From time to time discussion of the status of Genesis 1 swings round to its alleged similarity with the Babylonia tale Enuma elish. I’ve seen such discussion on the Anglican Forum sponsored by the diocese, although ‘discussion’ is not the ideal description for the exchanges I’ve read, where the parties sometimes talk at cross purposes (particularly if they disagree with a point advanced) and without really attending to the points made by the other.
In that context, an article by Hasel, G. “The Significance of the Cosmology in Genesis 1 in Relation to Ancient Near Eastern Parallels” from 1971 is interesting.
I’ve included some pertinent excerpts from the paper here.
…[B]y the turn of the century and continuing into the twenties and thirties the idea of a direct connection of some kind between the Babylonian and Hebrew accounts of creation was taken for granted, with the general consensus of critical opinion that the Hebrew creation story depended on a Babylonian original.
…
[But] it is no longer scientifically sound to assume that all ideas originated in Mesopotamia and moved westward as H. Winckler's "pan-Babylonian" theory had claimed under the support of Friedrich Delitzsch and others. The cultural situation is extremely complex and diverse. Today we know that "a great variety of ideas circulated in ancient Mesopotamia…”
…
N. M. Sarna, who wrote one of the most comprehensive recent studies on the relationship between Gn and extra-biblical sources bearing on it, states: "... to ignore subtle differences [between Genesis and ancient Near Eastern parallels] is to present an unbalanced and untrue perspective and to pervert the scientific method." The importance of difference is, there- fore, just as crucial as the importance of similarity. Both must receive careful and studied attention in order to avoid a misreading of elements of one culture in terms of another, which produces gross distortion…
…
On this basis there is a growing consensus of opinion that the Biblical term tehom and the Babylonian Tiamat derive from a common Semitic root. This means that the use of the word of tehom in Gn 1:2 cannot be used as an argument for a direct dependence of Gn I on the Babylonian Enuma elish.
…
In contrast to the concept of the personified Tiamat, the mythical antagonist of the creator-god Marduk, the tehom in Gn 1:2 lacks any aspect of personification. It is clearly an inanimate part of the cosmos, simply a part of the created world. The "deep" does not offer any resistance to God's creative activity. In view of these observations it is un-sustainable to speak of a "demythologizing" of a mythical being in Gn 1:2. The term tehom as used in vs. 2 does not suggest that there is present in this usage the remnant of a latent conflict between a chaos monster and a creator god. The author of Gn 1 employs this term in a "depersonalized" and "non-mythical" way.
…
In short, the description of the depersonalized, undifferentiated, unorganized, and passive state of tehom in Gn 1:2 is not due to any influence from non-Israelite mythology but is motivated through the Hebrew conception of the world. In stating the conditions in which this earth existed before God commanded that light should spring forth, the author of Gn 1 rejected explicitly contemporary mythological notions.
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These notable differences have led T. H. Gaster to suggest that "the writer [of Gn 1] has suppressed or expurgated older and cruder mythological fancies." But these differences are not so much due to suppressing or expurgating mythology. They rather indicate a radical break with the mythical cosmogony. We agree with C. Westermann that the Biblical author in explaining the creation of the firmament (expanse) "does not reflect in this act of creation the contemporary world-view, rather he overcomes it.
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N. M. Sarna considers the similarity between the Egyptian notion of creation by word and the one in Gn 1 as "wholly superficial." In Egyptian thought the pronouncement of the right magical word, like the performance of the right magical action, is able to actualize the potentialities inherent in matter. The Gn concept of creation by divine fiat is not obscured by polytheistic and mantic-magic distortions.
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With von Rad and others we may conclude that "the entire passage vs. 14-19 breathes a strongly antimythical pathos" or polemic. Living in the world of his day, the writer of Gn 1 was undoubtedly well acquainted with pagan astral worship, as were the readers for whom he wrote. The Hebrew account of the creation, function, and limitation of the luminaries demonstrates that he did not borrow his unique thoughts from the prevailing pagan mythical views. Rather he combats them while, at the same time, he portrays his own picture of the creatureliness of the luminaries and of their limitations.
…
But when it comes to defining the purpose of man's creation, he [the scriptural writer] makes a supremely significant advance upon the time-honored pagan view. In contrast to the doctrine enunciated in the Mesopotamian myths. .. , man is here represented, not as the menial of the gods, but as the ruler of the animal and vegetable kingdoms (1:28).
…
On the other hand, in Mesopotamian mythology the creation of man is almost incidental, presented as a kind of afterthought, where he is a menial of the gods to provide them with nourishment and to satisfy their physical needs. The author of Gn 1 presents an antithetical view. The very first communication between God and man comes in the form of a divine blessing.
Order of Creation
A comparison with Enuma elish indicates certain analogies in the order of creation: firmament, dry land, luminaries, and lastly man. These orders of creation certainly resemble each other in a remarkable way. But there are some rather significant differences which have been too often overlooked. (1) There is no explicit statement in Enuma elish that light was created before the creation of luminaries. Although scholars have in the past maintained that Enuma elish has the notion of light before the creation of the heavenly luminaries, such a view is based on dubious interpretations of certain phenomena. (2) There is no explicit reference in Enuma elish to the creation of the sun. To infer this from Marduk's character as a solar deity and from what is said about the creation of the moon in Tablet V is too precarious. (3) Missing also in Enuma elish is the creation of vegetation, although Marduk is known to be the "creator of grains and herbs." Even if the creation of vegetation were mentioned in the missing lines of Tablet V, its appearance would have been after the luminaries whereas in Gn it is before the luminaries. (4) Finally, Enuma elish knows nothing of the creation of any animal life in sea and sky or on earth. A comparison of creative processes and their order indicates the following: (1) Gn 1 outlines twice as many processes of creation as Enuma elish; and (2) there is only a general analogy between the order of creation in both accounts; it is not identical.
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E. Wurthwein suggests that the placing of the creation accounts in Gn at the beginning of a linear history emphasizes a contrast to the cyclical nature of mythology, which is especially significant in view of the fact that creation in Gn 1 comes to a close within a certain non-repeatable period of creative time that closed with the seventh day. In his view this should be under- stood as a polemic which marks off, defends, and delimits against such mythical speculations that maintain a constantly repeating re-enactment of creation. Furthermore, it should not go unnoticed that the creation of the tanninim, "sea monsters," in Gn 1:21 reflects a deliberate effort to contradict the notion of creation in terms of a struggle, which is a key motif in the battle myth of pagan cosmogony. It also puts emphasis upon the creatureliness of the tanninim as being identical to that of other created animals
…
Gn cosmology as presented in Gn 1:1-2:4a appears thus basically different from the mythological cosmologies of the ancient Near East. It represents not only a "complete break" with the ancient Near Eastern mythological cosmologies but represents a parting of the spiritual ways which meant an undermining of the prevailing mythological cosmologies. This was brought about by the conscious and deliberate antimythical polemic that runs as a red thread through the entire Gn cosmology. The antimythical polemic has its roots in the Hebrew understanding of reality which is fundamentally opposed to the mythological one.
This is also mentioned in a paper on the St Mark's Avalon site.
20 April 2009
16 April 2009
Men, Women and Genesis
Interesting couple of articles on the CBE website:
One, on the equality of men and women, argued from Genesis 1-3, and the other on the implications Paul draws from the new creation. Have a read.
Odd that my most conservative views about the creation go to my (for a conservative) somewhat 'radical' views about the relation between women and men, some would say. To that I say (nicely, I hope), go read your Bible.
One, on the equality of men and women, argued from Genesis 1-3, and the other on the implications Paul draws from the new creation. Have a read.
Odd that my most conservative views about the creation go to my (for a conservative) somewhat 'radical' views about the relation between women and men, some would say. To that I say (nicely, I hope), go read your Bible.
15 April 2009
Dinosaur photo.
Well, the title is just to get some attention…it’s a photo of a piece of graffiti about dinosaurs. It is on a tree in a car park near my local Uniting Church premises. I’ve walked past it for years without noticing until now.
If you’ve trouble reading it, it says: “Why aren’t dinosaurs in the Bible?”
Answer 1: The word ‘dinosaur’ was invented in the 19th century, so the word couldn’t be in writings composed prior to that date.
Answer 2: Given that the word was not used prior to the 19th century, we could look at descriptions of animals in the Bible.
For some commentators, the descriptions of leviathan and behemoth in Job are consistent with what we know of some dinosaurs from their fossils.
Job 40:15 describes an animal that is sometimes thought to be an elephant, but the description of the tail eliminates that possibility.
Job 41:1 describes a more unusual animal, sometimes thought to be a large crocodile, but that doesn’t fit, with description including: ‘outer armour’, ‘double mail’, ‘strong scales’, ‘out of his nostrils smoke goes forth’.
It is the inconclusiveness of these descriptions that lends verisimilitude, in my view. If a writer was trying to invent a creature, they would be more likely to give a thorough description to ensure their readers understood them. But here, because Job is referring to creatures that are known to his readers, his description can be effective in abbreviated form, simply brining to mind the aspects of the creatures he is interested in.
Similarly today, if we were talking of an elephant, we might only mention its trunk, or thick legs, or big torso, or little tail, not giving a comprehensive description, and we would all know what we were talking about. But to someone who had never encountered the animal it would not be adequate to give a mental impression of the animal’s appearance.
12 April 2009
Genealogy does...
Flicking through my notes on the sermon series that started this blog: that on Genesis, I had recorded the speaker's remark: the purpose of the genealogies is to find the 'serpent crusher', that mentioned in Genesis 3:15
And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel."
Their work is to connect the arrival of the serpent crusher to the events that gave rise to the fall, curse and promise, and to direct us to undoing of our basic fear, that of death.
If there is no historical thread between the serpent crusher and Eve, that is, if the events of the garden are mere story...myth, then there is no point to the serpent crusher being in historical continuity with that which he will crush; and death is not undone, because death is in our historical context, not in a story world.
And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel."
Their work is to connect the arrival of the serpent crusher to the events that gave rise to the fall, curse and promise, and to direct us to undoing of our basic fear, that of death.
If there is no historical thread between the serpent crusher and Eve, that is, if the events of the garden are mere story...myth, then there is no point to the serpent crusher being in historical continuity with that which he will crush; and death is not undone, because death is in our historical context, not in a story world.
10 April 2009
Pre-eminence
In the passage below (Col 1:9-20-Green’s Literal Trans.), I think that some interesting cross lights are thrown on the relations between Jesus as redeemer, the father, his work as creator and his pre-eminence.
It seems that it would deflate Christ’s pre-eminence (v.18c) if all things created by him and for him included the death that he came to end, wresting us away from the accuser. Those who want to meld the revelation of creation in the Bible with materialist constructions and say that materialism gives us the ‘means’ while the Bible gives us the ends, fail, I think to see the dominance of means over ends, if the means includes the very destruction that the end puts away for ever. Given that this passage links together Christ as creator, sustainer, head of the Church, redeemer and the one who ends the reign of death their linking draws together these lines of thought within the Bible, including, obviously, the creation. The very point seems to be that death is an intruder, which we know from elsewhere in the scriptures (1 Cor 15:26) and Christ’s victory over it is of vast significance. To have death within Christ seems ridiculous to the point of theological self-destruction.
The full passage:
For this cause also, from the day in which we heard, we do not cease praying on your behalf, and asking that you may be filled with the full knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, 10 for you to walk worthily of the Lord to all pleasing, bearing fruit in every good work and growing into the full knowledge of God; 11 being empowered with all power according to the might of His glory, to all patience and longsuffering with joy;
12 giving thanks to the Father, who has made us fit for a share of the inheritance of the saints in light, 13 who delivered us out of the authority of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, 14 in whom we have redemption through His blood, the remission of sins; 15 who is the image of the invisible God, the First-born of all creation. 16 For all things were created in Him, the things in the heavens, and the things on the earth, the visible and the invisible; whether thrones, or lordships, or rulers, or authorities, all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and all things consist in Him. 18 And He is the Head of the body, the church, who is the Beginning, the First-born from the dead, that He be preeminent in all things; 19 because all the fullness was pleased to dwell in Him, and through Him making peace by the blood of His cross, to reconcile all things to Himself; through Him, whether the things on the earth, or the things in the heavens.
It seems that it would deflate Christ’s pre-eminence (v.18c) if all things created by him and for him included the death that he came to end, wresting us away from the accuser. Those who want to meld the revelation of creation in the Bible with materialist constructions and say that materialism gives us the ‘means’ while the Bible gives us the ends, fail, I think to see the dominance of means over ends, if the means includes the very destruction that the end puts away for ever. Given that this passage links together Christ as creator, sustainer, head of the Church, redeemer and the one who ends the reign of death their linking draws together these lines of thought within the Bible, including, obviously, the creation. The very point seems to be that death is an intruder, which we know from elsewhere in the scriptures (1 Cor 15:26) and Christ’s victory over it is of vast significance. To have death within Christ seems ridiculous to the point of theological self-destruction.
The full passage:
For this cause also, from the day in which we heard, we do not cease praying on your behalf, and asking that you may be filled with the full knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, 10 for you to walk worthily of the Lord to all pleasing, bearing fruit in every good work and growing into the full knowledge of God; 11 being empowered with all power according to the might of His glory, to all patience and longsuffering with joy;
12 giving thanks to the Father, who has made us fit for a share of the inheritance of the saints in light, 13 who delivered us out of the authority of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, 14 in whom we have redemption through His blood, the remission of sins; 15 who is the image of the invisible God, the First-born of all creation. 16 For all things were created in Him, the things in the heavens, and the things on the earth, the visible and the invisible; whether thrones, or lordships, or rulers, or authorities, all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 And He is before all things, and all things consist in Him. 18 And He is the Head of the body, the church, who is the Beginning, the First-born from the dead, that He be preeminent in all things; 19 because all the fullness was pleased to dwell in Him, and through Him making peace by the blood of His cross, to reconcile all things to Himself; through Him, whether the things on the earth, or the things in the heavens.
3 April 2009
A Question of Hope
Hope is one of the significant aspects of our relationship to God. Paul regards the pagans as being without hope because they are without God (Eph 2:12). Hope is the function of faith looking to what God promises on the basis of what God has done (Heb 6:19); it is universally contingent on God’s demonstration of his capability within history, both explicitly, and implicitly in the teaching of Jesus, and it is all referred back to God’s prime capability demonstrated in his creating this world that we experience and in which our relationship with God has its setting and is exhibited.
Hope comes to us, however, not only by action, but by God’s word encapsulating and communicating his actions. Without his word, if we were not historically located at the point of his action, we would not strictly be aware of it; although the flow of biblical history (to adopt a title of one of Schaeffer’s books) would give us some confidence in God’s actions by virtue of the logic of the historical flow.
Hope arises from the link between action and word, filling actions with content and reflexively pointing us back to God’s word as the originator of his actions.
This is demonstrated nowhere better than in the creation. The creation is brought by God’s word: he speaks, it happens. He is immediately (that is, with no mediation apart from Christ, q.v. John 1:3) the author of the place that we live in and we ourselves. His authorship and revelation give us sufficient information to understand God, ourselves, the world we are given into and the noetic engagement with that world provided (Adam's naming the animals is an indicator along this line). No agent stands between us and God, and no process separates us from God.
Our confidence in the word of God and our hope is built on the continuity of God’s demonstrated connection with us and the world he created for us as the place where relationship and covenant is brought into being and played out. The three critical points in this are creation, incarnation (death pointing back to sin, and the contrast thrown starkly against the ‘very good’ preceding it, resurrection pointing forward to the new creation which envelops, reflects and extends the 'very good' now marred) and in the future, the new creation itself.
To remove God from his creation, which occurs when there is any interjection in the creation account and its significance as an anchor point for the historical 'flow', that dilutes the presence of God or the effect of his word also historically detaches him from the horizon of our existential placement. It brings uncertainty rather than certainty, because God’s relation to this world becomes uncommunicated and unknown, perhaps unknowable; this pushes God away from what he says and demonstrates (if words have meaning) is his closeness to us.
In some views this goes hand in hand with God’s actions being regarded as not only not being by God, but coming about by some mediating process not mentioned by God (and the mystery thus thickened by the uncertainty and speculation required by this argument from silence), but far removed from us in time, as though time might introduce the very process that is unstated by God (!). The function of time in this scheme is not only to provide the ‘time’ for the unstated to mediate between God’s word and its result in our time-space experience, but to push the question beyond any hope we would have of coming to knowledge of the creation as God's work: the intellectual process at work seems to be, ‘first deny the event, then insert a speculative component to assert sense in the event, then remove the event from our historical horizon with the effect that God is no longer the God of the Bible (where chronological information is almost pedantically set out) but a deist God who is uninvolved, or a Gnostic God who cannot be involved. Either way, not the God who is in intimate covenantal relationship with us; denoted with consistent historical reference to the world we are in and endorsing that world as the world that is from God to and for us; the one that we experience by the same mental organs and system of representation and logic by which we can come to have experience of God.
The upshot of pushing God out of the stream of being that puts us in the creation that he created and he has recorded requires some other creation to have occurred, which makes it call some other ‘god’ and invoke some other intervention than the incarnation of the creator amongst his creation.
Hope comes to us, however, not only by action, but by God’s word encapsulating and communicating his actions. Without his word, if we were not historically located at the point of his action, we would not strictly be aware of it; although the flow of biblical history (to adopt a title of one of Schaeffer’s books) would give us some confidence in God’s actions by virtue of the logic of the historical flow.
Hope arises from the link between action and word, filling actions with content and reflexively pointing us back to God’s word as the originator of his actions.
This is demonstrated nowhere better than in the creation. The creation is brought by God’s word: he speaks, it happens. He is immediately (that is, with no mediation apart from Christ, q.v. John 1:3) the author of the place that we live in and we ourselves. His authorship and revelation give us sufficient information to understand God, ourselves, the world we are given into and the noetic engagement with that world provided (Adam's naming the animals is an indicator along this line). No agent stands between us and God, and no process separates us from God.
Our confidence in the word of God and our hope is built on the continuity of God’s demonstrated connection with us and the world he created for us as the place where relationship and covenant is brought into being and played out. The three critical points in this are creation, incarnation (death pointing back to sin, and the contrast thrown starkly against the ‘very good’ preceding it, resurrection pointing forward to the new creation which envelops, reflects and extends the 'very good' now marred) and in the future, the new creation itself.
To remove God from his creation, which occurs when there is any interjection in the creation account and its significance as an anchor point for the historical 'flow', that dilutes the presence of God or the effect of his word also historically detaches him from the horizon of our existential placement. It brings uncertainty rather than certainty, because God’s relation to this world becomes uncommunicated and unknown, perhaps unknowable; this pushes God away from what he says and demonstrates (if words have meaning) is his closeness to us.
In some views this goes hand in hand with God’s actions being regarded as not only not being by God, but coming about by some mediating process not mentioned by God (and the mystery thus thickened by the uncertainty and speculation required by this argument from silence), but far removed from us in time, as though time might introduce the very process that is unstated by God (!). The function of time in this scheme is not only to provide the ‘time’ for the unstated to mediate between God’s word and its result in our time-space experience, but to push the question beyond any hope we would have of coming to knowledge of the creation as God's work: the intellectual process at work seems to be, ‘first deny the event, then insert a speculative component to assert sense in the event, then remove the event from our historical horizon with the effect that God is no longer the God of the Bible (where chronological information is almost pedantically set out) but a deist God who is uninvolved, or a Gnostic God who cannot be involved. Either way, not the God who is in intimate covenantal relationship with us; denoted with consistent historical reference to the world we are in and endorsing that world as the world that is from God to and for us; the one that we experience by the same mental organs and system of representation and logic by which we can come to have experience of God.
The upshot of pushing God out of the stream of being that puts us in the creation that he created and he has recorded requires some other creation to have occurred, which makes it call some other ‘god’ and invoke some other intervention than the incarnation of the creator amongst his creation.
25 March 2009
Thinking about Leadership #2
The conventional image of the leader is the person ‘out front’, leading the way; someone with the ideas, the capability, the vision, the understanding and the will to achieve something and that actually achieves it, or gets out of the way so that others can and moves on to some other activity where they can make a difference.
It is an image of an isolated and remote figure, detached from others. It is an image that has been formed from fictional portrayals of military leaders or explorers. It is wrong.
In church circles it seems that there has been a recent recognition of a lot of contemporary business discussion about leadership; but the recognition seems to be picking up the early discussions in the business literature, and not the more recent material which puts the leader more and more into the picture in terms of functional contribution, not figure-head, as one who activates and supports people rather than dominates them.
It is the functional contribution of leadership that is of more importance, and functional contributions are always situational and occur in the context of a community of interest. Like a church, for example.
One of the most useful approaches to the idea of leadership, in my view, comes from Ronald Heifetz of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. An article that gives a helpful summary of his view is here.
Heifetz characterises leadership as an activity, that is, it is doing something, rather than being something. Thus it is situational not organisational. It is not (necessarily) a title on an organisation chart, but it is the nature of an individual’s particular actions in a particular circumstance, with conjoined motivations of other individuals:
“Leadership is what individuals do in mobilizing other people, in organizations or communities, to do what I call "adaptive work." Adaptive work can mean clarifying a conflict in values, or bridging the gap between the values that we stand for and the current conditions under which we operate. When you have a problem or a challenge for which there is no technical remedy, a problem for which it won't help to look to an authority for answers - the answers aren't there - that problem calls for adaptive work.”
Adaptive work is required more broadly when there is a disjunct of some sort between desired outcomes and current performance.
In church activities, this can occur at many points, but none of them require the attachment of a title to a person or even a role. That destroys the situational dynamic through which leadership emerges, passes from person to person from time to time, and dissolves when the adaptive work is completed. This may be one reason we are warned against calling ourselves ‘leaders’ (‘teachers’ or ‘masters’) as formal appellations in church community (Matt 23:10), and instead told to regard our role with respect to others as fundamentally service: thus the word ‘minister’. And we all have a ministry of some sort!
There are two basic organisational functions: maintenance and change; those we anoint as ‘leaders’ in our mistaken echoing of worldly proclivities are often maintenance people; true leadership is required where there is change of some sort required. These are not titled people but people who’ve made an observation, seen an opportunity, or seek a benefit where there is currently detriment. The need to be supported by the maintenance people and their change function given a home in the organisation by the maintenance people (church staff, for instance), who will also give the change program a context. In some cases the change will be such that it should be separated from the mother organisation for the sustenance of both the mother organisation and the daughter initiative; a church plant is possibly an example of this.
What is referred to, inaccurately from a biblical basis, as a leadership team or role is better characterised as a maintenance team or role. Terms to refer to such people might be convenor, organiser or co-ordinator. Facilitator would do in a pinch, as would even the older title of secretary. More traditionally, ‘minister’ would be fine, as in the church all we have is ministries, and we all have a ministry. Just title the ministry: small group minister (convenor), children’s minister (the one who organises it would be the children’s ministry coordinator) (In fact, such terms could well be used in all organisations designed for Christian or church purposes, such as missionary organisations, and so on. The use of hubristic corporate titles such as director, chief executive officer and the like are in opposition to the operation of a community of Christian purpose).
The Bible has provided us with the perfect model for organisational life under the auspices of the Holy Spirit: that is of ministry. Note the consistent emphasis in the NT on this as the basic function within the church; and we all have a ministry. The idea of one ‘minister’ or an isolated ‘ministry team’ is not biblical; nor is the idea of a ‘leader’ or ‘leadership team’. If a person is truly leading in Heifetz’s terms, then no title or label to the effect is necessary.
It is an image of an isolated and remote figure, detached from others. It is an image that has been formed from fictional portrayals of military leaders or explorers. It is wrong.
In church circles it seems that there has been a recent recognition of a lot of contemporary business discussion about leadership; but the recognition seems to be picking up the early discussions in the business literature, and not the more recent material which puts the leader more and more into the picture in terms of functional contribution, not figure-head, as one who activates and supports people rather than dominates them.
It is the functional contribution of leadership that is of more importance, and functional contributions are always situational and occur in the context of a community of interest. Like a church, for example.
One of the most useful approaches to the idea of leadership, in my view, comes from Ronald Heifetz of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. An article that gives a helpful summary of his view is here.
Heifetz characterises leadership as an activity, that is, it is doing something, rather than being something. Thus it is situational not organisational. It is not (necessarily) a title on an organisation chart, but it is the nature of an individual’s particular actions in a particular circumstance, with conjoined motivations of other individuals:
“Leadership is what individuals do in mobilizing other people, in organizations or communities, to do what I call "adaptive work." Adaptive work can mean clarifying a conflict in values, or bridging the gap between the values that we stand for and the current conditions under which we operate. When you have a problem or a challenge for which there is no technical remedy, a problem for which it won't help to look to an authority for answers - the answers aren't there - that problem calls for adaptive work.”
Adaptive work is required more broadly when there is a disjunct of some sort between desired outcomes and current performance.
In church activities, this can occur at many points, but none of them require the attachment of a title to a person or even a role. That destroys the situational dynamic through which leadership emerges, passes from person to person from time to time, and dissolves when the adaptive work is completed. This may be one reason we are warned against calling ourselves ‘leaders’ (‘teachers’ or ‘masters’) as formal appellations in church community (Matt 23:10), and instead told to regard our role with respect to others as fundamentally service: thus the word ‘minister’. And we all have a ministry of some sort!
There are two basic organisational functions: maintenance and change; those we anoint as ‘leaders’ in our mistaken echoing of worldly proclivities are often maintenance people; true leadership is required where there is change of some sort required. These are not titled people but people who’ve made an observation, seen an opportunity, or seek a benefit where there is currently detriment. The need to be supported by the maintenance people and their change function given a home in the organisation by the maintenance people (church staff, for instance), who will also give the change program a context. In some cases the change will be such that it should be separated from the mother organisation for the sustenance of both the mother organisation and the daughter initiative; a church plant is possibly an example of this.
What is referred to, inaccurately from a biblical basis, as a leadership team or role is better characterised as a maintenance team or role. Terms to refer to such people might be convenor, organiser or co-ordinator. Facilitator would do in a pinch, as would even the older title of secretary. More traditionally, ‘minister’ would be fine, as in the church all we have is ministries, and we all have a ministry. Just title the ministry: small group minister (convenor), children’s minister (the one who organises it would be the children’s ministry coordinator) (In fact, such terms could well be used in all organisations designed for Christian or church purposes, such as missionary organisations, and so on. The use of hubristic corporate titles such as director, chief executive officer and the like are in opposition to the operation of a community of Christian purpose).
The Bible has provided us with the perfect model for organisational life under the auspices of the Holy Spirit: that is of ministry. Note the consistent emphasis in the NT on this as the basic function within the church; and we all have a ministry. The idea of one ‘minister’ or an isolated ‘ministry team’ is not biblical; nor is the idea of a ‘leader’ or ‘leadership team’. If a person is truly leading in Heifetz’s terms, then no title or label to the effect is necessary.
20 March 2009
Why Genesis ?
In a previous post I attempted to canvas some of the headline lessons that Genesis 1 has for us. Here I’d like to look directly at Genesis 1 and ask what it does. That is, why is Genesis 1 important in the Bible, given the Bible's grand span of the history and destiny of the relations between humanity and God.
The answer to this question is basic to the lessons that we are able to gain from Genesis 1, but I decided to reverse what might be the natural order between the two and deal with the more dominating question second.
Genesis, in identifying our creator, and in that by implication setting our basic relationship, and the scope of who we are, shows us (that is, doesn’t merely tell us, but shows us) our connection to our creator, God as well showing our life-context.
To do its work the creative events must be describable, if they happened, and if they happened, to make any connection between us and God, they must have happened in terms that we can understand and that are consistent with the reference frame for events in our life-experience; otherwise no sense could be made and no communication would occur. Thus our connection to God would be incommunicable and the story of our relationship be reduced to fantasy.
Thus Genesis describes creative events that can be communicated, and indeed are communicated such that it shows us in terms that make sense in our world-experience, how our world has its connection with God’s ‘world’. It shows us that there is a connection and it is one that is ‘denominated’ in terms that are definitionally valid in our life-world.
The linkage is more than a curiosity, thought. It very importantly, makes salvation significant, and indeed workable, and makes the incarnation both astonishing, and credible, from a theological point of view. The incarnation depends on the basis of connection between God and humanity that is given in Genesis 1. The currency remains the same between both creation and incarnation, and salvation becomes a response in its terms of the creation to the creation being marred by the choice of people-made-in-God's-image.
One of the points that comes from this is that the events of Genesis 1 must occur in time that is the time we are in, and is reportable in the terms that we would report it in. The ‘time’ of Genesis 1 refers to time as the universal denominator of actions, events and relationships: if something really happened, it can be given a location in time that is definitive and can be set on a line that it shares with our time: that is, it happened some quantifiable period before our time. If this is not possible, then the event, etc, did not, and could not have happened in time; and its reality has to be questioned at best, set aside (and therefore nullified and rendered void) at worst.
All God’s actions are denominated in time that thus has to make sense to our experience of time, and are communicated in time words and grammar that can be directly understood in terms that we would use them and use them to make communicable sense. Deny this and the whole game goes up for grabs.
That the events of creation are set on the same timeline we are on, they bring with them an ontological continuity with our contingent status; indeed they show our dependency and ground us, not in speculative ideas that avoid the test of history (that is, did they happen or not), but in events within our historical envelope and at least conceptually, within our life-world.
If these events happened outside our timeline; are therefore not reliably communicable in terms of that timeline, then there is a fatal disjunct between us and God and there is neither an ontological with God, nor a viable explanation of our dependency, nor any content in the ark: creation-fall-salvation-new-creation.
In Genesis 1 God shows us who he is and who we are in relation by the actions and events that bring us into being. If this is not true on the timeline we are on, then it is difficult to see how it has any truth value at all.
The way God makes this communication is not to weave a web of intrigue and mystery, but to tell it as it was: to relate the events that occured in the manner in which they occured, denominated by that which is common to our experience and is universal to all possible experience: time as we know it, and not a fantasy time that would unseat the veracity of the communication and detach the events from our horizon of experience and comprehension.
But more significantly (!) the basis and rationale for salvation that would be provided by the ontological unity between our contintency and our God that is welded in Genesis 1 would collapse to a mere speculative possibility and not be a concrete fact of existence. The very point to salvation that is in the creation (that is in existential-physical event relationships) would vanish, and we’d be left with a mere ethical contrivance, a piece of religious decoration at best.
Unfortunately much reference to Creation, when examined, reduces the work of Christ to this as it removes creation for this world and makes it some sort of religious mystery, with the real stuff given in a completely differenlty founded notion of origin in a material world that can make itself and thus is independent of God, and is necessary rather than contingent. This story makes all to be within creation, including notions of God, rather than having God external to and independent of his creation.
Thus, if Genesis 1 is not taken in its own terms, the whole becomes a house of cards and collapses as soon as ‘when’ is denied as a question that can be sensibly asked. And not only ‘when’ of a calendar, but ‘when’ of the sequence of dependency that is built up and demonstrated in Genesis 1 (and then, 2, of course) with God telling what is by showing what he did.
The answer to this question is basic to the lessons that we are able to gain from Genesis 1, but I decided to reverse what might be the natural order between the two and deal with the more dominating question second.
Genesis, in identifying our creator, and in that by implication setting our basic relationship, and the scope of who we are, shows us (that is, doesn’t merely tell us, but shows us) our connection to our creator, God as well showing our life-context.
To do its work the creative events must be describable, if they happened, and if they happened, to make any connection between us and God, they must have happened in terms that we can understand and that are consistent with the reference frame for events in our life-experience; otherwise no sense could be made and no communication would occur. Thus our connection to God would be incommunicable and the story of our relationship be reduced to fantasy.
Thus Genesis describes creative events that can be communicated, and indeed are communicated such that it shows us in terms that make sense in our world-experience, how our world has its connection with God’s ‘world’. It shows us that there is a connection and it is one that is ‘denominated’ in terms that are definitionally valid in our life-world.
The linkage is more than a curiosity, thought. It very importantly, makes salvation significant, and indeed workable, and makes the incarnation both astonishing, and credible, from a theological point of view. The incarnation depends on the basis of connection between God and humanity that is given in Genesis 1. The currency remains the same between both creation and incarnation, and salvation becomes a response in its terms of the creation to the creation being marred by the choice of people-made-in-God's-image.
One of the points that comes from this is that the events of Genesis 1 must occur in time that is the time we are in, and is reportable in the terms that we would report it in. The ‘time’ of Genesis 1 refers to time as the universal denominator of actions, events and relationships: if something really happened, it can be given a location in time that is definitive and can be set on a line that it shares with our time: that is, it happened some quantifiable period before our time. If this is not possible, then the event, etc, did not, and could not have happened in time; and its reality has to be questioned at best, set aside (and therefore nullified and rendered void) at worst.
All God’s actions are denominated in time that thus has to make sense to our experience of time, and are communicated in time words and grammar that can be directly understood in terms that we would use them and use them to make communicable sense. Deny this and the whole game goes up for grabs.
That the events of creation are set on the same timeline we are on, they bring with them an ontological continuity with our contingent status; indeed they show our dependency and ground us, not in speculative ideas that avoid the test of history (that is, did they happen or not), but in events within our historical envelope and at least conceptually, within our life-world.
If these events happened outside our timeline; are therefore not reliably communicable in terms of that timeline, then there is a fatal disjunct between us and God and there is neither an ontological with God, nor a viable explanation of our dependency, nor any content in the ark: creation-fall-salvation-new-creation.
In Genesis 1 God shows us who he is and who we are in relation by the actions and events that bring us into being. If this is not true on the timeline we are on, then it is difficult to see how it has any truth value at all.
The way God makes this communication is not to weave a web of intrigue and mystery, but to tell it as it was: to relate the events that occured in the manner in which they occured, denominated by that which is common to our experience and is universal to all possible experience: time as we know it, and not a fantasy time that would unseat the veracity of the communication and detach the events from our horizon of experience and comprehension.
But more significantly (!) the basis and rationale for salvation that would be provided by the ontological unity between our contintency and our God that is welded in Genesis 1 would collapse to a mere speculative possibility and not be a concrete fact of existence. The very point to salvation that is in the creation (that is in existential-physical event relationships) would vanish, and we’d be left with a mere ethical contrivance, a piece of religious decoration at best.
Unfortunately much reference to Creation, when examined, reduces the work of Christ to this as it removes creation for this world and makes it some sort of religious mystery, with the real stuff given in a completely differenlty founded notion of origin in a material world that can make itself and thus is independent of God, and is necessary rather than contingent. This story makes all to be within creation, including notions of God, rather than having God external to and independent of his creation.
Thus, if Genesis 1 is not taken in its own terms, the whole becomes a house of cards and collapses as soon as ‘when’ is denied as a question that can be sensibly asked. And not only ‘when’ of a calendar, but ‘when’ of the sequence of dependency that is built up and demonstrated in Genesis 1 (and then, 2, of course) with God telling what is by showing what he did.
15 March 2009
A question of leadership
This blog takes me away from the discussion of origins to another area of interest connected with things ecclesiastical.
Recently I read an article in Harvard Business Review by Henry Mintzberg (HBR July-August 1996:61-67 “Musings on Management”). It connects nicely with my comments on Diary of a Church Planter that mentions Mintzberg's remarks on the management failure that is implicated in the current financial melt-down (see right at the end).
I’ve attempted to adapt some of his ‘ten ideas designed to rile everyone who cares about management’ to the current near obsession with 'leadership' in some church circles (in the eighties I remember we were more concerned with 'ministry').
1. Organisations don’t have tops and bottoms.
Too much of church organisation is just that: organisation, rather than the growing of a community of faith: a body of believers mutually serving each other, and those around them.
But if you must have an organisation, then, rather than one that is diagrammed after the model of a triangle (minister, sorry, rector at top, parish council in middle, parish at bottom, etc.), model it as a set of concentric rings: service centre (parish council) in the middle, support systems (the various ministries and ministers, including paid and unpaid) in the next ring, all as individuals in the outer ring, and the surrounding ‘sea’ is the neighbourhood.
3. Lean is mean and doesn’t even improve long term profits
Getting rid of people to improve momentary profit, but hobble long term prospects is one of the dumbest moves a business can make.
For a church, though, it’s a different matter. Churches tend to multiply programs, services, ministries, activities, committees until their members topple from exhaustion. I suggest that the lean-making has to occur in getting rid of activities that take away from the mission of the church; the long term mission, not the flash in the pan connect09 type of mission. How the mission is done will emerge by the ‘service centre’ listening, watching and learning from what the outer rings of the church say, show and do, and what the surrounding neighbourhood provides opportunities for.
4. The trouble with most strategies is chief executives who believe themselves to be strategists.
See ‘3’ above. Good strategy comes from being in close touch with customers (the church has two sets of customers: members, that is the ring that’s in touch with the neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood itself) and their needs, sensing and testing opportunities and equipping people to take the opportunities that come their way.
One of Mintzberg’s comments on the ‘grand gesture’ strategists is: “they issue glossy strategic plans that look wonderful and take their organisations nowhere with great fanfare.”
5. Decentralisation centralises, empowerment disempowers, and measurements don’t measure up.
As soon as someone in an organisation thinks they can ‘empower’ workers, or staff or members, they rip any capability away from them, including that they had in the first place; because the act of ‘empowerment’ betrays the notion that the empowerer has the power to give out to others.
Nothing in the Bible would suggest that this is so. The life of the church is organic, social, spiritual, charismatic, and above all loving: seeking the better for the other. The service centre and support systems of a church exist to help its real life work really and get on with sensing what it needs to be and do, because the people, in contact with their community and each other are the source of the life of the church and are both its ‘service delivery’ channel and its ‘market information’ source.
6. Great organisations, once created, don’t need great leaders.
“Hero worship reflects nothing more than our own inadequacies; such worship stops us from thinking for ourselves as adult human beings”.
7. Great organisations have souls; any word with de or re in front of it is likely to destroy those souls.
Replacing technique for thorough understanding is a recipe for disaster, or at least ineffectiveness. It seems that there’s an endless stream of people with church growth or church planting, or church development answers, techniques, approaches and magic potions. We hanker after these genies because we think they might give us the ‘magic’ that worked for them. But what worked for them was, in many cases, their hard work thinking out in community meeting needs and taking opportunities, stopping things that didn’t work and testing new things to find what might work in that setting, for that church, with those members. There are no genies, only people together (living and loving together, being committed to each other to the point of sacrifice, should that be called for) lead by the Spirit.
9. Organisations need continuous care, not interventionist cures.
Styles that fail: the ‘boss’ style: boss (pretends) knows and control everything, has all the ideas, is the final filter and arbiter of action, calls the shots; the ‘professional’ style: the professional has been trained, has been to Moore college and knows everything about everything that is important, including the community that a church has been in and part of for generations, this professional can waft in and ‘do the job’ that no one else had the wit to do.
Styles that work: Mintzberg discusses ‘nursing’ as a style of helping organisations perform strongly: observing, being involved, orchestrating, nurturing. Mintzberg sees this as a more typically feminine approach to action; maybe we miss out by neglecting women in the service and support centres of our churches because we’ve missed the point of church and regard churches as organisations, rather than the body living out the love of Christ.
I’ve made a diagram of church ‘organisation’ that reflects these comments, here.
Along similar lines, a quote from a recent article by Mintzberg, A Crisis of Management not Economics, in the Canadian Globe and Mail.
“In the United States [and the Christian Church, or so it seems-me] particularly, they just make such a huge fuss over leadership, it has become an absolute obsession. Everything is leadership, leadership, leadership.
It is not coincidental that the more fuss that Americans make about leadership, the worse their leadership is whether it is corporate or political or anything else. Their leadership is dreadful in recent years and with all of this fuss on leadership. Leadership is about individuality, leadership is about me. Even if leadership is designed to encourage and to bring along other people and engage other people, it is still the individual driving it. So, show me a leader and I will show you all kinds of followers and that is not the kind of organizations that we want.
That is not the way that we build things up. I think that we need to put more emphasis on what I prefer to call, there is no word for it but I use the word 'community-ship', which is the idea that corporations and other organizations, when they function well, are communities. People care for each other, they worry about each other, they work for each other and they work for the institution and they feel pride in the institution.”
Recently I read an article in Harvard Business Review by Henry Mintzberg (HBR July-August 1996:61-67 “Musings on Management”). It connects nicely with my comments on Diary of a Church Planter that mentions Mintzberg's remarks on the management failure that is implicated in the current financial melt-down (see right at the end).
I’ve attempted to adapt some of his ‘ten ideas designed to rile everyone who cares about management’ to the current near obsession with 'leadership' in some church circles (in the eighties I remember we were more concerned with 'ministry').
1. Organisations don’t have tops and bottoms.
Too much of church organisation is just that: organisation, rather than the growing of a community of faith: a body of believers mutually serving each other, and those around them.
But if you must have an organisation, then, rather than one that is diagrammed after the model of a triangle (minister, sorry, rector at top, parish council in middle, parish at bottom, etc.), model it as a set of concentric rings: service centre (parish council) in the middle, support systems (the various ministries and ministers, including paid and unpaid) in the next ring, all as individuals in the outer ring, and the surrounding ‘sea’ is the neighbourhood.
3. Lean is mean and doesn’t even improve long term profits
Getting rid of people to improve momentary profit, but hobble long term prospects is one of the dumbest moves a business can make.
For a church, though, it’s a different matter. Churches tend to multiply programs, services, ministries, activities, committees until their members topple from exhaustion. I suggest that the lean-making has to occur in getting rid of activities that take away from the mission of the church; the long term mission, not the flash in the pan connect09 type of mission. How the mission is done will emerge by the ‘service centre’ listening, watching and learning from what the outer rings of the church say, show and do, and what the surrounding neighbourhood provides opportunities for.
4. The trouble with most strategies is chief executives who believe themselves to be strategists.
See ‘3’ above. Good strategy comes from being in close touch with customers (the church has two sets of customers: members, that is the ring that’s in touch with the neighbourhood, and the neighbourhood itself) and their needs, sensing and testing opportunities and equipping people to take the opportunities that come their way.
One of Mintzberg’s comments on the ‘grand gesture’ strategists is: “they issue glossy strategic plans that look wonderful and take their organisations nowhere with great fanfare.”
5. Decentralisation centralises, empowerment disempowers, and measurements don’t measure up.
As soon as someone in an organisation thinks they can ‘empower’ workers, or staff or members, they rip any capability away from them, including that they had in the first place; because the act of ‘empowerment’ betrays the notion that the empowerer has the power to give out to others.
Nothing in the Bible would suggest that this is so. The life of the church is organic, social, spiritual, charismatic, and above all loving: seeking the better for the other. The service centre and support systems of a church exist to help its real life work really and get on with sensing what it needs to be and do, because the people, in contact with their community and each other are the source of the life of the church and are both its ‘service delivery’ channel and its ‘market information’ source.
6. Great organisations, once created, don’t need great leaders.
“Hero worship reflects nothing more than our own inadequacies; such worship stops us from thinking for ourselves as adult human beings”.
7. Great organisations have souls; any word with de or re in front of it is likely to destroy those souls.
Replacing technique for thorough understanding is a recipe for disaster, or at least ineffectiveness. It seems that there’s an endless stream of people with church growth or church planting, or church development answers, techniques, approaches and magic potions. We hanker after these genies because we think they might give us the ‘magic’ that worked for them. But what worked for them was, in many cases, their hard work thinking out in community meeting needs and taking opportunities, stopping things that didn’t work and testing new things to find what might work in that setting, for that church, with those members. There are no genies, only people together (living and loving together, being committed to each other to the point of sacrifice, should that be called for) lead by the Spirit.
9. Organisations need continuous care, not interventionist cures.
Styles that fail: the ‘boss’ style: boss (pretends) knows and control everything, has all the ideas, is the final filter and arbiter of action, calls the shots; the ‘professional’ style: the professional has been trained, has been to Moore college and knows everything about everything that is important, including the community that a church has been in and part of for generations, this professional can waft in and ‘do the job’ that no one else had the wit to do.
Styles that work: Mintzberg discusses ‘nursing’ as a style of helping organisations perform strongly: observing, being involved, orchestrating, nurturing. Mintzberg sees this as a more typically feminine approach to action; maybe we miss out by neglecting women in the service and support centres of our churches because we’ve missed the point of church and regard churches as organisations, rather than the body living out the love of Christ.
I’ve made a diagram of church ‘organisation’ that reflects these comments, here.
Along similar lines, a quote from a recent article by Mintzberg, A Crisis of Management not Economics, in the Canadian Globe and Mail.
“In the United States [and the Christian Church, or so it seems-me] particularly, they just make such a huge fuss over leadership, it has become an absolute obsession. Everything is leadership, leadership, leadership.
It is not coincidental that the more fuss that Americans make about leadership, the worse their leadership is whether it is corporate or political or anything else. Their leadership is dreadful in recent years and with all of this fuss on leadership. Leadership is about individuality, leadership is about me. Even if leadership is designed to encourage and to bring along other people and engage other people, it is still the individual driving it. So, show me a leader and I will show you all kinds of followers and that is not the kind of organizations that we want.
That is not the way that we build things up. I think that we need to put more emphasis on what I prefer to call, there is no word for it but I use the word 'community-ship', which is the idea that corporations and other organizations, when they function well, are communities. People care for each other, they worry about each other, they work for each other and they work for the institution and they feel pride in the institution.”
13 March 2009
The son returns
I was able to attend a talk on the prodigal son facilitated by Justin Moffatt, the minister at St. Phillips, York Street Sydney
He mentions the talk on his blog.
Unlike most discourses in church settings, I was very pleased that we sat around tables and were invited to contribute to the talk by asking questions or making comments. For a command and control type paid Christian, this would be avoided at all costs, but I would think that for one convinced of the Spirit's leading amongst us, there would be no other way of ministering to each other over a passage from the Bible. So, it was good to be a part of.
As we were considering the passage, it occurred to me that the journey of the prodigal son is at once the journey of Adam, and then of us all.
Firstly, the parallel between Genesis 3 and the Son’s decision to take from his father and turn from relationship with him is striking.
Then the return is paralleled in us as we repent and seek the Father by way of Christ, then enjoy the Father’s good favour to be demonstrated in the eternal life that Christ heralds in his resurrection.
I like the way the structure of the parable reaches back to the very basis for Christ’s salvation on the one hand, but also points forward to his resurrection on the other. In one brief parable a soteriological microcosm!
He mentions the talk on his blog.
Unlike most discourses in church settings, I was very pleased that we sat around tables and were invited to contribute to the talk by asking questions or making comments. For a command and control type paid Christian, this would be avoided at all costs, but I would think that for one convinced of the Spirit's leading amongst us, there would be no other way of ministering to each other over a passage from the Bible. So, it was good to be a part of.
As we were considering the passage, it occurred to me that the journey of the prodigal son is at once the journey of Adam, and then of us all.
Firstly, the parallel between Genesis 3 and the Son’s decision to take from his father and turn from relationship with him is striking.
Then the return is paralleled in us as we repent and seek the Father by way of Christ, then enjoy the Father’s good favour to be demonstrated in the eternal life that Christ heralds in his resurrection.
I like the way the structure of the parable reaches back to the very basis for Christ’s salvation on the one hand, but also points forward to his resurrection on the other. In one brief parable a soteriological microcosm!
5 March 2009
Death's line
In a recent Bible study group, we discussed Christ’s substitutionary death. Naturally, we looked at the history of substitutionary sacrifice in the Bible, including making reference to Leviticus 17:11 ('For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.').
We naturally discussed that the substitutionary sin sacrifices in the OT did the dual job of reminding people of the seriousness of sin and its consequence in death, and pointing toward God’s provision of a ‘way out’ from their sin; in the OT is was the two-fold act of animal sacrifice, and sending the scapegoat into the wilderness.
Then we linked the OT practice to the NT where the lamb becomes Christ, and a man does the work that a lamb did; more than a man, of course, it was the creator himself.
But why was death required at all? What purpose could be served by killing an animal in a rite and the death of Christ on the cross?
We are steered in our thinking about sacrifice and the cross by the legal references used throughout the Bible, which may have an analogical purpose which, not being fully sensed, causes us, I think, to fail to put sin and death into a covenantal context. I would suspect that the Bible is not explicit about this context, because it is so obvious in biblical terms. That is, the covenantal relationship between God and humanity is dominating and so disappears from discussion and then, when its domination is not expressed, disappears from our theology too.
Thus, we see death in forensic terms and the punishment it represents as purely judicial. We sometimes refer to God’s abhorrence of sin, but we rarely take this further.
The further it can be taken, in my view, is back to Genesis 3:3, where the place of death in the creation is given (but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, 'You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’)
Death does not only serve as punishment, in a quasi judicial sense, but it results from the break of covenant between God and man. Man’s turning from God is a rejection of God; not merely breaking a rule; and man takes the creation with him. God rejected is no longer God in open relationship with man, and man, and with him the creation, it being his domain, is cut off from life, which only comes from God’s sustaining word.
It’s like a car driver rejecting the offer of petrol for her car and then facing the consequences of it not running, because she distrusted the word of the attendant that she would need to visit regularly to top up her fuel tank.
The death of the sacrificial lamb then, results from the death that comes through Adam, in the garden (of course, Paul reminds us of this in 1 Corinthians 15:21), as he steps out of covenant. The death of the sacrificial lamb, resulting from the primal death that Adam brought must point back to that very origination of death. Thus it is an echo of the event of Adam’s choice and a perpetual reminder that there is a great disjunct between our relationship with God now and what it was then (pre Adam’s choice).
This suggests a couple of things to me
Firstly, Christ’s death encapsulates Adam’s death. I say this because the curse came upon Adam (and us) in a global, not immediately absolute fashion. The delay has a gracious aspect to it: that death, paradoxically, is not ‘terminal’; its full effect is deferred: and its deferral takes us straight to Christ. When it has its full effect in Christ, and that is the only instance of its full effect in this life/world: cutting off Christ, then as the sin-bearer for us, from God the Father, which itself is astonishing in every way, it is almost immediately overturned, and death is no more.
In a way, the curse of death is suspended until Christ when it is brought to full effect and then ended: God out-gracing sin with resurrection to new life.
All this stems from the introduction of death by Adam’s rejection of the covenant and therefore all points back to that moment, which must be in continuous history to be theologically contiguous and to have any connection to us; and therefore the great trajectory of salvation has to be anchored in this world at every point: Adam did real things in this world, that undid an aspect of the (real) creation (knowledge of which is only through God's word), which aspect must have obtained before the thing done-- that is, the creation’s very goodness excluded those things consequential upon sin, viz. death, in all its dimensions--for it to be repaired by intervention in the same ‘this world’ in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, with that pointing to the new creation. The setting for all this is consistently given in the Bible as This World (and the resurrection and the pointer to the new creation is also in This World, which brings a continuity between the two).
An interesting corollary of this relationship between pointing toward Christ and Christ pointing back to Adam’s bringing of death, is that with animal sacrifice participating in the chain of reflection and anticipation, it must also have been precluded from the pre-fall world. If it was not, then the sacrifice means nothing, because it would not be pointing back to Adam’s bringing death, and therefore, forwards to Christ and condemning sin by the application of the ‘penalty’, but it would just be part of the normal function of the ‘very good’; and it is clear in the Bible that the animal sacrifice, the ending of its life, is not part of the normal function, but part of the abnormality of the death to which it points, from which it stems and through which the breach of the fall is contrasted with the creation which is now broken.
The setting for this whole drama, for the eviction of the good, followed by the eviction of death, has to be the world in which sin and death plays out; because that is the only point of contact that sin has with the creation: the setting of our relationship with God (and our dis-relationship post-fall) is the concrete world, in which Christ concretely was incarnated, died and was resurrected; or salvation is discontinuous with our world we cannot be reconciled…ever.
So, in summary, Christ brings to its conclusion the curse bestowed upon Adam adn then overturns it in signal and prospect of the new creation continuing but amplifying the very good creation after the lacunae of the fall.
Adam undid life, but Christ undid death!
Christ died our death and we are restored by his life.
We naturally discussed that the substitutionary sin sacrifices in the OT did the dual job of reminding people of the seriousness of sin and its consequence in death, and pointing toward God’s provision of a ‘way out’ from their sin; in the OT is was the two-fold act of animal sacrifice, and sending the scapegoat into the wilderness.
Then we linked the OT practice to the NT where the lamb becomes Christ, and a man does the work that a lamb did; more than a man, of course, it was the creator himself.
But why was death required at all? What purpose could be served by killing an animal in a rite and the death of Christ on the cross?
We are steered in our thinking about sacrifice and the cross by the legal references used throughout the Bible, which may have an analogical purpose which, not being fully sensed, causes us, I think, to fail to put sin and death into a covenantal context. I would suspect that the Bible is not explicit about this context, because it is so obvious in biblical terms. That is, the covenantal relationship between God and humanity is dominating and so disappears from discussion and then, when its domination is not expressed, disappears from our theology too.
Thus, we see death in forensic terms and the punishment it represents as purely judicial. We sometimes refer to God’s abhorrence of sin, but we rarely take this further.
The further it can be taken, in my view, is back to Genesis 3:3, where the place of death in the creation is given (but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, 'You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’)
Death does not only serve as punishment, in a quasi judicial sense, but it results from the break of covenant between God and man. Man’s turning from God is a rejection of God; not merely breaking a rule; and man takes the creation with him. God rejected is no longer God in open relationship with man, and man, and with him the creation, it being his domain, is cut off from life, which only comes from God’s sustaining word.
It’s like a car driver rejecting the offer of petrol for her car and then facing the consequences of it not running, because she distrusted the word of the attendant that she would need to visit regularly to top up her fuel tank.
The death of the sacrificial lamb then, results from the death that comes through Adam, in the garden (of course, Paul reminds us of this in 1 Corinthians 15:21), as he steps out of covenant. The death of the sacrificial lamb, resulting from the primal death that Adam brought must point back to that very origination of death. Thus it is an echo of the event of Adam’s choice and a perpetual reminder that there is a great disjunct between our relationship with God now and what it was then (pre Adam’s choice).
This suggests a couple of things to me
Firstly, Christ’s death encapsulates Adam’s death. I say this because the curse came upon Adam (and us) in a global, not immediately absolute fashion. The delay has a gracious aspect to it: that death, paradoxically, is not ‘terminal’; its full effect is deferred: and its deferral takes us straight to Christ. When it has its full effect in Christ, and that is the only instance of its full effect in this life/world: cutting off Christ, then as the sin-bearer for us, from God the Father, which itself is astonishing in every way, it is almost immediately overturned, and death is no more.
In a way, the curse of death is suspended until Christ when it is brought to full effect and then ended: God out-gracing sin with resurrection to new life.
All this stems from the introduction of death by Adam’s rejection of the covenant and therefore all points back to that moment, which must be in continuous history to be theologically contiguous and to have any connection to us; and therefore the great trajectory of salvation has to be anchored in this world at every point: Adam did real things in this world, that undid an aspect of the (real) creation (knowledge of which is only through God's word), which aspect must have obtained before the thing done-- that is, the creation’s very goodness excluded those things consequential upon sin, viz. death, in all its dimensions--for it to be repaired by intervention in the same ‘this world’ in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, with that pointing to the new creation. The setting for all this is consistently given in the Bible as This World (and the resurrection and the pointer to the new creation is also in This World, which brings a continuity between the two).
An interesting corollary of this relationship between pointing toward Christ and Christ pointing back to Adam’s bringing of death, is that with animal sacrifice participating in the chain of reflection and anticipation, it must also have been precluded from the pre-fall world. If it was not, then the sacrifice means nothing, because it would not be pointing back to Adam’s bringing death, and therefore, forwards to Christ and condemning sin by the application of the ‘penalty’, but it would just be part of the normal function of the ‘very good’; and it is clear in the Bible that the animal sacrifice, the ending of its life, is not part of the normal function, but part of the abnormality of the death to which it points, from which it stems and through which the breach of the fall is contrasted with the creation which is now broken.
The setting for this whole drama, for the eviction of the good, followed by the eviction of death, has to be the world in which sin and death plays out; because that is the only point of contact that sin has with the creation: the setting of our relationship with God (and our dis-relationship post-fall) is the concrete world, in which Christ concretely was incarnated, died and was resurrected; or salvation is discontinuous with our world we cannot be reconciled…ever.
So, in summary, Christ brings to its conclusion the curse bestowed upon Adam adn then overturns it in signal and prospect of the new creation continuing but amplifying the very good creation after the lacunae of the fall.
Adam undid life, but Christ undid death!
Christ died our death and we are restored by his life.
25 February 2009
What about dinosaurs?
Some one asked the question of the title, above, as a comment to a past post.
This is a blog, not an answer service, so I don't answer questions, just for the record.
I will admit comments that are considered comments or reasoned discussion that has a concise and thoughtful point to make, but nothing else, I am not interested in word count contests.
All I can suggest to the dinosaur man is that he considers Genesis 1:24, 2:16 and 7:17ff and then consider if he thinks that the Bible refers to the real world, or the world of the mystic to be arbitrarily referred to this-world events at the readers' convenience.
This is a blog, not an answer service, so I don't answer questions, just for the record.
I will admit comments that are considered comments or reasoned discussion that has a concise and thoughtful point to make, but nothing else, I am not interested in word count contests.
All I can suggest to the dinosaur man is that he considers Genesis 1:24, 2:16 and 7:17ff and then consider if he thinks that the Bible refers to the real world, or the world of the mystic to be arbitrarily referred to this-world events at the readers' convenience.
11 February 2009
Genesis & date information
As an exercise I did a rough analysis of the arrangement of Genesis 1-11 in respect of the occurance of date information.
Others might like to analyse this further, to see if it leads anywhere in particular, but I found that about 19% of verses in Genesis 1 are concerned with dating the action reported, and again about 19% of verses in Genesis 1-11 have the same concern, with a couple of major groupings as though they were calibrations of the timing of action.
See the diagram I prepared.
Others might like to analyse this further, to see if it leads anywhere in particular, but I found that about 19% of verses in Genesis 1 are concerned with dating the action reported, and again about 19% of verses in Genesis 1-11 have the same concern, with a couple of major groupings as though they were calibrations of the timing of action.
See the diagram I prepared.
Things we Learn from Genesis 1...
What turns on our view of Genesis 1? That is, what if it were a direct relation of actual events that occurred in our space-time frame of reference? Or, what if it were a metaphor for a naturalistic origination of the world, but the Israelites wanted their God to have a slice of the action, so they composed a litany that reflected their belief? The world, of course would be really other than how it is presented in Genesis 1, so it would be difficult to hold that it told us any more than the belief-content of ancient Israel culture.
There are a range of positions between these two poles, with differing shades of theistic reliance and belief, with differing underlying views of the cosmos and its history; many however, even though theistic in language and ostensible reference, are in fact materialist, and presuppose, even if implicitly, the existence of the cosmos in its own terms. Frequent reference to ‘nature’ can be a dead give away to this line of thinking, as it rejects at the outset that we live in a ‘creation’ rather than a ‘nature’. Nature implies a level of independence of a creator that flies in the face of the direct intent of Genesis 1, and much else in the Bible. It buys into naturalism, then pretends to find naturalist postulates a convincing cause of a meta-analogical interpretation of Genesis 1. Some theologies are that screwed up as to what they believe and what it means that they think the obviously opposing positions of evolution and creation are able to be harmonised. Not so, of course, and the trace of the history of modern evolutionary thought is a large scale demonstration of the divide between the two.
Much of what I say will be on the surface uncontroversial, even with the less orthodox, but even if that is the case at the surface level, my contention is that if the direct meaning of Genesis 1 is rejected, then it can have no relation to events in this time-space field that are congruent with relations between processes and entities that we understand because the only things it sets out to describe are such events contingent on that very field. If it is in fact describing some other events, we would not know and could not know, so would have no reliable way of making such a second order reference.
Thing 1
God is the author of the cosmos, would be a pretty obvious thing that we learn here. Consequentially, the cosmos is not self-sufficient and thus is contingent. It also has a beginning, so history’s ground is a continuum of events and relations that require a primal event initiated from outside the cosmos and that the underpinning primal relationship for all subsequent events is with God.
Thing 2
God’s existence is presumed, but not proved. It may be that retroactively the very existence of the cosmos is such a proof (else how there could be something, moreover something contingent, rather than nothing must be otherwise proven. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a proof, incidentally, but this may be a limitation of my reading, rather then anything else). By extension, I think we can surmise that God is uncaused and therefore without beginning. A beginning requires time, and it would seem that time is a dimension of the physical creation, so the question implodes.
Thing 3
Not only is the cosmos, specifically the earth, itself contingent, but within it are systems of interdependency that indicate a cascade of dependency of parts (beings and non-beings) with each other. The sequence of creative acts on the days in the light of what we can see as to the operation of the world in sustaining life seems to indicate this (starting with space and energy, ending with mankind, via earth, plants, animals which Adam is called to name as a first act of a) knowing himself and his need for companionship, and b) knowing the world he is to superintend with that companion). This cascade of reliance on other factors, processes or beings for the sustenance of the life of any particular being would seem to provide clues to Adam and Eve and their progeny in their work of superintending the creation. They are the first scientific information about the creation. Domains and relationships are clearly set out in Genesis 1 and the nature of procreation is also set out (after their kind, a broad category of a creature’s type, not to be confused with our modern construct of ‘species).
Thing 4
The real is not finally or ultimately material, but as it has its source in an act of will, by one who is love (1 John 4:7). Two considerations come from this. Firstly, material is not a prime constituent of the cosmos; it is not fundamentally real or holder of its existence in itself (follows from Thing 1). Secondly, and as the corollary, the real is finally and fundamentally personal. Love therefore is not whim, or of no final or basic significance, but is part of the basic property of relations within the cosmos. Paul tells us that all that will survive is love (1 Cor 13:13 and prec.). Nevertheless, the material is real, substantial and in itself good: Adam was created out of clay, and the domain of the material is the one in which we are called to covenant in terms that make sense only in that domain.
Thing 5
The effect of God’s word is immediately effective in creating and ordering material. This supposes, of course, that the text means what its direct grammatical sense indicates, and that natural providence is not operating during the 6 days.
Thing 6
The connection between God’s word and its creative effect is unmediated (except by Christ, of course: John 1:1-3)
Thing 7
Extending from Thing 3, all creation has both a logical and personal dependence on God. From this flows the strength of God’s chief claim in relation to us that he is our creator.
Thing 8
God created us for action in his cosmos on our own account, but in relation with him, both filial and dependent, but not, I suggest deterministically. God had set us as vicegerents over creation with, it would appear delegated ‘authority’, exemplified in Adam’s naming of the animals. This had a couple of purposes: developing the grounds for Eve’s creation, and introducing Adam to his relationship with the creation: to analyse, understand a creation that is comprehensible and subject to examination and enquiry.
Thing 9
The creation is the setting of God’s relationship (covenants) with we, his creation. This underpins all aspects of our relationship with God, gives the significance of the fall, and provides the pivot on which turns God’s action to overcome the fall and restore relationship…in a recreation of the world, not in some ethereal non-physical setting. The fact that the creation provides the setting for covenant brings the point of the creation: it is the field of action between God and man, intended for action denominated in love and harmony, but broken so that the action is denominated in strive and trouble.
Thing 10
The last major thing that I see (at the moment) is the most potentially confounding for systems that have their thought forms moulded by the western tradition: or any paganistic tradition, for that matter: we cannot get behind particulars to abstract universals, in the platonic sense: the particular is germane to consideration of it in its relationships. It is the system of relationships that provide the grounding for our thinking about life, and it is only realist approaches that meet both the demands of love (I think of Paul Johnson's book "Intellectuals" that shows what wickedness follows when ideas, ideals and theories are put before the welfare and benefits of one's fellows) and reflect the characteristics of this world as indicated in the Bible in its continuous realist implicit reference to the world created as reported in Genesis 1, as being the very world, from the word of God which is suitable for the formation of, for the grounding and circumscribing his covenant to lead to to final joy in his presence.
Notably the terms that delimit the covenant, its grounding (ultimately in Christ, of course), and its structure are those that are coterminous with our everyday life experience, where we action is bounded in every way by space and time.
There are a range of positions between these two poles, with differing shades of theistic reliance and belief, with differing underlying views of the cosmos and its history; many however, even though theistic in language and ostensible reference, are in fact materialist, and presuppose, even if implicitly, the existence of the cosmos in its own terms. Frequent reference to ‘nature’ can be a dead give away to this line of thinking, as it rejects at the outset that we live in a ‘creation’ rather than a ‘nature’. Nature implies a level of independence of a creator that flies in the face of the direct intent of Genesis 1, and much else in the Bible. It buys into naturalism, then pretends to find naturalist postulates a convincing cause of a meta-analogical interpretation of Genesis 1. Some theologies are that screwed up as to what they believe and what it means that they think the obviously opposing positions of evolution and creation are able to be harmonised. Not so, of course, and the trace of the history of modern evolutionary thought is a large scale demonstration of the divide between the two.
Much of what I say will be on the surface uncontroversial, even with the less orthodox, but even if that is the case at the surface level, my contention is that if the direct meaning of Genesis 1 is rejected, then it can have no relation to events in this time-space field that are congruent with relations between processes and entities that we understand because the only things it sets out to describe are such events contingent on that very field. If it is in fact describing some other events, we would not know and could not know, so would have no reliable way of making such a second order reference.
Thing 1
God is the author of the cosmos, would be a pretty obvious thing that we learn here. Consequentially, the cosmos is not self-sufficient and thus is contingent. It also has a beginning, so history’s ground is a continuum of events and relations that require a primal event initiated from outside the cosmos and that the underpinning primal relationship for all subsequent events is with God.
Thing 2
God’s existence is presumed, but not proved. It may be that retroactively the very existence of the cosmos is such a proof (else how there could be something, moreover something contingent, rather than nothing must be otherwise proven. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a proof, incidentally, but this may be a limitation of my reading, rather then anything else). By extension, I think we can surmise that God is uncaused and therefore without beginning. A beginning requires time, and it would seem that time is a dimension of the physical creation, so the question implodes.
Thing 3
Not only is the cosmos, specifically the earth, itself contingent, but within it are systems of interdependency that indicate a cascade of dependency of parts (beings and non-beings) with each other. The sequence of creative acts on the days in the light of what we can see as to the operation of the world in sustaining life seems to indicate this (starting with space and energy, ending with mankind, via earth, plants, animals which Adam is called to name as a first act of a) knowing himself and his need for companionship, and b) knowing the world he is to superintend with that companion). This cascade of reliance on other factors, processes or beings for the sustenance of the life of any particular being would seem to provide clues to Adam and Eve and their progeny in their work of superintending the creation. They are the first scientific information about the creation. Domains and relationships are clearly set out in Genesis 1 and the nature of procreation is also set out (after their kind, a broad category of a creature’s type, not to be confused with our modern construct of ‘species).
Thing 4
The real is not finally or ultimately material, but as it has its source in an act of will, by one who is love (1 John 4:7). Two considerations come from this. Firstly, material is not a prime constituent of the cosmos; it is not fundamentally real or holder of its existence in itself (follows from Thing 1). Secondly, and as the corollary, the real is finally and fundamentally personal. Love therefore is not whim, or of no final or basic significance, but is part of the basic property of relations within the cosmos. Paul tells us that all that will survive is love (1 Cor 13:13 and prec.). Nevertheless, the material is real, substantial and in itself good: Adam was created out of clay, and the domain of the material is the one in which we are called to covenant in terms that make sense only in that domain.
Thing 5
The effect of God’s word is immediately effective in creating and ordering material. This supposes, of course, that the text means what its direct grammatical sense indicates, and that natural providence is not operating during the 6 days.
Thing 6
The connection between God’s word and its creative effect is unmediated (except by Christ, of course: John 1:1-3)
Thing 7
Extending from Thing 3, all creation has both a logical and personal dependence on God. From this flows the strength of God’s chief claim in relation to us that he is our creator.
Thing 8
God created us for action in his cosmos on our own account, but in relation with him, both filial and dependent, but not, I suggest deterministically. God had set us as vicegerents over creation with, it would appear delegated ‘authority’, exemplified in Adam’s naming of the animals. This had a couple of purposes: developing the grounds for Eve’s creation, and introducing Adam to his relationship with the creation: to analyse, understand a creation that is comprehensible and subject to examination and enquiry.
Thing 9
The creation is the setting of God’s relationship (covenants) with we, his creation. This underpins all aspects of our relationship with God, gives the significance of the fall, and provides the pivot on which turns God’s action to overcome the fall and restore relationship…in a recreation of the world, not in some ethereal non-physical setting. The fact that the creation provides the setting for covenant brings the point of the creation: it is the field of action between God and man, intended for action denominated in love and harmony, but broken so that the action is denominated in strive and trouble.
Thing 10
The last major thing that I see (at the moment) is the most potentially confounding for systems that have their thought forms moulded by the western tradition: or any paganistic tradition, for that matter: we cannot get behind particulars to abstract universals, in the platonic sense: the particular is germane to consideration of it in its relationships. It is the system of relationships that provide the grounding for our thinking about life, and it is only realist approaches that meet both the demands of love (I think of Paul Johnson's book "Intellectuals" that shows what wickedness follows when ideas, ideals and theories are put before the welfare and benefits of one's fellows) and reflect the characteristics of this world as indicated in the Bible in its continuous realist implicit reference to the world created as reported in Genesis 1, as being the very world, from the word of God which is suitable for the formation of, for the grounding and circumscribing his covenant to lead to to final joy in his presence.
Notably the terms that delimit the covenant, its grounding (ultimately in Christ, of course), and its structure are those that are coterminous with our everyday life experience, where we action is bounded in every way by space and time.
15 December 2008
How to read the Bible
1. Introduction
For the person who wants to get to grips with a large and ancient book that has been read by millions of people over thousands of years, there must be a better way than just starting at the beginning and reading to the end. A better way, that is, of getting the main message, before you read it right through.
The Bible is not just a ‘book’. It is a collection of 66 separate documents. Some we’d call books today. Others are collections of songs, there are letters, some to groups of people, others to friends, and some unusual forms of literature that are most like ‘calls to action’ that sometimes might be made today in speeches or pamphlets.
Some of the more book-like ‘books’ in the Bible are historical accounts, or compilations. These are not like our modern history books, where an author looks back to the past and composes his work, but they are more usually reports prepared at or near the time of the events of interest and brought together into the form in which we now have them.
With a conventional book, one tends to read from start to finish, because this is how the author would expect it to be read. As the Bible was not written by one author at one time (it has dozens of authors who wrote over a period of more than a thousand year), it was arranged according to a general historical logic: the first few books are in rough historical order of their subject, but then there are other books that don’t fit this: Psalms, Proverbs, the prophets, for example. In some cases the books are simply arranged in order of size, with the larger first. The letters of Paul in the New Testament are the best example.
There are two major divisions in the Bible: the Old Testament, with 39 works written BC, or before the birth of Christ (BCE, or ‘before common era’ as some people say), and the New Testament, which is 27 works written AD, or after the birth of Christ, in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar was the Roman emperor just before this period, with these documents written during the first decades of the era (CE, or ‘common era’).
The whole set of books in the Bible is listed and described here. [link]
2. Reading in 5 Easy Steps
It first occurred to me that a ‘method’ of reading the Bible for a new reader could be helpful when I had read a guide by Thomas Merton to reading Augustine’s “The City of God”. Not that I used the guide, I’m a ‘start to finish’ reader myself. But I liked Merton’s idea.
So, here’s how I’d suggest a newcomer read the Bible, so as to get the overall feel.
Before you start, there’s one more thing to know about the Bible’s organisation. Each book is broken into chapters, which are not always logical divisions, and each chapter is divided into verses, again, not always logically. The verses roughly equate to short paragraphs. These divisions were assigned in the Middle Ages as a means of easily referencing specific passages, and are still used for that today. However, when they were written, the books of the Bible were written as continuous prose (or songs) to be read as such. For instance, no one writes a letter and expects people to read a couple of sentences each day. No, the normal thing is to read right through the letter, usually in one sitting.
I’ve set out three alternative reading plans for people with (a) little, (b) some, and (c) more time that they can devote to reading.
1. The Beginning
The reader’s normal instinct, to start at the beginning, is sound here, as it mostly is. The opening of the Bible sets the scene for all that unfolds, showing us the ‘realness’ of the created universe, which is the setting of God’s relationship with us, both as creature, and as friend (the friendship was rapidly betrayed by humanity; the rest of the Bible tells of God restoring the friendship).
(a) Genesis chapters 1-11
The first eleven chapters provide the foundation for the Bible’s entire history, taking us up to the formation of the people of Israel, with Abram’s ‘call’. They also provide the foundation for our universal history and relate the events that underpin all human culture and its physical setting.
(b) Genesis complete
Genesis is the ‘book of beginnings’ and thus the book of orientation: it orients us to our world and relationships with each other and God. It also orients us to the commencement of God’s saving us from alienation from himself. On the historical level, it reads as a great saga (not undercutting its historicity) with a magnificent narrative sweep of huge scope: from the creation of all that is, to the formation of the people through whom God will bring re-creation and restoration of harmony between us and him.
(c) Genesis-Deuteronomy (the entire Pentateuch, or Torah, being the first five books.)
These books include long lists (Numbers) and law codes (Leviticus) which can get dull for a modern reader, but the information is important to allow you to understand the structure of Israel’s society and politico-religious system.
2. Troubles
After its great start, Israel, like most other human groups, had a tendency to run off the rails. People came along speaking for God. They were called prophets, and their job was to warn Israel of the danger and difficulty they were courting, urging them to turn from that path to one that would return them to companionship with God.
(a) Hosea and Joel
As a pair these books show God’s efforts to lead his people back to relationship with him, and the ultimate result of restoration, in Joel.
(b) Isaiah
Isaiah is a great prophesy that points to the messiah, the rescuer appointed by God to retrieve his people, and open the way to the new creation.
(c) Isaiah and Joel.
3. Israel’s contemplative life
The ‘devotional’ works form a set of books that consists of ‘wisdom’ literature, songs (referred to as ‘poetry’ today) and related works. It provides an insight into the devotional life of Israel, and the frankness with which God is approached.
(a) A selection from the ‘messianic’ Psalms: 2, 8, 16, 22, 45, 72, 89, 110, 118, 132 and 23.
(b) Add to (a) Psalms 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14; add 119, to go a little further.
(c) Add the Song of Solomon and Proverbs chapters 2-6; to go further add the book of Job.
4. The Beginning of the New
The Old Testament shows us the long path from the Fall, where God’s creatures rejected his friendship, to God’s restoration of that relationship through his entering our world in Jesus of Nazareth (it is important to note, for Old Testament symbolism, that ‘Jesus’ is the Greek version of the Hebrew name we usually translate as ‘Joshua’). Jesus heralds the new relationship between God and man, and its culmination in the “new creation” which is introduced through the New Testament and given final unveiling in the book of Revelation.
(a) Mark’s account of Jesus’ work.
Mark gives the shortest and most directly written account of Jesus work. Not a biography in our sense, as it is less about the person, and concentrates on his mission.
(b) Luke’s account of Jesus’ work.
Luke’s is probably the most historically rigorous of the four gospels, written to a gentile, and so probably more in tune with our Western mind set than the others.
(c) Luke’s and John’s accounts of Jesus’ work.
Together these two accounts give both historical and spiritual perspectives to the work of Jesus. John’s account is regarded as more the philosophical, or spiritual of the gospels.
5. Into the New
The next readings cover the history of the foundation of the Christian community from the end of Jesus’ mission with his ascension to heaven to the conclusion of the great missionary efforts of Paul the apostle (which means ‘messenger’). They show the significance for us of Jesus’ work in that we now can approach God, because God has ‘stooped’ down to us to re-found the relationships between him and us.
(a) Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letter to the Galatians
Acts is an historical sketch of the foundation of the Christian community, and Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians is a summary of the profoundly radical Christian theology that Paul brought to the ancient world.
(b) Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Ephesians
Adding Ephesians to the selection at 5(a) provides additional spiritual material with its practical outworking in our everyday lives
(c) Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letter to the Romans
Romans, as it is usually called, is Paul’s ‘tour de force’ and sets out his theology in its full force and its grand cosmic and eternal scope, running from the brokenness of this world, the source of that brokenness, and its being made good in the world to come. It is unparalleled.
Conclusion
The final book, Revelation, shows us, in sometimes extravagant picture language for us moderns, the culmination of God’s restoration in the ‘new creation’ despite all the adversity that can be thrown at his plan.
(a) Revelation 19-22
The end of it all is not the end, but the new beginning; the new creation where there is renewed relationship with God, the creator.
(b) Revelation 5 and 6, then 19-22.
(c) Revelation complete.
Summary Table of the three reading plans
For the person who wants to get to grips with a large and ancient book that has been read by millions of people over thousands of years, there must be a better way than just starting at the beginning and reading to the end. A better way, that is, of getting the main message, before you read it right through.
The Bible is not just a ‘book’. It is a collection of 66 separate documents. Some we’d call books today. Others are collections of songs, there are letters, some to groups of people, others to friends, and some unusual forms of literature that are most like ‘calls to action’ that sometimes might be made today in speeches or pamphlets.
Some of the more book-like ‘books’ in the Bible are historical accounts, or compilations. These are not like our modern history books, where an author looks back to the past and composes his work, but they are more usually reports prepared at or near the time of the events of interest and brought together into the form in which we now have them.
With a conventional book, one tends to read from start to finish, because this is how the author would expect it to be read. As the Bible was not written by one author at one time (it has dozens of authors who wrote over a period of more than a thousand year), it was arranged according to a general historical logic: the first few books are in rough historical order of their subject, but then there are other books that don’t fit this: Psalms, Proverbs, the prophets, for example. In some cases the books are simply arranged in order of size, with the larger first. The letters of Paul in the New Testament are the best example.
There are two major divisions in the Bible: the Old Testament, with 39 works written BC, or before the birth of Christ (BCE, or ‘before common era’ as some people say), and the New Testament, which is 27 works written AD, or after the birth of Christ, in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar was the Roman emperor just before this period, with these documents written during the first decades of the era (CE, or ‘common era’).
The whole set of books in the Bible is listed and described here. [link]
2. Reading in 5 Easy Steps
It first occurred to me that a ‘method’ of reading the Bible for a new reader could be helpful when I had read a guide by Thomas Merton to reading Augustine’s “The City of God”. Not that I used the guide, I’m a ‘start to finish’ reader myself. But I liked Merton’s idea.
So, here’s how I’d suggest a newcomer read the Bible, so as to get the overall feel.
Before you start, there’s one more thing to know about the Bible’s organisation. Each book is broken into chapters, which are not always logical divisions, and each chapter is divided into verses, again, not always logically. The verses roughly equate to short paragraphs. These divisions were assigned in the Middle Ages as a means of easily referencing specific passages, and are still used for that today. However, when they were written, the books of the Bible were written as continuous prose (or songs) to be read as such. For instance, no one writes a letter and expects people to read a couple of sentences each day. No, the normal thing is to read right through the letter, usually in one sitting.
I’ve set out three alternative reading plans for people with (a) little, (b) some, and (c) more time that they can devote to reading.
1. The Beginning
The reader’s normal instinct, to start at the beginning, is sound here, as it mostly is. The opening of the Bible sets the scene for all that unfolds, showing us the ‘realness’ of the created universe, which is the setting of God’s relationship with us, both as creature, and as friend (the friendship was rapidly betrayed by humanity; the rest of the Bible tells of God restoring the friendship).
(a) Genesis chapters 1-11
The first eleven chapters provide the foundation for the Bible’s entire history, taking us up to the formation of the people of Israel, with Abram’s ‘call’. They also provide the foundation for our universal history and relate the events that underpin all human culture and its physical setting.
(b) Genesis complete
Genesis is the ‘book of beginnings’ and thus the book of orientation: it orients us to our world and relationships with each other and God. It also orients us to the commencement of God’s saving us from alienation from himself. On the historical level, it reads as a great saga (not undercutting its historicity) with a magnificent narrative sweep of huge scope: from the creation of all that is, to the formation of the people through whom God will bring re-creation and restoration of harmony between us and him.
(c) Genesis-Deuteronomy (the entire Pentateuch, or Torah, being the first five books.)
These books include long lists (Numbers) and law codes (Leviticus) which can get dull for a modern reader, but the information is important to allow you to understand the structure of Israel’s society and politico-religious system.
2. Troubles
After its great start, Israel, like most other human groups, had a tendency to run off the rails. People came along speaking for God. They were called prophets, and their job was to warn Israel of the danger and difficulty they were courting, urging them to turn from that path to one that would return them to companionship with God.
(a) Hosea and Joel
As a pair these books show God’s efforts to lead his people back to relationship with him, and the ultimate result of restoration, in Joel.
(b) Isaiah
Isaiah is a great prophesy that points to the messiah, the rescuer appointed by God to retrieve his people, and open the way to the new creation.
(c) Isaiah and Joel.
3. Israel’s contemplative life
The ‘devotional’ works form a set of books that consists of ‘wisdom’ literature, songs (referred to as ‘poetry’ today) and related works. It provides an insight into the devotional life of Israel, and the frankness with which God is approached.
(a) A selection from the ‘messianic’ Psalms: 2, 8, 16, 22, 45, 72, 89, 110, 118, 132 and 23.
(b) Add to (a) Psalms 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14; add 119, to go a little further.
(c) Add the Song of Solomon and Proverbs chapters 2-6; to go further add the book of Job.
4. The Beginning of the New
The Old Testament shows us the long path from the Fall, where God’s creatures rejected his friendship, to God’s restoration of that relationship through his entering our world in Jesus of Nazareth (it is important to note, for Old Testament symbolism, that ‘Jesus’ is the Greek version of the Hebrew name we usually translate as ‘Joshua’). Jesus heralds the new relationship between God and man, and its culmination in the “new creation” which is introduced through the New Testament and given final unveiling in the book of Revelation.
(a) Mark’s account of Jesus’ work.
Mark gives the shortest and most directly written account of Jesus work. Not a biography in our sense, as it is less about the person, and concentrates on his mission.
(b) Luke’s account of Jesus’ work.
Luke’s is probably the most historically rigorous of the four gospels, written to a gentile, and so probably more in tune with our Western mind set than the others.
(c) Luke’s and John’s accounts of Jesus’ work.
Together these two accounts give both historical and spiritual perspectives to the work of Jesus. John’s account is regarded as more the philosophical, or spiritual of the gospels.
5. Into the New
The next readings cover the history of the foundation of the Christian community from the end of Jesus’ mission with his ascension to heaven to the conclusion of the great missionary efforts of Paul the apostle (which means ‘messenger’). They show the significance for us of Jesus’ work in that we now can approach God, because God has ‘stooped’ down to us to re-found the relationships between him and us.
(a) Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letter to the Galatians
Acts is an historical sketch of the foundation of the Christian community, and Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians is a summary of the profoundly radical Christian theology that Paul brought to the ancient world.
(b) Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Ephesians
Adding Ephesians to the selection at 5(a) provides additional spiritual material with its practical outworking in our everyday lives
(c) Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letter to the Romans
Romans, as it is usually called, is Paul’s ‘tour de force’ and sets out his theology in its full force and its grand cosmic and eternal scope, running from the brokenness of this world, the source of that brokenness, and its being made good in the world to come. It is unparalleled.
Conclusion
The final book, Revelation, shows us, in sometimes extravagant picture language for us moderns, the culmination of God’s restoration in the ‘new creation’ despite all the adversity that can be thrown at his plan.
(a) Revelation 19-22
The end of it all is not the end, but the new beginning; the new creation where there is renewed relationship with God, the creator.
(b) Revelation 5 and 6, then 19-22.
(c) Revelation complete.
Summary Table of the three reading plans
6 December 2008
Evolution and Gravity
Amusing blog by Seth that uses gravity and evolution to talk about marketing. Some nice side lights on both.
5 December 2008
Study 4: Truly Human (Gen 2:4-25)
First, the passage:
We start the study with a ‘dorothy dixer’: “Is work part of God’s good intention for us?”
Mr Adam, the member for Eden “Mr speaker, I’m glad my honourable colleague asked that question…” and so on.
Q: What are we to make of this ‘new’ account of creation? How does it follow from Genesis 1.
A: It is a mistake of enduring popularity that there are two creation accounts in the Bible, that the silly redactor just lumped together, not noticing what he’d done! Sometimes I wonder about the thinking that Wellhausen brought to his hypothesis…well, all the time, actually!
It’s clear to me that Gen 1 tells us about the grand setting of creation, placing earth and its denizens in their place, both genetically and astro-spatially and the making of earth to be a place of habitation. Then Gen 2 takes us into day six to instruct us in the detail of the system of dependent relationships that are formed for our sustenance and delight on that day.
Consider Gen 1:1 and Gen 2:4
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...."
and
"These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created."
The former heads the grand setting of creation, the latter talks about the people as individuals.
The point has also been made that providing two ‘forks’ to an account is not an uncommon literary approach in ANE literature. I refer to two interesting articles on this by Shea: The Unity of the Creation Account and Literary Structural Parallels Between Genesis 1 and 2.
And there are ‘secular’ examples of this, for instance, in the beginning of the Gebel Barkla Stela, there are general terms describing royal supremacy, and immediately following is a restatement that specifically elaborates on the triumphs in Syria-Palestine. In another example, the royal inscriptions from Urartu have the initial paragraph attributing the defeat of certain lands to the god Haldi and then the same victories are repeated in detail as achieved by the king.
Q: Why were there no shrubs or plants originally? How did God fix this?
A: I immediately think of Kline’s article ‘Because it had not rained’ and Futato’s similar work and smell a literary hermeneutic rat. So let’s scotch that straight away.
Grudem does a good job of it:
The other considerations that I’d bring are that Ge. 2 is about man in his sphere: the plants mentioned are some of the plants, the animals mentioned are some of the animals; in both cases they are the plants and animals that man lives most closely with; particularly for food (I’m thinking milk and eggs here, not steak and chicken legs); if there is a discussion about the operation of normal providence or not, it must be had against the background of the special events of creation, and the orderly building of the successive relational dependencies that characterises the creative sequence. Kline wants to say that normal providence is operating (throughout all creation, mind you, which is simply crazy on textual as well as logical grounds); but to maintain this he has to disregard the connection of chapter 2 with chapter 1 and deny that chapter two is taking us into day 6 in detail. Thanks Meredith, but no thanks!
Finally, I quote Noel Weeks:
I like Noel’s insights because, unusual amongst theologians, he has a degree in biology. Also I enjoyed his talks at a house party about 25 years ago (my, aren’t we all growing old).
Q: In what ways is the creation of man unique? How does this add to the account of Genesis 1?
A: One of the stark differences between Judeo-Christian tradition and others is the very earthiness, the physicality of creation being brought into ‘religious’ focus. Man-made religions have a tendency to deny the material world as somehow not worthy of our elevated spiritual capacities. Bollocks to that! We’re made of dust, and it’s very good. But we are also blessed with God-breathed life: our life is of a different order to mere dust arrangements; even the animals bear a difference and are ‘living’. The life we are given however renders us in Gods image; I don’t think any man-made religion has anything like this in combination with the sheer dusty-groundedness that we have in the Bible!
The whole passage is an amplification of the events of day 6, and expands upon the summary of man’s creation and activity given in Gen 1: 26f.
Q: What does v.9a tell us about God’s design for creation and perhaps his very character?
A: A little acknowledged fact of God’s work is that it does good: it is for Stoics and other types of pagan that pleasure ranks low. For Christians (Jews too) pleasure is a major good and enjoying the creation is part of that. I look around me in the wilds, or I consider the sheer deliciousness of a nashi or blood orange: how wonderfully excessively sumptuous they are: they don’t need to be *that* good; half as good would do the trick, but no, God has made them, even though fallen, to be stunningly good. I could go on about other aspects of our life in the same vein but I won’t: how come it’s *so* very good? Well, God’s like that: he overflows with delights for his creatures.
Q: Vs 10-14 almost form an interruption in the text (it would read fine if they were removed). Why are they here? What is the significance of the rivers?
A: Detail goes to verisimilitude. And so it is here. These rivers no longer exist (the flood fixed that) but that they are recorded makes the creation to have been something that has the earth as its setting. The rivers and the other facts of this passage speak of real place and objects. They have no other function, as far as I can see.
Further, one of the characteristics of mythic or legendary language is the lack of specificity as to verifiable details: whether regarding time (date) or place. This detail may therefore be a pre-emptive counter-mythic move by the author, or simply a natural relation of detail that inter alia goes to the historicity of the account.
Q: Would you say the theme in vs. 4-17 is one of provision or prohibition [leading question counsel]?
A: I guess they want a discussion, not the choice of one of the words, but the word I choose is ‘provision’.
Q: What is the tree of knowledge of good and evil? What does it ‘give’ humans if they eat of it?
A: At first blush it seems a surprising, if not almost cynical move on God’s part to sow the seeds of destruction in his very good creation…just when it was all getting along so well, to, and all to do with a tree.
So, on the assumption that neither the author nor God is an idiot, let’s consider the text.
Taking that it was an actual tree with a time and space location (I think it was a durian, not an apple; eat a durian, and you really do get to know of evil…its smell, anyway) how would eating fruit consign creation to the road to perdition?
I don’t think the problem was the fruit itself, unless it was a durian, of course, but the act that was in question.
The point of man being in God’s image is that his moral judgements have actual significance and real outcomes will flow from them; thus he is fully capable in his relationships: capable that is to undo, which means that his doing truly ‘does’: that relationships can be undone means that good relationships have true value and are not mere hollow images of relationships.
The tree is God’s great risk. He shows to man that man has moral capability and really is ‘ruler’ of this creation; it is not just a game but a great ‘honouring’ of man. The risk is obvious; man might choose to ‘know’ evil. Eating the tree doesn’t just impart a theoretical knowledge, but the act gives the experience of turning from God. Turning from God gives directly the experience of rejection of God, because awayness from God is towardness to ‘not-God’ or the denial of God, which can only be evil: the negation of life and love.
Did God know what man would do? I’ll leave the question hanging, but suffice to say, that man’s choice was man’s responsibility; that was why creation was as it was, with man being in God’s image to make decisions with a real effect.
Q: Gen 2: 18-25. What does this passage tell us about the importance of human community?
A: Alone=bad; companionship=good. And that about sums it up.
Q: What is the significance of the active role that man takes here?
A: Adam does a couple of things in naming the animals: the difference between the ruled creation and his requirement for companion are clearly made; companionship does not involve ruling, but brings a ‘joint-ruler’ by implication. It shows that his aloneness is for one of his own kind, not other kinds. It shows that he cannot by himself meet his need for aloneness: we are creatures that need companionship above all else, and no amount of cattle will substitute. Just ask the Masai.
Q: How does this passage help us [to] understand how we were created to be in relation to God, nature and other people?
A: It shows us the system of relationships: we stand on one part of the creation (the earth) we study and husband another part (beasts and birds) and we are in companionship with each other as the ‘steward’ part. Each part is separated from each other part in ontological ordering and our movement to each is different: we will not treat our companion like we would treat our cattle or our land, as Adam’s hymn (Gen 2:23) makes clear.
4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven..
5 Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.
6 But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.
7 Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
8 The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.
9 Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers.
11 The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
12 The gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there.
13 The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush.
14 The name of the third river is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria and the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.
16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."
18 Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him."
19 Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
20The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper corresponding to him.
21So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
22The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
23The man said,
This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man."
24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed
We start the study with a ‘dorothy dixer’: “Is work part of God’s good intention for us?”
Mr Adam, the member for Eden “Mr speaker, I’m glad my honourable colleague asked that question…” and so on.
Q: What are we to make of this ‘new’ account of creation? How does it follow from Genesis 1.
A: It is a mistake of enduring popularity that there are two creation accounts in the Bible, that the silly redactor just lumped together, not noticing what he’d done! Sometimes I wonder about the thinking that Wellhausen brought to his hypothesis…well, all the time, actually!
It’s clear to me that Gen 1 tells us about the grand setting of creation, placing earth and its denizens in their place, both genetically and astro-spatially and the making of earth to be a place of habitation. Then Gen 2 takes us into day six to instruct us in the detail of the system of dependent relationships that are formed for our sustenance and delight on that day.
Consider Gen 1:1 and Gen 2:4
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...."
and
"These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created."
The former heads the grand setting of creation, the latter talks about the people as individuals.
The point has also been made that providing two ‘forks’ to an account is not an uncommon literary approach in ANE literature. I refer to two interesting articles on this by Shea: The Unity of the Creation Account and Literary Structural Parallels Between Genesis 1 and 2.
And there are ‘secular’ examples of this, for instance, in the beginning of the Gebel Barkla Stela, there are general terms describing royal supremacy, and immediately following is a restatement that specifically elaborates on the triumphs in Syria-Palestine. In another example, the royal inscriptions from Urartu have the initial paragraph attributing the defeat of certain lands to the god Haldi and then the same victories are repeated in detail as achieved by the king.
Q: Why were there no shrubs or plants originally? How did God fix this?
A: I immediately think of Kline’s article ‘Because it had not rained’ and Futato’s similar work and smell a literary hermeneutic rat. So let’s scotch that straight away.
Grudem does a good job of it:
Genesis 2:5 does not really say that plants were not on the earth because the earth was too dry to support them... If we adopt that reasoning we would also have to say there were no plants because 'there was no man to till the ground' (Gen.2:5), for that is the second half of the comment about no rain coming on the earth. Moreover, the remainder of the sentence says that the earth was the opposite of being too dry to support plants: 'streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground' (Gen.2:6 NIV). The statement in Genesis 2:5 is simply to be understood as an explanation of the general time frame in which God created man. Genesis 2:4-6 sets the stage,... The statements about lack of rain and no man to till the ground do not give the physical reason why there were no plants, but only explain that God's work of creation was not complete. This introduction puts us back into the first six days of creation as a general setting -- into 'the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens' (Gen.2:4). Then in that setting it abruptly introduces the main point of chapter 2 -- the creation of man.
The other considerations that I’d bring are that Ge. 2 is about man in his sphere: the plants mentioned are some of the plants, the animals mentioned are some of the animals; in both cases they are the plants and animals that man lives most closely with; particularly for food (I’m thinking milk and eggs here, not steak and chicken legs); if there is a discussion about the operation of normal providence or not, it must be had against the background of the special events of creation, and the orderly building of the successive relational dependencies that characterises the creative sequence. Kline wants to say that normal providence is operating (throughout all creation, mind you, which is simply crazy on textual as well as logical grounds); but to maintain this he has to disregard the connection of chapter 2 with chapter 1 and deny that chapter two is taking us into day 6 in detail. Thanks Meredith, but no thanks!
Finally, I quote Noel Weeks:
There is nothing which clearly indicates that normal providence was functioning during the creation period. Whereas rain is mentioned as the normal way in which vegetation is watered, in 2:6 the earth is watered by the going up of a mist. We cannot infer from 2:5 that there had been a long period prior to the situation reported in that verse during which the earth had become dry. Rather it fits into the framework of God first providing the environmental necessity (water) and then making the plants. Certainly springs do continue as one of the ways in which the earth has been watered since creation but the concern of the verse is the way it first began. The actual beginning does not assume the operation of normal providence.
I like Noel’s insights because, unusual amongst theologians, he has a degree in biology. Also I enjoyed his talks at a house party about 25 years ago (my, aren’t we all growing old).
Q: In what ways is the creation of man unique? How does this add to the account of Genesis 1?
A: One of the stark differences between Judeo-Christian tradition and others is the very earthiness, the physicality of creation being brought into ‘religious’ focus. Man-made religions have a tendency to deny the material world as somehow not worthy of our elevated spiritual capacities. Bollocks to that! We’re made of dust, and it’s very good. But we are also blessed with God-breathed life: our life is of a different order to mere dust arrangements; even the animals bear a difference and are ‘living’. The life we are given however renders us in Gods image; I don’t think any man-made religion has anything like this in combination with the sheer dusty-groundedness that we have in the Bible!
The whole passage is an amplification of the events of day 6, and expands upon the summary of man’s creation and activity given in Gen 1: 26f.
Q: What does v.9a tell us about God’s design for creation and perhaps his very character?
A: A little acknowledged fact of God’s work is that it does good: it is for Stoics and other types of pagan that pleasure ranks low. For Christians (Jews too) pleasure is a major good and enjoying the creation is part of that. I look around me in the wilds, or I consider the sheer deliciousness of a nashi or blood orange: how wonderfully excessively sumptuous they are: they don’t need to be *that* good; half as good would do the trick, but no, God has made them, even though fallen, to be stunningly good. I could go on about other aspects of our life in the same vein but I won’t: how come it’s *so* very good? Well, God’s like that: he overflows with delights for his creatures.
Q: Vs 10-14 almost form an interruption in the text (it would read fine if they were removed). Why are they here? What is the significance of the rivers?
A: Detail goes to verisimilitude. And so it is here. These rivers no longer exist (the flood fixed that) but that they are recorded makes the creation to have been something that has the earth as its setting. The rivers and the other facts of this passage speak of real place and objects. They have no other function, as far as I can see.
Further, one of the characteristics of mythic or legendary language is the lack of specificity as to verifiable details: whether regarding time (date) or place. This detail may therefore be a pre-emptive counter-mythic move by the author, or simply a natural relation of detail that inter alia goes to the historicity of the account.
Q: Would you say the theme in vs. 4-17 is one of provision or prohibition [leading question counsel]?
A: I guess they want a discussion, not the choice of one of the words, but the word I choose is ‘provision’.
Q: What is the tree of knowledge of good and evil? What does it ‘give’ humans if they eat of it?
A: At first blush it seems a surprising, if not almost cynical move on God’s part to sow the seeds of destruction in his very good creation…just when it was all getting along so well, to, and all to do with a tree.
So, on the assumption that neither the author nor God is an idiot, let’s consider the text.
Taking that it was an actual tree with a time and space location (I think it was a durian, not an apple; eat a durian, and you really do get to know of evil…its smell, anyway) how would eating fruit consign creation to the road to perdition?
I don’t think the problem was the fruit itself, unless it was a durian, of course, but the act that was in question.
The point of man being in God’s image is that his moral judgements have actual significance and real outcomes will flow from them; thus he is fully capable in his relationships: capable that is to undo, which means that his doing truly ‘does’: that relationships can be undone means that good relationships have true value and are not mere hollow images of relationships.
The tree is God’s great risk. He shows to man that man has moral capability and really is ‘ruler’ of this creation; it is not just a game but a great ‘honouring’ of man. The risk is obvious; man might choose to ‘know’ evil. Eating the tree doesn’t just impart a theoretical knowledge, but the act gives the experience of turning from God. Turning from God gives directly the experience of rejection of God, because awayness from God is towardness to ‘not-God’ or the denial of God, which can only be evil: the negation of life and love.
Did God know what man would do? I’ll leave the question hanging, but suffice to say, that man’s choice was man’s responsibility; that was why creation was as it was, with man being in God’s image to make decisions with a real effect.
Q: Gen 2: 18-25. What does this passage tell us about the importance of human community?
A: Alone=bad; companionship=good. And that about sums it up.
Q: What is the significance of the active role that man takes here?
A: Adam does a couple of things in naming the animals: the difference between the ruled creation and his requirement for companion are clearly made; companionship does not involve ruling, but brings a ‘joint-ruler’ by implication. It shows that his aloneness is for one of his own kind, not other kinds. It shows that he cannot by himself meet his need for aloneness: we are creatures that need companionship above all else, and no amount of cattle will substitute. Just ask the Masai.
Q: How does this passage help us [to] understand how we were created to be in relation to God, nature and other people?
A: It shows us the system of relationships: we stand on one part of the creation (the earth) we study and husband another part (beasts and birds) and we are in companionship with each other as the ‘steward’ part. Each part is separated from each other part in ontological ordering and our movement to each is different: we will not treat our companion like we would treat our cattle or our land, as Adam’s hymn (Gen 2:23) makes clear.
3 December 2008
Blessings and Curses
The curses in Genesis 3 are sometimes regarded, in my experience, as having an element of arbitrariness to them. Not so, in my view.
The curses systematically deracinate all the identified benefits mentioned in Gen 1 and 2 as attending life in the very good creation. They are all inverted as death is the invert of life and rejection of love brings alienation not fellowship. However, they are not merely the detriments that flow, as adverse as they are; but are markers of the grand turning from God and its result in death: I think they are all about ‘dying you will die’ as the result of taking the fruit (rejecting God). They thus underline the ‘deathliness’ of life that seeks to be against God. To contemplate, against this, that any death might have preceded the fall (required by any scheme of interpretation that denies the timing of Genesis 1) demonstrates a hermeneutic of rejection that ironically parallels the act of Adam.
1
Gen 1: 28
God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…”
VSS
Gen 3:16a
To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you will bring forth children;
> Being fruitful and multiplying will be attended with suffering.
2
Gen 1:26-28
Then God said, "Let Us make man in our image, according to our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…”
AND
Ge 2:23-24
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man."
24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
VSS
Gen 3:16b
Yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."
> Instead of unity, we have a contest; ‘one fleshness’ gives way to competition and rivalry.
3
Gen 2:15-17
Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."
VSS
Gen 3:17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it';
> Listening to Eve instead of God, all the trees ‘free to eat’ including, presumably, the ‘tree of life’; but access to that is cut off by partaking of the tree of rejecting God. There’s one tree we can’t eat: either it is the tree of death, or the tree of life: they are mutually exclusive.
4
Gen 1:29
Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
VSS
Gen 3:17
Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life.
> From the garden of delights (Gen 2:9a), to the thorn ground of sweat.
5
Gen 2:15-16
Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely…”
VSS
Gen 3:18-19
"Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return."
> Instead of trees leading to life, sweat ends in death; with return to the dust from which we were taken; [but in Christ, we live on, as he will crush the serpent’s head: God bringing his good end from our bad beginning; working all things together for good].
The curses systematically deracinate all the identified benefits mentioned in Gen 1 and 2 as attending life in the very good creation. They are all inverted as death is the invert of life and rejection of love brings alienation not fellowship. However, they are not merely the detriments that flow, as adverse as they are; but are markers of the grand turning from God and its result in death: I think they are all about ‘dying you will die’ as the result of taking the fruit (rejecting God). They thus underline the ‘deathliness’ of life that seeks to be against God. To contemplate, against this, that any death might have preceded the fall (required by any scheme of interpretation that denies the timing of Genesis 1) demonstrates a hermeneutic of rejection that ironically parallels the act of Adam.
1
Gen 1: 28
God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…”
VSS
Gen 3:16a
To the woman He said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you will bring forth children;
> Being fruitful and multiplying will be attended with suffering.
2
Gen 1:26-28
Then God said, "Let Us make man in our image, according to our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth…”
AND
Ge 2:23-24
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man."
24 For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
VSS
Gen 3:16b
Yet your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."
> Instead of unity, we have a contest; ‘one fleshness’ gives way to competition and rivalry.
3
Gen 2:15-17
Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."
VSS
Gen 3:17 Then to Adam He said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, 'You shall not eat from it';
> Listening to Eve instead of God, all the trees ‘free to eat’ including, presumably, the ‘tree of life’; but access to that is cut off by partaking of the tree of rejecting God. There’s one tree we can’t eat: either it is the tree of death, or the tree of life: they are mutually exclusive.
4
Gen 1:29
Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you;
VSS
Gen 3:17
Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you will eat of it All the days of your life.
> From the garden of delights (Gen 2:9a), to the thorn ground of sweat.
5
Gen 2:15-16
Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. 16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely…”
VSS
Gen 3:18-19
"Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; 19 By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return."
> Instead of trees leading to life, sweat ends in death; with return to the dust from which we were taken; [but in Christ, we live on, as he will crush the serpent’s head: God bringing his good end from our bad beginning; working all things together for good].
Sermon 7: Genesis 3: The Fall.
There was a lot to like about this sermon, in my view. It started off dealing with the common detraction from the Christian gospel about suffering and the ‘God of love’. Of course, Genesis 3 tells us why we and indeed the whole creation suffer. The greater question for the detractor is, to my mind, why their question has any significance at all. If there is no God, then it’s hard to see how any transcendent values can exist, yet the question pre-supposes them. Confusingly, the question also seems to imply a universal reduction to material, which is void of values of any type.
Nor do I see any alternative to materialism upon denial of God. If an alternative entertains the ‘spiritual’ in some way, it ends up as a type of theism (for which the question of death is maintained).
I suppose one retort from the detractor would be that they don’t regard the question as significant, but they see in it a possible defeater for Christian theism. However, my point stands. If there is no God, then the question of values, upon which the question hinges, is entirely irrelevant in every way! Assertions to the contrary eventually fall into the lap of the theist construct, and undo themselves. If there were no god, how could any question about Christian beliefs, or any beliefs have any interest, because they would all be part of the same soup of randomness.
But, back to the topic:
The outcome of the fall was first seen in Adam and Eve seeking to hide from God (Gen 3:8), rather than embrace him: they seeing in their behaviour the undoing of what they had; the beauty of their friendship undone most profoundly, and shockingly for God, him seeing that now he had to seek man, rather than man being in community with him. The image is rendered corrupt and no longer constituted as the basis for communion and fellowship between God and man.
God seeking man is the first picture of God’s other-directed-ness towards man and his love showing in seeking the lost. God seeks man; God will bring the ‘serpent crusher’ (Gen 3: 15) and God covers man’s new vulnerability (Gen 3:20).
The great and moving irony of this is that as A&E seek to become ‘like God’ and know good and evil: right from wrong, God from not-God; they betray a base lack of trust in God and seek to be like him originating in a motivation that is contrary to him: seeking self, instead of the other-directedness that characterises the God who is love.
Overturning what God has provided, they have partaken in the antithesis of the image they bear, and it all falls apart. In verse 22 of Gen 3, I think God’s statement that they know good and evil, is not one of envy, or jealousy, but of sadness; that they have met that which will kill them: standing for self, cutting them off from life, by having opposed the image they bear. They know good and evil, not as being the creator who in self knowledge knows what he is not, but by participating in evil: knowing by doing, and discovering what is not worth discovering. They may no longer take from the tree of life, because the tree is in the garden of delight. They are now in the land of sweat and curse because they have rejected the delight. To live forever in evil would be perdition. God in his mercy cuts that off to instead bring redemption.
Predictably the idea of Adam listening to Eve per se was regarded as being Adam’s error (Gen 3:17). This was stated as ‘the failure of godly leadership’ as though this is anywhere discernable in chapters 1 and 2. It is not, in my view.
A&E are to be ‘one flesh’ a unity, together and beside each other; there is no ‘leadership’ in marriage, because it is a partnership of love, equals coming into a ‘one fleshness’. The creation of priority within the couple is the result of the fall (Gen 3:16c) because A&E are joint rulers over all living creation (Gen 1:26-28). It is only after the fall that a ‘ruling’ of any kind would occur between the couple; and this was a curse! In fact, Adam’s error was in listening to Eve in preference to God (vs 17c). As I stated in the blog on the study , Eve had primacy in the exchange with the serpent and in the presence of Adam (Gen 3:6b) *pre-fall*. There was no problem with this; the problem was with (a) Adam making no contribution to the situation, and (b) putting aside God’s word to him in preference to the exchange he’d witnessed between Eve and the serpent. Noting that Adam’s setting aside God’s command was in the face of the command being given to Adam directly by God, whereas Eve would have had it second hand.
Nevertheless I was pleased that the sermon reminded us that the Bible slates home sin to Adam, and not Eve, unlike the mistake of Christendom for much of its history. Paul also reminds us of this episode in 1 Tim 2:9ff, his reminder being, I take it, that Eve gave wrong teaching, not teaching per se: Adam listened to wrong teaching, Eve’s sex was irrelevant, according to Gen 3:17c.
The curse couplet in Gen 3:16c was properly explained as being a doublet of inversion: the two who were to be ‘one flesh’, a unity, would now be in a struggle of dissension: she would desire to overwhelm (him) (as sin for Cain: Gen 4:7), he would desire to rule (her) as appointed only for non-image-bearing creatures in Gen 1: nothing good in either direction. Restoration begins with redemption, of course, where the curse is opposed on the way to being undone in the new creation.
An interesting point about the curse is that every element of it undoes a specific aspect of the ‘very good’. See this blog entry for a quick look at this potentially fascinating comparison.
I was pleased to hear the sermon mention the significance of the genealogies in the Bible; from early Genesis to the New Testament, they take us along the path to the ‘serpent crusher’, culminating in Luke’s genealogy that takes us from Adam to Christ, who undoes that basic of fears; the fear of death.
Because the Bible is about real events and people, the genealogies are essential to underline the connection: this is not some myth off in the land of the imagination; but it is here and now. The dust is the stuff that clings to our shoes.
I would also add that the ‘chrono-genealogies’ add historical structure to the lists of names. Firstly, the names are important, because they establish the soteriological trace through real people. The dates (ages at sons’ births) root the lists in history; the history contiguous with our historical experience of God.
Nor do I see any alternative to materialism upon denial of God. If an alternative entertains the ‘spiritual’ in some way, it ends up as a type of theism (for which the question of death is maintained).
I suppose one retort from the detractor would be that they don’t regard the question as significant, but they see in it a possible defeater for Christian theism. However, my point stands. If there is no God, then the question of values, upon which the question hinges, is entirely irrelevant in every way! Assertions to the contrary eventually fall into the lap of the theist construct, and undo themselves. If there were no god, how could any question about Christian beliefs, or any beliefs have any interest, because they would all be part of the same soup of randomness.
But, back to the topic:
The outcome of the fall was first seen in Adam and Eve seeking to hide from God (Gen 3:8), rather than embrace him: they seeing in their behaviour the undoing of what they had; the beauty of their friendship undone most profoundly, and shockingly for God, him seeing that now he had to seek man, rather than man being in community with him. The image is rendered corrupt and no longer constituted as the basis for communion and fellowship between God and man.
God seeking man is the first picture of God’s other-directed-ness towards man and his love showing in seeking the lost. God seeks man; God will bring the ‘serpent crusher’ (Gen 3: 15) and God covers man’s new vulnerability (Gen 3:20).
The great and moving irony of this is that as A&E seek to become ‘like God’ and know good and evil: right from wrong, God from not-God; they betray a base lack of trust in God and seek to be like him originating in a motivation that is contrary to him: seeking self, instead of the other-directedness that characterises the God who is love.
Overturning what God has provided, they have partaken in the antithesis of the image they bear, and it all falls apart. In verse 22 of Gen 3, I think God’s statement that they know good and evil, is not one of envy, or jealousy, but of sadness; that they have met that which will kill them: standing for self, cutting them off from life, by having opposed the image they bear. They know good and evil, not as being the creator who in self knowledge knows what he is not, but by participating in evil: knowing by doing, and discovering what is not worth discovering. They may no longer take from the tree of life, because the tree is in the garden of delight. They are now in the land of sweat and curse because they have rejected the delight. To live forever in evil would be perdition. God in his mercy cuts that off to instead bring redemption.
Predictably the idea of Adam listening to Eve per se was regarded as being Adam’s error (Gen 3:17). This was stated as ‘the failure of godly leadership’ as though this is anywhere discernable in chapters 1 and 2. It is not, in my view.
A&E are to be ‘one flesh’ a unity, together and beside each other; there is no ‘leadership’ in marriage, because it is a partnership of love, equals coming into a ‘one fleshness’. The creation of priority within the couple is the result of the fall (Gen 3:16c) because A&E are joint rulers over all living creation (Gen 1:26-28). It is only after the fall that a ‘ruling’ of any kind would occur between the couple; and this was a curse! In fact, Adam’s error was in listening to Eve in preference to God (vs 17c). As I stated in the blog on the study , Eve had primacy in the exchange with the serpent and in the presence of Adam (Gen 3:6b) *pre-fall*. There was no problem with this; the problem was with (a) Adam making no contribution to the situation, and (b) putting aside God’s word to him in preference to the exchange he’d witnessed between Eve and the serpent. Noting that Adam’s setting aside God’s command was in the face of the command being given to Adam directly by God, whereas Eve would have had it second hand.
Nevertheless I was pleased that the sermon reminded us that the Bible slates home sin to Adam, and not Eve, unlike the mistake of Christendom for much of its history. Paul also reminds us of this episode in 1 Tim 2:9ff, his reminder being, I take it, that Eve gave wrong teaching, not teaching per se: Adam listened to wrong teaching, Eve’s sex was irrelevant, according to Gen 3:17c.
The curse couplet in Gen 3:16c was properly explained as being a doublet of inversion: the two who were to be ‘one flesh’, a unity, would now be in a struggle of dissension: she would desire to overwhelm (him) (as sin for Cain: Gen 4:7), he would desire to rule (her) as appointed only for non-image-bearing creatures in Gen 1: nothing good in either direction. Restoration begins with redemption, of course, where the curse is opposed on the way to being undone in the new creation.
An interesting point about the curse is that every element of it undoes a specific aspect of the ‘very good’. See this blog entry for a quick look at this potentially fascinating comparison.
I was pleased to hear the sermon mention the significance of the genealogies in the Bible; from early Genesis to the New Testament, they take us along the path to the ‘serpent crusher’, culminating in Luke’s genealogy that takes us from Adam to Christ, who undoes that basic of fears; the fear of death.
Because the Bible is about real events and people, the genealogies are essential to underline the connection: this is not some myth off in the land of the imagination; but it is here and now. The dust is the stuff that clings to our shoes.
I would also add that the ‘chrono-genealogies’ add historical structure to the lists of names. Firstly, the names are important, because they establish the soteriological trace through real people. The dates (ages at sons’ births) root the lists in history; the history contiguous with our historical experience of God.
1 December 2008
Study 3: Man, Ecology and the Environment (Gen 1:27-2:3)
The passage:
Ge 1:27-2:3
NASU
As I was not at the study group meeting for Study 3, I’ll just go through the study…
Once I’ve got the ‘official’ answers for the study, I’ll comment on them too, as the occasion takes me.
1. What does the Bible tell us about…
- our world (Gen 1:31, and see Gen 3:17-19, Roms 8:21-22):
In brief: was very good, was marred and awaits its redemption. These three way posts on the route to interpretation tells not only about the spiritual or moral world, or the human ‘world picture’, which is what must, I think, be the result of a de-reification of the creation account; and what Paul caps off opposition to in the Romans reference; but about the world that we’re standing in. We are separated from the ‘very good’ of God’s pristine creation by the ‘very bad’ of a world cursed as its vicegerent rejected relationship with the creator and wanted to know good and evil (know I take it here includes ‘have direct experience of’ the antithesis of God, the author of the ‘very good’).
- the abundance of our world (Gen 1:29, 9:1-3, Ps 145:15-17):
Plants were given for food (and therefore, not animals, in at least the pre-fall state); after the flood, the food range was increased to animals, which were now resistant to man’s care; nevertheless, in its fallen condition, marred and reflective of what God is not like, God provides for us.
- Humanity’s relationship to and responsibility for the creation (Gen 1:27, 28):
At base, to ‘subdue’ it. Detractors claim that this gives licence for exploitation, and wonton waste of the earth’s bounty; but not so. In a pre-fall condition, it would have man doing for the creation consistently with God’s very-good declaration; that this is a precious thing, to be maintained in harmony and for the sustenance of the interlocking system of benefits that the ‘very-good’ would produce. It would be like a king ruling his kingdom not to destroy and lay waste, but to build up and improve as his home giving to his heirs something that they will thank him for.
2. What does it mean to ‘subdue’ and ‘rule over’ the earth?
See above, but lets look at the references given:
Gen 2:15
Look after the garden
Gen 2:19-20
Husband the animals. This is the passage where Adam names the animals; as the first act of ‘ruling’ them he must understand them. Incidentally, against what idealist theologians say, that Genesis is ‘not a scientific’ text book, this is the ideal counter. It shows Adam doing something that is precisely scientific (referring to the study of the real world to seek knowledge of the creation. Pagans would call it ‘natural’ science), examining the animals, perhaps classifying and describing them (required for ‘naming’ in ANE cultures) and identifying them, to create knowledge about them.
QED, Genesis 1 is a ‘science textbook’.
Ex 23:29-30
The Promised Land is conquered carefully so it does not fall to waste and ruin.
Le 25:3-4
Even rules are given to allow the land to lie fallow and rest, with a system of fallow years being described: the people of Israel’s slogan could be ‘Still managing the land, still caring’.
De 20:19
Caring for the land extends to protecting productive trees for those who would come after!
Pr 12:10
Caring includes caring for animals: there we have it, modern ecological concern and animal liberation predated by just a few thousand years and in the Bible too!
Of course, the ‘kicker’ comes with the spoiling effect of sin: alienation from the source of life and love.
4. What are the effects of human sin [is there any other kind?] on our environment?
Luke 12:15
Greed is to be guarded against. In the end it adds nothing to our lives.
James 4:1-3
And, of course, greed arises from self-obsession, which ends, ultimately, as well as morally, in murder, as we put self before others.
The end of the study consisted with ‘getting practical’ [I can’t think of much more practical than the foregoing, myself]
Q: As Christians, how should we respond to global warning?
A: Start off by not ‘shoulding’ on each other with Pharisaic casuistry! [Often one has to correct the question in Bible studies]. A better question would be: “what considerations arise from the scriptures when we consider the state of our planet?”
As to ‘global warming’ of course, there is no response, unless we can somehow change the sun’s output. But what would we bring to questions such as pollution and land degradation: why, opposition, of course, but seeking a staged correction of careless ways to avoid destroying people’s livelihoods (workers, that is). We might also be modest in our demands on the environment; the benefit is release of funds for mission and other service. Imagine how much money would be so released if all Christian families avoided private schools, operated one car (structuring their lives to use public transport), avoided ‘prestige’ cars, and took modest holidays: lots, is my answer.
Q: What would you say to the Christian who says “The Earth is going to be destroyed one day, so what does it matter if we make a mess of it first?”
A: a) not an attitude consistent with seeking to care for things, b) ‘one day’ but let’s act as if we might leave things better for our children, and theirs; otherwise, we may be leaving a mess for generations while the Lord tarries, c) our basic demeanour is to seek the benefit of others, so depredation would be avoided as we seek positives for our fellows and heirs, d) we are called to create and care, not destroy and despoil.
Q: Are Christians supposed to ‘save the planet”?
A: To the extent that this would be an outcome from living to care, seeking the betterment of others, soberly and with delight in the shards of ‘very good’ that persist against the fall, yes, but not as an object in itself. This needs to be balanced with providing food, homes, and enjoyment for all.
In some ways, not a lot of controversy in this study; but, my refrain for any series of studies in the early chapters of Genesis is this: if the idealists are right, and Genesis provides some sort of picture, but something other ‘really’ happened, then it’s a house of cards that collapses, as the ‘other’ would provide the basis for informing our take on the ‘real’; any action that would be motivated by understanding Genesis would be essentially predicated on its relating events and facts that are consistent with and stand in train, indeed are commensurate with our experience of the world, against the shared framework of time, space and causal delimiters.
Ge 1:27-2:3
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." 29 Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; 30 and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so. 31 God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed, and all their hosts. 2 By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
NASU
As I was not at the study group meeting for Study 3, I’ll just go through the study…
Once I’ve got the ‘official’ answers for the study, I’ll comment on them too, as the occasion takes me.
1. What does the Bible tell us about…
- our world (Gen 1:31, and see Gen 3:17-19, Roms 8:21-22):
In brief: was very good, was marred and awaits its redemption. These three way posts on the route to interpretation tells not only about the spiritual or moral world, or the human ‘world picture’, which is what must, I think, be the result of a de-reification of the creation account; and what Paul caps off opposition to in the Romans reference; but about the world that we’re standing in. We are separated from the ‘very good’ of God’s pristine creation by the ‘very bad’ of a world cursed as its vicegerent rejected relationship with the creator and wanted to know good and evil (know I take it here includes ‘have direct experience of’ the antithesis of God, the author of the ‘very good’).
- the abundance of our world (Gen 1:29, 9:1-3, Ps 145:15-17):
Plants were given for food (and therefore, not animals, in at least the pre-fall state); after the flood, the food range was increased to animals, which were now resistant to man’s care; nevertheless, in its fallen condition, marred and reflective of what God is not like, God provides for us.
- Humanity’s relationship to and responsibility for the creation (Gen 1:27, 28):
At base, to ‘subdue’ it. Detractors claim that this gives licence for exploitation, and wonton waste of the earth’s bounty; but not so. In a pre-fall condition, it would have man doing for the creation consistently with God’s very-good declaration; that this is a precious thing, to be maintained in harmony and for the sustenance of the interlocking system of benefits that the ‘very-good’ would produce. It would be like a king ruling his kingdom not to destroy and lay waste, but to build up and improve as his home giving to his heirs something that they will thank him for.
2. What does it mean to ‘subdue’ and ‘rule over’ the earth?
See above, but lets look at the references given:
Gen 2:15
Look after the garden
Gen 2:19-20
Husband the animals. This is the passage where Adam names the animals; as the first act of ‘ruling’ them he must understand them. Incidentally, against what idealist theologians say, that Genesis is ‘not a scientific’ text book, this is the ideal counter. It shows Adam doing something that is precisely scientific (referring to the study of the real world to seek knowledge of the creation. Pagans would call it ‘natural’ science), examining the animals, perhaps classifying and describing them (required for ‘naming’ in ANE cultures) and identifying them, to create knowledge about them.
QED, Genesis 1 is a ‘science textbook’.
Ex 23:29-30
The Promised Land is conquered carefully so it does not fall to waste and ruin.
Le 25:3-4
Even rules are given to allow the land to lie fallow and rest, with a system of fallow years being described: the people of Israel’s slogan could be ‘Still managing the land, still caring’.
De 20:19
Caring for the land extends to protecting productive trees for those who would come after!
Pr 12:10
Caring includes caring for animals: there we have it, modern ecological concern and animal liberation predated by just a few thousand years and in the Bible too!
Of course, the ‘kicker’ comes with the spoiling effect of sin: alienation from the source of life and love.
4. What are the effects of human sin [is there any other kind?] on our environment?
Luke 12:15
Greed is to be guarded against. In the end it adds nothing to our lives.
James 4:1-3
And, of course, greed arises from self-obsession, which ends, ultimately, as well as morally, in murder, as we put self before others.
The end of the study consisted with ‘getting practical’ [I can’t think of much more practical than the foregoing, myself]
Q: As Christians, how should we respond to global warning?
A: Start off by not ‘shoulding’ on each other with Pharisaic casuistry! [Often one has to correct the question in Bible studies]. A better question would be: “what considerations arise from the scriptures when we consider the state of our planet?”
As to ‘global warming’ of course, there is no response, unless we can somehow change the sun’s output. But what would we bring to questions such as pollution and land degradation: why, opposition, of course, but seeking a staged correction of careless ways to avoid destroying people’s livelihoods (workers, that is). We might also be modest in our demands on the environment; the benefit is release of funds for mission and other service. Imagine how much money would be so released if all Christian families avoided private schools, operated one car (structuring their lives to use public transport), avoided ‘prestige’ cars, and took modest holidays: lots, is my answer.
Q: What would you say to the Christian who says “The Earth is going to be destroyed one day, so what does it matter if we make a mess of it first?”
A: a) not an attitude consistent with seeking to care for things, b) ‘one day’ but let’s act as if we might leave things better for our children, and theirs; otherwise, we may be leaving a mess for generations while the Lord tarries, c) our basic demeanour is to seek the benefit of others, so depredation would be avoided as we seek positives for our fellows and heirs, d) we are called to create and care, not destroy and despoil.
Q: Are Christians supposed to ‘save the planet”?
A: To the extent that this would be an outcome from living to care, seeking the betterment of others, soberly and with delight in the shards of ‘very good’ that persist against the fall, yes, but not as an object in itself. This needs to be balanced with providing food, homes, and enjoyment for all.
In some ways, not a lot of controversy in this study; but, my refrain for any series of studies in the early chapters of Genesis is this: if the idealists are right, and Genesis provides some sort of picture, but something other ‘really’ happened, then it’s a house of cards that collapses, as the ‘other’ would provide the basis for informing our take on the ‘real’; any action that would be motivated by understanding Genesis would be essentially predicated on its relating events and facts that are consistent with and stand in train, indeed are commensurate with our experience of the world, against the shared framework of time, space and causal delimiters.
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