to go back in time through the historical past we also will not find a messianic era presided over by a returned Jesus sometime in the historical future: the apocalyptic and eschatological language of the New Testament, for us, is going to have to acquire different meaning, and a still resilient way of reading it, gifted us by ancient Christians, is to look up to the heavenly aeon as the place of the Kingdom’s fulfillment rather than forward to the future earth.
Consider for a moment that in traditional Christian faith, Jesus’s ascension to heaven is the full conformity of his humanity to his divinity and his in-filling all things with his theandric mystery. Jesus Christ is now, as Ignatius of Antioch once put it, more present while absent (“our God Jesus Christ is more visible now that he is in the Father”; Ep. Rom. 3.3). True, this is a later way of understanding the meaning of Jesus’s ascension than the earlier interpretation, that heaven is as though Jesus’s hold-tank until the time of the parousia, but all the same, this way of thinking about the ascension became standard in the late first century and beyond among Christians. So one has to ask either what Jesus so envisioned in this way has to gain from returning to earth to rule an earthly kingdom, or what humans would stand to gain from such a turn of events. Origen of Alexandria is the first that I know of to challenge the desirability of the messianic kingdom as a literal earthly paradise in De Principiis II.11: what would be the point of a literal kingdom?
We can maybe carve out space for an earthly messianic era that gives way, gradually, to the eternal state of a new heavens and a new earth: perhaps, as in Philo, or as in traditional rabbinic eschatology, the earthly restoration of Israel and the accomplishment of eschatological peace with the nations traditionally associated with messiahs (Philo doesn’t have messiahs but does talk about a figure we could describe as messianic who is apparently responsible for the change in some way) offers humanity a graduation to a new, higher phase of its existence, from which it can more easily point its attention towards the eternal. But whether a Maimonidean messiah or a returned Jesus ruled such an imperium, it is impossible to see how such a new era of the world would not eventually give way again to silver, and thence to bronze, iron, clay, and cleansing flood once more. “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold,” and all that. The advantage of a vertical, immanent Kingdom “up above” over a horizontal, futurist Kingdom “to come” is precisely its existence in a realm, if not beyond change, then at least beyond change’s veil as death.
Dismissal of golden age rhetoric is also easy for the privileged, and we should be mindful that there are people who long for utopia for reasons that have to do with their real sufferings, and not just abstract ideological impetuses. Perhaps—perhaps even hopefully?—the age of Saturn really will come round again within chronological time. But the true restoration, and the true ingathering, does not and will not happen here. This world, this universe, is the realm of generation and decay, and that is all it can ever do, no matter how many bright reflections of the divine poiesis it reflects in its rippling waters. Christ’s death and resurrection teaches us this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom; only pneuma can. This moving image of eternity that we know as the world of time, space, and matter is not itself the Kingdom in its fullness, but merely the rocking cradle of its princelings, whose infinite revolutions, deaths, and rebirths teach us half-sleeping infants to understand as best we can the steps to the dance of kenosis and epistrophē that the Trinity is, of which anacyclosis and samsara alike are but the most distant echoes.
I want to stress that there are exceptions in the evangelical world that neither require nor believe in a historical Adam and Eve, original sin, or the Reformed doctrine of absolute depravity. I’m not trying to paint with too broad a brush here. But my guess is that there are still lots of places on the ground where the reason that one isn’t hearing the debates is less because they’ve been resolved in favor of synthesis and more because many communities have simply stopped trying to argue their points and started enforcing them.
Until we discovered the Andromeda Galaxy in 1923, “galaxy” itself—from the Greek gala, “milk,” a reference to the Milky Way, now the name of our galaxy—was a synonym for universe. The nomenclature shifted when we suddenly had to explain a large collection of stars and planets we could observe somewhere else, separated from us by a vast gulf, and so “universe” came to include numerous “galaxies.” Initially, this seemed to be the final vindication of an Epicurean multiverse, insofar as Epicurus had already suggested there were infinitely many kosmoi self-contained in the void and periodically created and destroyed by interesting activity among atoms. Today, we have simply kicked the question of the multiverse up a step: instead of being a question of how many galaxies there are, we are interested in how many total space-time configurations of the universe there are, whether ours is the only one there is or whether there are incomprehensibly many or even infinitely many branched variations of the universe we know extant somewhere (or when or…you get the point that language begins to break down here). The Tegmark Scale is the equivalent to Kardashev when we are talking about different varieties of the many worlds hypothesis and of the multiverse generally. For the guide to the multiverse, see MJ Rubenstein, Worlds Without End: On the Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia, 2013), and the interview I did with her here.
Writing this as a reminder to myself to read Stephen RL Clark’s recent How the Worlds Became: Philosophy and the Oldest Stories (New York: Angelico, 2023).
The translation is Robert Alter’s, who provides the following note: “it is a garment worn thin or to shreds through long use, then a garment removed to be replaced by another, as God is free to do with the seemingly eternal heaven and earth” (Alter, The Hebrew Bible, vol. 3 The Writings [New York: W.W. Norton, 2019], 294 fn 27). My sense is that the idea of an eternal creation, or a continually born, dying, and reborn creation, is a genuine theme one can find in certain texts of the Bible that is under-seen and under-treated by theologians and scholars alike who are trained not to see it there.
You should definitely read SRL Clark's new book on mythology. I absolutely loved it. My hope is to one day devour everything that man has written. Best living philosopher in my opinion.
This "gnostic" view is the one that most accords with my deepest intuitions. This world can and never will be the Kingdom. Exactly where and what the aeon above are and will be like I have no idea, but that's what I look forward to this. Although how do we square this with the venerable picture of the cosmos to come as the burning bush all aflame but not consumed by the gracious love of God? That bush (cosmos) is not the same as the one we are currently in? This is just a womb that is bearing us until we are born of God into the true Kingdom?
I remember Dale Allison making a comment similar to DBH’s in THCATJ on eschatology mirroring protology (as far as mythological language goes). Somewhat tangential, but would you say the argument from contingency is (relatively) airtight?