Hans Madueme | A Better Way to Disagree

Hans: 

I think, like a lot of academics, there’s a kind of distaste for the kind of rhetoric that’s common in that space. And even if the these people have my convictions, I just don’t like the way the debate goes. I don’t like the tone, the rhetoric. I realize why things are going this way, but I wonder if there’s a better way.

Hans Madueme and I’m professor of theological studies at covenant College.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump. 

Today’s guest is a self-identified young-earth creationist. And no, BioLogos has not changed its position on the age of the earth or evolution as the best way to describe the variety of life on earth today. But one of the things that has always been a value at BioLogos is gracious dialogue—which, in practice, means talking to people who have different beliefs in a way that is not belittling or dismissive or simply an attempt to win a debate. We’ve had a few conversions like that on the podcast, but I think it’s fair to say that mostly we talk to people we agree with — at least on the big stuff. There’s a kind of learning that happens in places of agreement, but it’s not the same as the learning that can occur in gracious conversations over disagreement. We have so few examples of this happening now. And in this case, I think it happened well. And I can’t  take all the credit for that. Most of it has to go to Hans, who came onto our show with a posture that seems so rare nowadays—he came on with curiosity, with conviction, and with humility, and I found myself thinking about my own beliefs. And I ended feeling like we understood each other better. 

The centerpiece of this is his new book, Defending Sin, which came out earlier this year on Baker Academic. I think the book is worth reading. And I think this conversation is worth listening to.  Let’s get to that conversation with Hans Madueme.

Stump:

Hans Madueme, welcome to the podcast.

Madueme:

Greetings, Jim. I’m delighted to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.

Stump:

All right, well you must get tired of explaining your name, this syncretism of Swedish and Nigerian. But would you do it one more time, though? Give us a little autobiography and where you come from and how you got to be here and what you do and all that.

Madueme:

Right, right. No, that’s fine. So Madueme… I’m Nigerian and there are many ethnic groups in Nigeria. So I’m Igbo, so my last name… and it’s actually pronounced differently from that, that’s phoneticized, but that’s my Nigerian last name. Hans is Swedish, and I was born in Uppsala and my dad did a PhD there and he got to Sweden as a bachelor, ended up getting married, and I was the first of four and I ended up being born in Sweden. I was only there a year, so don’t ask me anything in Swedish.

And it’s turned out that I basically am a Nigerian in diaspora, so I’ve lived in Sweden. I lived in Nigeria till I was about six or seven, moved to Vienna in Austria, and I was living in Vienna from age 10 to 17 and was also… actually from six to 17, but I was also going to school in England from age 10 to 17, boarding school, so back and forth. And then I did my undergrad in Montreal, Quebec, and then came to the US for the first time for medical school.

Stump:

Very good. Give us a little bit more of that background because I do remember that you went to medical school and now are a theologian.

Madueme:

Right.

Stump:

So it wasn’t the case that as you were growing up, you said, “When I grow up I want to be a theologian.” How did that transition occur?

Madueme:

Definitely not. If any of your listeners are African and/or Asian, they’d probably resonate with my story. So growing up, I would say probably all Nigerian males just figure they’re going to be doctors. If not doctors, then lawyers. If not lawyers, then maybe an engineer or an architect. And pretty much, those are the only options otherwise you fail in life. And I think somehow I drank the Kool-Aid, and I assumed from a young age that I was going to be a doctor. My parents didn’t dissuade me. I think I was really just trying to please my dad and I went through high school and then got to undergrad. I was essentially pre-med at McGill University, and what happened, which at the time I didn’t realize it, but I became a Christian after my first year at college. So when I was 19, I found the Lord and was growing as a Christian while being a pre-med student.

I ended up at Howard University in DC doing medical school and had a growing number of theological questions. So I’m going through medical school and I’m reading theology, I finish at Howard, and then I get into the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to do an internal medicine residency. And when you’re a resident, you have a stipend. It’s a small stipend, but I used that basically just to… I think most of it was on Amazon books, and I had books just coming in on all… a range of theological issues, homiletics and understanding culture, et cetera, while training as an internist. And essentially in retrospect, what was happening was I was falling in love with theology and was falling out of love with medicine. And so by the time, I think, after my first year of my residency, it was as if I woke up one day and thought, “What am I doing?”

And it was actually quite a crisis for me to be at the Mayo Clinic and then decide that I think I want to… I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into the pastorate. I just knew that I had to go to seminary and it was devastating to my parents. And I finished the remaining two years of my residency all the while knowing that I was going to seminary afterwards. And some people questioned my sanity because you don’t actually make the big bucks until you’re done with residency and that’s exactly when I went into. I transferred to seminary. But that’s how it happened for me. And obviously, everything about who I am today, the sort of theological questions I’m interested in, I’m sure they all… the seeds were sown during medical school and through my training.

Stump:

Okay. Let’s push into the theological story a little bit further. You and I first met at a conference in Chicago about Adam and Eve, as I recall.

Madueme:

I remember that, yeah.

Stump:

We hit it off pretty well and I was surprised to learn later that, if we use labels here, that you’re a young Earth creationist. You didn’t lead with that in our conversation, which I think says something about your approach or your methodology.

Madueme:

Right.

Stump:

But I’m curious maybe how you feel about that label, but more how did you come to that position? What’s the story that led you into that particular theological tradition?

Madueme:

Right, right. I’m trying to remember what year that was, but I’m pretty sure at the time I wasn’t publicly a young Earth creationist. It may have been that, had you pressed me or asked me the question, I might’ve said I lean in that direction or I might’ve affirmed the label. But the kind of work I was doing, that I’d been doing for the past 10 or more years, had been in the area of the hamartiology, the doctrine of the fall, original sin, thinking about maybe science, faith, source of questions as the interface with the doctrine of sin. But I was very particular about bracketing out questions about origins and creationism. I think a lot of academics, there’s a kind of… I don’t know if to call it a distaste for the kind of rhetoric that’s common in that space. And even if, “Oh, these people have my convictions,” I just don’t like the way the debate goes.

I don’t like the tone, the rhetoric, and just a lot of the… there’s a lot about the polemics and controversies that I found distasteful, and also—maybe distasteful isn’t even the right word. I just found that I’m not sure I realized why things are going this way, but I wonder if there’s a better way. I didn’t think I would be that person to be involved in that discussion, so I think my attitude was just very much like, “I’m just keeping my distance from that whole discussion.” And I think I probably had that attitude when we met. And what was interesting is that as I have been working more deeply in these theological areas—so my focus is certainly science and theology, but I come at it from the theological side of things, though I care about the scientific questions, and as I press deeper into these debates, I think I basically—and I’ve been in conversations, the kinds of conferences that we go to and I’ve done stuff with Templeton and so on, been in symposia, not as a young Earth creationist, but I’ve been in those settings.

And I think at some point, I just realized in my research that I don’t think I can continue to bracket out those questions. In fact, I felt dogmatically, theologically, I felt I was seeing—and you’ve read my book, so it seemed to me that the questions that are typically front and center in the origins conversations are very much integral to the kinds of hamartiological questions that I was pursuing in the doctrine of sin. And so ironically, I found myself more convinced about young Earth creationism. Maybe I would’ve said I leaned that way, but then I just became, I was convinced and not only convinced, I thought, “You know what? I need to be more forthcoming about my position and perhaps even try to model a different way of articulating the position and even dialoguing with positions that I disagree with.” And so that’s a little bit of how the journey’s been.

Stump:

Yeah. Yeah, good. So just in full disclosure for our audience, we should say that you and I have interacted before. You wrote a section in the Five Views book on original sin that I edited and I’ve written for you in the online journal that you’ve edited. And we do bump into each other at conferences and I think it’s safe to say that we’ve been friendly to each other and that there’s not some kind of animosity between us.

Madueme:

Absolutely.

Stump:

And I will say I really, really appreciate that because as you know, that’s not always the case in this business. So let me get to your book here then, and see if we can’t continue in that vein of good, collegial discussion. Not that we somehow convey that we think the answers to these questions don’t matter because we do think that, but there’s a way of treating each other as scholars and as people that need not descend into name-calling or attributing motives that are obviously not there. So you have this book that came out this year, Defending Sin, which is a nice provocative title. Subtitle: A Response to the Challenges of Evolution in the Natural Sciences. And in attempt to find common ground with each other, I’ll note that your book is on Baker Academic and that Dwight Baker, formerly the president of Baker Publishing, is now the chairman of the board of BioLogos. So we have this Baker connection that obviously is okay doing business with both of us. I’ll also note that I had a book published this year, The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith. And it’s not quite the same audience. Mine is not on an academic press and yours has way more footnotes than mine does, but I definitely would have interacted with your book had it been available when I was writing. Maybe you would say the same. It’s not like we were intentionally ignoring each other. But I have now read your whole book and I’m interested to have some conversation about the ideas that are there and find some things that we see the same and at least talk about some of the differences.

So let me see if I can boil things down to two claims to start with from your book. So I would say that you’re claiming that the Bible clearly makes some claims about protology, right? Particularly as it relates to Adam and Eve, to sin, to original righteousness. The Bible clearly makes some of these claims which stand at odds with what evolutionary science says about origins. And secondly, what the Bible says has higher epistemic priority than science, so the science must be wrong. How is that for a big overview? What would you amend?

Madueme:

No, that’s pretty good, but one, just for definition’s sake, I don’t know if everyone’s going to know what protology is. They might think that’s a field of medicine that has a ‘C’. But you did say it. It’s first things, right? First things as opposed to eschatology, last things. Right? Okay. So that’s out of the way. And then the only thing… the second claim, I think you were missing something that if there is direct conflict between a scientific claim and a reading of scripture or an interpretation of scripture that is clear and time-tested and so on, then yes, I forget how you put it, but the science is wrong, but it’s not… the way you put it, it almost seemed like I’m anti-science, like science is always wrong. No.

Stump:

Okay. Let me clarify in that sense too, that I really appreciate that you don’t duck the science, that you’re not uninformed about the science and you’re not even trying to offer an alternative science which explains things in a way that is consistent with your theological commitments, but rather you’re just saying it must be wrong somehow, and we are going to have to wait to see how that might play out eventually. Is that fair?

Madueme:

Right, right. That’s fair. Yeah, that’s fair.

Stump:

And I would say that you, for the most part, give a pretty accurate account of these sciences. I might quibble in a few little places, but again, you’re not claiming to have some alternative science up your sleeve that explains things better. It’s just that you see—

Madueme:

Right. And on that point, just to be clear too, yes. I’m writing primarily as a theologian, and I try to interact with the literature that’s relevant, but I’m writing as a theologian. I do think I do have colleagues and friends who are scientists and who share my theological perspective and are engaged in the project of trying to think about, are there other ways? Are there other scientific models that are consistent with scripture? And I’m not opposed to that. And in fact, I’m supportive of those initiatives. Not all of them. In fact, there are some that I would distance myself from, but I do think there are some people who, to my mind, are doing good work, even if maybe it’s in its early stages and they still have their work cut out. But the project itself I think I’m supportive of, if that makes sense.

Stump:

Okay. So I guess what I’d like to do then in discussing some of this is to start on the methodological side, the epistemological side, and then we’ll talk about some of the more specific doctrinal things like a doctrine of sin or original righteousness and that sort of thing. But first on the methodology, let’s start with the Bible. The Bible, if again, finding common ground, we think the Bible is a source of knowledge, it’s a way of knowing, it’s a means by which we know true things about reality. So I have two questions that I’d like us to discuss a little bit related to that. So what kind of thing is the Bible and how clear is the message?

So let me start with that first one. What kind of thing is the Bible? And the community that I come from always had a commitment to what called a high view of scripture. The more I’ve thought about this and pushed into it myself, I think it’s not a competition to see who can have the highest view of scripture, is it? Because ours, in the Christian understanding, I don’t think is the highest view of a sacred text compared to something like the Muslim view of the Quran or the Mormon view of the Book of Mormon where these words almost literally fell directly from heaven into what they became. And that’s not what we think, right? And the Bible as the word of God, do we take the word of God in that Chalcedonian sense as fully God and fully human? Just talk a little bit about what your view of scripture is and how the divine and the human interact in the text that we have before us now.

Madueme:

Right, right. No, that’s good. I think I would say that the Bible is a communication from God to us. It’s divine discourse. It’s God speaking. And so for me, theologically, passages like 2 Timothy 3:16 that famously uses the Greek word “theopneustos” which I think the NRSV translates “inspired.” All scripture is inspired by God. The ESV is breathed out by God, the NIV is God breathed. And it’s that idea that it’s God breathed. And so I don’t know if we want to use the term concursus or something of double agency, but the human author, the biblical author, it’s his work, it’s his writing, and it grows out of, or it assumes, experience, personality, all of that.

And yet at the same time, every word written by the human author is what God intended to communicate to us. So on the one hand, I want to hold to what some have called an organic view of inspiration as opposed to a mechanical view. So the organic view would recognize that Peter writes differently from Paul and it doesn’t flatten out or diminish the humanity of the scriptures. But I would also want to say that there is something supernatural or miraculous about the scriptures and that’s the divine element. And so that somehow… and this isn’t 2 Peter, these men were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And so obviously if we hold a fairly robust view of divine sovereignty, everything written by any human beings is under the sovereignty of God.

And so God relates to anything anyone says or writes. So obviously, inspiration to my mind is over and above that, and that’s the supernatural element. There is a supernatural element brought about by the Holy Spirit such that those words are equally human and divine. Maybe that is a start to your question.

Stump:

Do you think, to follow up, do you think that the authors, the human authors of scripture, and maybe we talk about the New Testament primarily here, do you think they understood themselves to be under inspiration?

Madueme:

Yeah, it’s hard to say much about that, but there is some evidence that they had some idea of that, even as they were writing. So for instance, I don’t have the citation, but I believe it’s in 1 or 2 Peter, I think 2 Peter, where Peter says something to the effect, it’s a passage where he says, “Hey, there are people around here who are misinterpreting Paul and they’re attributing things to Paul that are outright false and they’re twisting his words.” But in that context, he actually refers to Paul’s letters as scripture. And again, it’s one verse and I don’t want to milk it too much, but it does seem like Peter has some sense that what Paul is writing is scripture. So that’s one text that comes to mind, and even Peter talking about the way his notion of, I think he’s thinking of Old Testament prophets, but thinking of them as being carried along by the Holy Spirit. One could speculate that the apostles had some sense that God was at work in their lives. But yeah, I don’t know that I can say too much more, but the passage I was alluding to in 2 Peter would lead me to think that they had some awareness of it. But given that scripture doesn’t say too much on that subject, I probably shouldn’t, either.

Stump:

And I don’t know how much hinges on the answer to that question—

Madueme:

Right, right, right.

Stump:

—just in trying to sort out maybe some passages. I think it’s in 2 Corinthians where Paul says something about, “This is what Jesus said, but this is what I say,” is making a distinction there. Or I am rather taken by the beginning of 1 John where it’s, “Look, we’re proclaiming to you what we saw and heard. This is our testimony,” and it feels like a much more human involvement—

Madueme:

It does.

Stump:

—in terms of, this is the knowledge we have. We’re just reporting to you with what we saw and how much of that we can just explain away as well. That was just God telling them that’s the spirit telling them to say things like that.

Madueme:

I think probably if we drill deeply into that question, I think we would probably see a set of texts that, to put it maybe a bit crudely, but a set of texts on the human side of the equation and we’d see different texts on the divine side of the equation. So for instance, I’d probably throw in the end of Revelation 22 where John, just the way he says, “If anyone adds anything to this text or takes away…” if it was just human words, dude, why so melodramatic? You know what I mean? But yeah, I take your point, though, that there are passages that seem to be on one side versus the other, which in some ways we would expect. It’s fully human and fully divine and as systematicians and philosophers, somehow we have to synthesize that material in a way that’s faithful to the text, but gives us more clarity.

Stump:

So what I take that to be as a complication then for my second question about the Bible and our epistemology here of what we take from the Bible in that how we sort out the message that is being proclaimed to us, the word of God that is being communicated to us, and what the cultural garb is of that message and how much.

So here are the questions on the perspicuity of scripture. How clear is the Bible’s message? And I’ll introduce this one and have you respond by saying… I talked about this at one of those Debar conferences at TEDs that maybe you were there and expressed some concern about the perspicuity of scripture. And a fairly well-known evangelical Bible professor said, “Oh look, here’s clear about the message of scripture. It’s that God created, that human sinned, that Jesus saves, and something else is coming.” To which I said, “I fully agree. I fully agree with that.”

Madueme:

Right.

Stump:

But it seems that you’re pushing for a much more fine-grained perspicuity of scripture, and you acknowledge many times that our interpretations of scripture are not inerrant or infallible. So again, there’s some common ground with us, but it doesn’t seem like we would agree necessarily on just what is interpretation and what isn’t interpretation that we take from the text. What’s your response to that perspective?

Madueme:

Yeah. So a couple of things. And you can come back at me, but first, my understanding of perspicuity as such, as a doctrine, is, I tend to think of that in terms of what’s clear is what the Bible teaches about salvation. How can we be reconciled to God? And that’s why on the one hand know a theologian might be 90 years old and still feel like there’s the vastness to what the Bible teaches that I haven’t even touched, and then a five-year-old can understand that Jesus died for my sins and can put her trust in Christ. But I think that might be a bit of a technical point because I think your point is more when we interpret the Bible and when we hold different doctrinal commitments, to what extent can we say, “Hey, my belief here is, I’m certain about that, and this is something that if there’s a scientific claim that contradicts it, that my doctrinal claim holds and rebuts. I know I can stand on the side of this doctrine.”

And it might not be just the resurrection of Christ or justification by grace of faith, but we’re talking about other doctrinal commitments that are maybe not as central to the gospel as, say, resurrection or justification. And in my book, I think you’re saying that there are a number of these doctrines where I seem to believe that no, we can be very certain about that, and that’s what you mean by the clarity of scripture. So just for clarity, if you were going to ask me about the clarity of scripture as a doctrine, perspicuity, I tend to think about that with respect to salvation. But then now if we move to hermeneutics and interpretation and what can we be certain about? Versus like, “Yeah, I have this belief, but for all I know, there might be all these other interpretations, so I’m not going to hold it with a certain tenacity,” yes, I think we probably have some interesting differences there, but how clear is this?

How clear is that? And then how central is this to the biblical story, whether we think about creation, fall, redemption, consummation, or however you want to summarize it, but is this close to the core of the story or is this way in the periphery? And then I also think about it from an ecclesiological perspective in terms of the Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox. Have they historically held this position? Perhaps in the pre-modern period, was there a universal commitment to this teaching or was this some teaching that some isolated wing of the church held, Catholicity of the doctrine? So to me, if a doctrine ticks all of those boxes, then to my mind, that might not be the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ or that Christ rose from the dead bodily, but that’s a robust doctrine that deserves full assent from the believer. And then if a scientist or an archeologist or someone says, “Oh, you know what? I think you’re wrong about that and here’s my evidence,” when it comes to doctrines like that, I’m not going to easily give up those doctrines. Right?

Stump:

Okay. So yeah, let me do push back just a little bit on some of this, and even maybe starting with the doctrine of perspicuity of scripture and your claim that, “Well, it’s the salvation that’s clear throughout,” yeah, it’s always a little risky to just pull out individual verses, but I certainly could pull out a range of verses that seem to suggest very different things even about that, so Ephesians 2:8 and 9, yes. “By grace you’ve been saved through faith, this not of your own doing,” but then James 2, “Persons justified by works and not by faith alone.” Justified is a different word there, but maybe we go to Jesus and the parable of the sheep in the goats. That’s his clearest statement of who’s in and who’s out that has nothing to do with grace or it’s, “Who has taken care of the least of these?” Or you go to Jesus talking to Nicodemus. “No one’s going to see the kingdom of God and unless they’re born again,” and explains a little bit of what… in Mark, it’s, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.” You could even go to 1 Timothy and say, “Women are saved through childbearing.”

Madueme:

Right. Right.

Stump:

So my first claim is that even that isn’t absolutely crystal clear. And then the next point would be the range of Christian—I was blown away when I first saw the Oxford Handbook of World Christianity and the annals of how many different Christian denominations there are, now over 40,000, all of them presumably thinking their reading of scripture is the right one. And I fully get your point to say, “Let’s look at some of the bigger movements and finding the tradition that helps us to understand this.” I wondered a little reading through your book here, though, of just how much of tradition counts in that regard. Is there a more narrow of, “This is the real tradition that we have to stay faithful to?”

Madueme:

No, fair enough. Just to your earlier point about the number of ways that scripture speaks about salvation and that seem potentially, if not contradictory, they’re certainly emphasizing different things. And, yeah, what would I say to that? I think on one level I’d just have to say, “Yeah, you got me. Those are really good points.” And maybe I could still say there’s a certain clarity. On a surface level, there’s a certain clarity that holds, but there’s a lot of ways we can give a much more fine-grained, nuanced definition. But I would say there’s a 7-year-old reading John’s gospel and comes under the conviction of the Holy Spirit and she puts her faith in Christ. I think that’s something real has happened and salvation has been experienced. That 7-year-old, if you ask them, “Okay, so what’s your understanding of salvation?” We’ll have a fairly kind of simple, unsophisticated, perhaps even problematic in some ways answer that lacks the kind of nuance, et cetera. I would say that doesn’t mean her experience is illegitimate and that she hasn’t actually encountered the Lord and there isn’t something true in a very deep and wonderful way about her encounter with Christ. Yet somehow, I think with the clarity of scripture, I want to say I can still hold to—is clear on salvation even though, yeah, you and I can maybe agree that there’s all kinds of exegetical complexities to this and there’s interesting questions and perhaps even unanswerable questions, et cetera. I think those can both be true, at least I hope so.

Stump:

So the point that I’m trying to pull out of this is that what seems to me to be clear is our doctrines that emerge, our, and I’d say our interpretations that emerge, are what’s clear and coherent because we’re picking the ones to emphasize and trying to explain away the ones that don’t quite fit. It’s our interpretations that are clear more than the text in its entirety that’s clear. And I fully agree with you that we pull out the major themes, but our articulation of them, I don’t want to give quite the same epistemic authority to as the text itself. And there’s probably a spectrum here that you and I are on different points of the spectrum rather than that we disagree fundamentally of the end points in some sense.

Madueme:

Right, no, no. I agree with what you said, what you’ve just said, and I think where we would disagree is, so I think we both agree that sola scriptura, we’re Protestants, and so only scripture is infallible. Confessions aren’t infallible, conciliar statements aren’t infallible, theological textbooks aren’t infallible, even if it’s by our favorite author, whatever. All of those are fallible. We’re going to agree on that. But then, what follows? Do I then say all doctrinal interpretations on the epistemic Richter scale are, I don’t know, three out of 10, four out of 10, five out of 10? Pretty much all of them? Or I think we’re going to agree on this. Okay, when it comes to Jesus Christ is fully human and fully divine, wait, that’s 10 out of 10, however you want to put it, but that’s way up there. Same with he rose from the dead bodily. But then what do you do with the fall of Adam? Or that two human beings were the first… there were two human beings at the very beginning and we’re all descended from them? What’s the epistemic way? And I’m pretty sure that’s where we would disagree.

Stump:

Let’s change on this methodology side over to science for a little bit. And so methodological naturalism is one of the important points here and I think most of our listeners are familiar with this, but the idea that science should only appeal to natural explanations or not. And believe it or not, you and I have some common ground here. I’ve written a bit about this myself, and I think that the way many people pronounce their commitment to methodological naturalism have some sort of obvious and enduring demarcation between science and non-science is just historically naive. The kinds of things that scientists study, what’s taken as natural, changes over time. It used to be that astrology was a properly scientific investigation, but studying the human mind was not. That’s pretty well flipped now, right?

Madueme:

Right, right.

Stump:

And Newton wouldn’t accept fields or spooky action at a distance and so on. I can’t imagine that what we take as proper objects of scientific study isn’t going to change again in the future, and there’s no governing body for science that gets to decide what’s properly scientific and what isn’t. So I think you and I agree on that, but here’s where we might diverge. I think methodological naturalism as a kind of provisional guide is helpful for restricting science, for limiting its scope.

So the Augustinian science you advocate for, and Alvin Plantinga famously advocated for, where, as scientists, we ought to bring in all that we know, including these things we know from scripture, that seems to me to give too much away to scientism, that science gets to answer all the questions. I want to say, “Science, you stay in your lane and admit when there are things outside of your purview,” rather than saying, “Nope, science gets to answer all the questions,” and maybe we include the supernatural in the answers there, but it still feels like it’s giving science too much authority to go that direction. What do you think about that?

Madueme:

No. Great. Can I just make a parenthetical comment? So I’m actually teaching a science and theology class at Covenant this semester, and our textbook is by none other than JB Stump.

Stump:

Oh my goodness.

Madueme:

And it’s Science and Christianity. You know the book, your Introduction to Science and Theology. And we just recently discussed your methodological naturalism chapter.

Stump:

All right.

Madueme:

And I told my students that this is—I agree with most of what he says in this chapter. Jim just knows the issues. And so I just want to just echo what you said when you said we are on the same page. I very much appreciated that chapter, and I did note, because there you do point out the scientism worry. And I have to say, that that was smooth. I liked that. I appreciated it.

Stump:

I’m going to quote you on that, maybe put it on a blurb on the back of the next edition of the book. “Hans Madueme says that was smooth.”

Madueme:

And I actually mean that in a good sense because I certainly have concerns with scientism and I see the thrust of your worry. And I would say, you know what? I think in a perfect world in which most scientists do respect the lane they’re in and don’t over-claim, don’t make any metaphysical statements or assumptions that go beyond the narrow view of science, I think, that you’re assuming, in that perfect world, I think I might be happy with that, but I just don’t know that that’s the world we live in. I think we live in a world in which science is the epistemic king. And CNN, if they’re doing an interview and they want an expert, they’re not going to bring on a theologian. Why would they bring on a theologian?

What could a theologian say and why would they bring a pastor or someone who’s appealing to scripture? No, they’re going to bring a Mayo Clinic physician or Richard Dawkins or someone like that, which I think just reflects the era, the post-enlightenment context that we’re in. So that given this cultural context, while I appreciate the point you’re making, and I feel like it’s insightful enough that I feel you getting me checkmated here, I think because of the cultural context we’re in, I don’t know that… okay, so if you have a group of scientists who are evolutionary biologists and you have geologists and you have all the accoutrements and all the associated disciplines, et cetera, and they want to answer the question, “Okay, where did this world come from? Where do humans come from?” Perhaps, “Where does death come from?” And they have robust answers to those questions. If they together just said, “Hey, we’re in our lane. We’re not making any metaphysical commitments here. Christians can believe what they want about Genesis,” great, then yeah, but I just don’t think that’s the case. And since that’s not the case, the Augustinian science argument is more like… given this context, then rhetorically and also substantively, we’re going to say, “Well, actually, if you’re wanting to answer these questions, then let’s take an expansive view of science of what science is and let’s be open to whatever data that we have, whatever we can know, whether it’s by natural means or whether it’s by supernatural means.” I think that’s why that seems more compelling to me than what you are saying just because of our context, intellectual context.

Stump:

Yeah, I think that’s fair too. And when scientific knowledge becomes the stand-in for all knowledge, right?

Madueme:

Right, right.

Stump:

That’s when that becomes difficult. So I think even Ernan McMullen, whom you quoted as a defender of methodological naturalism somewhere in that exchange that he had with Alvin Plantinga, said, “Maybe if there were a bigger category that we called general knowledge as a whole, we might see better that scientific knowledge is limited to just this one part, and there are other kinds of knowledge that come in, and that we want to try to synthesize those. We want to try to make sense of those.”

So I feel the threat that you’re trying to address, and it’s a real one. So that’s fine. So then the question becomes, and with this, we’ll maybe start transitioning into the specific topics here, is to sort out where science does get to have a greater voice and where it doesn’t, and where scripture does have a greater voice and where it doesn’t. So the kinds of questions where the epistemic authority of each, and maybe you don’t like it framing like this, where there’s a higher… is there a higher epistemic authority to science when I’m asking the question, “How does photosynthesis work?”

Madueme:

Right, right. Now, I… yeah.

Stump:

But then there’s going to be a range of questions because I might go to, which has the higher epistemic authority when we ask, “What’s the shape of the cosmos of the solar system?” Or, “What’s the smallest seed on… or is it the mustard seed?” Or maybe, “How long do people typically live?” And maybe I’m getting further and further into more substantive claims, or more clear claims there. But do you see what I’m doing there of trying to find the kinds of questions that scripture does speak to authoritatively, and are there other kinds of questions that it doesn’t speak to authoritatively, and we might see that science ought to be elevated in its epistemic authority in that constricted area?

Madueme:

Right, right. Yeah. So let me come at your question this way, and you can steer me back if need be. But so you remember Galileo, and I interact with Galileo quite a bit in the initial first chapter, but Galileo said he had that famous aphorism that he took from a cardinal that is, “Actually, scripture tells us how to get to heaven, not how the heavens go.” So that’s one way to partition this epistemically. When it’s about cosmology, when it’s about biology, when it’s about chemistry, that’s science. When it’s about spiritual things, when it’s about salvation and how to get to heaven, that’s scripture. So there’s a minimal sense in which I agree with that because I think earlier I said scripture is clear on how to be saved. And fundamentally, the book of scripture is about how we can be reconciled to God.

So in that sense, I agree with Galileo, but where I would amend what he’s saying is in telling that story, in telling us how to be reconciled to God, scripture does a bunch of other things, and the other things that scripture does are not just limited to spiritual matters. So for instance, Jesus is the Messiah, the eternal son became incarnate, but he was born in Bethlehem. And that’s actually foretold in the Old Testament, and that’s described in the New Testament. And if Jesus was born in Rome or if Jesus was born in Sydney or if Jesus was born in maybe closer in the Middle East, some other place, that actually… I don’t know that I would say that would be cataclysmic from a Christian perspective, but that would be a serious. At least let’s say from my perspective, that would have serious repercussions.

So in other words, the way I understand my faith, the way I understand Christianity, it’s not like Lord of the Rings or some book that has all these great spiritual insights and that is full of wisdom and only that. The biblical story also participates or takes place in the same space-time continuum that we live in, and that that matters, and scripture speaks to that. And so that’s why I don’t like… I can go partway with this, but I don’t like it as a whole story to say, “Well, the Bible answers the why questions and science answers the how questions,” and boom, everyone’s happy. But where do humans come from? I think created Adam and Eve supernaturally. And I think that’s an important element of the answer.

Now, if I have esteemed colleagues who are, say, biologists who said, “Well, that’s not really possible. We evolved from a population and it’s not really possible that there could only have been two people, and also it wouldn’t have been some kind of de novo creation where there was dust or there was ground, and then suddenly there was a full-grown man. I can’t understand that scientifically.” Then to my mind, scripture does speak to that. Now, at the same time, my view is scripture is not a science textbook. It’s not that kind of book. It doesn’t even claim to be that kind of book.

We shouldn’t read scripture as if it’s a science textbook or as if it’s a history textbook or any other textbook, for that matter. It’s about how we can be saved. But in telling us that story, it impinges on these other areas and it has implications on what a biologist might say about where human beings come from because the Bible has something to say on where human beings come from as it tells us a story of how to be reconciled to God. So it’s in that respect that I then think the epistemic authority issue comes up because if God is the God of orthodox, classical Christianity, and if that God has spoken us in scripture, and if that scripture is therefore inspired and infallible, and if in the biblical narrative it then says things, and if not poetically, not sort of… you know what I mean?

Assume the reader has all the hermeneutical nuance that the reader needs to have, and this isn’t a historical text, and straightforwardly, God says, “This is how I created human beings,” and then that is in tension with what a scientist is saying, my position is, “Well, yeah, on that point, scripture has greater epistemic authority.” And I would buttress that philosophically just by virtue of, in terms of epistemology, that we know that science is not infallible. We’ve read Thomas Kuhn and we realize all of that. Again, I’m not anti-science. I’m not one of these people that just… let’s be real glib about just disagreeing with scientific experts and so on.

No, this is not on my say-so. This is on God’s say-so, and it’s because of… at least to my mind, I’ve carefully tried to interpret scripture and I’ve done my exegetical due diligence, and it seems to me that God clearly says this, then I’m not going to be that impressed if a scientist or a scientific discipline disagrees if what I think God is saying is pretty… and here, you might want to press on this, but if it’s clear, if it’s central to the biblical story, et cetera, et cetera, yeah.

Stump:

But what I hear you saying, so particularly about the Galileo methodology, “how to go to heaven versus how the heavens go”, I’m fully on board to say that distinction is much too simplistic, that there’s a lot of overlap between the hows and the whys. So maybe we ask one of these, get into the particulars here, and sin, and your worry that evolution disrupts the essential gospel story that Jesus came to save us from sin. So just for the sake of the audience here to recapitulate a little of what you’ve written here, what’s wrong with saying the clear part that comes from scripture is that all humans sin, every one of us, and we might point evolutionarily to a world that there’s clearly a time before there was sin in our world and a time now when there is sin in the world?

But drawing strict lines of before and after gets a little problematic and I might even point to each of us as individuals from babies to growing up to adults where it’s difficult to draw that line of when you’ve become morally responsible enough that your actions might be counted as sinful. So what’s wrong with saying that the essential gospel story is fine so long as we recognize that all humans have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?

Madueme:

Right. Yeah, great question. Appreciate it. Just to be clear, what you’ve just said I think is monumentally better than someone who says, “I don’t believe in God,” for instance, or someone who says, “I believe in God, but it’s some vague God that has nothing to do with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” So we’re in a ballpark of where that, what you’ve just said, assumes so much of what I believe is true and right and good for us as human beings, et cetera. So let me just be clear about that, but at the same time… okay, so my first… what’s wrong with it? Well, first thing I’d say is, well, scripture does say something about us as sinners. And Paul in Romans 5:12 says that sin came from the first man, talking about Adam, Adam’s sin, and then death and… through Romans 5:12 to 21. So he’s got some things to say.

Genesis 2 and 3 have things to say. 1 Corinthians 15:21 to 22 have things to say. So if I think that those relevant texts are actually that this is God’s word, then I guess one problem, one thing that I would say is wrong is, well, we’re ignoring the biblical witness there. And it’s not necessarily a canon within a canon, but we’re truncating what God has told us. So in terms of our doctrine of scripture and what that entails vis a vis hearing from God, what God wants us to know, I’ll flag that. And then second, I would say I think there are unintended consequences or indirect implications that, knock-on effects or ripple effects that maybe the person who’s saying that isn’t taking into account.

So for example, you didn’t quite say this, but in some of the conversations in the literature that we dabble in, it’s quite common these days to hear, “Hey, yeah, we’re sinners. Where sin comes from is just not an important question. Jesus died for sinners. We are sinners. That’s all we need to know. We don’t need to know where sin comes from.” And basically, when you look at the evolutionary record and how we understand evolution, sin, what we call sin, has just always been there. It’s certainly been there before homo sapiens came on the scene. Well, now when you say that, now the person, the Christian who holds that view, he or she may not intend this, but to my mind I’m like, “Okay, so then you are saying that sin existed before homo sapiens and before Adam and Eve came on the scene?”

I’m just assuming a kind of evolutionary creationist view. You’re saying that sin existed before then. You’re certainly saying death existed before then. So not only is that then bumping up against at least a certain pretty classical way of reading a number of passages in scripture, but then you’re like, wait, hold up. What are we saying about the creator now? What are we saying about God, the creator? Because then you’re saying if God used evolution in this way to bring all of these things into being, and the method that God used is such that sin and death actually are embedded in creation before human beings come on the scene and then become sinners and then die. I don’t want to be dramatic, but it seems like at least the shape of the story is being changed now because then sin and death are not a result of what human beings did.

Sin and death have been there from the beginning and in fact are part of creation. And the point I make in the book is, okay, hang on. So now we’re saying God the creator actually made things with those things already in his good creation, and then he sends his son to undo that. But why is his son undoing what he produced or what he made as the creator?” It’s almost like, and the image I use, it’s almost like God the creator and God the redeemer are kind of at odds with each other. And so that’s what I mean. So apart from scripture, I feel like on some of these issues you start getting some theological almost inconsistencies.

Stump:

Yeah, I want to push into that too, because I think that’s the hardest question you have for me, by the way, is what you were just articulating there. And I want to say first that I’m going to separate the death stuff from the sin stuff. So your chapter on sin and biology, I think is great, and I don’t think at all that sin is biology. If it were, we could use CRISPR to change our genome and eradicate sin, right?

Madueme:

Right, right. Go to Walgreens for sanctification or something, yeah.

Stump:

So I don’t think you can have sin without moral responsibility so that the same actions could be performed by one of our long-ago ancestors. Even today, look at chimpanzees and you find what sure looks like war and murder and rape even, if it were done by a human. But I’m not saying that chimps are sinning in doing those things because they don’t have moral responsibility. And you address this in the text, too. Even for some instances of humans that might have other issues that are exculpating in some way, some degree. So no, you don’t have any sin until you have moral responsibility. The death part and the God is the creator of death, God is the creator of evil, this is hard. But I wonder still from your perspective, so God is creating all of us.

In a sense, God knit us together in our mother’s womb, but on your account, God only created Adam and Eve in a sinless state. The rest of us are created with capacity with sin. How is that different from saying, “Well, you’re only saying that there are two people that weren’t created this way, where the rest of the billions of us were.” I’m saying, I’m just taking two away from that. All of us were created, and I have to give some account for why that might be, and I think I have some reasons that at least point in those directions for God to do things in this way and that the death part of this. You addressed this a little bit too, that are we just talking about spiritual death in scripture? But you also say death is never less than physical death, and it makes me wonder about Paul in Galatians 2 that, “I’ve been crucified with Christ and I no longer live.” Well, that’s not physical death or even his… “I die every day,” he says in 1 Corinthians. So it’s not as clear to me as you’re saying it’s clear to you that there could not have been death before humans.

Madueme:

Right, right. And I appreciate that. Yeah, otherwise, if you agreed with me on that, you’d be close to being a young Earth creationist, and wouldn’t that be scandalous? But yeah, I did want to say something. Your earlier point about—

Stump:

Is God creating all of us humans in this sinful—

Madueme:

Right, right. And what I want to say, I don’t know if this distinction helps, but what I’m saying is creatio ex nihilo. I think Adam and Eve are created from nothing, although for listeners, out footnote and say they’re created ex materia because Adam was created from the ground. But the way, my view… so he wasn’t created from nothing technically, but he was created supernaturally from the ground, so from pre-existing material. But that creation, if we were watching what was happening, if you can imagine that, what we would see is Adam was not there, and then in moments, Adam was there. Even though Adam was created from pre-existing material, I’m happy to take a more capacious view of creatio ex nihilo to say Adam and Eve were created from nothing. I would put that under creatio ex nihilo, whereas the billions of human beings, that’s God’s providence. That’s God creating by providence.

I have a pretty firm distinction between the creation that happens—obviously this is a creationist view, but in the first six days versus what God is doing by his ongoing providence in redemptive history. And so I still think because it’s creatio ex nihilo, then it’s what the creator is doing, as it were, there’s no other historical agent with free will or anything interfacing in that process. This is God creating. “It’s good, it’s good, it’s good, it’s very good,” versus in a fallen world, what God is doing by his providence, which is good, but still is good in a fallen world.

So I guess what I’m saying is if you remove Adam and Eve being created without sin at the beginning when creation is good, if now we’re all how God creates us, whether it’s by evolution or whatever, but pretty much we are sinful people, we come to exist as sinful people from the very beginning, that’s what… and I’ll be curious if, for me theologically, I think I have a problem with that, and I don’t know if you’re saying that you can roll with that because it just seems like then the creator is making us already sinful, and I don’t know how that doesn’t… to me, that would be impossible given my view of God.

Stump:

Yeah. So isn’t it the case, though, that you’re saying… and here in your book, this gets to the point where you rely on mystery, right?

Madueme:

Yeah. Okay.

Stump:

How God could have created these two people, Adam and Eve, who do sin? So what I’m trying to say is that you and I are both saying all the people God has created sin.

Madueme:

Right.

Stump:

And that seems to say something about God, doesn’t it? That all the people you create are going to sin? Because I don’t see that there’s a huge difference, and this is where we disagree, I think because this is a really important difference, but I don’t see that it’s a huge difference.

Madueme:

Let me… just my last attempt to get some kind of distinction. I think the difference is clearly, at least if we’re taking Genesis 1 to 11 to have anything substantive to say that we can latch onto, then it seems like God does hold Adam and Eve culpable for their sin. And if God is holding them culpable, that means that there’s a real sense in which you should not have sinned. And it seems to me, again, maybe we have a difference here. It seems to me like after the fall or today, we are saying it’s not possible for us not to sin. It’s impossible for us not to sin.

We’re waiting for Jesus to come back. We’re waiting for the new heavens and the new Earth when we will be sinless. But it seems like God thought Adam and Eve generally could not sin, and that seems to be a different assumption from what you would have to assume about if Adam and Eve are in our category now and they just, “We’re going to sin because we’re human,” it seems like… why that gravitas in Genesis 3? Again, maybe we have some nuanced view that God was playacting, he was cursing them. “I knew you couldn’t not sin, but I’m still going to do this so that my son could come and redeem you.” But I guess, yeah, to me that seems to be the difference, if that makes sense? Yeah.

Stump:

Nope. I agree. I think that’s articulated clearly, even if not persuasively to my mind.

Hey, we’ve been going a while here and there’s lots more we can talk about. Maybe let me throw out one more thing to allow you to respond to here, and we’ll need to wrap things up and maybe have to come back and do this again sometime. But here’s one of my worries, and you know that a lot of BioLogos is founded on this worry, which is that the view that you’ve articulated here on sin and the Bible entails that science of evolution, even the science of the age of the Earth, is wrong. And we worry that people who accept that view will eventually come to see that the science isn’t wrong and that you’ve tied so closely the authority, the legitimacy, the truth, so tightly to that view of sin and the Bible that it sets people up for pitching out the whole thing, that it’s a package deal. Again, you’ve addressed this in your book, and let me just say to all of our listeners that it’s worthwhile reading this book to come to a greater understanding, but give us a little defense of that. Give us a little defense of that worry that BioLogos takes of, “This seems like it’s forcing people to choose between science and faith, and we think they’re going to end up choosing science if it’s presented that starkly, and we see it that way.”

Madueme:

I will say that that’s a sobering point you’re making, and it’s one that I do think about on a regular basis. And so just to acknowledge that, yes, that is… I think as I tell people, tell my students, when I’m talking about BioLogos and when I’m talking about evolutionary creationists, particularly when I’m talking to people who maybe hold a old Earth or young Earth perspective, I always want to emphasize just please know what motivating them and what’s motivating… one of the big motivations for the project. And I think I will what you’ve just said, and that this is like a… it’s an evangelistic burden. It’s the love of the Lord. It’s to care for people’s souls. And so even if you disagree with what they’re saying, at least… once you see that pretty clearly, I think that sort of helps people to at least have a kind of sympathetic attitude to it. “Okay, I get what they’re doing, even if I disagree with that.” So anyway, I think that’s a great-

Stump:

Thank you for that.

Madueme:

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And I would say—a couple of thoughts. One is that I think people that have my view, I think it’s very, very, very important that we’re just honest about the science and honest about the evidence and honest about… I just have a problem if people with my view say all evolutionists are almost like they have horns and this vast conspiracy, you know what I mean? This vast conspiracy and they’re leading the world astray. Now, I can understand some nuanced ways of speaking somewhat like that on a spiritual level, but one, many of these scientists are Christians and love Jesus and there is a sense in which they’re really genuinely dealing with the physical data, dealing with the evidence and in good faith. And I don’t like an attitude that’s like, “There’s no evidence.”

“There’s nothing there.” You know what I mean? “There’s nothing there.” And I don’t know, I feel like anyone who’s right-thinking would just realize even if the person’s not an evolutionist, “Is that really plausible? Is it really plausible that there’s nothing there?” And you know this. This gets at… you might actually think you’re defending God, but then one, many of the earliest scientists were believers. We have theological commitments. We’re made in God’s image. This world is intelligible, and so God delights when we investigate his creation and try to figure out how it works. By saying there’s nothing there and all of this is nonsense, you’re almost undermining these other commitments that I think all Christians should rightly have. So I just think we should be honest.

So I think that would help if young Earth creationists, when they’re talking about these issues and talking about evolutionists and what they’re saying and what they hold, yeah, we disagree, but don’t be so dismissive and recognize, man, there are reasons that people think this, right? To be able to communicate that, even if we then say, “But here’s why we disagree.” So I think one thing like you are hinting at. Pastorally, it’s going to come back and bite you. If you’re teaching Sunday schools and you’re teaching these high school students, you got… “Oh, these guys are dummies. There’s nothing to this. They’re just liberals, da da da,” and you set that up and then when someone actually looks at it and sees, starts reading scientific articles and textbooks and et cetera, and you just realize… and that’s where unwittingly, you set them up to de-convert and all the rest that you’re suggesting, so that’s one thing. And I think the other thing I would say, and there’s a lot more to say. We could have spent the whole time talking about this issue.

Stump:

Yup, yup, yup.

Madueme:

But the other thing, the last thing I would say is, I do feel like this is not going to be satisfying to you, but I still think it’s worth saying that at the end of the day, if we’re Orthodox Christians, we’ve got to recognize that there are things that we believe that are always going to seem foolish to non-Christians, not least of all, the eternal son of God became a human being. He was a baby and he grew up and that he died and he rose again. He’s in heaven. He’s going to come back. To some minds, that’s just ridiculous. How could you believe? That’s the heart of our faith.

And I think as we are increasingly post-Christian and radically secular in a cultural context, I think increasingly just some garden variety, Orthodox beliefs are going to seem just ridiculous to people, if not on a par… will put us in the same category as being racist and being bigots or whatever because we just think… we believe these things Christians have always believed. And I think once we recognize that reality, then to some extent, in many ways, I just kind of think, “Oh, okay. So my young Earth creationist, I don’t know that that’s so ridiculous compared to some other ridiculous things I believe.” You know what I mean?

Stump:

Fair enough.

Madueme:

I know there’s more to say. But yeah, those are two thoughts.

Stump:

There is, and I appreciate you saying those things, and I’m going to let you have the last word on those and simply say there’s lots more to talk about. But I’ve enjoyed this so much and want to thank you for the spirit with which you conduct yourself and these kinds of conversations, and want to thank you for pushing me to think more carefully about my positions and their implications and hope that we can talk like this again sometime. So thank you, Hans Madueme.

Madueme:

Thank you, Jim. It’s been a lot of fun.

Hoogerwerf:

Language for God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere, you can find ways to contribute at BioLogos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf, that’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. Thanks for listening.