Like you, Bonhoeffer appears to have had a religion of …

Comment on Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes by Sean Pitman.

Like you, Bonhoeffer appears to have had a religion of ethics. However, even you, even Barth, seem to believe more in the historical claims of the Bible than Bonhoeffer apparently did. He was more captivated by the ethical claims of the Bible, such as the Sermon on the Mount, than any of the empirical claims of the Bible, especially the miraculous claims, which he considered to be largely if not entirely mythical – an important myth, but mythical none-the-less.

Bonhoeffer thought of religious and secular truth as two completely distinct realms of knowledge. However, for him, the myth of the Bible was still “true” in the sense of imparting a present relationship with God. This truth, however, was not viewed by Bonhoeffer as being dependent upon a literal historical basis. For example, like you, he believed that historical criticism proved that Jesus did not speak very many of the words ascribed to him in the Bible. Yet, Bonhoeffer, didn’t dwell on historical criticism and never really preached on it – for fear of offending people in his congregation and causing them to distrust something that had been a source of comfort to them. Instead, he seemed to want to maintain an outward semblance of traditional views. So, he preached on the significance of scriptures without referring to their unhistorical character. In this, he was similar to Barth who, in “The Epistle to the Romans” issued an appeal to faith in the whole Bible as the Word of God without reference to the historical or scientific accuracy, or rather inaccuracy, of its statements.

Irrationalism (i.e., the view that knowledge or truth is primarily non-rational and non-conceptual; very similar to faithism or fideism) was an important aspect of both Barth’s and Bonhoeffer’s thought – since they were both heavily influenced by Nietzsche (a very popular figure in Weimar Germany). Bonhoeffer continually emphasized the need for faith and revelation, because truth “is not the clear sky of concepts and ideas” (Bonhoeffer, GS, 4:83). Their “irrationalism” affected their understanding of the Bible by providing them with radically new ways of conceiving of Biblical history and language – compared to that of traditional Christianity. As with Nietzsche, instead of dismissing the stories of the Bible as worthless myths, Bonhoeffer and Barth began to value them as a form of non-conceptual knowledge derived through instinct or intuition, or inspiration – a central feature in Nietzsche’s thinking. Nietzsche deplored the role of history in destroying illusions and myths and considered primitive Christianity a vibrant myth that degenerated when Christians began promoting Jesus as a truly historical figure instead of an important myth-maker. For Nietzsche, Jesus was not so much a temporal reality, but “an ‘eternal’ factuality, a psychological symbol redeemed from the concept of time.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Antichrist, section 34.)

Such influence seems to have had its effect on both Barth and Bonhoeffer. For example, Barth called the resurrection of Jesus an “unhistorical event” (Barth, Der Romerbrief, 175, 183) or part of “superhistory” that is unaccessable to the usual methods of historical investigation (unlike the history of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, etc.). He went on to argue, in 1920, that “It is beside the point even to ask whether they [miracles in the Bible] are historical and possible. They make no claim to being either. They signalize the unhistorical, the impossible, the new time that is coming” (Barth, Word of God and Word of Man, 91). Yet, Barth still seemed to believe in such miracles, just that they were accessible only by faith or belief, not by empirical means (similar to your own views).

Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, appears to have taken these ideas a step further. Concerning the resurrection of Jesus, Bonhoeffer wrote that “It is… senseless and crude to make of it a bare historical fact, for God wants to appear in history. The resurrection occurs in the sphere of faith, of revelation; every other interpretation takes from it its decisive character: God in history” (Bonhoeffer, Jugend und Studium, 1918-1927).

In 1928 Bonhoeffer went on to argue that the Bible is filled with material that is historically unreliable. Even the life of Jesus is “overgrown with legends” and myths so that we know little about the life of Jesus. Bonhoeffer concluded that “Vita Jesu scribi non potest” (the life of Jesus cannot be written). In Christology (1933) Bonhoeffer claimed that through faith historical facts were not past, but present; not contingent, but absolute; not historical, but contemporary. He further asserted that “the Jesus that cannot be historically grasped is the object of resurrection faith.” In other words, real history is pretty much irrelevant to faith – according to Bonhoeffer.

There are two passages in, “The cost of Discipleship” that seem to clearly reveal Bonhoeffer’s view on the unhistorical character of the Bible. One is only part of a sentence: “We cannot and may not go behind the word of scripture to the real events . . .” The other statement is found in a footnote:

“The direct testimony of the scriptures is frequently confounded with ontological propositions. The error is the essence of fanaticism in all its forms. For example, if we take the statement that Christ is risen and present as an ontological proposition, it inevitably dissolves the unity of the scriptures, for it leads us to speak of a mode of Christ’s presence which is different e.g. from the Synoptic Jesus. The truth that Jesus Christ is risen and present to us is then taken as an independent statement with an ontological significance which can be applied critically to other ontological statements, and it is thus exalted into a theological principle.”

Bonhoeffer went on to explain that, “The confusion of ontological statements with proclaiming testimony is the essence of all fanaticism. The sentence: Christ is risen and present, is the dissolution of the unity of the scripture if it is ontologically understood… The sentence: Christ is risen and present, strictly understood only as testimony of scripture, is true only as the word of scripture. (Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge, 219-21).

Bonhoeffer called the Word of God the word of decision (Entscheidungs-wort) for those who hear it. Decisionism is also a dominant theme in “The Cost of Discipleship,” where interpretation of the Bible is divorced from all scientific or historical or empirical considerations of any kind. In exchange, simple obedience to the commands of Jesus are promoted without any external reference. The anti-rationalist disposition of Bonhoeffer caused him to replace critical questioning of the Biblical text with a practice-oriented understanding of scripture – a form of practical or ethical Christianity. This concept of a “simple” understanding of Scripture was mistranslated into English in “The Cost of Discipleship” as “literal interpretation”, when, in fact, this term does not refer to the conveyance of any kind of historical, scientific, or ontological knowledge. In other words, it does not correspond in any way with the evangelical conception of a “literal understanding” of Scripture. To the contrary, Bonhoeffer conceived of the “simple understanding” of Scripture as something that captivates the will and demands a decision – apparently due to the ethical or moral weight of its claims.

Again, Nietzsche had also promoted a similar concept: “It is not a ‘faith’ that distinguishes the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently.” Nietzsche listed off actions that set the Christians apart, all of which he drew from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Nietzsche consistently stressed the primacy of the deed and the will and rejected all dogmas, formulas, and ontology. In the same way, Bonhoeffer’s call to obedience, specifically with regard to the Sermon on the Mount in his “The Cost of Discipleship,” should not be confused with a traditional much less fundamentalist view of scripture. It is actually closer to a Nietzsche’s view.

As another example, Bonhoeffer wrote:

“My view is that the full content, including the “mythological” concepts, must be kept—the New Testament is not a mythological clothing of a universal truth!; rather this mythology (resurrection, etc.) is the thing itself!—but the concepts must be interpreted in such a way as not to make religion a precondition of faith.” (Bonhoeffer to Bethge, 8 June 1944).

This mythology, to include the resurrection, “is the thing itself”? Quite clearly this is not traditional Christianity – far from it. It certainly isn’t the Christianity promoted by the New or Old Testament writers who clearly believed in the ontological historicity of their accounts and of the importance of miracles such as the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth to the meaning of key elements of Christianity – to include the foundation of the Gospel’s message of hope.

Christian ethics is one thing, an important thing to be sure. However, Christianity doesn’t have a lock on Christian ethics. Many other religions and philosophies promote the same or similar ethics. A key element of Christianity is the empirical claim that Jesus was God and lived and died and was raised from the dead in a most miraculous manner – in real history – that this isn’t just some ethical myth or story or “cunningly devised fable”.

In short, Bonhoeffer’s view, like yours and Barth’s, offers no serious challenge to modern neo-Darwinism that I can see. No one from the neo-Darwinian camp is going to argue with you because it would be pointless and meaningless to argue with a religion of “irrationalism”. However, find someone who seems to seriously present Christianity on an ontological/empirical basis – and you have a real battle on your hands (which appears to be the main reason why you’re arguing with me – because I’m promoting the need for an empirical basis for faith).

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

Sean Pitman Also Commented

Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes

I was not clear enough in my comment. There are 14 ERV’s that are intact and able to produce virus that we share with the chimps.

This is not true. According to a study published in 2005, no human ERVs capable of replication have been identified; all appear to be defective as far as producing infective viruses is concerned due to major deletions or nonsense mutations.

Belshaw R, Dawson AL, Woolven-Allen J, Redding J, Burt A, Tristem M (Oct 2005). “Genomewide Screening Reveals High Levels of Insertional Polymorphism in the Human Endogenous Retrovirus Family HERV-K(HML2): Implications for Present-Day Activity”. J Virol. 79 (19): 12507–14.

These occur at the same location in the genome of both humans and chimps. There is no question as to the function of these 14 ERV’s. Some of these are associated with disease states in humans.

This is also not true. While many ERVs are being found to be functional, most of these functions are beneficial to one degree or another, and some are even vital to life. Also, there have been no proven cases of human ERVs causing disease.

“HERVs have frequently been proposed as etiological cofactors in chronic diseases such as cancer, autoimmunity and neurological disease. Unfortunately, despite intense effort from many groups, there remains little direct evidence to support these claims, and moreover some studies have served only to muddy the waters for others.” – http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/6/reviews/1017

“Many still manage to generate proteins, but scientists have never found one that functions properly in humans or that could make us sick.” – http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/03/071203fa_fact_specter

It’s like arguing that regular genes cause disease. The real reason for disease is a loss of regulation of the normal function of regular genes, and perhaps ERV sequences on occasion, due to random mutations that destroy their original functionality.

If these are a product of design by God then why is reverse transcriptase part of the code in these viruses? They could have been placed directly in the genome as DNA. Did God design us to have disease? Would it not be more likely that these represent the past viral attacks on a common ancestor which were then incorporated into the germ cell and passed on the future generations of descendants? It would only require one ERV to prove common descent and we have 14. Ask yourself what is more reasonable?

Your knowledge about ERVs is very inaccurate. There are many rational reason for ERV-type sequences to be included, by design, in our genome. As already mentioned, many ERV sequences are being discovered to produced beneficial effects – some are even vital to life. Some ERVs have even been shown to fight against infection by exogenous retriviruses:

“The HERV-W env gene product has also been shown to block infection by an exogenous retrovirus, suggesting that the expressed HERV-W env gene could have a beneficial function to the host (Ponferrada et al., 2003).” – http://vir.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/full/85/5/1203

“However, in the case of both Fv4 and Rmcf, the mode of defense is by the domesticated env gene blocking the receptor required for retrovirus entry.” – http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=
10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.0010044

Beyond this, the theory that the ERV sequences within the human gene pool were derived from external viral infections is untenable given the population bottlenecks that would have been required to achieve this effect within the germline of humans or any other animal. Even modern retroviral infections never insert themselves within the germline cells of their host. Such a theory is based on something that is so extraordinarily unlikely that it hasn’t even been observed.

“No current transposition activity of HERVs or endogenization of human exogenous retroviruses has been documented so far.” – http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/suppl_2/14572

“Most of these elements represent ancient retroviral infections, as evidenced by their wide distribution in primate species, and no infectious counterparts of human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) are known to exist today.” – http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/6/1668

In any case, for further details along these lines, please refer to these detailed discussions of ERVs:

http://www.detectingdesign.com/pseudogenes.html#Endogenous
http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/endogenous_retroviruses.html

Sean Pitman


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
We share far more than 14 ERVs with chimps.

Not too long ago it was thought that around 30,000 ERVs existed within the human/ape genomes, comprising between 1-8% of each. As of the 2005 Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, where the entire chimpanzee genome was compared to the human genome, it is now thought that approximately 200,000 ERVs, or portions of ERVs, exist within the genomes of both humans and apes – totaling around 127 million base pairs (around 4% of the total genomic real estate). Some authors suggests a 45% ERV origin for the human genome at large (Mindell and Meyer 2001) and 50% for mammalian species in general, if all small fragments of ERV sequences are included in the estimate. In any case, of these hundreds of thousands of recognizable portions of ERVs, the vast majority of them seem to match up, at the very same loci, between humans and chimps. Less than 1% of the ERVs are lineage specific for either humans or apes. In other words, the vast majority of ERVs are shared or “orthologous” between humans and chimps (a significant increase from the seven or so that were once thought to infect both humans and chimps at identical locations).

So, doesn’t this make the case all that much stronger than humans and apes share a common ancestor? After all, what kind of intelligent designer would have put so much shared “junk” in both of our genomes?

Well, recent research is turning out some surprising discoveries on what was once thought to be junk-DNA. Much of what was thought to be junk is turning out to be functional to one degree or another – to include ERVs.

For more information on this most interesting topic, please visit:

http://www.detectingdesign.com/pseudogenes.html

Sean Pitman


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
Now you’re just projecting. How about putting your own ideas to the test and see where they stand? Isn’t it a bit strange that I’m willing to respond to questions and challenges regarding my position, but you are not? Are you willing to even consider that you might be wrong? What kind of evidence or demonstration would that take? – short of a conversion of most scientists?

I’ve spelled out quite clearly that my position is easily falsifiable and that I’d be more than willing to leave Adventism and even Christianity behind as convincingly falsified if reasonable evidence supporting the creative power of the Darwinian mechanism, or any other mindless naturalistic mechanism, could be produced… or that life has actually existed and evolved on this planet over hundreds of millions of years. I have no desire to believe in any falsehood – not matter how attractive it may seem to me. I really do desire to know the truth and follow where it leads as I am able to discover it.

What about you? What would make you leave agnosticism behind and consider that a personal God who thinks about you and cares for you and died for you actually exists?

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

P.S. By the way, science is also required to make leaps of faith. Science isn’t about absolute proof or demonstration. Science is about taking what little is known and using it to make educated leaps of faith into that which is not and cannot be known with absolute confidence.


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