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