Evolution has to do with, first of all, events in time. Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity says time, in the Bible and in Jesus's understanding of it, is quite different from our modern concept. In Chapter 11, "A New Time," Nolan says we think of time as a quantitative measuring tool, a yardstick for events. That's anything but biblical. In the Bible, time can't be separated from events.Nolan quotes Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad: "Today one of the few things of which we can be quite sure is that [our] concept of absolute time, independent of events, and, like blanks on a questionnaire, only needing to be filled up with data which will give it content, was unknown to Israel." (pp. 89-90).
To Jesus and the Hebrew culture of his day, time was not quantitative and absolute, but qualitative. It was knowable only in relation to the intentions of God, which could change, and the events which reflect those intentions. This was what Jesus meant by reading "the signs of the times." For Jesus, his Jewish contemporaries, and their forebears "time" was anything but the abstraction we take it to be. Rather, time was synonymous with expressions we use such as "what a time it was" or "considering the times."
We read in the Old Testament:
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, NIV)
We think of time as consisting of fixed points along an abstract time line to which events attach. We locate ourselves at a fixed point in the exact middle of this imaginary time line. To Jews of Jesus's time, though, the fixed points were the events themselves:
The Jews of ancient times did not locate themselves anywhere, they located events, places and times and saw themselves as on a journey past these fixed points. Sacred events like Creation, Exodus, and the Covenant with Moses, places like Jerusalem, Sinai, Bethel and times like the festivals and times for fasting were fixed points. The individual travelled through or past these fixed points. (p. 91)
What's more, we think of the future as lying ahead of us. Jesus and the ancient Jews did not think of the future in the same abstract terms as we do, but as actual events that are coming up behind us as we experience our present day lives — just as the later finishers in a foot race finish behind the earlier ones.
Those are just some of the ways in which our understanding of time ill prepares us to read the Bible. Here's a yet more important one. Crucially, we think of events in the future as having no power to determine events in the present.
Jesus had a radically different view. To him, the meaning of his times was qualified and even determined by "a real future event which will be qualitatively different from all future events" (p. 92). The Greek word for such a determinative future event was eschaton, from which we derive eschatology. The "signs of the times," properly read, Jesus said, tell us of this future event.
The future event or eschaton Jesus expected was the coming of the "kingdom of God," also called the "kingdom of heaven." In this "kingdom," God in his compassion would forgive the world's sinners, just as the father in Jesus's parable rushed out to embrace his prodigal son, no questions asked, when the son finally returned home.
To Jesus, "the 'kingdom-power' of the future was already influencing the present situation," writes Nolan (p. 95). Accordingly, Jesus's times were ones for rejoicing — "a time to dance," in the words of Ecclesiastes.
This was a truly radical idea. Something had changed, and in a big way, between the "time" of John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, and Jesus's own "time," when it came:
John's mood is like the mournful mood of a funeral dirge; Jesus' mood is like the joyful tune of a wedding dance. John's behavior was characterized by fasting; Jesus' behavior was characterized by feasting. And yet they are not contradicting one another. Both John and Jesus represent the actions of Wisdom (that is to say, of God), but they speak to different times and different circumstances. John's time was in fact a time for mourning, and Jesus' time was in fact a time for rejoicing. ... The time of John and the time of Jesus are radically different because they are determined by two radically different future events. John prophesied the judgment of God; Jesus prophesied the salvation of God. John lived off the prospect of a great catastrophe; Jesus lived off the prospect of a great "kingdom." John was the prophet of doom and Jesus was the herald of good news. (pp. 94-95)
This, despite the fact that John and Jesus were basically contemporaries! What had so radically changed?
Nolan says that "as Jesus would have thought of it, God had changed. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was doing something totally new and unprecedented" (p. 96, italics mine).
When Jesus says, in Matthew 11:4-5, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor" (NIV), it's to be read a sign, says Nolan, that "goodness is triumphing over evil. God has relented and is no longer intent upon punishing the people. God now wants to save them. The implication of Jesus' praxis [his customary practice or conduct] and his words is that God has changed. One can see it in the signs of the times" (p. 95, italics in the original).
What? God change? God relent? (The Revised Standard Version even, in several places speaks of God "repenting from evil.") Isn't God supposed to be eternal and unchanging? Aren't his intentions supposed never to vary? How can it make sense to speak of a good God as "repenting from evil"?
No punches are pulled by Nolan in this regard: "The God of Jesus is totally different [in terms of God's "image," to use our modern word] from the God of the Old Testament or the God of the Pharisees — indeed the God of Jesus is quite unlike the God which most Christians worship" (p. 96).
In an endnote (#17, p. 179), Nolan lists several Old Testament passages which show that, as he phrases it, "Nothing was more typical of the Hebrew's Creator God than to do new and unprecedented things, to create means to do something new and unprecedented." Among these passages:
Isaiah 65:17: "Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind" (NIV).
Isaiah 66:22: "As the new heavens and the new earth that I make will endure before me," declares the LORD, "so will your name and descendants endure" (NIV).
Habakkuk 1:5: "Look at the nations and watch — and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told" (NIV).
When God switches from intending to punish sinners to intending to save them — when he repents from evil," in the sense of no longer intending to cause us woe — that clearly qualifies as "doing something in your days that you would not believe."
So God's intentions change, and when they do, we can look forward to a wholly unprecedented future event, an eschaton, which will determine what our experience is like now.
To Jesus, the looked-for event was not a simple one. Rather, it was an either-or proposition. Either the kingdom of God would come, and soon ... or else there would be a catastrophe instead.
Jesus called for faith: specifically, the faith of men and women in believing that a new, widespread reign of heartfelt human-to-human compassion would usher in the kingdom of heaven. If that very brand of faith itself simply became strong enough and widespread enough, it would avert the catastrophic judgment which God would otherwise render upon us humans for our lack of humility toward and service to our fellow humans. That was the essence of Jesus's either-or prophecy (see p. 105 of Nolan for more on the either-or nature of it).
So the eschaton as Jesus saw it was conditioned upon our choice: we could choose compassion and faith — or we could choose their opposites, which we might call ... what? Oppression and self-righteousness? Narrow-mindedness and selfishness?
To Jesus, the coming of the kingdom was recognized as a miracle, says Nolan (p. 99). It would represent a utopia in which all humankind would be liberated from oppression, including oppression by those internal forces of the psyche which keep us as individuals from releasing our built-in potential for freedom (p. 100). This internal capacity for compassion, faith, and the liberation of others and ourselves is within each of us, but nonetheless beyond us; it is God, called by whatever name one chooses.
The kingdom could not come if there is no God, if God doesn't exist. Nolan: "Anyone who thinks that evil will have the last word or that good and evil have a fifty-fifty chance is an atheist " (p. 103).
On the other hand, the truth that there is a God guarantees that the kingdom will come someday. It could come suddenly and immediately if people have enough love, compassion, hope, and faith. Otherwise, Jesus taught, we are in for not just one catastrophe, but possibly many, many wars, disasters, and other sufferings. Still, at the end of the day, goodness will win out over evil, simply because there is a God, and God is good. This is Jesus's teaching in a nutshell.
I see parallels between this teaching and my understanding of the earth's evolutionary history as discussed by Stuart Kauffman (author of At Home in the Universe) and others who study the science of so-called "self-organized complexity."
Kauffman believes, according to Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, that life evolves in a mathematical domain which is not chaos per se but which has the same caapacity for producing novelty. This "edge of chaos" is also capable of allowing the novel beings which do arise to persist without being immediately superseded by vast new novelty; chaos can't do that. Chaos, in fact, is inimical to life.
But living systems, evolving at the edge of chaos, are occasionally plunged into chaos per se. They experience, in other words, catastrophes. Sometimes the catastrophe stems from an unfortunate external perturbation, but sometimes the internal dynamics of the system can get so far out of whack that they provoke an equally disastrous catastrophe of chaotic system behavior.
What can rescue them then? Rescue can come from the very habit their constituents have of working together, checking up on one another's current states, adjusting their own states and behaviors accordingly. No elemental constituent is any other's slave; all units are autonomous and equal. Yet there is a sort of system-wide web of cooperation going on, a network of interdependence whose result is the ability of the system as a whole to recover from chaotic catastrophe and wind up even stronger than before.
Chaos and catastrophe — and the re-emergence therefrom, stronger and better — can happen simply because the units of which such a system is built are, albeit indirectly, in touch with all the other units. No units are ostracized. No units are shunned.
Neither are there any "elites" who boss the "non-elite" units around. Furthermore, no one unit is directly connected to more than a handful of others. There are no true "kings" in such a system — if the system may be metaphorically thought of as a "kingdom"— no actual monarchs to which all the other units are connected and owe direct obligations of fealty as "vassals."
Such "kingdoms" do develop "order for free," though. Out of bottom-up interactions among units that are autonomous and equal emerge top-down regularities. The "kingdom" as a whole turns out to be far greater than the sum of its parts.
This sounds like the "kingdom" of God preached by Jesus, described by Nolan.
That ideal "kingdom" will come someday without fail, Jesus said. He said it would even come right away and suddenly, if only we would immediately establish compassionate, non-stigmatizing, supportive relationships amongst ourselves — among all of us, not just the so-called "children of light."
But if we wouldn't do that, there would be a catastrophe instead. "In the event, as we know," writes Nolan, "it was the catastrophe which came and not the 'kingdom'" (p. 108).
The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.
Then the Jewish nation was expelled from Palestine in A.D. 135.
By that time, Christianity had for some time been busily establishing itself as a religion separate from Judaism. It had originally been a Jewish sect. The new Christians needed a way to re-interpret Jesus's prophecy of a Jewish catastrophe so that the same prophecy would continue to mean something to them.
One of the ways in which that happened, according to Nolan, was this:
The early Christians simply adapted Jesus' prophecy to the new set of circumstances in which they found themselves.
Jesus' message, like the message of any prophet, was not timeless. Nevertheless it did point to something about humanity and God that was so fundamentally and definitively true that it could be re-interpreted in relation to other times and other places. Once the message had been taken outside Palestine with its particular political crisis, and more especially once the Romans had destroyed the Jewish nation, it was felt that the message had to be adapted to other situations or indeed to any and every situation. (p. 108)
As things actually happened, the early Christians, including the evangelists who wrote the Gospels, "apocalyptized" the message, says Nolan. By that he means this:
The eschaton becomes a supra-historical event distinguishable from the historical and political catastrophe [the fall of the Jewish Temple and nation] which was just about to take place [from the point of view of the Gospel of Mark] ... . The supra-historical judgment on the last day is then used, in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual [i.e., the state of his or her soul] rather than society. Matthew takes the process very much further, laying great emphasis upon the judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment. (pp. 108-109)
It is clear to me at this point (subject to my reading further) that Nolan prefers to dissociate himself from this apocalyptizing, moralizing strand in Christian history, "by 'de-apocalyptizing' the gospels," as he puts it (p. 109). He wishes to revive our ability to respond to Jesus's teachings as prophetic, not apocalyptic. (And note that in his lexicon, "catastrophe" and "judgment" are virtual synonyms.)
In other words, Nolan wants us to recover an understanding of the Gospel message as being more social than individual. Theough we must each personally choose to commit to a life of compassion and faith, the thrust thereof is necessarily outward, toward others, toward humankind as a whole.
I think of that as being theologically progressive. By that I mean Nolan rues any tendency Christians today may have to look only to the salvation of souls, their own first and then perhaps those of wayward others. Such an otherworldly focus tends to turn religion conservative, even fundamentalist. (I'm now intruding my own thoughts among Nolan's.)
Social justice is not a priority among Christians of that stripe. From Nolan's point of view, any sort of Christianity that doesn't emphasize social justice is completely missing the point. (Again, that's my understanding of his position.)
Perhaps not coincidentally, I'd say, conservative, fundamentalist Christians tend to be creationists, or at least they are typically opposed to Darwin's theory of evolution, in all its guises.
But I find (see above) that the "self-organized complexity" branch of Darwinian science today can give us a way to re-interpret the prophecy of Jesus in the Gospels and adapt it "to other situations or indeed to any and every situation," without apocalyptizing it.
Or, depending on exactly how you define "apocalyptizing," it may permit apocalyptizing the message without then going on to use it "in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual rather than society."
Either way you define "apocalyptizing," applying certain lessons of the "self-organized complexity" branch of Darwinian science today can serve to re-orient Christianity in a more progressive, social justice-oriented direction, based on faith and compassion as Nolan understands the original Gospel meaning of those terms.
"Evolution supports religion!" the headlines might read.
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