The Birth of Jesus, Part XII. Making Sense of the Wise Men

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 2 May 2013 1 Comments
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Question

I have a question. I learned that “survival of the fittest” meant that those who fitted, i.e. adapted, best to the circumstances of life would survive, not those who were the most powerful or the strongest. Am I right as your text is more in the last way? I apologize since English is not my mother tongue.

Answer

Dear Nico,

I am guessing that your question arose from a column some time ago when I sought to find a new way to discuss life after death by going deeply into life itself. There I talked about the origins of our universe and about the evolution of life on this planet earth, which began in the form of single cells and moved into self-conscious human beings over a period of about 3.8 billion years.

When we discovered DNA about fifty years ago we learned that life is one connected, unfolding whole. Now we must ask about the things we have in common with all living things: plants, vines, trees, insects, creatures of the sea, reptiles, mammals and other human beings. That shared connectedness is revealed in many things, but chief among them is that to be alive in any form is to be survival-oriented. In the plant and non-self-conscious world of living, animate things this drive for survival is innate, instinctual and unconscious. That is what Darwin was referring to and people interpreted him to be saying that the driving force of evolution was the “survival of the fittest.”

He was pointing to the quality of adaptability, which marks all living things. Part of what drove Darwin to this conclusion was his study of the size and shape of the bills or beaks of the finches on the various islands of the Galapagos chain. The way the beaks received food on each island over the centuries had changed the shape of their beaks. Those who were capable of adapting to the food source survived; those who were not able to adapt did not. Eventually the beaks were shaped to serve that bird’s survival.

Human beings are the only creatures of whom we are aware, who, because we are self-conscious, know that survival drives us. In turn, this gives us the opportunity to direct, more than any creature has ever been able to do so before, the process of our own evolution. The down side in our humanity is, however, that if our own survival is our deepest driving value, we cannot escape being self-centered. We view all things and all people from the perspective of whether or not they aid in our survival. This is the quality of our humanity that I believe the early fathers of the Christian Church observed and they interpreted it to be “original sin” and subsequently developed the “Myth of the Fall” to explain that our presumed original perfection was ruined by sin. This in turn provided the definition of human life against which the Jesus story was ultimately told. Jesus was God’s rescue operation sent from “heaven” to pay the price for our sinfulness on the cross and to lift us back to that status of perfection which was presumably ours before the “Fall.”

My sense is that these ideas are now bankrupt. Darwin revealed that there never was a perfect and finished creation and the absence of “original perfection” making the story of the fall into “original sin” nonsensical. One cannot fall from a perfection one has never possessed.

Creation is ongoing, unfinished process. If original sin has lost its claim to validity then so has the story of Jesus rescuing us from that fall. So, the way we tell the whole Christian story is consequently in flux and must be changed dramatically. Can we modern Christians lift the Jesus experience out of the dated explanations of antiquity and find a new way to communicate that experience? The future of the church hangs on how we answer that question.

Thanks for writing.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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