You Can't Go Back

There is only one framed photo in my office. Taken on top of a hill at night in Visakhapatnam, on the east coast of India, it has sat on my desk for over 2 years. It is a snapshot of what now appears to be a very fleeting moment in time - a period of calm before the hurricane hit. We had been married just over 3 months and felt like we were still on our honeymoon. Our worst trial was the negative review I received at work, our only uncertainty which country we would next visit, and our only financial problem was what to do with all the money we were saving. The Lady's hair is still vividly red and full of natural curls, and at 23 years old the freckles are still prominent on her cheeks.

Within a year, we wouldn't even look like that, and the smiles would be more forced. Another year and a half, and our life plans would be rewritten, our bank account would be empty, and our faith would look different.

As much as I love to recall the days of that photograph, I'm reminded of a fundamental truth in life: you can't go back. We all know this, and we're all in denial.

On Easter morning two years ago, our rector pointed out that we Americans (with our short but intense history) have invented a curious way of dealing with the inevitable loss that comes with the passage of time. We call it "nostalgia." When it merely leads to horribly-dated music, clothes, or even architecture, the effect is usually benign. But it doesn't stop there.

One commentator observed that the goal of the Religious Right (particularly in the 1980s and 1990s) was effectively a restoration of the "lost paradise" of the 1950s. He meant that they were not exactly radical, and most Americans would agree that the Fifties were pretty good. (Never mind the harsh realities of racial segregation and backyard bomb shelters). But aside from the quixotic nature of this goal, and its rose-colored view of the past, going back to the Fifties would just mean going through the Sixties again, and I'm not even sure if hippies would want that.

That's merely one example. Everyone longs for simpler times, or for the glory days. The Republicans want Reagan back, the Democrats want JFK. The Tea Party wants the 1800s back (or maybe 1776). The Amish want it to be 1693, while some Roman Catholics wish it were before 1517 (when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg) or perhaps before 1957 (when The Pill was introduced). On a visit to Egypt, our guide told us, "we have to be proud of our past [i.e. the pyramids] because there is nothing to be proud of today." Greeks take pride in Aristotle, Socrates, and St. Paul's physician (Luke) as their economy becomes the bane of the EU and the laughingstock of the rest of the world. We all, but especially Jews, wish we could go back to the 1930s and stop Hitler instead of appeasing him - just as I wish I could go back to a particular January day and stay home from work instead of frantically rushing through Bombay traffic to meet The Lady at a hospital.

But we can't go back - not in history, and not in life. It can be a hard truth to accept, but an even worse one to ignore. And ultimately, it is good news indeed.

The truth is, when that picture was taken we still didn't know each other that well. Our faith was vibrant, but had been only mildly tested. Our goals were good, but not necessarily great. Our hearts were genuine, but much smaller. Our view of life and of the world was fairly clear, but narrow. And although the future today looks almost as murky as it did then, looking back I know that we could never have imagined either the pain we would endure, or the beauty that would result.

Now, with our multiracial family and our amazingly supportive church, and having experienced redemption in such concrete ways, I'm not sure I want to go back.

Almost every major view of history can find support in the Bible: cyclical ("history repeats itself"), oppressed vs. oppressor (particularly in Amos, Luke, and James), progressive, paradigm shifts (see the Letter to the Hebrews), even existentialism. But Christians ultimately embrace a narrative view, because the Bible begins in a garden but ends in a city, and the King of that city had his finest moment redeeming us from the horrible mess we made. We believe that history is going somewhere, that there is a meta-narrative and that the Author of this story - maddening as it can be - is taking it (and us) somewhere. As much as we mourn the "paradise lost" of the Garden of Eden, our eyes are set on the heavenly city. So when I look at that photograph, although a part of me misses those days, I realize how far God has brought us in 5 years and can only wonder what He will do with us in the next five.

15 Things You Wish You Didn't Know About Me

1. I once returned a rental car because the cup holder did not fit my favorite coffee mug.

2. If there is a television on anywhere within my field of vision, I cannot help but to stare at it. It doesn't matter what is showing, or if it remotely interests me, or if I can't hear the sound, or if I'm trying to have a conversation with someone else - my eyes are drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

3. I had a very brief hip-hop career, consisting of 4 performances. The first one was in Compton, CA.

4. I have been drunk (and hungover) once in my life. It resulted from a night of smoking and drinking with a preacher and a missionary.

5. Although I'm from Kansas, I always pronounce the word "coffee" with a thick New York accent.

6. My sophomore year in college, I wrote a weekly opinion column for the school newspaper. I received nearly 200 pieces of hate mail (mostly email). A few of them were actually deserved.

7. I was fired from my first job after 6 weeks - by an assistant manager who was also a teenager.

8. I will still do almost anything for free food.

9. I watched the movie Spice World - with an entire house of guys who spent most evenings watching professional wrestling.

10. I hate chewing gum.

11. I have never purchased a television (and didn't even own one for 5 years).

12. The Lady and I like to joke about being polygamous. We decided that the plural of "spouse" is "speece."

13. In the past year I've seen only 3 movies and haven't been to a theater - but I continue to read several movie reviews every week.

14. There are few scenes more beautiful to me than wide-open spaces of ranchland.

15. I believe that coffee is a sacrament. I came to this conclusion in attempt to justify the amount of coffee spilled on myself, my clothes, my books, my cars, and our carpets - they have been baptized in coffee.

The Rocks Don't Lie / David R. Montgomery (Norton, 2012)

This book is primarily a refutation of the "flood geology" underlying young-earth creationism. I abandoned the young-earth view years ago as contradicting not only science but the clearest reading of the Bible (particularly Genesis 1:1-2). Most scientists would dismiss it as ridiculous. But Montgomery first takes young-earth claims seriously, and then solidly refutes them. By the time he is done, you realize just how fanciful it is to believe that the entire earth was reshaped by a global flood.

As a chemical engineer, I have always viewed geology with suspicion. Unlike chemistry or physics, you couldn't easily do experiments to verify theories. All we have are the existing rocks, and two people could look at the same thing yet come to different conclusions, with no easy way of settling the matter. Montgomery's lucid explanations did elevate my opinion of geology, demonstrating just how often we can see geologic history spelled out in rock formations.

The narrative structure makes the book compelling. Non-scientists forget that science is a human endeavor, carried out with human motivations and failings and sometimes by colorful personalities. And it is an ongoing quest for knowledge, a process by which we strive towards the truth, and not merely a settled body of facts. If a class were advertised on "The History of Geology," enrollment would probably be poor. But Montgomery makes it a fascinating story, enriched by his continued surprise at the rich and complex interplay between Christian faith and what was once termed natural philosophy. He makes it clear that the story he found was not what he expected, and runs counter to the revisionist narrative of "warfare between science and religion." It might have been simpler to stick to that narrative, but he instead tells it like it was.

The weakest link is the 9th chapter, "Recycled Tales," in which Montgomery tries to track down the origin of flood stories (and explain why some cultures have them and some don't). But when it comes to Noah's Flood, he trips over poor knowledge of the Bible: assuming that the Pentateuch was written 1000 years after Moses (based upon ideas in vogue in the 19th century), imagining contradictions where there are none, and deciding that flood stories with obvious political or social agendas are more trustworthy than the only one with no clear agenda (other than providing an intellectual foundation for human flourishing and freedom). Here is it is Montgomery who is 150 years behind modern scholarship, stuck in the old mode of "higher criticism." Higher criticism is driven by a three-fold presumption of guilt, that: 1) no book of the Bible could possibly have been written by the author to whom is it attributed; 2) whoever did write it must have been hopelessly biased, ignorant, or stupid; and 3) the texts we have today must have been so altered that there is no way we can know what was originally written by whoever it was that wrote it. The errors in this chapter may cause some readers to question other parts of the book, which would be truly unfortunate.

The final chapter, "The Nature of Faith," was poorly titled. It's fine if read as an attempt to put a personal touch on the questions examined throughout the book. It does make a nice epilogue to share how the researching of a book affected your own beliefs. But if Montgomery truly intends to lecture us on the nature of faith, he has much learning to do.

Additionally, these two chapters weaken the overall argument. It's as if Montgomery begins by saying, "Biblical interpretation and geology need not conflict," but then declares, "The Bible is bunk anyways" - in which case, who cares whether or not these two disciplines can be reconciled? Of course, if Montgomery doesn't find the Bible believable, he shouldn't pretend otherwise, but in that case he would have been wiser to skirt the question and stick to geology. He implies that while understanding the Bible is a hopeless endeavor, reading the rocks is simple and straightforward. But if rocks could interpret themselves, he (and other geologists) wouldn't have a job. It is possible to misread both the record of the rocks and the written record of God's activity, but it is also possible to progress in our understanding of either.

On the whole, The Rocks Don't Lie is an excellent overview of how the science of geology developed, and a surprisingly generous and open-minded recounting of its historical interaction with Christianity. Even the chapter recounting a visit to the infamous Creation Museum ends with a focus on how evangelical Christians instead strove to integrate the facts of geology with good Biblical interpretation!

Those wishing to understand Genesis better, or the overall relationship between science and faith, should see the work of Davis Young and Hugh Ross. The latter demonstrates how the most straightforward and literal reading of Genesis 1 actually concurs with everything modern science has told us from astronomy, biology and geology.