Theologian's Own-Goal

In the Sun-Herald on Sunday 14 August 2011, Brian Rosner, a 'New Testament scholar' attached to the Centre for Public Christianity, scored an own goal against Christian proclamation, and without even trying hard to avoid it! My son's soccer team does better.

What Brian did was write this, in the context of a press debate on teaching scripture in public schools, with Peter Fitzsimons, a well known booster for atheism.

"The much-maligned doctrine of creation, which to many Christians is not in opposition to evolution..."

Now, the correct line of debate with an atheist goes something like: "so why should your view, which results from an arbitrarily and essentially meaningless tangle of chemicals, have any credibility at all? Now let's get on with my view, which is based on people having real value."; however, Rosner, wanting to show how compatible are Christian ideas with those that would keep people from their creator forever, put it about that some Christians actually share the materialist world view of most (modern Western) atheists.

Now, what could he mean by this, apart from 'Peter, we are really on the same wavelength on what is basically real...nothing in Christian theology really needs to disrupt the atheistic thought world'? How crazy...with friends like these...

And why bring it up at all? The rhetoric of so many neo-othodox theologians in this context is that creation doesn't matter, just keep up with 'clear presentations of the gospel' (notwithstanding that Paul shows that the intellectual path for an atheist is from creation to Jesus: refer to Acts 17, as the paradigmatic evidence of this). No, Rosner shows that it is really important, but perhaps not as the Bible sets out; after all, if he can conflate the Bible's teaching that creation was purposed in love, quickly and recently with the idea that it is purposeless, slow and meandering, then he's on a different wavelength from the apostles. Seems that he's rather set to deflate the importance of the difference to help atheists into the kindgom. But what they would hear, and consistently do hear, from what they write, is that as soon as their world-concept is accepted, the rationale of the gospel evaporates, and God shifts notionally from transcendent creator, to social construct. Rosner abets this, despite the fundamental stuctural disparity between the two conceptions of the world, instead of opposing it with Pauline energy, concern and commitment!

As Al Mohler stated in his talk on the age of the universe, it is futile to try to meet atheists half way, as there is no halfway point for those in oppostion. As soon as ground is conceded, the attack has failed.

I can imagine Fitz saying in response: "so, my world view is fundamentally sound; what does 'God' add to it"?

But aside from this, what is the point of saying what a number of Christians think? That number may be decidedly wrong (as it is in this case); its the fallacy of truth being established by popular vote. For a paid Christian to make this mistake is frightening. If I was paying fees at Moore, I'd want a refund.

Finally, just why would a Christian accept that the doctrine of creation is 'much maligned'? Do I detect a freudian slip? Why not say, the 'poorly understood', or the 'not-very-well-communicated-by-the-church doctrine of creation' (and this because it is generally despised, as the behaviour of most theologians and proclamation indicates; or either ignored, rejected, or undermined by being re-written for compatibility with evolution; against which it is diametrically set!), or the 'completely neglected and disarticulated' or any number of other descriptions for how contemporary neo-orthodoxy blunts the sword of God's word. Of course the world maligns every doctrine we have; this is not news, but as a rhetorical strategy, I think it is wanting. Here is an occasion to make a point, but instead Rosner adopts the tail between the legs tactic: one known not to work!

Spotlight on leadership in the church

This article by Jon Zens picks up a theme I've caught in a few posts in my 'ministry' tag.

Drifting away, doing nothing

The Youthworks site has an article that shows where conventional evangelism, Christian education and apologetics fails to connect with what younger people; probably all people, really want to know about life, the universe and everything.

The four biggest questions that surveyed young people had were:

1. How can I know that God exists?
2. How could a good God send people to hell?
3. How can I believe in a good God when there is so much suffering?
4. Doesn’t evolution prove that God doesn’t exist?

The article's author went on to comment:

What strikes me about those questions is that they are very focused on the question of God’s existence and his nature

And is this surprising? I think not, because the Bible starts with these very questions: it sets out the parameters of the revelation of God in basic ontology linking immediately to the basic existential questions.

The author goes on to discuss this:

In our apologetics we often get caught up in the questions that we think are important, like: “did Jesus rise from the dead?” “Why doesn’t God want us to have sex before marriage?” “Can I take the bible literally?”These are good questions, but we should be dealing with the more foundational questions first such as: “Who is God?” even when we are teaching kids that we think are well informed.

In the survey, as well as choosing from a range of questions, there was the option of writing down your own question. Popular questions that came up repeatedly were:

1. Where does God come from?
2. Why did God make us?
3. If the Big Bang is true does that mean God is not?
4. What is heaven & hell and how do you go there?

The mistake that is made is Christian thinkers not engaging with the thought world of those outside the church; but assuming a shared thought world.

Yet, Paul, 2000 years ago, saw the issue, and confronted it in Athens. In Acts 17:22ff, he showed us how to evangelise outside of a Christian thought world:

So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands;

A comment on the Youthworks website put it this way:

This article indicates a deeper theological problem; and that is we seem to think [and] convey to our children, and probably the world, that profound questions about our being here at all can be answered independently of God. This arises from the empty notion that Genesis 1 doesn't tell us 'how' or 'what' but only 'why'; when, of course, the three questions cannot be separated. If the how or what of our being can be answered without reference to 'why' then the 'why' is not truly informative; but is detached from the world.

The contrary is the case, however, in the Bible's 'view'. That is, at base the question that the Bible answers first off is 'who' and this is folded out in terms of 'what', 'how' and 'why'. All are bound up with one another and reality is finally personal, not finally material, which is insisted by the modern materialism that hides behind the facade (the house of cards, really) of evolutionary dogma and yet insists that it provides foundational truths about our world.

In a Christian frame, science is not philosophically separate from theology, but grows out of it. And this is reflected in the history of modern science growing out of a thought-world that took its cues from the Bible's structuring of the real world as created by God; and created recently and rapidly, which underlines the hand of God, and not material independence mediated by extended periods of time isolating the cosmos from its creator.

Kelly on Creation, Days and Theology

A piece published many years ago in The Presbyterian Witness


Q & A 
with
Dr. Douglas Kelly

Q. The focus of your forthcoming book is Christ and creation. What is the importance of a study on creation in our day?

A. The title of my next book is The Creation: An Exposition Look at Genesis In Light of Changing Paradigms. Let me begin by citing from a great work from Straussburg by one of Calvin’s colleagues written in 1539 called Hexameron (still in Latin) on the six-days of creation. It was authored by Wolfgang Capito. He says that creation is the foundation stone of the whole Christian philosophy. By Christian philosophy he means systematic theology - world and life view and practice. If God did not make this world then religion is really a matter of some less than real world.

        James Denny was a Scottish theologian in Glasgow in the 1890's and early 1900's. He wrote in the 1890's that to separate religion (Christianity) from science is to separate religion from the true. Once religion is separated from the true, Denny goes on to say, then religion dies among true men. I would say that if God begins His revelation to us with the doctrine of creation it must be important. It is therefore not only the first doctrine of the Bible (other than God Himself) it is primal. It is the basis of all covenants, of all revelation, of all God’s dealings with the human race, that He made all things out of nothing.

Of course we know from the New Testament, particularly the prologue to John’s Gospel that it was the agent of creation who took on flesh in the incarnation. As St. Anselm said in his famous Cor Deos Hormo? (Why Did God Become Man?) it took somebody as big as the Creator/God to become man to redeem us. If God is not really the Creator. Christ is not as big as the New Testament told us He was. His work does not have the kind of universal and eternal consequences that the New Testament theology teaches. Creation is important both for reality and that the real world is controlled by God. Christ the Agent of Creation is also our Redeemer. If you eviscerate a solid biblical doctrine of creation, the religion becomes unreal and Christ is diminished.

Q. Why is there so little connection between Christ and creation in modern day preaching?

A. I think there are two or three factors involved. I believe that evangelical theologians and commentators since the late 1800's have tended to avoid creation because of its controversial nature. There has been the rather uncritical acceptance of the assumptions of vast ages of the universe and of some form of evolutionary theory by most evangelicals. Dr. Nigel Cameron who is now at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School wrote a book in 1983 Evolution and the Authority of the Bible. He surveys the evangelical commentaries in the late 19th century and finds there is only one - Thomas Scott's - that hadn't caved in to some form of evolution. Therefore most ministers have come out of ministries and institutions that have accepted some form of evolutionary thinking. Obviously that is going to take away one's zeal for the glory of the Creator; if what He did is considerably less than what we are told in Genesis.

A second reason might be that there is a tendency among us ministers to see practical results. There is nothing wrong with that. I do as much as anyone. There can be a hesitancy to preach the whole range of biblical doctrine because you might feel that some doctrines might be too hard for people to understand or the doctrines do not get a good response or are too divisive. An example is the critique of evolutionary thinking. Thus many avoid it.

Q. Regarding creation, some reformed denominations are receiving men who believe that Genesis is poetic. What is some argumentation that elders can use to confront this view?

A. First let me recommend In the Beginning by Edward J. Young, published by Banner of Truth a few years ago. He was an authority of massive erudition in the Semitic languages. He discusses this matter. In the 60's when he wrote this he said that evangelicals were hesitant to enter the lists with people that accepted evolution. Thus they said that Genesis 1-3 was poetic and not meant to be taken as serious chronological history. Therefore they could have peace with the other point of view.

E. J. Young says that there are poetic accounts of creation in Scripture such as Ps. 104 and certain passages in Job. Such characteristics of Hebrew poetry are not found in Genesis 1-3. One of the marks is heavy parallelism as in the Psalms such as synthetic and antithetic parallelism. Such parallelism is not found in Genesis 1-3. These chapters are written as straight chronological history.

My colleague at Reformed Theological Seminary in Jackson, Dr. John Currid wrote an excellent article a few years ago in which he shows that the five or six characteristics of Hebrew poetry are not found in Genesis 1-3.

The great Jewish scholar, now deceased, Issac Cassuto did, I think, the finest single commentary I have ever seen on Genesis. It was translated into English in l961. He says the creation account is the way the Hebrew mind wrote history. The writer gives the broad picture in Genesis 1 and then isolates a portion and expands upon it in Genesis 2. This approach is not the method found in the Hellenistic and western intellectual tradition of writing history.

Q. Another critique laymen may hear is that past reformed scholars such as B. B. Warfield did not hold to a six-day (24 hours) creation view.

A. That is a true statement. Reformed scholars beginning in the mid 19th century felt the pressure in the shift in the intellectual world to the belief that geology had proven a massive age of physical structures in the physical world and in the solar system. The reformed scholars perhaps did not have the same alternative explanation to help them critique as some of us do today. They tried to preserve the truth claims of Scripture but make some kind of allowance for vast ages as did Thomas Chalmers of the Free Church of Scotland. That began to influence Charles Hodge somewhat. However Hodge very clearly came out strongly against Darwinism in 1874. He wrote What Is Darwinism? Therein he said that Darwinism is basically Satanism. Hodge was not an evolutionist. In his later years however he felt it necessary to make an allowance for an ancient earth because he thought the information that was coming in at that time was fairly conclusive.

Green, one of his successors at Princeton, was for an old earth. He felt that evolution was receiving so strong a testimony in science as for instance McKosh's support. McKosh was the head of Princeton and an evolutionist from Scotland. So Green wrote on the genealogies of Genesis, trying to lengthen them out and allow for an ancient earth. Warfield, a student of Green's, did the same. He would, I think, have allowed for some form of theistic evolution although Warfield was very conservative, one of our greatest scholars.

In his lifetime he did not have any serious challenges to this scientific paradigm. Therefore he felt he had to accommodate it. This has been the story with many of our best reformed scholars. Without wishing to disparage their great work in other areas, I think we have to say that we regret that they did not raise enough questions about those people who question the veracity of the word of God at these points. We do have considerable information available to us that they did not have to help us answer these questions.

Q. It is also a reminder that men are prone to error. We have to ultimately return to Scripture for our answers not just rely on the work of godly scholars.

A. Yes. That is perhaps what Christ meant when he said, "Call no man ‘Father’."

Q. Looking at Scripture there seems to be much internal evidence for a 24 hour day. If ‘day’ is not literal then the passage may not be literal itself.

A. Right.

Q. What is the meaning of the word ‘day’ in Gen. 2:4?

A. It is referring to the first day of creation on which God created all things out of nothing- all things visible and invisible as the Nicene Creed states. The remaining days are, as the German theologian Von Rad states, the turning of a chaos into a cosmos. [Alternatively it is merely an idiomatic way of saying ‘when’.]

Q. In Gen 5:5 we read "So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years; and he died." In Gen. 5:8 we read, "So all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years; and he died." Thus the time comparison between the two life spans was based on the same increments of time. [note that the ‘days’ these men lived were ordinary days: a whole lot of them, formed into definite other periods called years. The days remain normal days.]

A. I think that is clearly true. It is definite in Hebrew that when you have an ordinal accompanying the word "day" it always means a normal solar day. If in the Bible anywhere "day" means something else the immediate context makes that perfectly clear. For example, in 2 Peter 3:8 we read that "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." The context clearly shows that "day" is a long period of time. [On the contrary, the normal day is used as a comparison; it tells us that God is not constrained as we are by time. If the day here was a long period it would make the comparison nonsensical.] It would be the worst form of isogesis to read that meaning back into Genesis 1 where "day" has ordinals in a specific series. The creation account sets the order for our lives. Are we to work 6000 years and rest 1000 years?

The Fourth commandment also points this out in Ex.20:8ff. The Sabbath is very clearly a normal solar day. Six days of work and one day of rest is the normal pattern.

I think the evidence is preponderant that "day" means a twenty-four hour day. The famous Hebrew Old Testament linguistic professor of Oxford University, Dr. James Barr was no conservative. He wrote the book Fundamentalism attacking conservative Christianity although he came out of that sort of background himself. He wrote a letter to David C. C. Watson in 1984. I have a copy of that letter. In it he says that no world class scholar in any major university that he is aware of thinks that the writer of Genesis intended the word "day" to mean anything other than a 24 hour day. Now he doesn't agree with the truth claims of Scripture. He is saying that we must be honest when we interpret Scripture and say that the writer meant 24 hour days.

Q. If we follow the reformed hermeneutic of Scripture interpreting Scripture then we can come to no other interpretation than that of a six day (24 hours each) creation. To deny six day creation is also to deny this interpretive principle.

A. I fear that if we loosen our moorings to the clear teaching of Scripture in these early chapters of Genesis we have brought in a principle that when the basic teachings of Scripture go against the culture then you go with the culture.

Q.Your forthcoming book is on changing paradigms. Could you elaborate on that theme?

A. I take the subtitle from the famous work of Thomas S. Kuhn (University of Chicago) who in 1970 published his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Therein he speaks about a paradigm shift. Science proceeds not on an even uphill line but in terms of revolutions in which one paradigm (which is a world view, model or explanation of reality) is in a sort of revolutionary way replaced by another. This new paradigm is contradictory to many aspects of the former but contains all the same facets though from a different point of view.

The reason the old paradigm eventually goes defunct is because anomalies or questions are raised with it that cannot be answered in light of the basic paradigm. Kuhn gives illustrations in the history of science such as the old phlogistic theory of fire which finally just could not accommodate all the evidence. Another very different theory arose. This has happened many times in science.

Only time will tell if I am right. I am proposing that since so many problems are now being raised against the scientific empirical possibilities of the evolutionary mechanism even from non-Christian scholars, it is becoming increasingly difficult for evolutionary science to maintain intellectual standing because it cannot answer these questions.

I am thinking that we are in a transition time. If believing scientists of which there are many will continue to do their homework well and if people will learn what they can, the pressure may come that in another 40-50 years from now there may be an intellectual revolution that causes the old evolutionary paradigm to be replaced by the creationist paradigm or perhaps some other paradigm.

Fred Hoyle of Oxford and Wickransinghe wrote a book entitled Evolution from Outer Space in which they say evolution is preposterous. Professor Wickransinghe has flown over here from the British Isles to be a witness on the creationist side in some cases, such as a recent one in Louisiana. Even as a Buddhist he is willing to stand on the side of creation because evolution is such bad science. Now their paradigm would not be one of Biblical creation. Thus I do not know which paradigm will replace it. I do believe the evolutionary paradigm has got to go.

Professor Phillip E. Johnson of the University of California is showing in his books that evolution is intellectually bankrupt. He is not a young earth man but he does believe in creation. He shows that evolution is dogma, not science.

Q. Could you list two or three books that you think are important- books that parents could use with their children- teaching them how to counter evolutionary teaching?

A. A very helpful book by Phillip E. Johnson, Evolution As Dogma is approximately 40 pages and very helpful. Another book Pandas and People by Davis and Kenyon examines empiric evidence against any possibility of evolution. It is intended for use as a supplement to high school biology textbooks. The authors asked evolutionists to critique the book. They interact with them. They try to be fair. There is no mudslinging. That book is being used in many public schools as a supplementary text. It has been translated into Russian and is in wide use there.

A somewhat older work, but still a valid one, is Henry M. Morris' Evolution and the Modern Christian- particularly in regards to the two laws of thermodynamics. It is written at a popular and accurate level.

Paul Ackerman's It's A Young World After All is popularly written Some of its chapters are uneven but it is thought provoking and of use to parents regarding the age of the earth.

Q. Your book should be available by the end of 1997?

A. That is right. The book will have questions at the end of each chapter. I hope to have a study guide for use with it for Christian school and home school youth.

Q. It should also be of use in Sunday Schools and Bible study groups.

A. That is right. It will also be useful for pastors and seminary students.

Q. We will look forward to the book's publication. Thank you very much for this interview.

A. God bless you.

Why I believe in God (Peter Jensen)

This piece was published in my church's newsletter for 31 July 2011, attributed to the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen.

I was asked recently about the reasons for belief and even more to the point, why I believe in God. I'm sure there are more, but here are ten of the factors which have created my belief in God.
First, the fact that he believes in me. That is, I have not found God at the end of a stringent enquiry into the nature of the universe. He found me, wandering as i was, and he revealed himself to me. It was his revelation, not my interrogation.
Second, the fact that his revelation was a public one. That is, it is not my private possession. When God revealed himself it was like the sun shining. As Jesus said, "I am the light of the world". Looking for God without looking at Jesus is like playing football without a ball—like seeing without insight.
Third, the fact that his revelation was a personal one. I do not believe in God because I have a superior intellect or am a better person. It is because God illumined my understanding by his spirit [sic-no capital 's'] as I looked at the person and work of Jesus Christ. God has to be God in the way in which I come to know him.
Fourth, I found that his revelation makes sense of the Bible. Overall, the Bible contains god's preparation for Jesus and then his fulfilment in Jesus. His preparation was more than sufficient to create a God believing people. The God they believed in was a God who made and then kept his promises; made promises and kept promises of an extraordinary nature. The most extraordinary, God-like keeping of promises is in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Fifth, I see that the worship of Jesus is a reality in the world. Everywhere people have treated him as God and seek to obey him. From that point of view it is no use asking is there a God—clearly there is. His kingdom is in the world. The actual question is, what sort of God? Is he a God whom I should worship?
Sixth, I judge that the worship of God makes best sense of the world. The standard human belief that there are many gods makes no sense of the unity of the world. The recently popular belief that there is no God makes no sense of the morality and beauty of the world. The belief that there is one remote God who cannot enter his own world makes no sense of the love in the world. The belief that Jesus Christ bore the burden of the sins of the world makes best sense, especially of a world of pain and suffering.
Seventh, I judge that believing in this God makes the best sense of history. I do not believe that history is circular, infinitely repeating itself. I do not believe that history will have no end. Believing in the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ explains the nature of the human experience of living in time and enables us to have the hope which give [sic] meaning.
Eighth, I judge that belief in God makes best sense of what I see in the community. The will of God expressed in the law of God is a tremendous positive force for good. The will of God followed by men and women is wholesome and life-giving. It creates generosity and public virtue. It frees people from such crippling vices as gambling and substance abuse.
Ninth, because I know that belief in God makes the best sense of what I experience in my own life. I have learned long ago that I am a weak and faulty creature, prone to error and vulnerable to pain. God and belief in God spares me some things because his law guards me against things which are harmful. I am not spared from the ordinary conditions of life in a world such as this. But I have found that in the midst of the trials of the world, the love of God is manifested in ways which assure and re-assure.
Tenth, because I know God. The way we have asked the question skews it a little. Our belief is intellectual but it is not merely intellectual; it is personal. To quote and old pro verb, God is not a problem to be solved but a person to be known.

My comment

Now, there're a lot of interesting angles there; and together, they make strong case, I think.
I was, however, quite struck by his avoiding the basic ground that the Bible sets out for belief in God, and indeed, his worship: that he is creator! I think, immediately, of course, of Romans 1:20 and that he grounds his revelation and sets his covenant relationship is the world that he has made.

Speed

I recently heard a discussion that one of the indicators of God's being creator, and not the cosmos itself being its own 'creator', or processes within the cosmos being required to give effect to God's fiats in Genesis 1, is the parsimony of action implied in Genesis 1.

That is, a clear result of intelligence brought to bear is the economy of effort that is applied.

This is echoed in a number of passages in the Bible:

The centurion's servant is one. The centurion expected instant results from Jesus' command, just as he expected from his troops.

There are also examples in the Psalms:

Psalm 33:8-10: he spoke and it happened!

Psalm 148:5: same as above!

Genesis 1 itself indicates parsimony of causative effort: God spoke...and it was so!

I don't think this leaves much room for setting aside the implications of rapidity in Genesis 1.

Bavink, Lankshear and myth

Recently, searching my emails I came across this letter from 3 years ago: in Internet time, this is ancient history, of course, and what fun to share it.

William,

Bavink in "In the Beginning" makes the observation that materialism leads to occultism, and points to the late 19th C when it did just that... I'll hunt up the quote as its quite pithy.

Along those lines, thinking about Lankshear's jumble of ideas; particularly his joining of EE [Enuma Elish] and Gen 1: it seems that his fundamental take on reality in referring to a mythical view as having credibility; that is, an a-historical tale being able to meld with what is historical (or at least factual; as he seems to think for some reason that God is creator), must itself be mythical.

He is letting a source that is outside biblical revelation structure his world view... what is that source? Well, it could be either purely materialist (maybe provide links to Gisler's JETS paper on beware of philosophies and Mortensen's The Master's Seminary Journal paper on materialism and age of earth; I can give links if you don't have them) which means that he is judging the bible on the basis of a view that denies the world view of the bible: that is, a view that says "there is no god'; 'material is all there is' and 'man has no moral, generative or epistemological relationships outside himself' that is, is ethically and actually independent. So; Lankshear appears to base his thinking, at least by default' on this world view and uses it to analyse the Bible; from the get go he has prejudiced his thinking.

Alternatively, his view might be that consequence of materialism: mythological: that there are factors to consider that are not principally material, but have arisen culturally as a response by the imaginatively powerful to their situation in the material world...which reduces entertainingly to 'mere fiction'. If myth is a cultural response to a historical situation, then its interesting, but probably unimportant... Lankshear is then using the unimportant to assess the credibility of the Bible!

Another thing about ANE and other myths, they all take the cosmos as a given; effectively; even if they pretend to be a true cosmogony; they are not, as in EE they are either a theogony, or a story of the origin of something within the cosmos, not of the cosmos and its ontological implications for us...so, myths are pretty skinny; and they do not allow us to build anything of substance; thus mythologically referenced cultures have not produced natural science; nor objective history.

On this last point, he fails also to understand the critical importance in Jewish culture of objective history: Jewish thought regards objective history with bedrock importance; it is not a mythological culture at all, but a concretely historical one; for it to base this on a myth is both absurd and incoherent: cultures do not and cannot build objective historically referred structures on mythological foundations: the Jews have done the reverse: their culture is objectively historical and concretely real down to day 1.

Once Lankshear manages to reflect on the structure of his thought world he might be able to adopt a biblical noetical frame of reference which would instantly eliminate the explanatory dead ends of materialism and its cousin mythology.

BTW, I'll lend you Bavink: he's old fashioned (well...just old) but has some great ideas, including a wonderful logical critique of Darwinism as it then was.

Southern Baptists

I've mentioned Al Mohler's work in previous posts.

Al has written a goodly amount on the matter of origins on his blog.

Here are some links:

The Futility of Theistic Evolution

Christianity and Evolution: Seeing the Problem

Creation vs. Evolution: The New Shape of the Debate

Evolution on the Mind

Should we really thank God for evolution?


The Buzzing Fly: Why the Creation-Evolution Debate is So Important

The Christian World View as Master Narrative: Creation

Mohler on Hawking on Creation

Mohler on Ruse on Creation'ism'

A darwinian compendium.

A knight of the mind.

Darwin's dog.

You'll get the idea!

God and Science

This letter appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald today (16 July 2011)

God and science
Mike Phillips (Letters, July 15) suggests that Tony Maher has engaged in cherry picking of his beliefs and that there is an inconsistency between accepting climate change science on the one hand and belief in a creator god on the other.
As many theistic scientists will attest, it's a false dichotomy to pit God against science. Scientific inquiry looks at the world and how it works, while theology looks behind the curtain and wonders why it all exists to begin with.
One might look at how the world began, the other at why and by whom the world began. The two disciplines ask and answer completely different questions about life.
Cherry picking? I don't think so. But Mike Phillips might be comparing apples with oranges.
Andrew Miers Bardwell Valley

Phillips' letter rightly identified the foundation of Christian theism (although without using that term) being that God is creator. Oddly, he sees the significance of this cornerstone idea or doctrine, while many teachers of the church fail to understand it, leading at best, in many cases to views such as Miers' above.

Miers and others who see a spilt between what happened and what it means are philosophically out of tune with the Bible's world concept, and theologically under-done when it comes to discussion of origins. The Bible is very clear that what happened is the basis for the significance of what happened (the 'why' that Miers notes). There is no split in the Bible's framing of the world of thought and event so that 'meaning' is carried on a different plane to causal continuity. Certainly the Bible insists that 'word' is necessary, but you may note, that the word with respect to origins is about what happened in causal continuity, and not other than what happened.

Phillips gets it: if the Bible is not to be trusted when it deals with events in causal continuity, then what it derives human significance from is but a fiction, and the 'really real' events, and their inherent meaning, are otherwise, and God is divided! A house divided, of course, is a house bound to fall, particularly when theologians set out to divide what God has conjoined.

Phillips knows that it is 'God of the real world' that Christianity has in mind; he just disbelieves. Miers on the other hand seems to think that Christian faith is in a God of other than the real world: disconnected, not Elohim who connects with us, or draws worship from us because he is creator of the real that we are in!

For the sake of brevity I won't go through the flowering of modern science in the rich bed of Christian theology and belief, including the face-value reading of Genesis 1.

Un-knowledge

The application of symbolism to critical biblical passages remains an interesting thing to contemplate.

Going on from my earlier post,

There is a major problem in attempts to cast the early chapters of Genesis as other than having the meaning of their face reading; particularly noting that the face reading is set in terms of of the causality of the world of our being and experience (coordination points are in the chronological alignment, the pattern of causality that is identical our experience, the continuity of space-time between the Genesis 1-3 depiction of the world and ours, and the uniformity of relationships between that depiction and ours, for example).

The problem is that unfooting Genesis 1 unfoots the understanding of our origin, relationships and sin (particularly the relationship with God) that only can come from Genesis 1.

The claim that G1 is mythic, or symbolic (which amounts to the same thing) immediately removes the information-content that it would otherwise convey. This means that the origin of all things, of our relationship with God (both made, in Genesis 1:27? and broken in Genesis 3:n, and fore-redeemed (Genesis 3:n), and our self-identity are not known, if they are not factual in the only account we have.

Then to explain sin, for example (but also to explain anything else in these chapters), becomes problematic. To understand the claims of scripture people must know the real connections that did, do and will affect them; they mythic connections will not do this, as people's lives are lived, challenged, enjoyed and frustrated in the real world, not the uninformative mythic one from whence comes at best metaphors of the real world. So is we can't show a 'real-world' engagement that explains our situation and all its dimensions, then it does not provide for us to understand our position.

This has a pastoral aspect.

If a person grappling to understand sin and God's redemptive response is told that sin is only explained in the Bible in symbolic terms, then the person can ask "then where did it really come from?" And how would we know? If G1 doesn't tells us what really happened, then what did really happen, and how would we know? Are we therefore really linked to God as G1 says, and do we really bear God's image, or is that just an ex-post facto hope for significance and meaning? The person could well ask, what is 'really real' and the 'real' point of reference for our existential position. If G1 is relegated to the symbolic, then the person would well look to materialism as the final reference point: materialism which eliminates God and the existential position would be the tissue of nonsense that Camus, Satre et al would leave us.

The unwitting, or perhaps just unacknowledged reference made when G1 is regarded as symbolic is that the world as we know it becomes 'a given' not created, and the result of itself, not of will. Alternatively it defaults to an implicit materialism which provides that true knowledge about the world in its totality (our world as experienced) leaves God out, as a not quite real figure; linking only through the tendrils of symbol, not the stout columns of what is real. So he's not really part of our world, but is set more in pagan terms, being an element of a prior world: the world as given, as Enuma Elish, for instance, assumes.

The odium of theistic-evolution

What is so odious about theistic-evolution, I think, is that it makes a represenetation of God, with respect to origins, that diverges from the representation God makes of himself through the creative actions; actions that are linked to who he is (Romans 1:20).

In saying that 'no, God didn't do that, but he did something else that not he but I tell you.' it is saying that God is different from how he has communicated himself, and the relationship of God to creation is not what the Bible sets out.

This arises, I think, in part from the thrall of modern materialism, but partly out of a misplaced idealism descended from ancient Greece, where 'god' is too exulted to have any real connection with the material.

But this is not Christianity. God has provided the material world as not only the setting, but as part of his covenant with man, as him who is in God's image, the steward of the creation, to whose redemption the 'whole creation' looks.

The theological trouble with theistic evolution

The trouble with theistic evolution (or Christian Darwinism) is that it says something about God that is different from what God says about God.

It makes a different relationship between God's words and actions from that which God states.

Adios theory

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald 25 June 2011: trouble is Lyell was right...adios theory!

4 big moves

I recently re-listened to Al Mohler's address on the age of the universe at a recent Ligoner Ministeries Conference.

In it he remarked that the Bible has four essential movements that condition the span of action between God and man: creation, fall, redemption and new creation.

These are four moments in the relation between God and us, where God's actions are material in the relationship.

And the relationship parameters are isotropic. That is, the zone of contact doesn't shift between them: sometimes metaphor, sometimes imaginary, sometimes real-world. They all must be real world and interact with our life-perspective, our experience as subjects, uniformly. Some cannot be appraised as 'lets agree this is important' (myth), and others as 'this occupies unique space in the time-space zone that effects and constrains my actions, choices and life-perspective'.

But even more, the zone of contact is action by God.

Most of the views of the account in Genesis 1 that depart from the direct meaning also seem to set aside that this is God telling us what he has done. Him describing the actions through which he represents himself to us in an unavoidably meaningfully tangible manner. It is not some artful allusion to 'teach that God is creator' but is the sequence of things that he did, being creator by which he communicates himself to us, and demonstrates that his claim to being creator is not empty, but delivered! So its 'personal'. Most of what I've read seems to want to de-personalise the account; yet the Bible is all about God's actions towards his creation, within his creation to the end of the new creation; once it is denied that he can give information about his acts, or that they occur in terms of different parameters from all his other acts, and from how acts 'work' (with causal continuity and contingency) in the time-space creation, then we don't have God's telling us about himself at all, but about someone/thing else. Strange way for one who is love to operate then. Does one write to a friend to tell him what one didn't do, or what one did do, as genuine self-revelation?

A friend made this comment in response to the above:

Interesting to note that when Philip said to our Lord Jesus "Lord show us the Father and that will be enough for us." The Lord Jesus replied with "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father...at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves."

The historical evidence of the Lord Jesus' recreative acts gave testimony of who he is; and so the evidence of God's creative acts giving testimony to who the creator is. Undo one, and you undo the other.

Creation outside Genesis

I was privilaged to attend a conference at St. John's Park Baptist Church recently titled Getting Genesis Right (check under sermons for the sound files).

One of the lectures was titled Creation outside Genesis.

This is the list of biblical references discussed (compiled by Dr. William Barrick of The Master's Seminary):

Exodus 20:8-11; 31:17
Deuteronomy 4:32
2 Kings 19:15
1 Chronicles 16:26
2 Chronicles 2:12
Nehemiah 9:6
Job 4:17; 9:8; 38:1-41:34 (38:4, 12, 32-33; 40:15)
Psalms 8:5-6; 33:6; 89:11-12, 47; 96:5; 104:2-5, 24; 115:15; 136:5; 148:4-5
Proverbs 14:31; 17:5; 22:2
Ecclesiastes 12:1
Isaiah 37:16; 40:26-28; 42:5, 12, 18; 44:24; 45:7; 12; 18; 51:13
Jeremiah 10:12, 16; 32:17; 51:15, 19
Amos 4:13
Malachi 2:10
Matthew 19:4; 25:34
Mark 10:6; 13:19
Luke 3:38
John 1:1-5, 9, 10
Acts 4:24; 14:15; 17:24
Romans 1:20, 25; 5:14; 8:19-22, 39
1 Corinthians 8:6; 11:9; 15:22, 45
2 Corinthians 4:6
Ephesians 3:9
Colossians 1:13-16
1 Timothy 2:13-14; 4:4
Hebrews 1:2; 11:3
1 Peter 1:20; 4:19
Revelation 4:11; 5:13; 10:6; 13:8.

One of the great themes in many of these references is that God's being creator provides the reason for us worshipping him. It provides the basis for the connection between creator and creature; embedded in acts which occured in the time and space that we occupy.

Symbolic Sin!

In my church's latest study group notes, the following question was posed:

5. Read Genesis 3.7-24. In these verses we see the consequences of human sin in the breakdown of relationships between people and people and God. In this highly symbolic section we see a reality that is still with us today. What area of brokenness troubles you the most?

As soon as a part of scripture is identified as symbolic, I get wary. To regard something as a symbol heralds its dereification, in this context. It makes it 'art' not 'life'. Art comments on life and relationship, it is replete with symbols and representations, but it is not, in itself real life; its a type of decorative communication about the real life to which it refers.

So when something in the Bible is declared to be symbolic, one first has to ask, symbolic of what? Of what concretely is it a symbol (and if we can't say, then its hard to declare it to be symbolic; maybe we should instead say that as modern Westerners we are just uncomfortable with it). Perhaps it is taken as symbolic of 'a reality that is still with us today'. But if it is our reality, why would we need a symbol? How does the 'symbol' participate in the connected reality of relationships over time and space?

What the passage does is give to us the source of the current shared reality (shared between us, and between us and God). Is the source a symbol of the source? How would we know? Has the current reality been always with us? In which case it doesn't need a source, but is inherent in the creation (as the problem only emerges when the face reading of Genesis 1-3 is denied, then the word 'creation' may be erroneous, and we should just say 'cosmos' or 'reality' as something that is unbound from God's creative acts that we've just denied and only can know from his word).

And if it is a symbol, what is the connection with our non-symbolic experience of the world as subjects? Where does symbol stop and the concrete or actual start?

I doubt that there is an independent epistemic basis for the declaration when our topic is a type of 'first philosophy' topic; that is, about the start of it all, so perhaps we are all just symbols of something else, our relationships are symbols of something else, and our concrete experience of death, pain, suffering and frustration is not due to actual estrangement from God, but is a mere symbol of some other actual thing.

No, it just doesn't wash.

So what is so symbolic about the passage? I think it is just that we have trouble with a talking snake (maybe all animals talked pre-fall...and how would we know they didn't...or did), and an actual tree being a reminder of a covenant. And what a simple gracious reminder. Nothing complicated to do, just remember the God-man relationship by your action of not taking the fruit. A fruit! Nothing to interfere with an enjoyable life, and itself demonstrating the mercy, graciousness and love of God; actually!

The words of C. S. Lewis are apposite here:

"These [critics] ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seeds and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight."

"The argument runs like this. All the details are derived from our present experience; but the reality transcends our experience; therefore all the details are wholly and equally symbolic....[However, you cannot know that everything in the representation of a thing is symbolic unless you have independent access to the thing and can compare it with the representation."

So, what is it, then?

In recent posts I've referred to some who claim that Genesis 1 is other than history. Typically these people will say that it's analogy, parable, metaphor, allegory, polemic or anything but an account of events that happened.

Proponents rarely declare the basis in reality, at the time of its writing, to which the text would refer analogically, metaphorically, parabolically, etc.

The scope of the problem these authors back themselves into can be illustrated if we look at the 'polemic' view of Genesis 1.

On the one hand, the Babylonians compose the Enuma Elish: so up come the Israelites with a counter story of origins (not that EE is really a cosmogony, its more a theogony). Your story vs. my story. But which story is right? If neither refers to what really occurred, then the polemic is empty and we still don't know what really happened, we just have a contest of tales that would descend instantly to a contest of preference, not truth; but surely the real should be accessible to the creator to tell us why he is the creator by telling us how he created, not how he didn't create as though this would persuade us of a fact that the claim cannot explicate! (if the creator can't present his credentials as creator in terms that make sense with reference to his actual creation, it becomes hard to discern the credential!)

This empty result is the end game of all non-literal interpretations of Genesis 1. They get us nowhere and leave the telling of what this cosmos really is to others. Some theologians support this project on the basis that we have the intelligence to examine the creation and determine its origin. However, scientific examination cannot be definitive of past singularities, it only uses the regular as its reference point. So we end up with a fundamentally religious (or at least historical) issue being divorced from the scope of God's revelation.

Separate the creation from the ability of the creator to communicate the connection between our world and his will, and we pretty quickly separate ourselves from God. This is why the idea of evolution is the mainstay of modern atheism. Atheists see the disconnection; what a betrayal of thought that so many theologians fail to.

Beasties

At the St Philip's Bible talk today (Thursday 23 June), in the series on Job, we reached God's rhetorical discourse to Job; the one where God mentions two particular beasts: behemoth and leviathan. Justin told us that they were most likely referring to the hippopotamus and elephant. Or perhaps mythical beasts: fairy story characters.

Justin, I don't think so; on any count.

Firstly, look at the descriptions: His tail sways like a cedar (Job 40:17); doesn't remind me of a hippo!

[Interesting to note Job 40:15b: "made along with you" made like I made you, or made at the time I made you? I'll check it out; but there appears to be an element of confluence in their creation.]

Then leviathan: his back has rows of shields (Job 41:15), his snorting throws out flashes of fire (Job 41:18)! Not like any elephant I've seen!

Both explanations are improbable, particularly when there are known animals that the descriptions to fit' only they are extinct. Of course, one does become perplexed by Job's references when the history in the Bible is set aside and the ear is bent to the arid world-story of materialism that starts from a completely different premise to the Bible, and naturally has different conclusion!.

But would the creatures be mythical? I think not. The detail is too fine and unelaborated for myth, and to naturally descriptive, and many parts of the descriptions are 'every day' observations. And if they were myth, then what sort of God is worshipped when he has to go to fairy tales to depict his works, and not to his own creation; which itself is set in the Bible as the basis for him being worshipped by us!

History, or not?

In the latest issue of Creation magazine there's an article by Andrew Kulikovsky "Common Errors". He refers to the errors usually made by people who attempt to read an evolutionary world view back into the Bible, specifically, Genesis 1, of course.

One of the errors he mentions, and a typical one (see this article on John Dickson of the Centre for Public Christianity for discussion of this type of error), is the assertion that Genesis 1 gives us a theological rather than an historical account. Bruce Waltke, Bernard Ramm and a few others are cited in this connection.

The trouble with this view is that it supposes that 'theological intent' can exist detached from the setting of theological interchange where meaning is made (the real world, and recursively, the world resulting from the creative work set out in Genesis 1). Thus theology is 'carried' by history, in the Bible; it does not exist in some other world detached from this one: a kind of theological upper storey (to use Francis Schaeffer's analogy) that doesn't have feet on the same ground that our feet are on.

Andrew makes this very point, quoting Graeme Goldsworthy (Preaching the Whole Bible as Christian Scripture), "The fact is that the whole Bible presents its message as theology within a framework of history".

Theology is connected through history (that is the recount of events in space and time) with the domain of life concerns that dominate our thoughts, feelings and hopes. It is in and makes sense in our world because it is us in our world who are subject of God's salvific communication. If this were not so, there would be no tangible congruence between theological statements and our possible apprehension of them. They would reduce to the nonsense of Zen koans.

A further question one would have to ask of this error, is its basis: how do its exponents know that certain parts of the Bible are 'theological' and not historical, when the explanation of the historical is typically the source of theological information, as God explains the significance of events (especially those set in historical narrative language, like Genesis 1). It is only history that makes theology meaningful. History is the domain of relationships between actors, people, agents; and God the creator in relation to us is on this plane: relationships that have actual reality do not exist outside of historical circumscription, because then they cease to be relationships and the very point of God's creating would evaporate. This is the great theological error that is made by those who want to think that theology and history exist in separate worlds.

Sun-Herald letter

I saw this letter in the Sydney 'Sun Herald' on Sunday last:

Jean Whittle (Letters June 5) begs the question that God is necessarily a created being like we are and thus stands in need of a prior causal creator. Theists will tell you that God is eternal and consequently has never come into existence. He just always is.

The dilemma facing Jean, indeed confronting all atheists, is whether their “god”, matter, is eternal or popped into existence from absolutely no-thing and from no cause. While the first alternative is purely religious, the second is metaphysical nonsense: from no-thing, nothing comes.

After deciding, maybe Jean can tell us theists how matter or no-thing produced the non-material biological information that underwrites life, and brought into being love, consciousness and morality.

The atheists' only explanation, evolution, fails badly, scientifically and philosophically, against theism. After all, a supremely intelligent and all-loving God certainly seems a more viable option to explain reality than, well, no-thing.

Sincerely yours

Marc Kay

Murder

At a recent lunch time Bible talk at St Philip's York Street, Justin observed (in the context of discussing Job 28)
If natural selection is true, then there would be nothing wrong with murder. It would be one means of the strong eliminating the weak.
And if the origin of humanity, let alone the cosmos, was as evolutionary dogma has it, this would be so; even if the dogma is bolted on to a theistic framework: as in theistic-evolution, it would remain true that murder to achieve success was built into the structure of reality, and moral questions were mere questions of convenience, and not having real moment.
Thus the dilemma of those who think that God 'used' evolution to create...they end up with a morally divided God, who's creation is different in type to him, where his glory is found (Roms 1:20), not in peace and joy and love, in the vanquishment of the weak.

What they say!

I've heard a lot of neo-evangelicals claim that the question of origins/the biblical doctrine of creation, is a rather unimportant issue in either a pastoral or evangelical context.

I think this clip from a recent Sydney Morning Herald contradicts that.

Plato

There’s a philosophical tendency in the West, following Plato, to conclude that if a theory isn’t working, there must be something wrong with reality

.
from Harvard Business Review May 2011: Nonaka, The Wise Leader

Reminds me a lot of neo-evangelicals who concluded that because the 'theory' that God created as he set out in Genesis is not like the popular theory of evolution, and is contrary to an implausibly ancient earth; that is, it doesn't 'work'; then there must be something wrong with the reality of his word...so, of course, much sweat and ink is spent on saying that Genesis 1, etc. doesn't mean what it clearly says!

Theistic evolution?

Termed by Al Mohler, an oxymoron, and I couldn't agree more, this web page on theistic evolution gives a good run down of the idea that Christian revelatory theism is somehow compatible with non-christian speculative materialism.

Cat and Dog Theology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Control'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No longer part of eternity

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

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

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

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

Facts from non-facts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why age?

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

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

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

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

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

The 5-fold formula

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real Public Events

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canards

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

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

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

Both assertions are, in my view, erroneous.

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

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

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

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

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

Creation? Yes, but on my terms!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The theological ramifications are not trivial!

Dembski's Theodicy

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

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

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

The notion has a number of other effects as well.

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

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

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

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

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