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In his latest offering, Peter Enns attempts to alleviate partially the tensions for evangelical Protestants and other contemporary Christians who uphold scripture as authoritative while at the same time, for whatever reasons, accepting the general contours of accounts of human origins offered by modern evolutionary biology and related sciences. Specifically, Enns addresses on the one hand how the figure of Adam is employed in the book of Genesis, in the Old Testament broadly, and in extra-biblical Jewish texts of the…

Soon after the 2012 election a Perspectives editor asked me to write about the diminished role overt faith had in presidential campaign discourse. He thought I shared his disappointment in the Obama campaign's reluctance to use Christian rhetoric and (his description) "almost total disregard for the Christian community." Turning down the request, I offered a contrary view that the diminished "God talk" of the Obama and Romney campaigns might be good. The limited religious rhetoric was consistent with the two…

Anyone up for a good news story--of the church leading the culture in a direction we can all, across our differences, applaud? Prepare to smile. In 1999, I had an amazing experience while worshiping at Scotland's Iona Abbey. As a person with hearing loss, I could understand virtually none of the spoken word as it reverberated around those ancient stone walls. Thankfully, my wife noticed a hearing assistance symbol on the wall indicating a "hearing loop" system that could magnetically…

On my last Sunday living in New York, it was a hymn that made me cry. I was leaving the city after almost nine years because I had fallen in love with a college professor in New Hampshire, and we were going to get married. The wedding would take place the following weekend, and all the details were set: the vows, the rings, the readings, and the hymn we would sing with our friends and family gathered around us. Written…

We all hold deep convictions that nurture us and give us direction. These convictions have a history; they are planted in everyday experiences that grow in significance over time and determine our behavior. My conviction about creation has such a history. I want to tell a part of that history briefly for two reasons: one is to provide some context for what I have to say about creation; the other is to invite you, the reader, to consider the history…

My active resistance to evolution began in 1944, when I was about ten, with a cartoon I drew of the devil--for family consumption only, though I don't remember getting any reaction. My devil was a kind of sumo wrestler with horns and hooves but no tail, wearing a belt labeled EVIL and brandishing a trident large enough to support three words, MOVIES on the short middle tine and MODERNISM and EVOLUTION flanking it right and left. Movies, which along with…

"Behold, the Behemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox." Job 40:15 If the book of Job is a drama, like a stage-play, then the last long speech belongs to God. But the speech is not what you'd expect in a summation. It's the speech God makes about the beasts, the Behemoth and the Leviathan, which are taken to be the hippopotamus and the crocodile. How does this speech advance the argument? What does…