God's "mechanism" ?

One of the hoary old stories of Theistic Evolution, often delivered with a smugness borne of unexamination, is that evolution provides the mechanism for God's creative acts, as though God needs a "mechanism" when his word is power itself!

For a counterpoint, here's how an evolutionist (Daniel Dennet) grabs for a 'mechanism' for his own evolutionary fantasies, explaining how the improbable came about:

And then, one fine day, a mutation happened to arise.

Yep, that's it...that's the 'explanation'!

Shown the door

Comment on Challies latest post on 'accountability'

Quote: "effective accountability [is]…able to function best when it occurs under the leadership..."

The American church seems to be more interested in 'leadership' than almost anything else. I can only guess that this comes from the toxic environment of American pop business writing, because I don't see it in the Scriptures. There's plenty there on ministry, but none on the modern conceptualisation of 'leadership'; which is the one drawn out and somehow superior to the others. It is an anti-community, anti-brotherhood concept which should be shown the door.

Effective accountability (another dubious concept in itself...I much prefer the scriptural characterisation of loving brotherly support) would be about...loving brotherly support; bearing one-another's burderns is not a 'leader' act, it is a community act.

Moltmann on the New Creation

Lifted from Think Theology:

“Whom does John see? He sees the infinite, eternal God coming to the finite beings he has created and to this vulnerable earth. God comes to his transitory creatures on this earth to live among them, and now finally to find rest in his creation as he once did on the sabbath. God will not seek out his dwelling place in special temples or cathedrals. He wants to make his whole creation his home: ‘Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool’ (Isa. 66:1; Acts 7:49). The cosmos is his temple; chaos is his enemy. That is why the beauty of the new creation will drive out chaos. Heaven and earth are waiting to become God’s house, for everything created has been made for love. God’s Spirit is in them all and throws them open for God’s future. God finds no rest until everything he has created has returned home to him, like the prodigal son in the parable.” (Moltmann, Jesus Christ for Today’s World)

 I pick up on "the cosmos is his temple; chaos is his enemy" Hard to see how the chaos of evolution as hypothesised could be a 'means' of creation, then.

And I like his phrase "everything created has been made for love"; love is basic, as it is inherent between the members of the Godhead.

The Fake World

Quote from CREDO magazine:

We want to live in the world as conceived by the biblical authors, not the fake-world invented by the evolutionists and secularists and rebels of other stripes.

Action God

In his piece in Credo on Mark, Matthew Claridge writes as follows:

In the biblical worldview, Word and Act must never be divorced. God acts, but he is always careful to clearly and accurately interpret for us what those actions mean. Nonetheless, the emphasis on action in Mark offers a vision of Christ that is tangible, dramatic, and theologically rich when understood in the context of all God’s redemptive purposes (more on that later). Christ came to do things, not just talk about things.

 The same thoughts could easily and appropriately apply to the account of creation in G1. It tells us the mechanism by which God created: he spoke, and his speaking: his will given words, is contiguous with and comprehensively causal of what he intends.

Genesis is structured in our-world terms, terms that we can make sense of and that have meaning in our world, offering a vision of the creation that is tangible, dramatic, and theologically rich when understood in the context of all God's redemptive purposes. God does things, not just talk about them!

Those who deny that G1 has any correspondence in actual events make a God who prefers to talk about rather than act, or, whose action and words are so far apart as to be non-commutative, pushing the things talked about into an 'upper storey' 'spritual' world that only intersects with our world verbally, not really. It is the pagan philosophical idealism that dogs theology at work, distorting the relationship between God, his creation and humanity.

The focus of G1. to take Claridge's words again, is on the most critical features of God's creative mission: we are only told what is essential to our knowledge of God, the creation and us, for us to discharge our role as stewards of the creation. If merely a piece of analogy, fantasy, or make-believe (which is the end state of most non-realist views of G1), then we are left with no knowledge at all and an ungrounded state of being: that is, nothing to do with the real world that it purports to concern, but limited to a world of the mind with no necessary reference to our event-stream.

Evolution...settled science? No! Belief system

Nice piece by Albert Mohler on this topic. It reminded me a little of Evolution as a Religion by Mary Midgley.

I like a lot of Al's blog posts, but I don't really want to connect with him in my side bar, because there's also lots I don't like. But that goes for most public Christians (and private ones). At least we have diversity in the church!

One of his works that I do like is a talk at the 2010 Ligonier conference on the age of the universe. Many think this is merely an obscure 'scientific' question. It is not, it is a question about the biblical frame of reference and its conception of the world. It goes to the heart of the matter.

While you're at it, check out materialism and the age of the earth, and Geisler's 'Beware of Philosophy' in the JETS 42.1. You can find the link on theological studies.

Here is a selection of Al's work on evolution'ism'

Calvinist Revival

Scary piece on Credo:

 2. Evangelicals Find Themselves in the Midst of a Calvinist Revival: By Mark Oppenheimer - Oppenheimer notes: “Evangelicalism is in the midst of a Calvinist revival. Increasing numbers of preachers and professors teach the views of the 16th-century French reformer. Mark Driscoll, John Piper and Tim Keller — megachurch preachers and important evangelical authors — are all Calvinist.”

 As soon as you add to Scripture and its effect in the church, you subtract from it; that is to say, I am a Christian, not a Calvinist. Thus, I follow JD (Joshua Davidson), not JC (John Calvin). Calvin's views were of his time, and persona...dangerous to think that they are uncritically determinist of what theology and church should be now.

I'd prefer a theology that dealt with the entire Bible, avoiding the special pleading that Calvinists must engage in to avoid the implications of those parts of scripture that contradict their theology.

Creation Psalm

A sermon I recently heard was on Psalm 104, interestingly, described by Spurgeon as the creation in poetry (thereby indicating that at least he didn't think that Genesis 1, etc, could be so described).

I doubt if the sermon giver had given much thought to the creation account and its theological ramifications, as he led us through the half-baked framework hypothesis, which, as I've written elsewhere, does not quite work, and fails as an interpretive scheme.

He then told us that none of the information in the Bible tells us how God created, but that he did. Of course, if God needs a mediating mechanism whereby he creates, then that mechanism stands in his place and is the real creator, determining how things really are. But, not so; the 'mechanism' is God spoke...it happened. Genesis 1 is crystal clear on this.

If the creation account is a metaphor then we need to decide what really happened in the creation...taken at face value, we know, and can trace the trajectory of the creation from God's will to our lives quite clearly. It is linked all the way. But as mere metaphor, then the link is at best, only suggested...and this raises more questions (who is this God who can only suggest at our relationship, a relationship so important, by the way, that it brings us into God's ontological field), at and worst, obscures the relationship completely. Either way, not a good basis on which to build the connections that the Bible makes between creator, creation and creature.

An amusing slip that in the sermon was a reference to 'before the world was know to be round'. I don't think there are any credible documents that there was a time before the earth was thought to be round...its even mentioned, arguably, in Job 26:10, Proverbs 8:27 and Isaiah 40:22. I think he confused Washington Irving's fiction, and how things really are.