Three ways to live

An excerpt from a famous hymn by John Newton to mediate on this morning. I slightly edited off the old English to make it more readable.

I asked the Lord, that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace,
Might more of his salvation know,
And seek more earnestly his face.

‘Twas he who taught me thus to pray,
And he, I trust has answer’d pray’r;
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.

I hop’d that in some favour’d hour,
At once he’d answer my request:
And by his love’s constraining pow’r,
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this he made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry pow’rs of hell
Assault my soul in ev’ry part.

…

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried,
Will you pursue me to the death?
“‘It’s in this way,” the Lord replied,
“I answer pray’r for grace and faith.

“These inward trials I employ,
“From self and pride to set you free;
“And break your schemes of earthly joy,
“That you may find it all in me.”

One of the major points where Christianity (as well as Judaism and Islam) disagree with the world concerns how the life on Earth came about. On one hand, we have a creation account in Genesis 1-3, implying the human race originated with one man, Adam, who was created by God. On the other hand, the theory of evolution, originally proposed by Darwin.

This semester I was asked to teach a course on Bioinformatics, which helped me learn a thing or two about the evolution theory. Without going into much details, I can say that evolution is the best scientific theory we now have that can explain the life as we see it. However, as much as there is evidence for why evolution might be true, there is no proof. In fact, it fails to properly explain many things that we observe in nature. I hope to do a more detailed post on this soon.

But today’s post is inspired by the article I read just now in Economist, entitled “The skull man”. It says that until recently, molecular biology and palaeontology disagreed on the origin of human race. Molecular biology believed on the basis of DNA evidence that human race originate from one man in Africa. Palaeontology, on the other hand, believed in so-called multiregionalist hypothesis, suggesting that men have evolved all over the world from local populations.

Well, it seems that molecular biologists were right after all. Recent paper by Dr. Hanihara, who has spent much of his time measuring the excavated skull sizes (some 4,666 male and 1,579 female), confirmed the African origin theory. Basic premise is that if the human race originated in Africa and then dispersed itself into other parts of the world, there should be more variability in African skull shapes compared to others. And that is indeed what Dr. Hanihara found.

To me that sounds like one more brick in support of the biblical creation account.

Since a recent bible study touched upon the covenants between God and the people, I did a more thorough study on this topic. Here are some of my findings.

1. The covenants form a core theme of both Old and New Testaments. In fact, the very word “testament” simply means “covenant”.
2. Bible describes Old Testament covenants God made with Noah (Gen. 6:18; Gen. 9:8-17), Abraham (Gen 15, 17), Jews at mount Sinai (Exodus 24), David (2 Sam 7). In the New Testament there is a new covenant established by Jesus (Mark 14:22-25).
1. Noah’s covenant - never to destroy the life on Earth by flood
2. Abraham covenant - many descendants that will inherent the promised land, promise to be God to Abraham and his descendants
   
3. Sinai covenant - promise to make Israel a kingdom of priests and God’s treasured possession
4. David’s covenant - promise of an offspring who will be the son of God and will have eternal rule
5. Jesus’ covenant - forgiveness of sins, new status as part of God’s family, new kingdom of priests
   
3. All God’s covenants are unconditional (e.g. do not depend on people’s performance), except for the Sinai covenant which stipulates the Jews to obey the Ten Commandments (and few other regulations). The circumcision stipulation in the Abraham’s covenant is not really a condition but rather a sign of the covenant.
   
4. Note that the promised land and the special relationship between God and the Jews is part of unconditional Abraham’s covenant, not only the conditional Sinai one. In fact, the latter being broken many times never jeopardize God’s relationship with true Abraham’s descendants (see Rom 9).

What does it mean to us? There is more similarity between the Old and the New covenants that we would like to admit. The new covenant, while superseding the Sinai’s covenant, as predicted by Jeremiah 31:31-34, did not change the everlasting Abraham’s covenant, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable (Romans 11:29). In fact, as follows from Rom 11:18, the Abraham’s covenant is the supporting root of the New covenant. Similar to Abraham’s covenant, to become a part of the New covenant you have to be chosen (or drawn) by God - it is by grace, not by works, that we are saved. The truly chosen people, however, will show a proper response of obedience, as a sign of belonging to covenant, not as the way to become a part of it.

(click image above to enlarge)

This is a continuation of my earlier posts on Evangelical and Catholic views on biblical interpretations. There I was quick to discard the Catholic view as being wrong. After giving it some thought and study, I would like to highlight some similarities and differences between the two approaches.

1. Both approaches have similar first step - discovery of the original meaning as intended by author, a process called exegesis. The goal of this step is to see what the original author intended for his audience to understand. Both views also agree that all other steps are based on this step, rather than exist on their own.
2. There is also an equivalence between the second step of evangelical interpretation (application) and the “moral sense” part of the Catholic approach. In simpler words, we try to derive how the original author, if happened to stand in front of us at this present time, would convey his message to us. Here we accept that we can extract more meaning from the passage than originally intended by the author, by extrapolating his ideas to our culture.
3. The Catholic “allegorical” and “anagogical” steps go one step further in deriving the meaning. Basically, they assume that there maybe a hidden meaning in the text that was not known to the original author and cannot be derived by step 2). This is clearly true, as the image of the snake on the pole attests. There is no way the people in the time of Moses could have predicted that it pointed to Jesus crucifixion, as Jesus himself acknowledged much later. Similar, the meaning of some things that happened in the New Testament will not be completely clear until the end times. Yet, the reason why these steps are not used in Evangelical interpretations is because of the danger of finding a meaning when there is none. The history of Christianity is full of example of people reading their own ideas into the text, e.g. thought allegorical interpretations of parables.

However, in my opinion, many Evangelical are throwing the baby out with the water by completely discarding the step 3. There is a hidden meaning in many Old Testament passages. Jesus himself said that all OT revelation points to him, and had to open the mind of his disciples to see it. In my opinion, the best way to reconcile this with the Evangelical view is to see that most Biblical passages have God as their second author. Hence it is possible that the biblical writer was simply recording the events as he observed them, without completely understanding the meaning. But the events were actually orchestrated by God, and to understand His meaning we need to see the Bible in the context of God’s overall salvation plan.

In my future posts I hope to provide more concrete examples of these ideas by applying them to actual biblical passages we study in the context of our bible study group.