fileshare.mennonites.org€¦ · Web viewHow does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship? 49. Derek Suderman, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. Conrad Grebel University

Creation, Christ, and the ClassroomMennonite University Faculty Conference Presentations

Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VirginiaAugust 7-9, 2008

Christ, Creation, and the Classroom 2

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©2008 Mennonite Education Agency

Table of Contents

Introduction........................................................................................5Carlos Romero, Executive Director, Mennonite Education Agency

The World via the Word: How does the incarnated Word of Godcreate all things?.................................................................................7

Willard Swartley, Professor Emeritus of New TestamentAssociate Mennonite Biblical Seminary

How does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship?........29Vi Dutcher, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition and Department Chair, Language and LiteratureEastern Mennonite University

The Incarnated Word of God Orients My Art: An IllustratedPower Point Presentation..................................................................33

Gregg Luginbuhl, Professor of ArtBluffton University

How does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship?........45Ryan Sensenig, Assistant Professor of BiologyGoshen College

How does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship?........49Derek Suderman, Assistant Professor of Religious StudiesConrad Grebel University and the University of Waterloo

The Word via the World: How does faithful teaching and science make visible the relationship between the created world and the incarnated Word of God? Crossing Borders between Science, Faith and Society...............................................................................53

Doug Graber Neufeld, Associate Professor, Biology DepartmentEastern Mennonite University

How does the creativity of the incarnated Word of God shape the discovery and understanding of the creation in my discipline and in my classroom?........................................................75

Jo-Ann Brant, Professor of Bible, Religion and PhilosophyGoshen College


Table of Contents (cont.)

How does the creativity of the incarnated Word of God shape the discovery and understanding of the creation in my discipline and in my classroom? -or-How do I connect the dots between the creativity of the incarnated word of God and the discovery and understanding of the creation in my discipline and classroom?............................................................79

Bradley Kauffman, Professor of Music, and Department ChairHesston College


Angela Horn Montel, Professor of BiologyBluffton University

How does the creativity of the incarnated Word of God shape the discovery and understanding of the creation in my discipline and in my classroom? The Word and the World...............89

Don S. Lemons, Professor of Physics, Department ChairBethel College


Linda Leitch-Alford, Associate Professor, MA in CounselingEastern Mennonite University


Introduction

MEA is pleased to share a compilation of the presentations from the fourth Mennonite University Faculty Conference which was held August 7-9, 2008, at Eastern Mennonite University. Forty-three deans and faculty members from Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Bethel College, Bluffton University, Canadian Mennonite University, Conrad Grebel University College, Eastern Mennonite University, Goshen College, and Hesston College participated in the two-day event. A number of graduate students and additional EMU faculty and staff attended the general sessions as well.

The theme of the conference was “Creation, Christ and the Classroom” with John 1:1-18 as the focal text. The keynote addresses, the presentations by faculty, and the table group discussions focused on answering the following questions: How does the incarnated Word of God create all things? How does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship? How does faithful teaching/science make visible the relationship between the created world and the incarnated Word of God? How does the creativity of the incarnated Word of God shape the discovery and understanding of the creation in my discipline and in my classroom?

In addition to the keynote addresses and presentations by faculty that are included in this booklet, a significant amount of time during the conference was set aside for participants to discuss the questions in table groups—first according to their academic discipline and then in randomly created groups. For participants, it was a unique opportunity to discuss these issues with colleagues from Mennonite higher educational institutions throughout the United States and Canada.

Mennonite University Faculty Conference was funded by The Marpeck Fund and Mennonite Education Agency (MEA). I want to thank the planning committee, the worship leaders and all the presenters who gave their time and energy to make the event a successful endeavor. I also want to thank those who took time from busy schedules to attend the 2008 Mennonite University Faculty Conference.

MEA is committed to strengthening the bond between church and school so it is important that MEA offers this compilation as a gift to both. I hope that you, the reader, will be inspired by it. I encourage you to read these presentations as an individual, or in group settings at your educational institution or congregation. I trust they will lead to thought-provoking discussions of the ways to integrate faith into daily life.

MEA seeks to fulfill its mission to strengthen Mennonite Church USA through its work with preschools, elementary and secondary schools, colleges, universities and seminaries. I am confident of the high quality of


the faculty, their deep commitment to Mennonite education, and their love for the church. I’d like to dedicate this booklet to the teachers and professors in these Mennonite educational institutions whose ongoing contributions to the church and the world is truly inspiring.

In Christ’s service,

Carlos Romero, Executive Director


“The World via the Word: How does the incarnated Word God create all things?”

by Willard Swartley, Professor Emeritus of New Testament, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God.2 He was in the beginning with God.

3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

What has come into being 4 in him was life,

and the life was the light of all people.5 The light shines in the darkness,

and the darkness did not overcome it.

The voice of the mystical eaglesounds in….[our] ears.

Let our exterior sensecatch the sound that passes;

let our mind withinpenetrate the meaning that abides.(Eriugena, introducing John’s Prologue, ca. A. D. 860 [trans. by O’Meara]

cited by Brodie: 133)

IntroductionJohn’s Prologue, majestic and beautiful, soars like the eagle, the symbol of John’s Gospel in the early Church. The eagle-Word begins its flight beyond time and history; it then descends to earth so that the Word lives among us. The Word- Logos, even though it occurs as specified subject in only verses 1 and 14, unites the eighteen verses with its iridescence, sparkling like a diamond.

The Prologue begins with the preexistence of the Word, co-participating agent in creation bringing forth life and light. Further, the Word shines as light in the darkness and enlightens humans coming into the world. The


Word coming into the world elicits both negative and positive responses. The Word makes its abode with humans through incarnation. As the incarnate Word, its glory-brilliance credentials him as the “one and only” (begotten) Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. His fullness of glory, enhanced by John’s witness to the light, pales God’s former gift of grace in the law given by Moses—thus grace upon grace. Finally, the epiphany of the only God-Son as Word-Speech tells “God’s Story” (phrase from Moloney, 1998: 47). The “story of Jesus is not ultimately a story about Jesus; it is, in fact, a story of God” (O’Day: 524).

The WordThe term Word has multifaceted meaning. In Greek thought the Word/Logos is a philosophical term denoting rationality, cosmologically the rational structure of the universe and the systems that order the cosmos (the interrelation of the galactic bodies, gravity, the seasons, space and time, the species, etc.). The Prologue soars the mind of the reader into the metaphysical, mystical, universal, cosmological realm, with Logos-Word the main character! The discourse is both theological and philosophical, where Logos fits in the Greek world.

In Hebrew thought the Word/Logos connects to a key word in the prophetic tradition, the Hebrew dabar/word-speech. The Hebraic understanding links logos to the creative power of the word, spoken by God, as in the Genesis 1 creation account. The word (dabar) brings events, deeds, and the visible world into being. Genesis 1, liturgically arranged, portrays creation coming into being by word-command, the word of God. God said, “Let there be light” and light came into being. So goes the seven-day drama of God’s creating power. Further, at the end of Day 6 it says that “God saw all that he had made and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31a). This accords with the view of the Psalmist, “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their hosts by the breath of his mouth” (33:6; emphasis mine). Similarly, Isaiah 55:10-11 declares that God’s word goes forth to accomplish that for which it is sent. In the prophetic literature the word of the Lord initiates the prophet’s call and mission (Jer. 1:4; Isa. 9:8; Ezek. 1:3; Hos. 1:1; Amos 3:1). God’s spoken word is creating power and the prophet is God’s mouthpiece. The Hebrew contextual meaning of Logos is indeed significant; its importance cannot be overestimated.

Another linguistic source, Aramaic, related to the Hebrew, must be considered also, since it was the common language spoken in Palestine during Jesus’ lifetime. The OT Scripture was translated into Aramaic so the people could understand it. The Aramaic for Logos-Word is memra. This word, memra, was used by the Hebrew scribes for the unspeakable holy name for God, the Lord—YHWH. That connection, and its import cannot be ignored, for it already makes the point that generates life-and-death controversy in the Gospel. The Word is God, with YHWH naming.


Philo, a Jewish philosopher contemporary to Jesus, synthesized Jewish thought with Greek thought, forging a Jewish-Greek philosophy that makes the Logos-Word the rational, ordering principle of the universe, both in its origin and ongoing governance. Commentators diverge on the degree to which John’s Gospel, in it opening portrait, seeks to connect with the rational Hellenic mind or with the Hebraic understanding of God’s word as the creative, upholding power of the universe. Stephen Need explicates the vast range of meaning that Logos carried: in Israel “‘the word of God’ was essentially a metaphor for God’s activity in creation and history” (398); in Greek thought it signified “‘rationality’ and ‘discourse’ and this certainly included speech” (399). For the Stoics logos was the rationality that ordered the universe and held it together. It denoted both “‘inward thought’ and ‘outward expression’ or speech” (399-400). Perhaps the Evangelist wants to connect in both directions, Hebraic and Hellenic. Logos is John’s first play of double entendre (meaning). To Greek Gentile readers it fit into their notions of Logos at the creative, ordering principle that upholds the universe. To the Jewish Christians, it evoked the long traditions of God’s word as the creative, prophetic power to bring into being what did not exist, to put into place all that is in the universe,

John’s Prologue indeed echoes Genesis 1. In addition to its use of Logos-Dabar as the means or agent of creation, its opening words, in the beginning (en archē) are the exact words of Genesis 1 in the Greek LXX. Further, the Logos was in the beginning, was with God, and was God. This echoes the peculiar plural for God, with singular verb, in Genesis 1. “In the beginning God/Elohim (pl.) created/bara (sing.). Whether we understand this construction as the plurality of majesty or inclusive of Wisdom with God from the beginning, it provides a template for John 1 where God and the Word are distinguished and yet one (See Appendix 1 for Menno’s struggle with this mystery). The Gospel of John thus begins when, where, and how God begins. To know more would deny God God’s Godness. The same holds for the Word. Humans cannot fathom the profundity of this opening claim. This Logos is as inscrutable as God (Rom. 11:33-36): “What God was the Word was” (Moloney, 1998: 42).

How was the Word co-participant agent with God in the divine creation of all things? Is this creation ex nihilo? Yes and no. Yes, in that God’s creation through or by the Logos brought into existence that which before did not exist (Heb. 11:3; Rom. 4:17b). Also, in the sense that when compared to creation myths of that time—for both OT and NT, the biblical account is not the result of warfare among the gods or an inferior god constructing the world out of evil matter (the hyle in Gnosticism), from which the humans must escape though special gnosis, knowledge, to gain salvation. Yes, also in the sense that the world God created was and is good


—the material nature of the world is good, both in the ethical and aesthetic sense.

Creation ex nihilo means that the creature is from God and no other source: “it exists through God and not otherwise. Hence it is not itself God, or an emanation of God. Nor is it self-engendered and therefore independent of God through creation.” (Barth: 155). In John’s Logos emphasis, the same is to be said: the Logos is the source of creation.1

But the no to this question must also be heard. It does not mean “creationism” versus “evolution.” Those ideas and concepts are not in the minds of the biblical writers. John uses the verb ginomai, meaning “coming into existence.” It is both a point-action and process concept—hence the suggestion of emergence as a possible translation, in the various uses of ginomai.2 Creation did occur at the dawn of time, marking “the absolute beginning of the created world” (Eichrodt: 72). But it should also be noted, as Ellis points out, that a creating process is built into the creation-event, as the language of Genesis 1 indicates:

God said: Let the earth bring forth vegetation Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures Let the earth bring forth living creatures

God is the Creator-Enabler who blesses and enables humanity to procreate and rule the earth. So also the sun and moon and lesser lights rule over day and night. “The creation story is an enabling story prompted by the divine word” (Ellis: 80)1 The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo was formulated as such in the second century in the church’s struggle against Gnosticism, but was not dependent upon that challenge for its authority. Scripture provides the basis for the doctrine (presented well by Capon). See Capon’s long list of references, from the OT, intertestamental literature, and the NT, esp. Heb 11:3; Rom. 4:17.The doctrine, formulated in the second century:

Protected against dualism, that some pre-existing entity—even chaos—competed with God Enabled the material world (matter) to be considered good, not evil matter (hyle) Affirmed the sovereignty, omnipotence, and freedom of God Declares God truly the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 22:13)

2 In verse 3 the Greek verb (ginomai) occurs three times. It recurs in verses 6, 10, 12, 13, 14a, 15, and 17. It heads the second paragraph at v. 6, and recurs in the first line in the fourth paragraph, at v. 14. In several of its ten uses in the Prologue it is translated became or become; it has the sense of come into being. In verse 3 it is normally translated, however, create. In the aorist (completed action) infinitive it describes those who receive the Logos as becoming children of God. Clearly, ginomai has a range of meaning, with most all its uses denoting the emergence of the new. Schoneveld suggests the English word emerge as a translation to catch its meaning of the new breaking forth into time and space.


At the same time, we note, “nothing but the autonomous decree of the transcendent God determined the form of creation. That the creation ex nihilo thereby enters the picture is incontestable” (Eichrodt: 72). But again, God’s creative activity continues through time and nature. Changing forms in species, with some becoming extinct over time and others beginning through the mechanisms of evolving forms of life—not life itself, which begins with creation—may be seen as God’s pattern “to bring biological diversity into being.” Creation as such does not describe these mechanisms, but describes rather “God’s immanent ongoing creative relationship with whole universe, including its biological diversity” (Alexander and White: 98).

The OT celebrates the diversity and wonder of God’s creation. Numerous Psalm texts view God’s creative actions as having a beginning and continuous action (Pss. 8; 19:1-6; 89:5-14; 104; 105:1-5; 136:1-9; 147; 148:1-10). [Power Point presentation. Pictures taken by Gary Oyer, and text from Psalms 19:1-6; 148:1-9; 57:11]

How the Logos creates the world as God’s agent is unanswerable, or if answered, tautological: the Logos creates by the Logos-word. It is the rational, ordering, creative power that begins what is now visible. It is directed to an end: to shine God’s glory into the world (Cosmos) and lead people to belief in Jesus as Messiah and Son of God. One might take the tact of explaining how by citing the extensive similarity between Word in John and the role of Wisdom in creation. But John chooses not to utilize the Wisdom tradition, and if he did it hardly would explain how, in any empirical way. See Appendix 2 for Logos and Wisdom (Sophia).

What was created was life in him. John’s Gospel is rightly called The Gospel of Life (Beasley-Murray). In the first part of John, Jesus’ public ministry (John 1–12), life (Zōē) occurs 50 times.

The Life Is Light For All, Shining In The Darkness 1:4b-5The instrumentality of the Logos in creation continues in linking both life and light to the Word’s creative work, echoing again the Genesis narrative, where God speaks and “there was light” (1:3) and then life comes into being. The fourth Evangelist reverses the Genesis 1 order: the Logos brings forth life first and the life becomes the light of humankind. This light shines into the darkness (an echo perhaps of the “void and darkness” of Gen. 1:2). However, in John both light and darkness describe not only the cosmological reality, but also the moral dimension, the human responses to the Logos-creator (3:18-21; ch. 9).

Translations differ on the verb in the final clause: the darkness has not overcome it [the light] (RSV, NRSV), or the darkness has not understood it


(NASB; NIV, TNIV). The KJV took also the latter meaning: and the darkness comprehended it not. The Greek verb (katelaben) can mean either. If the cosmological milieu is foremost, then overcome is better; if the moral-belief dimension is in view, then understand, comprehend is better. At this point in the unfolding Prologue the cosmological realm should take priority, in my judgment. If we look back on the Prologue from the Gospel narrative as a whole, then yes, understand, or even better, comprehend fits the situation (ch. 9 as classic example). Within the Prologue, however, we have not yet come to the historical plane and the incarnation of the Logos. Hence the portrait we gaze upon at this juncture is the Logos-creator bringing forth life and shining light into the cosmological darkness. The darkness does not overcome or overtake the light, but the light keeps always shining. The God-Logos continuously pierces and dispels the darkness: shine is present tense, continuing action; overcome is a point-action past tense. The ongoing accent falls on the light shining, the light eternal.

John’s Witness to the Light 1:6-8Here the Prologue links the transcendent, metaphysical reality with the historical, bringing onto the narrative stage a witness to the light (Hooker: 357-58). John appears de novo as witness to the light, with cosmological and moral connotation. John is witness and only witness to the light.

The True Light 1:9-12Verse 9 is difficult because it is not clear how three important assertions fit together. Following the Greek word-order, it would read: He was the true light; the one who enlightens all people; coming into the world. The last phrase is dependent on a noun, either light or people. Most translations link the final phrase to true light, thus The true light was coming into the world. Or, does coming into the world modify all people? The KJV and Augustine (Beasley-Murray: 6, 12) take it as enlightening all people who come into the world.

I believe the KJV/Augustine understanding is more correct. The expression, “all who come into the world” was common among Jews (Beasley-Murray: 12). Hence, the meaning is: the Logos, the true light enlightens all people as they come into the world. That is because the light continues to shine, always, everywhere. Gary Burge in his NIV commentary says, “The light invades the darkness, shining on every person and exposing them for who they are. No one is exempt, and in the course of this Gospel the divine revelation divides the audience” (58). As verses 11-12 indicate many refuse to come to the light, but to those who receive the Logos-light God gives the right/authority (exousia) to become children of God. This is the identity of the believers in John’s time and ours.

This claim about the human stance toward the light has enormous implications for our work in the classroom. In John, especially 7:16b-17,


"My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own,” knowing is linked to disposition of the will. Learning is not value-free, but occurs within a context of commitments. John’s Gospel has a distinctive epistemology.3 Receiving the Word-Creator-Light and becoming children of God opens the eyes to see the Light and understand the Word.

Word made flesh, resplendent in glory 1:14-171:14 The Word became flesh; we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth

The glory of the LORD shall be revealed,and all people shall see it together,

for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.Isaiah 40:5 (also Handel’s Messiah)

This verse shocks: the Logos-Word co-existent with God from eternity and co-participant in creation became flesh and dwelt among humans (v. 14)! What does it mean to affirm that the Word/Logos that became incarnate? This point is pivotal in John’s theological affirmation: the Word became flesh and lived among us. “Flesh here… [indicates] the full humanity which the divine logos assumes, a humanity that is embodied and spirited” (Lee, 2002: 34). Flesh is now the home of the Logos, who is also God. The term dwell among us (eskēnōsen) reflects the OT experience of God dwelling among the people, with the divine presence in the tent/tabernacle (skēnē).

“And the word became flesh”…God…“pitched his tent…” The consonants of the Greek word are those of the Hebrew word (shekinah) which denotes the presence and glory of God. The “tent of meeting” was where God dwelt with his people and where his glory was seen (Ex. 40:34-38). The same glory had filled the Temple of Solomon (I Kings 8:10f.) (Newbigin 1982: 8).

Jesus the logos who in creation is the life and light of all is now the tabernacling divine presence, God’s shekinah glory (John 1:14) among the people (Coloe: 2001:135-36).4

3 “Knowing and doing became a reciprocal experience of understanding and obedience, obedience and understanding… it was impossible to understand the Scripture and the living Word apart from a love for Christ and a longing to do his will” (Dyck: 37). J. H. Yoder’s pithy description of this stance is memorable: “Only… [one] who is committed to the direction of obedience can read the truth so as to interpret it in line with the direction of God’s purposes. ‘If …[one] will to do the will of my father, he [she] shall know of the doctrine’” (1984: 27).

4 Glory/glorify occurs 348 times in Scripture, with 18 of those uses in John.


Just as God’s glory signified God’s real presence in the tabernacle, so the Logos- become-flesh reveals God’s glory, God’s real presence among us (Smith, 2001: 121). God’s glory in Christ is the Revealer of God’s own self. But the jolting claim is that this divine glory is revealed in the flesh (sarx). The text does not say that Logos became a human (anthropos), nor a man (aner), but flesh. God’s glory is revealed in and dwells in the flesh—what a paradox! C. K. Barrett makes the point, “the paradox which runs thorough the whole gospel: the doxa is not to be seen alongside the sarx, nor though the sarx as through a window; it is to be seen in the sarx and nowhere else” (165). This is a radical claim to the full humanity of Jesus (see Thompson, 1988), which in turn links Jesus’ humanity to our humanity.5

The verb that links the reader to the glory is one of John’s five seeing words (a form of theaomai). Phillips, in his study of “Faith and Vision in the Fourth Gospel,” puts this vision-verb fourth highest in denoting spiritual vision, next to pistueō, which is believing vision (85). The RSV translation beheld connotes the sense of contemplation, and echoes the Israelites gazing upon the glory of Moses when he descends from Mount Sinai. The dramatic and symbolic elements are present in theaomai, which prepares for what is seen, glory/doxa. The phrase echoes Moses’ request, “‘Show me your glory’” (kabod; Exod. 33:18; C. A. Evans, 1993:80).

The final phrase, full of grace and truth, is certainly an echo of Exodus 34:6 (Evans: 82), referring to God’s steadfast love (chesed, usually translated charis/grace in the LXX) and faithfulness (emet, which may be translated truth). This coupling of chesed and emet/emunah permeates the OT (e.g., Ps. 85:10; 89:14). It points to God’s loving kindness and faithfulness. God holds true to the covenant promises, and sustains the covenant people now and forever. The glory of the Logos become flesh incarnates these foundational attributes of God. In Jesus the Son, we know God’s chesed-grace and God’s faithfulness-truth.

How are these attributes of the Word-made-flesh to be fleshed out by us in the classroom? How does the moral character of the teacher impact the teaching process?

Word as Revealer 1:18Capping 1:1 and 14, this verse declares John’s bold and scintillating Christology: the Gospel is revelation, God’s self-disclosure. The first 5 The Gospel narrative reveals this divine glory, as Moloney comments on glory in 17:22, “Jesus life, teaching, and signs have been the revelation of the doxa of God.… The doxa, which is the love bestowed upon the Son by the Father…, is present in the human story in the doxa that Jesus has given to the believers” (1998: 474). To grasp the meaning of God’s glory, the thesis of Jörg Frey is crucial. Glory in John is defined ultimately “in his hour” at the cross, as John 13:1-3 and 17:1-5 make clear.


declaration of the verse, No one has ever seen God, surely echoes Exodus 33:20 (cf. v. 23), “You cannot see my face, for a human cannot see my face and live” (C. A. Evans, 1993: 80). Evans also points out that John’s positioning Jesus in the Father’s bosom (God’s ‘front’) and existing with God in eternity (1:1) contrasts to “Moses’ fleeting glimpse of God’s ‘back’ (81). The greater grace and truth (echo Exod. 34:6) comes with this divine One who uniquely can and does reveal God to humanity.

The only God (Word/Son), metaphorically located in the bosom of the Father (RSV), is rendered close to the Father’s heart (NRSV) or in closest relationship with the Father (TNIV). The term bosom (kolpos) occurs only one other time in John, to denote the Beloved Disciple reclining close to Jesus at the Last Supper (13:23).

The subject of the final clause is that one (ekeinos), with only a one-word verb (exēgēsato), meaning declared/revealed/exegeted. This construction fits JoAnn Brant’s view of John as drama, even lending itself to pointing (deictic stage designation)—that one. Jesus exegetes God for us to know God. The verb has no object, except by inference: the story to follow. Moloney renders it, “He has told God’s story” (1998: 47).


Wider New Testament Witness to Jesus as Agent of CreationJohn 1:3-4 is not the only NT text that speaks of Jesus Christ as agent or co-participant in creation. Other texts declare the same:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-- all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Col. 1:15-17)

[I]n these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.

(Heb. 1:2-3a)

This first stanza of the Colossian hymn affirms Christ’s supremacy over all creation in rank and time, for he is the firstborn of all creation (v. 15) and before all things (v. 17). Further, in Christ all things hold together. Using scientific physics language to make the theological point, Christ is the ultimate “field of force” that holds all things together.6 The Hebrews text makes three arresting points. First, Christ who created the worlds is the reflection of God’s glory, an echo of John 1:14—we beheld his glory (RSV). Second, the phrase, exact imprint of God's very being, echoes John 1:1—the Word was God. Third, the Son-Creator sustains all things by his powerful word. The word is the power of the creative dynamic, both in the beginning at the dawn of creation and in the continuing creation-process, a double point noted earlier, evident in the creation Psalms especially.

Further, this inclusion of Jesus Christ in the divine identity of God as Creator implicitly affirms Jesus’ pre-existence. At least three more NT texts make a similar claim as John 1 and these two cited texts: 1 Cor. 8:6; Heb. 1:10-12; Rev. 3:14 (here Jesus Christ is the origin of creation). 1 Corinthians 8:6 is especially striking because it shows a carefully formulated parallelism between God as creator and Jesus as creator:

But to us (there is but) one God, the Father,of whom (are) all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom (are) all things, and we by him. (KJV)

6 A theological analogical concept to “field of force” in physics is “principalities and powers” in Pauline literature. See Ted Peters, “The Doctrine of Creation and Modern Science,” in Cosmos as Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance, ed. Ted Peters. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 167, and Willard M. Swartley, Covenant of Peace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), ch. 8 on “The Powers.”


This text echoes the well-known Shema: Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God (is) one LORD (Deut. 6:4). These two two-line statements in synonymous parallelism affirm that God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ is one. Jesus Christ is implicitly identified with YHWH in the word Lord, and thus with God who existed before the world was created (Bauckham, 1998: 37-38). Paul, a Jew as was Jesus, would have repeated the Shema twice daily, at least.

Including the Word-Jesus in the Shema’s monotheism means: Jesus is one with God and God-Jesus is one. The divine identity of Jesus does not compete with robust monotheism. Jesus is included within the divine cosmic sovereignty, as Creator and Sustainer of the universe. This inclusion of Jesus Christ in the divine identity of Creator implicitly affirms the pre-existence of Jesus Christ, the image of God who reveals/ exegetes God to us (last word of John 1:18).

Source of Spirituality in Symbol, Song, and Art“To inquire about John’s theology is like asking about the meaning of a symphony. The meaning, Beethoven would say, is not in talking about it but in listening to it. In the case of the gospel, the meaning lies in living it” and leading us to restful union with God through Jesus Christ (Brodie: 55). The mystery of the Prologue, with its images of light and darkness, flesh and glory, stirs the imagination, leading into the meditative and contemplative. Its symbolism connects with people of all ages, in personal development and throughout time. It provides a resource for women and men to reflect on their spiritual journeys. It invites every person to participate in the life of the Word who tents among us.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), in commentary on John’s Prologue in her first vision sees a Trinitarian image—bearded head of God the Father, the winged figure of the Holy Spirit, carrying the lamb (cf. John 1:29, 36), the Son—that evokes the sapiential/Wisdom tradition of Israel’s Scripture and speaks passionately of the creative power that John calls the Word:

I, the highest and fiery power,have kindled every spark of life, and I emit nothing that is deadly. I decide on all reality. With lofty wings I fly above the globe: With wisdom I have rightly put the universe in order. I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows.

(Jasper: 71; Vision 1.2 in Liber divinorum operum)


Through its symbolism, its high Christology, and its hope for humanity, the Prologue has been a rich source for worship, in poetry, art,7 and music. The Hymnal Worship Book8 lists 13 hymns that connect with this text. The author of “O Come All Ye Faithful” apparently saw this text as a “birth narrative” as he combines Bethlehem with “True God of True God, Light of light eternal…Word of the Father…and Glory.” It is Martin Luther who offers us “Savior of the Nations Come” an advent hymn declares Jesus “was the Word of God made flesh, woman’s offspring, pure and fresh” (HWB: 212, 173, 882).9 The Prologue Is Doxological Theology John’s Prologue is poetic, laced with rich metaphors. With visual verbs so prominent in the Gospel, the fullness of grace and truth is the gift of contemplative seeing (theaomai; similar in meaning to theōreō).10 As Lindars remarks, in trying to enter the mind of John “I had the overwhelming impression that the figure of Christ was always there in his imagination, static and yet full of life, containing in himself the whole Gospel” (1957: 23). John sees what the rich symbolism points to, whether Logos, the I Am declarations, living water, bread of life, the vine, or Beloved Disciple. The language of the Gospel is more metaphorical than descriptive. The Prologue does not give us a descriptive (scientific) account of how the Word created all things. But is does invite us to contemplate the Word as Creator in the same vein that the Psalmist contemplates the place of the human in the vastness of the universe: what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God [or angels], and crowned them with glory and honor (8:4-5).

7 Light plays a major role in art, and in some depictions the path to God is through Christ as Light. The iconography of the Eastern Orthodox Church features light with great intention in the halos that surround not only the head of Jesus, but those on whom God’s favor rests. Often this is true in the illuminations of crèches. In one such scene there is written along the side of the crib “And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (Nes: 31). In Jaroslav Pelikan’s collection, The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries, one is hard pressed to find an art piece that does not include the theme of light. If not directly surrounding Jesus’ head, the light sometimes seems to come from his very face, with the more subtle exposures with light coming in a window.8 Hymnal Worship Book, Churches in the Believers Church Tradition (Elgin: Brethren Press, 1992).

9 In more contemporary music, a popular image from the prologue appears in “Shine, Jesus, Shine.”

10 Even the John the Baptist sections contribute to the genre, for he functions as witness, testifying doxologically to the Word coming and come into the world. As Lindars points out, witness finally is an act of contemplation (1957: 26). It arises from having beheld the glory (doxa).


Creation, as wonderful as it is, is not the object of worship; rather, the Creator, the God-Word, is the subject who creates. God-Word is the One worthy of worship. In contemplating the Word with God, become flesh, uniquely revealing God, we glimpse the glory, grace, and truth of John’s world of contemplative seeing. This seeing is knowledge of God that sets us as humans in right relationship to the created order as caring stewards of the earth and all that is in. It sets the stage also for comprehending the significance of scientific knowledge, the two hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and the more than one hundred billion galaxies flung in space beyond our own (Gingerich: 27). The human being is also a wonder of wonders, with DNA codes and brains with unbelievable complexity: “the number of synaptic interconnections in a single human brain vastly exceeds the number of stars in our Milky Way: 1015 synapses versus about 1011 stars” (Gingerich: 30). But the greatest wonder of all is that the Word who created all things came to be one of us, tenting among us, to be the transmitter between Creator and creature, creating soul communion of “mutual indwelling” (John 17:20-24).

For meditation, listen to John Michael Talbot’s Light Eternal, two pieces: “In the Beginning” and “Eternal Light.” These will connect the Prologue to the heart, enabling the Prologue to function doxologically and leading the listener to worship. [Overhead]

The Prologue as Model for the ClassroomTwo main perspectives emerge in John’s Prologue that bear directly on classroom teaching and learning: creation as creativity, both in course preparation and in the teaching process, and incarnation as “fleshing it out” so students grasp what you as teacher are seeking to communicate. Sandra Schneiders, commenting on the Prologue, writes provocatively of God-in-Jesus’ self-disclosure in John. How does this creative, incarnate, revelatory model guide us as persons and teachers in the classroom (and outside the classroom)?

What relationship of faith to teaching and learning does it suggest?

In John, revelation connotes a relationship, not a one-way communication of otherwise unavailable information that the hearer, at risk of her or his salvation must take or leave. In relation to this Gospel it is helpful to think always in terms of self-revelation rather than of the “unveiling” of information….

John’s Gospel begins not with “In the beginning was God” but with “In the beginning was the Word.” In other words, God is not a self-enclosed monad, knowing and loving ‘himself’ from all eternity and only later deciding to let others in on the divine secret. Rather, in the Johannine view, God’s very nature is self-communication, self-opening,


self-gift, that is creative of the other. Divine Wisdom, which had poured herself out in creation, in the salvific history of the chosen people, in the testimony of the prophets and the teaching of the sages, and which had been at times received and at times rejected by humanity, goes to the very limit in entering human history in the person of Jesus. The Word, Holy Wisdom, God’s self-revelation becomes human, incarnate, in order to speak to humanity in a language we could understand. (Schneiders: 49)

Metaphorical Connections to Disciplines in the Classroom1. Word as rational, ordering principle upholding the universe (or

multiverse)2. Word as creative speech-power

-all that was made: the vastness and diversity of creation and human culture3. Word as life-giving4. Word as light shining in the darkness5. Word enlightening all coming into the world6. Word become flesh, incarnate, dwelling among us

-beholding his glory (even on the cross—giving life on behalf of the world)

-the Logos-in-flesh glory, full of grace and truth7. Word revealing, exegeting God

John 7:17 Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own.

Beyond the PrologueWith the Beloved Disciple emerging in second half of John, beginning at 13:23 (echo of 1:18), love emerges as the key mark of Jesus’ followers (13:33-35).

Also, Jesus’ new relationship to his disciples: I call you no longer servants, but friends (15:15).

We might explore the implications of these two points for teaching in the Anabaptist-Mennonite classroom?


BibliographyAlexander, Denis and Robert S. White

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Burge, Gary M. 2000 John; The NIV Application Commentary. Grand Rapids:

Zondervan.Capon, Paul

1996 “Is Creation Ex Nihilo A Post-Biblical Invention? An Examination of Gerhard May’s

Proposal.” Trinity Journal 17NS: 77-93.Coloe, Mary L.

2001 God Dwells with Us: Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel. Collegeville, MN:

Liturgical Press. Dyck, C. J.

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Prologue. JSNTSS 89. Sheffield Academic Press.Frey, Jörg

2008 “‘dass sie meine Herrlichkeit schauen’ (Joh 17.24): Zu Hintergrund, Sinn, und

Funktion der johanneischen Rede von der doxa Jesu.” NTS 54 (2008): 375-97.Jasper, Alison

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JSNTSS 165/ Gender, Culture, Theory 6. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.Gilkey, Langdon

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by David Tracy and Nicholas Lash. Concilium 166. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and

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2002 Flesh and Glory: Symbol, Gender, and Theology in the Gospel of John. New

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Fourth Gospel, ed. F. L. Cross. London: A. R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd.Moloney, Francis J.

1998 The Gospel of John. Sacra Pagrina. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

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18.” Theology (Nov-Dec): 397-404.

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Church. Fairfax: Eastern Christian Publications


Newbigin, Leslie 1982 The Light Has Come: An Exposition of the Fourth Gospel. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.O’Day, Gail R.

1995 The Gospel of John (The New Interpreter’s Bible). Nashville: Abingdon,

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ed. F. L. Cross. London: A. R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd.Russell, Robert John

1989 “Cosmology, Creation, and Contingency,” 177-209 in Cosmos as Creation: Theology

and Science in Consonance, ed. Ted Peters. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

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24/25: 80.Schneiders, Sandra M.

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Ethics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.Thompson, Marianne Meye

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Appendix 1Menno on the Logos Become Flesh

Menno Simons treats at length the interconnection between John 1:1 and 1:14 bolstered by appeal to numerous verses and phrases in John 6, especially v. 51 to stress that Jesus gives himself in his wholeness, flesh included, for the life of the world. Menno devotes over a hundred pages (in “Incarnation of Our Lord” and “Reply to Micron,” in Menno: 794-913) to Jesus the Word became flesh in Mary. But the flesh is not from Mary. For if the flesh was from Mary, Jesus would have been half Adam-type flesh. But he is not, Menno argues. Further, he would have the character of two sons simultaneously: one, from Mary (fallen and sinful, as are all humans) and the other, from God, pure and holy. Menno regards this as absurd. Menno argues against John a Lasco (787-92) and Micron, a Zwinglian reformer (835-913) and others as well, to assert that Jesus the Word came down from heaven. The Word came from heaven and it became flesh in Mary. Menno affirms that Christ came down from heaven and will again ascend to heaven.

Some Anabaptist historians describe this as Menno’s doctrine of “heavenly flesh,” and question its orthodoxy. But my reading indicates that Menno is careful not to say that the flesh came from heaven. Rather, the Word came from heaven and it became flesh (for all the wrong views that Menno opposes, see p. 829, his “Second” point). Menno appeals often to the recurring Johannine contrast between the heavenly and the earthly (John 3:12-13; 6:62; Eph. 4:9-10), and correlates this with Paul’s distinction between the first Adam and the second Adam, Christ. The second Adam, Christ, comes from heaven, and will again ascend to heaven. Menno argues for Christ’s full humanity: “he became flesh in Mary.”

Menno’s treatment of the incarnation and how we view the human and divine in Christ appears to make John’s theology umpire the virgin birth narratives of Luke and Matthew, though he enlists those in his argument. His foundational theme, however, is the Word became flesh; flesh did not originate from Mary’s humanity—otherwise Jesus would be of the Adamic seed and Jesus would have had a split nature. Menno’s argument cuts some very fine distinctions, which may not be altogether edifying to us today. But two points are of enduring value: his effort to see Christ as a whole, unified man with two natures, a term he appears to reluctantly accept, and his emphasis on Jesus in his wholeness, flesh included, giving his life for the salvation of the world. Jesus was subject to suffering and death, and thereby overcame the power of death, destroying the devil, and delivering all those held in bondage through fear of death (his exegesis of Heb. 2:14-17; 823, 827-28). [See further on this topic in the TLC section for John 6, BCBC Commentary.]


Appendix 2John’s Logos/Word and the Wisdom Tradition

That John the Evangelist never explicitly links Jesus to the wisdom tradition is a puzzle of significant magnitude. Many commentators readily blend the Logos and Wisdom-Sophia traditions. Witherington presents the entire Gospel as Wisdom!—his book title. Witherington holds that Sophia-wisdom is the portal for understanding Jesus in John: “...recognizing that Jesus is being portrayed as God’s Wisdom, indeed Wisdom incarnate, in this Gospel is the key to understanding the presentation of the central character of the story” (20). He says Wisdom is clearly in the Prologue and once we see it, we can see “that Wisdom is the key to every aspect of this complex work” (20). On John 1:38 where the disciples seek out Jesus and go to where Jesus is staying, Witherington quotes wisdom texts: (Sir. 51:23, 25-27) for the phrase “See with your own eyes,” and Wisd. Sol. 6: “Wisdom is …easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her” (70). After this, he seldom refers to Wisdom texts. His thesis is not that all persuasive, given its showing in his commentary as a whole. Evans cites 11 parallels between John’s Prologue and Sirach 24 alone, as well as 7 more parallels between Sirach 24 and the rest of John’s Gospel, and 24 parallels between the Prologue and other Wisdom texts (1993: 84-92); further he cites 7 parallels between the Prologue and Genesis 1 (1993: 78). Here arises a conundrum: with all these thought-parallels between wisdom texts and John, why does John never mention wisdom/sophia?

Carter, Talbert, Brown, Scott and others assume that Logos is analogous to Wisdom since much of what is said in the Prologue about the Logos is also said about wisdom in the sophia traditions. Indeed, the similarities between the Sophia tradition and John’s Prologue are impressive [Logos/Word], as Talbert (68-70) and Carter (137) present them in parallel columns (Carter follows his list with a fine exposition of the Gospel’s emphases, utilizing the wisdom paradigm, 137-39). But he fails to say that John never designates Jesus as wisdom. Why does John not identify Jesus with that tradition? Talbert perceives the issue and suggests two possible reasons: Logos in John 1:1 matches Genesis 1:1; both begin (Gen. in the LXX) with en archē—implied here is that Genesis 1 narrates God’s creation by divine word—and second, the masculine Logos fits better with the Father-Son emphasis dominant in the Gospel. Jesus as Sophia would hardly fit with that masculine imagery (74). These explanations, while perhaps applicable, do not get to the core of the theological issue. John’s positive portraits of women in the Gospel make his avoidance of Sophia because of gender doubtful.

After noting numerous similar functions of Logos and Sophia (Hebrew, hokma), Stephen Need explicates the vast range of meaning that Logos


carried: in Israel “‘the word of God’ was essentially a metaphor for God’s activity in creation and history” (398); in Greek thought it signified “‘rationality’ and ‘discourse’ and this certainly included speech” (399). For the Stoics logos was the eternal principle of the rational order, the ultimate structure of reality, that ordered the universe and held it together. It denoted both “‘inward thought’ and ‘outward expression’ or speech” (399-400). A significant loss among commentators who readily blend Logos with Sophia is the lack of exposition of the significance of logos in both the Hebrew and Greek traditions, as C. H. Dodd exposited so well years ago (1957:10-13), where it is linked with another term of great significance in John: glory (doxa). Dodd refers to the musician Abe Vogler who in his music made “of three things not a fourth, but a star,” so John has made out of the two hemispheres of thought and experience, joined in single term, a new category to comprehend a new and unique fact (1957: 12). C. H. Dodd’s fuller treatment of “LOGOS” (1953: 263-85) also lists Wisdom parallels to the Prologue (274-75), but makes it subservient to the larger Logos tradition, both Hellenist and Hebraic. Need’s recent article seeks to redress the needed balance.

We ask the important question: why doesn’t John’s Gospel ever explicitly link Jesus with wisdom (Sophia)? In my [Logos/Word] Essay I develop more fully three theological reasons, which I briefly propose here. First, John’s Gospel is fully incarnational. Logos takes on human flesh. As Dodd puts it, even with all the parallel functions between Logos and Sophia, “we are still far from anything which could justify the statement Theos hēn ho logos, even though the functions assigned to Wisdom are often clearly those which are elsewhere assigned to God” (1953: 275; transliteration mine).

A second reason why John may avoid linking Jesus to Sophia in the Prologue, and elsewhere, flows out of his incarnational theology. Sophia never takes on human flesh and lives among humans; Logos does. True, Lady Wisdom makes her abode in Zion (Sir. 24:10-11) and went forth to dwell among humans, but “found no resting place” and thus “returned to her place, and took her seat among angels” (1 Enoch 42:1-2). This is similar to John 1:10-11 both in wisdom’s coming into the world and being rejected. But the Gospel text is more historically focused, akin to the rejected prophet theme in the OT.

Third, John avoids the Sophia portrait of Jesus because Jesus’ glory in the Gospel is intrinsically linked to his suffering and death. This theme, through the double entendre of the Evangelist’s lifted up, lies at the heart of the Gospel. In a recent article Jörg Frey demonstrates persuasively that glory in John is linked to and culminates in Jesus’ suffering and death (cf. Dodd, 1957). He regards 1:14b-c as pivotal, with glory unveiled in the Gospel’s serial emphases upon Jesus’ glorification, climactically disclosed in Jesus’ death on the cross (note 12:23, 27, 37-41; 13:31-32; 17:1-5). Divine


glory is revealed in Jesus, in “the crucified one in his ‘hour’” (375, 382-83). Retrospectively then, glory is linked also to Jesus’ pre-existence and return to God after his resurrection. Each of these themes is developed more fully in the Essay [Logos/Word].

In addition to these points, we might consider also other theological issues:

1. Sophia/Wisdom in Prov. 8 is the first created: “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old” (v. 22). This is not what John 1:1 says about Logos. If Logos refers to Jesus Christ, and it surely does in John, the church’s creed (dependent on John’s Christology), holds that the Son was preexistent from all eternity with/in the Father, “begotten, not made (created)” –Nicene Creed, emphasis mine.

2. The phrase about wisdom in Wisdom Solomon 7:25-26 conflicts with John’s theology:“For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;…For she is a reflection of eternal light,a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness”The word “emanation” is especially problematic, for it smacks of Gnostic language, where various eons, “powers,” “planets,” nous (mind), and Sophia (wisdom), etc. emanate from the Creator God, which in some texts is the result of cosmogonic conflict. This falls short of what John’s Gospel says and what the church believes about Jesus Christ, designated here as the Logos.

3. Does Sophia at any time in any of the numerous relevant texts/traditions become flesh, and suffer and die? This is a primary “fencepost”/boundary mark between NT belief about Jesus Christ and Gnostic thought, which extensively utilizes the wisdom tradition.

See additional considerations in my commentary text.


Appendix 3

The Creationist (Intelligent Design) View and Evolution

The issues in the Creationist (precursor of Intelligent Design) debate are explicated well by Langdon Gilkey in his article, “The Creationist Issue: A Theologian’s View,” in Cosmology and Theology, ed. by David Tracy and Nicholas Lash (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark and New York: The Seabury Press, 1983), 55-69. Two critical issues flow throughout the article: confusion over the differing types of explanation by science and religion and a false union of science and religion, as in Creationism (or in I.D.). A religious explanation such as God as Creator, even though appealing to order, design, and purpose in the cosmos is not science, but religious belief. A scientific explanation of how phenomena evolve, change, and mutate is based on empirical data, and cannot/should not be expanded as science into a worldview of theism or atheism or secular humanism. What is needed especially in our scientific culture is respect for the place of the other. Owen Gingerich’s God’s Universe is a model of such respect, encompassing both vast scientific knowledge as an astronomer (Professor at Harvard also teaching the History of Science) and humble belief in God as Creator.

At the heart of the conflict is misunderstanding of truth. In our scientific age the tendency is to identify truth with factual data. But truth understood from a Judeo-Christian perspective is much richer: faithfulness (emet, cf. John 1:14), reality portrayed in story and drama, and finally authenticity, modeled supremely in Jesus reflecting God. Because of the reductionism of truth to factual data, religious belief such as Creationism appeals to science in order to establish its truth. The secular scientist may also use his scientific view of truth to discredit all religious belief, because “truth” so defined within science makes belief outmoded and offensive. But in reality science works with theories and models, as the history of science shows (Newton’s vs. Einstein’s view of gravity). Einstein’s general theory of relativity, summed up, is: “Space tells matter how to move; matter tells space how to curve.”11 Further,

A religious community which allows its own dogmatic intolerance and its irresponsibility to the world to expand only aides in such false union [of science and religion]. A scientific community that ignores the relation of its truth and its life to law, to morals, and to fundamental

11 Summed up by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, in Robert John Russell, “Cosmology, Creation, and Contingency,” in Cosmos as Creation: Theology and Science in Consonance (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 183.


religious symbols also only makes itself and its culture vulnerable to ideological capitulation. Ignorance of the religious in both its demonic and its creative forms can be even more fatal for a scientific culture than ignorance of new scientific and technological developments. The implications of this controversy for our educational programme in the humanities, as well as in the sciences, are immense. (Gilkey: 68)


Appendix 4

Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, 1995

Article 5. Creation and Divine Providence

Creation and Divine Providence

We believe that God has created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, [1] and that God preserves and renews what has been made. All creation ultimately has its source outside itself and belongs to the Creator. The world has been created good because God is good and provides all that is needed for life. [2]

We believe that the universe has been called into being as an expression of God's love and sovereign freedom alone. Creation witnesses to the eternal power and divine nature of God, who gives meaning and purpose to life and who alone is worthy of worship and praise. [3]

We acknowledge that God sustains creation in both continuity and change. We believe that God upholds order in creation and limits the forces of sin and evil for the sake of preserving and renewing humanity and the world. [4] God also works to save human beings and the world from death and destruction and to overcome the forces of sin and evil.

We therefore are called to respect the natural order of creation and to entrust ourselves to God's care and keeping, whether in adversity or plenty. Neither the work of human hands, nor the forces of the natural world around us, nor the power of the nations among which we live are worthy of the trust and honor due the Creator on whom they depend. [5]

(1) Gen. 1:1; Isa. 45:11f.; John 1:3. (2) Gen. 1:31; 1 Tim. 4:4. (3) Ps. 19:1-6; Rom. 1:19-23. (4) Gen. 9:8-17; Ps. 104; Eph. 3:9-11. (5) Ps. 33; Matt. 6:25-33; Matt. 10:26-31.

Commentary

1. In confessing God as Creator, we refer to the one and triune God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, according to the Scriptures. Creation should


be understood as the work of the triune God, not as the work of the Father or Son or the Holy Spirit alone (Heb. 1:2-3; Col. 1:16; 1 Cor. 8:5-6; John 1:3, 14-18). Some ways of speaking about God may undermine the full confession of the triune God as Creator. For example, speaking of God only as "Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer" rather than as "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" may promote the mistaken understanding that the "Father" alone is "Creator," the "Son" alone is "Redeemer," and the "Holy Spirit" alone is "Sustainer."

2. We speak of creation as an "expression" of God because of biblical references to creation by the divine word (Gen. 1; Ps. 148:5; John 1:1f.; Rom. 4:17). In many creation stories of other religions in Bible times, the world comes into being as an extension of the god or gods. In these accounts, the world shares in divinity, or is itself divine. In contrast, the biblical account of creation by the word of God clearly distinguishes between God the Creator and what has been created. The biblical refusal to confuse the created with the Creator, or to ascribe divinity to the world, fits with the Bible's rejection of idolatry in all its forms (Isa. 45:12-21; Acts 17:22-29).

When we confess that God is the Creator of the universe, we reject the idea that the world came into being without God. Nor do we accept the view that God made the world out of something which had existed before the time of creation or the view that matter is co-eternal with God. Scripture is clear that God was before anything else existed. Thus, both the Old Testament word for create and the witness of Scripture as a whole imply what theology has called "creation out of nothing."

As Creator, God is ultimately owner of the earth. God has given the earth to human beings to care for as God's stewards. See "The Creation and Calling of Human Beings" (Article 6) and "Christian Stewardship" (Article 21).

3. God continues to sustain and care for the world rather than leaving it to itself. Although sin and evil have damaged God's original creation, God continues to use the natural order, family, culture, and social and political systems to sustain life and to limit the forces of evil (Gen. 4:15; Ps. 34; Isa. 19:12-25; Matt. 6:25-30; John 5:17; Col. 1:15-17). Even though natural disasters cause havoc in the world, God continues to preserve creation and humanity from total destruction (Gen. 8:21-22). Therefore we need not be


overcome by the fear of natural forces and other human beings which may cause suffering, persecution, or even death.

We are called to entrust ourselves to God's care, rather than finding our security in technology, in the elements of the natural world, or in the nations in which we live. We accept and use the resources of nature, society, and technology, so far as they sustain and enhance the quality of human life and the world around us in harmony with God's purposes, and so far as they do not undermine trust in God's providential care.

4. God not only preserves the world, but also acts to save the chosen people from evil and to bless all peoples and the rest of creation. God used elements of nature to free the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, to provide them with food, to accompany the revealing of the Law at Sinai, and to provide them with a dwelling place (Exod. 6-16; 19; Ps. 124; 136).

Because God works in ever new and surprising ways, creation is open to change. God also works to bring newness into creation for the sake of the covenant people and for all nations (Isa. 42:5-9; 44:21-28). See "Salvation" (Article 8) and "The Reign of God" (Article 24) on the renewal of creation in Jesus Christ and, through the work of the Holy Spirit, in the church and the world.

Copyright © 1995 by Herald Press Scottdale PA 15683. Order print copies of Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, and Summary Statement, Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective, From Herald Press, Scottdale, Pa.



“How does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship?”

by Vi Dutcher, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition & Department Chair,

Language and Literature, Eastern Mennonite University

How does the incarnate Word orient my scholarship? My business, my scholarship, is words. I rummage around for them in the same way that I root through a bag of my grandmother’s old dresses for just the right fabric for a quilt. I chase after words in the same way that I run to catch a flight when I’ve not allowed enough time to go through security. I know that I cannot find the words that reflect my thoughts in the same way that a mirror reflects our dog’s face back to him. That search is useless. I pursue words that represent my thoughts.

For example, if I want to convey my deep sympathy to a friend whose spouse has died, how do I say this in a way that conveys my sorrow beside her? (This is not really the same at all as her sorrow. I certainly cannot take the place of the one who died.) How do I say this in a way that conveys my care for her? (Yet what have I done to be believable in that care?) How do I say this in a way that conveys my deep belief that she will be sad for a very long time, that this is realistic, and that I will be around for her as much as I can—which, when it’s all said and done, is not very much? How do I say this on a beautiful weekend when I call her, and she answers the phone in a whisper? I invite her to my home, then, give her nourishing food (send some home with her in an emptied Feta cheese carton), engage her in conversation about ideas we enjoy discussing together, laugh with her, cry—hard—with her.

I represent my care to her through these behaviors. In the same way, I represent my thoughts in writing through words. Words that are strung together into sentences, which, when heaped up together, make a paragraph. Stack enough of these in the same location, and I’ve got a potential article, story, poem or a book.

My area of scholarship is Rhetoric and Composition: The intersection of writing (the composition part) and audience (the rhetoric part). It is


representing my thoughts in a logical manner in words (logos) aimed toward a specific audience (ethos) in order to engage that audience successfully (pathos) through the truth. This is my translation of Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric in the book of his notes entitled Rhetoric.

Now, I could unpack this definition word by word: “representing,” “thoughts,” “logical,” “aimed toward,” “specific audience,” “in order to engage,” “that audience successfully,” “through the truth.” That would take quite a long time. If you’re interested, I suggest you take one of my courses. What I want to do here today is focus on using words to represent the truth, what this costs, and what this has to do with the incarnate Word in my scholarship.First of all, do I have something to say? It’s no good to write until I do. To recognize that I sit down to write when I have nothing to say is to recognize a truth. Perhaps there is a deadline pushing me, a promotion file looming. Images of authors of best-selling books parade across my mind, and in these images, the authors are telling me that writing is quite easy, if you’re good at it, and if you’re really committed to it, and if you really want to do it. Finally, they sneer at me and march off my mind’s screen. I stand up then at my desk, walk to a mirror, examine my hair and decide that it’s way past time to find a new hairdresser. I find the mending stack and tighten a button. I climb the stairs to the kitchen and finish the grocery list. I walk outside and clean all the dead leaves from the plants. I return to the kitchen and check the calendar to make sure I’m not supposed to be somewhere.

Then I walk down the steps to my desk and sit down again. The struggle to write—to find the words to string together to represent the truth--is inextricably linked to personal transformation—to the truth—what some call, the emotional truth of our lives.

For this, I need time and silence. I sit at the desk, before my computer, in silence. I pay attention. I am alert. But usually only after I say, why must I write? What is driving me anyway? Why can’t I earn my keep by changing spark plugs? Then I pay attention again. I am alert. I begin to listen. I begin to practice what Simone Weill names “attentiveness.”

I say that I need time and silence. What I need from that space is attentiveness. Without attentiveness, I cannot write. I cannot find words no matter how deeply I rummage and how far and fast I chase. I look at the computer one last time. Then I turn my swivel chair, find my yellow legal


pad and my fine point, rolling-ball black pen. I write a word. I look at it, read it, have a thought, and I write another word. I write a sentence. I read it. I have more thoughts. I write another sentence. And then another. I think again. I write a page. Then I’m dreadfully impatient. The ideas are coming far too rapidly than I can write with paper and pen. So I turn to my computer. I type what I’ve written, making changes, adding and deleting words as I go. I come to the end of that yellow paper, and I keep writing—for a time.

Then the voices begin. Let me explain. This year one of my writing projects is in response to a call from elementary school teachers for children’s literature that can be used by guidance counselors as biblio-therapy when they address children’s emotions of grief and sadness toward death and personal trauma. I began writing a children’s book—about the story of these red pop beads.

When I first begin to write, I see children in my mind’s eye. Children who are attentive, listening, engaged in the story. I look in their eyes. And through the process of attentiveness that I’ve just described, I find, in dark corners, the words to transfigure my memories into story. My memories of my three-year-old sister’s death when I was six years old. My memories of a father who walked through those next years in anger, refusing to speak of what was breaking him; of a mother who wearied of a young girl asking incessantly for her sister to play with, asking to play with her sister’s red pop beads that have, by now, risen to the level of a family treasure and are hidden away by parents; of a mother who did her crying during the day when her husband was away installing furnaces in the homes of families who managed to keep all of their children healthy. I find words to begin representing these memories. To tell the truth. To bring to life this truth so that my memories can be released and assist me in finding my way to more words, words that allow me to lose my grip on the previously unnamed sorrow—to find adult words to explain a child’s feelings. No, that’s not right—not for a children’s book. To, as an adult who is that child grown up, find the words to explain a long-ago child in words that a present-day child can read—and bring to life the truth—in the “broken, triumphant Word”— the translated Word; the incarnate Word.

This is, as I said a bit ago, when I first begin to write. Then the voices begin. Voices that interrupt me when I’m paying attention to those children who are listening to my voice tell the truth. The first voice is my father’s


voice: Why don’t you put your brothers in the story and use their names? You give your sisters’ names; it would be nice if you’d use the boys’ names. They’d like that. They could open the book—your book—and see their names.

My mind jerks away from the Word. I say, abruptly because I want to get back to the Word: “I don’t want to worry as much as you do, when you write, that I’m pleasing everyone. And when I write, I’m not concerned about passing out compliments.”

And then my mother’s voice begins: “You make me sound so strict and even mean. What kind of a mother did you think I was?”

She’s got my full attention. “Now, Mom,” I plead, “this is the way I remember it. You’re such a good mama.”

Voices . . . entire conversations raised, hovering, discarded.

Now that I’m fully distracted and inattentive, I begin to see, in my mind’s eye, the book—the end-product, if it gets published, and its colorful jacket. The art work. Should a strand of red pop beads be included with every book? Would that be possible? I wonder if a publisher would or could actually make that happen? What would it look like to see my name on the jacket of a children’s book?

This is when I groan aloud in frustration that borders on, and at times is, despair. I’ve wandered far from the Word. When I focus on the voices, the material object of the finished book or a deadline, I cannot hear the truth; I cannot wait around to hear it. I am long gone. It may arrive at the scene, but I am long gone.

When I am attentive to those children who are lined up in front of me, I’m watching them, and I’m listening to them. I ask them Simone Weil’s question: “What are you going through?” This is ultimate attentiveness: What are you going through, children, when you want to play with the red pop beads that belonged to a sibling when she died? What are you going through when you are told you cannot have them, when what you really want to do is touch something that belonged to that sibling . . . that sister who died and cannot play with you any more. You are only six years old. What are you going through? What are you going through


when in response to your questions, no adults answer you. What are you going through?

Simone Weil argues that our “work [must be] without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes.” Rather, our work is done “with a view to the idea we want to express.” With a view to the idea, I say, that we want to represent: with a view to the truth. The truth for you—the reader; for me—the writer, and I am also the reader of each word. For when you and I read, and you and I prize the truth, and you and I want this Word to live in us and transform us—we read with attentiveness. We read with this active question: What are you, character/writer, going through? Therein lies the incarnate Word-engaging us, together, the readers, in an act of faith: “an acknowledgment that, as Larry Woiwode writes in his book What I Think I Did, “We are headed somewhere and it’s our story that carries us forward in its wake. If I weren’t headed toward eternity, I wouldn’t have a story to tell.”

Works Cited

Weil, Simone. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love

of God.” Waiting on God. Trans. E. Crauford. New York, G. P. Putnam & Sons,

1951.Woiwode, Larry. What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts. New York: Basic

Books, 2001.


“How does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship?”An Illustrated Power Point Presentation

by Gregg Luginbuhl, Professor of Art,Bluffton University


I am illustrating my reflections today exclusively with examples of my own art work. I ask that you try to “read” the visual images presented here, as well as

This first plate in my Creation Series represents the mystery of the beginning. Genesis 1:1-2 says, “The world was void and without form, and the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” The text from John, included


As an artist, I am most fascinated with these words from the focal text of the conference: “Through him

without him nothing was made that has been made;

and then, “In him was life, and that life was the light of people.”


I reflected on the things made through God, vs. the creative work that I do as an artist, as my art must be viewed in the context of this broader picture:---God is the Creator.---God as Creator brings material and forces into being.---God’s Creation is dynamic. It is forces set in motion. It continues to evolve.---The scale of God’s Creation cannot be fully apprehended.---God’s Creation is forever.

By contrast:---I am creative. I rework materials and forces that God has provided. Clay, wood, metal, and even light are examples included in the illustrations to this presentation.---I remake, or “remark”, God’s Creation, and in the process, become receptive to it.---My art is essentially static.

Through my art, I pay homage to all of creation.


Through my art, I remake. Here the dorsal fin of a fish becomes a headdress as fish and Indian morph into one.

Remaking; reworking; is a process of discovery: developing questions,


and sometimes humor!

Reinvention and juxtaposition is a process of playing with Creation

provoking us to see more clearly.


This dresser, with its faux wood grain and brass hardware, is made entirely

Through my art I meditate

and pray.


The process of art makes me perceptive to line, to shape,

to form, and to

texture. In this bronze titled The Last First Draft


text is seen primarily as surface texture.

Through art, I become perceptive to God’s Creation, and receptive to

John 1:10 underscores the need to cultivate receptivity: “He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did


As a receptive person, I find beauty

in unexpected places.

Through my art I search for


and study the Word through Visual Exegesis! In this process, I focus on the imagery provided by a Biblical text, and gain insight into the text, and

An artist’s statement such as the one printed on this slide, written to accompany the finished work, points to insights, and further questions that arise through this process. Here is the

and Jonah spiritually


In the Creation Series, the plate illustrating creation of

evolved into a peaceable kingdom fable. “The ape, most intelligent of the animals, makes a strong and complex statement to the zebra, who is only capable of seeing the issue in ‘black and white.’ The parrot screeches a radical point of view, while the lizard is only tense, gripping the earth.

Later, I rediscovered the source of the tense lizard in this visual composition in the lines of a poem titled At the Bomb Testing Site by William Stafford There was just a continent without much on it under a sky that never cared less. Ready for change the elbows waited. The hands


The ape in this composition was originally in the plate entitled Creation of Mankind,

receiving the spark of life, in the manner of Michelangelo’s Adam, from the hand of God—as I attempted to reconcile my understanding of science with the Biblical text. The image appeared comical and heavy-handed, so the ape was returned to the animal kingdom, making way for a

Later Time magazine used my original, more startling concept, on the cover of an issue that wrestled with the same theme.In summary, the “incarnated word” has been the foundation, the point of instigation, and the subject of inquiry in my art. This effort has made me, and I hope others who have viewed the work, more perceptive, and more receptive to beauty, truth, and the word.


by Ryan Sensenig, Assistant Professor of Biology,Goshen College

I have two quick stories to introduce how I, as an ecologist, respond to “How does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship?” The stories reflect some of the diversity of perceptions regarding what the environmental crisis says about humans, and of course we all have unique perceptions. Most of us are aware that the earth is losing species far too rapidly, that we have successfully altered the globe’s climate, and inadvertently caused all manner of ills for ourselves and the other creatures. So what is the root of the problem?

Story one: The problem is lack of knowledge.E.O. Wilson, famed Harvard biologist, recently came to Goshen speaking about his book, the Future of Life. He gave an eloquent rallying call for humans to preserve habitat, essential in order to halt the extinction spasm we are orchestrating. “The relative indifference to the environment springs, I believe, from deep within the human nature. The human brain evidently evolved to commit itself emotionally only to a small piece of geography, a limited band of kinsmen, and two or three generations into the future.” [1]

His major suggestion is to spend 30 trillion dollars to purchase areas that contain high endemic diversity… global hotspots of diversity. According to Wilson, the problem is that humans have only recently in their evolutionary history found science, the basis for an environmental ethic. Education, political will, and technological solutions can solve the problem. Thinking “right” is the answer.

Story two: The problem isn’t…. or at least…. the problem is not about us.I was recently eating breakfast at a hotel before going to a meeting. All in one motion, a gentleman asked whether he could sit with me, blessed his food, informed me he worked for a local church agency, and asked why I had lecture notes at breakfast. I indicated that I was an ecologist, preparing to give a presentation. Lecture review was not meant to be on the menu that morning. “Oh, you don’t believe all that stuff about global warming, do you?” I paused briefly and braced myself for what I might say; would I launch into a diatribe about CO2 flux and global circulation patterns? I was surprised with what I actually said. “Do you believe in ‘sinful’ nature, that humanity is in someway fallen?” “Oh yes of course” he smiled confidently. “Then given enough time, do you think humans might


act selfishly enough to damage our planet?” His face grew quiet for the first time and we both sat in rather awkward rapture of our eggs.

How does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship? Both stories minimize the beauty of what it truly means to be human, created in God’s image, which means we are at once wholly “of nature” and at once capable of relationship with “the other”, which includes God and all the creatures of the planet. Both stories miss that the environmental crisis is a spiritual crisis, a symptom of our forgetting how to live as part of something. The incarnation has much to say about how we should be human.

What does the incarnation say about Creation?The incarnation solidly asserts that God values Creation enough to become physically a member of it. In Cal DeWitt’s words, “Matter matters.” This challenges the dualistic view that spirituality is denial of our “creaturely” nature. Creation is not merely the materialistic grand stage on which life is played out while we work toward heaven. Quite the opposite, the incarnation suggests that wholeness, holiness, comes in learning how to live as creatures, as part of something. God’s presence, wisdom, and spiritual transformation are found in eking out our lives in the biological world. Richard Kearney says, “God cannot become fully God, nor the Word fully flesh, until creation becomes a “new heaven and a new earth.” [2]

What does the incarnation say about God?God is constantly making space for the “other” and first did this through the decision to create. At a recent science-religion conference at Goshen College, Holmes Rolston III, when asked what evolution has taught him about God, replied, “God is more like a parent than an architect, and more like a teacher than a craftsmen.” God seeks to constantly open up new opportunities, allows our future to unfold with our decisions, and challenges us to make choices needed to be whole. It is highly anthropocentric to think God created for the purpose of producing a piece of “art”, as if the universe were a part of some grandiose heavenly museum. God created as an expression of love, releasing “the other” to explore its own expression of love for “the other.”

Diogenes Allen had this to say: “When God creates, it means that [God] allows something to exist which is not [God]. This requires an act of profound renunciation. [God] chooses out of love to permit something else to exist, something created to be itself and to exist by virtue of its own interest and value. So the Creation of a world means that God renounces … status as the only existent – [God] pulls … back, so to speak, in order to give … creation room to exist for its own sake.” [3]


The incarnation and subsequent crucifixion is the extreme example of “pulling back.” George Ellis calls this a kenotic morality, “a morality of love and self-sacrifice, which is of transforming nature” [4]. Only in leaving room for the “the other” can a relationship be of importance.

What does the incarnation say about us?The incarnation challenges us to live in a way that merges spirit and matter. It seems at one moment we are Darwinian machines acting only to perpetuate our genes, apes with cell phones. The next minute we are capable of kenosis, self-sacrifice that opens possibilities of peace and hope that inspire. It is this tension that makes us fully humans, in fact fully spiritual beings.

The incarnation, in this light, is a powerful statement of ecology. By fully learning to live as creatures, we become more spiritual beings. I am just one part (at one point in time and space) of a grander system, I am dependent on the parts around me, for the whole system to work the individual needs to live in support of “the other.” The created order is groaning for us to understand these concepts. Norman Wirzba echoes this idea, “Salvation is not a private guarantee to entrance into heaven. It refers much more broadly to the restoration of wholeness and health between and among ourselves, the earth, and God.” [5]

Implications for scholarship So what do these philosophical and theological statements mean about how we approach ecology and environmental science at Goshen College?

Firstly, quite simply to be a Christian means to be an ecologist! There you have it; we can dissolve the rest of the departments at Goshen College. Well of course, by ecologist, I mean one who lives as if connected to something else… in fact all else. David Orr says it another way, “All education is environmental education.”

A first commitment in academia is therefore to teach in ways that bridge the disciplines. As academics, we need “the other”, to teach together in ways that acknowledges that our disciplines are each parts “of wholes”. Of all the chronic pains the world experiences (poverty, exploitation, hate, soil loss) can any of these be solved without an ecological approach to education?

This leads to a second academic goal that arises. Teach in a way that merges spirit and matter. Things happen when spirit and matter are fully fused. We become most human, reflecting our rightful role in Creation. William McDonough, UVA architect and guru of green design, tells the following story.


“I was asked to design the principles for the World’s Fair in Germany in 2000. I established a list of ideas and sent them off for comment. I included such ideas as: insist on the rights of humanity and nature to coexist, recognize interdependence, respect the relationships between spirit and matter, accept responsibility for the consequences of design, create safe objects of long term value…etc. The Germans looked at the list and they said, “We like all of them except that one about spirit and matter, that is too fuzzy.” It was number eight. So I said, okay, we move it to number 3. They said, “no, no you don’t understand, we are trying to get rid of it.” But I left it at number 3. I sent it off to indigenous people and they all came back and said, “These are all really neat Bill, except, you know, there’s only one principle. It’s that one right there, number 3. All the rest of them evolve from that one principle.” [6]

What does merging spirit and matter look like? It means research and teaching that always asks, “how am I, are we, connected to “the other?” Fusing spirit and matter means using our emotions, relationships, sense of justice, creative passions to ecologically transform our communities. It means teaching ecologically, laterally, and communally. It means risking space in our curricula for the unplanned. It means tackling problems, with students, that we are unsure we can solve. To borrow Rolston’s image, it means teaching less like an architect. It means committing as a community of like-minded folks to model kenosis.

Jim Yoder’s Green Design class at EMU is a tremendous example where students were charged with helping to explore how to design the new Science building in an ecologically responsible way. To quote Eldon Kurtz, EMU’s physical plant director, “This has been the richest learning experience I think I've ever observed on this campus." Just imagine all the unforeseen, unplanned, hope-filled, outcomes that were a part of this process. The process of self-emptying, ironically develops an encompassing inertia, soon the whole project has a life of its own.

The restoration of habitat (as in Merry Lea’s Tall-grass Prairies) by definition forms a relationship between the “restorer” and the land and creatures. The sense of connection, the awe of the complexity, the colors and hues all move us. Restoration also allows the system to change, become its own, a kind of respecting “the other.” In restoration of ecosystems, we learn our limits, a central spiritual lesson. In restoration we experience a taste of what a kenotic morality looks like.

The blue nuns of Michigan, a group of several hundred Catholic sisters, decided that matter matters and renovated their motherhouse to create the largest geothermal heating/cooling system in the country. The project has received national accolades and in 2006 was rated by the American Institute of Architects as one of the 10 most green buildings in the U.S.


The magic that emerges from the process is, ironically, the greatest product. Planning, envisioning, and challenging one another to live as part of something, as kenotic beings, is where we become fully human. The result of these efforts is we become more spiritual beings, more aware of our connections, more whole, and a bit of the kingdom of heaven is realized on earth, a precursor of what is to come.

Recently I took my two 5-year olds to Merry Lea, Goshen College’s environmental field station. I was giving a tour to my wife’s parents and we were walking through the restored prairie that was established around the buildings. Mara and Isaac suddenly disappeared…. they were drawn like bees to the multitude of flowers and interesting insects and creatures. Later that week, we were back in our yard in Goshen and one of them said, “Dad, when are we going to let our grass grow nice and tall like at Merry Lea?” Kenosis by a 5-year old. The incarnation models for us how to live as creatures, and in doing so, we are more and more in the image of God.

References:

1. Wilson, E.O., The future of life. 2002, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Random House Inc.

2. Kearney, R., The God who may be: A hermeneutics of religion. 2001, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

3. Allen, D., The Traces of God in a Frequently Hostile World. 1981, USA: Cowley Publications.

4. Ellis, G.F.R. A universe of ethics, morality, and hope. in Second Annual Conference on Religion and Science. 2002. Goshen, Indiana: Pandora Press.

5. Wirzba, N., The paradise of God: Renewing religion in an ecological age. 2003, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

6. McDonough, W., Mindful timelessness, in Keynote Address: Pennsylvania Sustainable Agriculture Association Meeting. 1999: Penn State University.




by Derek Suderman, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Conrad Grebel University College

First I would like to express thanks Willard Swartley for his comments earlier; I wish I had time to consider these before making my own. As it stands I will frame my comments in three general areas, and then describe some implications for how these understandings orient my scholarship.

Embodied Word Fully aware of many different and competing claims, as a Mennonite Christian I understand Jesus Christ to be the fullest incarnation or embodiment of the Word of God. This is not a dualistic stance that somehow plays ‘spirit’ off against ‘body’, but the divine Word that is embodied. What’s more, the logos or Word employed throughout John is one of the terms used more generally for ‘wisdom’ in the ancient world. So not only is this Word embodied, but it also reveals God’s wisdom.

While this is not controversial (I certainly hope not!), I suspect that we often either forget or downplay another way in which this Word is embodied. One of my favourite passages with regards to this appears in Deuteronomy.

Deuteronomy 4:5-6 I now teach you statutes and ordinances for you to observe in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. 6You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, "Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!"

The tiny word “this” is significant here. We might expect that the surrounding peoples would recognize the “statutes and ordinances” as wise, but the passage does not say “these” but “this.” It is the act of observing these laws, of following after or being disciples of God, that surrounding nations will recognize as wise. Deuteronomy calls the people of Israel to follow God’s will, and by doing so to embody the “words” provided by God. The mere articulation of or having these laws ‘on the books’ is not enough; it is the embodiment of these commands in a particular people that will make the nations stop and take notice.


A similar point is made in Ephesians:

Ephesians 3:8-10 8Although I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to me to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, 9and to make everyone see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; 10so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

This passage raises the stakes still further. Not only will surrounding nations recognize this wise people, but God’s wisdom is made visible --- is embodied --- to heavenly rulers and authorities through the church. This should not surprise us, I suppose: if the church is the body of Christ, and Christ is the embodied or incarnate Word of God, then it stands to reason that the church is also an embodiment of this Word.

In other words, the believing, committed community --- Israel in Deuteronomy and the church in Ephesians --- embodies divine wisdom by living out its distinct, particular vocation. In each case it is through this distinct people that surrounding ‘nations’ and even heavenly “rulers and authorities” can recognize God’s wisdom. Of course, this also implies that the inverse may also be the case: if this particular people either disappears or loses its distinctiveness, then its capacity to reveal divine wisdom goes with it.

Living WordI am a bit uncomfortable with describing Christianity as a “religion of the book.” It is true that, like Judaism and Islam, our tradition places specific written documents at the centre of our liturgy, ecclesiology, and identity. Without the Bible we would not know who we are. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal for us as Christians is not to read the written word, but to encounter the living one. To use an analogy, when our daughter Zoe was younger we would often want to show her something by pointing to it with an outstretched arm and index finger. At the beginning, however, Zoe would stare at the finger and miss what we were pointing towards --- she was mistaking the pointer for the thing being pointed to. Eventually she came to understand that she was not to look at the finger itself, but the thing to which it pointed.


As important as the biblical documents themselves are, their purpose is to point --- I would use the term witness --- to the living Word. One of the temptations for those of us professionally engaged in Biblical Studies is to become so enamored with our own investigation and placing documents “in their context” (which tends to mean the historical settings in which they were written and produced) that we run the danger of turning biblical studies into an archaic discipline that inspects artifacts or relics from the ancient past. Of course, emphasis on historical context has prompted significant gains and improved our understanding of the Bible, and particularly how this document or series of documents came to be. But to claim an incarnated Word means to recognize it as a living Word, not an intriguing but ultimately ancient, passé, or irrelevant one. While knowing more and more about the documents themselves and their contexts can be extremely helpful, the conviction that the Word became embodied implies that we should not stop there.

And, for Mennonites in particular, it is worth reminding ourselves that this is the case for both Old and New Testaments. Both can witness to the living Word still active and embodied among us, but both can also be cut off from this Word by other interests, concerns, and assumptions.

Creative WordFinally, the prologue of John’s gospel both engages and distinguishes itself from other understandings at the time. On one hand, the term logos or ‘Word’ term was used to talk about cosmic wisdom in Greek philosophy. On the other, John 1 also intriguingly parallels a rabbinic discussion of Gen. 1:1 that draws on Proverbs 8:22 and equates ‘wisdom’ with Torah. Thus, John 1 seems both distinct from and engaged in such discussions. Like the Genesis Rabbah12 John 1 builds on the Prov. 8 passage, and like Greek philosophy it seems concerned with ‘cosmic order.’ However, John shifts the center of gravity from the ‘Torah’/law (Pentateuch) on one hand and from a 12 The Genesis Rabbah is a rabbinic commentary traditionally assigned to about the 3rd century AD (or CE). Its discussion of Gen. 1:1 moves immediately to Prov. 8, prompted by v. 22 in which personified Wisdom says: “The LORD created me in the beginning of his work…” Seeing “in the beginning” as a link to Gen. 1 and by associating Wisdom with Torah (law or instruction), the rabbis suggest that God created the world through Torah. The point being made here is simply that this reflects a similar interpretive move as John’s Gospel where the world is created through the ‘Word,’ which is then identified as incarnated in Jesus Christ. For this discussion with explanation, see: Jacob Neusner, Confronting Creation: How Judaism Reads Genesis (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 14ff.


philosophical principle on the other to this particular embodied and living Word, Jesus Christ. In effect, John’s prologue addresses similar questions raised in both Greek philosophy and rabbinic exegesis, but asserts a significantly different answer.

And again, this Word is involved in the creation of the world. As such, it should not surprise us when we find elements that witness to revelation not only within the Christian family but outside of the church as well, within our physical environment and even in other religions. To this end, I am glad that we have musicians, artists, biologists, and others engaging this issue of the incarnation, since the Word’s creative role suggests that these are very important voices to bring to the table.

ImplicationsTo return to the beginning, I will outline several implications from what I have just said that orient my scholarship. While these may resonate to varying degrees with your own perspectives, my comments here are unapologetically autobiographical.

First, and perhaps foremost for me, I think it is extremely important to maintain a continual, direct, and conscious link between the written words that witness to the living Word and the contemporary embodiment of this Word in the church. If we are interested in reading the Bible as Scripture and not just another ancient historical document then we need to take the “original setting” of the Bible in the church seriously, both historically and in our contemporary setting. Likewise, taking our role as church seriously necessarily implies interaction with Scripture --- and our entire Scripture, Old Testament and New.

Second, I do not think that we have taken full advantage of the biblical resources at our disposal to witness to this living Word, and here my own passion lies in exploring voices from the Old Testament that have often been overlooked or even sidelined in the Mennonite tradition. I am continually struck by how contemporary concerns with land, ecology, militarization, political engagement, globalization, economics, business practices, family dynamics, sexuality, and many others would benefit exponentially from increased engagement with the Old Testament. Indeed, I would suggest that the Old Testament offers more and often better resources than the New in many of these areas. It is worth reminding ourselves that neither Jesus nor the New Testament writers envisioned themselves as replacing the


Scriptures they treasured (what we call the Old Testament). This material remains a significant theological witness to the embodied, living, and creative Word of God.

Third, I think we require a more robust understanding of the wisdom of God beyond our explicitly Christian traditions. How do we account for the physical sciences, medicine, or even fine and performing arts within a biblical framework without such an understanding? In what ways can we recognize the ‘image of God’ in our Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish neighbours, while also recognizing our competing claims regarding the ultimate basis of wisdom found in these and other religious traditions? How might our commitment to embody the Word affect our engagement with those beyond our tradition?

Conclusion I have appreciated this opportunity to step back and reflect on why I do what I do. As you can see, my understanding of the “incarnated Word” affects the topics I am interested in exploring, but also key assumptions I bring to bear on the material as I do so. And while much scholarship rightfully focuses on the gospels and New Testament documents that explicitly reflect on the Word made flesh in Jesus, I see my own task as demonstrating the significant theological resources present, and often lying fallow, in the Old Testament.

I am under no illusions that this is the most important thing to do, but I see it as my role and the one to which I dedicate my scholarship. To paraphrase my former professor Gerald Sheppard, “I may only be the big toe in the Body of Christ, but I am going to wiggle for all it’s worth to the glory of God!”


“The Word via the World: How does faithful teaching and science make visible the relationship between the created world and the incarnated Word of God?”

Crossing Borders between Science, Faith and Society

by Doug Graber Neufeld, Department Chair of Biology and Chemistry,

Eastern Mennonite University

I. IntroductionI remember vividly about this time before my first year of teaching ten years ago, I had a dream one night that I was standing at a dock and I could see a ship coming in from the distance. I was waiting in anticipation—my ship was finally arriving, an obvious metaphor for my starting a job that had been my goal after long years of doctoral and post-doctoral work. As the ship got closer, my joy turned to concern, because I could see that there was a wake created by the ship. In my eagerness for my ship to arrive, I had forgotten this about ships—they do create wakes. My concern turned to alarm as I realized this was no small wake, it was a tidal wave, and before I could turn and run from my ship, it had struck me full force, and I was reduced to being tossed about like clothes in a laundry machine.

It doesn’t take a dreams expert to interpret this—I was coming to the belated realization that teaching is an overwhelming endeavor. Of course, the good thing is that we start every year afresh standing on that dock. Every year we can think about what we will do new this year to carry out our mandate to educate students. Here we want to think about what constitutes effective and faithful teaching in the context of God’s good creation. What is the relationship between the Word and World, and what does it mean in the context of a world in which humanity as a whole is altering God’s creation on a scale not seen in human history, and yet individually we find ourselves increasingly isolated from God’s creation?

The title given to me for this talk is “The Word via the World: How does faithful teaching and science make visible the relationship between the created world and the incarnated Word of God?” It asks a good question, although the title conveys a certain theological depth that I don’t claim to have. I’m a biologist and environmentalist; lately I spend my time doing things like mucking about in streams, or showing students what to do with


human waste. I therefore focus more on the first part of this question—the faithful teaching and science—agreeing with the sentiment that “Our Christian tradition sees the quest to know the world as the search for God.”1

I will not be delving into what exactly is the relationship between our earth and Christ. That is my first disclaimer—I am coming not as a theologian or philosopher, but mainly as a scientist and educator, not-too-long-ago returned from attempts to play those roles in a cross-cultural setting. I find myself mostly drawn to thinking about practical matters of teaching and scholarship, particularly with respect to Creation care, and with respect to undergraduate education. Second, I gratefully acknowledge that these ideas have come from a variety of sources; I do not claim these as new ideas.

We want to think about what it means to teach God’s creation in faithful and life-giving ways. My thesis is that this is most productively and faithfully done when we recognize and then cross some conceptual borders that traditionally have hindered science. Let me explain first what I mean by border crossings.

This summer I returned to Cambodia. It had been a year since Cristina, our two young sons and I piled into a dubious-looking taxi and said goodbye to a country and people that we had come to love. It was a farewell to a life as MCCers. It was a farewell to not only a place and a people, but to a lived reality, and a return to a different lived reality. As one small example of the difference, when I returned this summer, the first thing I did when leaving the Phnom Penh airport was to “bribe” the traffic police so that they would let the “illegal” taxi leave the compound. The taxi driver and I shared a laugh, and he commented that “probably I don’t do that in the states”. No, and although I think bribery is not specifically listed in the lifestyle guidelines here at EMU, I am not in the habit of bribing the police in Harrisonburg. However, “bribing” the traffic police in Cambodia was entirely normal part of life.

Perhaps to some it may sound like a lapse into some sort of moral turpitude, but I frankly had no moral compunctions about it, and those of you with similar cross-cultural experiences will recognize what I’m talking about. They are two different places in space and time, and you are, in a sense, two different people. There are different rules. More to the point, there is usually an experiential disconnect between the two entirely different realities. Both realities feel like home, I have my place in both of them,


Cambodia and the United States. But something about the difference in the realities makes the connections between the two difficult to make. So instead there is a mental switch that flips back and forth: Cambodia—bribe, Harrisonburg—don’t bribe.

This notion of crossing cultural borders I take largely from some rich Native American and Maori educational literature, where they describe how their students live two realities at home and school, and flip back and forth between them. When dysfunctional, students do not see the relevance of the one way of knowing and being to the other. Nancy Maryboy, a Navajo scientist, described her experiences at a meeting I attended this year. She went to a well-regarded, progressive university, but it meant nothing to her because the teaching was fragmented, and didn’t help her understand who she was in the world. It did not fit with the Navajo worldview of connections and harmony. Likewise, I remember distinctly having a discussion with my language tutor in Cambodia about evolution. What do Khmer think of evolution, I wondered? He was familiar with the general notion, but said they viewed it is as “western thing”; most Cambodians, educated or not, did not see how it was relevant to the daily struggles and joys of life in Cambodia. I found this particularly interesting, and it stimulated my current interest in what science means to other cultures. Incidentally, this is true here in North America, where a national study determined that what is most important for understanding evolution is when the public sees how evolution is important for society.2

Gregory Cajete, a Native American educational scholar, describes the better side of these conceptual border crossings, where at its best one is keeping true to one’s own culture but is able to cross borders into science to take what is good for their own culture.3 The same can be said of the borders between science and religion, and this resonates with what we know about working in international development. As one development worker in Cambodia noted “…the most useful roles expatriates could take would be that of helping Cambodians to examine their own culture and analyse whether it has elements… that are contributing to the country’s problems.”4

In other words, the different worlds we live in are recognized, and different ways of knowing can be used as mirrors against each other to work towards a better society.

This is also consistent with what we know about learning. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences entitled “How People


Learn” came to two major conclusions, one of which was that true learning comes by testing new knowledge against previous knowledge.5 That connection has to be made. With respect to science, most students leave science (50% of all intending science majors do not become science majors) because they do not recognize how science connects with the reality of their life. The other conclusion from this study, incidentally, is that students come with very different learning styles, something we are all very aware of.

Christ, in this passage of John, tells us something about crossing borders—he crosses the border between God and humanity and brings his message to us in a way that we understand.6 This has implications for how we view the world. As Francis Schaeffer has written, the incarnation elevates the status of the material world.7 Looked at in a different direction, theologian William Dyrness points out that Christ’s descent to earth was seen by the reformers as evidence for a more “organic or interactive” view of the earth, rather than a “domineering or separatist” one. Likewise, it has been noted that the direction of the Revelations 21 passage (the new earth and heaven) is down towards earth, not upwards. Both the incarnation and the final revelation therefore point towards “God’s very dwelling as being with the creatures.” 8

II. Creation Care and the Challenge to Anabaptist EducatorsHow do we address some of these borders? Before identifying these borders, I want to start by outlining more specifically some of the challenges that are before us. If we want to be faithful teachers, what are we up against?

A. Challenge #1: The EnvironmentChallenge number one we face is what we’re doing to God’s created world. Now, as has been noted, “…the easiest way to start an academic brawl is to ask what an educated person should know”, the practical outcome of the axiom that “for every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.” However, I’ll wade in and suggest that we’d better get our ducks in a row in how we teach our students about God’s creation. Learning to live sustainably on this planet is simply the central challenge that humanity faces at this juncture in history.

Take climate change, the current hot topic. Our pastor in Cambodia, Graham Chipps, once stated that “only the ignorant or willfully delusional


deny the reality of climate change,” and I would tend to agree. The evidence is now there that this is not simply a matter of opinion. John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former Chief of Staff and somebody who knows a lot about what the big issues are for this planet, went so far as to say that “Security challenges pale in comparison to global warming”.9 Environmentalist Bill McKibben adds “Historians...will look back on this as the time when denial finally began to crumble. When we finally began to understand that the planet as we’ve known it was at stake.”10

Since Hurricane Katrina, which was the 9/11 of the environmental world, we’ve seen reports of a litany of possible effects of climate change. You’ve likely seen the latest, a high profile prediction by climate change experts giving 50:50 chance that the North Pole will be free of ice this summer, much to the dismay of polar bears, at least if we believe the media. Regardless, this is not just an inconvenience to polar bears. In fact, the only critique of Al Gore is that his title understates it. It is not merely inconvenient but deadly. It certainly is for arctic tribes whose lives are still closely tied to the environment as they’ve know it for centuries. Likewise there is a recognition that climate change is particularly deadly for developing countries in tropical regions, where people and agricultural systems are living on the edge.

Two points are important to emphasize about this challenge: First, as Native Americans among others have pointed out, this is not just a technical problem. It is a scientific problem linked to many other disciplines—we’ve got to pay attention to those borders. Daniel Wildcat from Haskell University, states that “Climate change problems are fundamentally about how a large part of the people are living.” Second, as science writer Andy Revkin points out, in terms of ethics this is fundamentally about the next generation (at least as framed in terms of the human prospect); thus the focus on sustainability. Holdren expresses how these points work out in connecting climate change, sustainability and social justice: “Our search for an environmentally sustainable way of life is actually a search for raising or maintaining the well-being of all humans, both in the present and in the future. Of course, the most conspicuous places in which this well-being is absent are in the areas of poverty. Climate change and sustainability are therefore very closely linked to issues of social justice.”11

My purpose is not to reiterate what you can hear in the news everyday about the details of this crisis, nor to play the assigned role of the doom-


and-gloom environmentalist. My intention is rather to raise some questions about our approaches to those problems.


B. Challenge #2: Effective Education in a Changing WorldChallenge number two that we face is educational. How do we effectively connect with students about creation? As Anthony Grafton expresses with wit in an article entitled “The Nutty Professors”12, “Anyone who has ever taught at a college must have had this experience. You’re in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room…lecturing to a roomful of teen-agers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones;…Suddenly you find yourself wondering,…Why in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes?” If you are like me, around late February I’m wondering what I’m really doing.

The world is changing and we wonder, as Peter Senge puts it, “Are we preparing students for the future they will live in or the past we have lived through?”13 Furthermore, we are all concerned about student enrollment. This gets exactly to the issue what is our role in higher education, and why should students come to our colleges rather than going to a cheaper place? This gets particularly interesting when we think about minority or international students. At least in the natural sciences at EMU, we’ve tried hard but still struggle with how to best serve minority or international students. Retention is often difficult, and there is often an achievement gap, a situation which is not unique to our institution. Why is that?

Finally, science has had an increasing effect on culture, but the number of people going into science has been decreasing. There has been plenty of hand-wringing over the failure of science to attract students, certainly here at EMU we’ve dealt with a drop in science majors over the past decade or so. Fortunately, this across-the-board decreased enrollment has propelled science educators to think about what attracts students to science and what most effectively teaches those students about science. In the end we rightly live with a constant angst about whether our curricula meets the needs of our society.

C. Challenge #3: The Church’s Faithful Response to Environment CrisesThe third challenge is the question specifically stated in the title: How do we teach about Creation in a way that is being faithful to Christ’s mandate?

The gravity of the environmental challenges has worked its way through society, and into the Christian community. I recently saw one of these advertisements where they are bringing together people of very different persuasions—in this case Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson—who are saying that they disagree about many things, but on climate change they agree. Especially as the election nears, there is a growing recognition that there is a sea change in the evangelical movement. Survey data show that concern


about the old hot button items of abortion and homosexuality are waning, as evangelicals shift more towards issues of social justice and the environment.14

If the global scale of these injustices is unique to our era, and the church is becoming conscious of it, then our challenge as the church is to formulate our unique response. The United Presbyterian Church states in the Confession of 1967 “In each time and place there are particular problems and crises through which God calls the church to act...[the church] seeks to discern the will of God and learn how to obey in these concrete situations.” If faithfulness means that we come to the world in the same way as did the incarnated word—with an attitude of care and responsibility—then what do we as a church do?

More to the point for us, what is the niche for Anabaptists, and specifically for Anabaptist educational institutions? Do we have something special to contribute? Merely being green is not distinctive, as we discovered last year while working on green building ideas for our new science center. It became clear that a green building is no longer cutting-edge, but is more-so keeping up with what is becoming commonplace.

III. Science and Border Crossings So the struggles I’ve outlined, as Anabaptist educators, is that we’ve got an environmental crisis we need to deal with, we’re struggling with how education happens in this changing world, and we want to believe that we as Christians (and specifically as Mennonites) have a special place in this endeavor. How then do we bring these together to, as David Orr says, “…equip the young for a world different from any human kind has ever known.”15 My suggestion is that it is not just a matter of doing better science, or being more rigorous. Bringing creation into the classroom means thinking more deeply about how it connects to the whole. As I said, I think there are some conceptual borders that need to be crossed. I want to talk about three of these borders, and discuss some about why they need to be bridged better.

A. Border #1 –Science and SocietyThe first border that needs to be addressed is between science and society. In science, there is actually a movement to bring science more into the public realm. Called variously “citizen science” or “science for the public good” or sometimes other terms, this is a call to relevancy, and a call to recognize the subjective, emotional human component in what is supposed to be a purely objective, rationale endeavor.

It has been argued that our real goal as science educators is to make good public citizens, rather than “idiots.” In its original meaning idiot was


somebody who was not informed enough, or did not care enough, to be a citizen. Idiot derives from the Greek word for private; somebody who is an idiot is a private person who cannot be bothered to engage in the public discourse needed for a healthy society. Ironically, in this light the “genius” scientist who cares not how his or her results are used in society is more accurately described as the quintessential idiot.

On the other hand, the Greek notion of citizen was somebody whose life includes a vibrant public dimension. Originally this could be focused on the local community, such as Thomas Jefferson’s belief that “Citizenship occurred when gentlemen farmers joined under the shade of a single tree to discuss their affairs”. Globalization obviously has changed the relational landscape so that citizenship now has a broader dimension. Citizenship has also expanded to include the earth itself, not just humanity. Aldo Leopold, one of the fathers of the modern environmental movement, advocated for what he called a “land ethic” wherein we have an ecological citizenship.16

In the context of science and God’s creation, there are several aspects to this call to cross into the public realm, to both be and create good citizens. One is the how of communication—what tones do we use, when and where do we choose to engage the broader public in our discipline. That many people do not feel that scientists communicate very well with them is not an earth-shattering revelation. Much has been made of the need for scientists to talk in the common, non-technical language. This is obviously common to all disciplines; we have a tendency to conflate cryptic vocabulary and clever wording with importance and truth.

Why is it so important how we communicate, and relate to people with respect to our disciplines? We purport to live with the enlightenment idea that the facts will set you free, but it is not clear how this actually happens. Andy Revkin, the skilled science reporter from the New York Times, points out that scientists fail to realize that people tend to rely as much on educated guesses, or simply “common sense.”17 Matthew Nisbet, an expert in science and the media, finds in his research “…scientists have the well-intentioned tendency to think that if the public just understood technical complexities better, that their viewpoints would be more like scientists’, and then controversies would subside.”18 It isn’t this simple, obviously, and for several reasons. First, as Nisbet and Mooney point out, there is too much information out there, and people do not have the time or ability to weigh up competing arguments. So more than we realize, “…we tend to use our value predispositions (such as political or religious beliefs) as perceptual screens, and so select the news outlets and Web sites that match our already-formed opinions.”19

What seems to be even more important, however, is that people believe something if they feel comfortable with that person, if that trust is there.


Again from Nisbet and Mooney: “...rather than evaluating the asserted claim itself, we instead evaluate the claim’s source. If the source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often without really understanding it.... Consider, for example, that many Americans who claim to believe in natural selection are unable to accurately describe how natural selection works, suggesting that their belief is not necessarily rooted in an appreciation of the evidence.”20

George Bush understood this, or at the very least stumbled onto this truth. Never accused of being overly rational, he was famously the candidate that we would like to have a beer with, not the one that kept up with the newspapers. I had an “aha” moment during the last presidential election campaign, when during the Republican national convention a radio announcer was asking the reporter why Republicans supported a certain person who did not hold many of the standard Republican positions. From an objective perspective, it didn’t make any sense that this person was getting so much traction with the Republican constituency. The reporter replied with some exasperation, “...look, you’re making the same mistake that all observers do. You assume that people choose the candidate solely on the facts and positions; but these other intangibles are more important.” So there is a growing amount of evidence to show that, more than we like to admit, we don’t always act as rationale beings when making decisions. In short, as scientists and teachers, we need to do a better job of relating. Don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not saying that our only goal is to be liked by our students, that would be a disaster. But I am saying that we are naive if we think it is just the “what” or even “how” of what we teach—the “who” is important too.

Another aspect to bringing science more to the public is to focus more on the relevant problems of society—in other words not just how we communicate, but what do we communicate to the public? We need to make a more conscious effort to choose paths that address the pressing problems of today. In terms of teaching, we need to think more about what examples we choose that will connect more viscerally with our students. As Cajete notes, “science is successful when it shows it has relevancy, then students can get past fear of science.”21

Harvard recently completed an extensive revamp of their core requirements that emphasizes active learning in a way that gets students thinking and applying knowledge. This was led by their interim president Derek Bok, author of the book “Our Underachieving Colleges” in which it was noted, among other things, that students remember just 20% of the content of class lectures a week later. This may be good news for the more cynical of us—hey, they actually remember some! But, it ain’t stellar. Bok says “Students will be more motivated to learn if they see a connection with the kinds of problems, issues and questions they will encounter in later life…”


“Those studying poverty, for example, absorb more if they also volunteer at a homeless shelter.”22

A couple of examples from my own experience here at EMU, which I mention not because I claim to have done things better than others, but mostly out of sheer luck I’ve blundered into a couple of educational experiences that were much more grounded to the realities of the world. One example of a course that worked well in this respect is a Green Design course that we ran last semester here at EMU. The course was in response to plans to build a new science center annex, and to do this in a way that uses as few resources as possible. The majority of the class consisted of students studying ideas for how to make this building green. The students responded well to the challenge, and really became invested in their projects. The success of this course was due to several factors, not the least of which was the ability of this class to meet the desire of many of our students to “do something relevant” rather than “just sit in class”.

Buildings account for a tremendous amount of energy and materials usage. In the U.S., the buildings consume 40% of our raw materials and energy, produce 33% of our CO2 emissions and use 25% of our water. As Orr reports, “By one estimate we will attempt to build more buildings in the next fifty years than humans did in the past five thousand.”23 In the face of those statistics, it wasn’t hard for students to feel like what they were doing really was important. In addition, this is “their building”—it is EMU, it is their community and they took ownership for that. Finally, there was a strong spiritual component to their endeavor. They helped hold us accountable for all of these high ideals which we taught them. In fact, when the biannual spoof issue of the student newspaper, the Feather Brain, came out there was a report that the science center was not going to be built because it was more environmentally friendly to simply use what we have. Perhaps they had learned a little too well—we weren’t excited about abandoning our plans for new science duds...and we haven’t. But the students had learned well, because if we really want to care for the environment, the real solution is that we need to learn to do with less, not just seek solutions that can maintain our current levels of consumption. This is a lesson we need desperately to apply to many areas of our consumptive lives. In short, the students learned something in this class that they would not have otherwise, a sort of educational application of Mark Twain’s observation that “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”

A second example is an outgrowth of my Cambodia time. I now work with some colleagues on a program to teach American students how to do science in the context of another culture. Six students go with me and my colleagues during the summers to Cambodia and Thailand to work with Khmer and Thai colleagues on issues of water sanitation—how to improve


drinking water access and waste water treatment in a region that has challenges we never imagine from here. Students are in the communities, not only living and working with Cambodians and Thai, but really seeing how science works in that context. For instance, their studies on a wetland that provides sewage treatment services for virtually all of Phnom Penh goes to the Ministry of the Environment which helps to inform government policy about this wetland, at least in theory. Our goal is that the students come away being better global citizens in the context of science.

B. Border #2 – Science as Cross-Cultural ExperienceThis example leads into the second border that I think we need to work towards crossing, which is cultural; we need to think more intentionally about how our disciplines work in different cultures. There is a New Yorker cartoon showing a boat that is sinking in a rainstorm. On the boat are two giraffes, two of many other animals, and a bearded guy saying “I knew the woodpeckers were a mistake.” You and I get the joke, but interpreting that image assumes cultural literacy. You need to know about the ark, two-by-two, etc. The key point is that if you, as a student or public citizen, don’t know what other people, teachers or scientists, assume you know, you will be excluded. Our model of communication is often the sender and receiver, but we usually aren’t sure what is heard is the same as what is sent. The receiver has perceptual filters, and we must understand that of listeners.

I had the opportunity to think a lot about this while doing science in Cambodia, which is a very different environment than doing science here in a western country. For example, when I was teaching statistics in Cambodia, I once launched into an example referring to flipping coins, standard fare for teaching here. Halfway through I stopped dead in my tracks, because I had momentarily forgot that, well, they don’t have coins in Cambodia. On a deeper level, Cambodia has many of the common traits of Eastern countries, plus some of its own.24 Some of that difference is perhaps best illustrated by a study on American and Asian students, in which they were shown a picture, with a group of fish on the right side, and one individual fish on the left, looking away from the group. American students interpreted the single fish as representing creativity, breaking out from the mold—it was a good thing. Asian students, however, were very uncomfortable with that fish. The single fish was lonely and lost, and not part of a community.25

This fits with my experience of science in Cambodia. As David Ford, an educational colleague in Cambodia, put it: “The Western concept of… the autonomy of the individual and the individual nature of learning, is anathema to a culture that sees more value in collective, proven wisdom than individual, new ideas”26 In research projects, the goal was not to generate new data, but to replicate data already produced by “experts”.


This is reflected in the following verse from the Chbah, the set of Cambodian poems that all students learn:

To know by oneselfIs like being lostIn the middle of the forest,Or like a blind manLeft to himself, who sets out on his wayWith no one to take his hand.And when he looks for the pathHe never finds it,But wanders into the forest insteadBecause he has learned things by himselfWith no one to take his hand.

The point of this example is to show how much of the way science is done is intertwined with Western cultural ideals, and can be in direct contradiction with ideals of other cultures. The notion of a marketplace of ideas, where ideas are in competition and the best one wins, or the belief that everybody is equal, but ideas are better or worse—it just doesn’t happen that way in Cambodia and much of the rest of the world. So I wonder, and still do not have a very good answer for, how does science work in a place like Cambodia?

I find this all fascinating, but why is it relevant to you? First, because I’m deeply convinced that if we intend to solve global environmental problems, such as climate change, we need to have global solutions. For instance, there’s much talk about China’s energy usage and therefore carbon emissions, but I wonder if we’re really relating to them in a way they understand. Witness the extremes to which the Chinese have gone to put on a good face for the Olympics, in particular to reduce the dust and smog—this saving face is a concept that we as Westerners don’t naturally understand at a deep level. I don’t know, but maybe if we put climate change more in the context of harmony and community, rather than as related to individual consumption, Asians would be more apt to feel equals and our conversations would be more productive.

As another example of this cultural difference, sociologists note a distinct difference in environmentalism in Latino vs Anglo populations. Anglo populations look more towards technical solutions while Latino populations look toward communal solutions. Their views of wilderness also differ; for an Anglo it is usually synonomous with a pristine conditions, while Latinos feel they are an integral part of nature, rather than her protectors nor consumers.27 Surely this has implications for how we approach environmental issues in the global context.


Secondly, as I’ve talked about already, one of the biggest challenges we face is in attracting and retaining minority/international students in the sciences. Why? Perhaps again it has to do with underlying cultural assumptions in science that we don’t often recognize. It is scholars in Native American science education that have helped us understand the conceptual borders that students cross when they go into the classroom. What they find is that students are good at compartmentalizing school and home life, but not necessarily good at connecting the two, or at least traditional education does not encourage this. When they don’t connect the two, then they don’t see the relevance and they are not invested. The transition from a student’s life-world into a science classroom is a cross-cultural experience for most students. Glen Aikenhead, one of the leading scholars is this area, has found in his research that “One major influence on science education identified by students in developing countries is their feeling that school science is like a foreign culture to them.”28 He further concludes that many students in industrialized countries also feel that science is like a foreign culture.

What practically does it mean to cross this border? How might this actually play out in our classrooms? This is a question less easily answered.29 In the classroom, this crossing of cultural borders takes any number of individualized forms. At the very least I think that there is an aspect of listening that is not emphasized enough, a two-way component to this. Typically, our approach has been that of John Dewey, the early educator who said “Formation of scientific habits of the mind should be the primary goal of science teacher” or more bluntly as the physicist Carl Weiman says “We want them to think like us.” I don’t think that works well, and nor do I think it is true to the spirit of science. Rather, we need to be constantly conscious of what we assume students know.

A simple example of making sure science is listening to their constituents is in recent studies on the effects of warming on north slope, the predictions were of massive increases in insect populations. This was tempered by indigenous knowledge of wind patterns; Native Americans there pointed out that increased winds during warm periods actually blow away many of the insects. Another example comes from the Maori experience, where they find that unquestioned application of discovery learning, where the students are presented with a question that they have to figure out, does not always work well. When not done appropriately, it comes across from the teacher as “I know something you don’t, and you need to work to get it.” This can play out in the power inequalities that are realities for Maori students.30


C. Border #3 –Crossing the Border between Science and ReligionThe final border we commonly run aground on is that between science and religion. I don’t intend to rehash the culture wars that have gone on between these two areas. In common with the themes of what I’ve spoken of with the first two borders, I do want to focus on what science can benefit from in reaching beyond itself to asking what contributions can come from religion. This is not giving up on explaining the world in terms of natural causation, but how do we connect those explanations with religion. In other words, not erasing borders, but being able to cross them—this is an important distinction here for all of these borders that I’m describing.31

First, religion has a lot to say about we view our place in the world. How do we understand our place in nature? I think that this is immensely important for the current environmental crises, and so want to focus a bit on this. Prominent environmental philosopher Paul Thompson points out that mainstream environmental ethics has focused on two views, either nature for humans to use, or nature for its own sake. A good example of the “Nature is for humans to use”, or conservationist, view might be the motto you would see as you enter nearby George Washington National Forest—National Forests are famously the “land of many uses”. On the other hand, the Wilderness Act is an example of the “Nature for its own sake”, or eco-centric, preservationist view. A parallel dichotomy has been described for Christian approaches to our place in the world. On the one side is preservationist stewardship, where we are supposed to tend the earth with the garden of Eden as a reference point—preserving and bringing back nature to a pristine condition. In contrast, productivity stewardship says we are made in God’s image, and as such should use the resources of the earth to build and to improve the world.32

What is notable, and has been noted, is that either approach in a sense tends to set us aside from nature and does not hold a very strong view of how we are actually another component of the natural world. This is easy to see in the productivity model—where the earth is ours to use—but paradoxically can also be present in the preservationist view. Advocating for a pristine condition often leaves humans out, and assumes “human beings are unnatural; that we may be in nature, but we are not part of it.”33 It assumes an outdated view of humanness, where we are sort of aliens that have been plunked down on the surface of the planet. This notion is out of step with ongoing discoveries of science, particularly with respect to genetics and neuroscience, that point towards our similarities with other life forms here on earth.

This has practical consequences. As one example, the focus on these two positions has placed agriculture in an uncertain position within environmental ethics—is agriculture a part of nature or not?34 Maybe this lack of clarity works itself out in a number of issues. For instance, the


debate over biotechnology in agriculture has been marked by polarity, and hasn’t been terribly productive, I think, because we tend to see ourselves detached from nature. Some have a view that nature is ours to manipulate at will, and therefore we can justify manipulating the genomes of plants without much forethought. But on the other side, the notion that all genetic engineering is unnatural is perhaps standing in the same pool of water. In that view, natural is typically understood as being “non-human”, or non-human influenced. The fact that we are acting as manipulators therefore defines genetic engineering as unnatural, and not morally justified. But maybe what we are doing is not as different as we would like to think from what nature itself does. Nature does its own genetic tinkering; just several months ago another article came out in Science magazine reporting “Massive Horizontal Gene Transfer…” in a type of arthropod.35 This means that these animals have picked up oodles of genes from other species, in this case bacteria, fungi and plants. My point is not to solve the issue of genetic engineering. But my point is that these decisions cannot be made without a clear view of where we ourselves stand in the natural world.

On the more productive side, the local foods movement and the green building movement are encouraging signs that we are starting to think about how we place ourselves in the world as components of the ecosystem rather than simply intruders. Whereas we in the states tend towards the industrial view of agriculture, this is a substantial move back towards a more agrarian view, where agriculture is a key locus for integrating humans and culture, and thinking of humans as a part of nature.

All that said, what need is there to reach beyond scientific ideas of where we stand in nature, to cross the border into the realm of religion? Realizing that we are in many respects not that much different from other animals is one part of the equation, but it needs to be connected with a sense of purpose. Orr says: “We [may be] ], in Lynn Margulis's words, ‘upright mammalian weeds’, but is this all that we are or all that we can be? If so, we have little reason to be sustained beyond the sheer will to live. Perhaps this is enough, but I doubt it.”36

This connects closely to my previous points about connecting with the lived realities of people. A recent review entitled “Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science”37 identifies a major disconnect between a mechanistic explanation of nature and the commonly held belief that there is a higher purpose to everything in life. They go so far to say that “There is good evidence that “children naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose. For instance, 4-year olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions (‘to go to the zoo’)...” There is, they say, a promiscuous teleology in human nature—we prefer to believe there is a purpose. Of course we as Christians would say there is good reason for this human tendency. What I emphasize is that from a very practical standpoint, we


cannot ignore this in our teaching of science, or relegate it to some other sphere of daily life.

I don’t presume that other people don’t find purpose in life in other ways, but I do presume that Christ at least gives the fullest expression of this. Religion can say something about learning our place in the world precisely because it tells us something about our purpose and about where we stand in nature. The John text in particular says something about the connection between God and nature, God and humankind, and by extension, nature and humankind. We are given a notion that we are embedded in nature, but with a purpose. This passage emphasizes God’s governance—the notion that God continually oversees his good creation. It is an echo of passages like Ps 104 “[God] makes springs gush forth in the valleys; they flow between the hills...[God] causes the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for the people to use.” It emphasizes that God’s ordinary activity is not miraculous, but rather within the regularity of creation, above and against chaos.

Certainly others have advocated for a position of humans embedded in nature, from Francis Schaeffer, who agreed with Lynn White Jr. that we should reject dualism, to St. Francis of Assisi, who advocated for equality of man and nature, and was thus called “the greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history.” White actually echoed this by ending his seminal 1967 article with the statement “I propose Francis as the patron saint for ecologists.”38

Religion can, then, provide some of the bridge between science and society that I talked about earlier. For instance, religion has an opportunity to contribute substantially to climate change and other environmental issues. Bill McKibben notes that if environmentalism is less doom-and-gloom, but also focuses on what we want, why we are here, then it opens up a hopeful future. He says “Perhaps the most important of those possibilities is a new link with communities of faith in this country. Though they don’t always live up to their ideals, churches and synagogues and mosques are among the few institutions that can posit some idea for human existence other than accumulation… Perhaps most importantly, religious leaders who are embracing environmental concerns are saying that ‘This is God’s world,’ …a shocking idea for a culture that’s come to think of everything as ours.”39 This last quote illustrates exactly why I think knowing our place in nature is important, and why the incarnation says something important to the present day problems.

IV. What Can Anabaptists Contribute? All of this brings us to ask questions not only about how we faithfully teach creation, but also back to what unique contributions we as Anabaptist institutions might make to these issues. What is our niche? We could list a number of possibilities, but I want to focus on just a few.


First, Mennonites at least in the past obviously have a reputation for valuing simplicity. Nowadays there is a suspicion of the word ‘simplicity’, and I agree with some of this hesitancy. In the context of church work, it can be used as an excuse to underpay employees, although I personally don’t think that is as prevalent in the universities as might be assumed. Never-the-less, as a church we’ve crept away from the word and the practice of simplicity. Here I should be clear that I mean not just financial or material simplicity, but in more general terms reducing the complexity of activities that do not actually enhance our lives. The very word is somewhat out of favor in Mennonite circles; being associated with a simplicity of mind—and as academics to be thought of as simpletons is a fate worse than death. For instance, note the words used in the various mission, identity, etc statements for EMU. They mention concepts like peacebuilding, creation care, community, service, etc., which are all good words that I agree with. I wonder sometimes, however, if we warrant a more explicit challenge to the dominant consumptive values of society.

I like the implication that in an increasing complex world, we focus on what is really important, that we learn what it means to live with what has called the norm of sufficiency. “The norm makes a simple basic demand: that the good things of God’s creation be shared...”, says the Presbyterian eco-justice task force.40 Thus, a norm of sufficiency is rooted in community, in how we all relate together. It is expressed as one component in the orthodox tradition of asceticism as “a communal social attitude of respectful use of material goods because we are never alone in this world.” 41.

Sufficiency or simplicity thus raises questions about what sustainability really would mean. As Native American educator Daniel Wildcat distills it “Climate change problems are fundamentally about how a large part of the people are living.” So rather than thinking solely about technology, we need to think about how we live. Does it mean that we attempt to grow our current styles of living, but try to do it in a way that is more efficient? Traditionally, Mennonite theology would have been skeptical of this approach. Even if such a technological fix were possible, which is doubtful, there are broader reasons of the soul for living more simple lifestyles. In this view, sustainability is more a question of having smaller houses, traveling less, and reusing what is out there.

A second area for which us Mennonites in higher education can make a contribution is obviously in the area of caring for “the least of these”. We’re strong on our social justice, and we have an opportunity to make a needed contribution to how science fits into this puzzle. As we heard at an MCC retreat in Vietnam once, “Power lies in who gets to tell their stories.” Scholars of Maori science education in New Zealand have understand this well, the idea that by excluding the underprivileged from science, we are


excluding them from the public discourse, on what decisions are being made. They have tried to improve science achievement in Maori students precisely because they will not have a place at the table of science policy unless science education is more successful.42

Linked to this is a special appreciation for listening to each other. Science hasn’t always done a very good job of listening, which is part of what I’m trying to convey by saying we need to cross more borders. The Creation care movement can capitalize on Christ’s special care to listen to others. A theology of the priesthood of the believers, the development approach of MCC—these are reflections of our belief that all people have something valid to say. This refines the notion of an expert, and is actually very relevant to science. Biologist Paul Grobstein has been a forceful advocate of rethinking science. His formula for “getting it less wrong” in science emphasizes, among other things, that we have created a culture where it is bad to be wrong. 43 We need to encourage honest attempts, even if they are sometimes wrong. In part this problem is built into the structure of the scientific process as a whole, it is one of the difficulties in science that there are great penalties for being wrong, but not the reward for being right. The climate change issue illustrates this well—so many of us tiptoed around this issue of climate change for fear of being called chicken little that our canoe is floating farther down the river with less time to think about how we deal with the approaching rapids.

I find it fascinating that Iceland, which of all places despite its inhospitable climate, comes out at the top of the heap in various studies of well-being, which is to say happiness. Eric Weiner in his fascinating book “The Geography of Bliss” reflects on the creativity and happiness of Iceland relative to other more morose countries, and concludes that Iceland has a healthy culture of encouraging people to try, and then allowing them to be wrong. In fact it is almost expected that people will have tried some wild ideas and most of them will have flopped. In the end, though, this builds a stronger, happier society.44

ConclusionPerhaps I’ve been oblique about addressing the formal question in the title of this session. In the end, faithful teaching simply makes evident the composition of the world around us, and our place in this world. If students simply want information, there are over 2 million Wikipedia articles that students can go to. We are faithful when we teach students how to make sense of all that information. When we’ve shown them those connections, then we’ve made students aware of how the incarnated Word works in the world. Then we have communicated that God is a God that is willing to cross boundaries to help others, is a God that continues to work in this world, and has a concern for all of Creation.


I leave you with two images that stick in my mind from Cambodia. One is the day at the Royal University of Agriculture when I was just learning the Khmer script, which is rich in different symbols—lots of swirls, circles, symbols above and below other–imagine Sanskrit, if you’ve ever seen that. I was walking along and there was a banner across the road, so I decided to try to read it. I was conscious that this attracted even more than the usual amount of attention from students—a westerner reading Khmer—that’s unusual, I confess were my prideful thoughts. I couldn’t make it out, though, so continued on my way. Twenty feet down the path, it struck me, I turned around and looked at the semitransparent banner from the other side and realized that I’d been trying to read it from the wrong side. Suddenly all the attention from students took a different meaning: “What’s this fool looking at the backside of a banner for? Foreigners are so inexplicable!” What we as educators or scientists put up there is one thing, but we have to know how people are looking at it. And figuring out how people are looking at it requires some amount of putting ourselves into the cultural realities of others. As scientists, it’s not just what we put up there, but we have to understand where people are standing.

The other image is the wonderful title of a book about the church in SE Asia—“The Cathedral of the Rice Paddy.” I thought of this phrase often as I engaged in my favorite activity, which was riding motorcycle through the rice patties with a tropical sunset—I won’t even try to express in words how beautiful it is. But the title expresses the sacredness of God’s good creation—it is a cathedral. It also expresses the complex relationship that we have with nature, the rice paddy is a profoundly human-influenced environment, yet if that intersection of human activity and the rest of God’s creation is done properly, then the creation is still honored and bountiful.

In the words of Wendell Berry, “…to live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”45


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Endnotes1Amalee Meehan, “Paradise Regained: Teaching Science from a Christian Standpoint in a Postmodern Age,” Perspectives in Science and Christian Faith 59(4), (2007); Meehan writes clearly in this article about integrating Christianity and science in the classroom: “Confident that all truth is of God, there is no fear of what we might discover. Christian educators are uniquely posed to raise a sacramental consciousness—a disposition to see the ultimate in the ordinary—in their teaching...” 2See Matthew Nisbett and Chris Mooney, “Framing Science”, Science, 316 (2007).3Author’s notes taken from annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 14-18Feb, 2008, Boston, MA. 4Jenny Pearsen. The MultiCultural Iceberg: Exploring International Relationships in Cambodian Development Organisations. (Oxford, 2005).5John D. Bransford et al. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (National Academy Press, 1999). 6The Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective (Herald Press, 1995) makes the case that Mennonites have a special appreciation for the way in which Christ brought his message as a teacher. “In some Protestant traditions, the Messiah (the Anointed One) is identified as prophet, priest, and king--the offices for which people were anointed in Old Testament times… This confession also identifies Jesus as teacher, against the backdrop of Old Testament wisdom literature (for example, some of the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes). As disciples, we participate in this fourfold work of Christ.” This should be especially interesting to us as teachers: we do have a tradition of Christ as a teacher, and therefore surely a model of how to teach.


7Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man (Tyndale House Publishers, 1970).

8William A. Dyrness. The Earth is God’s: A theology of American culture. (Orbis, 1997). All of this points towards a fundamental assumption—that bringing about God’s kingdom means acting here and now, and not waiting for some future event. As Matthew 6:10 states, “Thy kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven.” Gordon Zerbe in The Kingdom of God and Stewardship Ethics (Baker Book House, 1991) has a good discussion of kingdom theology with respect to creation. He says “The importance of the presence of the kingdom for a theology and ethic of creation can hardly be overestimated. Without this affirmation Christian faith could easily degenerate into a posture of spiritually preoccupied escapism and total pessimism regarding the present world. Christian faith must affirm the ongoing redemption within and through the present spiritual-physical, social, and cosmic order… There are some interesting and important theological questions, such as “why should we preserve the earth when it is headed for collapse and a new heaven and new earth will replace it?... According to the New Testament, heaven is indeed where God’s rule is now recognized. The constant affirmation, however, is that this rule will ultimately be manifested throughout the entire cosmos so that redeemed life will be fully experienced on a redeemed earth. The final hope of Christians is not heaven, but participation in God’s restoration of all things. This is the ultimate vision that informs the present task of Christians in the world.”9Authors notes from 2008 AAAS annual meeting.10Bill McKibben. “A Deeper Shade of Green.” National Geographic (Aug

2006): p33+.11Holdren, John P. “Presidential Address: Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being” Science 319, (2008).12Anthony Grafton. “The Nutty Professors” The New Yorker, (Oct 23, 2006). p82+13Peter Senge. “The Academy as Learning Community: Contradiction in Terms or Realizable Future?” in A. Lucas, ed., Leading Academic Change: Essential Roles for Department Chairs. Amalee Meehan (2007) also expresses this sentiment well with the statement, “…no longer are we prepared to accept the objectivity of any learning process and outcome; what learners bring to the study and socio-cultural context in which they work makes a difference to learning outcomes. Yet science continues to be taught and examined as if it had never left the age of modernism; to a large extent it still reflects the modern understanding of science as objective and certain…. Christian understanding of ‘faith’ has also shifted in comparable ways from the modernist stance of absolute truths revealed and taught as infallible beliefs toward deep faith convictions that can embrace paradox and ambiguity; faith in the age of modernism is more a leap than a certainty…. In light of postmodern systems of understanding, a key question arises for Christian schools: are we in danger of fossilizing science


in our high schools or, by contrast, can we grasp the opportunity as Christian educators to teach in faith-filled and life-giving ways.” 14e.g. Krissah Williams Thomas “GOP Loyalty Not a Given for Young Evangelicals”, The Washington Post. August 15, 2008. 15David Orr, Design on the Edge (MIT Press: 2006).16Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac. (Oxford University Press, 1949).17Notes from AAAS meeting18Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney, “Framing Science” Science, 316, 200719Ibid20Ibid21Author’s notes from 2008 AAAS meeting.22Jeremy Caplan. “As Harvard Goes…” Time, Mar 5, 2007. 23David Orr, Design on the Edge (MIT Press: 2006).24Seyyed Hossein Nasr in The Need for a Sacred Science (State University of New York Press, 1993) describes some of the key characteristics of Oriental societies that are relevant to our consideration of how science is done: “Oriental traditions have emphasized the hierarchical nature of reality, prominence of spiritual over material, sacred nature of the cosmos, inseparability of man’s destiny from that of the natural and cosmic environment, and the unity of knowledge and interrelatedness of all things.” Furthermore, whereas Western societies tend to define individual is the center of identity and meaning, Eastern societies tend towards defining the group is the center of identity and meaning. Finally, Cambodia has a strong patron-client structure. 25In his insightful book The Geography of Thought (Free Press, 2004), Richard Nisbett has a wealth of evidence for differences in deeper-level thinking, and how those differences are relevant for how different cultures operate as a society, and how they approach problems.26David Ford, pers. comm. 27P. Wesley Schultz et al “Acculturation and Ecological Worldview Among Latino Americans.” J. Env. Ed. 31, 2000.28Glen Aikenhead and O.J. Jegede, “Cross-Cultural Science Education: A Cognitive Explanation of a Cultural Phenomenon.” J. Res. Science Teaching. 36. 1999. See also Aikenhead and Ogawa (2007) for a good recent review of some of the assumptions behind modern science, and how those differ from assumptions in some cultures. 29There are some practical barriers. For instance, facilitating border crossings depends on us as teachers being comfortable and confident in making such transitions. In addition, there is a deeper level debate about what actually happens during a border crossing. Waiti and Hipkins (2002) describe this in the context of Maori science education: “Do we want students to learn the concepts of Western science as the ‘one right way’ to understand the natural world? In that case, Maori contexts are appropriated as ‘props’, assumed to motivate the interest of Maori students. Or do we wish all our students, including


Maori, to learn that there are different cultural ways of looking at the world, each constructed as a coherent body of knowledge for social purposes relevant to the contexts of its creation? Critics of this view say it is relativist and can lead students to believe that ‘anything goes’ providing you can make a convincing argument...” This points to what Charbel El-Hani and Eduardo Mortimer (2007) have called the central dilemma to science teaching: “How can we avoid demanding that our students change their beliefs by learning science, and, yet, intend that they apply in their lives what they learn in the science classroom, a basic goal for virtually all science teachers?” The same question applies to teaching in all disciplines.30Pauline Waiti and Rosemary Hipkins “Cultural issues that challenge traditional science teaching.” Paper presented at the Third Annual New Zealand Science Education Symposium, Massey University, Wellington; November 22-23, 2002.31Neither am I advocating that we avoid “enculturating” students into science. As Charbel El-Hani and Eduardo Mortimer (2007) put it: “After all, each and every way of knowing has its own places and modes of enculturation. The question is not one of denying the role of enculturation in science education, but, rather, of explicitly and critically acknowledging it and then addressing the problem of culturally sensitive science teaching.” Perhaps the closest to the point of how one practically operationalizes multiple ways of knowing is given by Waiti and Hipkins (2002): “It seems to us that the student who can clearly describe related concepts from the perspective of Western science and other worldviews is at a distinct advantage. Such a student could also to learn to judge when it is important to be rigorously scientific, and to differentiate these situations from those where wider frames of reference might be more useful. Those who work at the cutting edge of the ‘science and society’ movement would like to see all scientists able to make this important distinction...”32George Bennett gives a lucid description of these two positions in “A Comparison of Green Chemistry to the Environmental Ethics of the Abrahamic Religions.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 60. 2008. 33Deane Curtin Environmental Ethics for a Postcolonial World. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).34Deane Curtin (2005) has described how this problem plays out in developing countries: “Critics have point out that this narrow conception of what an environmental problem is leaves out most third world environmental concerns, which usually have to do with the integration of people with place, not their separation. Urban ecology, as well as agriculture, is simply written out of the picture. ... This view literally deprives billions of the world’s disenfranchised peoples from gaining a place in the conversation.” 35Eugene Gladyshev, Matthew Meselson, and Irina Arkhipova. “Massive Horizontal Gene Transfer in Bdelloid Rotifers.” Science 320. 2008.


36David Orr. “Four Challenges of Sustainability.” Conservation Biology. 16. 2002.37Paul Bloom and Deena Weisberg, “Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science.” Science, 316. 2007.38Lynn White Jr.’s incisive 1967 paper still echoes off the halls of environmentalism. White claimed that “the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve humanity” was the root of the environmental problems we face. At its base, White was asking how we see our ourselves on this planet: “What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them.” 39Bill McKibben. “A Deeper Shade of Green.” National Geographic (Aug 2006). He goes on to say: “It’s precisely this ability of religious leaders of all stripes to see the individual as part of something larger than themselves that so important. And also their commitment to taking care of the needy, because of course there are lots of people in the world who aren’t rich. If we can’t help them figure out some path to dignity other than our hyper-individualism, the math of global warming will never work.” David Orr’s insights into this are also relevant. “Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world is not sustainable because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode our desire to sustain it and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors.” 40Sufficiency, as argued by the Presbyterian Ecojustice Task Force (1989) is “respect to the claims that humans make on nature’s sustenance. This norm reflects a basic equality that people have, under God, in claiming what they need for life and health.... Respect for everybody’s claim to have enough limits anybody’s right to go for more.” 41George Bennett. “A Comparison of Green Chemistry to the Environmental Ethics of the Abrahamic Religions.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 60, 2008.42Pauline Waiti and Rosemary Hipkins. “Cultural issues that challenge traditional science teaching “ Paper presented at the Third Annual New Zealand Science Education Symposium, Massey University, Wellington; November 22-23, 2002.43Paul Grobstein “Revisiting Science in Culture: Science as Story Telling and Story Revising” J. Research Practice 1(1), 2005.44Eric Weiner. The Geography of Bliss. (Twelve, 2008). 45Wendell Berry. The Gift of the Good Life (North Point Press, 1981).

Some recommended sources for general science news: New York Times, Science Section (Wednesdays):

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/


Science Now (news updates from the magazine “Science”) http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/

Scientific American news site http://www.sciam.com/section.cfm?id=news

Andy Revkin’s news blog on climate change, the earth and sustainability, http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/

Grist daily environmental news and commentary http://gristmill.grist.org/



“How does the creativity of the incarnated Word of Godshape the discovery and understanding of the creation

in my discipline and in my classroom?”

by Jo-Ann Brant, Professor of Bible, Religion and Philosophy,Goshen College

With apologies to the framers of this question, I am going to take the advice I give my students. During an exam, if a student says to me, “I don’t know what you mean by this question or how to answer it,” I tell them to reword the question so that they can answer it. After all, I am interested in what they do know more than what they don’t know. So, I am taking liberties and tweaking the question and making it two questions so that I can say something meaningful in the time allowed about what I do in my classroom.

If the conference planners had asked my students whether they should allow me to answer the assigned question, I am positive they would have warned them. “You don’t want to ask Jo-Ann a question with the word understanding in it, because she will feel compelled to go on and on about how one knows what one knows when one is knowing it.” Yes, I firmly believe that in order for someone to get anything out of a class activity or assignment, it is imperative that I explore the how before the what. So before I can discuss what I do in my class, I need to share a little bit about my understanding of cognition.

There are many paths to insight besides that of formal logic, and I employ exercises and activities which I have come to know and trust from many sources, but there is one path to insight that reigns supreme in my assignments that I find rooted in the creation story itself. We are created in God’s image. The story of creation in particular and the Bible in general reveal that God is a creator. J.R.R. Tolkien believed that this means we are sub-creators and that through imagining other worlds and possibilities we understand this world better. There is a rabbinic saying that God created human beings because God loves stories. I think that Simone Weil explains why when she writes, "There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp


because we are amusing ourselves with lies" (On Science Necessity and the Love of God).

I must pause at this point because I live in constant fear of the slit-eyed suspicious reader who, on the hunt for any hint of the heretical, will say, “Ah huh! That Jo-Ann Brant thinks the Bible is Fiction.” I am laying myself bare. I am a biblical scholar who believes that there is truth in fiction and that understanding the way fiction works, particularly ancient fiction helps us understand the Bible better. I will not provide an elaborate defense for my scholarship but will make the following simple points. Even Jesus used fiction, that is parables, to describe the reign of heaven. When biblical authors sought to make their meaning and God’s purpose clear they used conventions that made it possible for their audience to understand them. I believe that God chose the best storytellers to be found who then used human language in order to express divine thought and to tell the stories of the Israelites and Jesus and the early church in ways that were and are compelling and fraught with meaning and truth.

When I turn to the creation stories in my courses and help students see that they are being told in a particular way, they begin to see that the point is not that God -- as opposed to some blind force of nature – created the world, but that the point is what sort of God created the world and what is the nature of the world God created and what is our place within that creation. We look at the biblical story in the context in which it was first received by comparing it to the story which most people in the Ancient Near East knew and around which they organized their lives, the Enuma Elish in which Marduk creates the world from carcass of the great mother goddess Tiamat whom he has killed. The God of Genesis does not create with violence but by calling the world into being, by persuasion. The world is not a dead thing that constantly reverts back to its original nature and is sustained only by the gods’ continued efforts to keep it going. The world is created as a place of becoming or self-generation and constant change and growth. Humans are created not as slaves to do the work that the gods do not want to do. Human beings are given dominion.

This raises the question of what it means to have sovereignty. Rather than answering that question by looking at the way that power works in this world through conquest, destruction and oppression, I suggest that we look at what humanity does with its capacity in the first stories in Genesis. We create musical instruments and tools with which to make things. Adam


names the animals. Human beings begin the enterprise of creating language and culture and technology out of the matter that God has created. When Lamech kills a man, he also creates a system of justice that operates on the principle of revenge. Not all of humanity’s creations are good. Some of them are challenges to God’s nature.

When it comes time to design assignments in my courses, I take seriously the capacity of my students to tell stories and by telling stories to understand the density of the reality described in the Bible. Here are two examples to illustrate what sorts of activities I invite them to undertake.

In Bible 200, a course in which I introduce various biblical genre, students take a story like that of Gideon and reflect upon how knowing the commandments of the Torah inform their reading by using the structure of a legal trial. They must first write an arrest warrant listing all the possible infractions of the law. Then they write the prosecuting attorney’s opening statement and include arguments, first to substantiate the charges based upon the narrative in Judges 6-8 and then to justify the proposed punishment given biblical law. Then they shift perspective and write the defense attorney’s closing arguments once again drawing from the intricacies of the narrative and the measure of the law. Next they provide the judge’s verdict and sentence providing rational for both that is based upon biblical law and justice wherever possible. In their conclusion, they then reflect upon the questions “How does knowing the legal background help you understand the story better? What is praiseworthy or condemnable in the actions of the character from the standard of justice proposed by the book of Deuteronomy: how we treat the stranger, the orphan and the widow, those who are denied a share in the abundance of a society. Not only does this assignment get them to realize that the meaning or the significance of the story is shaped by the Torah, they begin to recognize the way that the story constructs human intentionality and moral complexities. What is more, they cannot simply cut and paste their research. Every student develops arguments.

In the course on Jesus and the Gospels, students adopt the persona of a character such as the Samaritan woman or Pilate, and in the first person describe his or her experience and understanding of Jesus based upon the material in the Bible and our best knowledge about the social and political milieu of the first century. This assignment requires copious expository footnotes that document that what they write is grounded in sound research


and not flights of fancy. Students begin to shake their habits first of measuring characters by 21st century social norms and then of denying characters alterity, an unfathomable otherness as Emmanuel Levinas puts it. Students begin to recognize that the gospel stories point to significances of the incarnation that defy reduction to creedal confessions or treatment of people as mere functionaries.

There are many other dimensions to my answer to the first question that lead to different sorts of activities and assignments in my courses that I do not have time to describe on this occasion. But I want to make a nod toward one particular theme that emerges in my classes in order to address one shortfall in my reworking of the original question that I was assigned. I have neglected the prologue of the Gospel of John and the incarnate Word of God.

The meaning of the Word, the logos, of God in the Gospel of John is rooted in the biblical wisdom tradition. The Gospel of John makes evident in narrative what Paul explains in exposition. The wisdom of God looks foolish to this world. John helps us see that the crucifixion, something that signifies humiliation in the Roman world, is Jesus’ glorification. No student escapes my courses without learning about how the biblical world operated out of the cultural values of honor and shame and how the Bible proposes alternative bases for assigning honor than that of the world. Most (alas not all, I have work to do in the design of my courses) come to recognize that many Christians adopt a notion of salvation based on the values of guilt and innocence and then live their lives based on social values of honor and shame that are directly at odds with what the Bible reveals about God’s glory. They begin to see how the Bible is written not just to reveal God’s will for the future but also to bring the pettiness and destructiveness of striving after human glory to light. My hope is that they will have the courage to prefer the glory of God to the glory of conquest, accumulation of wealth, and the lonely life of living at the top at the expense of God’s creation.




in my discipline and in my classroom?”- or -

How do I connect the dots between the creativity of the incarnated word of God and the discovery and

understanding of the creation in my discipline and classroom?

by Bradley Kauffman, Professor of Music, Department Chair,Hesston College

I’ve been in conversation with this topic for some weeks now. I have experienced it as something of a moving target, and when I think I have an approach, I discover a new kind of nuance that muddies the water. I hope that these observations at least point in a helpful direction. My comments relate largely to the choral classroom.

What do I observe and what are some questions that accompany my observations?On a basic level, the ongoing creation within the adolescent mind is one of my most fascinating glimpses of God’s creation. But when I’m paying attention, I make as many discoveries as the students do. Perhaps we’re all works-in-progress.

Choral music is known to some as the first art. We can imagine an early primal human utterance bringing unexpected catharsis and then building upon itself. It is this idea that singing is an inherent, intrinsic, inevitable expression of the human plight that compels me year after year to choose my profession, just as day after day I choose my Christian faith. Within my work, I witness the echoes of creation and experience a sense of co-creation. If singing is the first art, it is surely inspired by an impulse to make sense of the created world. It may also be heard as a dialogue with the creator.

The idea of first art raises interesting questions. If singing has functioned as a universal, transcendent, primal medium for accessing the creator, what does it mean to live in a culture that has turned music into a consumer product? That we pay others to do our singing for us? What does it mean


that fewer members of my generation are choosing artistic pursuits? What are we putting in place of art? What does it mean that audiences typically want to hear an “upbeat” repertoire (whatever that is)? How do we carry the responsibility of expressing the range of human dialogue with the creator? When is it our duty to portray joy and when is it appropriate to challenge or possibly disturb our audience? These questions have, I think, implications related to the spiritual and intellectual health of humankind.

A fundamental aspect of the creativity of the Incarnated Word of God that I find compelling is that Jesus’ creativity invariably points us toward an upside-down, counter-cultural view of life. Jesus takes what is known and turns it on its ear. You have heard this, but I tell you this… In the study of music, I find much opportunity to examine this counter cultural nature. The act of making one’s own music in the twenty-first century is itself counter-cultural. The very process is emblematic of a conspicuous choice. Utterly inefficient, we spend hours rehearsing material that we eventually present in a matter of minutes. Doing so, we pursue that which all of us in the liberal arts world embrace—a desire for wholeness and a search for that which is eternally true.

If we believe that the Genesis story and indeed the Gospel story are our story, and that missio dei, God’s mission requires our participation, we find ourselves choosing a counter-cultural path. While mainstream Christianity presents a static gospel, a completed creation, we must be vigilant in our pursuit of an authentic (Anabaptist) alternative. Some of our students come to campus over-churched to the point that they are numb to this distinction. In musical study we can reexamine and internalize that which we believe. Engaging the text, we learn to inform our personal tastes beyond “toe-tapability.” I choose literature with this in mind, looking for opportunities to engage the question of “what does this mean in the mainstream?” What does this mean to us?” Last year one of my first year students was struggling with the transition to life on campus. She ended up moving home and commuting, thankfully, throughout the second semester. Her favorite piece was not found among our “crowd pleasers,” but was a 16th century Kyrie setting by Palestrina. Lord, have Mercy, Christ, have mercy, Lord, have mercy.

Each of our disciplines builds upon specific ways of knowing. In the arts, knowledge is revealed principally through emotion, perception, and language. I am fascinated by the construction and deconstruction of ways


of knowing that leads ultimately to the ongoing creation of intellect. Students come with the emotional part built-in. One of my tasks is to help students develop greater balance between intellect and emotion. When the two are in balance, we build profound, life-giving discoveries.

Thoughts on how I try to cultivate the ongoing creativity of the Incarnated Word of God in rehearsal.The latin text O vos omnes comes from Jeremiah. In the book of Lamentations we find Jeremiah looking upon the devastation of Jerusalem. The city itself cries out: “O all you who pass along this way, behold and see if there is any sorrow as my sorrow.’ Besides grieving Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of the Babylonians, the text points toward the suffering of Christ. This lament has been set to music many times. Last year we prepared the setting by 20th Century composer Pablo Casals. If you know Casals, you probably know him as a brilliant cellist. His compositional output was relatively small compared to his stature as a performer. After discussing the meaning of the text, I asked my students to engage the question of why Casals, not a prolific composer, might have chosen to set this particular text. I assigned a short biographical article containing what I consider to be a plausible answer imbedded neatly within. Casals, fled his native Spain during the civil war of the late 1930s. Refusing to live under the subsequent dictatorship, he lived the rest of his days in exile in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Casals clearly knew some piece of the sorrow we hear in Jeremiah’s lament. When we came together to discuss the article, students (more than one) theorized that it must have been Casals’ divorce that would have precipitated an emotional connection with this text. It was surprising to me that this was the single thing about Casals’ life that registered as profoundly painful. Eventually posing my own theory, I was deflated by the blank stares that ensued. It was an education for me in how foreign a concept the idea of exile is to us.

The story continues weeks later on a Midwest, fall break tour. We were performing a concert for an intimate gathering at Christ the King Mennonite Church in Schaumberg, Illinois. Though only about 30 people, it was one of the most ethnically diverse audiences we sang for all year including Asians, Africans, Latinos, and African Americans. The time came to sing the Casals. At the last minute I was inspired to dialogue with the audience about the piece. I invited them to name places of turmoil that were most on their minds in that moment. The responses came quickly: Burma,


Iraq, Afghanistan, Kenya, the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Schaumberg. There was a real earnestness in their voices. Offering it as a gesture of solidarity, we sang the piece. And for the first time, it flowed through us, intellect and emotion in balance.

I am perpetually, albeit clumsily, a student in the art of question asking. As we pursue artistic ways of knowing, the right question may be more important than the right answer. More important is the task of poking holes in conventional thinking. Doing so, we come closer to a profound understanding of both the creator and the created world. Ultimately, an important discovery in late adolescence may be the need to confess our inability to comprehend the mysteries of creation.

In addition to pursuing good questions, I try to incorporate collaborative language into daily rehearsal. Using language to dialogue with the divine or to discuss music has its limits. Art, like the wonder of creation has incomprehensible depth. It has been said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Again the idea emerges that music is so intimate that it defies verbal quantification. Yet failure to talk about it results in missed opportunities for new understandings.

The art of language itself is one of the reasons I am captivated by choral music. One of my greatest pedagogical revelations occurred when a mentor prompted me to remove a lot of “I language” from rehearsal discourse. “I want you to turn to page 6. I want you to think about what it means to be free. I want this phrasing to be more linear.” However subtle, interjecting the self in this way weakens the creative process. It implies one person’s ideas are paramount while everyone else becomes, at best, a docile sponge. Used in this way, the “I” serves no useful purpose—it only communicates the obvious. As I became more attuned to this reality, I also began to eliminate “you” language, replacing it with “us.” “Many of us are far from home.” Choosing this most basic language purposefully honors the collaborative ability of the group and values the creative insight of each student. This doesn’t mean that I come to rehearsal without very specific agenda or that we become subject to anyone’s whim. Rather, it means that we look for ways to build collaboration into the everyday language of rehearsal. (And I try not to call the students “kids.” If we want to develop their capacity for intellect and maturity, calling them “kids” undercuts this effort.)


Reflecting on the idea of asking questions in rehearsal, I observe that good questions typically address one of three objective goals.

1. To help students discover layers of meaning found both in the text and the musical material.

2. To introduce an alternative to mainstream thought and reveal the ongoing creation of missio dei.

3. To connect our experiences with universal ones.

To perform choral music is to engage language. Much of what we study requires synthesis. We may be singing a dialect, a foreign language, and, regardless of language, always navigating metaphor. Robert Frost called metaphor the “height of all thinking” because it endeavors to “say matter in terms of spirit or spirit in terms of matter.” When we examine the meaning of a choral text we generate critical common understandings. We can begin a dialogue with the composer that illuminates the intersection between text and tune. Examining the composer’s inspiration gives us a way in. We may then be able to do that which is most difficult; to transform notes on the page into art with meaning. Ultimately we expand our ability to critique and interpret.

I have the luxury of teaching electives. The arts are a natural place for students to be drawn into conversation. It is a place where awe, mystery, doubt and illumination may be freely explored and revealed. Because of this, I see students with a diversity of beliefs and backgrounds drawn into discussion and ultimately into common expression. This is truly an act of creation and re-creation.


“How does the creativity of the incarnated Word of God shape the discovery and understanding of the creation


by Angela Horn Montel, Professor of Biology,Bluffton University

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

John 1:1-3 (New International Version)

In the sciences was the word, and the word was with controversy, and the word was “evolution.” It was with creation in the beginning. Through it all things were made; without it nothing was made that has been made.

In my discipline, the Word with a capital “W” is evolution. The grand theory of evolution unites all of biology to the extent that, as the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky has famously stated, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky 1973). One could extend Dobzhansky’s observation to encompass many of the other scientific disciplines, including cosmology, geology, and nuclear physics; all of these sciences are unified in the evidence that they provide for an ancient earth, dating to around 4.6 billion years old and fostering the development of the first single-cell, prokaryotic life as early as four billion years ago.

The general public and American scientists were asked the same Gallup Poll questions in surveys conducted five years apart, the general public being surveyed in 1991 and the scientists in 1996. In the surveys, 40% of the general public agreed with the statement that, “Man evolved over millions of years from less developed forms of life, but God guided the process, including the creation of man.” An identical percentage of scientists from disciplines as diverse as biology and mathematics agreed with the same statement. The stark difference between scientists and other members of society, however, can be seen in the percentages that selected the other two alternatives that were offered to the participants. Greater than half (55%) of American scientists agreed with the statement, “Man evolved over millions of years from less developed forms of life. God had no part in the process.” In contrast, only 9% of the general public affirmed this statement. Instead, 46% of the general public embraced the idea that, “Man was


created pretty much in his current form at one time within the past 10,000 years,” while only 5% of scientists agreed (Witham 1997).

We could spend the entire ten minutes I have been allotted discussing the implications of each of these statistics or what the respondents understood each statement to mean, but for now I want to emphasize the 40% figure. Fully 40% of scientists were willing to agree that “God guided” the evolution of humans from other life forms. In 2002, when the Ohio State Board of Education was confronted with the issue of whether or not to include intelligent design in the public school science curriculum, the University of Cincinnati’s Internet Public Opinion Laboratory polled Ohio science professors. Eighty-four percent of the respondents answered in the affirmative to the question, “Do you think accepting the theory of evolution is consistent with believing in God?” (Bishop 2002). Many scientists apparently do not see a conflict between religious beliefs and the theory of evolution.

In my undergraduate, general education biology classroom, filled with earnest Christian youth who are anxious to make a stand for their faith, the Word with a capital “W” is creationism or the neocreationism that masquerades under the guise of “intelligent design.” No one seems to have told these young folks that religious belief and acceptance of evolutionary theory can peacefully coexist. Some of them arrive in my classroom fortified for the war against secular explanations for life on earth. And it is a war, believe me. And it frightens me.

Individual scientists and scientific organizations such as the National Center for Science Education (www.natcenscied.org) have invested endless resources, both intellectual and financial, to maintain the integrity of the science education that is received by young people in our country, while at the same time many millions of dollars more have been invested to fight the concept of evolution by individuals and organizations such as Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis (www.answersingenesis.org). One can even drive just a few minutes over the border of my home state of Ohio into Kentucky and visit Mr. Ham’s 70,000-square foot Creation Museum (www.creationmuseum.org), “designed by a former Universal Studios exhibit director.” There you can enjoy seeing modern Homo sapiens (whose oldest know fossil remains date to around 200,000 years ago) and dinosaurs (which according to the fossil record became extinct 65 million years ago) coexisting. You can also enjoy a planetarium where their brochure boasts you can experience “a thrilling 22 minute ride billions of light years away to the vast outer regions of our universe” (Answers in Genesis). Never mind that the “vast outer regions of our universe” are more than 10,000 light years away, and thus one must technically discount their existence if one believes that the earth is only 6,000-10,000 years old after counting up all of the generations of ancestors listed in Genesis. Or, I guess since their


brochure uses the wording “billions of light years away” they must acknowledge that the vast reaches of our universe do exist but they instead discount the speed of light. Such inconsistencies can be ignored as long as one is a crusader for the Lord, it seems.

Or else it seems that one can make up convoluted explanations in an attempt to fit scientific data to a Biblical worldview that requires a young earth. For example, one can claim that the speed of light was much, much faster in the past or one can claim that God made the world appear to be billions of years old, when in fact it is only 6,000 years old by instantaneously allowing light from galaxies that are billions of light years away to reach our planet at the time of creation. As Kenneth Miller puts it in his book, Finding Darwin’s God, this makes God out to be a charlatan who “deliberately rigged a universe with a consistent—but fictitious—age in order to fool its inhabitants” (Miller 1999, p. 80).

If you are confused by the barrage of creationist propaganda, you are not the only one. Writes Darrel Falk, author of Coming to Peace with Science, “As our young people go to college and study, they will incorrectly perceive that they need to make a decision that is focused not so much on whether to pick up their cross and follow Jesus but on whether astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear physics, geology, and biology are all very wrong (Falk 2004, p. 25)” Given the war that is being waged against my discipline in the name of God, how am I as a pacifist Christian biologist to allow “the creativity of the incarnated Word of God [to] shape the discovery and understanding of the creation in my discipline and in my classroom”?

I will not pretend to have this immense question answered completely. I am constantly revising my approach and second guessing myself. But, I will share where I am currently on this journey.

Toward the end of the term in my general education biology classes, we begin our unit on evolution in earnest. (Since evolution is pervasive in biology, I try to incorporate various evolutionary concepts throughout the term such as the endosymbiosis theory, which suggests that eukaryotic cells obtained internal organelles like mitochondria by engulfing ancient aerobic bacteria. But, of course, until I actually use the Word “evolution” my students’ defenses are not on full alert.) I attempt to show the students how all of the biology that we have studied unites in the theory of evolution. It is at this point in the term where I distinctly feel that some of the students begin to view me as the prototypic amoral and atheistic scientist. After all, some of my students have heard, perhaps even from the pulpit, that many evils of society, including racism, can be blamed on Darwin’s theory of evolution or have attended workshops on how to challenge anyone who presents to them the theory of evolution.


One approach would be to say that since my course is a science course and since creationism is religion and not science, we will not discuss creationism. In recent years, I have tried to avoid this separatist approach. I must not skimp on my presentation of the evidence for evolution, especially since many of my non-science majors may never again be presented with this evidence unless they specifically seek it out in later life. But, I feel that I must also incorporate a discussion of creationism into my classroom, not only because students are amazingly attentive to such material, but because, like Darrel Falk, I am concerned that a deep chasm is opening up between science and religion that leaves young people confused.

To begin this discussion, I introduce my students to the various positions on the creation/evolution continuum, which is a tool developed by the National Center for Science Education (Scott 2000). These positions range from the “flat earthers,” who believe despite scientific evidence to the contrary that the earth is flat because the Bible refers to “the four corners of the earth” to atheist evolutionists, who embrace evolutionary theory and believe that matter alone, in the absence of spirit, can account for the appearance of life on earth. I present the concept of intelligent design, as outlined in Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, and then point out the scientific arguments against intelligent design, thus exposing it as another form of creationism.

I attempt to be clear, however, that acceptance of evolution does not rule out belief in a creator. To this end, I attempt to explain to them the difference between methodological materialism and philosophical materialism. All scientists use the concept of methodological materialism in conducting their research. In other words, they use only material (matter) as explanations for their observations. When scientists come to a question for which science does not currently have an answer, they do not halt their research and simply state that God did it and we can’t explain it; instead they assume that there can be a “material” explanation. Many past “unknowns” in our world such as the tides or solar eclipses were attributed directly to the hand of God, but we now have materialist explanations for these phenomena. Philosophical materialism goes a step further than methodological materialism and states that not only do scientists look for materialistic explanations, but material is the only thing that exists. There is no spiritual dimension to the world. To be a scientist, one must apply methodological materialism to one’s studies, but one does not have to assume philosophical materialism to be a scientist. In fact, by definition, science does not accept supernatural explanations and therefore cannot prove or disprove the existence of God.

Unfortunately, some scientists mistakenly use the fact of evolution to argue for the absence of a creator. Ironically, creationists themselves set up the


perfect scenario for scientists who espouse philosophical materialism to argue against the existence of God. Creationists do this when they search for God in the apparent inadequacies of nature. For example, Kenneth Miller recalls in Finding Darwin’s God when a well-known creationist used to poke fun at the lack of transitional fossils between four-legged, terrestrial organisms and whales by showing comical drawings that were half cow, half whale. But, subsequently in the 1990s scientists unearthed amazing transitional fossils showing several species that are intermediate between whales and terrestrial mammals (Miller 1999). Intelligent design creationist Michael Behe has claimed that biochemical pathways such as the blood clotting cascade are too complex to have evolved and therefore had to be designed by a “designer.” Since publication of his book (and actually even before its publication), science has assembled much evidence that such pathways could have gradually evolved by co-opting existing proteins for new functions. With each new materialistic explanation, the creationist must flee to the next gap in our knowledge to search for God. And when that gap, too, is filled by science, the philosophical materialists are standing ready to falsely assert that once again science has disproved the existence of God.

And this is exactly what the creationists and some of my students fear: that accepting the scientific explanation for life will leave them with a powerless God who is out of a job. To illustrate to my students that they need not fear for their faith when they accept reason, I introduce my students to several scientists and theologians who go beyond the god-of-the-gaps theology and write from the perspective of theistic evolution, including John Haught, Nancey Murphy, and Ken Miller. For example, in his book God After Darwin theologian John Haught writes, “For if ultimate reality is conceived of…as self-emptying, suffering love, we should already anticipate that nature will give every appearance of being in some sense autonomously creative… Since it is the nature of love, even at the human level, to refrain from coercive manipulation of others, we should not expect the world that a generous God called into being to be instantaneously ordered to perfection. Instead, in the presence of the self-restraint befitting an absolutely self-giving love, the world would unfold by responding to the divine allurement at its own pace and in its own particular way” (Haught 2000, p.53). We readily accept that God has granted free will to us as humans. Would we not expect God to do the same with the rest of creation?

In one of my courses, I have had my students read the entire book, Coming to Peace with Science, which in addition to doing a marvelous job of explaining the evidence for evolution, emphasizes that the Bible was meant to bring people to God and not as a science textbook. In the book, evangelical Christian and scientist Darrel Falk also points out that God could not have spoken in the language of evolution to the prophets of the Bible considering that society at the time would not have comprehended


such concepts and the inclusion of such concepts would have detracted from the central message that God is loving.

Although I have not yet found time in class to explain the concept to my students, many writers have suggested that the indeterminacy at the level of subatomic particles means that we can never know everything about nature. We cannot know, for example, when a particular radioactive atom will decay, thus resulting in a DNA mutation, which is the raw material upon which natural selection works. This leaves room for the divine hand to function within natural laws. Such divine guidance would not be detectable to scientists and would allow for divine nudging.

So, do I bring my students to peace? Well, probably not entirely. I am afraid that I fail at this objective due to lack of time for discussions with students and the reality that I have other content to deliver. Even if I could dedicate my entire course to the topic, some students would still leave my course with conflict in their mind. Questions that still remain are how to incorporate the stories of Adam and Eve or of Noah’s flood or concepts of the human soul into a worldview that encompasses gradual human evolution from less intelligent life forms over millions of years. Such questions will require reading and soul searching beyond my course. But, I do hope that the seeds of desire to learn more are planted and that my students can grow a faith that is strong enough to accept that “the creativity of the incarnated Word of God” can encompass the Word evolution.

A creation that has taken billions of years to “unfold by responding to the divine allurement” can be all that more miraculous and awe-inspiring. A recognition that the owl or epiphytic plant or even fungal species that is on the verge of extinction due to habitat destruction took several thousand or million years to evolve into the distinct species it is today is necessary. To recognize the interwoven dependencies within ecosystems, whose intricacies scientists have only begun to understand is important to developing a deeper appreciation for the creation.

For example, in one of my courses, to illustrate this I describe the discovery that a species of tropical ants not only cultivates a fungus to feed itself, but the ants also play host to a species of bacteria that produce antibiotics that prevent the overgrowth of a parasitic fungus that would otherwise destroy the ants’ fungal garden (Currie 1999). This past year during my sabbatical, I attended a seminar where a speaker suggested that herpes viruses that many children acquire during childhood (we’re not talking the venereal kind here, but rather species of herpes viruses such as HHV6 or EBV) may confer protection from bacterial infection or even cancer. Since we house these viruses for life once they have infected us, the speaker was suggesting that the viruses are maintaining the immune system in a slightly activated


state, and he coined the term “benevogens” (in contrast to “pathogens”) to describe this relationship between us and the viruses. A full understanding of the symbiotic relationships that have evolved among living creatures is beyond our grasp. The creative power of the creation is nearly incomprehensible.

In other sections of my courses, I emphasize an understanding of how human population growth threatens the rest of creation, how humans have disrupted the balance in the carbon cycle to bring about global climate change, how the burning of fossil fuels creates acidic precipitation , and how other environmental issues such as eutrophication must be addressed. The creativity of the creation is being challenged in ways that it has not in the nearly four-billion-year history of life on earth. The intricate relationships that evolved over millions of years are being altered or destroyed. Perhaps an understanding of a creation to which we are inextricably linked by the very sequences of our DNA held in every cell in our body can inspire our stewardship of that creation.


References

Answers in Genesis. Retrieved July22, 2008 from www.creationmuseum.org/assets/pdf/creation-museum/cm-brochure.pdf

Behe, Michael. (1996). Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. New York: Free Press.

Bishop, George. (2002, October 15). Majority of Ohio Science Professors and Public Agree: “Intelligent Design” Mostly about Religion. Retrieved July 24, 2008, from the National Center for Scientific Education Web site: http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/733_ohio_scientists39_intellige_10_15_2002.asp

Currie, C.R., Scott, J.A., Summerbell, R.C., & Malloch, D. (1999). Fungus-growing ants use antibiotic-producing bacteria to control garden parasites. Nature, 398, 701- 704.

Dobzhansky, Theodosius (1973). Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. The American Biology Teacher, 35(3), 125-129.

Falk, Darrel. (2004). Coming to Peace with Science: Bridging the Worlds Between Faith and Biology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Haught, John. (2000). God After Darwin. Boulder: Westview Press.

Miller, Kenneth R. (1999). Finding Darwin’s God. New York: HarperCollins.

Scott, Eugenie. (2000). The Creation/Evolution Continuum. Retrieved July 14, 2008, from the National Center for Scientific Education Web site: http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/9213_the_creationevolution_continu_12_7_2000.asp.

Witham, Larry. (1997, April 11). Many scientists see God's hand in evolution. The Washington Times, p. A8.



in my discipline and in my classroom?”The Word and the World

by Don S. Lemons, Professor of Physics, Bethel College

This conference of Mennonite college and university faculty convenes a natural grouping. Not only do we share the common, daily, tasks of teaching and learning in small, values-oriented, liberal arts institutions. We work under the protection of a particular church – one whose primary goal is to form radical disciples of Christ. But these common tasks and this particular discipleship don’t always cohere. There are tensions; we are pulled in different directions; we separate our lives into isolated parts. We try to be, after all, modern professionals with an ancient faith.

Our theme – the Word and the World – point to the two poles between which our lives are stretched. Thus our theme poses a problem and asks a question but it also suggests a direction in which to look for answers. Fortuitously, these terms neatly describe the two texts we, at Bethel, have chosen to study this year in our senior capstone course: the biblical book of Genesis and “Sacred Cosmos” an extended theological argument by Terrence Nichols who, as the title suggests, sees the cosmos sacramentally, that is, as mediating God’s grace.

As Christians, we believe the Bible, while not the Word Incarnate, is the Word “in text” and as such gives witness to the Word Incarnate. This Word created the universe and declared it “good.” This Word is the life of the world and the light that overcomes darkness. Against the Word, I rhetorically place my “world”, not because it so important, but because I know it especially well and, as a physicist, my world concretizes our common problem. The scientist’s world is a highly structured system of impersonal elements related by deterministic or probabilistic laws that describe processes set into motion by initially random conditions. The effect of these laws and initial conditions, as mediated through inherited genomic sequences, determines our behavior – presumably everything from why I have brown eyes to why I showed up at this conference. In this world picture, usually called “metaphysical naturalism,” there is no place for the efficacy of the Word.

Herein lies a problem and I think not one only for me but one for all modern people. If we accept the scientist’s world as a complete picture of the actual world, we are left with certain problems – our daily dependence on


the ability to act freely, if missing, undermines the very trustworthiness of our truth claims about “the way things are.” If we accept metaphysical naturalism, our very strong sense that it is wrong to torture people, for instance, is merely a feeling that may or may not confer evolutionary advantage – the personal froth on an underlying impersonal dynamic. We could argue these points.

But my primary aim is to examine the alternative. Suppose we do believe in and aspire to trust in a triune god who creates the universe, a god who cares for us personally and has responded to the human condition with a bold act of self-denying love that in the fullness of time and in the communion of the Holy Spirit conquers sin and death. Then we have a different picture, with different problems, and a different question namely: “How do we incorporate the intimate personal reality of this Word into the seeming impersonal reality of our world?”

My responses to this question, after such a long introduction, may seem anti-climactic. But life is not an easy game and we don’t get to practice. So instead of tendering an argument or offering advice, I’d rather make confession. Confession presumes only that I am honest and that you are willing auditors. And since time is short, I’ve worked on constructing concise formulations.

I. Physics is not the World.As a teacher at a small college in which knowledge is structured into specialized disciplines I have often felt pressured to assume the role of “Mr. Physics.” Being “Mr. Physics” means being prepared to retail the latest, most exciting developments in my field to naïve auditors; it means being ready to argue the case that my discipline offers, not only unique insights, but a point of view that is absolutely necessary to understanding the larger world and making our way in it; it means implying that me and my students are especially privileged beings.

But the physical world is not the world. Studying physics is like the appreciation of a lovely jewel – the word “cosmos” refers to this kind of visible beauty and order. We can admire and polish it; we can glorify it in all modesty; but in the end we can put it away in order to admire other jewels. Physics is a world, but not the world.

II. Physics is not the Word.Physics teachers regularly chastise themselves for not having the imagination to organize their material around a captivating narrative. Rather, first semester introductory physics begins with tossing rocks and, after much intolerable math, ends with the heat death of the universe. But “literature envy,” and I have a bit of it, is not the answer. Physics is not organized around stories and I should not pretend that it is.


Neither should I try to theologize on my subject. I could say, for instance, that God created Maxwell’s equations and then there was light or God created the “standard model” or the “second law of thermodynamics” and then said, “This too is good.” But my students come to my classes to learn physics not to hear sermons about physics. When tempted to preach about my subject I say the Jesus prayer and then “Back off, Satan!” Physics is not the Word.

III. The World and the WordSo “How do I incorporate the personal reality of this Word into the seeming impersonal reality of our World?” The short answer is: to be a servant at the College and an appreciator and enabler of my colleagues work.

I should not have to worry about garnering the proper respect for physics or for myself. My colleagues are the most credible defenders of my work. Likewise, my most serious responsibility is to understand, appreciate, and defend the work of my colleagues. I tell myself that the means to this end are the usual ones: I should cooperate with others, serve on committees, not hide an honest opinion but refuse to dismiss others or condescend to them, do not put yourself first. I am not only or even primarily an expositor of physics but rather a servant of my students and my colleagues.

Fortunately, I have role models at Bethel – several of whom are here – and I intend to close by mentioning these colleagues and friends. Bill Eash teaches choral music, but with just as much intention he attends student and faculty presentations from all areas of the college and participates with his lively questions and honest appreciation. Dale Schrag’s job at the College is so multifaceted as to escape simple description. But, in all, his purpose and actual effect is to make other people look good – students, faculty, and administrators. Brad Born has even given up the teaching of literature to serve as our Academic Dean. I expect he misses teaching; the job of a teacher at the College has so many built in satisfactions. But we appreciate his sacrifice. These are the ways to live the Word in the World.





by Linda Leitch-Alford, Associate, MA in Counseling,Eastern Mennonite University

The question in front of us at this conference, as others have alluded to, is one of those that any of us could spend a lot of time staying up at night trying to figure out. The question for a short response like this one is what piece to select for response remarks. I choose two words and one phrase out of this vast topic. The two words are “creativity” and “discovery” and the phrase is “understanding creation within my discipline and in my classroom.” My discipline is counselor education; in our department we train professional counselors for licensure as mental-health professionals. These people will be in one-to-one relationships in therapeutic settings. They may also do group work and/or work with families.

Some of you may be aware that the disciplines within mental health (e.g. psychology, counseling, marriage and family counseling, and social work), those disciplines are most predominantly centered on understanding the individual. There is emerging, within the mental health professions, some thinking about community context in the treatment process. However, even in the spaces where context is given consideration, there is little conversation about how we actually live in community.

I came to Eastern Mennonite having done some academic work, but primarily I have been a practitioner. Because I had spent 23 years in full-time private practice, I came to EMU more as a practitioner than a scholar. I would like to think that my teaching and research agenda are scholarly, but I am a very practical person, raised in a blue-collar family where we needed to know where “the rubber meets the road” and were not necessarily concerned with discussions of theory. So that is a part of what I bring to professional and academic life.

Balancing: Individual and CommunityOne of the things that I have struggled with throughout my professional career is the need for balance between individual and the community context in which the individual lives and interacts. It is my belief that if we were better at knowing how to live in community, many of the people who present their troubles and disturbances within the context of professional counseling would not have a need to spend that kind of money and time in therapy. As an aside, let me say that I do believe that there are individuals who present for professional counseling who have disturbances that can


only be addressed by a trained professional. However, I also believe that all individuals presenting for mental-health counseling are better able to move into health if they are surrounded by a healthy community.

One of the things that we struggle with in our department is to begin to think about what professional counseling looks like using the perspective of Anabaptist tradition. I personally would see that as looking at individuals in the context of living in community. My hope is that if we utilize what is known within the Anabaptist tradition about living in community and compare that to what seems to be sorely missing in other parts of our society, we will have a contribution to make to the field of professional counseling.

Creativity and Diversity in Creation of HumankindMy most fundamental understanding of humankind is that everyone is created in the image of God. Scripture is very clear, “…then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image,’ so God created human beings, in the image of God they created male and female.” (RSV, Genesis 1:26 and 27). To me the art of sitting with people and helping them discover how they have been created (even if they do not have a spiritual contract with me). To help others discover the human soul and the creativity that the Creator must have had within that created Word is just one of the most awesome things that I think about and deal with and know in my life.

People are diverse. When you think about the different shapes and sizes and colors and cultures and orientations and feelings and responses to life that exist within the human community, there is this massive creative diversity. It is incredibly fun for me to get to discover that and walk with people as they discover their own soul diversity. To teach students how to discover this soul diversity and how to help people discover themselves is a exciting experience. As I sit in my chair I always have in my mind the notion that this person or these persons are made in the image of God. That is not always an overt part of the counseling process for me.

One of the primary classes I teach relates to professional ethics. All of the ethics codes for all of the mental health professions emphasize the dignity of humankind, and what a fit that is with scripture. Underlying each of the codes we have professionally agreed upon moral principles. One of the key moral principals is autonomy, which speaks to the need for counselors to respect individual autonomy in life decisions and actions. Consequently, I have to think through the balance of individual autonomy and the significance of community in honoring and teaching the ethical code I am bound to as a professional. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2003) was very clear in his book Life Together that (and I do wonder if he rolls over in his grave every time I do this paraphrase) that the community which does not honor the alone journey of the soul is dangerous to the individual and the individual


who does not honor their own journey of the soul is dangerous to the community. This concept is foundational to how I deal with this principal of autonomy. A second moral principle underlying our code is beneficence, which is simply to do good. A third principle is malfeasance or “do no harm.” Fidelity is the fourth principle, which instructs us to keep the promises or commitments that we make to our clients. If I say “your story stays here,” then your story stays here. The last principle is justice, which puts forth the idea that all people are equal and they need to be treated equally. There is nothing in these moral principles that is counter to Mennonite or Biblical traditions, right? Yet, in the world of mental health professional literature, they get fleshed out in a very secular way that does not think about community, so we have to think about that.

StoriesLet me tell you three stories. These are stories from my clinical life. The details are changed enough to protect confidentiality but dynamic is consistent with the case situation(s) referenced. These are illustrations about honoring individuals who are created in the image of God and how that gets fleshed out for me in the world of professional counseling. Clinical work for me is to look at human beings as made in the image of God and to help them discover this truth in their own inner worlds.


Deb I am going to tell you first about Deb, and I have been a little bit hesitant to tell you about Deb because Deb’s story is one of sexual-abuse recovery. A large percentage of what I have done in practice dealt with reports of sexual-abuse trauma. Having said that, let me make two points. First, I know that first of all, it is an abusive-to-the-soul topic. I sometimes think that if this topic is not abusive to your soul, this is an issue of concern. Second, I am aware that in a group this size there are probably 1-2 men and 4-5 women for whom even hearing those two words could stir up inner angst, and I want you to know that I am sensitive to that.

Deb came to me years and years ago and saw me on and off during more than a decade. Deb was raised in a family of great neglect and some violence. Deb had a neighbor who took some of the little girls in the neighborhood, took them captive, and perpetrated acts of torture upon them. This is in a lily white, upper middle class, suburban area of a major US city. This stuff does not just happen overseas, it happens here. Additionally, Deb had a biologically-based mood disorder that was episodic and at times wrecked havoc in her life.

Deb was one of these people who was taken to a church youth group by a neighbor very early in her life. She embraced Jesus Christ as a teen. She was an incredible person and client with whom it was a privilege to work. When interventions worked, she was incredibly grateful. When interventions did not work, she would just work with a positive attitude until we came to a breakthrough. She was a delight. When she was not being negatively effected by her bio-chemical disorder she had a sparkle in her eye. People felt drawn to Deb. She was a marvelous woman of great creativity. It was easy to see the image of God stamped in her life. I did not have any trouble with my theology when interacting with Deb.

SammyAnd then there was Sammy. Sammy presented in my office as extremely depressed along with what we call a personality disorder that had so handicapped him that as a young man of about 22 years of age, he found himself unable to interact in society at all. Sammy lived in the unfinished apartment over his parents’ garage. His parents and several siblings understood his disorder and were getting coaching about how to work with him. This is a lovely family and it was easy to see the image of God in this family unit.

However, with Sammy seeing the image of God was not so easy. Sammy always presented with a bit of an odor. Sammy also was very unkempt. His clothes probably did not get hung up. They probably sat in a pile and were selected out of whatever pile on whatever day. Clothes were obviously wrinkled, hair was obviously disheveled, and I found that I had to schedule


Sammy so that there was a good 20-30 minutes after he left before my next client session. When this was not possible, my next client would walk in and go, “Hmmm! It is kind of stale in here today.” We made great use of candles.

There was one time when a client came early, and as Sammy was shuffling his way out of my office, the client walked in. She was a licensed master’s level mental-health professional who is very well trained. Her discipline is particularly big on multiculturalism, diversity, and dignity. On that day she came in, sat down, and said, “How do you do that? How do you sit with him for an hour?” It struck me that it was, at least to her, a pretty amazing thing. I had seen the image of God in Sammy. Sammy had a brilliant mind. He could do mathematics, write stories, and art like hardly anybody I had ever met. He did not talk much. Probably out of a 60-minute session, Sammy might say 20 words - maybe 10 minutes’ worth of words on a really good day. But I found him endearing and I saw in him the image of God. He and I were able to talk about that from time to time.

Amy’s FatherAnd then there was Amy’s father. Amy’s father had been a United Stated Army Sergeant in his youth, and if you picture the stereotypical characterization,– very stiff, very large-boned, very muscular – that would be Amy’s father. He filled the doorway of my office. Amy’s father would walk in and say unkind, threatening things. He would call me before every session to inform me that Amy lied and that I needed to be careful about what I believed. Amy’s father had been a missionary – not with MCC, you can relax as I go on. But this is not an isolated story. I tell you this because I have worked with a lot of ex-missionaries, and I know the stories. On the mission field he had adopted Amy and others. He had proceeded to molest Amy as well as one of her adopted sibs and also sell her for financial gain to other people, nationals and some expatriates.

When Amy finally told me her story, my struggle emerged. Amy’s father is made in the image of God. How do I deal with that? Sometimes we encounter or hear about people that cause us to wonder, “Is the image of God in this one so tarnished that I just can’t find it, or was it ever there?” In my soul and the theology I embrace, I believe it is always there. We were created in the image of God. What happened to Amy’s father? How did he come to make the choices he made? How did his internal self get so disorganized that he can at the same time profess Christ and do these kinds of acts? Is this beyond human understanding or scientific inquiry? I just know by faith that it exists.

So my challenge was how do I see Amy’s father as made in the image of God? I did not work with him. He was not my client and, to be honest, I was quite thankful for that. But I still had to face that challenge inside of myself


in the times that I encountered him. How do I find the image of God created in him? As Amy went into Child Protective Services, I really had to think about that. There was a lot of really ugly stuff he generated around the placement of Amy in the foster care system and that increased my struggle. Was Amy’s father that one exception to my theology or was I called to relate to him as if I believed the image of God was embedded somewhere inside his soul? Because I believe all people, male and female, are created in the image of God, I had to struggle.

That is the way creation meets my discipline, both in the easy places, which are fun and easy and in the really, really difficult places where it is mine to struggle through.

Note to reader: After this response, the conference members were asked to contemplate about how they fleshed out their own beliefs about human creation, using a picture created by Jerry Holsopple, which was hanging in Martin Chapel. Immediately following this exercise, we partook in communion together.

References

Bonheoffer, D. (2003). Life together. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN-13: 97-80060608521


Documents

fileshare.mennonites.org€¦ · Web viewHow does the incarnated Word of God orient my scholarship? 49. Derek Suderman, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. Conrad Grebel University