Last week I looked at Scripture through the lens of some applicable sciences. Since I’m preaching this Sunday, I thought I’d try this technique on sections of the remaining lectionary texts.
Amos 5:6-10, 15—Justice and Science in One God
We start with a stunning challenge from the prophetic tradition.
In approximately 760-750 BC, during reign of the reasonably prosperous forty-year reign of Jeroboam II, Amos, who hailed from the Judean village of Tekoa, prophesied “harsh words in a smooth season” (as the Oxford Study Bible phrases it).
And Amos’s words remind us that (1) the God who created the universe (2) also formed us to do good.
6 Seek the Lord and live, or he will break out against the house of Joseph like fire, and it will devour Bethel, with no one to quench it.7 Ah, you that turn justice to wormwood, and bring righteousness to the ground!8 The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night,who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the earth,the Lord is his name,9 who makes destruction flash out against the strong, so that destruction comes upon the fortress.10 They hate the one who reproves in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks the truth.
This is the God who calls us to justice and life:15 Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate;it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph. Amos , the 8thcentury BC prophet
Let’s take those two key points one at a time. The God who makes the heavens (Pleiades and Orion) has power to care for the poor. Several Old Testament scholars hasten to assert that God as Redeemer—the One who brought the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage—arrived on the scene in Israel way before the God the Creator. It took later engagement with surrounding pagan cultures to push the concept of creating. I must admit I haven’t found that assertion entirely convincing, and here one reason why: an 8thcentury BC prophet—i.e., early in the actual writings of the Hebrew Bible and around the times of many of the Exodus texts—proclaims that God not only created this world, but the stars above.
Admittedly, the astronomy of biblical times found a significantly smaller universe than that of the Hubble telescope. Still, set within a scientific framework, that means the God we know through astronomy is the One who creates through the long history of the universe.
Indeed and secondly, the God who creates also forms in us, through these processes of evolution, empathy and cooperation. I remember hearing biologist Darrell Falk address an assembled group at the American Academy of Religion and tell us that, when he studied biology in graduate school, the discourse was almost entirely overwhelmed by the individual’s struggle to survive. As the zoologist Richard Dawkins so brilliantly phrases this in his 1970s book, it’s about “the selfish gene. But, much to Falk’s surprise, one of the lessons from evolutionary science in the past three to four decades is the importance of cooperation, as well as competition, in evolution. And that should shock us because popular uses of “Darwinian” largely refer to ruthless competition. But what evolutionary science (say, through the work of biologist David Sloan Wilson) asserts is, Yes, we do have to survive in order to pass on our genes, but we do that better in an environment in which we are protected and supported by our community.
Jesus in Mark 10—Calling Us to our Evolved Compassion
What does the New Testament add to this mix? It sets the conversation in another key, one that calls us to discipleship.
We find this passage from the Gospels in the lectionary:
17 As [Jesus] was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18 Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” 20 He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” 21 Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” 22 When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. Jesus in Mark 10
Of the many things that could be said about this passage, one is Jesus’s call to care about someone beside ourselves, and particularly about our own accumulation of wealth and status. Jesus’s redemption undoes the sin of Adam and Eve. It is in fact how their original dilemma in Genesis 3 becomes replicated through all our lives as human beings. Listen to how one of the giants in theology and science, particle physicist and Anglican priest, John Polkinghorne puts it in Science and Theology: An Introduction:
At some stage, the lure of self and the lure of the divine came into competition and there was a turning away from the pole of the divine Other and a turning into the pole of the human ego. Our ancestors became, in Luther’s phrase, “curved in upon themselves.” We are heirs of that culturally transmitted orientation. One does not need to suppose that this happened in a single decisive act; it would have been a stance that formed and reinforced itself through a succession of choices and actions. John Polkinghorne
And so here we observe one of these choices Jesus of Nazareth forced a would-be follower to make. Extrapolating to our lives, the key to following Jesus is to moderate between these two central impulses—to care for our selves and for others. Here he’s saying, “Mr. Rich Guy [my paraphrase], stop building your barns for yourself. Instead care for others—it’s the subtler pull from our evolutionary history, but it’s the one that brings life.”
At least those of some of things I hear in these passages as I read Scripture scientifically. Tell me what you see.
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