The other day I asserted that Christian theology still hasn’t fully absorbed the insights of Darwinism, even where it claims to have accepted them. This Christian Century article provides a good overview of some attempts to do just that.

I think there are two issues that stand out as particular challenges for theology here: the nature of divine action and providence, and the nature of human beings. This article deals mostly with the former, though it touches on the deeper connection between human beings and the rest of creation that Darwinian science discloses.

There is also an epistemic question here of exactly what kind of status theological and scientific claims have and, in cases of apparent conflict, which should give way. Ultra-fundamentalists might say that theological claims always trump scientific claims, whereas many secularists would say the opposite. But most of us, I think it’s safe to say, reside somewhere in the middle: we recognize that new knowledge of the physical world requires at least some modification (or at least re-interpretation) of certain traditional theological claims. On the other hand, a lot of dubious claims have been passed off as the assured findings of “Science,” which are nothing of the sort.

A concrete example might help us see the problem a bit more clearly. Much traditional theology taught that death was, in some mysterious sense, the result of sin. This could be understood in different ways: death could be seen as the punishment for our disobedience of God’s commands, or it could be seen as the inevitable result of humanity’s turning away from communion with God (or some combination of the two).

The picture given to us by evolutionary theory, however, tells a very different story. In this telling the existence of death long preceded human sin, or the existence of human beings for that matter. In fact, given our understanding of the evolutionary process, it seems that death is something like an inextricable aspect of the process by which new forms of life come to be. Far from being a punishment imposed from without, death is a necessary condition of human existence (at least in this world).

How theology negotiates this apparent conflict has far-reaching implications. It affects our understanding of providence, sin, atonement, and redemption. For instance, if death is, in some sense, a “natural” part of existence rather than a punishment for sin, does this affect how we understand what it is Christ is supposed to save us from and how he does it? Or what does the omnipresence of death say about God’s power and goodness?

There isn’t, it seems to me, any single “correct” way for proceeding here. The Christian metaphysic (or narrative if you prefer) isn’t a single monolithic whole, but a mutable cluster of views some of which are more central than others. To what extent it can be changed without surrendering something essential is something about which there’s been a lot of disagreement. Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, has been alternatively praised as providing a successful re-interpretation of some central Christian claims, and criticized as someone who essentially abandoned those claims. (See, for instance, Was Reinhold Niebuhr a Christian?)

At the same time, Christians looking to be up-to-date have at times been too quick to embrace claims that are properly speaking philosophical rather than scientific. A lot of revisionist theology which denies God’s intervention or the possibility of miracles falls into this category; it has embraced a philosophical naturalism which isn’t mandated by scientific findings, even if it may be compatible with it.

In his short book An Examined Faith, the Protestant ethicist and theologian James Gustafson identifies three strategies theologians use in dealing with scientific and other “secular” sources of knowledge: rejection, absorption, and accommodation. Rejection subsumes scientific claims to theological ones, whereas absorption does the reverse (perhaps with the creation of a “nature spirituality”). But accommodation of some kind remains, for Gustafson, the most viable strategy.

Within the “accommodationist” strategy Gustafson distinguishes between approaches in which scientific findings primarily limit religious claims and those which authorize them. Limiting approaches means, essentially, that religious claims need to be re-visited primarily where they conflict, or appear to conflict, with the well-founded findings of science. Authorizing approaches go further in using science to inspire or shape the character of theology. For instance, a limiting approach might acknowledge that biological and other sciences show certain things to be true about human beings, but deny that they give an exhaustive account of human nature. An authorizing approach might, on the other hand, seek to provide an overview of human nature entirely legitimated or inspired by scientific considerations (see Gustafson, pp. 90-91).

As Gustafson says

Few, if any, Christian thinkers use only one criterion or rule to direct the flow of traffic in any intersection where theology and ethics meet scientific and other secular traffic. Interest in different Christian doctrines determines which secular traffic has to be directed, as I have shown above. Accommodation to traffic from astrophysics is different from accommodation to psychoanalysis: the former, prima facie, intersects with the doctrine of creation, the latter with theological anthropology. (p. 91)

A further implication, I think, is that there is no general a priori way of determining how “science” should relate to “theology.” Rather, the approach should be more piecemeal, by identifying specific doctrines which seem to intersect with particular scientific findings (be they physical, biological, social, etc.), each of which may be more or less well-founded. The challenge is that it would seem to require that religious thinkers be well-informed about particular scientific disciplines and findings and not rely exclusively on generalized characterizations of what “science” does and doesn’t do.