In recent full page peaen to neo-orthodoxy (well, nothing to do with orthodoxy to my mind, so meta-orthodoxy might be a better term) in Eternity we get this:
I'll write about it later, but for the moment, let's think about Exodus 20:11, then Deuteronomy 5:32, and finally, reflect on Genesis 3:1, the serpent's words particularly.
For Bird, taking the word of God seriously means taking it not quite seriously enough and cutting it to fit the cloth of contemporary materialist ideas. Not on, as Deuteronomy 5:32 tells us, reflecting on the coupling of creation and statute in God's words in Exodus 20:11 and more emphatically in Ex 31:12-17
Now, some bright spark will tell us that God was really a Hegelian idealist when he was speaking, and was not referring to concrete acts in the actual real world, but a story about something else of which he did not reveal (as though the concrete events of creation were not in fact important to understanding God and us).
Bird courts a significant epistemological problem which he hides under the obfuscation of 'competing narrative'. Of course one cannot 'compete' against a non-truth by a factually decoupled narrative that merely paints an alternative but unsubstantiated picture; one must compete by the truth.
That's why in the army we don't use pictures of bullets, but actual real bullets.
