On Evolutionary History in the Light of Pascha
The following are some thoughts that were percolating in my head during the course of Holy Week and Pascha, which we in the Orthodox world recently celebrated. It’s a good time (though to be fair is there a bad time within the liturgical calendar?) to reflect on the nature of time and God’s working in the world, the order and arrangement of the services rather “playing” with our experience of time while also pointing to some rather counter-intuitive ways of conceptualizing and participating in time and space. It occurred to me at some point that there are potential points of contact with one of the themes I’ve been developing over the last few years, the interface of Christian theology and biological evolutionary theory (and history on the grand scale in general); as always in these contexts I write strictly as a layman and not as any sort of authoritative voice of Orthodoxy, though I hope these sorts of reflections are indeed useful and help in some very small way to better our collective theological understanding.
The basic starting point for any Christian theory of history or indeed of creation in general is not the opening chapters of Genesis, nor Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, nor contemporary science—not to belittle any of those resources, to be sure, but rather to properly situate them. Rather, it can only be through the prism of the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ that we understand the nature of God’s creative power and His work in the world, of His relationship to the world and the ontology of that world in itself and in relation to God. And while I am not aware of any existing approaches along these lines, I think that any Christian theology of evolutionary creation must begin with our understanding of the redemptive, creative work of God in Christ and the way in which it interfaces with creaturely being and chronology, revealed most manifestly in the context of Pascha and the ‘events’ and realities we celebrate therein.1
The scandal of the Cross was—is—among other things the degree to which it violates what had become the received notion of God, whether that notion emerged out of the ancient Hebrew scriptures and religious systems or the various philosophical theologies of the late classic world: the deity as both impassible and as a sort of divine monarch, His will unchallenged, His presence decidedly removed from the ordinary orbit of the world. The salvific triumph of God should be one of majesty and splendour, apocalyptic fire and wrack and ruin, as imagined in any number of antique and late antique apocalyptic texts. An omnipotent and omniscient God whose salvific power, His bringing of the Kingdom, took place through becoming human and dying a shameful and seemingly utterly defeated death was on no one’s agenda (and one might argue it’s hardly on anyone’s agenda today, two thousand years later, as much as some of us might profess it).
If God works inwardly and mystically within the flow of history, a history of beings and indeed matter itself that possesses a very real autonomy and inner agency, and is not simply a manifestation or projection of the Divine will or person, pace an Akbarian or Neo-Platonic schemata of divine effusion, then we should not attempt to identify precise points of “intervention,” since such language makes no sense in light of a God who is all-pervasive, filling all things, and working with and in them in His divine providence, not as a tyrant or a magician behind the curtain, but as the Crucified God who is intimately present to His creation and who is creating and shaping and transforming that creation without violating its basic autonomy and agency, even if it means entering directly into that creation and suffering at the hands of humans, who are both the “crown” of the created order and its most terrible and destructive products.
The historian cannot look at a given period or even moment in human history and straight-forwardly descry the work of God in it; she cannot chart the flows of human time as a story of salvation history and of continual divine presence and activity. Rather, it is a matter of faith—here, not in the sense of epistemic understanding and assent but fundamentally the sense of trust, of assurance in the absence of easy or evident all-encompassing proof—that God is indeed at work in human history, that the “signal” of the Holy Spirit can at times be discerned even if we may not be totally confident in our interpretations.
And so we come to the question of the world’s origin and the emergence and evolution of biological life: the solution is perhaps already evident, and in fact I would suggest it is right there, in part, in the opening chapters of Genesis. God’s creative working in the natural world should not look any different from His working in the flow of human history: if we can—rightly—identify human history as also being salvation history, even if we can only identify the precise points and “mechanisms” at a scattering of points, and must subsist in faithful trust elsewhere as to the how, so it is with the wider creation. The history of life on earth—biological evolution and all of the accompanying and shaping processes—is indeed the history of God’s creative work and power, but it is a fundamentally inward one, God working in His creation in a manner quite beyond our understanding.
When God calls forth living things from the land and sea in the Genesis narrative, it is the earth and the sea that—evidently—do the work, a remarkable for its time suggestion of a basic autonomy and materiality of the created order, given that most ancient myths of creation featured a deity or spirit being directly fashioning each individual entity. But here as elsewhere the self-ness of creation is stressed, its relative autonomy and even agency in itself. But we can go further and say that it is not just a matter of the created order responding to the Divine call, working itself out within the created “laws” and parameters laid down within its basic being as it emerged in the very beginning as designed and intended by God. It is that (though the language of design does not really capture how God works vis-a-vis the created world—no language really captures it in fact), but it is more: it is God present to and working within and through the history of the cosmos, the history of life, in a way the exceeds human comprehension.
The creative work of Pascha, the transformation effected through the Resurrection of Christ, is simultaneously the work of a discrete moment within human history and a process distributed across human history, instantaneous in relation to God, stretched out through time in relation to us: the language of St. Paul in particular reflects this tension or multiplicity of perspectives, the Kingdom that is come and is not come yet. We reflect it in the Paschal Liturgy, proclaiming that not one dead remains in the tomb, even as we know that insofar as our experience of time is concerned, that realization has not yet transpired—though in another way, it has. The work of this new creation is ongoing, both in terms of God’s work in us and through us, and in terms of our own creaturely participation, we as co-workers, in the words of St. Paul, with God. The creation is not an automaton, but an active, agency-possessed co-worker and co-agent.
Things are no different, I want to suggest, when it comes to the history of life on earth, and of the cosmos itself: in relation to God, all of creation is created in one single moment, the moment of time coming-into-being; yet it is also a long grand unfolding, God working in and through the “natural” processes of becoming, what we call evolution, be it stellar or biological or cultural. From our perspective, just like human history, salvific and otherwise, it is long and often seemingly random and undirected, and in a sense it is. The created order has its own autonomy, its own agency and ontological reality: but at the same time it is inhabited by and directed by Divine Providence, by the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit “hovering over the waters.” This is not the work of a tyrannical monarch, but of the King Who rules from the Cross, and as such it might well not meet the standards that we “civilized” people have developed over the last five thousand years of urban civilization with our strict hierarchies and centralized seats of rule. We want a created order that is neat and tidy and that works along clear and obvious lines of cause and effect; God’s reply to Job showcasing the wild and often seemingly chaotic created order looming just outside the walls of the city-state is no more immediately palatable to us than it was to ancient Near Eastern people.
The lesson for them and for us is that God’s creative work is manifest in the wildness and apparent flux and flow of the natural world, of time and history; the light of Pascha brings it all into even greater relief—and scandal—as we see God’s most fundamental work in creation taking place within and through the actions and wills of creatures operating in history, through the good and the bad, inwardly, humbly, and mysteriously.
This is a bit of a tangent—hence its being placed in the footnotes!—but it’s striking to see the contrast between the two “creation accounts” of Christian Scripture: the opening chapters of Genesis are heavy with (quite obvious) symbolism, poetic structuring, an almost mythic quality, far more indicative of the meaning of the events or processes described and very difficult, even for the most rigorous literalist, to locate within the stream of historical time (a fact long ago recognized by the ancient exegetes of the Church, with someone like. St. Ephrem concluding most of the narrative took place on an entirely other plane than this one). By contrast, the Gospel narratives of the death and resurrection of Christ, as well as the earliest “kerygma” of the Apostles (which continues to be reflected in the creeds), places almost all stress on the historical events themselves, with little to no attempt at telling what they mean; even the Gospel of St. John is light on the theological interpretations. Part of this is due to the sense one gets in earliest Christian writings of the sheer explosiveness of these things, of this encounter with Christ and these “events” that completely reconfigured the world of their witnesses and participants. But I believe it is more than that, and that it reflects the vastness of the meaning, the impossibility of capturing all of the meanings and significances within a narrative context; St. Paul’s epistles and other early Christian writings begin this process, one which continues to today.