Between Two Wor(L)ds: Worldview and Observation in the Use of General Revelation to Interpret Scripture, and Vice Versa

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Mar 1998 by Johnson, Dennis E

DENNIS E. JOHNSON*

To his great dismay, Harald Alabaster was caught between two worlds. A. S. Byatt's novella "Morpho Eugenia," from which the recent film Angels and Insects was made, is set in Victorian England in the decade following the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species. Globe-trotting naturalist William Adamson has been cast into hard times by a shipwreck, and Alabaster, with a dilettante's interest in insects but no organizational skills, becomes Adamson's patron. He takes him into his household to bring order to his chaotic collection of rare specimens. Yet the real burden of Alabaster's heart is the writing of a book that will prove scientifically that his romantic brand of Christianity is compatible with Darwin's new theories. Adamson is to help with this apology by arguing against its thesis-a task that he undertakes most willingly since, despite his surname, he long ago abandoned the fundamentalist belief that he is Adam's son, embracing instead a coldly consistent Darwinian naturalism, a view of "nature red in tooth and claw," purposeless and amoral. In one of their discussions Alabaster admits his distressed confusion:

The world has changed so much, William, in my lifetime. I am old enough to have believed in our First Parents in Paradise, as a little boy, to have believed in Satan hidden in the snake, and the Archangel with the flaming sword, closing the gates. I am old enough to have believed without question in the Divine Birth on a cold night with the sky full of singing angels and the shepherds staring up in wonder, and the strange kings advancing across the sand on camels with gifts. And now I am presented with a world in which we are what we are because of the mutations of soft jelly and calceous bone matter through unimaginable millennia-a world in which angels and devils do not battle in the Heavens for virtue and vice, but in which we eat and are eaten and absorbed into other flesh and blood. All the music and painting, all the poetry and power is so much illusion. I shall moulder like a mushroom when my time comes, which is not long. It is likely that the injunction to love each other is no more than the prudent instinct of sociability, of parental protectiveness, in a creature related to the great ape.... I began my life as a small boy whose every action was burned into the gold record of his good and evil deeds, where it would be weighed and looked over by One with merciful eyes, to whom I was walking, step by unsteady step. I end it like a skeleton leaf, to be made humus, like a mouse crunched by an owl, like a beef-calf going to the slaughter, through a gate which opens only one way, to blood and dust and destruction.1

Alabaster is torn between two worlds, in a twilight zone between the theocentric universe of the Bible, imbued with meaning by its Creator, and the anthropocentric empiricism of modernity, yielding a mechanistic, senseless view of the universe and humanity.2 As the story unfolds, Alabaster's own household is seen to resemble ever more closely the ant colony that Adamson is researching: Both are ruled by pampered, fecund queens and populated by all-but-useless male drones and all-but-faceless servants.

I. BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

At the distance of over a century from the 1860s, evangelicals still live between two worlds. My title is borrowed from that of John Stott's book on the challenge of preaching in the late twentieth century, but it is not only the preacher who stands Between Two Worlds.3 We all live between the ancient world in which the Bible was given and the modern world, which has been molded by the Enlightenment's faith in reason and scientific experimentation. Therefore we confront the challenge of expressing what God revealed long ago and far away in terms intelligible to modern and postmodern people.

What is the difference between these two worlds? There are obvious changes in the observable surface culture: language, clothing, political structures, means of production, art, architecture, information technology-from papyrus to the Internet.

But the canyon between the two worlds is deeper than these surface features. The Bible and modernity present two different worldviews, two paradigms for making sense of experience and the universe. Toward the beginning of our century Rudolph Bultmann saw this and spoke of the distance between the Bible's ancient mythic-supernaturalistic picture of reality and the modern naturalistic worldview that had made scientific and technological advance possible:

This conception of the world we call mythological because it is different from the conception of the world which has been formed and developed by science since its inception in ancient Greece and which has been accepted by all modern men. In this modern conception of the world the cause-and-effect nexus is fundamental.... Modern science does not believe that the course of nature can be interrupted or, so to speak, perforated, by supernatural powers.4

For people living in the Bible's world, events could result from interventions in human life by God or angels or demons. For people living in the modern worldview, said Bultmann, events result inexorably from unbroken chains of naturalistic causation, without divine or demonic meddling from outside the space-time continuum.