Abortion and Gelada Monkeys

One of Canada’s longest running radio shows is CBC’s Quirks and Quarks.  Each Saturday, host Bob MacDonald features a series of clips on different news items from the world of science, medicine and technology.  I’ve been listening to this program on and off since I was a kid.  It’s always interesting – and you can always count on MacDonald to bring in the “E” word:  evolution.  It’s a subversive approach to convincing the Canadian public of this doctrine, as if the sheer repetition of something week in and week out will make it true.

The February 25, 2012 edition of Quirks and Quarks took the evolutionary agenda one step further.  One of the segments was about gelada monkeys.  These baboon-like monkeys live in the highlands of Ethiopia.  They live in a harem structure – with one male gelada monkey heading up a harem of many females.  When a new male monkey takes over a harem, the females that are pregnant typically miscarry.  If they don’t, the new male leader will often kill the infants and newborns.  The theory is that the females miscarry in order to “cut their losses” and start over.  They typically are impregnated by the new male leader in a short period after their “spontaneous abortion.”  Of course, this is regarded as an adaptive strategy, something that has evolved for the advancement of the species.  Monkeys have allegedly evolved with abortion as a way to maintain and improve their kind.

The researcher, Dr. Jacinta Beehner, made it clear that that the female monkeys don’t choose to miscarry.  It’s something that spontaneously happens.  They don’t deliberately cause the loss of the unborn monkey in any way.  Yet, throughout the interview, MacDonald continued to speak about the female monkeys making a choice in the matter.  The expression “cutting their losses” was used repeatedly by MacDonald.  It was pretty hard not to read between the lines.  The Quirks and Quarks website makes it even more clear.  It speaks of female geladas spontaneously aborting their pregnancy, as if they have a choice.  We’re told, “Essentially they are ending investment in offspring in-utero that have no future.”  Hmmm….not too subtle.  Caveat auditor – let the listener beware!

(Originally published in the March 2012 issue of Reformed Perspective)

Book Review: The Theology of B. B. Warfield

The Theology of B. B. Warfield: A Systematic Summary, Fred G. Zaspel, Wheaton: Crossway, 2010.  Hardcover, 624 pages, $44.00.

Ninety years after his death, Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield continues to be a respected voice in Reformed theology.  Along with Jonathan Edwards, the Hodges, and a few others, Warfield is one of the pre-eminent Reformed theologians in North American church history.  Yet for all his renown, few have given him a careful reading.  Popular ideas persist about what Warfield believed about this or that.  Part of the problem is Warfield himself never systematically laid out his theology in one place.

Fred Zaspel has therefore done us a favour by carefully collating Warfield’s theology into one helpful volume.  After an introduction surveying Warfield’s life and work, Zaspel follows the standard topics of systematic theology and distils Warfield’s thought on each one.  Here and there he also interacts with interpreters, particularly the ones whom Zaspel feels have not done justice to Warfield.

Zaspel himself is a sympathetic interpreter.  A Reformed Baptist pastor in Pennsylvania, he is broadly in agreement with Warfield’s theological bent.  Where he personally might depart from Warfield (regarding infant baptism, for instance), Zaspel remains respectfully silent, just simply laying out the Princeton theologian’s views without comment.  At the end of the volume he does offer some critique, but for the most part he allows Warfield to speak for himself.  That’s not to say the book consists mostly of quotations – most of the time Zaspel summarizes and paraphrases.

The Theology of B. B. Warfield will appeal most to pastors, scholars, seminary students and informed “lay people.”  Like Warfield himself, it is not light and fluffy.  Technical language is used and readers are expected to have an intermediate level of theological knowledge.

There are four areas in the book especially worthy of further comment.  Early on, Zaspel deals with Warfield’s views on apologetics.  He argues that Warfield has been unfairly portrayed by later Reformed apologists such as Cornelius Van Til.  Van Til argued that Warfield did not give adequate expression to the effects of sin upon the unregenerate mind.  Zaspel attempts to defend Warfield against this accusation.  He notes that Warfield did not attribute “right reason” to the unbeliever and spoke repeatedly of the pervasiveness of sin (77-78).  However, Zaspel also states that Warfield maintained that unregenerate man “is able to see the compelling force of ‘right reason.’”  Unfortunately, Zaspel is unable to see that this justifies Van Til’s complaint.  While he adds some useful nuance to Warfield’s views, Zaspel does not succeed in exculpating Warfield on his inconsistencies in apologetics.

Warfield is known as the great defender of biblical inspiration and inerrancy.  Therefore, one would expect a book of this nature to deal with those subjects at length.  Zaspel does not disappoint.  He outlines how contemporaries of Warfield and latter-day interpreters have accused the Princetonian of “rationalistic scholasticism” in his doctrine of the Bible.  He helpfully illustrates how these charges fall well short of the mark.

A third area of interest is Warfield’s thought on evolution.  The claim is often made that Warfield had an appreciation for evolution.  The argument is advanced that if Warfield can be regarded as a great Reformed theologian and he held to evolution, then how can contemporary advocates of evolution be excluded from Reformed churches?  Those making such claims ought to read Zaspel’s careful summary of Warfield’s views and how they developed.  He concludes Warfield could at best be said to have been noncommittal or to be critically agnostic (386-387).  However, Warfield also developed a “strengthening conviction against evolution” (385).

Finally, one of Warfield’s greatest concerns was the influence of perfectionism or Keswick “higher life” spirituality.  In his day there were popular preachers and writers claiming it was possible for Christians to no longer sin in this age.  There were also those who claimed that Christians should not regard themselves as sinners, since they are a “new creation in Christ.”  They denied the biblical teaching that, in this age, we are both justified and sinners (simul iustus et peccator).  These false teachings are still around today.  Today we still need Warfield’s biblical defense against these errors.  Zaspel provides a helpful door.  Warfield approvingly quoted Thomas Adam, “The moment we think we have no sin, we shall desert Christ” (465).

The Theology of B. B. Warfield is a comprehensive guide to the thought of “the Lion of Princeton.”  There’s no question it will be a standard reference for decades to come.  Anyone interested in the development of Reformed theology on our continent needs to have it and read it.

The almighty God is my faithful Father and he gives everything its meaning (Lord’s Day 9)

Stephen Jay Gould is a very intelligent man and an effective communicator.  He’s written extensively on the natural world and science.  He’s also reflected on the big important questions of life.  Here’s what he wrote in one place on the meaning of our lives:

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available….We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer – but none exists.  This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating.  We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature.  We must construct these answers for ourselves.

It should be obvious from that quote that Stephen Jay Gould is not a Christian.  Rather than believing what the Bible says about the origin of the world, Gould holds to the theory of evolution.  He believes that man has descended from fishes and primates and so on.  But more than that, he also believes that there is no meaning to human life apart from the meaning that we make for ourselves.  Sadly, this is a common way of thinking.

Nevertheless, it forces us to think about these questions for ourselves.  Why are we here?  What does give our lives meaning and purpose?  Do we construct our own meaning?  These are questions that we need to reflect on with an open Bible.  God’s Word gives us the authoritative answers to these questions.  In the Bible, we don’t find theories, we find truth.  In the Bible we find the revelation of who our God is.

The Bible reveals to us that God is almighty.  This almighty God is also our faithful Father through Jesus Christ and because of the gospel.  When we understand those biblical teachings, then we also more clearly understand how our lives have direction, meaning and purpose.  Our lives, and indeed the lives of all humans who’ve ever lived and ever will live, take on significant significance when viewed through the lens of these truths.

Click here to continue reading this sermon based on the scriptural truths of Lord’s Day 9 of the Heidelberg Catechism.

Meanwhile…elsewhere

Dr. John Byl has been blogging quite regularly as of late and has made some helpful contributions to the debate over whether theistic evolution should be tolerated in the Canadian Reformed Churches.  One of the central issues is hermeneutics.  The latitudinarians argue that, historically, Calvin spoke of accommodation in Scripture and it’s accommodation that we see in Genesis 1 and 2.  In other words, God uses words that people can understand according to their context.  People in another context thousands of years later have to reckon with this accommodation in their biblical interpretation.  You can find Dr. Byl’s discussion of this subject here.

Similar debates have been taking place in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church in connection with their school, Erskine College and Seminary.  There too, biblical inerrancy has been questioned in an effort to make room for a variety of views on origins.  Rick Phillips at Reformation 21 recently commented on this.

We have more of the same taking place at Reformed Theological Seminary and in the Presbyterian Church of America.  Bruce Waltke recently resigned from RTS because of his position on origins and the nature and authority of Scripture.  Dr. Mark Jones is  the pastor of Faith PCA in Vancouver, BC, and he recently blogged on Waltke’s views.  He says, “As this post will make clear, Waltke has endorsed the work of Francis Collins, and by doing so has committed himself to an understanding of evolution that simply is not compatible with the Christian faith.”  Read the whole thing here.   In a follow-up blog post, Jones continues to interact with Waltke’s views.  He also takes on the familiar line about Warfield and evolution.  His conclusion?  “Warfield did not affirm Darwinian evolution.  In an article yet to be published by Fred Zaspel he makes a convincing argument to this effect, which I am in general agreement with in my own book on this subject.”  You can read this post here.

This morning I noticed that the latest issue of Modern Reformation has an article by a group of PCA geologists arguing for an old earth.  You see, this issue is becoming hot all over.

The Creation Question Revisited

In late 1992 I was just beginning my writing “career.”  I was still living at home with my parents and our family didn’t yet have a computer, so whatever I was writing was on an old electric typewriter.  One of the first articles that I had published was entitled “The Creation Question.”  It was published in the January 1993 issue of the Canadian Reformed young people’s magazine In Holy Array.  In that article I stated, “Theistic evolution is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  It attempts to make a compromise between scriptural truth and so-called scientific fact.”  I noted the situation in Grand Rapids at the time: “Professors at Calvin College subscribe to the Three Forms of Unity as well as the Ecumenical Creeds, but yet they continue to teach and promote theistic evolution.”  One of those professors, Howard J. Van Till, was quoted as saying, “Creation and evolution are not contradictory…”  I never would have guessed that in less than 20 years we would be battling theistic evolution in the Canadian Reformed churches.  If you had said 40 or 50 years I might have believed you.  But less than 20?

The battle is over whether there should be room for theistic evolution.  Those who say that there should be are what I have termed “latitudinarians.”  That means that they are agitating for latitude and toleration for these views, even if, as they say, they don’t personally hold to them themselves.  It’s sort of like the “pro-choice” movement.  “Personally, we might never choose abortion for ourselves, but we believe that people should be free to choose and hold whatever position they wish.  But abortion should be an option.”  Just insert “theistic evolution” wherever you read “abortion” and that’s what we’re hearing.  [UPDATE:  to be clear, I'm not saying that those trying to make room for theistic evolution in my context are also loose on abortion.  Rather, my point is that the rhetorical strategy is similar.  However, there have been other contexts where the issues fall together.]  Interestingly, the United Reformed Churches have unequivocally stated (in 2001) that there is no room for theistic evolution in their church federation.  In other words, they’re not “pro-choice” when it comes to this issue.  We should follow their lead.

The latitudinarians tell us that the real enemy is not evolution, but evolutionism.  Scientifically and philosophically naive theologians and ministers constantly confuse these two, apparently.  What the latitudinarians are calling “evolutionism” is normally known as naturalism or materialism.  It is an unbelieving worldview which includes the theory of evolution as an explanation of origins.  Of course, we stand against naturalism/materialism.  We would expect all Reformed confessors to do that.  But our beef is also with the theory of evolution.  We need to stand against naturalism/materialism AND the theory of evolution.  Don’t let this evolution/evolutionism talk fool you.  It’s a false dilemma that confuses the issue.  Both are unbiblical.  There should be room for neither in our Reformed churches.

Finally, in the latest issue of Clarion there’s a letter to the editor chiding ministers and theology professors for giving guidance on scientific questions for which they have no qualifications to answer.  We’re hypocritical for challenging science on some issues, while making use of scientific advances and insights in our daily life.  When we need to get financial advice, we go to accountants and financial advisors.  When we need scientific insights, we should go to the scientists.  The logic sounds impeccable.  However, there is a fallacy.  It’s called equivocation.  Equivocation is changing the meaning of a word or a term in the course of an argument.  In this instance, the term equivocated is “science.”  In one instance, science refers to operational science.  In operational science, observation and experimentation lead to certain advances in knowledge and technology.  In another instance in this argument, science refers to origins or historical science.  This refers to what happened in the distant past, attempting to piece together the evidence to explain what we observe.  The Word of God directly and authoritatively addresses the question of origins.  Ministers and theology professors are trained to interpret, explain and apply the Word of God.  Thus they are qualified to address the question of origins.  That is a valid and sound argument.