I often attend a lunch time communion service; tis a wonderful thing. As part of the service we are blessed with a brief sermon, usually from an older, and in some cases, retired servant of the church. The blessing is not in their brevity, I might add, but in their content.
The other day, the president made a number of remarks that touched on the interests of this blog.
He told us that OT history was the basis of all that comes in the NT: the miracles in the latter being associated with faith in the creator; which creation, of course is set out in the OT, as part of its history!
He went on to say that God is established as the cause of creation in Genesis, and this is one of the parts of history that underlies faith. Our faith is not the airy faith of the one who rejects that God existentially intersects with our historical flow, but on the contrary the concrete faith of one who relies on God to do and be as he not only says, but showed that it was God that said it, in Christ, emmanuel.
Some further remarks were added as to the fact that science could not 'prove' that God created, but nor could it prove the opposite. I feared here that we were leaping out of the conrete biblical ontology into the idealism that lets us say that two contradictory things can be true at the same time in the same relations! I hope not. I hope he was just saying that it is not a matter of observation or deduction from the physical creation (but not denying there is some validity in that) but that it was a matter of that faith that is founded in the acts of God in history.
