Cat and Dog Theology

Recently I attended an evening with Gerald Robison of Cat and Dog Theology: a surprisingly fun ministry.

After Gerald's talk question time started and a couple of questions dealt with the recurrent 'good God, world of evil' subject.

One of the questions went something like "does God like earthquakes and tsunamis?" because, I guess, the questioner thought that they were part of the 'very good' world that God created. This may have been indicative of a poorly taught or understood theology of creation and its place in the biblical (the 'real') history of the physical world; or a failure to integrate information about spiritual matters, with the covenantal relationship between the material world and our concourse with God.

Gerald's answer focused on Romans 8:22 ("For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now".); and given the time constraints, it appealed to me as a pretty good answer. He went on to affirm that despite the effects of sin on our world, 'God was still in control".

The answer, however, did not quite satisfy. There is a more fulsome response to deal with the why of natural 'evil' (earthquakes and the like), and the notion of God's being 'in control'; the latter being a particularly objectional piece of contemporary reflexive determinism.

That the world is not as God created is clear in scripture: the cosmos left God's hand as 'very good' (Gen 1:31). We are twice removed from this state: firstly by the fall, where God ceased his intimate relationship with his creation (Gen 3:9, for example), and secondly by the flood, and its aftermath.

In the contemporary Anglican church the question of natural evil arises, perhaps, because of the inroads made into the doctrine of creation by worldly admixes of 'theistic-evolution' or Christian Darwinism, and various other reconfigurations of the doctrine brought by metaphorical readings of Genesis 1, etc. Thus, I suspect, the world contorted by disruption is mistakenly 'read' as the very good world that left God's mind as revealed in the genesian account; and God is somehow identified with the blind, relentless, meaningless, cruelty and frustration that 'evolution' entails.

But, not so. God created 'very good' consistently with his goodness and love; he took pleasure in what he had done and gave to us; he also will restore the entire creation to joyful fellowship with him and peace; overturning any idea that this broken world represents, in its brokenness, God's nature. [Despite its broken state, Paul insists that it does still make representation of God]

'Control'

The notion of God being 'in control' comes up frequently, and appears to be used by Christians, in many cases, as the final support for their confidence in God's capability to finally save them. However, the glibness of its expression conjures up for me the image of God as puppeteer; which I don't find in the Scriptures.

Without grappling with the vast world of debate on this topic, and its many colours and flavours (canvassed in Christian Determinism, as one example served up at the top of a recent Google search); I will put down but a few notes.

God's being 'in control' strikes me as a god disengaged from his creation, and one who imposes on his creation or people (those in his image, and therefore not made to be 'controlled') the events and circumstances of their lives.

But God our creator represents himself differently to this. I think of Romans 8:28 where Paul tells us that God (actively) works all things together for good...so, God engaged, at work and, I think one can extend to him working in the world that we are working in, he to reliably bring about what he wills not necessarily over against us, but through and by us, even if we intend otherwise.

The way the teleological dimension of God's relationship with the cosmos is expressed in Job, is I think, what is largely in mind when people talk of him being 'in control'; but the biblical expression is far more helpful: Job 42:2, for instance, where God's ends will out: but reading this with the Romans passage, it is not, I suggest, by 'brute force' fiat, but by his working, by his Spirit in and with the minds and motivations of his creatures in all their circumstances.

I find myself discomforted by the absolutist terms that speak more of a Greek philosophical tradition ('in control' being of this ilk), and am more comfortable with God as represented in the Bible as living with us, and taking a part in the pattern of life, albeit a supreme part, by which his objectives are never thwarted and always achieved: so in these terms, he is not a puppet master, but the supreme moulder, leader, guide and 'captain' of the way of his creation; even his creation marred in rebellion and seeking to be against him.

We, though, in his church, are part of the new creation, seeking not to be against him, but to be entierly for him; but the new creation has intersected with the old, and God achieves his goal while we are wading still through the mess and sometimes horror of life in this now broken creation. We live, as it were, in two creations at once, and this living sustained in God's light by his indwelling Spirit and engaged by the life of prayer.

Just as an aside, I think that some confusion arises when people think of pre-destination, in this context, and perhaps think the Bible teaches that God has pre-destined 'you', the individual, to share eternity with him. I don't think this is so; rather, the destination of the 'train' of the church is eternity with him; but who is on the train is a different matter: not entirely different, but nevertheless, different, as God seeks and saves those who are lost, and would that all come to know him.

No longer part of eternity

From a recent article by Elizabeth Farrelly (touted as an architect on the Herald's website, but she isn't: not registered in NSW so cannot be one!)

It captures very nicely the wrong-headedness that parlously descends upon as by evolutionary fictions, and spreads through the church due to its faustian bargain in 'theistic evolution' reconfiguring Genesis 1 into a metaphor for something else!

For in big, fat, rich modernity, as you know, time is money. We may live twice as long as those mediaevals, but our time cannot be wasted on the merely beautiful or the merely worshipful. This is because we no longer see ourselves as part of eternity but simply as the poor, bare, forked animals that Darwinian modernism bequeathed us. Our allotted span is all we have, so it matters...

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/mystery-dies-when-we-dont-see-ourselves-as-part-of-eternity-20110427-1dwmy.html?posted=successful#ixzz1KlKuot6U

Facts from non-facts

There are a number of views of Genesis 1 that fall into a basic conceptual approach to the text. It is this: the information contained in the passage is not factual. It does not correspond to events in the real world in either sequence or substance. However, Genesis 1 does teach that God is creator, that he is (somehow) sovereign over creation and that he has created a cosmos that is consistently well ordered, predictable and is subject to uniform causal regularities.

What is not explained by this basic view is how all this fact is derived from something that is non factual on its face!

It seems that to hold that one can draw the factual from the non-factual; denying that the material on its face conveys facts, but that somehow underneath it reveals something that it does not do on the surface, in the direct meaning of the text, is not a mark of thought, but of conjuring!

What is pretty obvious to me, is that this program requires the material to be sorted into that which has objective meaning and that which does not, not on its own grounds, but by some criterion that is private to the interpreter.

But how would we know that interpreter A, in rejecting that the direct reading of the text is factual, is able to know that other matters in the text, not directly accessible to the direct reader, are where its facticity lies? Indeed, how would we know that interpreter A has anything of value to say against interpreter B who responds to the text on its face? Or is it just that one garners credentials from the occult act of finding something beneath the text (occult here referring to 'hidden')? What is the basis either in the text or by reference to something outside the text to say that a fact can be deduced from a text which itself contains no facts?

That doesn't sound like even a rational reading of a text, let alone a spiritually responsive one!

So, lets get it straight; most modern post/neo/quasi evangelicals would say that Genesis 1 teaches us that God is creator, but does not provide any factual material, any reliable content, which communicates that! So where does the idea that God is creator come from if that creator cannot communicate the basis of the attribution to those he created in language which is the medium presumably created for communication between persons, or, if the Bible is right, is ontologically basic?

This is a particularly pointed question when most such PNQ evangelicals fall into line with the idea of evolution being thoroughly (or not quite thoroughly) explanatory of origins; an idea which in itself seems to feel no epistemological deficiency; and actively denies that personhood is basically real, but rather, that material is; personhood being a mere outworking of an assembly of material.

John Dixon, who I mentioned in my previous post might be one of these non-facts teach facts chaps. I'd ask him: by what criterion do you draw from a text whose facticity you deny, conclusions which are only validly available by reference to the very text you deny can provide them.

The decision to claim that some facts are established in the face of the rejection of their medium is arbitrary; those who espouse it don't have any substantial ground to reject the contrary view, that the fact they claim is carried only by the facts that convey it. To deny this is more than perverse, it is crazy.

Why age?

Comment I posted on a recent article on John Dickson's teaching about earth and its age.

It is saddening to see Christian teachers like John Dickson wanting to support a conceptualisation of the world that separates it from God, indeed, wants to make it independent of God's revelation in a fashion that has more to do with paganism than Christianity. The pagan worldview typically sees the world either as 'given' or as independent of any intelligent cause or agency. Long ages abet this idea.

Further support for paganist ideas comes in denying that the Bible could or would want to include information about our physical cosmos or world; yet the physical setting is clearly significant in the scriptures: it shows us our very tangible connection with God, and God's direct connection with his creation, thus establishing who he is for us, and who we are before him.

In denying that the opening chapters of Genesis have anything concrete to say about these topics people like Dickson, etc. effectively say that the 'god' they conceive is very different from the God of the Bible, who sets out his program for relationship with us in terms parameterised in the terms by which we know the very world that he says that he created.

Moreover, the approach that severs the direct genetic connection between God and his creation, and ultimately us, de-personalises the connection God declares through Genesis 1:1 to 2:4; de-personalisation is precisely the fruit of pagan ideas. I wonder if this implication is seen by others?

The 5-fold formula

There have been a few schemes that apply a structure to Genesis 1; usually they are schemes to avoid the direct reading of the passage (e.g. the 'framework' hypothesis), but oddly, the authors of these schemes usually fail to deal with the passage's most obvious structuring scheme.

Joseph Pipa in his lecture on the doctrine of creation puts it this way:

Moses adopts a formula much more powerful and pervasive than the parallel between the days 1-3 and 4-6. It is a five-fold formula that is used fairly consistently with each of the six days, the work of each day is described by the five-fold formula:

1. the act of creation,
2. the declaration of fulfillment,
3. the statement of purpose,
4. the expression of delight and
5. the indication of time.

In each event the act of creation is described in a two-fold manner: firstly the word of creation, and that is complimented by the particular works of creation.

The word predominates as we read this chapter: "and God said", shaping the particular out of the initial 'mass' of creation.

Real Public Events

I've recently been listening to a lecture by Thomas, until recently, of Durham (Tom Wright: recently stepped down as bishop) 'Can a scientist believe in the resurrection?" In it he makes a couple of remarks that I'd like to use to consider how we might think about Genesis 1/the creation.

1. He says that the question of Jesus' resurrection was not a question about the internal state of his followers, but about something that happened in the real public world.

That is, the resurrection as an event was accessible to anyone who was there at the time, independently of that person's views, beliefs or prejudices.

2. He also said that the disciples' transformed world view was only explicable on the assumption that something really did happen (really = an event in material space-time which objectively occurred independently of any observers)

Here it is clear that people's approach to life and their thoughts about their own circumstances and personal trajectories through life were reoriented by something that really happened.

Christian faith is thus not some rarified 'faith in faith', but confidence in the actuality of events that have an affect upon us.

So, the creation, if not something that happened in the real public world in the terms in which God portrays it, is not something that happened meaningfully at all! If it was not accessible, in principle, to anyone who read the text, and could make sense of it, then it is not revealed, but obscured!

Then, the world view that the creation account sets out to create is one that depends on something really having happened. Not something that we are free to characterise ( and therefore characterise God) any way we please, but something that is bound to the context of the revelation; otherwise, it is not this creation that we are talking about, but some other source of the world, built on some other premise, and connected historically to some principle other than the God who has taken pains to tells us the basis for the connection between us and him from which flows the entirety of redemptive history.

Canards

In the most recent Southern Cross; the journal of our (Sydney) anglican diocese, a letter was published in reply to an earlier one on Genesis 1.

The earlier letter used Genesis 1 to be able to draw conclusions about life on earth; the latter letter denied this was possible, but that information could only come from outside the Bible.

Specifically, the author, one Stenning, asserted that Genesis was but poetry; and presumably could have no truth content in its own terms, and that armed with 'two books' to 'read the world' we could be content to relegate the Bible (Genesis 1) to other than concretely informative.

Both assertions are, in my view, erroneous.

Firstly, it is hard to understand how anyone could think that Genesis 1 is poetry. It is obviously not! So obvious, I'll not rehearse here what I've covered previously.

The second assertion is a little trickier, although I've touched on it previously too.

Are there two books? One of 'nature' (and that word gives the game away instantly: its not 'nature' but the 'creation' that should concern us), and the other of God's word? The so-called book of nature only becomes such, that is, nature is only 'en-booked' in the propositions formulated by people, with all the prejudices, errors and fabrication that people are prone to. Hardly something to use over against the Bible!

Reference to a second book in this context is almost invariably to off-set the biblical information about origins, and render it meaningless by comparison with modern 'majority' views. So the second book is not really the book of the creatures, to express God's power, as Francis Bacon put it, but the book of 'God cannot communicate his work of creation to us'; with us relying instead on constructions that start, not with God, but with asserting his irrelevance. This is canvassed in another recent post.

Second book reference also usually indicates a view that the Bible has no business talking about the material cosmos, and that any such talk is usually irrelevant to spiritual matters. But the Bible would have it otherwise. In the creation do we learn of the close connection and historical continuity of redeeming relationship between God and man, and that it is this world, this setting, in which we encounter God; not some other, less concrete, less do to with 'our' world, world. The pastoral implications of this can be quite dramatic, in my own experience.

Creation? Yes, but on my terms!

It is a popular line in much of the evangelical world that Genesis 1, etc. tells us that God is creator, and that creation was ex nihilo, but that the actual facts of creation do not line up with Genesis 1. So Genesis 1 is either pure polemic, or mere rhetoric.

Simply at the level of the pure logic of the claim, it seems to be a nonsensical position to hold: it denies the alignment with events of the only information that we have on which to base our acceptance of God's being creator. The claim is that 'God created, but not how he tells us'. The sceptic is well entitled to deny that our belief in God's being creator can be a serious one.

What is happening here amounts to denying the word of God, and maintaining that his creating was not on his terms, but has to be on our terms (and who are we to say?).

This was the mistake of the Pharisees: they wanted a messiah on their terms, not God's!

In making this move, we evacuate God's revelation of its direct verbal-grammatical meaning, and substitute our own thoughts as to what really must have happened, bending, in many cases to the materialist view of the world, and allowing its claims the ascendency over those of our God! This happens either by accepting the notion of Darwinian evolution, or materialist cosmogony and the accompanying history of the earth, or both; usually both.

I don't know of any other part of scripture where we deny that God can communicate what he wants, and we comfortably substitute our own views!

But this is not a denial without danger: as soon as we substitute our own content, we change the substance of God's information: we say not only that God created, but not how he says, but that the world is other than the Bible sets out.

Our relationship with God throughout the Bible, and its flow of history, is framed in terms of the creation: it sets out who he is, who we are, and grounds the covenant! Setting the details of the account aside means that we set this aside too, and we have to then be content that the world is not the world that God sets out for us, but some other world, where things happen differently, and to which God relates differently.

The theological ramifications are not trivial!

Dembski's Theodicy

When I first read Andrew Hodge’s review of Dembski’s “The End of Christianity” in the Journal of Creation, I regarded Dembski’s views as being arcane speculation. I did not expect them to become present in everyday Christian discourse. But subsequently to reading the review, I found that they had!

A Christian worker of my acquaintance used an approach similar to Dembski’s to answer a question as to how there could be death before the Fall. This was done in a group discussion, but did not itself evoke much comment, unfortunately. It certainly didn’t bring discussion of the logical circle that Hodge sets out in the review, which ends with God being the author of evil.

And here, I think we see the basic theological problem of theistic evolution: not that it puts death before the fall, which it does, and which is obviously a problem, it being at first counter-scriptural then making the evidence of the dissolution of relationship between God and creature come to effect before the actual dissolution; but that it makes the action of evil inherent in the creation. Thus it makes to be evil part of what God has done out of his nature, and termed ‘very good’. This is simply incoherent. It makes God the author of ‘not-God’ and therefore by nature to include his own inversion. Interestingly Barth does this very thing in this statement in his commentary on Romans 8:21, 22 “All things...observed by men are hidden in God...good and evil” (Oxford edition, p. 309). It ends up more Zoroastrian than Christian, to my mind.

The notion has a number of other effects as well.

It seems to ignore that temporal order was created by God as part of the organising structure of experience within his creation. To upend this and have his creation show the dislocation of the fall prior to the fall makes nonsense of sequence, justice and causality. Indeed, if this had been part of orthodox theology, I doubt if science and reason would have taken root as the temporal anti-causality of Dembski’s theology would remove their basis in the created world (that which God has created as Real). Such an outworking would be reminiscent of the anti-temporality of some contemporary philosophical discussion that pops up in both critical theory particularly, and some flavours of post-modernism (refer, for instance to Fredric Jamison and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s glee at the displacement of history’s ‘grand narratives’ by post-modern language games, notwithstanding the irony of their inevitable reliance on strict temporality for actual communication).

Dembski seems to have also set out to rather glibly solve a problem that his commitment to naturalist chronology creates; but glibness here leads to another theological error. The results of the fall in death and dissolution are because relationship with God is broken. God steps back from his creation, as it were (signified in his having to seek Adam, and not know him in confraternity: loss of loving intimacy and life sustaining involvement has occurred) within the temporal framework of that creation. Adam, as the steward of the creation has rejected and ejected God from fellowship in his life by particular action at a particular time (notwithstanding the interpretation of Calvinism that has God in relationship trampling over his own creation of temporality, sequence and his image in man): the creation thus cut loose from the author and source of life must experience death and decay, frustration and failure.

To have the creation simultaneously be in fellowship with God and out of fellowship with God, which is what Dembski’s theodicy requires, has to be explained, not just presented by an off-hand and illogical assertion.

The final consequence is that Dembski’s ‘effect of the fall before the event of the fall’ theology is, as I’ve touched on above, destroys the temporal structure the Bible, gives to interaction patterns. It forces the adoption of a cyclical indeterminacy that turns its back on temporality, makes chronology meaningless and runs against biblical thought. This, if it truly did emerge with any real grounds from the Bible, would align Christian (and Jewish) theology with the types of pagan anti-temporal structures that Eliade discusses in “The Myth of Eternal Return”, and would undermine revelatory historicity with dire implications for the incarnation. In these terms, Dembski’s adoption of the concept of kairology is interesting as it makes time subjective (which is quite workable in many day to day ways: 'eat when hungry' is an example), but risks melding this into a pagan package of impersonal spiritualist subjectivity, countering the highly involved personal spiritual objectivity of the scriptures.

Finally, it is simple to rebut Dembski’s parallel between the sufficiency of Christ for redemption across history, and applying the fall contrary to causality irrespective of the flow of history. The first case is an act of will: God decides, a-temporally, that Christ’s work will have trans-temporal effect, because in fact it makes life triumph over death, and so must swallow up death (irrespective of what would end up to be transient temporal effects); but the second case is a matter of an event sequence within the creation where God has provided time as the mechanism of experiential structure, causal sequence and consequential moral responsibility or, to adopt a quip: “to stop everything happening at once”, which is precisely what Dembski wants to have happened!

Related

The Bible is premised on the relationship of God and his creation, specifically God and mankind, where the relationship is personal: that is, as between persons.

For the relationship to substantiated as real, it has to have a real basis; a point of connection. For example, the marriage relationship for Christians, is given a basis in reality in the wedding ceremony, where a covenental connection between man and woman is made.

A parallel to this is the connection that God demonstrates with his creation in the creation account in Genesis 1-2 (and 3 for that matter, to give in a soteriological fulsomness). The link between the two is not just asserted, but shown. Shown in terms that are part of the fabric of reality between God and humanity (the fabric created by God, which is part of the substance of the account). In both participating in the shared fabric, we and God are shown to be sharing an ontological domain that makes sense of communion (relational concourse), expectations, relationship and covenant.

If the words of the account have no connection with the reality they assert to recount (that is the account means other than it specifically states, and sets out its propositional content only to infer a vaguely stated 'real' on the basis of a clearly stated non-real) then the intersection of our and God's being is not validly given and there is no indication of joint participation in a shared domain, or 'fabric'. That is, the parameters that would show the participation are invalid. If this were so, then the creation account would be meaningless, and convey no content that was propositionally fruitful: it would tell us nothing and undercut the notion that there was a basis for our connection with God.

If God could not tell us the basis in meaningful propositions, then it would be fair to think that there was no basis in the reality that would put God and us into relationship.

Enuma Elish

Many years ago I recall a discussion on the Anglican Media forum about the influence of Enuma Elish on Genesis chapter 1.

Kitchen, among others denies that there is a link, but this came back to mind when I was reading Creator and Creation by Simkins, where he says:

Certainly the Enuma Elish is the most elaborate Mesopotamian creation myth, but it is doubtful that it represents the predominant Mesopotamian view of creation. One prominent Assyriologist even characterized it as a sectarians and an aberrant combination of mythological threads that have been woven in to an unparalleled composition (Lambert, 1965). Although he perhaps depicted the myth too narrowly, he has rightly cautioned us against overemphasizing this myth in understanding the Mesopotamian view of creation. Some scholars have even argued that the Enuma Elish is a foreign import into Mesopotamia. The textual evidence suggests that there is no single tradition that made up the Mesopotamian view of creation.

Dinosaurs in Eden?

In an article in the current (Feb 11) Southern Cross, the Sydney diocesan newspaper, there is an article on 'dating' (romantic, not geological), quoting:

"My father always told me that the Bible tells us what we need to know, not what we want to know.

For a child who wanted to know if Dr Who was real and whether or not dinosaurs were running around in the Garden of Eden, this was a disappointing answer to my queries"

How interesting that the connection of the Bible with the real world, at its beginning, as it creates the framework for understanding that God's word and the real world converge in God's revelation (and thus the word making sense of the world), is (a) anticipated by a child, but rejected by an adult, and that information about the grounding of salvation history in the totality of the history of the creation is something we presumably don't need to know, although we might want to know it.

The Bible, however, does seem to think that we do need to know such things; the pity is that many today think that the Bible is wrong on this and the identity of the world created, the act of creation and our experience of God expressed in the Bible is not necessary to know! An extraordinary traducing of the Bible's 'view" of itself!

Now, were dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden; of course, it is logically possible, seeing that all creatures were made on day 6.

Two books

I commented on an article I saw that mentioned the 'two books' notion that is supposed to make the Bible and contemporary interpretations of the created world (note, not the created world itself, although this is hoped to be understood, but the interpretations, which are if not completely tendentious, then at least programatic).

I know it's popular in heterodoxy, but the 'two books' idea is nonsensically overdone, in my view. One book is clearly a book: the Bible, the other is a book only by metaphor. Yet, how often are books about the metaphor book used to interpret the Bible, and the possibility of the Bible: which is a real book full of propositions, doing some interpreting of the metaphorical book is rejected?

At root, I think this position entails a philosphy that at its start fails to be informed by the Bible, and has its roots in paganistic idealism, where a non-real world is the only one the Bible is allowed to occupy; its statements of connection with this world expressly denied to enable its rejection!

Genesis literary?

From Al Mohler's talk at last year's Ligonier Conference:

The idea that Genesis (1-11) is merely literary has to be rejected out of hand as in direct contradiction to our understanding of the Bible as the infallible word of God.

The framework theory is one of the least defensible positions when we understand that it is based upon the assumption that there not only may be a long period of time in Genesis 1 and the sequence of days, but actually that the sequence does not matter. It simply is not credible 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 of the direct content he has given us within the text!

Even a commonsense reading of the text indicates that it is making historical and sequential claims.

As Pipa says, it contains so many time and sequence markers that it is as though the writer is going out of his way to drive the point that this text relates events that occur in time as we experience time, and with a tempo that we can make sense of given our own experience of the succession of days.

The unitary construction of the chiasm in Genesis one emphasises the point: this text sits as a unit, self contained, and understandable within its own terms.

Conflict on evolution

Al Mohler gets discussed in this Baptist article.

All the fluff that gets discussed in Christian circles about there being a non-issue between evolution and creation has to die on quite a number of verses in the Bible. For instance, Hebrews 11:3 tells us that "the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible" which is the very opposite of the evolutionionary claim that what is seen WAS made out of what is visible. QED, in my view!

I've posted on Mohler before, and will do so again.

Tom's midnight garden

From Tom's Midnight Garden (p. 169, the Oxford Edition) by Philipa Pearce:

After discussing theories of time, Tom says:

"I've heard a theory too...while his uncle paused to drink some tea, 'I know an angel--I know of an angel who said that, in the end, there would be time no longer'

"An angel!" His uncle's shout was so explosive that a great deal of tea slopped down his tie, ..."What on earth would an angel have to do with scientific theories?" Tom trembled and dared not explain that this was more than a theory, it was a blazing angelic certitude.

Interestingly, this related to the book's using Revelation 10:1-6, where the angel refers to "him that lives for ever and ever, who created heaven...and earth..." surely a secure credential for unifying thinking about the created order and the revelation of the one who created it!

Ironically, discussion on Michael Jensen's blog, treads the very same territory as the uncle: there is a separation between the creator (theology) and his creation ('science' and the world of theories), yet the Bible, in the account of creation, the tying of creation to the Son and by extension the incarnation, and our being in the creation as the place where we encounter God, and in which God covenants with us, brings them together!

Reading on Origins

Over recent months I've read a number of books to do with the question of origins. They are:

Eliade: The Myth of the Eternal Return
Bavinck: In the Beginning
Young: Studies in Genesis One
Thielicke: How the World Began
Moltmann: God and Creation
Sarfati: The Greatest Hoax on Earth?
DeRosa: Evolution's Fatal Fruit
Herbert: Charles Darwin's Religious Views
Crowe: Creation without Compromise
Sarfati: By Design
Kelly: Creation and Change
Wilder-Smith: God: To Be or Not To Be
Moreland: Creation Hypothesis
Lennox: God's Undertaker
Wells: Darwinism and Intelligent Design
Sandford: Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome
Sudera: One Small Speck to Man
Mortensen: The Great Turning Point
ReMine; The Biotic Message
Repcheck: The Man Who Found Time
Simkins: Creator and Creation
Pipa nd Hall: Did God Create in 6 Days?
Moberly: Theology of the Book of Genesis

I could well comment on all of them, but for the sake of brevity I'll only do so for 'By Design'. I was disappointed by this book as it didn't really get to the issue of what design is as opposed to the product of stochastic processes.

A quick think suggests that design is characterised by:

High entropy: so it's not likely to be like something produced by undirected processes;
Parsimony: efficient fit to purpose; to properly appraise this we'd need to understand the full purpose within the context of the system (and the system of systems, to coin a defence technology phrase). For example, some claim that the koala's pouch is the 'wrong' way, or the design of the retina is inefficient; both claims do not address the full functional set that the particular design meets.
Trans-systemic interfaces: where the inputs and outputs of one system or sub-system are parsimoniously coupled with the output and input requirements of a system that operates within a different, but functionally related domain (e.g. eye-brain; facial anatomy and musculature, muscle feed back systems, circulatory and secondary nervous systems all of which are coordinated to enable vision);
System of systems participation: where a system works with other systems to produce a result that is not directly required or produced by one individual component system.

When is a day...a day?

From a lecture by Dr Joseph Pipa on the meaning of "yom" in Genesis 1?

"...it is used 2304 times in the Old Testament with the great overwhelming majority of its uses referring either to the period of daylight or the normal 24 hour day. The theologian Berkhoff writes "in its primary meaning the word "yom" denotes a natural day".

It is a good rule in exegesis not to depart from the primary meaning unless this is required by the context. It is not only the primary meaning, it is the default meaning of the word... this is the overwhelming sense of the word and that your first reading is always to be then of a daylight period or a normal 24 hour day, unless there is something else in the text that will cause you to see that it is being used in a figurative fashion."

Critics will ask how can you have a standard day in days 1 through 3 without the sun to regulate the period? But clearly days 4-7 are regulated by sun and should be so taken, so the coherent reading of the text, if 4-6 are regulated by the sun, then the same meaning should apply to verses 1-3: that's what the text demands.

Another word in the Hebrew that could have been used to communicate long periods of time is "olam". 'Day' does not express an epoch, if one claims then, one has to demonstrate such a use in the Bible: is there any such use of day in the Bible? Even figurative uses rely on day indicating a 24 period, except where is it idiomatic. For instance "period of influence", when it still contemplates a set of natural days or 'when'.

576 times "yom" with a numbered prefix: always refers to a standard day; the only possible exception is Hosea 6:2, but here, still, it refers to not a long period, but of God's brief judgement. It is also a prophesy of the resurrection, and still refers basically to a day as a day.

Moreover, when an ordinal is used with "yom" it always means normal day in sequence.

[Pipa suggests that you check the usage of 'yom' in Bibleworks or Logos...my preference is for Bibleworks, FWIW]

Clods

Read in the SMH reprinting a Telegraph article:

The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun. Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all. Then it will burn out. Then it will get very nippy indeed.

The dominating view of humanity as peddled by today's knowledge workers. From an evangelistic perspective, unseating this view of man has to be a first step to re-seating man as the creation of God, and in need of restored relationship.

Joshua Davidson

With the NT adopting the Greek-ized form of the saviour's name, the signficance of Joshua taking the people into the promised land is obscured: I prefer to think of the Messiah as Joshua of Nazareth: closer to the truth!

But if we were going to render our Lord's earthly name into contemporary style, it would be as the title of this post: Joshua Davidson! It doesn't quite work liturgically, but there you are!