LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 200

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200

IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

Christians have used to negotiate culture, what are their implications for the
intersection of faith and science, and which of these models is most congenial
to a Lutheran understanding (section 5)? And what difference does it make
to science if we see nature, and ourselves, as creations, not accidents (section
6 and 7)? Finally, we will see how Christian theology, rather than being a
superstitious relic of our pre-scientific past, provides a strong foundation and
motivation for modern science (section 8).

In response to this, it is important to gain a correct understanding of the
authority of Scripture and of the proper role of reason. Lutheran theology is
clear that the Scripture is the inspired,34 infallible Word of God,35 and as such
it is our highest authority and most reliable criterion for knowledge. Due to
its divine source, Scripture is in a quite different category from the perspective of any human faculty, including our senses and reason. These faculties at
best tell us how the spatio-temporal world most likely operates, from a finite,
creaturely perspective. But we are severely limited by a number of factors.

2. The authority of Scripture and the
proper role of reason

First, we live at particular locations in space and time and our attempts to
reconstruct the past and to anticipate the future are fraught with uncertainty
because of our limited access to data and the need to make assumptions
which could be false (such as the assumption that processes observed in the
present operated in the same way in the remote past, and will continue to do
so in the future).36 Second, although science has been spectacularly successful
in positing mechanisms and laws behind the world of appearances, there is
no warrant for supposing this gives us the final answer as to how the world
really is in itself. Given our vantage point, it seems the best we can hope for is
to discover contingent patterns and regularities: to say that these are absolute,
necessary laws of nature on a par with the Law of God goes far beyond what
the data justify.37 After all, the entire cosmos is temporary and in constant
flux; it is not a place of timeless truth. Third, as Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
taught us, even with the data we have, we are prone to bias—to “idols of
the mind”— in our interpretation of those data.38 A major flaw in Bacon’s
account, however, is that he supposed we could cleanse ourselves from bias,
so as to perform a “true induction” from the data alone. This conflicts with
the fact that sin affects not only our religious and moral faculties, but also
our reason. Our sinful desire for godlike knowledge and mastery of reality

As society moves in post-Christian directions, we see an increasing
number of books on science and religion which assume without argument
that science is the highest authority. While some of these works are overtly
antagonistic to revealed religion,32 it is common even among the friendlier
ones to assume that science can correct Scripture. For example, in a recent
work on the neuroscience of religious experience, Andrew Newberg and
Mark Waldman reject biblical Christianity in favor of a more inclusive, Unitarian spirituality. They claim that it is a matter of pragmatic survival that our
belief in God should progress:
[I]f you cannot change your image of God, you may have trouble tolerating people who hold different images of God, and that
may threaten our planet’s survival…. if you cling to your childhood perceptions, you will limit your perception of the truth.
This is the drawback to any religion that insists upon a literal,
biblical image of God.33
The controlling idea for the New Atheist or opponents of biblical Christianity is that what we should believe about God is defined by what science has
revealed as the best way for humans to get along in this world. The assumption here and in many similar works is that the human brain has generated
various pictures of God, and the important question is to determine which
picture is most useful on therapeutic and sociological grounds. The idea
that God might authoritatively reveal the truth of Himself to us from above
is rejected in favor of a pragmatic theology from below, which does not see
religion as a matter of truth at all.

32
Some obvious examples would be the works of the New Atheists, such as: Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006) and The Magic of Reality (New York: The
Free Press, 2011); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York:
Penguin, 2007); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New
York: Viking Penguin, 2011); and Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York: The Free Press, 2012).

34

2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:19.

35
For an explanation of the meanings of “inspired” and “infallible” as understood by the
Lutheran Church Missouri—Synod, see: ”A Statement of Scriptural and Confessional Principles, IV Holy Scripture,” available at: http://www.lcms.org/doctrine/scripturalprinciples#IV.
36
In philosophy, this is related to Hume’s “problem of induction.” David Hume showed that
there is no way to give a logical justification for our inductive expectation that the future will
resemble the past, because any principle we use (such as “nature is uniform”) assumes that
resemblance, making the argument circular.
37
In fact, it conflicts with recent science itself to say this, as most scientists accept that the
universe could have had quite different laws (the laws of nature are contingent on the “fine
tuning” of the universe).

33
Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman, How God Changes the Brain (New York: Ballantine
Books, 2009), 103–104.

38
See Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Bk I. Bacon distinguished: “idols of the tribe,” which
afflict all human beings, e.g., reading non-existent order into coincidences; “idols of the cave,”
which afflict individuals, e.g., the influence of a mentor; “idols of the market place,” or confusions caused by language, e.g., treating cold as a real thing; and ”idols of the theatre” or mistaken rules of demonstration, e.g., the Aristotelian idea that determining what an object must
do by intuiting its essence made it unnecessary to determine empirically if that object does
behave in that way.

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makes us expect more from science than it can or should give: we want the
final answers and final control to lie in the works of our own minds.39 Another
name for this is idolatry, which makes us deny our creaturely dependence on
God, our inability to cure our sinful condition, and our need for a Savior.

which dispenses with the need for revelation, nor despise it on account of its
potential for misuse.41 Rather, the proper approach is a middle way, in which
science is an instrument that serves our scripturally revealed purpose to love
one another, as Christ has loved us.

Thus, as finite, fallen creatures, our assumption should be that human
thought constructions are penultimate, incomplete and prone to error both
in detail and in their systematic orientation and design. That does not mean
we should give up on using reason or doing science, however. Reason is a
valuable gift, but its proper function is that of a servant oriented to the service
of neighbor, rather than that of a usurping judge that aims to correct or to
supplant God. Luther made this clear in his important distinction between the
right and wrong use of reason when approaching God’s Word.40 The wrong
use of reason—the “magisterial use”—allows human reason to judge which
aspects of God’s Word are (or are not) acceptable. This means that the finite,
contingent and fallible works of the human mind are used to evaluate the
revelation of an infinite, necessary, and infallible God, which exaggerates the
certainty of science and undermines confidence in God’s Word. The right use
of reason—the “ministerial use”— is that of a servant to revelation. Following
Anselm (1033–1109), reason may be used to aid a faith seeking understanding
(fides quarens intellectum), for example, when systematic theology explores
the consequences of Scripture for various doctrines. It may also be used to
defend the faith (Christian apologetics), and to apply the faith in the Christian
life (Christian ethics). In the latter case, it may help to disclose the best, specific means of serving a neighbor, concerning which Scripture is often silent.
Scripture contains no books of plumbing or automotive repair: it exhorts us to
love our neighbor as ourselves, but leaves the techniques to human ingenuity.
Science is a spectacular manifestation of human reason. But for all its
success and power, still science is rightly understood as a servant. It has a
very important role, but a limited one. Science is not authorized to stand as an
arbiter over God and His Word, and it makes no contribution to our salvation.
But it is a wonderful gift for Christian living in this world. As a minister that
serves our faith, science vastly increases our ability to meet our neighbor’s
temporal needs. So we should neither exalt science as a surrogate religion,
39
In this regard, Bacon himself is frequently criticized for his dictum “knowledge is power,”
which expressed his belief that a major motivation for science is to gain control of the natural
world. While Bacon claimed that this was for “the relief of man’s estate,” the temptation of this
power is that it provides the illusion that we are not creatures dependent on God’s common
and salvific grace, but masters of our own destiny. For C. S. Lewis, this was the primary temptation behind the tower of Babel (Gen. 11) and its modern equivalent: a “scientocracy” in which
human technology replaces God as our Provider and Savior. For an incisive, recent exploration
of this theme, see ed. John G. West, The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and
Society (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2012).

3. The proper relationship
between God’s “two books”
It might seem that this settles the question of how to read God’s “two
books,” the book of Scripture (God’s Word) and the book of nature (God’s
works). Yet while Scripture is the supreme source and norm for knowledge,
the interplay between scientific and scriptural knowledge is a subtle matter.
One of the main reasons for this is the human tendency to impose meanings
on a text that are not there, which can happen both with the scriptural and
the natural text. It is easy to do eisegesis (where the interpreter expresses his or
her own preferred ideas, though they do not derive from the text itself), when
we are called to do exegesis (to draw out the meaning that really resides in the
text). In particular, if we wrongly assume that Scripture is speaking in the
terms of a scientific theory when it is not, or if we assume that nature can only
be understood through that theory, we may easily construct a false conflict
between the two books.
A famous example of this is the alleged contradiction between modern
science and Joshua 10:12–13, which describes a day when the sun stood still.
If we suppose this text to be expressing a scientific theory in astronomy, it
is easy to suppose that Scripture is committed to the geocentric paradigm,
according to which the sun is one of many planets going round a stationary
Earth. So the sun “standing still” means that it became still like the Earth. The
problem is that we now have excellent reason to reject the geocentric paradigm in favor of a heliocentric one, in which the Earth is one of many planets
going around the Sun. Although Scripture is our supreme standard, it would
be improperly dogmatic to insist that human science is simply wrong before
considering whether our interpretation of Scripture was required by the
text. The Bible is a collection of inspired, infallible writings, yet God inspires
human writers to convey His message in humanly comprehensible terms.
And throughout the Scripture we see God communicating to us in the terms
of common-sense appearances.
For example, we are told eight times in Matthew’s gospel that the kingdom of Heaven is like various familiar things accessible to the senses, such
as a mustard seed, leaven and treasure. Using this approach, the Joshua text
simply says that from an earthbound perspective the sun appeared to be
still (which is remarkable enough), which does not imply that the Earth

40
For an excellent discussion of Luther’s views on the proper role of reason in the spiritual
and earthly realms, see Steven A. Hein, “Reason and the Two Kingdoms: An Essay in Luther’s
Thought,” The Springfielder 36:2 (September 1972), available on-line at: http://www.ctsfw
.net/media/pdfs/heinreasontwokingdoms.pdf.

41
The principle here is abusus non tollit usum (abuse does remove proper use). Thus, for example, the fact that wine may be abused does not remove its proper use in Holy Communion.

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