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Peacocke's distinguished career as a scientist included early research on DNA. His theology, alas, is typical of that of many thinkers who set out to explain what is "credible" for us to believe about God and his "interaction with the world" given the "comprehensive, indeed dazzling, perspective on the being and becoming of the world and of humanity that the sciences have … unveiled to our generation." This turns out to entail a rejection of anything resembling Christian orthodoxy from the first century to the present. There was no Fall as recounted in Genesis (whether interpreted literally or in symbolic terms), and instead of sin we have

a sense of incompleteness, a felt lack of integration and a widespread judgment that human individuals in twentieth-century society have failed to live up to the hopes engendered by scientific technology. These hopes have foundered on the rock of the obduracy of self-will operating in a humanity inadequate through its own inner paralysis of will to the challenge of newly won knowledge and power over the world.

There are pages and pages of this woolly stuff in Theology for a Scientific Age. Meanwhile, Scripture is discarded whenever it is convenient—so no virgin birth (the subject of which occasions an entirely irrelevant discussion of the mechanisms of heredity: the "science," you see), no atonement (unless redefined so as to be unrecognizable in biblical terms), no crude notions of a brazenly "intervening" God such as we see dealing with Abraham and Moses and Elijah (that God doesn't square with quantum indeterminacy; now we know better).

What makes all this rather creepy, from the standpoint of orthodox belief, is that Peacocke continues to use Christian language, talking about Jesus and the Holy Spirit and a very great deal about God's self-giving love. Again and again he returns to the assertion that the church must drop "incomprehensible and unbelievable" teachings and present the faith in a "credible" manner. It seems never to have occurred to him that as he was writing those very words, a charismatic evangelical fellowship across town was no doubt meeting for worship, affirming the very doctrines that Peacocke is so keen to toss overboard.

And while Peacocke's views don't represent the full spectrum of Anglicanism, a reading of his books makes it all too clear why so many Anglican churches are empty all over England. There's a bland obliviousness to the man, epitomized by the section in the superbly produced Templeton Prize presskit in which Peacocke summarizes and comments on his own books! "This was my first really major book in the field, the result of my being able to concentrate my thinking in my post as Dean of Clare College, Cambridge . …" "This was the first theologically informed analysis of this problem in the light of the new 'molecular biology' and was much quoted. … " So nice of you to tell us.

Peacocke calls his approach to science and theology "critical realism." What many readers will find in his work, however, is precisely an absence of the realism about the human condition that so distinguishes the biblical witness.

Also:

A few weeks ago, Books & Culture Corner discussed Leon Podles's essay, "Missing Fathers of the Church: The Feminization of the Church and the Need for Christian Fatherhood," which appeared in the January/February issue of Touchstone magazine. At the time, the essay was not posted online. Now it is. Enjoy.

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March (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45