Spring break is over...No more time for blogging. =)

I appreciated the open, vulnerable honesty of "Dana Schuster." The gentle perspective on how the biblical Creation story and scientific data can remain friends was a relief. Thank you to the anonymous author for sharing potentially dangerous views. They reaffirm my own and bolster my faith--both in a loving God and in the possibility of our church evolving (dare I use that word?) to a community of grace.

Zane,

See you "later"...thanks for your website contributions.Blessings in school.

All the best,

pat

Hi Zane,

Good talking back and forth. Maybe I'll see you at your church one of these Sabbaths.

God bless,

Frank

Well, my copy hasn't arrived yet. Maybe it will be my Sabbath surprise when I get home. I'm still at the office. It's been a productive week for me: finished an article, loving the texts for this season of Easter so I'm stoked about the sermon tomorrow. I've been reading Surprised by Hope, by NT Wright recently too, so it's been all around very Eastery these days for me.

Also reading Shane Claiborn and Chris Haw's, Jesus for President. Excellent stuff.

Finally, check out these good words that Bonnie pointed me to today, from our GC Pres. It made me happy.

Sabbath peace, everyone!

Those are good words Ryan. Thanks to you (and Bonnie) for pointing them out. My copy hasn't arrived yet either, but I'll hope it can be weekend reading.

I've been dragging my issue around with me all day, reading snippets to Tommy in the car and to my parents over the phone. I'm in a bit of crisis mode right now about the local church (not mine, of course, but everyone else's in 'normal Adventist-land) and Scriven's articles (both of them) were balms in Gilead.
thanks to 'Dana Schuster' for being willing to embrace ambiguity--I had a conversation just this week which would have benefited from some of those wise, gentle words.

I also appreciated my colleague Cafferky making intelligible what I usually consider boring--issues of structure. But that's critical.

The article on homosexuality looks promising, but way too long for me to fit it in right now.

I loved the Road to Clarity interview and re-read Hannon's review for my husband.

Great issue. Thank you so much. I think those who don't participate on the blogsite will be pleased to hear from the university students. The rest of us already benefit from them.

Still no magazine in my mailbox. Whatsup with that? :(

If anyone (not just Ryan) has subscription questions, email subscriptions[at]spectrummagazine[dot]org

This is an issue that reminds me why Spectrum is so important. I actually haven't gotten mine in the mail yet, but I borrowed one from a friend over the weekend and stayed up way too late reading it Saturday night.

Every section is chock full on thought-provoking articles, but the section on The Bible and Sex is extraordinary. Loren Seibold's article on sex in Christianity is superbly written and had a ring of truth in every paragraph. (There was only one note that I really wished had been a parenthetical in the actual essay text as I originally wondered why he was lumping rape, incest and homosexuality in he same sentence. His note explains that he is in no way putting homosexuality in with the other two, but that growing up those were all unmentionables in his church.)

And John R. Jones' article, "Examining the Biblical Texts about Homosexuality" was the one that kept me up way past my bedtime. You're right that it's long, Lisa, but it's well worth taking the time soon to read it. He managed to still write in an entirely accessible manner even though it's a very weighty work of scholarship (the references go on for three plus pages!

This issue feels like one that folks who aren't regular subscribers might want to order as an individual issue.

Great suggestion, Daneen. Individual copies are available for $10 by contacting Julie at the Spectrum office. E-mail subscriptions@spectrummagazine.org. We also take phone orders 916-774-1080.

When Fritz Guy told us about the significance of Jones' scholarship, we knew we had to publish it, in its entirety. This is not a topic that you can have a substantive discussion in 1500-2000 words. I was also struck by the significance of Biblical understanding to the discussion of the public policy issues in Mitch Tyner's article.

Ryan, I hope that your copy has arrived by now. The journal was mailed from Missouri (where it is printed) on March 17. How quickly it moves through the US Postal system depends on many things including your local post office. I, too, am awaiting my home copy in the mail.

Thanks to all for the feedback. It is very helpful for those of us at the editorial office to hear from readers.

I'm probably the minority here but, while I enjoyed "Dana's" article and thought she (I'm picking a pronoun here) spoke very well to the internal struggle of reconciling evolution to Genesis, I also found it frustrating. She seemed to be just dancing up to a point where the discussion could get interesting but then backed away from the implications.

When one looks at the problem of theodicy, I'm afraid I'm with Cliff in that there really isn't any logical way to reconcile Genesis and evolution. There is no escaping that creatures suffered for billions of years (granted at least one of those billion concerned unicellular organisms which suffer in a pretty limited way) and to make matters worse, they didn't even have the capacity come up with theories to try and make sense of it like humans do. I don't like the implications of that but there it is. I would like to hear more of her possible alternative explanations for how God really didn't create like that. I didn't see how the alternative universe suggestion makes things more palatable. Adam and Eve, in another universe, sinned, and so creatures in this universe have to suffer for billions of years? How fair is that?

I would argue also that the Genesis account hardly gets God off the hook for evil anyway. While it is a much nicer narrative where we take the blame, not God, there are still questions around why a loving God would create the capacity for evil, would create a creature He knew would bring evil into the world, would not destroy evil sooner rather than later (to look at the SDA perspective - just how stupid are those creatures watching on other worlds anyway? I've only been around 42 years and I can tell evil is bad. Does it really take billions of years, or even a few thousand?), would set up a very tempting situation in the garden and then walk away knowing the implications of the fall (any parent could tell you this was a bad idea especially considering the consequences) and so on.

So I think it is a false dichotomy to see Genesis as providing a narrative that answers evil while evolution doesn't. I do recognize that evolution's picture of God is bleaker, no doubt. One can say that Genesis and evolution can be friends but those are simply comforting words unless one digs deeper into what that would look like.

Beth, thanks for pointing out the false dichotomy of seeing Genesis as a narrative that gets God off the hook for evil while evolution does not. I agree--I've always felt that if the Genesis narrative was supposed to be the literal way in which evil came into the world, it's a bum deal. Adam and Eve were given a choice without full knowledge; it feels a tad like entrapment. Besides, the world we live in requires knowledge of binaries; in order to appreciate light, we must know dark, in order to love joy, we must know sorrow. In this context, there's an excellent reason to choose "knowledge of good and evil."

I don't know that I ever will know without doubt how the story functions--is it a story about when people became gained self-awareness? I keep coming back to Marcus Borg's explanation that, no matter what we believe about the particulars, the larger truth remains (I'm paraphrasing):

- God created life
- It was good
- Something happened
- We live our lives east of Eden
- We long to return.

Thanks Daneen for your response. I could agree with Borg if, by God's creation being good, he means all the good that we can see around us now that is intertwined with the bad. I can talk about suffering but there is also much beauty and joy. If however, he means something more good than what we see now, something that does not have death intertwined, something less violent, then he has simply gone against the scientific data and has lost me.

This is the real crux of evolution in regards to Genesis. There has never been a time on our earth, with or without humans, when death was not a part of life. Period. No squiggling around it. It is simply a core part of what the data show us and one cannot say they accept what science says without accepting that. We, along with all living things, were created from a process of beauty and ugliness, life and death, joy and suffering. We may very well have been created with a yearning for heaven - for God's kingdom, for something better than what we have now. But we are not yearning for something better in our past because it never was. There is nothing to return to, only something to move forwards to.