The City and the City

Ross Douhat’s post on Darwinism and Christianity Ezekiel linked to is interesting, though the comment thread rapidly descends into the usual tiresome nonsense. I’ve never found the “evolution as refutation of the argument from design” issue worrisome (not as an adult, anyway) - there are plenty of theological resources to deal with the questions that raises (if I remember correctly, Colin Gunton’s The Triune Creator has some good stuff on this). But the aesthetic objection - the violence in the evolutionary process - is a more serious issue.

Ross’s option #1 - animal suffering doesn’t matter - is clearly unsatisfying. As someone points out in the comments, I’m not sure how much the third option reflects what Teilhard de Chardin actually thought (I’ve only read a bit of him; the thing I found most dated in Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity was how much he interacted with him), but as an option on its own it’s probably the most appealing to me. However, I worry moving the Fall extra-temporally has a slight gnostic flavor and diminishes the reality of time as an aspect of Creation (it smacks a little bit of C.S. Lewis’s Platonic tendencies).

Perhaps what could save #3 (and perhaps #2) - and here I’m being quite speculative - is a reconsideration of our understanding of time. I was reading Stanley Hauerwas’s commentary on Matthew today, and I was struck by something he mentions by way of a quote from Nicholas Lash. Apparently there’s a fifth century martyrology which says for 25 March (long the new year in much of Europe, and still tax day in England, I think) that on that day “our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified, and conceived, and the world was made.” This reminds us that for Christians history is not fundamentally linear but rather cruciform - the life of Christ is the center and pivot of all time. Therefore, could we venture to extend Christ’s redemptive work to Creation itself, so that the evolutionary process could be viewed itself as a sort of cruciform turning of evil into good (whether that evil be assigned to Satan or backward-projected human choice), with the suffering involved forming part of the suffering of Creation borne by Christ?

I don’t know. But in any case I think we’d do well not to cling too closely to a linear understanding of time (though for Christian, rather than flaky pop physics, reasons) - especially for those in the Western theological tradition which already includes some Star Trek-level temporal paradoxicalness in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.