I’m taking an extended break from All Saints Pasadena, and have been wandering back to the Warehouse community at Lake Avenue Church. I attended intermittently in 2001-2002, and will be heading back there on quite a few future Sundays. I’ll post some of my reasons for this transition another time.
And at Richard Mouw’s site, he takes on the issue of faith and evolution, and how he — as an evangelical — came to embrace the latter while remaining firm in the former. He writes of what helped him:
…I was immensely pleased to come across a wonderful paragraph in a scholarly essay, published in the early 1990s in Christian Scholars Review, by Ernan McMullen, who taught in the Notre Dame philosophy department for several decades. Father McMullen affirms that over a period of millions of years, there have been “uncountable species that flourished and vanished [and] have left a trace of themselves in us.” The Bible, he says, sees God as preparing the world for “the coming of Christ back through Abraham to Adam”; but is it too much of a stretch, he asks, “to suggest that natural science now allows us to extend the story indefinitely further back?” And then this wonderful passage: “When Christ took on human nature, the DNA that made him the son of Mary may have linked him to a more ancient heritage stretching far beyond Adam to the shallows of unimaginably ancient seas. And so, in the Incarnation, it would not have been just human nature that was joined to the Divine, but in a less direct but no less real sense all those myriad organisms that had unknowingly over the eons shaped the way for the coming of the human.”
I love that. That makes this evangelical animal rights activist very, very happy.
Ernan McMullin is a great philosopher of science, and he’s very much responsible for my department being in the great shape it is today. The paper Mouw is referring to is, most likely, “Evolution and special creation”, which is a response to an anti-evolution screed of Al Plantinga’s, “When faith and reason clash: Evolution and the Bible”. McMullin’s paper was published in Zygon in 1993 (28:3). I can’t seem to find a publicly-available electronic copy. I do, however, have a PDF.
I’d love to see it!
Come over to Paznaz sometime! I guarantee you would LOVE the head pastor, T. Scott Daniels. He theology is a lot like yours: very progressive, yet a total Jesus lover.
Is Warehouse as conservative as their parent, Lake Avenue?
Officially, yes. Unofficially, no. It’s a very diverse community in terms of political/theological views.
The entire Plantinga/McMullin/Van Till/et al. dialogue can be found here. McMullin’s paper from where Mouw got the quote can be found here.
Gosh, another church move. You’re making me dizzy. Godspeed, though, Hugo.
Thanks, Macht, for the link and thanks, Dan for the email of the text!
i LOVE that quote. made my day. thank you.
As a former member of that church, I’ve long been curious - did it secede from the Congregationalist denomination, or just shorten its name? And when did it happen?
If you poke around on the website, X, you’ll see that Lake is a member still of the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, http://ccccusa.com/