Related

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

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

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

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

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

Enuma Elish

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

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

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

Dinosaurs in Eden?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two books

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

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

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

Genesis literary?

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

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

The framework theory is one of the least defensible positions when we understand that it is based upon the assumption that there not only may be a long period of time in Genesis 1 and the sequence of days, but actually that the sequence does not matter. It simply is not credible that God gave us this text with such rich detail and sequential development merely that we would infer from it his providential direction without any specific reference to all of the direct content he has given us within the text!

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

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

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

Conflict on evolution

Al Mohler gets discussed in this Baptist article.

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

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

Tom's midnight garden

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

After discussing theories of time, Tom says:

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

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

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

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

Reading on Origins

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

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

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

A quick think suggests that design is characterised by:

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

When is a day...a day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clods

Read in the SMH reprinting a Telegraph article:

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

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

Joshua Davidson

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

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

Preaching on Genesis

I've heard a good number of sermons on Genesis 1, a few live, and a few via MP3s. The live ones include those that triggered this blog to start a few years ago: a series on Genesis at my local church.

But I've heard more since then, particularly at the sites linked from this blog.

The MP3 variety have, I must say, been better sermons. They have taken the hearer more to thinking about Christ than the live ones! Perversely, the local sermons, in a 'Bible-believing' evangelical church, did not so take up the challenge with the warmth, passion, logic and drama that the linked ones do.

Have a listen to:

Joseph Pipa on the Doctrine of Creation

Gary Hendrix also on the Doctrine of Creation

Rick Viz, of course, on the Fact of Biblical Creation

could have

Surprisingly, even some biblical creationists have claimed that God could have created in a different manner to that which he [told us that he] did. For instance, they say, he could have created in 6 seconds or 6 billion years, if he had wanted to (or instantly, as Augustine averred). This goes alongside the claim that God could have ‘used’ evolution as the means of his creation, which often prepares the way for accepting that he did use evolution (contrary to the direct reading of Genesis 1, and elucidated by Ps 33:9, John 1:3, Hebrews 1:2 and Hebrews 11:3, for instance)!

But, what are we saying here? Are we recognising that God doesn’t act arbitrarily, or capriciously, but that his actions reveal who he is, as Paul teaches in Romans 1:20. Does not the claim above attribute to God, not the glory of the one who is, but the inglory of who he is not, or worse, that of pagan ‘fates’ or ‘spirits’ who in the relevant literature are unpredictable, capricious and have no discernable selfhood or nature?

There are two answers to the question, I think:

Firstly, on the basis of the argument above, the answer is “No, God could not have created in any old way, because he is not a magician who does tricks, but is the almighty creator whose actions, will and nature are unified: he only does what is of him to do, what represents who he is". This is the import of my reference to Romans 1:20. If we say that God didn’t create as he has revealed, as is his nature, representing who he is, but we set that aside and say that he did, or could in principle, create in another way, then we are talking about another identity, not the God of the Bible, the creator of all that is. As Kurt Wise said in a conference address in about 2000, if we say that God created in a way other than he reveals to us, then we are talking about another god! This amounts to backing into blasphemy: not saying that something of the Holy Spirit is not of the Holy Spirit, but that the Holy Spirit could be other than he is!

The second answer is that to suppose alternative creative possibilities is idle speculation and doesn’t get us anywhere. One could also speculate that God could not have created at all; then where would we be? Not that creating was necessary, but that it was what God chose to do as an act in line with his will; entirely and thoroughly in line with his will, which is in line with his nature. The point is that the only information we have about his creating is what is in the Bible, to want to set this aside and claim that could be alternatives is completely pointless, unless, of course, one wants to open the way to set aside the revelation and claim that it is about something other than what it depicts. That then is a different story and relies on what is not said, not on what is said. This still gets us nowhere, because everything that is not said is available for reference: then why have words at all, if their meaning can be negated so easily?

The god who could have created differently is, I suggest, another god: he is not the one whose invisible attributes are revealed in his creation, but one who is otherwise: uninvolved, dis-related, not in relationship, or one who is by his nature love. So could God have created in a way different to that which he did? All I can say, is, 'not this God' you have to think up another god whose invisible attributes are different to the one who reveals  himself in the Bible and in creation.

Stick up for Atheists!

I overheard a coversation at a primary school concert this week: a chap was telling his friend that his daughter (in year 1) had told the teacher "those of us who are atheists don't feel happy singing this song". The song was a Christmas carol, of course.

The friend, who was a church goer, supported the child's independence, and may have made an opening to the fellow on the larger questions (no conversation had under God's hand is a lost conversation, IMO); but what could have been said as an alternative?

A reply might have gone along these lines:

That's a great comment: it takes Christmas to the next stage: you know that Christmas is the Christian work-over of a pagan cult; well that girl was giving the Christian festival another religous work-over; but her religion is 'I don't believe in God'. I don't know that there's a lot of romance in that religion though.

OR

Yeah, its not right that children are made to suppress religious questions: I hope she lets others question her religion!

OR

I wonder if she has explored the logical conclusion of a thorough-going materialist ontology: that there are no qualitative differences between any particular configurations of matter.

OR

Hey, really? Ironically, I reckon that [modern Western] atheism is a heresy of Christianity! It presupposes a rational world where human ideas have value! Which is inconsistent with atheism!

How come?

Atheists act as though will has value and ideas have significance but their belief does not provide a basis for either. But both are consistent with Christian theism. It has it that personhood is fundamental to what is real, and mind is prior to matter! Atheism must reduce to materialism and that provides no way of saying any arrangement of matter is any better than any other.

OR

How can you say that? I mean – any belief expressed by an arrangement of material can have no value over any other: they are all equally arbitrary results of arrangements of material which aren’t themselves differentiable as to value and so provide no basis for comparative valuation. In other words, arrangements of material are just that, and being simply material there is nothing in them to say one is better than the other and so there is nothing in them to say the results of any one are better than any other. So, if your atheism is the result of an arrangement of material, which on your grounds it must be, and if my theism is the result of an arrangement of material, then there’s nothing to tell them apart! Both are equally unimportant.

OR

That’s certainly a view, but how can it have any real-world validity, any substance, when it is the result of a mere arrangement of matter and when there is no basis in matter for preferring any one arrangement and its results over any other?

How can matter rise above itself and allow the creation of value judgements, or even basic value attributes when matter is the final reference point? You start with material arrangements and end with other material arrangements. Nothing is there that allows gradations of value to be established, or value criteria to be derived in any way that has real meaning; that is, meaning attached to what is basically real: value is completely arbitrary, as are arrangements of matter and therefore is without substance. What you are left with is force, which is what atheists use on everyone as soon as they come into power.

Genesis and Poetry

My comments on an article on Genesis and Poetry:

The narrative structure of Gen 1, while it contains a sort of rough parallelism, is more like a deliminted list, as we'd call it today. It has a list structure similar to the ordered lists used in computer databases, with regular structure of incremented counts, start and end markers and a content section.

Blocher calls it a list, and it is in general structural conformity with the many other narrative lists scattered throught the pentateuch and historical books of the OT (this would be worth a solid academic study by a Hebrew scholar). The point of a narrative list is that it makes communication both memorable and unambiguously efficient; its over-arching dual structures of the two groups of three days, and the rough chiasmatic structure also go toward improving its memorability.

Prior to the use of punctuation and typograpical hints to the interpretation of texts, I hazard the guess that the sophisticated structures of grouping and patterning of texts, such as chiasmis performed the role of demarking text units to draw understanding of what was being communicated.

Translating leadership

In the light of my recent posts on the misapplication of the notion of 'leadership' to church life, I recently came across some statements of a church's objectives which I thought I'd attempt to re-word in the light of those posts.

Original: to review the leadership structures and processes of church and evaluate our goals in the light of this.

My suggestion: to review the ministry structures and processes of church....

Original: To develop service/leadership teams for reach congregation.

My suggestion: to develop service teams for each congregation.

Original: For our children's ministry leaders; to establish regular meetings and care for our leaders.

My suggestion: For our children's ministry workers; to establish regular meetings and pastoral support.

Original: To further develop a culture of equipping leaders.

My suggestion: To further develop a culture of equipping and encouraging people to take part in ministry.

Original: To establish a leadership team to coordinate men's ministry.

My suggestion: To establish a committee to coordinate men's ministry.

The constant use of the word 'leadership' is not only cloying, not only uninteresting use of English, but it masks the range of ministries that people engage in within a church, it hides variety, interest and complexity behind one somewhat mechanical term which has become meaningless through (inaccurate) overuse.

Refutations

Rick Vis in his talk “The Fact of Biblical Creation" quotes Henry Morris in his commentary on Genesis:

This opening verse of the Bible refutes atheism, because the universe was created by God; it refutes pantheism for God is transcendent to that which he created, it refutes materialism for matter had a beginning, it refutes dualism because God was alone [notwithstanding that God is in three persons], it refutes humanism, because God, not man is the ultimate reality, it refutes evolution because God created all things.

What Good's Creation?

From a talk by Rick Vis at Grace Reformed Baptist Church (at about 38m into the talk) "The Fact of Biblical Creation":

The implication of welcoming the truth of our text, Genesis 1:1 is simply this: it opens the door to hope and salvation for sinners.

Once admit that the world come into being because of the supernatural creation of almighty God, then there is no miracle in the Bible that should be a stumbling block to any man; believe that God created all things out of nothing and what miracle that follows should be so hard to believe; once believe, once recognize, once acknowledge that God created the heavens and earth and all that exists out of nothing, then it's not a leap at all to believe that the same God, God the son, the second person of the trinity, should join himself to a human nature, not ceasing to be God but nevertheless becoming fully man to save sinners, idolaters who have been saying ever since Genesis 3 “in the beginning man”, and to bring them to a place where they begin to agree with Genesis 1:1 and say for the first time in their lives “in the beginning God”.

Quadrant on Christians

In this month's Quadrant there's a discussion of the public face of Christianity, noting the voice that the 'new atheists' have, but the lack of public involvement by Christian intellectuals in defending, explaining and applying their faith in critique of current culture (and not just mere moralising, for which the Church seems to be pegged).

They mention the Centre of Public Christianity, which is not too bad an endeavour, although I've criticised one of its people for their view of Genesis 1, etc. that fails to distinguish a Christian view from a Naturalist one, but the problem with such explicit missions to the contemporary mind is that it waves its flags and everyone ducks, dismissively.

I'd prefer to see Christian intellectuals in the 'marketplace' so to speak. Writing in the SMH Spectrum weekend magazine, in the Australian and Financial Review; having a strong, cogent and sufficiently well argued case to be listened to, because what they say is worth hearing.

This would be 'counter-ghettoing' after decades, if not a century of ghettoing, largely driven, I lead towards thinking, by the self-boosting ascendency of naturalism under the cover of its flag-ship, Darwinism. Christians in the public sphere have not come to grips with the strength of biblical creation and the weakness of materialism for engaging persons with their inevitable teleological concerns, and, given the popular interest in or commitment to Darwinism, at some level, and origins in general, they end up having nothing to say.

Interestingly in the Church itself the topic is avoided, as if there's an unspoken embarrasment at the doctrine of creation; yet whenever the topic and its related topics come up, they are received with vast interest and often debate (see this discussion). People at church think about and are interested in this topic, but the Church's servants so often skirt it.

What your exegesis says about your exegesis

Much contemporary evangelical exegesis of Genesis 1 starts with an acceptance of the basic tenets of materialism and preserves that world view from any final conflict with the revelation of God, showing no final challenge from the Word of God to the Word of Man and no opening of the path to the gospel by declaring that our creator and redeemer works through his word and is intimately involved with his creation. The great point of Genesis 1 is that Spirit (love, personhood, mind) is basic, and matter is not, it is produced by mind (God's mind).

In short it provides a view of Genesis 1 that leaves the materialist world view intact. So you've got to wonder at its credibility, and its evangelical effectiveness, because failing to effectively challenge an anti or non-theistic world view must be a marker of failure to adhere to biblical proclamation.

Rather, Genesis 1 can be a launch pad for challenge from both the real world and revelation to the notion that the world is somehow independent of God, marked in the assertive rhetoric which has as its aim, and result, the removal of God from the real world of our personal encounters. Indeed, it so amends the intent of Genesis 1 that it comes into conformity with the materialist impoverishment that stands diametrically opposed to it!

This exegesis removes any challenge to the materialist conceptualization of the world in an anti-prophetic move that denies the Spirit of God. Most materialists upon hearing such exegesis relegate it to fantasy, because they *know* that the cosmos exists on its own account and mind is a mere arrangement of matter. That most usage of Genesis 1 fails to dislodge this is the extent to which it submerges the gospel. It agrees that we live in a purely material world, and statements to the contrary are a mere gloss with strictly aesthetic appeal, and not post-Fall confrontations to its lunacy. They therefore offer nothing to a world lost in empty and self-obsessed consumerism, where things, image, impression, and sheer braggadocio displace inner growth and loving connection with the creator of all things, who is love.

Sustainability

It's amazing how adherence to the biblical doctrine of creation can lead to evangelism in the most unlikely of settings.

I was at a business function hosted by a university school of business (at The Establishment, for what its worth) and was chatting to a couple of people when the conversation swung to sustainability. I played a somewhat sceptical line to see where it would lead (I discussed economic drivers of production and consumption and wondered where the idea of sustainability fitted in).

One of the people there claimed that sustainability was a Value, not only because it would preserve the habitat we all relied upon, but even if there were no people it would be a Good. I asked how it would be a Good if there were no people to value the result: she said it would be Good for the earth; but, I said, the earth is not conscious, so how would the good be apprehended?

She had no answer and was at materialism's dead end. So I discussed that Good only had context in people, and had to be about conscious interactions; but if these interactions were the mere outcomes of material, the notion of Good having any real weight evaporated.

Of course, the conversation meandered, but it got to the point where I could point to the dichotomy: materialism took us to dust, which had no differentiable value, but the notion of value itself relied upon there being a means of differentiating values and this came from mind. If mind was basic, then there were real values; and thus was congruent with a real creator, mind who had will: matter therefore being an outcome of mind.

It wasn't the gospel by any means, it was too short a conversation, but it took her to an edge of her inarticulate materialism. I pray the next conversation with a Christian who obeys the word of God in its revelation of creation will move her thoughts closer to our redeemer.

The Faith of an Evolutionist

John Whitcombe suggested that the following would be a statement of faith for one who 'believes' in evolution:

By faith I understand that the worlds were not framed by the word of any god, so that what is seen has indeed been made out of previously existing and less complex visible things by purely natural processes over billions of years.

The faith of the Christian, in distinction, is given in Hebrews 11:3: "by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that the things that are seen are not made of things that are visible; in line with Genesis 1:1: the personal, transcendent, triune God created all things that exist and he did it out of nothing.

So the materialist thinks that complex things came from less complex (gratuitously?), that personality comes from material, that life comes from non-life, randomly and for no special reason. On the other hand, the biblical Christian would hold the opposite: that matter came from (God's) mind, that personality comes from personality, and our being as people: loving, communicating and hoping, connects with the basics of reality, in opposition to the materialist, for whom the only connection we have with the basics of reality, is that we can reduce to material: dust!

Yet there are Christians who either think that our origins: the Bible's information about our origin, is of marginal, and perhaps only symbolic importance, or that the true information is given on the basis of materialism and that God must be an epiphenomenon of matter, because evolution relies on material: it is a philosophy that finally mind comes from matter, and the personal is of no more real significance than dust blowing in the wind!

Some Christians think that 'evolution' explains what God proclaims; yet the disjunct between the two is that our origin is connected to God, to 'word' to person and to will at every point; and does not start with material, but thought. The material is, however, important in the economy of God, because we are made in material, and the life in the high entropic improbabilities that we are is connected with God to the extent that rejection of God is linked with the absence of life: death!

Mohler on Adam

A quote from Albert Mohler:

If you adhere to an old earth position you have a very difficult time explaining how the effects of the Fall--death, disease and suffering--showed up long before Adam and Eve.

[from the current Creation magazine]

The article also cites a couple of papers on the topic:

Plants and death, and

Romans 8

I've posted with reference to Mohler previously, on the Framework Hypothesis, and the age of the earth.

Dead like dust

Further to my posts on death, reading the Bible I came to Genesis 3:19. This would seem to cap off any thought that the death Adam brought was only 'spiritual'. There is clearly a conjunct between the physicalness of the creation as our physical setting, and that death intrudes physically: dust is clearly of physical, and death is clearly to have physical effects. QED.

2 Worlds to Live In

Comparing conceptions of the world between materialism and Christianity causes me to ponder why anyone would want to adopt or even align with materialism.

Materialism has it that matter produces mind.

Christianity, that mind produced matter.

Materialism asserts that the end of all questions is dust: that’s effectively what everything comes from.

Christianity tells us that the end of all questions is a person with whom one may have a beneficial relationship, a relationship of love.

Materialism is that reality is finally material. Persons’ relationships, decisions and will have no significance.

Christianity is that reality is finally love: persons’ relationships, decisions and will have significance.

Some Christians think that materialist speculations tell us how the universe came about, and then graft God onto this scheme without any influence on the scheme (so the grafting has no effect or substantive point).

The Bible sets it the other way around: The creation account provides the scheme by which we can understand the material world as the product of love, for beneficial relationships. It goes on to explain why this seems to not properly obtain in our experience as we, in the first man and woman, rejected relationship with God for isolation from his love.

What do these two ways of conceiving the world produce?

Two different chains of descent, or "provenances" for we people: for the materialist we go back to pond scum, and by reference have no where to look for the basis of person hood and its significance; for the Christian, we go back to Adam, a person, who is directly from the will and action of God: its persons back to the start, and our personhood is not an 'emergent property' of material, but has genuine significance.

What do we do with words?

There’s a common hermeneutical epistemology employed in respect of Genesis 1 that represents, I think, a retreat from the possibility of gaining understanding, rather than an advance into understanding. Applied to texts wholesale, the approach often adopted to Genesis 1, etc. would render problematic any attempt to provide safety instructions on cleaning fluids!

One of the features of the relationship between us and God is that it rests on propositions: the ‘word’ is of central importance in Christian theology, practice and devotion. Indeed, it was in the beginning and through it all that exists came about (John 1:1-3 and Genesis 1, Hebrews 1:2, 11:3 Ps 33:9?).

But when it comes to G 1, we have commentators telling us that God is not capable of communicating propositions that have any connection with the real world to which they appear to represent a connection, but by such propositions communicates something other than the content of the words used.

This does two very dramatic things: firstly, it puts out approach to the Bible on par with a world-concept in which there is no communicating God. It gives Christian theology the same footing as paganism, where lack of knowledge leads to myth, where explanation is rendered irrelevant and inaccessible by the ‘mists of time’, questioning is deflected by vagueness, and enquiry denied by imprecision. In G 1 we have to the contrary of myth the elucidation of information to demonstrate, not just assert, God’s creative activity. If the information is false, the demonstration fails and we don’t know that (let alone what) God created!

Asserting the validity for exegesis of applying whatever explanation we like for words in the Bible (that is, explanations that overturn the sense of the words on their face reading, given the narrative genre we are dealing with here), puts us in the same position as the pagan who denies that there are any such words, or an author of God’s capability and love (and therefore truthfulness) to produce them.

Secondly, and by implication, it denies that the content of G 1 is able to convey precision, despite it being replete with precision on its face: as to timing, events, and their distribution over the period stated. If anything, the content is nothing but precise. To overturn it, you must deny that God can communicate content that is congruent with actual events in our earth “frame of reference”. And if he can’t, you must establish the basis upon which we can use the communication of these events (which become not-events) to establish a principle that only exists on the basis of the report of these events having correspondence with their occurrence in time and space, and therefore having a date and a location!

The step-wise denial, which if not articulated by commentators, is implicit, means that the hope that we can make anything of G 1 collapses under the weight of a level of incoherence that makes texts pointless as means of communicating. Welcome to the Framework Hypothesis!

(Briefly here: a previous post on God's word qua word.)

Hostile Intruder

From a sermon by Robert Jones, St James Turramurra, 11-11-2007 (a Remembrance Day sermon, starting with mention of the Battle of the Somme)

The Bible passages used were:

Isaiah 11:1-10

1 Cor 15: 12-58

Robert towards the end of the sermon, made these remarks:

Jesus’ resurrection signals the total defeat of death…death itself will be destroyed as the hostile intruder it is in God's creation.

Picking up on the theme starting at Death at the Carrington.

Whose God?

From Kurt Wise’s talk in 2000 at Grace Reformed Baptist Church on Creationist Biology

[at about 8 mins, if you want to find it in the talk]

God in creating created a creation that reflects his very nature, he was constrained to create a creation that reflects his very nature,…if God had been a different God there would have been a different creation that would have resulted (Roms 1:20). If you believe in a different kind of creation, you believe in a different kind of God. When you play around with the issues of origins, because there is such a direct relationship, accord to the claim of God, God himself created the creation. so If that’s the case, if you postulate a different mode of origin of the universe it necessitates a different view of God from that provided in the scriptures.

Wise on death and the creation

From Kurt Wise’s talk in 2000 at Grace Reformed Baptist Church on Creationist Biology

[at about 47 mins, if you want to find it in the talk]

We under estimate the importance of sin before God, so much so that the sin of man caused a crack in the perfection of the entire universe. There is no such thing as a little sin. Sin is extraordinarily important in God’s economy and we so undervalue the significance of sin; but when you start to see the effects it has had on the biological creation I think you re struck by the incredible force of sin in God’s economy and how much against his nature that it is.

For example, the curse introduced imperfection into the creation, [and] automatically God introduces death: which it turns out has a dual function: punishment for sin, but also an indication of his mercy. Can you imagine being fallen forever, separated from God? And that goes for the creature itself, because in Romans chapter 8 it says ‘the earnest expectation of the creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God’: the entire universe is waiting for our glory because it is going to be relieved from the curse, the bondage of corruption will be lifted.

Kelly on Death

Another follow-up to the Death at the Carrington post:

From Creation and Change by Douglas Kelly, Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte.

Even more theologically significant is the clear Biblical teaching running throughout the Old and New Testaments (as in Genesis chapter three and Romans chapter five) that death and disintegration of the entire cosmos came through Adam's sin, for Adam was the covenant head and representative of the whole creation, not Lucifer. Althought Lucifer fell before Adam, his fall did not bring death into the rest of the created order, because Adam, not Lucifer, was the representative figure (or 'covenant head') of the whole creation, thus taking it down with him into judgement. (97)

Winslow on Broken Creation

Further to Death at the Carrington, I looked at a number of commentators to see how they had dealt with the ramifications of the fall for the entire (inculding animal creation:

From Octavius Winslow "No Condemnation in Christ Jesus" (1853)

Ch. 20 "A Suffering World in Sympathy with Suffering Man"

From the ruin of man, our Apostle naturally turns his consideration to the ruin in which the apostasy of man plunged the whole creation--animate and inanimate. If another link were wanting to perfect the chain of evidence demonstrating the existence of the Divine curse for man's sin, this passage (Roms 8:21) would seem to supply it.

We read of no blight resting on the material world, of no suffering in the brute creation, prior tot eh period of Adam's transgression. The present is juste the reverse of the original constitution of the world. When God made all things he pronounced them very good (Gen 1:31). We delight to look back and imagine what this world was when, like a new born planet, it burst from the Fountain of Light, all clad with beauty, radiant with holiness, and eloquent with praise...

All the materials and elements of nature were harmless, and in harmony, because all were sinless. Innocence and happiness reigned over teh irrational creation. The whole world was at rest, because man was at peace with God, at peace with his fellows, at peace with himself...

Man was in "league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field were at peace with him" (Job 5:23)

[describes the world as fallen]

Yea, every creature that we meet, and every object we behold, supplies an evidence (sic) of man's fall, and bears the frown of God's curse...thus closely is a suffering world linked with suffering man. Thus the whole creation--material and animal--sympathizes with the weight of woe that crushes our race to the earth. When man fell, God cursed the ground, and cursed the brutes of the field, for man's sake' and no the whole creation groans and travails in pain until the time of the restitution of all things.

Interestingly both Leon Morris in his Commentary on Romans (Eerdmans 1988, p. 329f) and Cranfield in his ICC commentary on this same book (v. 1 p. 413ff) consider that Paul in Romans 8:21 has in mind the 'sub-human' creation.

Calvin is at one with this view:

21. Because the creation itself, etc. He shows how the creation has in hope been made subject to vanity; that is, inasmuch as it shall some time be made free, according to what Isaiah testifies, and what Peter confirms still more clearly. It is then indeed meet for us to consider what a dreadful curse we have deserved, since all created things in themselves blameless, both on earth and in the visible heaven, undergo punishment for our sins; for it has not happened through their own fault, that they are liable to corruption. Thus the condemnation of mankind is imprinted on the heavens, and on the earth, and on all creatures. It hence also appears to what excelling glory the sons of God shall be exalted; for all creatures shall be renewed in order to amplify it, and to render it illustrious.

Then, I just had to see what Barth had to say on Roms 8:21: check his commentary in the Oxford edition (pp. 309-313). I can't figure if he's a full-blown mystic, or even a pagan, with his seeing 'evil' within God (when it is the antithesis of God-ness), his making the Fall unobservable (I take it he means this in principle, not in force of historical remove), and the trajectory from despair to hope being one of perception, not historic act!

Yet, I like these comments: "We groan as the creation does; we travail in pain together with it." (p. 312) and "Ought we then to regard this knowledge as too scanty for us? Is it not enough for us to know the groaning of the creation and our own groaning? Ought we to demand some higher or better knowledge, which takes no account of the Cross or of the tribulation of time? If so, we must, perforce, take no account of the Resurrection" (p. 313)

Finally, from an old Puritan: Matthew Poole on Roms 8:21:

...the creatures in their kind, and according to their capacity, shall be partakers of that liberty and freedom, which in the children of God is accompanied with unspeakable glory: they shall not partake with the saints in glory, but of that liberty which in the saints hath great glory attending it, and superadded to it. The creature, at the day of judgement shall be restored (as before) to that condition of liberty which it had in its first creation; as when it was made at first: it was free from all vanity, bondage and corruption, also it shall be again at the time of the general resurection (Acts 3:19,20; 2 Pt 3:13).

Sermon on Roms 8 that may interest.

Death at the Carrington

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOLUTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of other posts following this topic:

Douglas Kelly: quote from his book Creation and Change

and

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

Wise on Creation

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

A few tidbits from his talk:

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

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

This remindes me of Hebrews 11:3

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

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Creations?

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

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

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

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

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

Literary Structural Parallels Between Genesis 1 and 2

The Unity of the Creation Account

The Hermeneutical Problem of Genesis 1-11

Genesis 1-2 in its Literary Context

E J Young 1 and E J Young 2

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

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

The song remains the same

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

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

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

Two Books

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

Bacon's dictum is thus:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Which God?

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling powerful?

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

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

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

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

Old Earth?

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

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

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

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

So their source is….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My further notes:

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

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

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


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

Demonstrated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its not right, its not even wrong!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can God Speak?

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

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

Destroyed by Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contra Keller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prophets on Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaiah 44:24

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

Note especially the 'all alone'

and

Isaiah 48:13

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


Jeremiah 10:16

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

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