‘The
goal of creation, and at the same time the beginning of all that
follows, is the event of God’s Sabbath rest and Sabbath joy, in which
man, too, has been summoned to participate. It is the event of divine
rest in the face of the cosmos completed with the creation of man – a
rest which takes precedence over all of man’s eagerness and zeal to
enter upon his task. Man is created to participate in this rest.’ Karl Barth, Dogmatics III/I, 98.
It reads wonderfully well. It reads as though Barth could be an author on this blog.
But not so.
Barth is famous for putting into different compartments scripture and the contiguous objective space-time causality that we inhabit, that scripture seems to speak to and in which terms scripture is delineated; making nonsense of one or the other!
Because: the creation account is presented in terms of the categories and the contiguous causality that we live in. Recursively, this makes the account congruent with the world that it describes and the world whose terms we share in our existential experience. So, we can make sense of it and take real meaning from it. It gives us a confidence that God has revealed truth to us, and we are not left to the winds of chance.
The world of the account is reflected in a world that has identicial causality with no break in the objective causal continuity between the two, otherwise, one would not make sense in terms of the other and the account would not tell us anything real about this world or God. Which is where Barth is.
The end result would be that the account would have no Real meaning in this world and we would have to seek elsewhere to know not only what really happened, but what is really real, in a basic sense, and how this world, us and god (whose identity is now obscured from us with no place for fellowship...more like Allah than Jehovah) inter-relate. And where would we go? Barth, Dawkins, Enuma Elish? Then, who would we be?
Or, in short:
The nub of it is: if the creation account is not about events (objective causality) in this space-time world, then it is about something else, and the real time-space world is otherly denominated...for which info we have to go elsewhere...where?
