For little kids

I recently picked the Bible Societies' book "Christmas" by Susannah McFarlane.

What a great idea to get children interested in Christian faith and to start understanding it.

Then, on page 6, it started to unravel.

"People didn't want to do what God told them to....They wanted to decide things, not God."

And this was for kids, who spend their whole lives being told what to do...is God like that? Just a bigger teller what to do?

I don't think so. Just think about Genesis 1:27 and 3:9-10. God made us for relationship, to be 'in sync' with him, then sought that relationship.

What's missing in the book is that God started out as the one who loves, who seeks relationship everywhere.

Thus the text might better be:

"People didn't want to be friends with God and live how he had made them to. People turned away from being God's friends and tried to be God's bosses. But they didn't know enough, and weren't wise enough.

We are all like that, we think we know better than God about who God made us and we muck things up...often we do this a lot.

No matter how hard we try, we cannot really be God's friends because we keep telling him we don't want to live like he made us."

You get the picture. For kids particularly, its about relationship, about relationship broken, and about God himself coming into our world (that he made for us) to make us strong enough to be his friends again.

Then, of course, you'll have to deal with what it means that God made everything. The first thing kids will hit at preschool is materialistic, pagan evolution, which de-personalises the universe, pushes God away from real involvement with us, and denies that he created us in any real and meaningful way.

Indeed, part of the theology of Genesis 1 is that God stepped into our world in the very act(s) of creation and did so to show his means of creating: by his direct word, and that this creation was immediately from the 'hand' of God. The place made for us to be friends of God. The creation account embeds the relationship in the real concrete world; not in some immaterial fiction that has no relation with anything real in our lives.

Time as agent

It's even hit TV documentaries:

Michael Portillo in his Irish railway series, in commenting on the Irish v British troubles in the early 20th c. commented on Q. Elizabeth II's visit to Ireland:

The beauty of time passing is that the makes the impossible possible.

Now, where have I heard that error before?

To be accurate: the beauty of time passing is that the actors change, circumstances change, peoples' perceptions and motivations change and what was impossible in the past becomes, because of these social and political changes, possible.

Genre

You've probably been in a discussion in a Bible study group, where one of the sage ones, patiently explains that understanding Genesis 1 starts with its 'genre'. A fancy word for literary type. Why they don't say 'type' I don't know.

But what is the 'genre' of Genesis 1?

It's not peotry...we can look at the psalms and see what Hebrew poetry is.

It's not symbolic...we get that lesson in Ezekiel...and a bit more in  Revelation.

It's not quite history either: compare to the later pentateuch or Acts...a little different.

What are we left with?

Chronicle!

That is, a time-ordered list of events.

The writer has driven the point of 'time' and 'sequence' home in every possible way while retaining literary elegance.

Time markers are prominent:

We start with 'in the beginning', then after a set of events: set with chronoligical grammar (the 'waw' consecutive: 'then this happened' recurs through out the creation passage.

Each day is numbered and delineated so that we know what type of day is meant: an evening-morning type day, of course!

Numbers 7 has a similar structure, and it is clearly a chronicle as well.

Compare this with a snippet from Enuma Elish; a pagan theogony that some have the gall to compare to Genesis 1.

Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being...
Ages increased,...
Then Ansar and Kisar were created, and over them....
Long were the days, then there came forth.....

 Here and throughout EE uses the chronological imprecession of pagan myth: time markers are not important to myth, in fact, not having them is the important thing to de-historicise the myth and place it beyond enquiry.

Quite the opposite to Genesis 1.

On history: despite this, there are clear historical elements in Gen 1. History compared to chronicle adds meaning, if not analysis. It is not only 'that' something happened, but 'why' and the consequences. It puts events into an existential coherence that Gen 1 certainly does.

The point I want to drive, tho' is that the objective chronological markers of sequence frame this narrative with unmistakable self-conscious precision.

The Gumbel Error

My previous post on Nikki Gumbel's removal of 'when' from history and giving it to science (he means, of course physical science, as history is a 'science' in that it seeks knowledge) left a gap: the gap was about time itself and its place in the Genesis narrative. I've already dealt with this from one perspective, but there is another I want to bring here.

The presumption that the time markers in Genesis are not germane to the revelation derives from an implicit physicalism: an ontological error that parts company with both the dualism of the Bible, and its concrete realism. Because it presumes that time is a 'given' its action within creation is not recognised and thus the error also parts company with time's existential dependence: that 'word' has priority. Moreover, 'word' strictly in the John 1:1-3 sense. Not a logos of the Greek kind, but the word as going out from the love of God as triune communion of unified will.

Time is integral to the revelation as a created thing, and the markers of time in the creation passage show not only that God orders within time, but uses time to bring order; he using time as the domain of fellowship within the creation (I don't know how the new creation will work in this connection...we'll have to wait and see) where it provides a shared constraint-space definitional of event sequence. Time forms the event-space in which we can join in relationship. Indeed, in which we are shown that the event-space is God's and is where he joins us in relationship.

To put this to one side is firstly a hermeneutical arrogance, then it treats time as an 'accident' of material, almost putting it behind God and not an essential part of the revelation. If God use the time markers as simply symbolic of something else ('what' is never canvassed), one would have to wonder at the specificity of the markers, the deliberation of the pace of creation, the connection formed by his people Israel reflecting his creation and use of time having their life pattern reflect God's.

But, time has to be signficant, and more than symbolic theologically (because the language denies a symbolic role and requires a concrete role for it), as time is our universal constraint: it dominates everything that we do and think; it is inescapable.

Physicalism evacuates time of its theological significance. The proponents fall back to the implicit materialism. Their reference to a paganised framework of understanding (that there are universal givens apart from God) this entails is a theological embarrasment.

Alpha boob

I saw the second video of the new Alpha course where Gumbel tells us that Jesus is the creator walking on earth. Good. Then, opps, 'I've mentioned creation, I'd better hose down that one straight away'. So he moves onto science and assets its non-connection with history (the Bible).

He tells us that science is about how and when, but the Bible tells us about who and why. He gives us the analogy of a birthday cake.

Now, when did 'when' slip into the domain of science? I don't remember that happening!

Nikki clearly wants to offset any recourse to the timing of early history in Genesis 1-11, and let us slip comfortably into the idea that Genesis' timing is something to do with 'who and why' isolated from science and its 'how and when'. Thus letting science appear to take the lead when it comes to the understanding of time in ancient texts, Genesis in particular.

But 'when' is always history, my friend, and in early Genesis (1-11) reaches far more into our relationship with God, and God's relationship with his creation than a bare 'scientific' fact. It carries profound implications for who God is in relation to us, and how the Bible positions itself as revelation.

Gumbel fails to tease out the ontological issues that Genesis 1-11 deals with and the setting that God thereby delineates for his fellowship with us, his creation-in-his-image.

Gumbel also fails to deal with the evidence in the text (a fail for an ex-barrister, let alone a theologian): its form of language (consecutive narrative), its time references (natural days delineated in two ways, just to make sure we follow), its style (unadorned fact), its reference by other parts of Scripture (Exodus 20:11, for example, and note God's direct speech in this passage), its parallel with other passages of historical narrative (Numbers 7 springs to mind), and its 'first philosophy' of word, not matter (John 1:1-3, Hebrews 11:3).

So Alpha carefully places the train of developing belief on tracks that lead through the dark tunnel of pagan confusion before it ends at the precipice of materialism's emptiness.

Thus The Gumbel Error.

Dateable time

In the 'Life of Jesus' video, John Dickson makes the comment that the gospels set Jesus in 'dateable time'. This gives the gospels at least face credibility, because they talk about what happened in a way that we can connect with. We can make the trace between then and now, and clearly thus share the same world as the events of the gospels.

Similarly for the creation. 'Life of Jesus' talks about our creator, but without giving him a concrete real time relationship with us. But the Bible goes to some lengths to put the creation into dateable time. In fact, it is used by some Jews to set their calendar! If the creation didn't occur in dateable time, then God can't really make a claim on being a creator in any real sense, because he can't link his actions with our world, so 'creator' as myth, not as fact, as fairy tale, rather than the event which determines, dominates and defines our existential situation!

The alternative is that in principle it did occur in dateable time, but so very long ago, in a manner we have no access to that we just have to take it on faith. But this is not biblical faith; that rests on real events and real actions.

Plutarch: on time

A while ago I put up some blogs on the relationship of time to the creation.

Plutarch has made a similar observation on the importance of that universal limitation on our thought and action: time is, as they say, of the essence!

13: So the buildings arose, as imposing in their sheer size as they were inimitable in the grace of their outlines, since the artists strove to excel themselves in the beauty of their workmanship. And yet the most wonderful thing about them was the speed with which they were completed. Each of them, men supposed, would take many generations to build, but in fact the entire project was carried through in the high summer of one man's administration....It is this, above all, which makes Pericles' works an object of wonder to us -- the fact that they were created in so short a span, and yet for all time.

The point being that mixing process and time says something about the doer: complex process, plus short time = wonder at the outcome. Any process and huge time: not remarkable at all; thus the brief time of God's creating is an important part of the Genesis record, I suggest.