What is a symbol for, and how does it symbolise?

The symbolist has to explain the real links between a symbolist view of Gen 1 and the realist purposes to which it is put.

The symbolist view of Genesis 1, etc. would have to entail a category error of the magnitude of the undergraduate 'fallacy'.

This is the 'fallacy' committed by many under-graduates who confuse possession (e.g. of a hand out, an e-book, a website address) with knowledge (produced by having read, considered and understood the given text).

The way it pans out in theology is that on the one hand we have, we are told, a 'symbolic' representation of God's creating, for various reasons to do, it would seem, not with creating, per se, but with bragging to ANE neighbours on the 'our story is better than your story' basis.

This places the creation account on the same rhetorical level as a Goon Show script where Neddie Seagoon fronts up to battle with a picture of a gun. Nice, but useless in the real world.

The fissure between a symbol of something rendered unknown by the declaration that the only information we have about it is a 'symbol' (of something else, presumably, but without any real world correlate), and real world events and relationships that are said to depend upon, or are referred to this symbol (that's like threatening your gun totting enemy with a read from your book of Kitchener's battle of Omdurman), have got to be given a connection that crosses the category boundary of 'we are in the real world' and the symbol is not. So where is the 'real world' link to the world of symbols?

Clearly they need a consulting philosopher who is up to date with Hegel, the Greek deceivers (Plato and his pupil Aristotle: a bright pair, but they made too many ontological mistakes to get full marks), and the tail enders, the Neoplatonists.

But seriously, folks, the problem is that there can be no link. God represents himself as creator at critical places in Scripture, which references can only point back to the Genesis account (note I carefully don't say, 'accounts', mainly because I don't think that Genesis is a second temple fantasy, and I can read what the text says...clearly one event, two subject matter branches). If the account is vaguely symbolic (that is, with no identifiable reference event), then it can have no meaningful connection with any of its citations.

God uses his credential as creator inescapably as being the one who created in 6 days, as he sets out in Genesis, and therefore dependable in doing what he says he will do, of being in relationship with us, and having a fellowship with us that characterises the relationship in objective and tangible terms which make sense in the continuity of time-space-event between his actions as reported, and our experience of being in the world created, on an intellectual level, defined by those actions and God's statements in relation to those actions.

Very simply the two are in different domains of meaning with no link apart from a hollow verbal one: Creation = symbol of something unknown, God's actions = thing is real space-time contiguous with the (claimed) basic reality of God-acting-with-wisdom-in-love.

It just is...

A sermon I recently heard was a cracker.

Both insightful, and not!

How could this be?

The insight was the relation of God and creation, on creation being part of God's self-definition in relation to us in our space-time-causal world.

The 'not' was that creation as set out in Genesis 1, etc. was, we were boldly told, not about origins at all (despite it being God's foundational credential for our worship and knowledge of him, Roms 1:20 springs to mind, along with Hebs 4:3f and 11:3 ); indeed, that the Hebrews had no interest in origins per se (despite the credential popping up time and again throughout the OT and particularly pointedly in Acts 17:24ff) but were interested in the relationship that it indicated.

Now we start to play with category errors: the claim above notwithstanding that it only indicated a relationship, not because it is some purist 'form' in isolation, but because it was set out as a time-space event in our continguous objective causality. This is how it shows relationship. It is able to speak to such by demonstration of the fellowship between God and man particularly, but extending to creation in general. The fellowship is shown in the common space-time-event domain of God's action (by speaking, with immediacy as the scriptures insist), and our responses.

It went on. We were told that because God created we all need to be environmentalists, while not guarding against the environmental religion we are now beset by, or the need to balance benefits to people with our stewardship of the creation, it being our home, the place of our fellowship with God, the subject of his future redemption (which was touched upon, but not in this sense) and, in travail, although that was mentioned, and so no purist end state is available.

More significantly, we were told that things in creation 'just are' and didn't matter beyond this mute given-ness...yoga, tai chi, evolution...they just were, and didn't matter. This makes sense if you in fact, or implicitly, separate creation as a doctrine from creation in fact in the real world, denying that the use of real world terms because that's where it happened are telling us anything real.

Au contraire. Because of creation these things do matter, in a contra-positive way. Yoga is not merely body positions; it is represented that way to we dumb westerners, but it is an integral part of a pantheistic conception of the universe that is at root impersonal, its perception by us illusory. Tai chi is possibly the same but I don't know of it.

But even more 'contraire': nothing 'just is' but all is created by intention, in love, and is full the wisdom of God. As Rorty wistfully once sought a joining of justice and beauty that is denied in his random 'just is' materialist world, this provides it: everything comes together in the loving intention of God.

Evolution I do know about.

A few days after the sermon I was browsing in a bookshop (a time-space-event one, not an electronic one, as handy as they are). I came across a book published by the New Scientist: How Evolution Explains Everything about Life (although a recent book claims that it doesn't, with typcial journalistic shrillness).

This clearly asserted a dominating, total world view; not a mere technicality within God's creation-not-about-origins-which-just-is!

The idea that creation 'just is' was presented in terms that nothing in the creation is to be afraid of. And with this I emphatically agree; but the things cited are not 'in' the creation; they are intellectual (or  spiritual in a demon sense) artifacts of human (or demonic) endeavour.

To put evolution in the 'don't matter' box, takes us to the edge of not one, but two cliffs.

The first is that evolution, not being a 'thing' but a set of ideas, comes from somewhere: it comes from a human desire to conceive the universe as 'just is' in materialist terms. How ironic. I would aver that this view was part of the ancient Greek's lack of interest in science as we know it today. Aristotle typifies this in that he attempted to deduce things about the world, rather than examine it. His legacy remains dominant in theology, despite its unbiblical premis (evolution). It was also the very contrary view of the universe by mainly what today we would call creationist investigators (scientists) that led to the flowering of modern science. Thus, the Bible is not a scientific textbook, rather it is the essential prolegomenon to any science.

The second cliff is that it either puts God logically within a materialist frame, evolution being a materialist, not a scientific conception of reality, or implies that he must be pushed off away from us. This is contrary, obviously, to Genesis 1 etc. where the universe is framed within and by the thinking, relating, loving being behind and through it all, who relates to us.

Genesis gives life to the relationship by demonstrating God's creation is a 'concrete-realist' set of sequenced events, in contiguous objective space-time causality with us; these events form the creation and are definitively placed in time and sequence. The time and sequence that we know and use. If they don't really tell of the creation, then something else, of which we have no historic knowledge, does. This inevitably plays out as undercutting the 'creation' as God's chief relational credential for our worship and demonstration of his work in fellowship with us as it can then do neither.

It undercuts because it renders the actual action of God unknown and perhaps unknowable and thus meaningless in the space-time-event deliminted universe we are in, shades of the category error again: that some sort of symbolism can be connected to real meaning, in the real world, even though its real-world-terms description is denied and said to be about something else (and how would one know, one wonderes) for which we have no reference).

The real-world-terms it is communicated in; and no other could have meaning, show us realist categories (not neoplatonic imaginative ones), the show that our ideas and actions have real meaning and our relationships have consequences because our relationship with God is real and has consequences. Oh, and they also start our knowledge, thereby, of the creation that we are to steward, and show that we have time-space-event objective, shared continuity with it and God's act in creation, and participatory being with him (the only way to have connection) to come full circle.

Some who take a second temple view of Genesis 1 have considered the six days of creation as a rationale for the Jewish week. But not so. The Sabbath pattern and God's using that very pattern is at the core of his demonstration of fellowship. Both he and his people fellowship in a common ordred pattern of the use of time.


To some extent, as a result of all this, Genesis 1 is a science text. John Buridan treated it as such, conceptually, to much profit.

As a footnote, the reign of Barth in the sermon was clearly evident; as was the influence of the Buddha, regretably, even if unconscious.

Theologians quoted were Brueggemann and Goldingay; both of whom miss the realist point of Genesis, and invite us into an Hegelian frolic. This direction is not helpful, although they do have plenty to provoke profitable thought.