It’s time to revise our picture of human origins, and the theology built up around the one handed down to us by authors and church fathers who knew nothing about our hominid cousins.

This is the final episode of our miniseries looking at the impact that scientific discoveries over the past couple centuries of our hominid ancestors might have on Christian theology. It needs to be recognized that none …. NONE ….. of the Biblical authors, nor the characters they write about, nor any of the church fathers who unpacked Christian theology over the centuries after the Bible was written … NONE of them knew about human evolution, about millions and billions of years, about our hominid cousins with whom we interbred and interacted, nor about the spiritual journey that we … and possibly also those cousins … have been on for the past many hundreds of thousands of years. It’s time that we updated the picture.

The four episodes which preceded this one have raised many questions. Today, we’ve distilled those many questions down to five broad categories and brought in a world-class theologian (Dr. Douglas F. Ottati) to help us explore how to reconfigure Christian faith to accommodate that new information that was completely unavailable to the Biblical authors and Church Fathers. Those five are:

the tension between Biblical revelation and scientific discovery. Many Christians like to speak about “the Book of God’s Word” and “the Book of God’s Works” (or God’s World) being in harmony. But the uncomfortable fact is that the two often do NOT tell the same story. And John 3:16 does NOT specifically refer to humans/people, but to the entire universe (which would include other species)!
many Christians are becoming comfortable with human evolution and even asserting that God “used” biological evolution to “guide” genetic changes; however, biological evolution is supposed to be random and undirected.
so much scientific evidence rules out the ideas of:
- a first human or a primal pair, which are foundational to a great deal of Christian theology;
- a sudden appearance of suffering, disease and death in the evolutionary time-line;
- humans being the sole participants in a search for a Higher Being.
contrasting a traditional Christian view of the human condition (Fallen creatures; utterly depraved) and an imminent end of the entire universe as described in the Book of Revelation, with a revised modern Christian view of humans climbing an evolutionary ladder (in the biological, cognitive, spiritual, moral, and ethical senses) collectively towards a Divine ideal, and other species/aliens joining us in that journey on a time-line that stretches out for millions (even billions) of years.
the concept of being “created in the image of God” takes on a whole new meaning now that we consider other hominids, and even certain other non-hominids, on a journey toward that Divine ideal.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about Dr. Ottati at his institutional web-page, and his many books at Amazon; you may also want to check out our previous conversation with him a few months ago.

Episode image by Andrew. Thanks Andrew!

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CW 333: Freedom of Thought and Societal Forces: Lecture 5. The Assets and Liabilities of World Cultures (Stuttgart, December 27, 1919) by Rudolf Steiner