Archive for category: Evangelicalism and Sci…

The Christian perspective on nature is deeply rooted in profoundly evocative creation narratives (Gn 1-2; Ps 8; Jn 1; Co 1; et. al.). The inter-textual approach between the Prologue of the Gospel of John as a commentary on Genesis is most instructive. The focus is not upon the seven days of creation but upon God and the divine Logos as the sole agency of all created existence. It is conspicuous however that two verses from the great creation story of Genesis 1 have the Creator fashioning the earth and its seas to “bring forth life” (vss. 20, 24) as a secondary agency in creation. Since Augustine (4^th – 5^th centuries) there is a sense that the seven days of creation are taxonomic in some way and not to be regarded as literal 24 hour days. Ultimate causation belongs to the Creator and nothing in the nuts and bolts of modern science actually contradicts this. Side-taking, either / or judgments against science is not only unnecessary but unwise.

The Evangelical legacy in America with regard to science is perhaps the distinctive cultural issue in American public life. The Scopes Trial (1925) was an odd kind of high water mark for evangelicals that quickly receded with the disastrous “defense” offered by William Jennings Bryan, the evangelical lawyer and three time candidate for the presidency. Out of this internationally followed trial, among Protestants became permanent: anti-science or anti-creation was the mutual caricaturing of both sides.  “Creation research” emerged and continues to hold sway over vast numbers of evangelicals. For many evangelicals there seems to be little change in creationist belief: young age of the earth, everything is a product of special creation, alternative pedagogy and legal initiatives for public schools. Unfortunately, the projects of creation science of often pseudo-science exhibited in the Creationism museums, foremost in Petersburg, KY, but world-wide. All propound some version of the geological record as containing fossils that were generated virtually entirely during the Noahic flood and the co-existence of dinosaurs with Adam and Eve; features which are not included in any biblical narrative of the creation.

The point of contact between the sciences of nature and of God, are epistemologies and practices of knowledge (scientia).  Science and religion have been combined almost since the beginning of human culture – likely, part of the emergence of monotheism itself. The modern successes of science have affected everything from philosophy to the nature of the human being as well as to the consideration or dismissal of evolution as part of God’s creative design.  Historically, although evangelical theologians would propound theistic evolution, by the mid-1920’s it had become questionable in the minds of many fundamentalist believers.  For many people particularly as a completely atheistic version overshadowed the public version. Ethically, it seemed very dangerous to conclude that nothing distinguished human beings from the rest of the animate world.

Natural science and technology became central to what can be called “scientific culture”, with its own narrative regarding the cosmos as a whole. Although the scientific method of empirical observation and the successful repetition of experimental results were already outlined in Francis Bacons’ Novum Organum (1620), by the mid-20^th century, science had so diversified and specialized that there appeared many non-overlapping features of scientific knowledge. But as the cultural milieu of scientific modernism emerged “the belief in science” went over the top with absolutist claims and a kind of religion called loosely: scientism. One of the benefits of postmodernism has been the destruction of of such master narratives as scientism.

There are various ways to organize knowledge.as well as to debate that which is known or knowable. Classic Christian theology knowledge by revelation is a certain kind of claim that defined the known otherwise unknown. Everything was done to mesh to knowable and the knowable by revelation through various analogies, that of the “Two Books” – nature and scripture. From this notion of the cosmic library, the two are said never to truly contradict one another.

This has largely faded from contemporary evangelical discourse because of the overwhelming pressure to take sides. The book of nature is still there but now in a counter-science of creationism – no less ideologically driven than scientism. As with scientism ignoring every possible inference and burden of proof with respect to God’s existence, creationism ignores every possible inference and burden of proof with respect to at least the vast age of the earth let alone complexifying physical processes that were created to generate life.

Perhaps the greatest damage done to evangelical theology is a kind of certainty seeking account of rationality. Here is where the commitments of faith lead are derived from the experiences of faith. Faithful reasoning, based upon the gradual acquisition of scriptural reasoning cannot be reduced to scientific rationality. Many of the metaphors of theology already made this error early on, e.g., a “trinity” of light, of numbers, of elemental forms (liquid, solid, vapor), of physical structures, all of which could not convey even core truths implied by the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Christianity’s trinitarian monotheism is indeed encumbered by the logic of three-in-oneness but the mathematical analogies must go no further. God is in every way utterly unique and other – this is what his holiness is all about.

A great deal has changed. First, the rules of evidence have become much stricter and as a result, there is far less that can be claimed on a macro level of the universe or the human being itself that rules God out or in. Indeed, the book of nature was intended to be read through the book of divine revelation – not the other way around. Revelation, as Barth used to emphasize, is uni-directional and irreversible. God is not disclosed because of human intention but always because of his will to disclose himself – both in terms of scripture and nature.

I would like to take another tack here in order to comment about the massive commitments to creationism amongst evangelicals. Creationism represents a certain kind of separated life, body and soul – in the world, but not of the world. This which historically would be one of the Christian ways of holiness or sanctification, means nothing less than the defining of everything in one’s world according to certain readings of scripture on the way toward a “biblical world-view”. Creationism, which originally meant the unique creation of each human soul rather than generated through the branching off of a new baby from its parents (i.e., traducianism), belongs to this alternate narrative of God, the world, and humanity.

What are the consequences of creationism? In the long term not much politically or in terms of public education. It has been enough in recent years just to attempt to give “intelligent design theorists” (better: “theologians”) to the public schools. The only problem is that even intelligent design theory will not stand up to the legal test of religious neutrality. Some endeavors have been made with a bit of “success” through voting referenda but this defeats the purpose of securing free exercise for publically valid religious perspectives. Contemporary creationism, even “creation science”, belongs to the alternative way of life that evangelicals may wish to live. For evangelicals, a good comparison would be with a halakhic way of life in Judaism or a canonical way of life in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. The construction of a biblical world-view will exclude evolution and the massively extensive age of the earth for profoundly spiritual and moral reasons. In terms of the natural sciences, creation science does not seem to have deterred the general consensus about evolution. There is a necessary humility in science. It may not be the measure of humility required of devoted followers of Jesus but there is some respectful meeting ground if they will be patient with the creationists.

From a public perspective, separated Christians on balance are a far greater good than otherwise. Evangelicals that have not embraced these forms of creationism should find a way to see the belief system as beneficial. Evangelicals are consistent – with the proviso that material relations can be “self-caused” if God created them to function this way.

 Probably the most important feature of the science / religion interface is just the concept of creation itself. Although human intuitions, both religious and scientific are oriented to think of the universe as having an origin, a beginning, that may or may not be evident from any fact of nature. Inference is the weakest form of “evidence” and certainly the key features of creation as revealed from scripture, that all things have an absolute beginning from God who is without beginning and their ultimate source. As this doctrine is maintained, there is huge room to support the advancement of science and all of its humanitarian and ecological promise.

“Well, it’s kinda hard for me to believe in Jesus because—well, you know, the dinosaurs and everything.” Stuart was in the first year of a graduate degree, with wavy brown hair and cheeks to match the hue of his posh pink polo. Sawing at a tough bit of curry chicken over dinner during an Alpha course, this agnostic student was responding distractedly to my question, “What strikes you as the most troubling feature of Christianity’s claims about Jesus?” For all that it lacked in rhetorical verve, Stuart’s off-hand comment voiced one of the fundamental difficulties educated non-Christians must overcome in order to embrace Christianity: the popular face of our religion seems squarely and thoroughly incompatible with scientific knowledge. 

Prima facie, the existence of dinosaurs possesses little relevance to the teachings, putative deity, and redemptive death of a Galilean Jew 2,000 years ago. But to Stuart, serious countenance of the Bible’s Christological claims would require assent to a whole litany of scientifically incredible assertions. And Stuart came by this assumption honestly. He had been exposed to the sort of Christianity that regularly fulminates against evolution, the sort of Christianity from which I also hail. (I as a homeschooler, my Christian biology curriculum required me to rehearse seven reasons why radiocarbon dating was unreliable; while my grasp of the water-cycle may have been flawless, my knowledge of plate tectonics was mediated through detailed exposition of Noah’s Flood.) 

In this conversation with Stuart, it felt as if my fundamentalist chickens were coming home to roost. To share the gospel, I now had to divert from the story of Jesus in order to deconstruct historicizing readings of Genesis 1-11. Ironically, my evangelical tradition had actually hamstrung the evangelism effort by contributing to the erroneous supposition that Christianity and mainstream science are ideological alternatives. In fundamentalist circles, this anti-scientism is sometimes taken as a mark of Christian piety.[1] But I would like to suggest the opposite: Christian piety should motivate a far more robust engagement with mainstream science than has hitherto characterized the evangelical tradition.

 Evangelism and Apologetics

 I’ve already indicated how a concern for evangelism should stimulate more rigorous interaction between religion and science. In a similar vein, I would underscore Kyle Roberts’ observation that better Christian engagement with science is imperative for in-house apologetic purposes, insofar as a great many young Christians are abandoning their faith because of its putative incompatibility with science. Kyle points out, “Traditionally, apologetics has been directed primarily to non-Christians (atheists, agnostics, or adherents of other major religions). But another apologetic need is arising today within the church itself. This apologetic argues that the perceived forced choice between science and faith is a false dichotomy.” Serious reflection on the subjects of cosmology and human origins is a matter of urgent pastoral and apologetic concern.

 Belief in the Transcendence of God

Still, when I talk about the role of piety in the faith-science dialogue, I’m not just thinking about gathering converts and maintaining the numbers on our church membership rosters. Christian piety should make us receptive to the insights and truths of science insofar as proper Christian piety has a fundamental commitment to the transcendence of God. Yet, however much we extol the greatness of a God whose being splinters our rough-hewn images of him (cf. the commonplace warnings about ‘putting God in a box’), our reticence towards the insights of science may indicate that we begrudge God the right to gainsay our traditional assumptions about the way he works in the world.

I wonder if the apophatic theological tradition might provide us with a much-needed corrective. Apophatic theology is not simply an exercise in saying what God is not; it is no primer to theological nihilism. Rather, apophaticism is a spiritual and intellectual commitment to recall that our predications about God, even when true and revelatory, are also inadequate caricatures; whatever true things we may say about God fall magnificently short of exhausting or circumscribing him. Recourse to apophatic theology might counterbalance the hubris by which we presume unduly on our understanding about, e.g., the way divine agency operates in creating and sustaining the universe. Apophatic theology is not to be confused with sloppy relativism; it manifests deference to divine transcendence.

For this reason, I found my head bobbing enthusiastically at Peter Enn’s post, when he wrote: “It may be that evolution, and the challenges it presents, will remind us that we are called to trust God, which means we may need to restructure and even abandon the ‘god’ that we have created in our own image. Working through the implications of evolution may remind Christians that trusting God’s goodness is a daily decision, a spiritually fulfilling act of recommitment to surrender to God no matter what.”

Trust in the Work of the Holy Spirit

 Peter’s comments about trusting God’s goodness and surrendering to God bring us back to the heart of all properly Christian theological inquiry: belief in the self-revelatory work of God through the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, all our attempts to pursue truth through Scripture and theology rely upon the assumption that the Holy Spirit inspired the composition and compilation of the Scriptures and continues to bear with and sustain our efforts to hear the Word revealed in those holy texts. But we also believe that the Spirit of the Creator God bears with and sustains our efforts to hear the Word as revealed in the creation that declares the glory of God (Psalm 19).

 As an undergrad at Wheaton College, I recall Prof. Sam Storms introducing the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, that wonderful epistemological heuristic that articulates how God’s truth is revealed through Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience (with special deference to Scripture as the “base” of the Quadrilateral, so to speak). Dr. Storms, being a good charismatic, underscored that the whole reason we trust any of the “sides” of the Quadrilateral is because we believe in the operation and self-revelatory activity of the Holy Spirit, A) in the inspiration of Scripture, B) in our daily experiences with him, C) in the history of the Church as enshrined in Christian tradition, D) and in the operation of our reason in reflection of the All-True God whose image we are and bear.

In this respect, I’m in energetic agreement with Amos Yong’s encouragement that “Those who are led by the Spirit can therefore pursue the life of the mind, even the scientific vocation, and in this way also bring their own questions, perspectives, and curiosities to their scientific endeavors.… [P]ursuit of the Spirit-filled life can be part and parcel of the modern scientific task.”

Conclusion

As I said above, popular evangelicalism can sometimes wear its opposition to science as a badge of Christian piety, and some evangelicals have been wont to characterize engagement with science as a faithless attempt to ingratiate oneself to the fashions of the academy. But I’d like to think that grappling with the Big Bang and abiogenesis can express precisely the sorts of piety that should animate Christian evangelicals. For the sake of the lost and for the sake of our own struggling parishioners we have an obligation to sort out a faithful understanding of modern science. And this intellectual engagement is not stirred by an anxious disbelief in the Scriptures; it is vivified by a deep-seated conviction in the transcendence of the God who is revealed, if only in part, in those Scriptures. Still, however partial may be the glimpse of the God’s face we see in the Bible, it is a true glimpse, true because it is given to us by the Holy Spirit. And it is faith in the continued operation of that Spirit, in and for God’s people and through the world God created, that gives me hope that evangelical engagement with science will not only prove possible, but revelatory.

 

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[1] More than once have I heard someone reject evolutionary biology or mainstream geology by appeal to Colossians 2:8 (“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ”.) Of course, the fact that Pauline literature is shot through with appropriations of Stoicism should keep us from presuming that Paul thought that all philosophy was demonic and deceitful. The existence of bad philosophy does not mean that all philosophy is bad; the existence of bad science (or scientists bent on turning their research into a pike on which to impale Christian belief) does not mean all science is bad. 

I’d like to take a step back here and ask what may seem to be a stupid pair of questions. Why are we, where issues of science and religion are concerned, writing mainly about evolution? And does the lack of historical perspective make this a more troubling and divisive issue for us than it needs to be? 

The perspective available to us is quite deep. Heliocentrism was once seen as an attack on faith, and perhaps as a more threatening attack than evolutionary theory appears now; not human origins and purpose but the origins and purpose of the whole universe inevitably came into question. The Biblical creation story, to start with, doesn’t work so well if our planet is a sort of footnote in a solar system, and if that solar system is just a speck in a galaxy. Christianity got over this intellectual difficulty, or rather didn’t even fully experience it. Church authorities digested the problem over time and quietly allowed for it in their doctrine. Luckily for them, the scientific debate was over before most ordinary people even knew of it.

In my own field of ancient languages, the challenge of faith by science is more or less passé as a matter of public controversy (though not of course as a source of pain and conflict within individuals and religious communities). But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the research and publications were a seemingly endless source of passionate debate. That’s over now. Granted, certain believers and certain institutions still reject philology in connection to the Bible, but those views aren’t indulged in a respectable divinity school or seminary, nor do they take up much space in the media or public life.

Tellingly, though, the terms by which adepts try to guide religious young people’s adaptation to the two fields are similar. Here is the physical evidence (in the case of philology, that’s the manuscripts with their numerous variants—they can’t all be the inerrant word of God, can they?); here is a theoretical reconstruction of the evidence’s interrelationships (for the Bible, that’s an account of which manuscripts seem to have come from which, if only through now-lost intermediaries—no hard facts here, but some very convincing arguments).

Further, here are some proponents of this science who don’t consider it a threat to faith, and here are some who think otherwise. You yourself may or may not be able to integrate the science into your religion; but it isn’t a socially acceptable option for you to turn on the science’s purveyors and treat as criminals people who, as researchers and teachers, can’t in good conscience modify their testimony about their knowledge and experience; and who, in expressing whatever religious or nonreligious views they have, do only what they’re entitled to. The theological problems the science suggests are arresting and important, but these problems—it’s been widely agreed for a long time, an agreement strongly in the interest of the civilization Christianity do so much to form—don’t lie at the door of an apparatus criticus or a manuscript stemma.

I’m confident that, partly by these means, the controversy over evolution will eventually go the same way as the controversy over the Bible’s origins. But I also think that, in the meantime, it’s wholesome to be asking why we’re so preoccupied, right now, about this particular thing. As it happens, I have an insider’s view of one side, going way back. As a biology professor’s daughter, I heard little about creationism until the mid-seventies, and then it seemed to be everywhere, in the new form of “creation science.” In the stacks of Bowling Green State University, for example, where my father taught, I encountered Creation Science Quarterly, with its articles looking a lot like the ones in periodicals where my father published, with graphs and charts and long stacks of bibliography.

My father was incensed to learn of Creation Science Quarterly and descended on the library administration, demanding to know why public money had been spent on the subscription, or, if the subscription were a gift, why it had been accepted. He was outraged at the disingenuousness of claims that “creation science” was an objective, spontaneous, and sincere critique of modern biology, and his work fighting the unregulated dumping of toxic waste revealed ways in which the challenge to peer-reviewed science could back up terrible abuses.

For example, after he retired to Pennsylvania with my mother, he found that the state legislature there had actually passed a bill reclassifying a number of known, dangerous toxins as “beneficial,” so that they could be sprayed straight onto the ground, even in a flood plain. As in many other instances, the damage done to the credibility of the life sciences through the undermining of evolutionary theory in the media and schools proved a candy story with pre-smashed windows for corporate and government hooligans. They no longer had to justify their actions on scientific grounds but could do the opposite, denigrate scientific claims per se, and this was easy when they relied on existing prejudices. Cadmium in your drinking water won’t hurt you, because this man who says it will also believes in evolution; he’s an elitist, antireligious scientist. (My father, for the record, was a devout Methodist, who taught Sunday School for decades.)

But a daughter’s affection doesn’t blind me to another view of the evolution controversy, a view by which the role of scientists looks less heroic. All of my relatives had been rural and poorly educated until the mid-20^th century. My father did by far the most with his G.I. Bill financing, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a tenured professor, and he was excessively proud of this—and more than a little impatient with those who weren’t interested in pursuing post-graduate degrees, or who wouldn’t listen to his opinions on public policy. As the economy went its sad way and it became less and less easy, even for people who were keen, to get an advanced education, the ideological dividing lines in my extended family became much sharper. One member, my brother, is now a tenured Ivy League anthropologist; and one nuclear family has supplied several volunteers to the Creation Science Museum in Kentucky. There’s a clash-of-cultures element here, an emotional one involving, on both sides, assertions of “You can’t take intellectual life away from us and do whatever you want with it!” And it’s an intransigent conflict partly because almost all the parties are, in this state of American society, permanently set where they are and have less and less contact outside that milieu.

I hope I don’t cause offense (especially not to my family) by going into personal matters here. I’d just like to make the case that the evolution controversy is a phenomenon of its time, a time of environmental stress and increasing social division; much as the controversy on the origins of the Bible was fueled by rapidly increasing literacy. To think of a wound that we can trust God to heal in the fullness of time might be better than insisting that we, with our mere human abilities, can somehow work everything out and soon reach a state where there isn’t considerable distress and dissonance over the issue. In fact, as I’ve indicated, distress and dissonance are part of the natural process, and trying to make them go away won’t help and may well do harm.

Those of us struggling to promote evolution to skeptical evangelicals—as I have been doing for three decades—invoke the familiar history of Galileo, hoping by analogy to open closed minds to the possibility that evolution might be both true, and compatible with Christian faith, just as heliocentricity has turned out to be both true and compatible with the Christian faith. Indeed in my first book, written almost a quarter century ago I wrote: “The Galileo incident, when extracted from the significant political and personal milieu in which it was embedded, can serve as a paradigm for the present conflict.” My thinking—far from original—was that Christians should deal with Darwin and evolution, just as they dealt with Galileo and heliocentricity. I am no longer convinced this analogy works.

America’s present controversy over evolution is being labeled in some circles as another “Galileo Moment,” although the present controversy is really just the  ongoing battle over evolution, recently intensified by emerging genetic evidence against a literal first man.  As I have looked more closely at the arguments defending Adam and assaulting evolution, however, I have come to see that the present controversy is really quite continuous with the one that gave John Donne such pause in the 17^th century, namely, the longing for coherence and the demand that it not be lost.

17^th century concerns about what Copernicus and Galileo did to the earth were not primarily about its location or movement per se.  There were, to be sure, a few awkward Bible verses about the earth being “fixed” but they were easily handled as figurative or observational, once it became clear that the earth was indeed in motion. The real issue was the loss of the order that created the structure on which the Christian worldview had been based. In particular, the well-defined earthly realm, extending only to the moon where the corruption of sin ended, provided a comforting limitation on the extent of the curse placed by God on the creation.  When Donne says “The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit can direct him where to look for it” he is lamenting that the new location of the earth makes no sense in the theological scheme of things. Why are we looking in the perfect heavens for the imperfect earth? Why do we seek the perfect sun at the center of the world, as far from God as possible?  What parts of the world share in the curse of sin? Where is the boundary between the heavens and the earth, between perfect and imperfect, between changing and eternal?

Note how the following 17^th century objection to Copernican astronomy is based entirely on the way it disrupts the system of religious thinking, rather than the challenges it poses to a literal reading of the Bible:

“It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it cannot be that any such great things have been done especially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah’s ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Savior?”

Today’s anxiety about the historical Adam takes this same form. The literal meaning of the Bible verses about his origin—created from dust in a perfect garden in the Middle East about 6000 years ago—is up for grabs, just as the literal meaning of biblical references to the fixity of the earth has long been up for grabs.  Only the most fundamentalist Christians who reject most of science anyway feel no pressure to modify their interpretations of Genesis.  For Christians who take science seriously the biblical Adam is not as important as the theological Adam—that is, Adam as the source of sin, death, and the Curse is what matters, not when and where he lived. In other words, Adam has a role to play in keeping the theological system coherent just as a centralized earth had such a role.

Today’s controversy over evolution and the historical Adam is best understood as the ongoing controversy over the Copernican revolution because of the great degree of overlap between the central concerns raised by each—concerns about how the overall Christian understanding of the world and its history, especially the central theological role played by humans, fits with the reality disclosed by science.

A historical Adam fits into the “Christian Theology 101” scenario known as “Creation-Fall-Redemption”: God created everything perfect in the beginning; a human choice to reject God and commit sin messed up the perfect creation—all of it; Jesus’s work of salvation redeems humans from that sin, a precursor to God redeeming all of creation at the end of time, creating a “new heavens and a new earth.” Phrases like the “unified biblical narrative” are often applied to this simple scheme.

The theological system here contains the following elements: 1) God created a perfect world free from sin, consistent with his nature and omnipotence; 2) God gave his creatures freedom; 3) The creatures—Adam and Eve—abused their freedom and sinned; 4) the source of all the imperfection, evil, death, and suffering is the sin of Adam, and God is in no way responsible for it—he created only perfection; 5) God, working through Christ, redeems humans from their sin; 6) God wraps it up at the end.

This scenario entwines naturally with the medieval worldview. God creates the world with two realms—earthly and heavenly—both perfect. When Adam sins, God curses the earthly realm, the human part of the world, conveniently bounded by the orbit of the moon.  This curse creates thorns, carnivores, and germs that produce sickness. God does not curse the heavens since that part of the creation is completely separate from the realm where Adam lived. 

The entanglement of the two concerns—the location in space of the earth and the location in time of Adam—emerges when we look at two related theological questions: 1) the special role played by humans in the divine drama; and 2) the spatial and temporal extent of the Fall. If the earth orbits the sun what is the spatial domain of the Curse? When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon was his footprint on perfect soil? Does the Mars rover explore a perfect planet that could never be home to weeds and thorns? Is the outer solar system photographed by the Voyager spacecrafts different than the region around the earth? Are aliens on distant planets sinful? Would aliens like Star Trek’s “Mr. Spock,” with one human parent, inherit Adam’s original sin? These questions seem strangely out of place in an age of science and yet a curse on the physical creation has long been a central Christian doctrine, discarded only by liberal theology.

In the same way, the temporal domain of the curse is impossible to pin down in time without a historical Adam at the beginning of time. If sin and death entered the world with Adam’s sin, how did so many species go extinct before he sinned? If nature was indeed “red in tooth and claw” before sin, is God then responsible for so much suffering? Did God intend the lion to chase down the hapless zebra as we see on nature shows? Or is that grisly scenario a consequence of human sin? If we evolved from earlier life-forms, how did our sinful natures arise? And at what point in the development of ever more intelligent primates does the concept of “sin” begin to make sense? Do we even have sinful natures? If there is no fall from perfection, then what does salvation mean?  Is it “all in pieces, all coherence gone”?