Recently I attended an evening with Gerald Robison of Cat and Dog Theology: a surprisingly fun ministry.
After Gerald's talk question time started and a couple of questions dealt with the recurrent 'good God, world of evil' subject.
One of the questions went something like "does God like earthquakes and tsunamis?" because, I guess, the questioner thought that they were part of the 'very good' world that God created. This may have been indicative of a poorly taught or understood theology of creation and its place in the biblical (the 'real') history of the physical world; or a failure to integrate information about spiritual matters, with the covenantal relationship between the material world and our concourse with God.
Gerald's answer focused on Romans 8:22 ("For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now".); and given the time constraints, it appealed to me as a pretty good answer. He went on to affirm that despite the effects of sin on our world, 'God was still in control".
The answer, however, did not quite satisfy. There is a more fulsome response to deal with the why of natural 'evil' (earthquakes and the like), and the notion of God's being 'in control'; the latter being a particularly objectional piece of contemporary reflexive determinism.
That the world is not as God created is clear in scripture: the cosmos left God's hand as 'very good' (Gen 1:31). We are twice removed from this state: firstly by the fall, where God ceased his intimate relationship with his creation (Gen 3:9, for example), and secondly by the flood, and its aftermath.
In the contemporary Anglican church the question of natural evil arises, perhaps, because of the inroads made into the doctrine of creation by worldly admixes of 'theistic-evolution' or Christian Darwinism, and various other reconfigurations of the doctrine brought by metaphorical readings of Genesis 1, etc. Thus, I suspect, the world contorted by disruption is mistakenly 'read' as the very good world that left God's mind as revealed in the genesian account; and God is somehow identified with the blind, relentless, meaningless, cruelty and frustration that 'evolution' entails.
But, not so. God created 'very good' consistently with his goodness and love; he took pleasure in what he had done and gave to us; he also will restore the entire creation to joyful fellowship with him and peace; overturning any idea that this broken world represents, in its brokenness, God's nature. [Despite its broken state, Paul insists that it does still make representation of God]
'Control'
The notion of God being 'in control' comes up frequently, and appears to be used by Christians, in many cases, as the final support for their confidence in God's capability to finally save them. However, the glibness of its expression conjures up for me the image of God as puppeteer; which I don't find in the Scriptures.
Without grappling with the vast world of debate on this topic, and its many colours and flavours (canvassed in Christian Determinism, as one example served up at the top of a recent Google search); I will put down but a few notes.
God's being 'in control' strikes me as a god disengaged from his creation, and one who imposes on his creation or people (those in his image, and therefore not made to be 'controlled') the events and circumstances of their lives.
But God our creator represents himself differently to this. I think of Romans 8:28 where Paul tells us that God (actively) works all things together for good...so, God engaged, at work and, I think one can extend to him working in the world that we are working in, he to reliably bring about what he wills not necessarily over against us, but through and by us, even if we intend otherwise.
The way the teleological dimension of God's relationship with the cosmos is expressed in Job, is I think, what is largely in mind when people talk of him being 'in control'; but the biblical expression is far more helpful: Job 42:2, for instance, where God's ends will out: but reading this with the Romans passage, it is not, I suggest, by 'brute force' fiat, but by his working, by his Spirit in and with the minds and motivations of his creatures in all their circumstances.
I find myself discomforted by the absolutist terms that speak more of a Greek philosophical tradition ('in control' being of this ilk), and am more comfortable with God as represented in the Bible as living with us, and taking a part in the pattern of life, albeit a supreme part, by which his objectives are never thwarted and always achieved: so in these terms, he is not a puppet master, but the supreme moulder, leader, guide and 'captain' of the way of his creation; even his creation marred in rebellion and seeking to be against him.
We, though, in his church, are part of the new creation, seeking not to be against him, but to be entierly for him; but the new creation has intersected with the old, and God achieves his goal while we are wading still through the mess and sometimes horror of life in this now broken creation. We live, as it were, in two creations at once, and this living sustained in God's light by his indwelling Spirit and engaged by the life of prayer.
Just as an aside, I think that some confusion arises when people think of pre-destination, in this context, and perhaps think the Bible teaches that God has pre-destined 'you', the individual, to share eternity with him. I don't think this is so; rather, the destination of the 'train' of the church is eternity with him; but who is on the train is a different matter: not entirely different, but nevertheless, different, as God seeks and saves those who are lost, and would that all come to know him.
30 May 2011
28 May 2011
No longer part of eternity
From a recent article by Elizabeth Farrelly (touted as an architect on the Herald's website, but she isn't: not registered in NSW so cannot be one!)
It captures very nicely the wrong-headedness that parlously descends upon as by evolutionary fictions, and spreads through the church due to its faustian bargain in 'theistic evolution' reconfiguring Genesis 1 into a metaphor for something else!
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/mystery-dies-when-we-dont-see-ourselves-as-part-of-eternity-20110427-1dwmy.html?posted=successful#ixzz1KlKuot6U
It captures very nicely the wrong-headedness that parlously descends upon as by evolutionary fictions, and spreads through the church due to its faustian bargain in 'theistic evolution' reconfiguring Genesis 1 into a metaphor for something else!
For in big, fat, rich modernity, as you know, time is money. We may live twice as long as those mediaevals, but our time cannot be wasted on the merely beautiful or the merely worshipful. This is because we no longer see ourselves as part of eternity but simply as the poor, bare, forked animals that Darwinian modernism bequeathed us. Our allotted span is all we have, so it matters...
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/mystery-dies-when-we-dont-see-ourselves-as-part-of-eternity-20110427-1dwmy.html?posted=successful#ixzz1KlKuot6U
27 May 2011
Facts from non-facts
There are a number of views of Genesis 1 that fall into a basic conceptual approach to the text. It is this: the information contained in the passage is not factual. It does not correspond to events in the real world in either sequence or substance. However, Genesis 1 does teach that God is creator, that he is (somehow) sovereign over creation and that he has created a cosmos that is consistently well ordered, predictable and is subject to uniform causal regularities.
What is not explained by this basic view is how all this fact is derived from something that is non factual on its face!
It seems that to hold that one can draw the factual from the non-factual; denying that the material on its face conveys facts, but that somehow underneath it reveals something that it does not do on the surface, in the direct meaning of the text, is not a mark of thought, but of conjuring!
What is pretty obvious to me, is that this program requires the material to be sorted into that which has objective meaning and that which does not, not on its own grounds, but by some criterion that is private to the interpreter.
But how would we know that interpreter A, in rejecting that the direct reading of the text is factual, is able to know that other matters in the text, not directly accessible to the direct reader, are where its facticity lies? Indeed, how would we know that interpreter A has anything of value to say against interpreter B who responds to the text on its face? Or is it just that one garners credentials from the occult act of finding something beneath the text (occult here referring to 'hidden')? What is the basis either in the text or by reference to something outside the text to say that a fact can be deduced from a text which itself contains no facts?
That doesn't sound like even a rational reading of a text, let alone a spiritually responsive one!
So, lets get it straight; most modern post/neo/quasi evangelicals would say that Genesis 1 teaches us that God is creator, but does not provide any factual material, any reliable content, which communicates that! So where does the idea that God is creator come from if that creator cannot communicate the basis of the attribution to those he created in language which is the medium presumably created for communication between persons, or, if the Bible is right, is ontologically basic?
This is a particularly pointed question when most such PNQ evangelicals fall into line with the idea of evolution being thoroughly (or not quite thoroughly) explanatory of origins; an idea which in itself seems to feel no epistemological deficiency; and actively denies that personhood is basically real, but rather, that material is; personhood being a mere outworking of an assembly of material.
John Dixon, who I mentioned in my previous post might be one of these non-facts teach facts chaps. I'd ask him: by what criterion do you draw from a text whose facticity you deny, conclusions which are only validly available by reference to the very text you deny can provide them.
The decision to claim that some facts are established in the face of the rejection of their medium is arbitrary; those who espouse it don't have any substantial ground to reject the contrary view, that the fact they claim is carried only by the facts that convey it. To deny this is more than perverse, it is crazy.
What is not explained by this basic view is how all this fact is derived from something that is non factual on its face!
It seems that to hold that one can draw the factual from the non-factual; denying that the material on its face conveys facts, but that somehow underneath it reveals something that it does not do on the surface, in the direct meaning of the text, is not a mark of thought, but of conjuring!
What is pretty obvious to me, is that this program requires the material to be sorted into that which has objective meaning and that which does not, not on its own grounds, but by some criterion that is private to the interpreter.
But how would we know that interpreter A, in rejecting that the direct reading of the text is factual, is able to know that other matters in the text, not directly accessible to the direct reader, are where its facticity lies? Indeed, how would we know that interpreter A has anything of value to say against interpreter B who responds to the text on its face? Or is it just that one garners credentials from the occult act of finding something beneath the text (occult here referring to 'hidden')? What is the basis either in the text or by reference to something outside the text to say that a fact can be deduced from a text which itself contains no facts?
That doesn't sound like even a rational reading of a text, let alone a spiritually responsive one!
So, lets get it straight; most modern post/neo/quasi evangelicals would say that Genesis 1 teaches us that God is creator, but does not provide any factual material, any reliable content, which communicates that! So where does the idea that God is creator come from if that creator cannot communicate the basis of the attribution to those he created in language which is the medium presumably created for communication between persons, or, if the Bible is right, is ontologically basic?
This is a particularly pointed question when most such PNQ evangelicals fall into line with the idea of evolution being thoroughly (or not quite thoroughly) explanatory of origins; an idea which in itself seems to feel no epistemological deficiency; and actively denies that personhood is basically real, but rather, that material is; personhood being a mere outworking of an assembly of material.
John Dixon, who I mentioned in my previous post might be one of these non-facts teach facts chaps. I'd ask him: by what criterion do you draw from a text whose facticity you deny, conclusions which are only validly available by reference to the very text you deny can provide them.
The decision to claim that some facts are established in the face of the rejection of their medium is arbitrary; those who espouse it don't have any substantial ground to reject the contrary view, that the fact they claim is carried only by the facts that convey it. To deny this is more than perverse, it is crazy.
15 May 2011
Why age?
Comment I posted on a recent article on John Dickson's teaching about earth and its age.
It is saddening to see Christian teachers like John Dickson wanting to support a conceptualisation of the world that separates it from God, indeed, wants to make it independent of God's revelation in a fashion that has more to do with paganism than Christianity. The pagan worldview typically sees the world either as 'given' or as independent of any intelligent cause or agency. Long ages abet this idea.
Further support for paganist ideas comes in denying that the Bible could or would want to include information about our physical cosmos or world; yet the physical setting is clearly significant in the scriptures: it shows us our very tangible connection with God, and God's direct connection with his creation, thus establishing who he is for us, and who we are before him.
In denying that the opening chapters of Genesis have anything concrete to say about these topics people like Dickson, etc. effectively say that the 'god' they conceive is very different from the God of the Bible, who sets out his program for relationship with us in terms parameterised in the terms by which we know the very world that he says that he created.
Moreover, the approach that severs the direct genetic connection between God and his creation, and ultimately us, de-personalises the connection God declares through Genesis 1:1 to 2:4; de-personalisation is precisely the fruit of pagan ideas. I wonder if this implication is seen by others?
It is saddening to see Christian teachers like John Dickson wanting to support a conceptualisation of the world that separates it from God, indeed, wants to make it independent of God's revelation in a fashion that has more to do with paganism than Christianity. The pagan worldview typically sees the world either as 'given' or as independent of any intelligent cause or agency. Long ages abet this idea.
Further support for paganist ideas comes in denying that the Bible could or would want to include information about our physical cosmos or world; yet the physical setting is clearly significant in the scriptures: it shows us our very tangible connection with God, and God's direct connection with his creation, thus establishing who he is for us, and who we are before him.
In denying that the opening chapters of Genesis have anything concrete to say about these topics people like Dickson, etc. effectively say that the 'god' they conceive is very different from the God of the Bible, who sets out his program for relationship with us in terms parameterised in the terms by which we know the very world that he says that he created.
Moreover, the approach that severs the direct genetic connection between God and his creation, and ultimately us, de-personalises the connection God declares through Genesis 1:1 to 2:4; de-personalisation is precisely the fruit of pagan ideas. I wonder if this implication is seen by others?
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