13 March 2018

Are we pagans or what?

One of the challenges faced by attempts to regard both evolution and the biblical creation account in Genesis 1-2 as explanatory as to origins, and thus, the nature of the world and its ontological basis, is that the heart of the creation account is removed.

It was encapsulated in a sermon I recently heard where the speaker claimed that the cosmos 'just is' while endorsing its creation by God.

So, it is not 'just is', but created! One cannot have it both ways or Paganism is given a toe in the door.

Above all else the creation account in Genesis is personal. It starts with the personal as being basic to all that is (both Genesis 1 and Colossians 1 treat this) and emphasises this in the G1 account firstly, in God's real personal agency in creating by speaking and it having immediate effect: no long, nebulous, impersonal processes (the hallmarks of paganism with its determinedly impersonal or a-personal framing).

Secondly the personal is demonstrated in God working in our 'time-space'; thus the reason for the delimination of effort by days. This represents the first move of fellowship between creator and his image-bearer creature: that we share agency in discrete time. God knows what our work is like, and we reflect his in our work. This is the first move of fellowship, and enshrines our image-bearer-ness in the very good creation, not in the disaster that followed in the degredation of creation, which we now suffer from.

Other origin proposals are diffuse, nebulous, as I've said above, and fundamentally de-personalised. The personal in itself, and in our possible connection with it, is lost in their unlocatable and ill defined event that occures in a discontiguity with our experience of the Creation. The door is opened by taking such a framing to Genesis to deism: the remote God. God in Genesis 1 is the highly involved, engaged one in concrete relationship with the very concrete cosmos and its events in time and space.

And there's the clue. It is strikingly odd that our experience of the creation would not be the terms in which creation is explicable to us. In G1 it is very much this. The tangibility of our lives in contiguous objectively causal time-space is the very tangibilty of the creation and the terms in which it is communicated to us. Thus we don't live in a pagan or an idealist (paganism converted to the complicated words of philosophy) denominated world/cosmos/existence. Rather we live in a personal, concrete, discrete things happen in explainable time type of cosmos, denominated in direct connection between actor and event, in time and space locations that are communicable and that establish the event existentially.