Second open letter reviewing a sermon on Genesis:
Dear M.
I’ve been thinking about your sermon on Sunday, but am not yet ready to set out my thoughts in detail. However, rather than delay, I'd like to give you this sketch of the topics and hope to provide a fuller discussion later.
1. The matter of Galileo’s treatment by the Church of Rome usually gets an airing when biblical origins are discussed. The airing usually addressees the converse of what happened. The problem Galileo encountered was that the church was wedded to the science of the day: Aristotelian in base, and had difficulty untangling this from what Galileo was doing. It was not a conflict between the Scripture and ‘science’ but between the church’s insufficient doctrine of creation being grafted onto Aristotle’s ideas.
The church is doing the same today, largely wed to evolutionary ideas, it seems reluctant to develop a theology of creation that sits squarely on the word of God (in terms consistent with the Bible, rather than borrowed extra-biblically, as per my previous letter) but instead seeks to read Genesis in worldly terms. A useful page on this is
here.
2. If I heard you correctly, and please forgive me if I am wrong on this, you allowed that the spectrum of theological responses to Genesis 1 from historic creationism (i.e. ‘young earth creationism’, but I find that term inelegant and neglectful of the history of theology) to theistic evolution are valid.
Logically, at least three of the views have to be wrong; that is, not representative of real events; or indeed real theological meaning. If theistic evolution occurred, then the other alternatives did not.
What is important is how we come to a conclusion on what the text says; I quake in my boots when I read Kline’s wanting to adjust exegesis to the requirements of modern ‘science’. Here comes the church doing a Galileo again, I think, conforming its exegesis to the ideas of the day.
3. I would not think that there is adequate textual support for ‘apparent age’, ‘gap’, or indeed the ‘day-age’ view that you presented, let alone theistic evolution, which must step past so much of the text of Genesis 1 as to make it irrelevant. At a grab: Gn 1 tells us that creatures reproduced after their kind but evolution tells us that they don’t and that one kind has given rise to all other kinds (many people, including, for example, Pannenberg make the mistake of conflating ‘kind’ and ‘species’; but this attempts to read back into the text a modern concept that doesn't have the breadth of ‘kind’; this then invites the error of ‘fixity of species’, a notion used as a point of criticism by evolutionists, typically, but this comes by the influence of….our sponsor, Aristotle!). Hebrews 11:3 tells us that what is seen was not made out of what was visible, but evolution has it precisely opposite. I suppose it could be argued that the ‘big bang’ was putatively formed out of what is not visible, but the rest of the evolutionary scenario has it that everything was formed out of what is seen.
As an aside, the ‘apparent age’ notion comes up from time to time, but it ironically does so on the assumption that the pagan history of the cosmos is correct, negating the possible truthfulness of the word of God; for instance, it is said that the stars look as though they were placed billions of years ago because of the time light takes to travel. This makes an assumption about the absoluteness of time, which we know is not so, and that our physical understanding cannot be informed by revelation (and thus to the role of the Bible and the question of science…)
4. I think there is a lot of value in discussing the purposes of the Bible and science with respect to origins. I think I would differ with the purposes you canvassed, and for theological and philosophical reasons, however, I’ve got to think this through a little more; its along the lines of the Biblical revelation being bound to the terms and location of our experience, and this for theological reasons: it establishes the setting and terms of the covenant. If reality is ‘bent’ to do this, then the basis of the covenant is problematical and the real-ness of the relationship between God and man undone; if not ‘paganized’.
5. My thinking about the day-age idea ramifies along a number of lines. The one I find most interesting is the question of time.
First off the mechanism of creation we are told, repeatedly throughout the Bible, is that God spoke and it happened. There’s an immediacy to this by direct implication: the utterance of a word has immediate effect: one speaks, another hears; a law is commenced by proclamation, it commences, etc. I understand that the grammar of Genesis 1 is also the grammar of historical sequence, so inserting great undefined gaps between the days, or regarding the days as ‘pictures’ would be difficult, I’m told. The ‘pace’ of events in the text, and their structural configuration is congruent with the direct reading’s result: there’s a powerful rhythm of cause and effect that moves with an unremitting rationality and matter of fact-ness that also, on literary grounds, speaks of the dramatic rapid succession indicated by the cascade of ‘and it was so.’
This particularly comes together in the making of man. The sequence runs together: formed, breathed (2:7, but as the two passages go together, (refer for example to
this article) I think this passage is germane); there are no logical gaps in the volition-to-outcome stream that I can see.
The critical context for consideration of the impact of ‘long durations’ is that, as far as I know, the Judaeo-Christian cosmology is the only one with short durations: all pagan cosmologies, including those that would have been known at the time in the ANE, that I’m aware of, have very long durations for earth or cosmic existence, which itself is a telling matter, I think. Now we have, in the last couple of hundred years a resurgence of the pagan-originated long ages.
Long durations have a couple of effects: they either would provide the time for chance to operate on matter; or they for practical purposes would remove the question of our maker’s identity and relationship with us from our consideration: it happened so long ago as to not matter. Time is the great ‘existential removalist’. Great periods speak of uninterest on the part of a creator who removed himself so far in time. Time is also the great existential coupler: in a relationship, we join in time, not in denial of time and temporal proximity is paramount.
In modern times, long periods serve to eliminate a creator, at least as we know him. Hutton, for instance, was driven explicitly by his deism and belief in eternal matter and cyclical history to propose what has become geological time. Nothing scientific about that! Long ages being indicative of random physical processes operating successfully is that they eliminate will, that is, the will of a person. The converse of course is that speedy action is a mark of the operation of will, given capability, and certainly if the operation is by spoken word, with its unavoidable immediacy. As a comparison, there’s an old saw amongst engineers that anyone can build a bridge, but an engineer will do it quickly and cheaply. That is, will, in the form of intelligence in this case, will do it faster than lack thereof.
I think one of the limbs of the polemic strength of the creation account (against origin fictions) is not only that it sets out what happened, in opposition to what did not happen, and thus gives us our foundation, not our myth, but its speed eliminates alternatives. Deny the speed, and alternative are invited with the possibility created of time providing a generative means when it in fact has none.
‘Long ages’ creates a dependency of our knowledge of God upon matter and how it works, rather than on God and his revelation. It allows the mistaking of the creation for the creator, and accommodates lines of thinking that deny a creator.
