In thirteen years I have worked in a wide variety of roles
on the campuses of three different Christian colleges. I attended two
seminaries. In each of these places the stated “official” stance on Creation
was unique. Within the ranks of various faculty members and departments one
would find some holding to a literal interpretation of the book of Genesis,
while others preferred a framework theory. I know godly men and women who
believe in a literal Adam and Eve and others, equally as godly, who don’t. I
have worked alongside numerous Christian colleagues who believe in
microevolution and others who defend macroevolution. I had professors who
taught that the creation account was more mythology than fact, and others who
suggested that interpreting the book of Genesis rightly was actually a matter
of eternal salvation. I count all of them among my brothers and sisters in
Christ. They are members of my family.
Unfortunately, the evangelical church (of which I count
myself) has often erred on the side of “majoring in the minors,” growing
increasingly concerned with peripheral issues of little importance and even
less clarity, rather than boldly linking arms to accomplish the work for which
the church was called into existence to accomplish. The church was not created
primarily to develop and protect dogma (although I do not dismiss the
importance and necessity of this task), but to develop and disciple people who do
not know God as their Father, and invite them home to their true family.
This week at Toccoa Falls College we finished a three-day World
Outreach Conference. On Tuesday night when Nye and Ham were slugging it out on
the national stage, we were praying for unreached and unengaged people around
the globe who have never heard the name “Jesus,” and certainly do not know how
to interpret the creation account of Genesis. The juxtaposition of the two events
reminded me of a beautiful sermon preached once by Frederick Buechner in which he
imagines a world where God has made his existence abundantly clear by writing
messages in the stars, until a day comes when someone, staring into that same sky
asks simply, “So what if God exists? What difference does that make?” The stars and their message evaporate, never to return.
Buechner continues,
We all want to be certain, we all want proof, but the kind
of proof we tend to want - scientifically or philosophically demonstrable proof
that would silence all doubt once and for all – would not in the long run, I
think, answer the fearful depths of our need at all. For what we need to know,
of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely
brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps
the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our
day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but
who in one or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we
move around down here knee-deep in fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the
world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether
we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence. That
is the miracle that we are really after. And that is also, I think, the miracle
we really get.
This is the true revelation the church needs to be
televising, and it is the message I am certain a desperate and longing world is
waiting to hear.
