On Barrett on Adam

With the kind permission of the editor of the Journal of Creation, below is a letter of mine published in that Journal recently.

I was pleased to read Lita Cosner's paper "Christ as the last Adam..." in Creation 23(3) 2009. I hope it is the forerunner of more theological work on matters related to creation.

She quoted Barrett's consideration of the unimportance of the historicity of Adam, and rightly, to my mind, disagreed with it.

I fear that Barrett's sentiments are widely held by Christians, if without clear articulation; that is, I think they are held unconsciously by many people, lead by those theologians who do make their case clearly.

There is a thread running through much of Western theology that seemingly rests on a view of the world that is perversely not biblical. Why I say this is that I read the Bible itself as displaying a  'concrete realist' regard for the world and relations within it. Much theology is in debt to some form or other of philosophical idealism: the upshot of idealism is that one seems to be able to hold one set of axioms applying to the real world where we live and shop (try being an idealist in the supermarket), and refer to another set with application only to a world (the 'ideal' world) whose intersection with this world is purely verbal, or ideal, to allow the idealists to be consistent without disconforming pressure from the world he/she moves around in.

Idealists, particularly theological ones, would seem to be able to believe any number of contradictory things before breakfast, and particularly in theology can believe that the Bible at once has God creating, and at the same time the cosmos bringing itself into being, but argued from differing premises without relinquishing the final common relationship.

I don't think that this stands up to biblical scrutiny, let alone logical analysis.

So, Barrett's view fails: while it is true that 'sin and death' are empirically established as part of human experience, this is not Paul's point. His point in tracing it back to Adam is to do two things (if not three!), as I see it.

1. He refers us to the Genesian creation account as basic to the interplay of God and man and to remind us that death and sin were not part of the creation. Rather, they are the result of a breach in the relationship between God and his image-bearing creation, man (the interplay gone wrong) and therefore as not inherent in the creation and thus are theoretically correctable! In Christ, of course, they are actually corrected and will be shown to be corrected in the new creation. If they were inherent, then we are stuck with them (and stuck with death, contradictorily from him in whom is life: John 1:4 and on whose creation death is an intruder: Gen 2:17 in the light of Gen 1:26a and 1 Cor. 15:26!).

2. He reminds us that Adam's history, including the fall and thus sin, Christ, and our experience today (his day...our day by induction) are ontologically contiguous. There is no idealist breach in the coordinates of their contiguity; to suggest that  there may be ontological discontinuity between them would suggest that reality is other than revealed in the Bible, that there are elements to it that are either not revealed to us, or might be also 'given' and independent of God. Such elements might introduce something between God and man other than Christ (some 'principle' such as may be required by theistic evolution), or tell us that there is more to creation (that which will have an influence on us) than is shown between God and his creation as explained in the Bible...but how would or could we know...it takes us to the endless and fruitless speculation that has often dogged Christian theology with mysticism, for example, to retain this premis of convenience.

2a (or maybe 3). He must needs reference the creation as from God's hand by God's will and done by his word as also sharing time and space coordinates that place it in the same structured reality as that we occupy, and in the same terms as our experience: that is, the events that constituted creation are events as we know events, and do not, probably cannot, refer to another type of event that does not have the same time-space participation that is had by events that follow from will as we know them. This also indicates that our relationship with God, as personal, is personal in equivalent terms to other relationships: our engagement with God, through Christ, is real and substantially concrete; it is to have effects in our life and is not just an 'idea' with no relational or existential consequence within the concrete terms of our world.

The converse, that Barrett would have us entertain, must, I think, undo all this.

But it is not only Barrett who suggests that we need to take Genesis, and the way it frames reality, differently from how we frame the everyday world. Almost every theologian who wants to accommodate the dictates of materialism must do the same thing; perhaps unwittingly, but maybe not.

This comes to the fore in the incoherence of the claim that Genesis 1 tells us a whole bunch of things about the creation, which are deduced from the text, but deny that the text means anything in the terms that it uses, and that its scope is not concordant with the world that it on its face describes and refers to (I was particularly struck by this line when I received an invoice from my child's Jewish pre-school; the year was noted as being well into the 5 thousands). So one wonders at the basis for such an alternative philosophical framework: where does the account touch the real if at every point its content is denied in real terms; but maintained in some other terms whose reference frame is never articulated, nor given any basis in the only world that we have access to, and which is the world of encounter between God and us. That is the creation which provides the setting for covenant between God and us.

Discontinuity between the reference frames necessarily flows from denial of the congruence of the Genesis 1 text with the world it seemingly has in its sights. But the discontinuity is self refuting, at least at some level, because it cannot make reference to anything that would sustain the discontinuity apart from a view of the world which at the outset denies the biblical world-conception (hardly a commendation for an approach to the Bible) and has more in common with a paganistic removal of the creator from our world of interaction, or with materialist failure to accommodate the non-material at all.

So, is the choice then that Barrett and his ilk must entertain an imagined world to mount their criticism of the historicity of Adam and hope they maintain a Christian theology, or reject the Bible in the terms in which it couches itself, and therefore ask as to believe them with no adequate basis for such belief, but in doing so render such a theology un-Christian and counter-biblical.

Another "leadership" genius

Just for the record, another churchly genius who thinks that people and not the Holy Spirit "lead" the church. Apart from that barb, the site appears to have some interesting material.

See my own crits. of this notion.

Trojan Horse?

I came across a nice piece on Euangelion on theistic evolution, picking up a piece on Rick Phillip's blog. about the same thing (A hermeneutical trojan horse).

One particular statement caught my attention:

...why can't you American Presbyterians do the same and recognize that the literalness of Genesis 1-3 is a secondary matter to faith and order?

 One finds it hard to know where to start a response to this question.

At root, it seems to imply that faith (and therefore order, which must logically depend upon it) can somehow exist apart from content. By content I don't mean the form of words in Genesis 1, where God presents himself as creator by delineating his creative deeds, but content as actual creative events; because I think that the point of scripture is that actuals underly the words, and the words do not float in a Barthian 'theosphere' above our real concrete world.

God's actions are real and concrete: the whole tenor of scripture is riven with this: it is about actuals, not virtuals, suggestions, allusions or sheer imagination. Therefore faith comes as a result of understanding the implications of the actuals for us; to suggest otherwise is to send faith on the path to wishful thinking.

BTW, I didn't see the rancour in Phillip's blog that Bird finds; however I do agree with his concluding remark.

Sometime after I posted this, I found myself browsing an article by Lawrence Wood "History and Hermeneutics: A Pannenbergian Perspective". (the link is to an index, the article is in  v.16 n.1 1981) Of some interest, not that I'd agree with aspects of it, but its crit of Barthian influences is right, IMO. 

Silence!

Worthwhile post on the silence of Christians in the face of persecution: not silence as Christ's, but silence as Judas'.

Theologian strikes out; or God has trouble communicating!

I never thought I'd do this, but to roughly paraphrase Karl Barth, we should never allow current scientific views to  determine our approach to the text of Scripture. I think of Genesis 1 in particular, and furthermore, I have in my mind a discussion that I heard about with a lecturer in OT at a Sydney Bible school.

The essential points in discussion were the usual things: Genesis is of a genre that precludes its direct meaning; the creation of the sun is 'out of sequence' therefore we need to turn our ear to 'science' to determine what really happened in the beginning.

Well, what are we to make of this? A theologian whose mental parameters are set, it would seem, not by the Word of God, but by contemporary naturalism. I can't help thinking that Norman Geisler's essay 'Beware of Philosphers' (link to Geisler here) should be required reading for all in the church: each year! Because here we have an example of what can happen when contemporary philosophy bends an approach to scripture away from the Bible's own premises and corrupts its revelation to an obscuration.

The starting point for considering the views expressed (and note, this is just based on a report of the conversation/s I heard, and may not fully reflect or understand the lecturer), is his comment that the creation of the sun on day 4 is 'out of order'.

So who sets the order? Is the Bible internally incoherent, or are the nostrums of materialism used to 'set' the order against which the Bible is out of step? Its a sad day when Biblical exegesis fails to follow the Spirit's revelation, but instead holds it up for comparison against the words of that cultural movement whose starting point is that there is no God!

But it is not just a problem of a brute contest between word and fact (as though people are able to define the starting of the universe, not having been there, and inevitably conforming speculation to prior world view commitments), but one of theological disposition.

It would seem that the lecturer's dispositon is to excise from the Bible any content that he assesses is not relevent to his take on the history of salvation (I assume), as rendered by (a) its seeming disconformity to current culturally established (not scripturally established) beliefs and (b) his possible view that the Bible can only speak to what he says it can speak to (2 John 9 springs to mind: the NSRV gives a helpful rendering).

The failure is one that is long in the tooth for theology, reflecting noetic and cultural influences that extend back to the idealism of Ancient Greece, pre-digested by Plotinus and the German Idealists, for example. This results in regarding the physical world as a 'given' in effect, and its creation not significant to the intercourse of God and man: creator and creature. And as soon as its put in these terms, how ridiculous is the stricture on the Bible's scope: But, no! The Creator gives us the setting for that intercourse. It tells us much about himself, the creation and its relationships. For example, it is a real physical world (these are our bounds) we live in that was very good in conception and execution, for us to revel in fellowship with God and each other, but is profoundly effected by the Fall: that the fall, a moral rent, has had physical effects underscores the importance in God's creation of the physical, the creation as a whole, and influences us in our relationships as its stewards.

Part of the broad river of interpretation that sets the Bible as subservient to modern naturalism has it that for various textual reasons, the Genesian account of creation is less than revelatory, being more metaphorical or symbolic. But if not factual, symbolic of what? Whence the information about the creation, if the creator cannot reliably give it; and how seriously are we to take the credentails of the creator if the only way he can tell us what happened, demonstrating his credentials, is to tell us something other than what happened and the only means he gives of locating it in historical relation to us gives no such information! You may as well use a photograph of a jet plane to travel overseas!

But does the text itself say 'metaphor', 'symbolic' or suggest any other indirect reference system? I don't think so. The simple fact of direct action historical grammar makes this whole passage the very opposite of symbolic. It is concrete: God said, it happened. There is no allusive process here, no playing with vague referents or figures of speech (see note below on chiasmus). The account is a simple list of days (and thus the repetition) and what happened on them: it is a very compressed, economical, and at the same time majestic passage, with very high fact density: it is all about the action and its results with the only adornment being God's judgement of it as 'good' and 'very good'. Compare that with the meandering nonsense of Enuma Elish, for example.

The only reason to say that it did not or could not happen thus is to have other information; but there is no other information from the creator; and contemporary evolutionary speculations, themselves making the naturalist assumption (the universe made itself: an even bigger miracle!), were not foreign to the ancient world. So it is obtuse to claim that God had no interest in giving us real information that grounds his covenant and simply tendentious to maintain that God was accommodating to lesser minds: itself a reference to evolutionary speculation and unbiblical. On biblical grounds the early people would have to write to accommodate our lesser minds, subject of generations of degrading mutations (Just think of the intellectual powerhouse that Adam was, to name the various animals in a day in the first record of scientific activity)!

But back to the sun being 'out of order' (which is a peculiar take on the text, in my view).

The apparent 'problem' I think that our friend sees is that the evening and morning sequence commences from the first word of creation while the sun is provided on day 4 as a marker of times.

How, I wonder, is this a problem? Do we need the sun to 'make' time? I don't think so! Do we need changes in lighting conditions to persuade us that days are passing? Again, I don't think so.

The text indicates, I think, that the HS is not interested in telling us about lighting conditions per se; these are merely markers of time passing and not the time passing itself (to mistake the markers for the time itself is a 'magical' or pagan view, I would think, not a Christian one), but is very concerned with the passing of time, and what time interval precisely is passing. The enumeration of passing days before D4 reinforces how important this is, and that the markers of time (sun moon stars) do not make time, but only serve to mark its passing for us (this implies then that time was made on day 1 as part of the coming to existence of the physical cosmos). The fact that there are no markers before D4 brings our attention to the enumeration of passing days: its an arresting usage and excludes a metaphorical understanding of the time, it is as though the writer wanted to make certain that we understood that he was talking about days as we know them: evening and morning type days. Thereby emphasising that understanding the time period is critical to understanding God, his creation, our history and relationships. Detaching this time from the markers stresses its importance, I think. This is a 'pay attention' moment, and the time must be profoundly significant to be given the prominence that it has been given. If we attempt to develop any other understanding of this passage, I think it immediately implies that we conceive of uncreated things apart from God, a view, an implication, inimical to entry into a biblical world-view.

Two small matters:

1. Some people think that the lighting conditions might vary with some sort of light source and a spinning world giving diurnal change prior to D4; but this is neither required nor implied. Certainly, light was made first; well, one could argue that raw matter was made first (earth without form and void: the subsequent verses clearly set about the filling, so the first verse simply points to the work of the subsequent verses); then light, as representative of the energy spectrum is necessary for all the rest to proceed. No light, no anything else.

2. This doesn't help with an understanding of 'separating light and darkness' which is clearly there to teach us something (as is all Scripture...but it doesn't teach us what we want, as those who accommodate to the world would hope, but what it wants, to correct and rebuke us, and bring us to God for life); maybe it refers to some physical process to do with energy and 'raw matter'; but I'll leave that to others to consider.

On Chiasmus

Some people make much of the chiasmus they find and claim that this, along with the list-like repetitions in the passage, indicate that it is not an account of actual events. However, chiasmus is a structuring device used in many documents, including those we know to be historical, and was common in ancient literature. One possible reason being to clearly delineate the text unit in a language without punctuation or formatting that we use today to structure our texts, the other is that it makes the text memorable for both memorising and oral repetition. The repetition is simply an artefact of the list form and allows a compressed conveying of detail without further elaboration. These days we'd provide a numbered list instead, nicely formatted by our word processor.

See this article by Kay and this also by Kay.

What's wrong with Christianity

Greg Clarke from the Centre for Public Christianity spoke at a recent meeting at St Philip's York St. His topic was along the lines of why Christianity makes such little headway these days.

I offered to him the following thoughts:

1. Recently I heard a sermon from the archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen who mentioned along the way the 'cringe' that many Christians feel when a 'public' Christian speaks on the live media (TV, radio). He thought the cringe might be because they would talk about the gospel; but in my case the cringe, which does occur, is because they reduce Christian faith to some naff disconnected credal statement, cute moralism or unsubstantiated rhetoric. Rarely do I hear an intellectually strong case made that properly foots the gospel in terms that would make sense to the audience. Nothing of the existential calibre of Paul's Mars Hill address.

So the irreligious have Richard Dawkins as their poster boy, with the Christian faith seen (for those who saw the ABC's Q&A a couple of weeks ago) as given voice by Senator Fielding, who was clearly caught off guard (more discussion on Senator Fielding on Q&A here) but there seems to be little public Christian discussion that would confront the 'way we are' in the popular mind with the gospel.
Indeed, not only does most Christian media discourse fail in this regard; that is, it either underplays the gospel, or assumes a dumber than average audience, but it also tends to be accepting of the way people frame the world: that is generally materialist/naturalist, so they hear the discourse as cast within their own world-concept (and reject it) and not as a viable or cogent challenge to it.

2. The formal connection we attempt to make with people (I mean in public proclamation) in many cases also seemingly plays below people's mental capability and human dignity: disengaged (that is, not answering the question 'how is this going to connect with my life concerns?'), but also dumb (and sometimes failing to recognise that lots of people have a level of spiritual interest, if not Christian).
I note in the NRSV that Paul is often stated as 'arguing' with people about the faith. I take this as not an angry fight, but as a discussion (engaged, involved, attentive, responsive) about reasons for belief. In our proclamation we rarely do this, in my experience; so people remain uninvolved in the discourse...and as McLuhan has said, the message given by our medium is 'be uninvolved' (I think of sermons and other one way communication particularly).

3. The final element that sprang to mind was relevance. Some years ago a person I know was faced with very pointed family distress. He attended church (with his family) and the sermons went on airily attempting to expound the Bible, but nothing seemed to be in touch with his world (that is, again, disconnected from people's life interests or needs): there was no opportunity for prayerful support, or indeed prayer itself, as the church servants (ministers) were intent on moving the congregation out for the next service to start. Then the only thing was the morning tea, where people tended to triumph their successes rather than being available for confidential intimacy and prayerful support for each other. It took me some effort to encourage this person to keep attending, but it was touch and go. He almost become one of the many Christians who refuse to attend church meetings.

4. I wonder if our induction of people into Christian faith could also be a factor. A simple intro to the faith says 'this is simple'. No challenge made means no challenge available, or worthy of a novice.

My impression of the induction of new disciples is that we go lightly instead of equating our action with the seriousness of Christian faith and inviting people to its riches.

Now, I've got no idea of what might be done generally, or what the span of practices is, but I tend to think that few churches have a structured introduction that is sufficient to the task.

What I've heard suggests to me that we go lightly with a read of Mark's gospel, then simply turn up to 'church' and Bible studies (adult Sunday School/home groups). But I'd like to see a structured decent length series of experiences for a new Christian (thinking older youth to adult here). Over a two year period, it would include seminars, and at least a weekend (a couple?) if not a week away at a 'retreat' for study, reflection, prayer and counselling with an older Christian.

[Just on 'retreats', I attended a Capernwray fellowship school when I was younger and was impressed that their attitude was serious about the Bible, about prayer and living the Christian life, but also serious about enjoyable surroundings: it was in a converted country estate; serious about enjoyable food and appreciation of a thoughtful approach to the physical and aesthetic aspects of life: no hair shirts, but no indulgence either.]

The experiences would include directed reading of the Bible: perhaps the entire Pentateuch, one major or a few minor prophets (Isaiah would be my choice), a selection of Psalms, and in the NT Luke's gospel, Acts, and either Romans or the trio of Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians (hmm, now have I got the order right?) then, say James then Revelation. That would be a year's reading with suitable brief guide notes to contextualise the books.

There should also be theological reading and reflection in a group context; perhaps a few churches could join together for this, to encourage theological thinking, connecting thought with life and modelling prayer. To the extent possible, I'd want to encourage the reading of proper theologians too, not popular reductions.

Lastly, I'd include reading and discussion on church/theological history, Christian social action (including actually doing some), and current issues of Christian practice (connection with everyday life), thought and proclamation (encountering contemporary world views).

The message this would send is that Christian faith is a serious business and needs to be seriously taken up. I think the message that any light-weight induction into the faith sends is that Christian life is at the level of cake baking: simple recipes done quickly with no profound impact on life.

This post at Evangelion is a nice link on teaching theology.

Evolution: April fooled you?

Is 'evolution is a fact' really an April Fool's joke? It seems to be when you expand the definition.

Templeton undoing 'religion'.

Another of the blogs I watch that had an article of interest: it touches the intersection of 'religion' and science. Of course, for most religions, and for much Christian theology, this is fine. But its not biblical!

Atheist? Just don't bother!

In a recent press report the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens, was reported as linking his Christian faith with aspects of his work during a speech he gave at a Christian gathering.
There was the usual run of silly comments that press articles attract (very rarely to they attract reasoned debate, of any kind…they’re akin to the local bus stop for quality of observation and argument), but one that took my eye was this:

“Oh great, another one in a position of power that believes in the magic man in the sky”

This represents a typical line of cynicism that is used with some frequency in recent times: cute but pointless;
Well, almost pointless, because there is a response.
Christians don’t ‘believe in a magic man in the sky’. For a start we don’t believe that God has a spatial characteristic. Perhaps criticism of Christian belief should start with an understanding of its text, the Bible! Then you may as well develop a clear understanding of the meaning of the distinction between the Old and New Testaments.
 
I'd say something like this:

"You don't act as though God doesn't exist (that will get most atheists worked up!): Why? You act as though your thoughts have real meaning and signfiicance; if there was no God and material was the ultimate basis of all that is, I don't see how anything would have genuine significance; after all, it would all be mere material, and as we know, material has no thoughts."

If you have no belief in God, in Christian terms: that is the creator and sustainer of the cosmos who is the author of life, relationships and volition, then your thoughts, intentions and love only have accidental utility and no significance beyond a random collision of material particles; for a Christian, they have genuine validity and are reflective of the ultimately personal; that mind produced matter, and not the other way around.

If mind comes from matter, then it matters about as much as matter itself does: not much.

If matter comes from mind, then we know that mind matters above matter, which is how we mind our matter in the first place.