Death at the Carrington

A few of us were discussing various faith-related questions recently at a weekend away at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba (just so you know where) when the discussion swung around to the implications of Adam being the ‘death-bringer’ when there must have been death before the fall.

This referred to the death of plants and animals from creation to the time of Adam’s choice to break relationship with God.

A few paths to solution were offered, but it interested me that implicit in the question was a view that history was defined by evolutionary/naturalist conceptualisations, and not biblical ones.

This seems to stem either from a view that Genesis 1 does not or cannot provide the historical frame in which the Bible sets our understanding of God’s actions with respect to his people (which actions extend to the first move he makes in creation), or that such information, if provided and not mythopoeic is not important to the extent that a view of history based on naturalism (or deism, if we think of Hutton, the dean of modern geological time) provides what we need to know about the world we are in, contrary, again, to Paul, I would suggest.

[BTW, if Genesis 1, etc. is mythopoeic, then it does not give information and cannot produce knowledge; it would thus stand contrary to the 'mission' of the scriptures, which is to give us knowledge about God's relationship to his creation.*]

It would fit here to launch a discussion of the philosophical idealism that allows such a view to have any air-time in contradistinction to the biblical historical frame (and contrary to the Bible’s own philosophical footing, of “concrete realism”; but then, if the historical and theological verity of early Genesis is denied, the source of the Bible’s realism is also denied, and one is forced to make one’s hermeneutical reference outside the Bible). Such discussion is, however, for another time.

SOLUTIONS

There were three basic offerings to resolve the problem of death before Adam.

1. Adam’s death was retroactive and explained animal death that predated Adam’s death.

2. The death Adam brought was restricted to ‘spiritual’ (because animal and plant death [must have] preceded the fall).

3. God anointed, as it were, a great ape with spirit, to become Adam, [which, being against a background of continued death, the ‘death’ as curse would have been of reduced significance: more emblematic than actual.]

Oddly, the Bible's solution, that there was no death before Adam, didn't get any discussion: the discussion seemed to prefer to stay away from the scriptures, per se, despite, for example, Romans 8:22!

Comments

I’ve not previously come across the idea of the effect of Adam’s sin being retro-operative (that is, the animals pre-fall would have suffered the curse because of something that’ll happen in future) and the person who raised it may have sought to get discussion going (which was a great line with which to do it, IMO), but it seems to not properly accommodate a number of factors related to the historical sequence that God has created**, the nature of God’s relationship with his creation, and particularly Adam, the nature of the creation as act and its being (or ‘Being’: capitalised), and the intrusion that death constitutes in the ‘very good’ creation.

I think the simplest response is: death is at root separation from God. At the fall, man turned his back on God, rejecting God’s fellowship. God in responding to man’s choice, man as being in God’s image and responsible to steward the creation, stepped back from the creation in total, but as loving, of course looked toward Christ to heal this breach, 'over' heal it, in fact, in the new creation.

Death before Adam would have God stepping back from the creation before his fellowship was rejected, which would be decidedly odd, as there would have been no basis for this, and it would be unloving, to say the least.

Death before Adam would also have put the creation into a contradiction, with the continuity of being within a unified creation being broken from the start. Noting that both Adam and the creatures had living souls (nephesh chayyah), how could some living soul be not subject to death while others were, when there was no cause for it? It would cause a breach in their joint 'living soul-ness' that is not suggested in the Bible, but has to be imported to 'save' a materialist cosmogony!

Also, the creation being ‘very good’ could not in part have a representation of the last enemy, death; particularly when the toppling of death is signified in the scriptures by peace in the animal kingdom (lions and lambs, children and asps, etc.); perhaps to indicate the fulsome extent of the new creation across its entire span. I note in this context that the Bible teaches that animals did not eat each other prior to the fall (Gen 1:30).

[BTW, this also illumines why plant ‘death’ is not biblical death: plants, and possibly insects, for example, do not have living souls: the confusion arises from taking our concept of death and reading it back into the biblical one.]

The other thought is that God created in sequence: time and its passing has real meaning in the creation and in our life experience; to topple the meaning of time in the operation of the creation would render impossible the causal certainty by which we live and think. If this had been a widespread reading of the scriptures in the past it would, I think, have frustrated the rise of modern science, rather than scriptures being read in direct realism leading to its rise.

The other solutions aren't solutions at all, but are in opposition to the biblical data. They simply deny what the Bible teaches. Restricting 'death' to the physical shies away from the materiality of the creation, and the unity of life across domains of spiritual and 'soul-ful', the other, that, in trivialising death does more to undermine the crucifiction than solve a problem of naturalism's, not the Bible's making (eg. I Cor 15:21).

*I take it that the point of the creation account is that it conjoins our experience with the creation showing our 'setting' for relationship with God being in the same domain as our experience of life: continuous with the interlocking chain from God's will to word to Adam being made in God's image (from 'dust' by God and not through intermediate steps) to us being from Adam. If this is not so, but just myth, then there are disjuncts all along the chain and God's existential claims with respect to us have no tangible foundation in the domain in which we enter relationships.

**Any theology that must set aside the sequential approach to time in the Bible, seems to partake of a paganised view of time, which seeks to set aside historical sequence to give a footing to the cyclical view of history and enable an imaginative participation in it by people who inevitably live in history. See my posts on Eliade, who touches the matter of 'time' in religious thought.

A couple of other posts following this topic:

Douglas Kelly: quote from his book Creation and Change

and

A selection from a number of commentators on the scope of death brought by the fall.

Wise on Creation

Kurt Wise, a paleontologist, spoke at a creation conference in 2000 at Grace Reformed Baptist church.

A few tidbits from his talk:

He starts off by using Jesus' miracle at Cana (water to wine) as a structure to analyse the construction of hypotheses regarding the created world.

The creationary hypothesis is: that which is is ultimately not derived from pre-existing things, it is not developed through natural processes, but is created by fiat, and is, according to the biblical claim, young.

This remindes me of Hebrews 11:3

God created the entire universe as a polemic against man-derived ideas: God created the universe as a polemic against every false idea of man

.

This attracted me, as some regard Genesis, not as an account of events that corresponds to those events in real historically accessible space-time, but as some sort of purely literary polemic against competing creation myths. Of course, it is, but not in distinction from its realism.

Those who think of it in purely literary terms must end up with an empty polemic: just a bunch of words that do not reflect something real about the creation we are in. It suggests that God's word is not potent and not connected with events: that is, is not joined causally with our world: the world we are in and by which we and all our relationships are circumscribed, delimited and defined.

I suspect that they've also swallowed paganism's 'idealist' framing that the material world is a 'given' and 'God-talk' occurs in a separate field from the real world with the only crossing point being the private knowledge of the priests.

Towards the end of the talk Wise talks about faith as being that by which we understand God to be creator, as all evidence: all theories, rather, will bring us short of completion.

At first I was a little taken aback by this, particularly as I had in mind Paul's words in Romans 1:20 that God's invisible attributes are visible to all through his creation.

So, what was Wise on about? Well, I think it is this: knowledge coming from facts is something that is without any interplay of persons, it is just the one having the knowledge that is in play, where as God seeks us to be with him by faith; that is, faith becomes the means of us seeking or joining God. Faith forms the relationship between man and God, and God's being creator is about that relationship, not just about bald facts. I guess he was thinking of Hebrews 11:3.

2 Creations?

In a recent article in Eternity (a tabloid newspaper of the Christian variety) Richard Clarke claimed that in Genesis 1 and 2 there were two creation accounts; it seemed as though he was now able to fix the Graf-Wellhausen badge to his study desk at last, with the claim that evangelicals were flexible about scripture, or words to similar effect.

On the contrary, I thought that evangelicals sought to understand the scripture and be challenged by it, not avoid it by re-definition!

Now, I know that there is a vast literature on these two chapters, and any descent discussion should take more words that I’m prepared to commit to right now, but here are some thoughts, with links to relevant articles below.

The basic reason that I don’t think that the two chapters are alternative accounts of creation is that the account in chapter two largely pre-supposes the creation, and does not explain it. It is an easy trap to fall into if the creation account is regarded as myth at some level, and not an account with a one-to-one correspondence with tangible events. I say this because most ‘myths’ including the famed Enuma Elish (also here on EE) also presuppose the creation, rather than explain it (which is a fundamental reason for rejecting the – I think blasphemous -- idea that Genesis 1 is somehow in debt to EE).

The account in chapter two also zooms into relationships. It doesn’t speak in the cosmic categories that preoccupy Chapter 1 which frames the creation in structural relationships and hierarchy, but its about persons: God and Adam and Eve, what they do together, the transactions that prepare the way for us to understand the Fall, and the role that A&E have with respect to each other, God and the creation. If this chapter was a creation account it leaves much unstated. That it depends on the information in Chapter 1 makes it so much the clearer, and an effective literary transition from the total scheme account of Chapter 1, and the covenantal sequence of personal relationships and interactions that follow it.

Literary Structural Parallels Between Genesis 1 and 2

The Unity of the Creation Account

The Hermeneutical Problem of Genesis 1-11

Genesis 1-2 in its Literary Context

E J Young 1 and E J Young 2

Green on the Unity of Genesis, at p. 9ff "No Duplicate Account of the Creation".

And, an image from a book by Kitchen on the OT

The song remains the same

Sometimes it passes amusing that the struggles of today, where biblical creationists argue against the hermeneutical conceits of those who want to find biblical support for their melding materialism and an emasculated doctrine of creation, were also encountered in the past.

Here's Mortenson on George Bugg (early 1800s)

Respecting the accommodation of the language of Scripture, Bugg contended that the history of creation has one plain, obvious, and consistent meaning, throughout all the Word of God. The rest of Scripture offers no hint or key to any other meaning so that if the obvious meaning is not the true one, then the biblical authors have misled their readers and the creation narrative has no meaning, or a false one. Furthermore, argued Bugg, the phenomenological language that the Bible uses to describe the movement of the heavenly bodies is the common language used than as now. Otherwise, it would be intelligible to no one but astronomers...However , although the Bible also was not intended to teach the science of geology, it did give detailed narratives of the creation and the Flood, which were critically relevant to the discussion of geological theories about earth history.

Two Books

When it comes to discussions of science and Christian faith (or as it more usually is, materialist origins doctrines and Christian faith...), Bacon's dictum often comes up. Indeed, I heard it used as the basis for somewhat heterodox views of the Bible espoused by Henry Schaeffer in a presentation in Mosman many years ago.

Bacon's dictum is thus:

For our Saviour saith, "You err, not knowing the Scriptures, nor the power of God," laying before us two books or volumes to study, if we will be secured from error; first the Scriptures, revealing the will of God, and then the creatures expressing his power; wererof the latter [the creatures] is a key unto the former [the Scriptures]: not only opening our understanding to conceive the true sense of the Scriptures, by the general notions of reason and rules of speech; but chiefly opening our belief, in drawing us into a due meditation of the omnipotency of God, which is chiefly signed and engraven upon his works."

(from The Advancement of Learning, p. 46 of the 1906 Oxford edition)


But I think Bacon gets it wrong. While the creation points to God, it is the Scriptures that provide our epistemological framework when it comes to understanding God and his acts. The propositional revelation sets the stage for our approach to the world, not the other way; as once observations of the world are turned into propositions, they constitute a 'second order' to revelation, being encapsulated in human ideas.

Better Granville Penn's 1820s view as stated in Terry Mortensen's book The Great Turning Point:

Genesis and geology ought to be connected because it was philosophically permissible, even necessary, to attempt to identify the God of Scripture with the God of nature, i.e., to show that they are one and the same God as Scripture itself teaches. And since God had communicated certain historical facts about the original creation of the earth and the Flood, it would certainly not be prudent to disconnect them from the geological study of the surface of the earth. Rather, to trace the connection of Genesis to geology would be "of the first importance in man's relation to God under Divine Revelation," as it would contribute to our confidence that Scripture is of divine origin, as we are sure that nature is...

The real problem, said Penn, was to show that the God of Scripture is the God of nature. Penn objected to the assertion of Conybeare and other geologists that the study of Scripture and of geology should be dissociated because (as the old earth geologists asserted) the professed object of revelation was to treat only the history of man. Penn argued that Exodus 20:11 shows that God intended to impart to man special and particular historical knowledge about the origin of the celestial bodies and the plants and animals of land and sea, before he imparted a history of man's own origin. "the history of the origin and relations of all and each of these, is therefore as much a professed objecct of revelation, as the history of the origin and relations of man himself"

Scripture is the one that teaches, and where it is history, it tells what happened, including when it touches on the formation of the material world in which our lives and God's actions meet. So, of course, questions of creation are important, and God provides the starting point. It is a pagan-derived abberation that shelves the material world in favour of the world of the idea, at the expense of the concrete world that God's revelation demonstrates.

Which God?

I recently listened to Kurt Wise's talk at the Grace Reformed Baptist Church creation conference (in 2000) where he said something with the import of:

If you deny the biblical data on God's creation, then you end up worshipping a different God to the one revealed in the Bible.

Ironically, I've had conversations with, usually younger people (and those usually university students, who may be suffering from the 'undergraduate delusion', i.e. they know everthing), where, on the topic of creation, they accuse such as I, who hold to the direct veracity of the biblical account, of 'worshipping a different god'.

This accusation is hurled because I counter the idealist biblical theology they espouse; without them understanding that they are espousing anything in particular, of course, just uncritically recycling the pap they've often been fed.

It amused me that Wise turns the tables, and points out that as they attribute to God things in creation that are not of his word (that is, they add to the doctrine of creation from outside the Bible, such as in the incoherent cliam that 'God used evolution'), they must be worshipping a different God to the one in the Bible.

Feeling powerful?

One of the themes I discuss on this blog is the misuse of the concept of 'leadership' in the Christian Church.

If we anoint people as 'leaders' mimicing the style of business and government organisations and adulatory journalists, we run the risk, I think, that Bob Sutton that leadership provides power, and the powerful de-humanise.

An unsurprising phenomenon identified by Lord Acton, ironically writing to a bishop!

So, no more 'leaders', but bring back 'servants', ministers, teachers, helpers, and the like.

Old Earth?

I got this comment (posted but as I've turned off comments, except from me! I re-post it; links are by me)

Well, of course the earth is old (therefore, I must be an ‘old-ager’) its about 6,000 years old. That’s old in my book!

The trouble is, we’ve been seduced by repetition that serious ages extend for billions of years, which have the effect, in my view, of distancing the creator from his creation.

Do these hyper-extended ages (HEAs) spring unmediated by human conceptualisation from the earth? Of course not. From historical reasoning? Again, no!

So their source is….

A deist pre-conception that the world must be of HEA because ‘god’ is a remote impersonal deity, care of Hutton ([and Lyell - ed.]), and the history in the Bible can be set aside tendentiously as untruthful, thus the surface form of the world must be the result of current processes operating over HEAs.

But that’s all supposition and full of assumptions about initial conditions, the rates of forces operating (e.g. a little bit of water over a long time, or a lot of water over a little time?), and who God is: more Greek than Christian in the deist conceptualisation; but anyway, an uninvolved God who is not the loving creator. So, wrong from the get go.

It is a concern that Christians who accept HEAs seem to be critically detached from the scriptures and uncritically attached to the progeny of deist ideas.

But there is also an implication that the Bible is not really concerned with such things as the age of the earth, which appears to be considered merely a technical scientific detail, or the nature of the creation, which also appears to have been passed to ‘science’ for adjudication.

However this is an approach that must deny scriptural content to proceed. It must also ignore the underlying ‘religious’ basis of the axioms of contemporary discourse in this area, and naively think that there is a neutral position when it comes to questions of creation.

The very point, I would suggest, of the creation account and its historical definition (given, for example, the chronogenealogies, which even if they could be extended by some period, go nowhere to meeting the time purportedly required for evolution of the cosmos) is to demonstrate:

(1) the means of creation: by fiat, of course, showing us the basic structure of the cosmos, as not admitting of alternative explanations that avoid the connection of man and God (unless the revelatory content is ignored, of course, which is the usual approach of even Christian commentators);

(2) that the creation occurred in terms that are congruent with the terms by which we understand and experience the world and our lives in it [thus showing that it refers to this world, and this world is the setting of God's dealing with man -- me], and

(3) the line of connection between God and man.

Demonstration being superior to assertion, and giving knowledge, whereas myth gives none.

Thus the Bible is very interested in the physical parameters of the creation, because its physicality is part of its ‘nature’. The denials that attend (I’d say ‘must needs’ attend) views that avoid the direct implications of the text refer more to a paganistic idealism of mind rather than the concrete realist philosophical frame of the Bible. Theologically, this extends to the incarnation and thence the new creation as realist events, not idealised mythic stories.

Inserting vast periods of time into salvation history immediately claims that God cannot show the connection between his fiat acts and humanity, and that mythic mystery, the ‘unknown’ stands between our creator and us; not connection, epistemic certainty, relationship and community.

Setting aside the creation as defined in the Bible invites humanity to define itself as it likes, ultimately leading to worship of the creation, not the creator. And this is exactly what we see!

My further notes:

If the demonstration of God’s founding of and the relationships with his creation is not factual, then no abductive extension can be made from it: no valid conclusions are available if the information we have doesn’t correspond with what happened.

Ironically, many commentators seek to draw conclusions about God’s creation as if the ‘demonstration’ were factual while denying that the events related in the Bible actually occurred. That is, that it provides information about actual events and relationships. Thus they assert conclusions that by their own claim have no real basis. So I wonder how they came to the conclusions that they assert in the absence of the only evidence that could promote the conclusion!

And I've just seen an article that attests to the discussion above: that students who believe in HEAs are more easily convinced of evolution's validity than those not. Of course, if you believe one fiction, you're more likely to believe the next! This was reported in Physorg.com 10 March 2010, and Evolution 64(3): 858-864 March 2010.


And more on point 2 above: that the creation revelation sets the place of God's encounter with his creation: it makes meaningful within the parameters which circumscribe our life God's contact with us in its totality; God is thus seeking us in the lives we are in: it makes the proclamation of the gospel be something that addresses our life-world, the circumstances we find ourselves in; our 'thrownness' to borrow a concept of Heidegger. It is not another world; the incarnation, being a type of reprise of the creation movement of God to Adam (ending in the post fall quest in Genesis 3:9), responds to, and rescues us as we are in this world, this world created fallen and to be redeemed.

Demonstrated

What does Genesis 1, and the other early genesian data do? As per my previous post, it tells us what happened, it is there to give us knowledge, but what is the function of this knowledge?

I think one major function of the knowledge arising from the information in Genesis 1 (and in 5, too) is that it doesn't just assert God's creation, it doesn't merely represent a claim that is devoid of references to the very subject of the claim, but it provides God's demonstration of what he did, and by which stands his revelation (claim) to be creator, and that we are connected to his creative act resulting in Adam and Eve.

It is by the demonstration of the effects of his creative actions that we can understand the meaning of his being creator. Without the detail, as I've touched on previously, we'd be left with the emptiness of myth. God's revelation as to his being creator has content that demonstrates what it is that his being creator entails (and thus excludes other expanatory programs for the creation as we experience it: whether the pagan myths of ancient days, or the materialist mythology of today). The creative content is not isolated from this world, the world that we experience, and exist only in some other world where we have no connection, but it is in the terms of our apprehension of the bounds of this world.

God just doesn't tell us things of such importance, he shows us. Like a good author who will not just tell us the characteristics of a character, but will show us them in the narrative, God is not content to abuse our likeness to him with an indeterminate reference to his activity as creator, he gives us a precise, detailed and (as it happens) rebuttable reference; noting that rebuttal challenges God's truthfullness, capability to communicate within our noetic frame of reference, and ultimately his being creator.

The knowledge we get from these parts of Genesis tells us real things about the real world we are in: shows us real links between us and God, and a real sequence of creation that encompases the setting of our place of encounter with God in the terms in which we know that setting: it provides epistemologic consistency and contiguity.

One of the outcomes of this is that alternative explanations are excluded; or rather, to be maintained they must exclude God's revelation. So, if one wants to say that God mixed it with materialisms great fantasy, Darwinian evolution, one has to set aside, or argue for the direct meaninglessness of God's word, or some other meaning that requires the text being given a particular extra-textual gloss.

And that is indeed what we have. But at least we can't pretend with an sustained credibility that we are representing the word of God, we have to explain why we are not. At least that signals to the hearer that we are embarking upon nonsense.

Its not right, its not even wrong!

If 'God being creator' is all that we need to know, about him and the cosmos, that would be established, arguably, and 'just' by John 1:1-3; but we've got far more information than this, with richness of detail as to events and the crystal clear framework of their happening (the days: the only objective framework in the text that's worth talking about) in Genesis 1; and this detail is referred to in other scriptures, so it has more than just passing importance.

Some people tell us that the Bible tells us that God created, but that science (Darwinism) reveals his method. But John 1:1-3 gives us authorship, the method is given elsewhere in scripture: Psalm 33:9 tells us it was by speaking as does Psalm 104, and Genesis 1 gives us the dense and stately detail. Aside this one must also consider Hebrews 11:3 (and 1:2, for that matter). These are clearly the reference points for passages such as Jeremiah 10:16 and Isaiah 48:13 (for the OT, of course). There's no room here for a 'method' because we have one. There's no room to set Genesis 1 aside as teaching a mere subset of its content.

So, when I hear people try to diminish the role of Genesis 1 in our understanding of the world God created as the setting for his covenant, I think of a quote of the physicist Pauli when confronted with an unscientific assertion in a colleague's paper:

"It's not right. It's not even wrong."

The hermeneutics and theology that seeks to step around Genesis 1 is so mis-founded that it isn’t even wrong!
 
Presumably the Bible is there to provide knowledge; including Genesis 1; so how does it provide knowledge if it is treated as a kind of baroque dance where moves have meaning for the dance, but the dance itself means nothing! Indeed, how does Genesis 1 teach anything if the basis of what it is said to teach: the details of its content, is denied as factual, and claimed to be a sort of word picture to teach us by telling us what didn’t happen, using the language of ‘this happened’.
 
Exegetes confuse themselves, and their readers, when they embark on a quest for hidden knowledge based on the dignified language of Genesis 1 (mistakenly called poetic, or poetic-like, when it is formally neither), but disregard the obvious lexical and grammatical import of the text. They then wrap this in a claim that the text as read cannot mean what it says, but means something else; but if it doesn’t mean what it says, the basis for it meaning something else is either gone, or left to the imagination of the exegete.

This position is not right; it's so off the beam, it's not even wrong!

Can God Speak?

Interestingly, those who steer their hemeneutical commitments away from the direct reading of Genesis 1 implicitly, it seems to me, claim that God has some problem with propositional revelation.

Thus, the one who is the word can't, under this view, use words to tell we who are in his image (rational propositionally aware people), what happened to create us in our cosmos by language that has direct reference to the time-space-event characteristics of the thus created cosmos. That is, he can't tell us where we came from or how we are connected to him, and can't identify the setting of his covenant! Odd.

Destroyed by Time

In my post on Keller's article, I mentioned at the end the conclusion of myth that attends de-historicised Genesis 1, etc.

There's a bit more to myth in this connection, I think. The part notions of time play needs to be touched upon. I mentioned that time seems to be related to capability: e.g. anyone can build a bridge, given enough time, but engineers can do it with reliable speed: next year, not next century.

One of the plays of time in myth is part of its de-historicising effect when extended to crazy periods. Eliade talks about this in his book of earlier posts.

When vast periods of time are interposed between then and now, they serve to break the possibility or validity of explanation; they destroy prevenance, and bring to question any assertion of relationship. Myth allows, even requires, its basis to be 'lost in time' and beyond both question and any verification.

One of the things that the Bible's treatment of the time of its own history is to underpin and demonstrate the underpinning of continuity between events of creation, where our resulting from God's word is recorded, and the historical stream to now.

This, and the period involved removes alternatives that would destroy the connection demonstrated, and allow all sorts of 'worship of creature' into our religious world; which is precisely what history shows to occur.

Contra Keller

I recently read an article that discussed Tim Keller's view on origins, science and the Bible. [Keller is one of the servants at Redeemer Presbyterian Ch in NYNY].

The article batted back Keller's, to my mind, rather absurd take on the relations between Genesis, the Bible generally, science and questions of origins; but one area it didn't touch, and I don't think that this really gets acknowledged by proponents of the 'it doesn't mean what it says' brigade is what Genesis teaches us, and how it teaches us. After all, the scripture is provided for a reason (if divinely inspired) and the reason has to have practical and theological signficance to make it to the biblical text. Saying that it teaches us what it doesn't say does not, in my view, encourage confidence in the Bible's credibility (where else, for instance, has that particular 'fast one' been pulled, a detractor might well ask?).

There are two main planks to the reason, I think, for the origins account and its chronological location (that is through the chrono-genealogies in the Bible, and the related genealogies that, while stripped of detailed chronological information, bear considerable historical significance).

Firstly, they give the relationship between God and humanity its provenance: God says that we are connected to his creative activity, and "here is the connection" spelt out in unmistakable and directly obvious detail.

Secondly, telling us the modalities and method of creation teaches us our relation to the creation (that is, we are all creatures, and there are no hidden 'princples' at work in some occult fashion between God and us), teaches us that the creation as is is real, and dependable, and gives context for humanity being given dominion over it (so there are no 'magic groves' of trees that might harm us if we decide to harvest them). It makes the work of God congruent with the world he made and understandable in terms of its creation. That is to say, when God tells us that he made X, then it is X as we know and understand it, not some other X that has no describable connection with the world we know and can comprehend.

The two planks together give us a concrete 'realist' framework for understanding our position with respect to God, history and the cosmos. Take sticks out of the framework, and it ceases to maintain a unified perspective between the elements of the world we are in and the creator's link to the world. Christian ontology collapses!

Also, if we entertain that somehow 'God used evolution' it would mount a criticism of the truth content of John 1:3 and Hebrews 11:3, not to mention many other passages (see my earlier post on prophets). It would also raise a question about God's capability: he having to create by a second order process: making evolution to make us. But the whole area of 'evolution' (as in 'nothing, if left for long enough, will produce ideas') is one where random mechanical action has agency, not God. God using not-God? Absurd! There is also the factor of time: that things done quickly and accurately speak of power delivering intention, things done accidentally and with mistakes along the way speak of the reverse. For God who is love, this reverse is unthinkable (and unattested by scripture).

Put these lines of consideration aside and we are left with a mythic Genesis; and as myth arises from ignorance, then it would be odd indeed that God sets his covenant, his creative work, and the significance of humanity and the rest of creation in a contextual agnosticism. It would be saying: "I did it, I created you, and I created the world, but I can't tell you when and how to demonstrate the veracity of my claims." Odd, to say the least; leaving us where the myth-hearers are: in ignorance.

Prophets on Creation

At a recent Bible talk at St Philips York Street we started to consider the book of Jonah.

Reading through, we came to Jonah 1:9-10a: "He said to them, "I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land."
Then the men became extremely frightened..."

I like to see the context of these references to God as creator being his existential representation to us in revelation (or his 'credential' in relation to us in faith response to him).

Here for instance I note that (a) it doesn't say 'Lord God of heaven who said he made the sea and dry land..." which could be expected if analogical re-framings of Genesis 1 were credible; rather it makes a direct reference to Genesis 1 as having valid content, as being evidence of the thing done and its doer; and not being a second order reference to some other process, too mysterious to put into words, or insufficiently important to our understanding of our relation to God, or awaiting the speculations of 19th century British deists.

I also note (b) that the point hit home to the sailors immediately: they "became extremely frightened". No mucking about here with word games; none of them remarked..."I think you mean God provides a framework to indicate his authorship of creation by some means unstated, and other than his direct fiat, so, as this removes him far from us in both existential and real terms, I'm not frightened in a remote God".

This joins well with Hebrews 11:3, where the creation is stated as the launching point of faith!

Other passages I've read recently that refer to God's being creator are:

Isaiah 44:24

Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb,
         "I, the LORD, am the maker of all things,
         Stretching out the heavens by Myself
         And spreading out the earth all alone

Note especially the 'all alone'

and

Isaiah 48:13

Surely My hand founded the earth,
         And My right hand spread out the heavens;
         When I call to them, they stand together.


Jeremiah 10:16

The portion of Jacob is not like these;
         For the Maker of all is He,
         And Israel is the tribe of His inheritance;
         The LORD of hosts is His name.

I guess there would be from some a deflecting argument about poetic language, anthropomophisms and metaphorical language, but taken with Gen 1, it would seem that there's an immediacy in these words that is congruent with the 'on the face of it' reading of Gen 1. It seems to belie the interposition of other principles, forces or factors standing between God's will and the world as subject for Isaiah's and Jeremiah's readers, and us or between God's fiat word and the response in creation; which analogical readings tend uniformily to put off without textual warrant.

Genesis sermons

A couple of interesting sites with sermons on Genesis.

Stillwater RPC, and

some talks from a conference on creation in about 2000.

I don't agree with everything said on these sites, but there's plenty to work through with profit, IMO.

Dr. Pipa is one of the speakers at the conference, and in dealing with Kline's redigestion of the 'framework hypothesis' makes what I think is a fairly silly suggestiong that the thorns, etc that come to pester humanity on the land were seeded before the fall by God in knowledge of the fall. I think this is speculative and unnecssary given the drama that the fall would impose on the creation as God moved away from live-sustaining relationship with humanity.

Samuel

The text for our sermon at church this morning was from 1 Samuel 2. I was particularly taken with the pastoral reference, and implications of 1 Samueal 2:8:

He raises the poor from the dust,
He lifts the needy from the ash heap
To make them sit with nobles,
And inherit a seat of honor;
For the pillars of the earth are the LORD'S,
And He set the world on them.

The dependence of many passages on Scripture on God's being creator is often, I think, overlooked in discussions of origins.

I just wonder how people would have confidence in God, if they really understood there to be a great gulf of the unknown standing between his word and us? A gulf which does not seem to be present in Genesis 1.

See also my post '13' on this.

Framework theory

From Dr. Albert Mohler speaking at the Ligoner Ministries 2010 annual conference:

The idea that Genesis is merely literary has to be rejected out of hand as in direct contradiction to our understanding of the Bible as the inerrant and infallible word of God. That option for any credible and faithful evangelical Christian must be taken off the table. So then, we are left with the framework theory, held by some prominent evangelicals, but, I would argue, one of the least defensible positions when we understand that it is based upon the assumption not only that there may be a very long period of time that is involved and incorporated in Genesis 1 and the sequence of the days, but actually that the sequence does not matter! It simply is not credible, at least to me, that God gave us this text with such rich detail and sequential development merely that we would infer from it his providential direction without any specific reference to all the direct content that he has given us within the text.

It certainly seems by any common sense natural reading of the text that it is making historical and sequential claims.

Challies on evolution

Tim Challies, whom I've recently added to my blog roll, has this nice post on evolution and Christian thought.

No chance

Recently reading Douglas Kelly's "Creation and Change" I was browsing through his long list of NT citations of the Genesis creation account, and, of course, came to John 1:3: "All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being" (in Bulgarian, this is: Всичко това чрез Него стана; и без Него не e станало нищо от това, което е станало, if you really must know).

Here, I think, the notion of chance being operative in forming the creation as we know it, and as described in Genesis 1 (that is, formed by God in the categories we know, and he states) is put paid to: can't happen. Because, if chance operated, and that is the mainstay of contemporary evolutionary dogma, then some things came into being apart from Him. Not on, according to John.

And this is an exemplary statement as to the importance of the detail of the physical creation for our knowledge of self, the cosmos and God: unlike ancient Greek and Eastern religious view points, the physical world is of substantial moment; it is not relegated to a lower order of reality, because it was made by God in love as the place we stand in relationship to him, and it was made purposively by him as this setting for fellowship. It becomes ludicrous to claim that God 'used' evolution to create the world we see, because this demands that God stood back from the world of purpose to allow an 'interregnum' of chance to operate and do what it does (that is, allowing things to come into creation apart from him). Not only is this teleological nonsense, but it categorically defeats the central tenet of evolution. Chance! God 'used' chance for purpose? Oxymoronic (or just plain ordinary moronic).

No. He tells us that everything came into being through Christ, the only mediator between God and man, the word of creation; with no mysterious or occult principle intervening in the stream of relationship between God and man, commenced with God's creative acts.

Evolutionary Evangelist

One result of entertaining evolution as a real explanation of origins (even if artificially conjoined to Christian faith via so-called 'theistic evolution') is described by Al Mohler on his blog. It jetisons utterly the God of the Bible. Is this where the neo-evangelicals are taking us with moves such as the text-denying 'framework' hypothesis?

13

Recently I was invited to a business meeting on the 13th of the month. The person who invited me apologised laughingly for the date...for some '13' is considered 'unlucky'.

As it happens, I don't run my life on luck; I seek to live in dependence upon the creator and our redeemer. Luck just doesn't enter into it!

During a walk I was musing on this and wondering at the difference between myself as a Christian, with a certainty of faith in God and one without this who allowed themselves to be dogged by 'luck', omens, and similar superstitious rubbish.

I thought that one of the pillars of faith was that God who created, who spoke the cosmos into being, relieved me of the futility of unsettling reliance on the fates (luck).

But, I wondered as to whether this certainty would be as easily accessible if I thought that the Bible didn't tell us what happened when God created, and instead told us what didn't happen, then expected us to use this non-information to form a faith that God did what he didn't tell us.

I pondered that I could easily dismiss superstitious ideas about the number '13' because I knew that such things had no place in the cosmos, as the cosmos is mere creation of the one who saves. But could I have this comfortable position if I believed that God was not able to communicate to us his soverignty over creation (the process). There would still be a mystery, were there other factors that could influence me? How would I know?

But it is not so. God has communicated his creative work, and what creation is, by telling us in detail what constitutes the creative sequence and he tells us in terms that are congruent with the world we live in. Time then in creation, is time that we can connect to and make sense of. The actions of bringing things into existence are the things we see about us, at least in kind, the events are events that make sense to us as being about the features of the world we now see and experience. It is this world that God made, not some other world, not a world that he couldn't describe to us as co-participants in the 'life' of the cosmos. He as creator, we as its custodians and denizens.

If the creation, its account and our experience of it did not line up; one leg of our certain confidence in God would be gone, and the other, the resurrection, would be unstable. Thus, Hebrews 11:3

Death Penalty

I recently saw an article on the Creation website that set out to answer the question as to why God 'imposed' the death penalty on Adam for his sin.

As one could expect from a fairly theologically traditional organisation (I generally agree with their theological position in its dependence on the Bible, but I find that some traditionalists have allowed, I think, cultural influences to bend their theology; perhaps this is exemplified by such things as culturally traditional views of relationships with women, church order, and an overly forensic approach to theology).

The way Russell Grigg puts it in his article, it sounds as if the 'death penalty' is imposed in a discretionary manner because a law had been broken. But not so. The law was not given until many centuries after the fall. So, what happened?

God made Adam in his image, to be in a way a counterpart to God such that real relationship could be between the two: creator and creature. For real relationships, the imageness would need to include a real will, real capability for decision making to form a real relationship, and not just to mimic a relationship. God was, to adopt our language, taking a risk. But I'm sure he knew the possible outcomes and had them all 'managed' (as we like to say that we do with risk these days!).

The tree was presented to man as God setting the footing of the relationship: it was a genuine relationship, not an orchestrated one. Man could remain in a relationship of life, or turn from the relationship and cease to participate with God; that is, man would reject the one who had in himself 'life-source' as the foundation for the work of 'subduing' the creation (living within and caring for it, and not dominated by it). He would here live in life, but rejecting God, he would now live in rejection of the life-giver and so, in the struture of it would inherit death, purely on his own choice.

The 'death penalty' arrived because Adam choose to separate from life and 'know' in his own life-experience the evil of choosing 'not-life'.

Moltmann retrospective

...the human being perceives himself, not through reflection and introspection, but in the experiences of the history of the covenant and the promises of his God....The human being has really no substance in himself; he is a history. That is why the anthropology of the Old Testament does not deal so much in definitions as in narratives. (p.257)

These narratives are about the real world; the world we stand in and the world God spoke into existence which God sets in our history by the thorough chronological markers he provides in Genesis. Time, history, is not unimportant in the interplay of God and his creation, it is of the essence because it is in history: what really happened; that we are told who we are, who God is and what is the relationship.

The world we stand in and the world we talk about are the same world. They are not the two different worlds that many theologians, JM included, seem to entertain, but are unified as the only setting of covenant. The creation account brings together what our imagination might want to drive apart, and tells us that there is no other world that is, in our compass, more real than the one created, in which connection is made with God. Creation shows the joint history between God and his creation (us), with the history is established in the facts: the details of action, time and place, which as JM tells us on p. 73 has no corresponding human analogy; so claims that the creation account are parabolic in some way must go by the wayside.

If it is parablic, if there is something else, then God has not revealed to us the basis for our communion that has any meaning in the real world (the only world we know), and its provenance is made uncertain by the mists of unimaginably long periods of time and the uncertainty of mysticism (which is what any parabolic view of the Genesis account results in) removing from our historical experience God's actions and their results in the physical world we know.

Moltmann wrap up

A quick wrap of my reading of God in Creation by Moltmann

Moltmann wonders around the topic in his ‘true-to-form’ fashion: its entertaining, but can catch the reader off guard, as he appears to head first in one direction, then in another.

His views on the biblical doctrine of creation are no different.

Reading earlier chapters, he sounds like a biblical literalist, for all the reasons that biblical literalists are convinced by: the simple meaning of the words used in their grammatical context. No surprise there! Moltmann doesn’t try to kid us with pointless arguments about ‘literary form’ or insult our intelligence by proposing that he doesn’t take a literal, but a literary view of the Genesis creation account (he thinks, of course, that there are two accounts). What he does is to effectively put the biblical account in a different world from this one, yet seeks to make the intersection between revelation (I’m not quite sure if he thinks it is revelation or by using the word ‘myth’ if he thinks its more like crafted stories that attempt to convey something other than what they appear to convey) and the world we live in.

He does this more in the chapter ‘The Evolution of Creation’ than any other. In this chapter he is clearly influenced by contemporary rhetoric about origins; and adopts the scientistic/materialist frame of reference in both an uncritical and unfounded manner.

Uncritical because he neglects the history of ideas of evolution, being rooted in religious view that axiomatically excludes both revelation and a divine revealer, and unfounded because he appears to be informed more by the static Aristotelian conception of the physical world (he calls it ‘nature’ giving away the pagan game) than the creation as provided for in the Bible, and as conceptualised by modern ‘creationists’.

So, for example, he seems to believe the Bible requires a level of ‘fixity’, perhaps of species, that it actually does not. Then argues against this pointing to the ‘openness’ that is shown by evolution. However, the openness to the future he seeks is in the Bible comprehensively, as the creation is a field of interplay between its own variations: such as within ‘kinds’ of organisms and human custodianship. But the variation within the creation has no discernable teleological import in and of itself, the only ‘openness’ to the future, to God’s life related to ours, is in that very arena of relationship; and in our fallen world, of our movement toward and away from God: toward in repentance, and away in pride!

The basic failing of his theology of creation, seems to me to be that he operates his theology on two planes: the plane of the idealist and the realist. The Bible consistently paints a realist picture of the world and events; it is only what happens that is important. What does not actually happen is of no value. Yet Moltmann must hold that the creation did not actually happen as accounted in the Bible, but evolution did and does, and the one can inform the other. But this is equivalent to claiming that a mere story that one is wealthy will influence a statement from one’s bank! Try using that approach when you go to buy a Lear Jet.

Not so, of course. If something has no reality, then it has no substance! The ‘didn’t happen’ cannot inform the ‘did happen’ in the same world conception; and the world conception of the Bible is of a physical (embodied) creation from the word of God to form the field where the relationship between God and man; his image-like-him, is made. Because our total experience is circumscribed by the real world of event and consequence delimited by space and time in an absolutist manner, and God’s revelation of creation is to link his word to that world, it is difficult to give any credibility to a conceptualisation of the revelation that disconnects it from the very structure that it is causally of a family with.

It might be argued that mediatorial mechanisms do not threaten disconnection, but I think that if any but the mediatorial role of Christ is given a place, they do. They immediately undo the relationship between God and his creation/God and humanity founded in the history between them; particularly where the idea of evolution is concerned as in recognition of the formulation of this idea, it runs a materialist view, not a personalist/supernatural one, and requires an uncomfortable and indeterminate grafting of the world of love, relationship and hope on to the world of value-free material randomness whose only teleological target is the heat death of the universe. The notion of evolution is not merely mediatorial between God’s speaking and the world we live in coming into being; rather, it re-founds the basis for thought and life; removing it from the personal, and replacing it with the material. It thusly provides an interpretive framework that turns its back on a personal creator (creator who is a person; person-ness and not material being basically real), leaving us with a dead-end explanation that dissipates the personal in material, reifying the reduction.

It thus says that there are two histories with which we contend and that impose their utterly different coordinate systems on our conceptualisation of the world. But, again, the very purpose of the creation account is to give us the coordinate system by which we can understand our relationship with our creator, and the place of the world as product of his loving word, albeit fallen as we have rejected that relationship. The world God made in history by his word is our world, the world in which we either seek him or not, and the world that he will redeem in re-creation! It is not another world that just happened over vast periods of de-personalising time by random processes.

But did God put in train the random processes? Of course, but they are processes of degradation, not creation!

The Evolution of Creation

From this chapter in Moltmann, the following quote:

Why, in fact, does pantheism seem so plausible a philosophy to many evolutionary theorists, whether it be pantheism of matter, nature or life? The reason is not merely a striving for emancipation in rebellion against the church. †he reasons are factual, substantial ones. When eyes were turned towards the initial contingency of the world, theism always presented itself as the obvious philosophy, for theism distinguishes between God and the world. But when we are thinking about the evolution of the cosmos and of life from the contingency of events, dynamic pantheism seems much more plausible: the matter that organizes itself also transcends itself and produces its own evolution. So in this sense it is self-creative. This phenomenon can certainly be interpreted with the help of Spinoza's holistic theory. Natura est natura naturans. Consequently, deus sive natura. But the trinitarian doctrine of creation suggests a pneumatological interpretation. The God who is present in the world and in very part of it, is the creative Spirit. It is not merely the spirit of God that is present in the evolving world; it is rather God the Spirit, with his uncreated and creative energies

. (p.212).

Moltmann is here attempting to edge God into the creation that he, in my view, correctly, shows to reject him in its evolution.

No Date? Didn't Happen!

Watching a recent Martin Clunes show on TV, called, I think, the Islands of Britain, he met the self-styled head of the island of Forvik, an also self-styled 'Crown Dependency.

The fellow claims to have researched the legal status of the Shetland Islands and cannot find any dated link to the English or Scotish governments. He said on camera "If there's no date, then it didn't happen".

Which underlines the significance of dates in the Genesis account (whatever you, dear reader, think of them). Conversely to Forvik: if there is a date, it did happen!

Genesis makes the point that its events happened in history, and so they can be dated; and are.

Moltmann on Creation: more

A discernment of the eschatological redemption of the whole creation through Christ was the premise which led to the deduction that the protological creation had its foundations in Christ. This conclusion underlies the NT statements about Christ as ‘the mediator in creation’. We find the beginnings of this idea in Paul .He bases the liberty of believers in all sectors of life on the fact that everything is subjected to the sovereignty of Christ, but bases the universality of Christ’s sovereignty on the fact that everything has been created through him: ‘For us there is only one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist; (1Cor 8:6). In the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians too, awareness of the universality of salvation in and through Christ leads to the insight that ‘in him all things were created’ (Eph. 1:9ff.; Col. 1:15ff.). ‘The first-born from the dead’ (Col 1:18) is also ‘the first-born of all creation’ (1:15)

.

Hebrews 1:2 then presents the Christian vista of the universal lordship of Jesus, the Son of the eternal Father, and his mediatory function in creation, together with his preservation of the world and purification of our sins through him. ‘The Son’ is called ‘the brightness of his glory’ and ‘the express image of his (God’s) person (Heb 1:3 AV). These are symbols which Israel’s wisdom literature used to describe the eternal Wisdom of God through whom God created the world, still sustains it, and will one day glorify it (Prov. 8:22-31). The NT idea of Christ as mediator in creation is based on a sophia christology, according to which Jesus is both God’s Son and his eternal Wisdom. The Logos christology of the Gospel of John goes back to this when it declares: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things were made through him, and without him was not anything bade that was made’ (John 1:1, 3)

(pp 94, 95 God in Creation)

The experience of the eschatological reality of the Spirit leads to the conclusion that this is the same Spirit in whose power the Father, through the Son, has created the world, and preserves it against annihilating Nothingness: ‘When thou takest away their breath, the die and return to their dust. When thou sendest forth thy breath, the are created; and thou renewest the face of the ground’ (Ps. 104:29-30).

(p. 96)

The earlier theological idea of the Creator Spirit who interpenetrates, quickens and animates the world was pushed out by the modern mechanistic world picture. (p. 98)

and I especially like this:

…pantheism has turned people into indifferentists

quoting Heine (p.103) which is, I think an explanation of the moral and ontological result of evolutionism!

First 55 minutes

Frances Schaeffer, in an interview toward the end of his life with Christopher Catherwood, stated the crucial evangelistic importance of a sound space/time doctrine of creation. The author heard him remark in a discussion group at L'Abri in December of 1968 that if he had an hour with a person on a plane who did not know the lord, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes talking about creation in the image of God and were that man came from, and the last five minutes on the presentation of the gospel of salvation Schaeffer felt we are greatly mistaken to avoid the important subject of how we go her , why we are like we are, who is in charge, by whose rules we should play;, and by whose rules we will be judged. Schaeffer thought that when one avoid those questions, which are deeply implanted in every human heart, and jumps immediately to salvation, one loses the major impact on those who are seeking the truth. (p17 Creation and Change by Douglas Kelly)

Know your past

This letter appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald today:

Tim Dean (Letters, August 3) says we should stop concerning ourselves about the distant evolutionary past and decide what is best for us today. Humans, like all living things, have been evolving to suit their environment for billions of years. Ten or 12,000 years ago we started to change the way we lived and the environment we lived in. If we don't understand our ''distant past'', we have little hope of dealing with our present circumstances.

How true, but which 'distant past'? For the Christian, I would think that the Bible gives us the only useful information about our 'distant past' and the point is well made; without this information, we have little hope of dealing with our present circumstances.

Either our distant past shows us we are in the family of God, or it makes us part of the family of dust!

Moltmann on Creation

As long as nature and human history represent promises of future glory itself, all knowledge of God and the world is parabolic, figurative knowledge…Images make present what is absent. when what was absent is present, the image is no longer necessary; it is even detrimental…The parable and the thing compared will no longer be distinguished from one another, because God will be directly and universally manifest through himself, and creation with all created things will participate directly and without any mediation in his eternal life.

(p. 64 God in Creation)

…the verb bara’ is used exclusively as a term for the divine brining forth, for which there is no corresponding human analogy. The world means a bringing forth in the sphere of history, nature and spirit, through which something comes into existence which was not there previously…This shows the divine creativity has no conditions or premises…It is neither actually nor potentially inherent or present in anything else.

(p 73)

All the works which the Creator makes in his creation follow one another consecutively; the phrases ‘and God said…’, ‘and God separated…’ make this evident

(p. 74)

Creation is not a demonstration of his boundless power; it is the communication of his love, which knows neither premises or preconditions: creation ex amore Dei… In his love God can choose; but he chooses only that which corresponds to his essential goodness, in order to communicate that goodness as his creation and in his creation….His love…leads him to go out of himself and to create something which is different from himself gut which none the less corresponds to him…the Sabbath – makes it unequivocally plain that creation was called into being out of the inner love which the eternal God himself is…The event of creation is depicted as creation through the Word…God ‘makes’ his creation through the Word which he utters. The word of creation is the continuum joining the Creator and his creation.

(p.76)


Anyone who believe in the God who created being out of nothing, also believes in the God who gives life to the dead. This means that he hopes for the new creation of heaven and earth. (p. 93)

North Shore Times Headbutting Continues

God in Creation

I'm reading Moltmann's God in Creation and despite JM's theistic-evolution type stance (I don't think that he's a typical TE person in the normal neo-evangelical usage), and his reference to the concerns of the 1980s (concerns which now seem dated and a little politically naive), he makes remarks which I think worth posting.

If we think in terms of environment and biotypes, the construction of the first creation account is astonishingly clear and logical. Modern reproaches that it is the mere outcome of mythical speculation, or that it displays a naive knowledge of nature, are quite wide of the mark.

Of course, I don't accept that there is more than one creation account. He refers above, of course to Genesis 1, and implies that G2 is a second account, which, of course, it is not.

One think that I've noticed is that Multmann flicks between quite a biblical world-concept and the opposite, that is, a materialist or pagan world-concept. His use of the word 'nature' above could betray this. Most usages of 'nature' imply disconnection from God, and self-existance at some level; I prefer the usage 'the creation' when considering the world around us as this identifies dependence upon and authorship by God, underlining the basic-ness of personality, or love in thinking about things.

Eternity: sycophancy rules?

Because Eternity published Greg Clarke's article, that I wrote directly to Greg about, I thought I'd write to the editor as well; almost needless to say, the letter was not published (does this mean Eternity's editorial policy is "agree or be silent?")

Greg Clarke’s comments about those who accept the direct reading of the Bible’s account of creation, in his article in Eternity, seems to stand at odds, not only with long Christian tradition (and theological consideration), but with the Bible itself!

The Genesis account, is endorsed, without qualification, throughout the Old and New Testaments, it is the spring point for the setting of covenant between God and humanity, and beds the relationship in the real world, not in an airy world of allusion or literary suggestion. Indeed, we are told in the OT that God spoke to Moses plainly (Ex 33:11), so presumably, Moses passed this plain talk on to us in the Bible!

The critical text in this connection, however, is Hebrews 11:1-3 which shows that God’s creating is the starting point of faith, faith hung on his action in history, and a creation that came from his word, not made of things seen: the very opposite of what materialism (evolution) contends!

So, Greg, do I take your word, or the word of the Holy Spirit?

Creation by Crowe

I've just read "Creation without Compromise" by Donald Crowe. Not a bad read, IMO. The book is fairly wide ranging, but has the central theme of one's view of origins being about, at root, the 'world-view' one adopts.

The book argues this well, without referring to what I think is a landmark book in this area, The Myth of Religious Neutrality, by Clouser. (Clouser is an evolutionist, as it happens). This results in one being able to say, I think, cogently, that the debate about origins (creation vs. evolution) is not a debate about 'science' vs. 'religion', where the science side thinks it gets the upper hand (but which just goes to prove what a philosopher I heard once say, only proves that scientists make poor philosophers), but is purely a religious debate.

Thus, putting paid to the tivial comment one often hears that 'the Bible is not a science textbook'. As though this was ever a question!

The author makes much of the importance of chronology as being the structure for history, and that the Bible gives us substantial chronological information, and does so quite self-consciously: that is, one doesn't have to go hunting for it.

Chronology does a couple of things in this connection, that rarely seems to be picked up in discussion.

1. It acts much the same way as the provenance of a document does for an historian. It gives us certitude about the connection of the document with that which it purports to report. Thus, in the Bible, the chronology gives us structuring information that goes to the historical credibility of its reports. If you can't give the chronological coordinates of your history, then the certitude of it being history reduces.

2. Similarly to (1) above, it shows us our connection to God. It is not some vague or mystical connection, conjoured out of hope or wishful thinking, but a connection that is tangible in terms of what makes things tangible in our life and times.

Adding 1 and 2, the creation, and indeed Biblical history, occured in this world, with the delimiters that position and relate every other event in this world: time and place (space). It is prosaically explicable, and not a mystery accessible only to those 'in the know'; but is, at least in principle, public knowledge.

If you can't give the coordinates of your story (of creation) then, it remains a story, and the real world must be explained in some other way.

PM 'outs' as atheist!

Following our Prime Minster, Julia Gillard's stating that she is no a believer in God, the series of letters below appeared in one of Sydney's suburban newspapers.

Interesting how the idea of God (or not-God, in this case) very quickly becomes a discussion about origins...its like the two ideas go together!

Genesis days

Another quote from Young's article on the Genesian days.





The whole article is in two parts on Ted Hildebrandt's website: part 1 and part 2.

Genesis & its literary form

From Young, EJ, Studies in Genesis One "The Interpretation of Genesis
1:2" First published in the Westminster Theological Journal.

Much has been written, even in evangelical circles, about the alleged
parallel between the Enuma Elish myth and Genesis 1. Young deals with an
aspect of this here. It is also worth noting that Eliade (see previous
posts) shows that EE is a ceremonial text with more cult usage than
setting out an account of what happened. Genesis is couched in language,
and a theological logic that indicates that the author took the events
of Genesis 1 to have actually happened in our 'time-space'.

65 million years

This quote from the ABC1 'Gruen Transfer' panel show:

...at the end of the day I personally don't have a problem with objectification of guys by women in ads or women by men in ads because at the end of the day the only reason we're here after 65 million years is someone's been 'shagin.'

The Gruen Transfer is a show about advertising, the quote is from one of the panelists Dan Gregory from SMART.

Interesting practical application of the idea of evolution: let's just use people for titilation, because all we are is reproducing units.

Eliade 7

Why does the universe look so old?

Well, does it, now?

Check this blog reporting on conference remarks by Al Mohler.
It is also on line. (It’s under the SAT (for Saturday) tab and over 60 mins long.)

Eliade 6

Eliade 5

Eternity...idiots?

In a recent edition of a local Christian newspaper "Eternity" an article appeared authored by Greg Clarke, a worker at the Centre for Public Christianity. He made the somewhat undergraduate claim that Christians who take the opening chapter of the Bible at face value are, somehow 'idiots'.

I wrote to Clarke as follows:

I was in many ways pleased to see your recent article in Eternity. I was particularly encouraged having heard you speak at the Centre for Public Christianity supporters’ lunch a couple of months ago at the Wesley Centre in Sydney.

However, as I read the article, I became concerned at the pejorative language attached to an historic Christian position held with respect to our understanding of the opening chapters of the Bible.

I must say, I was surprised, no, disappointed, in the use of the term ‘idiot’ to apply to some of the greatest names in church history, many respected Christian people and, to an extent, to myself as well. It reminds me of a similar lapse many years ago when Archbishop Jensen, who was then principal of Moore College and had been a regular preacher at my church, lampooned the historic Christian doctrine of creation as being a ‘hill billy’ view!

It seemed that his, and perhaps your, preferred take on the scriptures was to set them aside in deference to the world view which starts with the axiom that there is no God, and if there might be, he certainly hasn’t spoken meaningfully to us in terms congruent with the world we are in (yet how contrary this is to the import of Genesis 1). This aligns with the deist roots of modern views of cosmogony and Earth history that makes of God a mere cipher with no real connection with either the material cosmos or ourselves.

The irony in your declaration that people who accept the Bible’s account of creation at face value are ‘head in the sand idiots’ is its similarity to the more vehement declarations Richard Dawkins makes about Christians in general! His point is that any insertion of the supernatural into the evolutionary scheme is a sign of insanity. It was amusing to hear him on ABC TV’s Q&A program stating his view that he doesn’t mind if church worthies accept evolution alongside the Bible, because he saw such acceptance as the death knell of religious views. Why should he worry, he’s won!

Irony aside, the repugnance of your claim is the implications it has for the believer’s humility before the revelation of God, the preconceptions that constrain your particular hermeneutic, and the general failure to engage with conservative scholarship, let alone scientific criticism of the very old pagan view that the world, the ‘real’ world, really made itself over vast amounts of time, and we merely ‘clip on’ God, as a fiction, as most materialists see it: not as the credible creator who started it all.

I know that your colleague John Dixon is of the view that Genesis 1 has a literary structure that precludes it being an account of actual events, yet his case is not made, in my view, and he appears to simply trot out ideas that E J Young, as an example, had discussed and rebutted in the early 1960s. So, nothing new under the sun! Dixon does venture further into some more complex literary considerations, with his reference to the chiastic structure of Genesis 1, but he fails to indicate how this necessarily precludes the text being an account of events, given the ubiquity of the structure in the Bible and in ancient literature.

But it is at the point of ‘realism’ that I think your claim hits a snag. The view you appear to extol seems to me to have more in common with the anti-realist views of broadly conceived paganism and its contemporary dress-up, philosophical idealism. This set of views is perfectly happy with the Bible being regarded as conveying information by not conveying information, in some incoherent twist of logic, while pretending to adopt the realist stance of the Bible: that things can be as stated, and the world came from God’s hand as a unitary creation. That is, we think, understand and live in the world as a consistent whole, including the illumination of that world from the word of God, when it in fact rejects any realist stance and makes the Bible discontinuous with the world that it claims God made for encounter between him and us!

At bottom, you seem to be more impressed by contemporary materialism, its acolytes and deep cultural assent, and align yourself with a non-believers’ critique of the Bible. This alignment has never produced a change in materialists, but paves the road to disbelief by saying that God has nothing to do with this world, it just is.

Eliade 4

Israel's different take on history and 'gods'.

Eliade 3

Interesting thoughts about Abraham's obedience to God in preparing to sacrifice Isaac:



and over the page:



and from the introduction:

Eliade 2

Eliade

I've just completed reading Mircea Eliade's Myth of Eternal Return, and while in parts somewhat testing (i.e. dull), in other parts very illuminating on the operation of the concept of time in religious and ontological contexts. I'll post pieces I've found particularly interesting from a Christian perspective.

The first is below.



Against what I realise is some contemporary scholarship, which attempts to reabsorb the creation account in Genesis 1 into an ANE mythic background, Eliade identifies is as going in the very opposite direction!

Shepherd

It is well known that David was, prior to his prominence in the Bible, was a shepherd: in 1 Chronicles 17:7, it says this of him:

Now, therefore, thus shall you say to My servant David, 'Thus says the LORD of hosts, "I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep, to be leader over My people Israel.

Interesting to note that a shepherd...a pastor? doesn't lead, but follows the flock! Also that the passage distinguishes that role from that of 'leader'.

I wonder if this might throw light today on the prediliction we have in modern western churches to refer to a model of community life that is predicated upon the exclusivity and individualisating notion of leadership.

Leadership may work in authority or information relationships, such as the armed forces, or in the quasi legal relationships of business or government; but I don't think it is congenial with how the scriptures, particularly the NT describes the life of the church. Certainly we have apostles, prophets, teachers, etc. But essentially all relationships within the body of Christ are characterised as serving, ministry, relationships, not leading/boss/political relationships, essentially.

Yet we allow ourselves to be led down the path of the world, which loves specialness, celebrity, power and prestige, and have 'leaders' and CEOs (of christian organisations...why not coordinators, organisers, even just ministers or servants?).

This comes to me every so often in the context of 'leading' a service, or a small study group. But I've never 'led' them, I hope I've always served! So a small group servant/minister? Or at most convenor or moderator?

I've learnt of a recent World Vision leadership convention for young people. Surely we want young people, particularly young christians to learn to be humble servants, not court the prominence of 'leadership'. Christ had some hard words to say about 'leaders'. I would suspect that we should try not to be such, but seek opportunities to serve, and encourage, which I think the word and the contemporary context of 'leader' mitigates against.

On Ethics: the NSW Education Program

The recent debate about teaching ‘ethics’ instead of ‘special religious education’ in public schools has been an opportunity for public Christians to proclaim the gospel. Unfortunately, the opportunity has been neglected!

Much of the debate has let people think that Christian faith is about ethics, when it is very much not so. One looks to Christians to behave ethically, because they have a different take on life to those who think it all ends here (quoting a lyric by Bruce Cockburn), but Christian faith is not so. If anything, it is about the failure of ethics to produce ethical behaviour (think of Paul in Romans 7).

My line of criticism of the ethics courses would be in reference to ethical failure: how are people to make sense of their actions when they fail to live up to their own standards; and whence forgiveness, which is the very point of Christian faith?

The whole area of moral epistemology was also ripe for attack, but was not taken up, so the Anglican church in particular just looked like it was blustering about a ‘lost’ monopoly and probably failed to influence anyone, or attract interest with its sage and compassionate grasp of the underlying issues.

In connection with this matter, a few letters to the press from parents of children in scripture classes have been unhappy with the curriculum. One example was a young child who came home questioning if her parents would ‘go to hell’. If a curriculum or SRE teacher was so blunt with a young child, I’d want to avoid it too. When dealing with ‘heaven and hell’ with children, a better approach is along the lines of explaining that God’s friends will live with God forever, and anyone can be God’s friend by believing him.

A child then asks: “what about people who aren’t God’s friends?” The answer could be “if people aren’t God’s friends, why would they want to be with him? But, they might become God’s friends later.”

Truth in a post-modern world

A recent talk at church was the second on faith contexts; this one was on faith in a post-modern age. The main thrust of the talk was about the ‘relativity’ of truth in a post-modern world, as opposed to the ‘absolute’ truth that Christians hold to.

I wonder what ‘absolute’ truth is? Is it objective truth, that is independent of the subject, or could it be stated as something being true in all relationships at all times? So, in a way, true, independently of relationships. This could get a bit tricky, because truth is only apprehended in a relation, for example between an observer and a phenomenon in the external world.
But more is said better by Moreland in his address to the ETS in 2004.

One of the lines of development that underpins the post-modern approach to truth is, I think Berger and Luckmann’s book “The Social Construction of Knowledge” (1966). Where the case is made, with some merit, I think, that we jointly construct ‘reality’ in social contexts. However, this construction is limited and falls below the line of ‘truth’ in typical cases, and remains an operational matter, being about how relations are conceived and operated in complex social settings where a large set of shared assumptions about interactions and their meaning(s) apply. But, no matter how a group ‘constructs’ its world, they will leave rooms by doors and not walls. What is ‘constructed’ is the psycho-social meaning attached to leaving a room in the immediate context, I would think.

Towards the end of the talk, people were invited to join a prayer in turning to God; ironically, the invitation was made using the phrase “if it’s right for you” or words to that effect; which agrees with the post-modern project and tended to undo the argument being put forward in the talk (so if a Buddhist heard the talk, would they feel it was not ‘right for them’ and so not consider the prayer?). The irony of it!

The Bible, on the other hand, calls for repentance absolutely; there is no ‘right for you’ option. I’m not wanting to be critical here, as I’ve used this phrase myself, and it is probably a kind way of inviting people to consider their relationship with Christ…but, it also shows how popular thinking intrudes on our language (the way we socially construct reality) almost unnoticed.

In this context its interesting to consider a quote from Plantinga from his essay Naturalism Defeated

“But if naturalism is true, there is no God, and hence no God (or anyone else) overseeing our development and orchestrating the course of our evolution. And this leads directly to the question whether it is at all likely that our cognitive faculties, given naturalism and given their evolutionary origin, would have developed in such a way as to be reliable, to furnish us with mostly true beliefs. Darwin himself expressed this doubt: "With me," he said, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? The same thought is put more explicitly by Patricia Churchland. She insists that the most important thing about the human brain is that it has evolved; this means, she says, that its principal function is to enable the organism to move appropriately: Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . . Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival [Churchland's emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

Aside from the puzzle of Platinga's have-cake-and-eat-it belief (he seems to accept evolution, which is derived from naturalism, but criticises its naturalism in interesting contrast to Flew’s latter day rejection of naturalism), he throws up an interesting take on the concept, and indeed, the operation of truth in a naturalistic world, where minds only need to be sufficient for survival, and while Churchland’s view might not be held by all naturalists, it does suggest a weakness in naturalism’s conceptualisation of why things are as they are. If it’s not about survival, in some way (and that net may be quite large), then the connection with truth may be unsure.

Of course, at base, the post-modern explanation is self-defeating: if ‘truth’ is what you make it, then the truth of that view is itself subject to what one makes of it: here the post-modern project follows in the steps of its naturalist cousin and, in the great tradition of logical positivism, cannot provide the basis for its progam in terms of the program, and collapses on itself. On these grounds, the Christian is at liberty to reject it, while inviting post-moderns to leave by the wall, and not the door.

As an aside, during the talk I referred to above, a comment was made about moral positions that are held in all societies. Unfortunately, the examples given were not held in all societies. For instance, child abuse, asserted as being universally rejected, was in fact institutionalised in the ancient world over many centuries; in his book Sick Societies, Robert Edgerton documents many societies where practices that we would be appalled by are or were commonplace and applauded. Don Richardson in his book Peace Child takes us on a similar tour of depravity.