Introduction

History records that certain changes in society occur through revolutions and uprisings, whether economic, political, military or religious. These revolutions try to bring a new ideology or paradigm to regulate and direct the priorities and actions of human beings and their institutions. In that sense, one of the great revolutions that humanity has experienced, especially in the Western Hemisphere, is the spread of Christianity as the fundamental religion in society. Mike Aquilina and James Papandrea, in their book Seven Revolutions That Changed the World,i convincingly argue that Christianity changed the way of thinking, and the values and practices of the European life. These changes ranged included recognition of human dignity, a new idea of dignity in the family, a positive point of view about work, and relationships between people based on tolerance and love. Alvin J. Schmidt shows that this change was profound and encompassing, and not only in Europe but also in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Wherever people were transformed by the Christian message, they changed the abhorrent practices and thoughts of their societies for better. These changes saw the end of infanticide, slavery and deadly fights of gladiators in the Roman Empire, the better treatment of women, the dignified morality of sexuality and the creation of educational and health institutions.

Christianity also brought a new vision of the place of human beings in the eschatological scheme of world history. The Old Testament God had promised to crush the head of the serpent (the devil, Gn 3:15), and the Prophets and the Psalmist David proclaimed salvation (1Chr 16:23, Job 13:16 etc.). The architecture of the Israelite sanctuary and the rites that were performed there, were designed to remind the people of Israel who the Savior was, His character, and how the plan of salvation played out: the blood of the Lamb replaced the sins of human beings and they were forgiven through the death of the animal on the altar. The objects and rituals of the sanctuary and, later, in the temple, prefigured the intercessory ministry of Jesus Christ who, as the Lamb of God, took on human form to teach that salvation is free, undeserved and available to all who wish to live eternally (John 1:29, Rom 8:3).

But Christianity was not a uniform, stable religious movement. As it spread geographically and acquired shares of power and influence, it also evolved into ideologies that in some respects had little to do with its original form preached by the Master Jesus of Nazareth. This was particularly evident in the subject of salvation. In the genuine biblical sense, salvation is a free gift guaranteed by the death of Christ on the cross. Luther, the Protestant Reformer in the sixteenth century, preached salvation by grace through accepting the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. To receive this salvation, all we need is to accept Jesus as Savior and live a life according to his teachings. In his letters to the Romans, Corinthians and Galatians, the apostle Paul extensively developed this doctrine of salvation established by Christ on the cross. According to Paul, human beings cannot do anything for themselves to earn salvation; salvation is not achieved or won—it is received.

But in centuries after Constantine (4th century), the vision of free salvation through forgiveness, faith and grace, developed into a materialistic view in which the human being is the one who struggles to get salvation before God, who in turn seems to have no interest in granting it freely. Not only was the genuine vision of free salvation distorted, but also a complex theology of condemnation was developed that emphasized God’s taste for pain and suffering of His children. Instead of forgiveness and grace, the motivating agents to earn salvation were penitence, the purgatory and hell. Thus, a complete distortion of the good, loving and generous God, and that of the figure of Jesus, is completed—salvation turned out to be through personal effort and penitence. Though Reformation brought back the fundamental biblical view of salvation by grace, the distortion of the image of God caused many philosophers to move away from a theistic worldview.

At present, in the Western world we can find three fundamental paradigms regarding salvation: 1)the paradigm of grace: God exists and is good; salvation is by grace for those who have faith in Jesus Christ; we cannot do anything to earn it; 2) the paradigm of merit: God exists; obedience to His laws, penitence (merit) and intermediation of other human beings (saints) increase the chance of salvation, and 3) the paradigm of emptiness: God does not exist; this life is all there is, nothing beyond this one; there is no ultimate purpose, but emptiness; ultimately the human species will evolve onto a higher state, perhaps prolonging its existence.

The merit-based option requires a frustrating personal effort to please God, who turns out to be indifferent, capricious, and often vengeful. Therefore, many people have opted for the vacuum, and have chosen to deny the existence of God and hence salvation. The distortion of the image of God through the second option leads to emptiness, nothingness.

Parallel to this historical distortion of the biblical view of salvation, there was a distortion of the value and place of human beings in the scheme of life. The Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century placed the sun as the center of the solar system, culminating in Galileo Galilei showing that the earth was not, in fact, the center of the universe. This could not have been more devastating to human vanity. But in the nineteenth century, Darwin humiliated humans even further by proposing that Homo sapiens had not been created by God but was merely the result of naturalistic evolution and the descendant of previous irrational species. This proposal shook the contemporary theological foundations by removing humans from the natural scheme of Creation and stripping them of the need for salvation.

In the Darwinian worldview, humans are just evolved animals and therefore do not need to be saved from their sinful situation. This concept stems from two naturalistic assumptions of the theory. First, there is no need for salvation because the evolutionist worldview entails no sin, only instincts and actions toward natural survival. Thus, the theory of evolution of Darwin saved the unbelievers of his time and those of the present from an intellectual confrontation, because it prevents them from seeing sin as breaking a universal moral code. Unlike the Christian worldview, where sin is the result of moving away from God and the breaking of divine commandments, in the evolutionary worldview a sinful act is not something evil or shameful, but a relic idea of a primitive animal that has yet to be removed in the evolutionary process. Thus, on the one hand Darwinian evolution is humiliating for the human being, but on the other hand it seems to exalt human pride and to free them from guilt. Therefore, true salvation is not an extra life in the hereafter, but the ridding of primitive religious ideas in the present. Darwin himself expressed this apparent contradiction when he wrote that “Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future.”

Another reason why there is no need for salvation in Darwinism is that it is not the individual who is saved, but the species, which, nevertheless will gradually evolve (or disappear) as new characters are appearing by genetic variation and natural selection. Therefore, it is futile for humans to pursue salvation of their physical, spiritual and mental state (be it sinful or just natural organic state), because we are only molecules that decompose after death. If we have fulfilled our biological Darwinian obligation to leave abundant offspring that is better equipped both physically and mentally, then we will be saved as species—at least for a generation—but not as individuals or souls. Eventually, this idea leads to an unworthy concept of ourselves: we are only a handful of molecules that will fertilize the soil after death.

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Historically, and since its inception, Darwinism has hurt the Christian faith. It has helped to undermine confidence in Scripture and has promoted a naturalistic view of biological existence and the universe that alienates humans from salvation. It has justified lifestyles and practices incompatible with the Christian faith. The conflict between Darwinism and Scripture (and Christian faith) is broad and affects the ideas that relate to origins or protology: the origin of the universe, earth, life and humans. It also affects eschatology: What happens after this life? For the extreme materialistic Darwinist, there is only matter and energy. As a consequence, all we need to explain is protology, because there is no eschatology.

In a sense, the Christian is not concerned about the extreme Darwinism that denies the existence of God or attributes the divine with only a symbolic presence in the evolution of nature. Of course, Christians are interested in bringing such Darwinists to accept Jesus as Saviuor, if for one thing, to prevent them from being ‘lost’. The problem is that extreme Darwinists do not feel 'lost’ but evolved. As such, they have reached an organic level in nature that gives them superiority and advantage, and they know that there is nothing beyond the organic, the finite and this earthly existence. As noted above, there is no concept of salvation for those who believe that there is nothing to be saved from. The blood of the lamb, which in God's covenant with Israel symbolized the death of the animal instead of the sinner, is nothing but the blood of an animal from which natural selection failed to save. Jesus' death on the cross is not seen as a sacrifice that overcomes the enemy, but the result of a misguided strategy for survival.

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This extreme materialistic Darwinism was not popular in the days of Darwin, and today many scientists still avoid it in favor of a version more subdued and conciliatory with the Bible: the so called theistic evolutionism, which tries to accommodate what Scripture affirms with the claims of scientists. This view of theistic evolution proposes a God who somehow cares about humans and reserves them a place in the hereafter where evolution will have been completed. However, this version of evolutionism is still antagonist to the fundamental principles and doctrines of Christianity, including salvation by grace.

For the theistic evolutionist, evolution is God's way of creating, the process of establishing life on the planet, which also evolved to have favorable conditions for life. God used the processes of evolution—mutation and natural selection—over millions of years to bring about biological complexity and variety. Predation, death and suffering are natural processes instituted by God to carry out His creative work. The stronger and more capable (the fittest, the one that reproduces the most, etc.) are the individuals that survive. Ultimately, what God cares for is not as much the individual as the species—the fittest species survives. Ultimately, it is the species that either survives, dies off, or evolves. In the most condescending versions of theistic evolutionism, God reserves the right to intervene in crucial moments of the evolutionary process, including, as proposed by the Catholic view, the infusion of the soul to a certain pair of primates (Adam and Eve) sufficiently evolved as to be aware of the transcendental. However, other theistic evolutionists claim that Adam and Eve were not real, but mythological characters, or a symbolic couple in the evolutionary chain from primates to humans. These statements contradict the fact that Jesus, the Son of God introduced Adam and Eve as real people (Matt 19:4-5). The Son of God, who had direct revelation of the Father, affirmed the historical validity of Adam and Eve. Paul presented Jesus as the second Adam, and said that if the first Adam, the one of the book of Genesis, did not exist, then the second either, and the redemptive sacrifice for the sins of Adam (and other people) make no sense. There is no salvation without the first and the second Adam. Darwinism not only denies the physical and spiritual salvation but also the historical figures of Adam and Eve and the promise of salvation that God made to them (Gn 3:15).

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One of the major problems of theistic evolutionism is to give meaning to death in the context of protology and eschatology. If God used death, suffering and natural selection as evolutionary mechanisms to improve the human species, Jesus would not have had to die, because death would not be the wages of sin, but the struggle for survival, which finally it will make the human species better. As a result, death is not the last enemy to defeat (1Cor 15:26), and therefore there was no reason why Christ had to die on the cross. Additionally, as mentioned above, what really matters is not the survival or improvement of the individual but of the species. However, the way the Bible views death indicates that God did not use it to create. The cross at Calvary Mount tells us that God desires salvation (life), not death of His creation. God hates bloodshed and violence and that may have been the reason why He brought the Flood (Gn 6:14). But in Darwinism, death is part of the natural evolutionary improvement of species; its role is to get rid of those who are not fit or whose physical qualities have diminished so much that survival is not feasible. Death improves the human species by eliminating the weak. In evolutionism, salvation of the species is through suffering and violence. Death is not something to eliminate, but part of the process of saving the species.

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If the earth and living things, as proposed by theistic evolutionism, are the result of millions of years of evolution, the idea of a new heaven and a new earth (Isa 65:17) is unnecessary. Will God take millions of years to create the new earth and new heaven? Why not just let the earth and nature continue evolving and improving? This naturalistic worldview led Rudolf Bultmann to say that “No one who is old enough to think by himself supposes that God lives in a nearby sky. There is no longer a heaven in the traditional meaning of the word... We cannot wait for the return of the Son of God in the clouds of heaven or hope that the faithful will find him in the air (1The 4).” He adds, “Even if we were we to believe that the world as we know it will come to an end in time, we would expect it to occur by a natural disaster, not a mythical event as indicated in the New Testament.” Bultmann reflects the common view among naturalists and evolutionists: not only do we not need heaven, but indeed it does not exist. This earth, this life is all there is, our only hope is to improve the species, which will be seen in future generations, not in ourselves.

Again, the Darwinian paradigm leads to despair and hopelessness. Paul, without knowing Darwin’s theory, expressed it graphically in its cultural context: “at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Eph 2:12). The “excluded from citizenship in Israel” and “foreigners to the covenants of the promise” refer to eternal death, vacuum. Paul says that these people lack hope, live without it, and end completely abandoning the idea of “God in the world”. The text could be read inverted: There is no God, no hope, no salvation. That's what Darwinism brings: atheism leads the human beings into existential emptiness and despair.

“But now” says Paul “in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (v. 13). It is not the evolution of the human species to a higher state of perfection which brings hope to the person, but Christ who managed to conquer death, who suffered and condemned violence, who reversed disease, and who sympathized with the less fitted and weak. Darwin managed to spread the idea that we are nothing valuable, with no hope of personal salvation, only death. Christ assured us that we are valuable, that he overcame death and that one day will completely remove it, and all of that gives us hope that this life is not all there is.

i Mike Aquilina and James Papandrea. Seven Revolutions That Changed the World. New York: Image; 2015.