Oakdale pastor leads a look at Adam, Eve and evolution co-existing
Living in a time when there are so many highly polarizing issues and people across the nation and world can be “exhausting,” an Oakdale pastor says.
Aiming to alleviate a bit of that weariness, the Rev. John Roberts of Saint Matthias Anglican Church will lead a course exploring middle ground on a subject that for a century has been dominated by voices at the two extremes: creationism vs. evolution.
“Adam & Eve & Evolution” is a free, five-week course that will be offered at the church starting next week.
I’m definitely open to respectful dialogue. Everyone who thinks about it has to camp out somewhere on the issue.
The Rev. John Roberts
The subject has intrigued Roberts, 33, since seminary, he said. He’s done more reading on it in recent years and has seen an emergence of ideas that are more in the center of the spectrum of beliefs. “You can embrace evolution and still believe Adam and Eve were real people,” Roberts said in a phone interview Wednesday. “That’s a fairly new concept in the history of the church.”
The pastor said people bring up the topic with him maybe every other or every third month. For followers of Christ, being expected to believe Earth is only 6,000 years old can be a real crisis of faith, he said. But saying people have to choose between science and faith is a false dichotomy.
One moderate position, Roberts said, is that Adam and Eve were real people but not the first people, and that they were selected by God 6,000 years ago for a special purpose. In that view, he said, early Genesis is not necessarily saying that 6,000 years ago, God created the cosmos out of nothing. Things such as the big bang and evolution from primates are not necessarily irreconcilable with Scripture, he said. “There are definitely other gradations on each side of that view.”
The subject isn’t purely academic or theological but rather directly shapes how people think about humankind and the world we live in, Roberts said.
A worldview on the Christian end of the polar opposites can make people blind to the full glory of God and creation, he said. “If evolution is true, it only further testifies to the glory of God.”
For the past 100 years, debate over the origin of human life has been highly polarized in the public square. And when any issue is polarized, the folks at each extreme are the ones who talk the loudest to the point that they often drown out everyone else. In this case, Young Earth Creationist Christians are at one extreme and Naturalistic Atheists are at the other. This leads to very little acknowledgment that there might be reasonable positions between these extremes.
From the course outline of “Adam & Eve & Evolution”
On the other, atheistic end, putting science on the ultimate pedestal and having “a fascination with creation without seeing the creator is only seeing half the picture,” he said.
A person’s worldview affects how he sees and treats his fellow man, the pastor said. Seeing life purely as survival of the fittest and trying to best the next guy feeds the “it’s all about me” mindset, he said.
On the Christian side, when people make faith about being right and winning arguments, “I would humbly say that is not what Christ intended.” That’s not to say people shouldn’t take a stand for what they believe, Roberts said, but Jesus “loved people whether they were agreeing with him or not.”
As for agreeing or disagreeing, the goal of “Adam & Eve & Evolution” is not necessarily to change what participants believe but to help them think through why they believe what they do.
“If their view stays exactly the same, I’m cool with that,” Roberts said. “We are not offering this course to have a fight with anybody. If people are interested in coming to start a fight, we’d prefer they not come. But you can have one of these polar views without being intolerant. If people just want to come to learn a little more about the other perspective, I think this will be a safe place to do that.”
Deke Farrow: 209-578-2327
‘Adam & Eve & Evolution’
What: A five-week survey of the spectrum of Christian perspectives on scientific findings and interpreting Genesis 1-3
Where: Saint Matthias Anglican Church, 107 S. First Ave., Oakdale
When: March 8-April 8; participants can choose from 6:30 p.m. Wednesdays or 9:30 a.m. Saturdays
Registration: saintmatthiasoakdale.com/aee or 209-847-2012
Admission: Free
About the course
Topics covered will include:
History
- An examination of the notion that science and Christianity have historically been “at war”
- An examination of the emergence of the Creationist movement in 20th-century America
Science
- A consideration of the scientific definition of a “theory”
- An explanation (in layman’s terms) of the most recent scientific findings pertaining to the origins of the universe, life, species and humans
- An examination of six models (four of them Christian) for interpreting the scientific findings on origins
Scripture
- A comparison of four Biblical interpretations of Genesis 1-3, which each maintain an emphasis on the authority of Scripture
Theology
- A consideration of how the doctrines of the fall and original sin might be reimagined in light of evolution
- A discussion of why all of this matters, including how the prevalent secular perception that Christianity is irreconcilable with science could be affecting the success of making Christian disciples
This story was originally published March 1, 2017 at 12:39 PM with the headline "Oakdale pastor leads a look at Adam, Eve and evolution co-existing."