Moses or Noah?
by Susan Trollinger
Reading Exodus 32:9-10 always gives me pause.
According to this text, God would nurture a wrath so great that He would say the following: “I see how stiff-necked this people is. Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.”
Am I supposed to worship that God?
Where is the grace? Where is the mercy? Where is the love?
But then the story takes a turn. Moses makes three powerful arguments that challenge God’s logic and plan.
So, let me see if I have this right, Moses says. You brought your people out of the land of Egypt and slavery only so that you would now slaughter them? Does that make sense, God?
Then, second: So, what do you think the Egyptians are going to say about you if you do this horrible thing, God? You’re a hypocrite, perhaps? These are supposed to be your chosen people. And you’re ticked off because they aren’t perfect. They’re human, so of course they aren’t perfect. Now, you want to exterminate them? What do you think your reputation is going to be in Egypt?
And then the third one: Remember your promises, God. To Abraham—that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars. Extermination doesn’t seem like a plan to make good on that promise. Are you going to keep your promises? Or just enjoy your wrath?
And God listens to Moses and changes His mind.
Now, that’s a God I can worship. Moreover, Moses is a biblical figure I can admire! To be sure, it would be a very scary thing to make not one, not two, but three arguments that directly challenge God’s thinking. Moses didn’t know how that was going to go. But he did it anyway. He was truly brave!
This story in Exodus brings to mind the story of Noah in Genesis. God tells Noah that he’s got to build an Ark. He’s got to get his family on it. They are, according to God, the only righteous people on the planet. And then Noah has to get two of every kind of land creature on it. And then God instructs Noah that He is going to bring a great flood that is going to drown every person and every land creature that is not on the Ark because they were just so unforgivably sinful. God just couldn’t take their sin anymore.
Really?
Does God’s wrath in this story make any sense? He was so ticked off at, what, elephants, rabbits, and giraffes, not to mention toddlers, babies, and the unborn, that he felt obliged to drown them?
What I love about the story in Exodus is that Moses doesn’t let God off the hook. He basically says to God: You want to exterminate your own people because you’re having a bad day? Really? That’s the kind of God you are?
And God relents. He, thankfully, listens to Moses.
But what about Noah? According to the account in Genesis, Noah just goes with God’s genocidal plan. He builds the Ark. Gets his family on board. Gets two of every kind on board. Never mind the rest of humanity or the rest of land animals. No need to worry about them. They’re apparently not righteous. So, if this is the deal, why do fish get a pass? So, tortoises deserve to die but Walleye don’t?
To repeat. I can worship the God that Moses engages. That’s a God who listens to reason and later sends his only son to save all us sinners who don’t deserve grace but, to quote singer and songwriter Mary Gauthier, “need it anyhow.”
To return to where I began this reflection—I love the story of Moses making his case to God in Exodus because it tells us of a brave man who challenged God’s very bad idea, and it tells of a God that can change His mind when he should. That’s a God we can engage. A God who listens. And while God might get pretty frustrated with us now and again, and for good reason, He’s still the God who became man and dined with prostitutes and tax collectors.
What this story from Exodus teaches me is that we can mobilize our own moral reasoning as we engage God. We can find our way with God to mercy, grace, and love.
Tom Cotton, or The Ghost of Joe McCarthy Returns to the U. S. Senate
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear in April.
Senator Tom Cotton, Arkansas, while wandering the halls of the Senate, has been possessed by one of the Senate’s most notorious ghosts, Senator Joe McCarthy. See, for example, Cotton’s questioning of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew regarding Chew’s citizenship and alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party during a heated hearing on January 31.
Cotton directed his questions towards Chew, asking, “Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?” Chew, a Singaporean citizen, responded, “Senator, I’m Singaporean.”
Did the good Senator not know that Singapore is a unitary parliamentary representative democracy?
Cotton then inquired further, “Have you ever been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party?” Chew reiterated his citizenship, stating, “No, Senator. Again, I’m Singaporean!”
Cotton questioned Chew about his perspective on the events, asking, “You said earlier, in response to a question, that what happened at Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 was a ‘massive protest.’ Did anything else happen at Tiananmen Square?” Chew acknowledged, “Yes, I think it’s well documented. There was a massacre.”
Senator Cotton defended his comments in a Fox News interview, stating, “It’s entirely reasonable to pursue a line of questioning about whether he himself, like his company, is subject to the influence of the Chinese Communist Party.”
The media mostly contained their criticism of Senator Cotton to charges of racism. This was a natural conclusion given Cotton’s less than admirable stances on race in the past.
On November 18, 2020, Cotton made a speech on the floor of the Senate, “Our Pilgrim Fathers.” While he embraced the mythology of the Puritans with unabashed love and loyalty, his real problem was with the New York Times’ 1619 Project. He took grave offense at the idea that somehow the arrival of slaves in 1619 was more determinative for America’s future than the arrival of the white pilgrims on the Mayflower. Cotton says, “Some—too many—may have lost the civilizational self-confidence needed to celebrate the Pilgrims.”
Historian William Trollinger put Cotton’s racist perspective in a more honest framework in his article, “Tom Cotton’s Thanksgiving, or, My Second-Grade Textbook Told the Truth and I Don’t Want Actual History to Get in the Way of My Feeling Good About Myself as a White Male.” Trollinger’s conclusion puts the nail in Cotton’s really bad speech:
He wants an American history whitewashed of the horrors of slavery, be it slavery of Africans or Native Americans. He wants an American history whitewashed of Protestant religious intolerance, whitewashed of the annihilation of the native inhabitants. Sen. Cotton wants a grade-school history that inspires a “civilizational self-confidence” among white students. That is to say, Sen. Cotton wants to cancel history.
This is the same Senator Cotton who said in an interview with the Arkansas Gazette,
We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.
Cotton trotted out the now requisite conservative response to all charges of racism: He called the criticism of his remarks, “fake news.”
No doubt, the Senator is “100% perma-press pure cotton white.” Cotton and his tribe of race-deniers have perfected a defense of denying the existence of systemic racism. Like fake historians insisting that America was born a Christian nation and is a Christian nation, Cotton and company argue slavery was not that bad and that racism no longer exists.
But there’s more here than Cotton’s obvious racism.
Senator Joseph McCarthy
In reports on Cotton’s questioning of the TikTok CEO no one seemed to notice Cotton’s voice giving presence to Senator McCarthy. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
Senator Joe McCarthy, dangerous demagogue and witch hunter, accomplished almost nothing in his attempts to root our communists from the American people, but his shadow continues to haunt political discourse. McCarthy’s ghost has the power to inhabit the minds of other senators. This is akin to the ancient idea that demons could take control of human beings and control them and speak for them.
All attempts to exorcise McCarthy from our political discourse have failed miserably. Almost 50 years after his disappearance, McCarthy still disturbs the political waters. The man who saw a Communist in every niche and corner of our nation still haunts us.
At the 1950 Republican convention in Chicago, McCarthy held forth with his paranoid rhetoric of purification:
I say, one Communist in a defense plant is one Communist too many. One Communist on the faculty of one university is one Communist too many. One Communist among American advisors at Yalta was one Communist too many. And even if there were only one Communist in the State Department, that would be one Communist too many.
Until he lost his crown to Donald Trump, McCarthy was considered the worst demagogue in American history. He was the “great smear campaigner.” James Darsey, in his article, “Joe McCarthy’s Fantastic Moment,” says, “The residual fear of that unidentified power still haunts the cloakrooms of American politics. There is something both elusive and perdurable about this incubus.”
McCarthy talked of “hidden and undisclosed forces,” “dark forces,” “chicanery,” the “mysterious” disappearance of incriminating documents; secret contracts, and secret trials, and secret parleys; “treachery,” and “lies.” Metaphorically, McCarthy introduced octopi, snakes, and spiders into his dream. The hoax being perpetrated was “monstrous”; the Communist party – a relatively small group of deadly conspirators – had now extended its tentacles to that most respected of American bodies – the United States Senate; a “world-wide web” of conspiracy has been spun from Moscow; “the Truman Democratic Administration was crawling with Communists.”
McCarthy, an investigator with no evidence, still managed to disrupt lives from Washington to Hollywood. The symbol of McCarthy was a stuffed briefcase that he claimed contained all the evidence. Maybe this is where Trump and his minions discovered the strategy of constantly alluding to mountains of evidence that they were always going to produce to prove the 2020 election was stolen. As with Trump, McCarthy had nothing. Unlike young David, who had three smooth round stones in his bag, McCarthy’s briefcase was empty. He would slay no Goliath or unearth no Communists.
Darsey concludes his article:
Does this leave us with anything to say about the McCarthy ethos, fragmented and disjointed as it is? Certainly we can say that McCarthy was no prophet: He was guided by no self-evident truths, no sacred canon, he did not offer judgment in time of crisis; all his cries of “smear” notwithstanding, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that McCarthy did not suffer the burden of his commitments (at least not until after censure) but reaped the personal rewards of his message—notoriety, money, and political power.
The metaphor of ghost may be the best way to understand the continued ability of McCarthy to haunt the U. S. Senate and some of its members. McCarthy created a coalition that would rise again, and a rhetorical style that would be revisited by populist conservatives.
Like Cotton. Where McCarthy saw Communists everywhere, Cotton sees liberal elites and enemies galore in his paranoid illusions. As with McCarthy, Cotton’s world is nightmarish, filled with conspiracies designed to destroy Western civilization. And as with McCarthy, Cotton does not need or even care about evidence.
The junior senator from Arkansas needs an exorcism, but who among us can “cast out” the ghost of Joe McCarthy? Even if such a healer came forth, he would face a culture already intoxicated with the spirit of paranoia, a fear of the pure and righteous being contaminated by “filth.” Ours is an age where truth has been run over by a hit and run driver, and lies in the ditch replaced by “alternative facts,” post-truth, lies, exaggerations, and conspiracy theories.
Democracy and American Christianity have had its fill of demagogues. Senator Cotton needs to find a good exorcist or go home to Arkansas to raise hogs.
“Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark”: Two Reviews
by Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch and Laura Tringali
Below are two reviews of Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark, a film which, as one of our reviewers points out, is “essentially a long-form advertisement for Ark Encounter.” To put it succinctly, Caitlin and Laura watched this film so you don’t have to.
Caitlin Cipolla-McCulloch is a doctoral candidate at the University of Dayton. Her research interests include Mariology, Latin American studies, and ways of building theological bridges across divides. She is keen to learn from others about how we can find common ground and speak to each other amid challenging situations. Laura is a trusted friend and colleague whose research interests diverge from her own, but who in her Catholicity shares a common bond with Caitlin.
Fly Old Bird shows up on the cinema scene at the same time as blockbusters such as Queen Bees. Though both Fly Old Bird and Queen Bees are films about challenges that come with moving into nursing homes, Fly Old Bird has a predictable and pedantic style which at times makes it difficult to watch.
The film is about two men who live in a trailer park in Michigan. Jon Koski, a pre-dementia 69-year-old man, is befriended by Miller Gibbs, a Christian. Jon, upset about his children’s desire to move him to a nursing home, decides he will travel to Ark Encounter. Gibbs, a man who has read the Bible through fourteen different times, and who has a deep desire to visit the Ark, decides to join Jon for the journey.
After a visit to Jon’s wife, buried in a local cemetery, Jon and Gibbs begin their flight to the Ark. What is fascinating as this film opens is that, while Gibbs exhibits signs of being a Christian who is very concerned with doing the right thing in fidelity to the Bible, he goes along with most of Jon’s antics without much conflict or confrontation, even at times enabling the journey. Gibbs does, however, point out to Jon how his kids seem to be correct about his dementia. While on the journey, Gibbs shares his evangelical Christian beliefs with Jon. They even make a stop at Gibbs’ church, where they receive brochures for the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum from the pastor. At this point, we deeply understand that this film is an evangelical tool designed to support and promote the Ark Encounter project.
It becomes clear that the film has been put together to share the message about the importance of making what Catholics might call a pilgrimage to the Ark and the Creation Museum. My concerns about this are multifaceted. Fly Old Bird attempts to capture the complexity of the challenges of aging, including Jon’s desire to push against the move to nursing care, while also seeking to portray the complications that occur in a family trying to support aging family members. Despite the fact that Jon’s children care for him, and want him to be taken care of a nursing facility due to his dementia, the message of this film supports Jon’s desire to go against his children’s wishes by traveling to the Ark. This would seem to distort the film’s evangelical message.
This movie, whose soundtrack engages the genre of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), has several plot developments. While on their journey, Gibbs has a heart attack, and Jon pulls onto the grass of a church, where Gibbs dies. At this point in the film, there is a bit of a confusing jump to Jon’s life in the nursing home, with a cut to Jon praying in the chapel, with Genesis 7, about Noah’s Ark. It seems Jon is seeking his “Answers in Genesis.” During this scene, his son enters the chapel space and provides Jon the opportunity to “escape” from the memory care unit. Jon sneaks out and steals a car from the nursing home’s parking lot to attend the wake of his friend Gibbs at the funeral home. Jon then steals Gibbs’ ashes from the funeral home and begins the journey south to the Ark.
Again, I find the emphasis on the Christian message confusing, due to the amount of theft required to make this pilgrimage to the Ark. This film’s message seems to be the Ark or else. Perhaps they should have painted “Ark or Bust” on the windows of the various stolen or borrowed vehicles, in case viewers needed more clues about the film’s main message.
Laura Tringali is a PhD student at the University of Dayton. Her research interests include reception history, feminist theology, and the intersection of religion, gender, and culture in U.S. history. Caitlin is a trusted friend and colleague whose style and research interests differ from Laura’s, but who in her Catholicity shares a common bond with Caitlin.
Fly Old Bird: Escape to the Ark is the story of 69-year-old Jon Koski (Alan Maki) who is on the run for his freedom. The film was written by Alan Maki and directed by his son Shaun Maki. Shaun Maki also owns the production company Sun and Paw, LLC that developed the film. Fly Old Bird is the third Christian film that Alan Maki has written, produced, and starred in. According to Rosemary K. Otzman of the Belleville-Area Independent, the Michigan newspaper local to the town where Alan Maki graduated from high school, Fly Old Bird won Best Script in West Virginia’s CARE Awards Film Festival.
Koski has been showing signs of dementia, and his children, his daughter Katherine (Alison Flaig) in particular, want him to move into a nursing home with a memory care unit. None of the interactions or circumstances in this film arise organically or sound authentic. Inorganic and inauthentic is the only way to describe the way that Koski and his neighbor Miller Gibbs (Dennis McComas) meet for the first time while Koski is in crisis over the conflict with his children. The strange relationship between Koski and Gibbs drives the rest of the plot.
As Koski and Gibbs get to know each other, Koski learns that Gibbs is a Christian by seeing a Bible on a table inside Gibbs’s home. Much of the Christian message of the film is explicit in the dialogue. For example, Koski picks up the Bible and asks, “What are you, a bible-thumper, too?” Gibbs retorts, “Does that offend you?” To which Koski replies, “As long as you don’t hit me over the head with it” (00:16:23). Under zero layers of subtlety, the audience is meant to see that Christians are persecuted by the judgments and misunderstandings of their faith. In this conversation, Gibbs reveals that he hopes to go to the Ark Encounter one day. The Ark Encounter is presented as a pilgrimage site of sorts for Gibbs. For Koski, the audience is given no reason for his latching onto the destination except that it fits his need to escape to “anywhere-but-here.”
Koski gets the idea that he and Gibbs should take a road trip to the Ark Encounter from where, he later reveals, he intends to hop a train to escape his kids’ plan to move him into a nursing home for good. Gibbs brings his Bible on the trip “to find direction,” he explains (00:30:12). The idea that the Bible will provide direction for their trip never comes back. However, Gibbs continues to state his Christian beliefs as matter-of-fact in this same manner. For example, Koski and Gibbs stop at the cemetery on their way out of town for Koski to say goodbye to his wife. Gibbs says, “It’s just her body, not her soul.” Koski asks, “Is that religious talk?” Gibbs replies, “It’s just a fact. … The Bible tells me so,” as he points upward (00:36:18).
The duo continue making stops along their trip. The next stop is to swap license plates with another car so that the police will not be able to find them when Koski’s kids inevitably report him missing. For the record, this is a crime. Though Gibbs comments on his discomfort with the crime, he is ultimately content to be complicit. The commandment is “thou shall not steal,” not “thou shall not be an accessory to theft” so, I guess, he is in the clear.
Over lunch at a subsequent stop, we find out that Gibbs has heart problems so serious he feels he is living on borrowed time. Koski asks if the medication Gibbs is taking saved his life. Gibbs replies, “No Jesus did, but that pill helps” (01:31:55). This foreshadowing pays off less than ten minutes later when Gibbs has a heart attack and dies.
At this point, there is a time jump. Koski is living in a nursing home, and we find out that Gibbs’s funeral service will take place later that day. To emphasize Koski’s feeling of being trapped, he is not permitted to leave the facility to attend the service. With the help of his son, who visits him and gives him the door code to exit the building, Koski flees from the nursing home. As we have already seen, Koski is not afraid to steal. He not only steals a car from the nursing home parking lot, he also goes to the funeral home and steals Gibbs’s urn and hat. Koski is off, once again, to take Gibbs to the Ark Encounter and then hop a train to his freedom.
At a rest stop, Koski is aware, as he was on his first trip, that the police may pursue him. He approaches a young man named Kyle, perhaps just eighteen years old, and asks him for a ride to the Ark Encounter. We find out that Kyle grew up in a church, so he is familiar with the Ark Encounter and is amenable to the idea that this strange encounter might be a “God thing,” to use his words. Kyle takes Koski to the Ark Encounter and pays for his ticket.
Nothing profound seems to happen for Koski at the Ark Encounter besides the satisfaction that he succeeded, in a way, in completing his trip with Gibbs. He sits inside the exhibit and opens Gibbs’s notebook to read a list of things Gibbs wanted to do. He crosses off “find a new best friend” and “visit the Ark Encounter.” “Go to heaven” is also on his list. For both Gibbs and Koski, the Ark Encounter is the gateway to freedom. We are meant to have a sense of peace that Gibbs is now in heaven after making it to the Ark Encounter. Likewise, Koski achieves his freedom by hopping a train after leaving the Ark.
Making it to the Ark Encounter is the climax. Nothing in particular happens there, nor is there any significant point of character development for Koski. Fly Old Bird is essentially a long-form advertisement for the Ark Encounter. For a Christian film that has clear dialogue and plot points directed toward evangelizing Koski, it is surprising that he never has an explicit conversion experience. He makes it to the Ark Encounter with Gibbs’s urn, and then the old bird flies, hopping a train like he intended from the outset of the initial road trip. The audience is left without closure as we watch a criminal, who is perhaps a good friend by some distorted standard I am sure we could imagine, ride off on the back of a train, in the process evading both law enforcement and any continued relationship with his children.
What’s Faith Got to Do With It?: Young Earth Creationism and the Promise of Certainty
by Susan and William Trollinger
As part of the 2023-2024 Science and Faith Series here at the University of Dayton, we are giving this presentation on Wednesday, February 28, 4.00-5.00 pm in Sears Recital Hall, Jesse Phillips Humanities Center.
The event is free, and all are invited. If you are coming from off campus, please use Lot C off of Evanston; stop by the parking booth, get a visitor’s tag, and ask for directions to Humanities.
And here is a brief summary of our talk:
Contrary to what one might imagine, the proponents of Biblical creationism do not appeal to religious faith. Instead, they proclaim Genesis 1 as a historically and scientifically true description of Creation by the only “eyewitness” (God), a description that is clearly substantiated by genuine, empirical science (as opposed to the false, biased science of evolutionists). That is to say, young Earth creationists possess the certainty of Truth.
If you are in the area, we would love to see you next Wednesday!
Living on the Margins: An Introduction to Evolvingcertainties.com
by Terry Defoe
Pastor Terry Defoe is an emeritus member of the clergy who served congregations in Western Canada from 1982 to 2016, and who ministered to students on the campuses of the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Evolving Certainties: Resolving Conflict at the Intersection of Faith and Science, a book which, among other things, chronicles his transition from Young Earth Creationism to evolutionary creation. Evolving Certainties is endorsed by scientists in biology, geology and physics, with a foreword written by Darrel Falk, former president of BioLogos, an organization that has as its goal the facilitating of respectful discussion of science / faith issues. Defoe has been educated at: Simon Fraser University (BA Soc); Lutheran Theological Seminary, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (M.Div.); and, Open Learning University, Burnaby, British Columbia (BA Psyc).
In the early years of my ministry, I met regularly with a group of students at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. While I was on campus, I would occasionally drop by the university bookstore. On one of those visits an item on a “New Books” display caught my eye. It was a book by Stephen Jay Gould titled Wonderful Life. The book was an in-depth discussion of the Burgess Shale, an amazing assemblage of Cambrian fossils from approximately 500 million years ago. This was the first time I had been exposed to a technical treatise on evolutionary theory. The book was technical but eminently readable.
When I read a book, I generally do two things. I underline, often in more than one color. And when my reading sparks a thought, I write it in the margin so that I can refer back to it later. Those notes then provide an outline to the development of my thinking over time. My goal for www.evolvingcertainties.com is that it become a sort of clearing house – a one-stop shop if you will, for information on the science / faith debate. Many evangelicals are young earth creationists by default. In other words, that’s what their denomination teaches, that’s what their friends believe, and perhaps their family, and of course their pastor. But they’ve never really checked it out, and they’re not convinced this is something that they wholeheartedly endorse.
Many evangelicals are satisfied with young earth creationism. Many more, however, are suffering from a serious case of cognitive dissonance, not sure as to what the key issues are and how these issues are dealt with by people of faith who have been able to reconcile their faith with evolutionary science. At this stage, the basic questions asked – and answered – are these:
1 Does science come shrink-wrapped in atheism?
2 Does the theory of evolution leave God out of creation?
3 How can random processes produce complex organisms?
4 Are science and faith irreconcilable?
5 Does the Bible predict scientific discoveries?
6 Does the Book of God’s Word contradict the Book of God’s works?
7 Is a literal interpretation the best way to go?
8 Does evolution corrode a Bible believer’s faith?
9 Is all truth God’s truth?
10 Can a Christian in good conscience adopt evolutionary theory?
11 What will change should I accept evolutionary theory?
These are the kinds of questions evangelicals ask – the kinds of questions I wrote in the margins of books like Wonderful Life. Without accurate answers to questions like these, few people would toss out their old paradigm for a new one. You might want to ask these questions of the creationists you may know. But before you ask them, you might want to lay down a few groundrules, reassuring the other individual that you value your relationship with them and will do your best to maintain it. You might ask how they came to adopt their present views and how strongly the hold them. You might want to hold a seminar in your church or social group – put these questions up on the screen – and invite discussion. If www.evolvingcertainties.com is helpful in this regard, feel free to use it. If you have any comments or questions, let me know.
Why science communication needs more storytelling
by Emma Frances Bloomfield
Today’s post comes from our colleague Emma Frances Bloomfield, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the intersection of science, religion, and politics from a rhetorical perspective. She received her PhD from USC Annenberg and wrote her dissertation on the similarities between science denial in the human origins and climate change controversies. She has written and presented on topics of the environment, digital rhetoric, narratives, political communication, and health. Her first book, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment, is available through Routledge’s series on Advances in Climate Change Research. Her second book, Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators, has just been published by the University of California Press.
In 2020, the Institute for Creation Research opened the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History in Dallas, Texas. Driving past the glossy glass exterior with a massive metal DNA structure, one may not initially realize that the museum is devoted to the “science” of creationism. The museum’s tagline, “Discover the incredible harmony that exists between science and the Bible as you encounter lifelike holograms, animatronic creatures, interactive displays, user-friendly touchscreens, and a multimedia Ice Age theater” promises cutting edge technology that challenges evolutionary science by proposing creationism as an alternative. While the Discovery Center may be the newest, it is by far the only creation museum. Answers in Genesis has its own Creation Museum and a museum-like tourist attraction called the Ark Encounter, both in Kentucky. The website “Visit Creation” lists nearly 40 creation museums across the world, with most in the United States, that create family-friendly experiences to perpetuate skepticism of evolutionary science.
It would be a mistake to downplay the importance of these museums and public attractions because they indicate a deep-seated and persistent skepticism of evolution that drives homeschooling and resistance to evolutionary teaching in public schools. Circulating information about human origins offers multiple stories about how humans came to be. The scientific story of human origins tells one of natural selection and aggregate change over millions of years that transformed single-celled organisms into you and me. The creationist story of human origins emphasizes the role of divinity, specifically from the Christian faith, in creating the diversity of life today. These competing stories perpetuate the lasting controversy over human origins, which affects public understanding of science not only related to evolution but also other scientific topics such as climate change and vaccination.
I analyze scientific controversies and their rival stories such as evolution in my book, Science v Story. Through the case studies of climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19, I break down the binary of my book’s title to see how stories and science constitute and influence one another. It is often the stories that ring true to our understanding of reality that come out on top, and it would be a mistake to assume that the scientifically accurate ones will always be most accepted. In an age of misinformation and interlocking ecological and social crises, the narrative deck is often stacked against the slow, methodical work of science.
Many controversies regarding scientific information stem from communication failures between technical experts and members of the public. In the topic of climate change, for example, climate scientists must navigate telling stories of urgency but also hope while skeptics emphasize more immediate public concerns such as economics and political loyalties. Stories rooted in conspiracy and distrust of medical elites drive skepticism of vaccination and COVID-19. The stories that science tells compete against these alternative stories for public adherence and political influence. I refer to these stories as “disingenuous rival stories,” because they detract from accurate, scientific knowledge in a way that stalls progress and action in a scientific controversy. As rhetorician Stephen O’Leary argued, stories that “give solace to some . . . will remain forever unsatisfying to others.” How, then, can we make science’s stories more appealing, resonant, and satisfying to broader audiences in the face of disingenuous rival stories?
Science v Story offers a mapping tool, called narrative webs, to help visualize the stories we tell and diagnose how we can improve them. Instead of placing communication in discrete categories of “science” or “story” or charting them on linear scales of more- or less-story like, I created a web design that maps stories onto six narrative features: character, action, sequence, scope, storyteller, and content. The web also contains three rings – the micro-ring, the meso-ring, and the macro-ring – that refer to the relative specificity of the narrative feature from the precise to the abstract.
Science’s stories tend to have macro-ring features, such as a characterless story about the Big Bang that marks the beginning of our universe as we know it over a massive temporal scope of billions of years in the past. Rival stories, however, tend to map their features on the micro-ring, which tends to feature concrete characters, trusted storytellers, comprehensible scopes, and relevant content. Through an analysis of the controversies of climate change, evolution, vaccination, and COVID-19, I explore how we can learn from rival stories to make science’s stories more personal and engaging without sacrificing scientific accuracy.
In addition to disingenuous rival stories, there are also productive ones that challenge scientific ones in ways that open them up to be more diverse, inclusive, and equitable. For example, a productive rival story to climate change is the inclusion of Indigenous climate science in global climate reports. Productive rival stories in medicine detail disproportionate distributions of the COVID-19 vaccine and histories of medical malpractice that have affected marginalized communities. Attending to these productive rival stories makes space for improving the practice of science by diversifying the stories science tells and its storytellers. It has perhaps never been more important to muster the tools of communication and storytelling to combat scientific skepticism, apathy, and misinformation. Together, I hope we can transform the conflict of science v story into the harmony of science and story.
Between the Progressives and the Fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists: How to Understand the Story of Noah and the Flood
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear in April.
The story of Noah and the ark makes for great sermons, movies, even stand-up comedy performances. Everyone loves a good story. From Bill Cosby, when he was actually funny, Noah asks God, “What are we going to do with all these rabbits,” to the most recent peer-reviewed scientific article in geology, interest in the flood remains of lasting interest.
Noah’s story is a rhetorical construction of an inspired, imaginative Hebrew storyteller recounting the saga, legend, myth, and tales of a time before history known as primeval time. The creator of Noah’s story is separated by centuries from the events the raconteur recounts.
Progressive Christians tend to talk about the flood in scholarly and scientific language that fails to achieve the primary objective: Persuasion. I also read several creationist defenses of the flood in the last month. These papers were filled with what was alleged to be scientific information.
Both sides seem intent on filling the great void with science of one kind or another. Write an article on creation and the flood and the ensuing flood of words will overwhelm even the most diligent researcher. Everyone has opinions about the flood. Why is it such a powerful magnet for such fierce debate? What makes one story more attractive than other stories?
External debates about history, science, biblical interpretation, and literalism cloud the meaning of the flood story. No one gets around to reading the story as biblical material intended to inspire faithful living.
A “Stand Up for Science” mug appeared on Facebook. The following claims appear on the side of the mug:
- Earth is not flat.
- Vaccines work.
- We’ve been to the moon.
- Chemtrails aren’t a thing.
- Climate change is real.
- STAND UP FOR SCIENCE.
Using that same approach, I will approach the story of Noah and the flood as a rhetorical act of persuasion designed to extol the mercy of God and the precarity of human existence
As biblical scholar Robert R. Cargill has observed,
It is time for Christians to admit that some of the stories in Israel’s primordial history are not historical. Christians and Jews must concede that the Bible can still be “inspired” without being historically or scientifically “inerrant.” Simply because a factual error exists in the text of the Bible does not mean that an ethical truth or principal cannot still be conveyed. It is time for Christians to concede that “inspiration” does not equal “inerrancy,” and that “biblical” does not equal “historical” or even “factual.” Some claims like the flood and the six-day creation are neither historical nor factual; they were written to communicate in a pre-scientific literary form that God is responsible for the earth.
Here’s a good rhetorical move to make: Do not accept the framework or language or definitions of fundamentalist/evangelical Christians. There is nothing in faith that requires your signature on a list of doctrines rooted in the human notion of inerrancy or literalism.
Preachers who preach the flood literally and preachers who preach that the flood was not literal are wasting pulpit time by not taking seriously the biblical text. I am acutely aware of the difficulties in my claims. I will not be scientific enough for my liberal allies; I will not seem biblical enough for my evangelical enemies.
Primeval Time
Noah’s flood, as the real estate agents say, comes down to three things: Local, local, local. It was a local flood that seemed like a universal experience. Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann says, “The flood narrative is widespread throughout the world. The flood narrative like the creation narrative is part of the common property of humanity. It is humankind’s basic expression of its being-in-the-world, of the threat to human existence and at the same time of its permanence.”
All flood stories are stories of primeval time. The definition of primeval: the earliest ages. The person writing about primeval time is a historical person millions of years removed from the ongoing origins of creation, but writing about stories that are a mixture of symbols, metaphors, analogies, myths, fables, and archetypal narratives.
The motifs in primeval stories are few, but the little that is narrated about the primeval event is the same the world over. As Westermann notes,
The experience common to all humankind is more impressive than the experience of isolated groups. This is the explanation of the astounding similarity of the individual motifs of the flood stories throughout the world. We are dealing here with a particular sort of tradition. It is not the result of an individual event, but of a series of identical or similar events which have been fashioned into a type. The flood is the archetype of human catastrophe, and as such has been formed into narrative. What the flood narrative aims at expressing is derivation as a result of the preservation of the one amidst the demise of all others. It is precisely this that is the goal of the flood narrative.
In summary, all cultures have flood stories. They have been shared across centuries of development and have become a single archetypal metaphor depicting universal human experiences.
Everybody’s got a flood story. If there were an international gathering of representatives from all peoples, cultures, and nations, conversations around the bars and coffee shops would include, “You think you have a flood story; I have the flood story of the ages.”
Westermann helpfully summarizes:
We are dealing with a narrative of primeval time that is in the context of the story of the creation of humans. Side-by-side with the creation of humanity there is now the possibility of its destruction; this leads to the preservation of humankind by saving the one. The creation of humans and their preservation involve a catastrophe; but the saving action does not take place in the realm of the history of humanity. It is an event that precedes history.
As Wilhelm Wundt has put it, “Flood narrative and creation narrative . . . complement each other.” Creation and flood exist outside of time as a single event. The literalist obsession with the destruction of humanity suggests a blood-thirsty desire for punishment. But the text refuses to submit to this horror motif because, to quote Westermann, “the extinction of humanity cannot really be the subject of narrative because with it all tradition would be at an end.”
Abraham and Moses Argue with God against Destruction
As Rowan Williams reminds us in Tokens of Trust,
Genesis may not tell us how the world began in the way a modern cosmologist would; but it tells us what God wants us to know, that we are made by his love and freedom alone. What the Bible puts before us is not a record of a God who is always triumphantly getting his way, but a God who gets his way by patiently struggling to make himself clear to human beings, to make his love real to them, especially when they seem not to want to know, or to want to avoid him and retreat into their own fantasies about him.
After the flood, God will again be tempted to destroy humankind. Abraham and Moses intervene in these two instances. Why doesn’t Noah plead with God not to destroy the earth? Even in God’s anger the story still presents a way of salvation. God is merciful. But Noah says nothing. He leaves the people to their destruction. Not once does Noah ask God if the sentence would be commuted if 50 righteous people were found. An accurate movie about Noah would have to be a silent movie.
Why is he the passive builder of an ark designed to save only him and his family? Perhaps in the primeval history, man has not yet developed theologically enough to express the arguments against destruction. In any event, the rhetorical acts of Abraham and Moses are helpful in showing us what the biblical writers are doing – the drama they are constructing.
There is another awful silence in the story. The coming of the flood is told with no comment or dialogue. There are no humans in sight to be destroyed. There is no reaction from those who threatened with extinction. There’s no lament, cry, death agony. There’s no questioning of God. There’s only absolute silence. Only an extreme Calvinist could be pleased with this announcement:
And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, domestic animals, wild animals, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all human beings; everything on dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, human beings and animals and creeping things and birds of the air; they were blotted out from the earth. (Genesis 7:21-23)
As Westermann points out, “Humankind as God’s creation cannot take for granted its own existence in the world; its existence is problematic and remains such in the presence of its creator.” More stridently, he says, “The creation decision can be revoked.”
The Bible sometimes does this by a very bold method – by telling a certain kind of story from the human point of view, as if God has human characteristics rooted in revenge, anger, and destruction. Since Noah remains silent, we turn to Abraham and Moses – two persons of faith who had good reason to know something about what God is really like. When they are faced with a crisis and things are going badly, and when it looks like the end of the line for humanity, Abraham and Moses argue with God until they persuade God to be merciful.
The mistake that a religious populist like Ken Ham makes is depicting God as if God acts as we act, as if God is the genocidal killer of the human race. Ham is more nonchalant in his belief that God destroyed up to 20 billion human beings in the flood than a neo-Nazi is of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust or an American patriot of the almost 200,000 Japanese killed in the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hitler saw the Jews as the “devil” – the universal enemy. President Truman and the American government saw the nuclear bomb as saving American lives.
What rationale or excuse does God have for the flood? Fortunately, only people like Ham have to worry over that question.
The writers of these biblical stories knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t believe in a bad-tempered, capricious, destructive God who needed to be calmed down by sensible human beings. They knew that the most vivid way of expressing what they understood about God was to show Abraham and Moses appealing to the deepest and most true thing about God as they pray to him. The message: Even if there were a universal disaster, God can be trusted to find a way to provide salvation for creation.
Precarity
At this point, an opening appears for the homiletical imagination – a possible application of the flood story to a current crisis. In our time, when humanity faces even more precarity than ever, there are millions of Christians who are not only not saying anything, but who are also (like Ken Ham) pretending that global warming is false. They are actively opposing the measures that would save the planet. They are opposed to life. This makes Noah’s silence seem almost righteous, the evangelical preachers negligent.
Westermann has previously pointed out that one of the primary motifs of the flood story is the threat to human existence that it imposes. Decades of climate and geological research have coalesced in consensus that global warming signifies precarity at the biological or species scale. It indexes the fact that we (and our various publics) “have now ourselves become a geological agent disturbing [the] parametric conditions needed for our own existence.” In other words, all humanity is rendered precarious. Humans are now on the endangered species list even though we continue to build and expand as did the ancient humans at the Tower of Babel.
It’s absurd that so many evangelical preachers are climate-deniers and literal flood believers. But what if we are also implicated in that we claim to accept the reality of global warming but live in “soft denial.” We refuse to face reality, not changing our lives as global warming reality demands. As usual, nothing is harder for even Christians to practice than repentance – the changing of our minds and practices.
Humbuggery
The hobbyists at the Ark Encounter in Kentucky are pulling a religious P. T. Barnum on the evangelical culture.
Barnum drew huge crowds to see his alleged 161-year-old former slave of George Washington named Joice Heth. When a local journalist attacked the credibility of Barnum’s claim, his business didn’t suffer. The crowds became larger. Barnum claimed that the controversy led to even greater ticket sales. When Joice Heth died in 1836, Barnum arranged another show where Dr. David L. Rogers conducted an autopsy on her body. He concluded that Heth’s “wonderful old age was a wonderful humbug.” She was approximately 80 and not 160.
Rhetorical scholar Jennifer Mercieca writes, “But Barnum had the last word. He planted a story with The Sun’s competitor, The New York Herald on February 27, 1836, which claimed that the Heth humbug story was itself humbug. In fact, reported The Herald on “good authority,” Heth was “not dead” at all, but alive and well in Connecticut.
Mercieca wonders why Americans are so attracted to hyperbole and humbug. She concludes: “We love to be amused and we love excess, and so we reward showmen with our attention. Some have said that we’re “amusing ourselves to death” and that we live in the “society of the spectacle.” A people who enjoy being “humbugged” are easy victims for certain kinds of religious and political demagogues.
The story about the flood is not historically true. Literal interpretations of the flood story have always been religious humbug in spite of their obvious sincerity. The attempts to prove that the flood actually happened are humbug as well. For example, John Whitcomb and Henry Morris provide the most lasting piece of humbuggery with The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter – supposedly a replica of Noah’s Ark – adds the final layer of humbuggery. It is as much like Barnum’s Joice Heth as any known humbuggery in history.
This entire episode is at least three layers of humbug deep.
Progressive Christians are too generous in allowing Ken Ham’s fantasies of the flood to parade through our culture as if they are legitimate parts of Christian history and faith. It’s all humbug.
The biblical account of the flood was written to praise God for being the “almighty” God of creation and the final arbiter of human existence. That is not humbug; that is eternal truth.
For evangelicals to persist in the fake war against science – from opposition to evolution to refusals to have vaccinations – adds additional layers of humbug to the ongoing saga.
We are much better served in helping humanity respond with courage and effort to the precarity of our existence and to demonstrate this in our lives together.
Top 10 Posts of 2023 on rightingamerica
by William Trollinger
It was another good year for rightingamerica, both in the variety of authors’ voices and topics, and in the number and variety of viewers. Below are the top ten read posts of 2023, with quotes from each of the posts. Enjoy reading (or re-reading!)!
10. “Yikes! Creationist ‘Scholar’ Attacks RightingAmerica” by William Trollinger (July 11, 2023).
Jerry, “there are 1 or 2 (ok, more like 9+ ) serious weaknesses/inaccuracies/falsehoods in your article that I must call to your attention . . . If [your attack on rightingamerica], ‘Creationists Slandered About the Darwin-Nazi Connection,’ were a paper written by a University of Dayton student in one of my first-year classes, I would have written this at the bottom of the paper: Failure to provide evidence to back your claims, and a dismaying tendency to resort to ad hominem attacks. This is not acceptable for a university-level paper. Revise and resubmit. You have until the end of fall semester to make these revisions.”
9. “The Fundamentalist Pro-Life Solution: Execute the (Bad) Women” by William Trollinger (February 6, 2023).
“Let me see if I have this right. As [Mark] Looy, [Ken] Ham, and AiG see it, women who have an abortion should be executed. But God will forgive them for their abortion, presumably if they repent while sitting in their cell on Death Row, or strapped onto the gurney in the execution chamber. So is the idea that they will be executed, but they will still have a chance to go to heaven? Is that the mercy and forgiveness that the Creation Museum is referring to? . . . Execute the bad women. Lots of them. All of them. It’s the final fundamentalist pro-life solution.”
8. “The Unholy Trinity in Fundamentalist Parenting: A Rhetorical Analysis” by Camille Kaminski Lewis (June 27, 2023).
“Another (unidentified) woman chimes in . . . describes her recent difficulty with her four-year-old child. She had hit him so much in one day that he was “black and blue.” . . . At the end of the day in her example, the mother “went to give [her son] a hug,” and the little preschooler repeated to his mother, “and God doesn’t love me, right?” She actually said “yes” – that God didn’t love the child because of his behavior – and continued, “Your sin will always keep you away from God just like it keeps you away from Mommy and Daddy. . . . This is terrifying.”
7. “Megachurch forces all members to sign anti-LGBTQ+ statement, or be removed from membership” by Rodney Kennedy (February 28, 2023).
“As regards their current anti-LGBTQ+ statement, the pastor and the church members should not expect that their current statement is going to hold back the righteousness of God and the mercy of God and the love of God for all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and queer persons. If FBC Jacksonville persists in this anti-God, anti-Gospel, anti-empathy, anti-human stance, they should sign a contract to build an ark. Because the flood of righteousness, mercy, and justice will ultimately sweep them away.”
6. “Quantity over Quality: Creationist Copia at the Discovery Center for Creation and Earth History” by Emma Frances Bloomfield (August 8, 2023).
“What struck me at the Discovery Center was the near complete reliance on museumgoers’ sensory experiences as the primary evidence for the truth of creationism. Museumgoers are encouraged to agree with ICR (Institute for Creation Research) that creationism deserves space in contemporary scientific discussions due to the copia of evidence in terms of intensity and salience and the quantity of sensory information, which is deployed to rotate, immerse, and interrupt museumgoers’ experiences of the space.”
5. “Dear Williamstown: Sorry for Misleading You on Ark Encounter – My Bad!” by William Trollinger (September 23, 2023).
“I want to own the fact that what we told you in our feasibility report was, well, false. Sorry about that! Speaking of blaming the victim, I am also sorry for saying that the reason Williamstown has not enjoyed an economic boom is that Williamstown is on the wrong side of the interstate. Of course, your town was on the wrong side of the interstate when we were selling you on underwriting the bonds, which was NOT a point we brought up during our sales pitch. Oh well, that’s capitalism . . . but again, sorry about that!”
4. “Like Father, Like Son: Jeffrey Dahmer’s Claims about Evolution in light of Lionel Dahmer’s Creationism” by Glenn Branch (December 26, 2023).
“Creationists are disturbingly fond of invoking Jeffrey Dahmer. To take a few examples at random: the creationist ministries Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International discuss Jeffrey in virtually identical terms, reflecting their common ancestry; a professor of philosophy at a fundamentalist university paraphrased [Dahmer] while participating in a three-way internecine creationist debate; and Jeffrey is credited by IMDB as appearing in “Kent Hovind: An Atheist’s Worst Nightmare,” a 2006 self-promoting film from a flamboyant creationist and convicted felon.”
3. “Fragile White Evangelicals: Taylor University and the Firing of Julie Moore” by William Trollinger (May 4, 2023).
“Comments from the top administrators at Taylor University are (to understate the case) lame. But here’s the thing. They can get away with such responses because, in firing Julie Moore, they are signaling that Taylor will never be ‘woke,’ Taylor will be a ‘safe’ school for fragile white students, Taylor – the school that in 2019 brought in Mike Pence as commencement speaker – will continue to cater to their right-wing constituency. That is, firing a writing teacher who has her students deal with racial justice, well, that sells.”
2. “Not Even Close to What Was Projected: A Few Facts about Ark Encounter Attendance” by William Trollinger (January 30, 2023).
“Ark Encounter has never reached the 1.2 million which was estimated as the absolute lowest possible attendance in the first year, much less reached the median estimate of 1.6 million. And with every year the Ark sinks further and further behind the numbers included in the feasibility report. Numbers that convinced little Williamstown to issue $62m of junk bonds to get the Ark project started, and to agree that 75% of what Ark Encounter would have paid in property taxes would instead go to paying off the loan. What a sweet deal for the Ark. What a government subsidy.
1. “Yes, Dr. White, Your Cedarville Students Need Revival” by Alex Mattackal (February 17, 2023).
“Of course, it makes sense that a culture which demands that victims be silent can’t hear how they are affected by institutional policies. Purity culture is a suppression machine that grinds on, oiled by university policy. The Cedarville handbook expressly forbids sexual contact of any kind. There are dress codes in place; curfews; segregated dorm rooms – if something bad happened to you, you were doing something bad. Accordingly, if you report, you can’t be expelled, but you are subject to discipline of some kind.”
Ken Ham’s Creation Story Meets Biblical Scholarship
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. He is currently interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, NY. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear in April.
(Disclaimer: The story of Kevin is a fictional story. No actual child was harmed in the writing of this essay. The churches mentioned are representatives of two different approaches to faith.)
This is the story of Kevin, a 10-year-old boy whose mother and father divorced. His mother was the organist at the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas while his father was a biology professor at the University of Texas, Austin, Texas.
Kevin’s parents had joint custody which included being at his dad’s every other weekend. The first Sunday of each month, Kevin attended Sunday School at FBC Dallas. His Sunday school teacher used materials from Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis. The second Sunday of each month, Kevin attended St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas. And this is how his life unfolded Sunday after Sunday with clashing world views.
At FBC Dallas, he imbibed a biblical literalism filled with the unusual interpretations of Ken Ham. At St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran Church he was introduced to biblical scholarship that applied a more nuanced approach to the often symbolic language of the Bible.
In his senior year of high school, he was studying Ken Ham’s book, The Lie: Evolution. Filled with cartoons, caricatures, and simplistic generalizations, the book offered an easy, accessible, and entertaining presentation of the evils of evolution. Cute characters standing on the Bible showed the importance of a biblical foundation for life. For instance, Ham illustrated the opening of chapter 8 of The Lie: Evolution with a drawing of bricks labeled “Abortion,” “Pornography,” “Homosexuals,” and “Lawlessness,” all resting on a foundation labeled “Evolution.” The chapter was titled, simply, “The Evils of Evolution.”
Ham’s creation account doesn’t attract followers by claiming literal truth. Nor does he intrigue people by saying evolution is not Christian. What attracts people is the populist message of evolution as an attack on the faith. The foundation of the belief is not faith but fear. Historians Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson point out in The Anointed:
Ham’s simple message resonates with fundamentalist Christians in America and around the world. Their faith is under attack by evolution. By undermining faith in God’s word, particularly Genesis, modern science is destroying the foundations of civil—meaning “Christian”—society. The result is widespread anarchy, immorality, and nihilism.
Meanwhile, at St. Martin’s Kevin was studying Claus Westermann’s classic commentary, Genesis 1-11.
The contrast between Ham and Westermann may be represented analogically as the great gulf that exists between the abode of Lazarus and the place of the rich man’s residence. In Luke’s words, “Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”
Imagine our fictional Kevin making the trek every weekend across the “great chasm” from the Land of Ham to the Kingdom of Westermann.
Claus Westermann’s commentary on Genesis can’t be easily reduced to a populist pulpit message. This remains a challenge for all academic publications. Theologians are academics at home in the university. They write primarily for other theologians.
Despite the almost insurmountable odds, I am determined to do the work of presenting the results of biblical and theological scholarship in the pulpit to lay persons attending churches.
The work of the preacher is to exposit Scripture and that is also the work of theologians. My initial task I have set for my own satisfaction is the comparison of the populist work of America’s most famous creationist, Ken Ham and the best Old Testament scholar of the 20th century, Claus Westermann. In an academic setting, Ham couldn’t be Westermann’s “hewer of wood” or “carrier of water.” In a local church Sunday school class or pulpit, Westermann’s 636-page commentary, Genesis 1 – 11 may not sustain enough interest to have people return for a second lecture or sermon.
Think of me as an assistant docent to the world of Genesis – coming alongside the primary guide, Claus Westermann, whose commentary on Genesis 1 – 11 is just the resource you didn’t know you needed. Until now.
Ham has created an imaginary world that has successfully convinced millions of Americans that his world is the real world. Yet Ham’s world tells us that the only part of science that we cannot trust is the fact of evolution. In all other areas, we have trusted science with our lives. Science has provided so many marvelous benefits. It has improved the quality of our lives and led to increased longevity. How is it even possible to maintain a complete dismissal of the science of evolution while embracing science is so many other areas?
While Ham attacks biology, geology, and physics, he always ends up at the beginning: a reliance on a literal Bible. The theory of literal truth dismantles Ham’s world because there has never been a literal Bible. This means there have never been a literal creation story.
The Story of Primeval Events in the Pentateuch and Its Prehistory
Westermann says, “The biblical story of the primeval events hands down what has been said about the beginnings of the world and of humanity in an unbroken line from antiquity to modern times.” Westermann argues that that the creation accounts have had an uninterrupted audience “from the time when the Yahwist planned his work in the 10th – 9th century B.C.”
Here is our first point of contrast. Biblical scholarship dates the Genesis accounts in the 10th – 9th century B.C. In other words, the narrative doesn’t originate with an eyewitness to the creation. Ham’s clumsy literalism falls into disarray when we consider that the story of creation was written long after the events of creation happened. The writer/editors of Genesis 1 – 2 are looking back at the beginning and imagining what it was like. Genesis 1 is no more a story of a literal creation than James Weldon Johnson’s poem, “The Creation.”
Judaism and Christianity have always celebrated creation. Westermann testifies,
There has been no break in that line of tradition which stretches back to the early stages of the Old Testament. The Christian Churches continue in their formal worship to acknowledge their belief in God, the creator of heaven and earth, and every attempt to detach faith in the creator from faith in Christ has miscarried.
A Christian rising in Sunday worship to affirm faith in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth doesn’t require Ham’s literalism.
The Poem of Creation
A creation poem imagining the beginning is not the same age as creation. The two events – creation and the story of creation – are separated by millions of years. Westermann says, “The Christian faith does not take its stand on an event at the beginning, but on an event in the ‘middle of time’; but because it looks to the whole, it must speak of the beginning.”
Ham’s literalism also struggles to deal with creation sources. The Yahwistic and Priestly syntheses of the Old Testament both begin with an account of creation. There’s no reason for faith to be thrown for a loop by the awareness that there are multiple creation stories with the main two identified by the name used by the writer for God. One uses Yahweh, the other Elohim. Faith doesn’t fall apart at the seams at the acceptance of this scholarly discovery.
A pre-Christian tradition lies behind the Christian confession of faith in God the creator; traditions which preceded Israel and from outside Israel also impact what Israel has to say about God the creator, Yahweh, the God of Israel.
The Hymn of Creation
The creation story of Genesis 1 – 2 is a hymn not a science theory. Westermann calls attention to hymns of praise which lift up God’s activity in creation. Hymns are not interested in chronological sequence or historical succession or even the age of the earth.
Even though Genesis 1 begins “In the beginning,” it is not the beginning of creation, time or even the book of Genesis itself. Genesis 1 – 11 is a distinct unity, a separate element from the Pentateuch. Westermann says, “It is …. A relatively self-contained unity, and not primarily a part of Genesis. It is a relatively late component.”
Genesis 1 – 11 looks to the universal; it includes all humanity; and primeval time, in which all takes place, cannot be fixed on the calendar. The attempt to fix an exact date for the first day of creation is an exercise in fiction. Such a date is as meaningless as all the dates Hal Lindsay has selected as the day of the Rapture.
As Westermann suggests,
The real question is this: Why has Israel’s confession of the god who rescued Israel from Egypt been extended back into the primeval events? And why did Israel speak of its rescuer as the creator of heaven and earth in a way which has so many points of contact with what the surrounding world said of its gods in the same context?
The writer of Israel goes back to the story of beginning to show that the God who called Abram and delivered Israel from Egyptian slavery is precisely the one true God of the universe. In short, God is God and we are not.
Genesis 1 – 11 answers a basic theological question which arises from Israel’s confession of Yahweh as the rescuer. This requires Genesis 1 – 11 to be exegeted around the relationship of the biblical story of primeval events to the tradition of the primeval happening in the history of humankind. I don’t see the point of attempting the impossible task of dating the first day of creation as a fundament of faith.
Ken Ham’s work is superfluous except for the money that he raises selling tickets to the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.
A Cautionary Tale: Dwell/Xenos Christian Fellowship, Evangelical Assumptions, and the Jesus People Movement
by Ben Williamson
Benjamin Williamson is Associate Professor of Theology at Ohio Christian University in Circleville, OH. Additionally, he serves as executive pastor at Riversong Church in Springfield, OH, and planted a church outside of Indianapolis early in his career. He has degrees from Asbury University (BS, Secondary Education), Wesley Biblical Seminary (M.Div.), and the University of Dayton (Ph.D. theology). He is currently working on a book for Fortress Press based upon his doctoral dissertation, out of which comes much of the material in this post.
In a 2022 article published by The Daily Beast, Emily Shugerman interviewed 25 former members of the Columbus, OH megachurch about alleged excessive use of controlling authority into the lives of its members. Sadly, this is not a new accusation to be leveled at this church. It has been publicly accused of cult-like behavior since a few years after its founding in the early 1980s.
“Dwell” (formerly Xenos Christian Fellowship) has been wildly successful since establishing itself as Xenos Christian Fellowship in 1980 and currently boasts a membership of 5000. Its origins coincide with the rise of what has become known as the Jesus People Movement (JPM). They began as a group of students who published an underground paper and rented a house near Ohio State University in 1969.
The JPM was the result of a brief confluence between the sixties counterculture and conservative evangelicalism. (Note: I use “conservative evangelicalism,” “mainstream evangelicalism,” “fundamentalism,” and “neo-evangelicalism” interchangeably, as in my estimation they are all fruit from the same tree.) It began sometime around 1967 and reached its peak from 1971 to 1972 before merging with mainstream conservative evangelicalism in the late middle and later seventies as hippiedom faded into the past. To be sure, one can see the marks of the JPM in current evangelical Protestant churches through rock-inspired worship choruses and a casual atmosphere both in dress and general informality.
However, the sixties counterculture’s emphasis on inner enlightenment was diminished within the JPM as it was absorbed into mainstream evangelicalism. The emphasis on a personal encounter with the Divine remained because that was always an element of conservative evangelicalism. While this attracted countercultural youths, the JPM was largely swept up in the rise of the Religious Right that grew into power in the late seventies.
The truth is that Dwell/Xenos was never as countercultural as it would like to claim. The founders, brothers Dennis and Bruce McCallum and Gary DeLashmutt, were highly influenced by the former’s mother Martha (who had strong ties to mainstream evangelicalism, and was a member of the John Birch Society), and by castoffs from the evangelical organization, Campus Crusade for Christ.
In fact, Dwell/Xenos is a cautionary example of what can happen within mainstream evangelicalism. As I see it, here are three assumptions common to conservative evangelicalism, and how they relate to what happened at Dwell/Xenos.
First, conservative evangelicalism takes for granted its ability to interpret and apply the Bible, considered absolute in its authority, to the lives of its members in a manner that is also absolute in authority. This confers a high degree of power to the pastor and/or small group leader. In the case of Xenos/Dwell, the church consists of a large and varying number of small groups. Small group leaders, trained by the church, lead these groups. These leaders naturally hold a high degree of authority in their interpretation of the Bible, a dynamic that is amplified by the age of the congregants (median age = 25).
Kathleen Boone’s book, The Bible Tells Them So, suggests that there exists within fundamentalism an invisible authority that operates under the guise of a proper, approved interpretation. Such interpretation has the effect of finalizing the text and denies the interpretive authority of the community. The interpreters themselves impose their authority on their hearers “by effacing the distinction between text and interpretation, an effacement especially apparent in literalistic reading when it is claimed that the interpreter does nothing more than expound the ‘plain sense’ of the text.”
Jim Smith, a psychology professor at Ohio Christian University, recalled visiting one of these early Bible studies as a student in 1970. They were packed into the living room of the Fish House and listened as Gary DeLashmutt shared a teaching from the Bible. There was some conversation invited, but the teaching was “more didactic.” Smith kept in touch with the church over the years and described their style of teaching as a “hardcore cognitive process. They teach what the Word says, and if [you don’t] match up, you’re the problem. They don’t want to hear anything you have to say. Also, if it’s emotional, they don’t want anything to do with it. It’s like if it’s emotional, it’s evil or something.”
Second, conservative evangelicals, particularly those in non-denominational churches, tend to assume that the Bible provides a blueprint for church polity that is absolute. As they formulate their church authority structure, they believe that they are doing so in a way that restores the model found in the first-century Church. Dennis McCallum and Gary DeLashmutt made ecclesiology the subject of their master’s theses at the J.C. Light and Powerhouse Seminary in Los Angeles, CA. This was a seminary run by former Campus Crusade leaders, and thus was a product of evangelical assumptions. The product of this specific assumption results in a structure of church government that is perceived to be absolute, deriving its authority from the Bible itself.
Third, there is a belief in the necessity of every Christian to have a personal encounter with the Divine. The individual Christian can receive a personal message from the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures. They can also receive personal direction through prayer. Finally, conversion happens through a “personal encounter with Jesus Christ.”
This third assumption of conservative evangelicalism could protect members of such churches from potential authoritarian overreach in the first two assumptions. Xenos/Dwell is an example of what can happen when the individual’s ability to hear God for themselves is marginalized. For example, important personal decisions such as where to send one’s children to college have been subject to vetting by the leadership of the church. In my dissertation, I referenced an article from 2001 co-written by Dennis McCallum argued,
“Since God has sovereignly placed these students in Xenos, shouldn’t the burden of proof be on why should go away to school? If someone had a perfectly good job and decided they would leave their church and established relationships to move. To another city to take a slightly better job, wouldn’t we critique that decision? Why wouldn’t the same critique apply if we’re talking about colleges?”
This said, in their book, Spiritual Relationships that Last: What the Bible Says About Dating and Marriage, DeLashmutt and Dennis McCallum affirm the sovereignty of the individual Christian to hear God in the process of making important life decisions such as deciding when and whom to marry. More than this, they speak out against churches who “have tried to minimize the significance of the individual decision making by dominating every area of their members’ lives,” and they mention that these churches use terminology such as “shepherding” to dominate the lives of their members.
However, and as I establish in my dissertation, this is likely a reference to former evangelical mentors with whom they had a subsequent falling out. Put another way, DeLashmutt and the McCallums recognize the issue as a problem in other evangelical churches, but cannot or will not see it in their own church.
Dwell’s model, built upon a network of smaller cell groups that meet in homes, provides community and the possibility for deep friendships. It fends off isolation. This is also true of their Dwell-sponsored student housing. No one at Dwell must face isolation . . . unless, and this is significant, they disobey the leadership.
If one reads Shugerman’s article in its proper context, and listens to the stories of these former members with the proper gravity, one realizes that these are often impressionable young adults in their mid-twenties. They are taught the three assumptions of evangelicalism, with an emphasis on the first two. They receive love and community from Dwell and their small groups. But in story after story, they also talk about being isolated from friends and family. And once isolated, the church gains a very powerful and authoritative presence in their lives. Leaving Dwell means loss of the identity and community one has earned through great personal sacrifice.
Post-Covid evangelicalism has begun to promote the viability of house church models reminiscent of Dwell/Xenos. Evangelical leader and former megachurch pastor Francis Chan is a significant proponent. Chan’s “We Are Church” movement is committed to the evangelical approach to the Bible with an acknowledgment that individual members can and should hear God for themselves. However, their statement that “The body of believers is supposed to be closer to us than our own families (Matthew 12:46-50, Luke 14:26)” carries the potential of a future authoritarian and isolating tendency. (And notice that they reinforce their assertion with the Bible).
Dwell’s story is important for evangelicals to consider in such a historical moment. As a person who affirms the inerrancy of the Bible and the possibility of a personal encounter with the Divine, I think it’s crucial to recognize that the assumptions undergirding evangelicalism have the potential to be interpreted in ways that allow for a destructive authoritarianism.