From the Rector

“What’s so funny about peace, love, and scientific understanding?”
 
My dear family in Christ,
 
Like many of us these days, I live with an addiction or two.  Most are harmless (or mostly harmless):  food, television, rock and/or roll.  Some of you know that I also nurse a social media habit.  Not proud of it, necessarily, but there’s no sense not being honest about it, either.
 
Now, in my (admittedly questionable) defense, I do try to use my social media platforms to do more than just share pictures of cats.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I simply don’t have any cats.  But I also try to engage in some aspects of what we once called “the public discourse” in our society, particularly when topics happen to float across my feed that touch on matters relating to our Christian faith tradition.
 
I’ve recently shared a couple of reflections online related to the science of biology—one on the particular topic of the complex relationships between genetics, sex, and gender expression; the other touching on evolutionary biology, specifically the origin and evolution of the human species as we know it today.  What, you may ask, do either of those conversations have to do with our Christian faith tradition?  Well, on the surface, perhaps nothing.  Yet, there are huge swaths of the ostensibly Christian landscape out there in our culture where it is widely, though wrongly, believed that in order to be a good, faithful Christian, one has to reject the clear evidence of biological science on both points.
 
In other words, there are a lot of folks who are actively teaching people that if you “believe” what science proves to be true about gender, or about human evolution, then you cannot possibly believe the Bible to be “true” and therefore you cannot be a “real” Christian.
 
(Of course, when we talk about facts that can be proven or disproven, “belief” is not the correct term to use at all.  Likewise, we often make the mistake of erasing the difference between “facts” and “truth” when we talk about Scripture, thinking—falsely—that the details in a passage of Scripture must be literally factual in a scientific sense in order for the Bible to be “true.”  That is obviously not the case, and Jesus proves time and again by teaching truth by means of parables that he just makes up on the spot.  I’m not going to comment on the bit about “real” Christians…)
 
My dear friends, such assertions are not only patently, demonstrably false but also actively dangerous.  Any approach to religion that requires would-be members to reject reality in order to “embrace the faith” is already several steps down the road towards being a cult to begin with.  Moreover, Christianity, specifically, has a long and glorious tradition of scholarship and scientific endeavor.  Indeed, as our modern university system evolved from the High Middle Ages into the Renaissance, students were once required to study all the natural sciences before being allowed to attempt the study of theology, itself once considered the queen of the sciences.  It was believed that one could not properly understand Christian theology if one did not first have a deep grasp of the natural world.
 
Worse still, in order to arrive at the conclusion that a person is required to choose between being a faithful Christian, on one hand, or accepting the things that scientific exploration has proven to be true, on the other hand, more often than not requires Christian Scripture to be mangled beyond recognition.  It requires that portions of the Bible which were from the beginning written as allegory, symbolism, poetry, and myth (in the grandest, truest sense of the term) to be crushed into simplistic and nonsensical texts devoid of any truth or meaning beyond the crudest and most literal reading.  (At the same time, many of the groups who insist on such literal readings of Genesis and other portions of the Bible also insist that we not take texts like Matthew, chapter 25, literally at all!)
 
Now, let’s be as charitable as we can be.  Let’s assume—and I truly believe this is a good assumption to make—that these ideas, as wrong as they are, come from a place of good intentions.  Folks want to be faithful.  Folks want to lift up Holy Scripture and say (and know) that the Scriptures are true.  Y’all, I aspire to both those things, myself!  I want to be faithful to Christ.  And I know that the Scriptures are, in fact, true.  This all fits together, because as John tells us in his Gospel (chapter 14, verse 6), it is Jesus himself who is “the way, the truth, and the life.”  If we are to be Christians, we must be people devoted to truth.
 
But that’s where many folks go off the rails.  They think that it’s either one thing, or the other, and if the choice is between God & salvation, on one hand, or scientific facts on the other, they enthusiastically choose God & salvation.  Well, as far as it goes, that’s the right choice … but it’s a false dichotomy to begin with.  The very notion that such a choice exists, much less has to be made, is just flat wrong.
 
I believe that Pope John Paul II spoke wisely and rightly in 1996 when, speaking on the subject of evolution, he told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that, “truth cannot contradict truth.”  If we, as Christians, believe in the truth of Scripture because we believe that Jesus is truth, then we must also accept what scientific examination has revealed to be true of the created world in which we live, the very world which was made by, in, and through God in Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit:  “All things came into being through him [Christ], and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3).
 
Our understanding of the material world must be informed by our faith … and our understanding of the Faith must take into account what we know of the created order.  The science of biology has revealed that all living human beings are of one biological species.  So when our Scriptures tell us that all human beings are created in the image and likeness of God, that means that not only our oneness but also our sacredness, our shared spark of the Divine given us by God, transcends all seeming differences and apparent barriers of race, nationality or culture.  And we must act accordingly, seeking and serving Christ in all persons.  Likewise, genetics has proven that even something as seemingly basic and fundamental as “biological sex” (much less gender identity) is extraordinarily complex and truly difficult to define, far from being simple and binary.  And that fact has to have an impact on how we understand such key aspects of our faith tradition as the sacramental rite of marriage, among other things, and it must spur us to examine more deeply any lines of Scripture that we previously thought said otherwise.
 
My friends, these are difficult ideas to consider.  But be encouraged by the fact that our Christian faith tradition has a long and, honestly, glorious tradition of faithfully wrestling with the highest, deepest, most difficult, most challenging concepts in human history.  Episcopalians have in the past been known to brag that our branch of the Faith does not require you to “check your brain at the door.”  Let’s do better than that.  Let’s actually steer into the difficult questions; let’s wrestle with the facts that make us uncomfortable, and the Scriptures that give us pause or make us shake our heads.  Jesus went to the cross for us.  We can, at the least, love him back with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.
 
Peace & blessings,
Christopher+

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