23 June 2013

It doesn't matter...

God created; we know that. It just doesn't matter when (or how, or over how long...).
This is a common enough view amongst Anglican clergy persons. I was going to write 'position' but I don't think that the notion is well enough thought out to be elevated to a 'position'.

No, its just a view, fairly ill-formed, if not completely uninformed, at that. And, I don't mean with respect to current debates, but I mean with respect to the 'biblical data' as theologians like to say, as if the Bible is a mere theological data mine to sustain their occupations (humph!).

The trouble with this view is that it does matter when and how and over how long that God created, because all these are elements of how God's creation is communicated and defined in the Bible, and are therefore part of what God's creation means: they establish its ontology and its historical placement with respect to us. They delimit creation in the Bible, showing its attachment to the world we are in. Indeed, the world that is created, and we as a part of it.

And the time references themselves are significant. Time's constraints are universal and order our experience, giving a trans-cultural and meta-historical system of coordination of our knowledge of events and relationships, everything has a time denotation that is part of the things characterisation in respect of all other things. It makes the disparate inseparable!

However, theology that it rooted in philosophical idealism, rather than the 'concrete-realism' of the Bible will engineer the pretense of separability between what the Bible 'says' and what we take it to mean as soon as a desire emerges to blend the Bible with paganism.

The common or garden variety of modern Anglican clergy person does this all the time, and here most particularly, betraying a view of Christian faith that has nothing to do with God's created world,  or thus the world we inhabit and find the coordinates of our meaning in, but resigns the real world over to materialism and the fantasies of evolution, just to appease the intellectual power-brokers of today.

It's a pity, really, because the Biblical tradition scorns the intellectual power-brokers of any day, and maintains a prophetic witness against them!