I mentioned the review of Walton's book in my post on the dangerous sermon, but would like to discuss it futher.
I think that Walton must be the source of much of the sermon in question. Walton's mistake however, is that he adopts a pagan framework from the start, and fits the Bible within it, ending up not with the God of creation, but a God within creation, who adheres to the categories of modern atheistic materialism, not the categories of the Bible. The Bible's categorical structure has will exercised in love basic to all being. A pity the speaker did not explore this, or start his thinking from the Bible instead!
Walton's view is founded on the great irony that the creation account is not about creation, but something else, also called the creation, but not the creation that we are talking about (if that seems 'double-dutch' it is). It requires creation to be independent (effectively asserting a prior material creation); he also, like most today, misunderstands the creation as an exercise in only material formation (it is far more than this), and the world view that is required to sustain his position (a pagan world view) either deifies the material creation, or regards it as a ‘given’ and does not conceive of it as having been originated in the will of one who is love.
Like many other moderns, he wants to split the creation into categories that evacuate it of meaning: some split ‘how’ and ‘why’ as the domains of science and theology, respectively. Walton, likewise splits function and being, but being is function in the unified creation that comes from God’s hand. To suppose otherwise is to fall into the pagan error, now repeated in the use of materialist categories, that the creation is otherwise originated, this origination so remote from us in every way as to be an impersonal given, destroying God’s representation to us as creator of a world where his words have real meaning in terms that make sense to us within the world (as it is from his hand, and we, his image bearers, can make sense of the words God gave to us) relating to him. In effect he ‘de-gods’ the world in its totality. This makes God not the creator of a world that is dependent upon him, and part of the means of his relating to us and extending his love to us, but a being derivative of, or referred to from the world which is beyond him.
On these grounds, who, then, are we, who is this god and whence relationship, if there is one that has any meaning at all?
The proposal is pagan from start to finish, and even if Walton truly understands ANE culture, he understands a pagan culture, against which the Bible stands and the word of God confounds! To take this as a reference is to set to one side the work of the Spirit of God in communicating the word to us and the relegate the Bible to merely another meaningless ANE curiosity of history.
And the creation account opposes both these errors in its unification of ‘how’ coupled with ‘why’, and function being part of formation.
'How’s' coupling with 'why' is made in the creation being about the relationships between persons, by the will of the almighty person, exercised in love for the bringing about of other persons to participate in that love, with all the other-centredness of love. The 'function' being part of 'formation' is made in the creation leaving God’s hand caused only by his word (will) and not an interposed mechanism so beloved of materialists who must split off matter from love to make it pre-eminent, and love subservient, and then seek a machine to do the work that the Bible tells us is the work of God’s loving mind!
Walton’s proposal, like every other attempt to defuse Genesis 1, etc. simply represents an embarrassment from pitting Genesis 1 against modern conventional materialism and wanting materialism to have the first and final word!
